No Happy Talk. It’s a Bolton Purge

It is normal that a new National Security Advisor would bring in his or her own team over time. But Tom Bossert, in the structure of the Trump White House, isn’t really even under Bolton’s purview. He plainly has no ‘team’ on hand to replace him with on day one. We have a new episode of the podcast that is coming up shortly where Steve Clemons and I discussed this and Bossert specifically over the weekend. This is what it looks like. Bolton will purge the people who may not be great in ideological terms but are still legitimate foreign policy hands. Bolton is a militaristic/nationalist. International agreements, diplomacy, alliances, let alone international institutions or international law are all so much drapery to him – frippery at best and tools to constrain U.S. power at worst. Relationships between nations are purely ones of force. He’ll act on that mindset. Expect many others to go.