Here's a prediction that is sure to annoy everyone: Now that he's national security adviser, John Bolton will become more moderate.
Some extremists moderate when they take public office because of bureaucratic push-back from the middle. Don't expect that from Bolton. He's made a career of fighting the bureaucracy from the right.
Bolton will moderate for the opposite reason: In this stage of President Donald Trump's administration, there's almost no one left to push back at Bolton from the center. Without such opposition, Bolton is going to realize that he's the grownup in the room, and the closest thing to a realist anywhere in Trump's foreign policy circles.
He will have to take the role of war-skeptic, asking the president to consider the consequences of aggressive action and intervention.
Ideologically, Bolton is a nuts-and-bolts national power right-winger who thinks the U.S. needs to project power outward and use force when it's pragmatically necessary to do so. That means he will also consider when the use of force could backfire--especially if no other senior member of the administration is looking out for the risks.
Even if Trump now thinks he has surrounded himself with advisers who will let him indulge extremist impulses, he hasn't, at least not in Bolton. Bolton will likely constrain Trump.
Bolton has consistently occupied a position at the right extreme of Republican foreign policy. But he has never been truly outside the spectrum. To the contrary, Bolton has always made sure that he was a member of the establishment, albeit the member with no one remaining to his right.
In government, Bolton worked for the Justice Department and the State Department in assistant secretary level roles. Those are the insider-power positions of these large bureaucracies. You have to fight to move the agenda, but you still have to play as part of the team.
Out of government, Bolton held a senior position at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank within the mainstream conservative establishment. He wrote for the Weekly Standard--again, establishment conservative. He has been a commentator on Fox News, not a Breit-bart contributor.
The point is not only that Bolton's niche has always been at the right wing of the establishment. It's that he has always had others in the conservative establishment to push back against him. He's never had to be the backstop against extremism, so he's always been free to advocate the most right-wing stance.
That's about to change. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has been replaced by Mike Pompeo, a former congressional ideologue who is further right than Bolton. If Gina Haspel is confirmed as the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, the agency will likely have trouble occupying the "voice of caution" role.
Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis might be the only figure against whom Bolton could struggle from the right. That depends, however, on whether Mattis himself stays in place--and whether he is interested in trying to constrain Trump from using military force abroad.
It's one thing to be the most right-wing member of the establishment. It's another thing to put policies in place that break the establishment's norms altogether.
Editorial on 04/12/2018