Bolton as McCain’s secretary of state? Doubtful

JACK GUEZ/AFP/Getty Images The liberal blogosphere is all in a tizzy over John Bolton’s endorsement of John McCain, leading some to speculate that the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations would be tapped to serve as secretary of state in a McCain administration. I doubt it. Is McCain a neocon? Maybe. Maybe not. Supporting ...

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596497_080212_bolton2.jpg

JACK GUEZ/AFP/Getty Images

JACK GUEZ/AFP/Getty Images

The liberal blogosphere is all in a tizzy over John Bolton’s endorsement of John McCain, leading some to speculate that the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations would be tapped to serve as secretary of state in a McCain administration.

I doubt it. Is McCain a neocon? Maybe. Maybe not. Supporting the surge does not a neocon make, friends. It’s true that since the late 1990s, McCain has increasingly surrounded himself with foreign policy minds sympathetic to the neocon cause, including Bill Kristol, Mark Salter, Daniel McKivergan, Marshall Wittmann, and Randy Scheunemann. His closeness to Kristol, in particular, has been well documented. But McCain casts a wide net. He also seeks advice from Henry Kissingers and Brent Scowcrofts, and occasionally — gasp — Democrats, too. And any way you slice it, McCain and Bolton don’t exactly see eye to eye.

Here was McCain’s answer to a question posed in 2006 by the New Republic‘s John Judis on a preemptive strike against Iran:

We haven’t taken the military option off the table, but we should make it clear that is the very last option, only if we become convinced that they are about to acquire those weapons to use against Israel…. I think that if they are capable with their repeatedly stated intention, that doesn’t mean I would go to war even then. That means we have to exhaust every possible option. Going to the United Nations, working with our European allies. If we were going to impose sanctions, I would wait and see whether those sanctions were effective or not. I did not mean it as a declaration of war the day they acquired weapons.”

That doesn’t exactly sound like John Bolton to me.

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