'Eliminate North Korea': Trump adviser John Bolton floats 'doable' plan for China to 'reunite...

[Moral Compass]

34. John Bolton continues to confirm that he is an idiot

Wow. You gotta hand it to him. He is nothing if not consistent.

Bolton is the one that in the immediate post-Clinton days when Bush had come up with the "Axis of Evil" decided that rather than continue to maintain the Clinton sanctions/reward method where the North Koreans were actually allowing the AEC to install and monitor cameras inside the North Korean nuclear facilities that we would cut off all contact with them and impose even harsher sanctions.

So, the North Koreans turned off all the cameras and now 17 years later North Korea is a bonafide nuclear power that is now testing ICBMs. Most experts don't think it will be that long before they have the capability to hit mainland US.

While you can't definitively lay the blame at Bolton's feet (there was Cheney, Bush, and others that actively supported Bolton--indeed this is why he was made US Amabassador to the UN) this general approach was hands down the least effective of all the methods that had been tried in attempting to find some rapprochement with the North Koreans. While they were extremely difficult to negotiate with they did respond to a basic carrot/stick approach. Whether that, long term, would have kept them from developing nuclear weapons is unknowable. They always cheated on every agreement. This was why the Bush administration decided to punish them by shunning them. Kind of a national time out. They used that time out to work ever harder at developing a nuclear capability.

Once Kim Jong Un took over, not having the temperance that comes with age, he set the weapons/missile efforts into overdrive.

It can be safely concluded that at the minimum John Bolton helped the make a bad situation even worse.

This latest suggestion is simply insane. How exactly would China go about "elminating" North Korea? The methods available to China are available to us (invasion or a nuclear decapitation strike). I can only suppose that he is suggesting a nuclear decapitation strike which the US, South Korea, Japan, Russia might well take exception to...and would be far more complicated and problematic than he seems to think.

It is comforting to know that John Bolton continues to be the idiot that he has always been. Of course, we have someone in the Presidency that makes Bolton look measured, calm, and judicious so the comfort is small at best.