John Bolton and the Winston Churchill Dinner at the Island Hotel With Update

Brian T. Kennedy, publisher of The Claremont Review of Books and president of The Claremont Institute graciously invited me and several other Claremont students to hear John Bolton give the talk at the Winston Churchill dinner. We stayed late into the morning, talking with several other CRB staff members and local bloggers.

The event started off as every event ought to: with prayer, the pledge of allegiance, and the national anthem. Brian T. Kennedy gave an excellent speech about how we must continue to defend the Republic even when all seems lost.

Soon thereafter America's Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton gave his speech.

After quoting Winston Churchill, Bolton had several observations on the current state of foreign policy. Ambassador Bolton served in that capacity at the United Nations until 2006, when the Democrats and a few turncoat Republicans torpedoed his chances of re-appointment.

Here are some of the things that Bolton said, according to my admittedly poor notes.

The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction is "the greatest threat we face today" and yet many don't treat it as serious as it should have been treated. They hope that by replacing our current leaders with those seen as more palpable we would raise our profile in the world, but this assumption fundamentally misunderstands America's place in the world. Opinion polls go up and they go down, but a president has to pursue the national interest of America and her allies. Bolton then cited a number of times where the president did the "right thing" and still had polls that turned against him. To suggest that polling is evidence of might is naiive.

He continued. Some suggest that the "unipolar world" has passed and that America is on the decline. But people who suggest that this is China or India's century are ahistorical. He then cited all the social upheaval during China's last century -- occupation by Japan, overthrow of various governments, the Great Leap Forward -- and said to generalize about China's last twenty years of economic growth is to ignore their turbulent history. Then Bolton had his best line of the night, "If there's one lesson history teaches us, it is this: 'Don't bet against America.'"

Bolton criticized the State Department has being against the interests of America and to focused on stability and diplomacy. Diplomacy, Bolton reminded us, is a tactic, not a policy.
Whenever Bolton would sit around the table with the other members of the cabinet, people would say we made "progress with country X on issue Y" and everyone would nod, but would have no real sense of the progress that had been made.

You can always win agreement if you give up your position. He then turned to N. Korea which has recently been taken off the list of state sponsors of terrorism. Bolton criticized the Bush Administration for doing that without so much as consulting Japan, our strongest ally in the region. He says that N. Korea is the largest distributor of ballistic missiles and cited their work on helping Syria procure nuclear weapons on the banks of the Euphrates. He also mentioned the work of PSI, a group of signatory nations that have worked to stop the spread of nuclear weapons materials. He applauded the actions of India at halting the advance of said material to Iran from N. Korea, yet said more work needed to be done to guarantee that N. Korea wasn't going ahead with their nuclear weapons programs -- which, by his count, they have stopped and then resumed again four times in the past sixteen years.

Bolton thinks that the reason N. Korea was removed from the list of terrorist sponsors was that the State Department is trying to make things easier on them if they are going through a regime change.

He began discussing Iran.

Unfortunately, our own intelligence agencies has been complicit in helping Iran get a nuclear bomb with their release of the national security estimates. If Iran gets the bomb, it could destabilize the entire region as Egypt, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia may get nuclear weapons in order to defend themselves. By delaying for five years, the European Union has been giving the Iranians time so that they are five years closer to getting a nuke. "Negotiations have costs, as well as benefits." He said that there are few options left but to force regime change or to launch targeted strikes in Iran.

UPDATE: My old boss and friend, Ben Boychuk, also went to the Churchill Dinner and has his remarks up at Infinite Monkeys. It's worth a read through. Boychuk used to work for The Claremont Review of Books and I worked with him on the shortly lived, but still awesome, RedBlueAmerica.com.