wo months before meeting with Trump in Singapore in June 2018, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un had declared that he was suspending nuclear weapons and missile tests.
However, Bolton seemed intent on sabotaging any accommodation with the North Koreans. A month before he had started to work at the White House, Bolton had written a piece for the Wall Street Journal in which he laid out the purported legal arguments for a preemptive war against North Korea. This would be a redo of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, of which Bolton remained a vocal supporter.
Within weeks of taking up his position as national security adviser,
Bolton said publicly that the administration was contemplating the "Libya model" for North Korea.
T
his referred to the Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi, who had agreed to abandon his weapons-of-mass-destruction program in the early 2000s in exchange for lifting the onerous sanctions that were then in place on his regime. A few years later, in 2011, US-backed rebels toppled Gadhafi's regime. The rebels then hunted Gadhafi down and killed him in a ditch.
For Kim, the "Libya model" was code for regime change; Kim had no intention of ending up dead in a ditch.
The North Korean first deputy prime minister, Kim Kye-Gwan, said of Bolton, "We do not hide our feeling of repugnance towards him."
Sarah Sanders, then-White House press secretary, quickly distanced the Trump administration from the "Libya model," saying, "I'm not aware that that's a model that we're using."
In February, Trump met Kim again in Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam, but Trump pulled out of the meeting early when Kim didn't offer much in the way of "denuclearization." Three months after the failed talks in Hanoi, the North Koreans launched some short-range ballistic missiles.
At a press conference in Japan in late May 2019, Trump contradicted Bolton, who had just told reporters that those launches contravened UN Security Council resolutions. Trump said he wasn't bothered by the launches.
When Trump met with Kim Jong Un for the third time at the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea to discuss North Korea's nuclear program, along tagged Jared and Ivanka Kushner, and Fox News' Tucker Carlson. Meanwhile, Bolton, who had spent much of his professional career focused on arms control issues, went on a previously scheduled trip to . . . Mongolia.
Earlier this year
Bolton had also pushed for a coup in Venezuela against the socialist strongman president Nicolás Maduro. A coup attempt by the country's opposition, which the US supported, fizzled. Trump blamed Bolton for the botched coup.
In May, Trump said that he actually moderated the bellicose Bolton: "I'm the one who tempers him, which is OK. I have John Bolton and I have people who are a little more dovish than him."
Given the amount of turnover in his cabinet, Trump couldn't get rid of Bolton immediately, but he started thinking about other candidates to be his national security adviser, according to a former senior Trump administration official I have spoken to.
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