Is Trump as gang-ho for war as the people with whom he’s surrounded himself? Let’s hope not. From Patrick J. Buchanan at buchanan.org:
For a president who won his office by denouncing the Middle East wars into which George W. Bush and Barack Obama plunged the nation, Donald Trump has assembled the most unabashedly hawkish conclave of foreign policy advisers in memory. And he himself seems to concede the point.
If foreign policy were decided by my security adviser John Bolton, the president confided recently, “We’d be in four wars by now.”
It was Bolton who ordered the Abraham Lincoln carrier group and B-52s to the Gulf and told the Pentagon to draw up plans to send 120,000 U.S. troops. It is Bolton who is charging Iran with using mines to sabotage four oil tankers outside the Strait of Hormuz.
Asked for evidence, Bolton barked back at reporters: “Who else would you think is doing it? Somebody from Nepal?”
But if Bolton is first hawk, he is not without rivals in the inner circle of the commander in chief.
