John Bolton Quotes

I have looked at public opinion polls in France in the late 1940s and early 1950s during the height of Marshall Plan aid. They had a very negative attitude towards the United States then. There were negative attitudes towards the United States because of Vietnam. There were negative attitudes about the United States when Reagan wanted to deploy intermediate range ballistic missiles. I don't think the president should base his foreign policy on American public opinion polls, let alone foreign public opinion polls. It was right to overthrow Saddam Hussein. It was the regime itself that was a threat. I think in hindsight, what I would have done is turn authority back over to Iraqis much more quickly and say: 'Your country, you figure out how to run it.' I think the future of China's unknown, I don't know what direction it's going to go in. It could go in the right direction, it could. It could go in a very bad direction, too. I think the International Criminal Court could be a threat to American security interests, because the prosecutor of the court has enormous discretion in going after war crimes. And the way the Statute of Rome is written, responsibility for war crimes can be taken all the way up the chain of command. This is the sort of investigation that some people who live in Fairyland might like to undertake, but which bears no relationship at all to conditions in the real world. I think the Russians basically don't think the North Koreans and the Iranians have the capabilities to get weapon systems that can threaten them, or that if they do the Russians know how to handle them and that that's the reason that it's all the more important that Russians be involved in the sale of high-end conventional weapons, the Bushehr nuclear reactor in the case of Russia and Iran, and similar kinds of relationships. I wouldn't give up on Russia. I think they have legitimate security concerns from Islamic fundamentalism, not only on their border but in their country. A strong State Department to me means a corps of career officials who believe that their job is to advocate America's interests and who are trained in effective advocacy, not schooled in accommodation. I think the regime in North Korea is more fragile than people think. The country's economic system remains desperate, and one thing that could happen for example would be under a new government in South Korea, to get the South Korean government to live up to its own constitution, which says any Korean who makes it to South Korea, is a Korean citizen. A citizen of the Republic of Korea. And you could imagine the impact that would have inside North Korea if people thought, 'If I could get out and make it to South Korea, I could have a different life.' If a prosecutor in The Hague decides that the U.S. has not followed through effectively on an investigation - is unwilling or unable to carry it through - then that person, that prosecutor, in an unreviewable fashion gets to second-guess the United States? That is unacceptable. That is an assertion of authority over and above the U.S. Constitution. Texas is a big state. It's a major force in the Republican Party. Let me ask, who died and made him king? Who gave him the authority to endanger 300 million Americans? That's not the way it works, and if he thinks he can get away with that, he's got another think coming. The International Criminal Court uses a prosecution-only approach. And by putting their fate in the hands of outsiders, countries are really dodging responsibility for actions taken in the name of that country, in the name of the people in that country, by the people of that country themselves. That is, I think, fundamentally the wrong direction to go in. America needs an adult in the White House who knows how to deal with China. I think it's critical that we return national security issues to the center of the overall political debate in America. The European Union can now act like a major power, at least that is what the European Union tells us. The North Koreans will sell anything to anybody for hard currency. If Al Queda came up with enough dollars to buy a nuclear weapon from North Korea I don't have any doubt that the North Koreans would sell it to them. The solution to North Korea is the reunification of the Korean Peninsula. China could influence the North; it supplies 80 to 90 percent of North Korea's energy. The United States have to put pressure on China in order for China to pressure North Korea. The Iranian government is the government that supplied the arms on the Karin-A to the Palestinian Authority several years ago, they are the world's largest central banker for terrorism, if they thought it was in their interest to give a terrorist group a nuclear weapon to use against America or against Israel, I don't think they'd hesitate. Although we refer to the International Criminal Court, the real problem is the prosecutor, because it's the prosecutor who decides who to investigate and what cases to bring. This court fundamentally embodied a potential for abuse of governmental power that I felt was inconsistent with being a free person - and [it was] inconsistent for a free country like the United States to subscribe to it. We need a strong and effective State Department. We can't conduct American affairs in the world without it. I am not a neoconservative. I am pro-American. The Republican Party is the party of national security. There's hardly a national security wing of the Democratic Party anymore. So if we turn away from it, that'll be a big problem. What we want for the Iranian people is control over their own government, which they don't have now. So you would do it through supplying resources and support from the outside to the indigenous people who are already quite unhappy. The mullahs have made hash of the economy since 1979, there's a huge amount of economic dissatisfaction. The young people, who are pretty well educated and sophisticated, know they could have a better life than this strict Islamic law. You know, as somebody who writes op-eds and appears on the television, I appreciate as well as anybody that...there is a limit to what that accomplishes. You have to negotiate from positions of strength. And right now with Iran, we're not negotiating from a position of strength. The Europeans are negotiating from the position of 'Please give up your nuclear weapons program, and by the way if you do we'll give you several boatloads of carrots.' The Iranians are quite willing to keep on negotiating on that line for a long time. If you get a President (Hillary) Clinton, you might well find, just as after Vietnam, that there is a retraction from Iraq and of American influence in the world. And in a couple of years the Europeans will be complaining about that too. The press tend to stick with that the people don't care about foreign policy in their daily lives and aren't concerned about it and so on and so forth. I don't think that's actually true. Just as that little opening in the Iron Curtain that Hungary created caused a flood of people out, and ultimately the beginning of the end of communism in Europe, if you could get refugee flows coming out of North Korea, while there'd be a very difficult humanitarian problem in the short run, both for China and South Korea, in the long run it would lead to reunification. The only way to resolve the North Korean problem is to change the regime. The culture of the State Department is very negative towards a conservative foreign policy. And the model that we all have, of civil servants as neutral careerists who carry out the policy of the elected president, doesn't work nearly the way it should in the State Department. So that there are many people who want to be good civil servants, who want to try and carry out these policies, but are afraid to do so. And I'm not even counting the very small number of conservatives in the State Department who are genuinely at risk.