Bolton is a good man. I think this is a mistake.
I knew he was bad news back in the 1990s when he was putting his name on open letters published in the New York Times, calling for the Clinton administration to topple the Milosevic regime in Serbia on behalf of the radical Islamic separatists in Kosovo.
The guy's acted like a Sunni Islamic mole in the U.S. government for years. Hence the only item on my profile page -- which was a comment I posted here on FR when Bolton's name first surfaced in early 2017 as a potential hire for the Trump administration:
I voted for Donald Trump because I was tired of Ivy League globalist pr!cks running this nation’s foreign policy. Anyone who still thinks the invasion of Iraq was a good idea shouldn’t even be allowed to clean the toilets in the White House.
I think Trump’s mistake was thinking Pompeo and his negotiator could get a compromise with the Taliban that the Afghan people and the American people would accept.
The issue is not a difference between a deal, ANY deal, with the Taliban or waging total war there. The issue is staying the course and wearing them down, as we did the Soviets.
By the way, I don’t think campaign promises are synonymous with doing what is right. Sometimes even politicians have to admit their estimation of things before they came into office differ from the reality they see from the perspective of being in command. I am asking if Trump is up to THAT challenge; if he is big enough to admit now that a different course from what he expected is needed. A course that is neither WWII in Afghanistan, or giving Afghanistan to the Taliban.