John Bolton Quotes

The Republican Party is the party of national security. There's hardly a national security wing of the Democratic Party anymore. So if we turn away from it, that'll be a big problem.

I am not a neoconservative. I am pro-American.

I'm a conservative Republican. I have been since I was 15 years old and participated in the 'Goldwater for President' campaign in 1964.

Texas is a big state. It's a major force in the Republican Party.

There's no doubt that Iran funds and supplies Hamas with weapons.

You have to negotiate from positions of strength. And right now with Iran, we're not negotiating from a position of strength. The Europeans are negotiating from the position of "Please give up your nuclear weapons program, and by the way if you do we'll give you several boatloads of carrots." The Iranians are quite willing to keep on negotiating on that line for a long time.

Just like Sept. 11, only with nuclear weapons this time, that's the threat. I think that is the threat. I think it's just facing reality. It's not a happy reality, but it's reality and if you don't deal with it, it will become even more unpleasant.

The only way to resolve the North Korean problem is to change the regime.

I think it's critical that we return national security issues to the center of the overall political debate in America.

You don't need to spend tens of millions of dollars on political consultants to tell you what you think when you already know what you think.

The Iranian government is the government that supplied the arms on the Karin-A to the Palestinian Authority several years ago, they are the world's largest central banker for terrorism, if they thought it was in their interest to give a terrorist group a nuclear weapon to use against America or against Israel, I don't think they'd hesitate.

Diplomacy is not an end in itself if it does not advance U.S. interests.

By creating a prosecutor who is overseen over by a court, they are melding executive and judicial power in a way that can lead to terrible abuses - as the founders of America understood full well. It's why they created a system of separated powers - to set up a constitutional mechanism that would enhance freedom, by making sure that no one's accumulation of power could predominate over [that of] others.

If Iran obtains nuclear weapons, then almost certainly Saudi Arabia will do the same, as will Egypt, Turkey and perhaps others in the region.

The Nobel Peace Prize has become hopelessly politicized. I think it cheapens the prize itself.

The culture of the State Department is very negative towards a conservative foreign policy. And the model that we all have, of civil servants as neutral careerists who carry out the policy of the elected president, doesn't work nearly the way it should in the State Department. So that there are many people who want to be good civil servants, who want to try and carry out these policies, but are afraid to do so. And I'm not even counting the very small number of conservatives in the State Department who are genuinely at risk.

We estimate that once Iraq acquires fissile material - whether from a foreign source or by securing the materials to build an indigenous fissile material capability - it could fabricate a nuclear weapon within one year.

I think the future of China's unknown, I don't know what direction it's going to go in. It could go in the right direction, it could. It could go in a very bad direction, too.

I have decided not to run for president.

North Korea is going to get away with keeping its nuclear weapons.

The International Criminal Court uses a prosecution-only approach. And by putting their fate in the hands of outsiders, countries are really dodging responsibility for actions taken in the name of that country, in the name of the people in that country, by the people of that country themselves. That is, I think, fundamentally the wrong direction to go in.

I don't much believe in bumper sticker characterizations of foreign policy.

Swapping Bergdahl for illegal enemy combatants (terrorists, in common parlance) signaled unmistakably to Taliban and al Qaeda that Obama is determined to withdraw from Afghanistan no matter what the cost to the United States or those in Afghanistan fighting to remain free.

It was right to overthrow Saddam Hussein. It was the regime itself that was a threat. I think in hindsight, what I would have done is turn authority back over to Iraqis much more quickly and say: "Your country, you figure out how to run it."

A lot of people have said to me, 'That's a great idea, running for president. You'll get booked for more speeches. You can write a book.'

I haven't given up on the possibility that sweet reason will prevail.

The North Koreans will sell anything to anybody for hard currency. If Al Queda came up with enough dollars to buy a nuclear weapon from North Korea I don't have any doubt that the North Koreans would sell it to them.

I am not a professional politician.

I wouldn't give up on Russia. I think they have legitimate security concerns from Islamic fundamentalism, not only on their border but in their country.

I wouldn't give up on Russia, and with oil at $90 a barrel, they can refurbish their strategic capabilities and under an authoritarian regime, those nuclear weapons are still there and in the wrong hands we might have a problem again.

Just as that little opening in the Iron Curtain that Hungary created caused a flood of people out, and ultimately the beginning of the end of communism in Europe, if you could get refugee flows coming out of North Korea, while there'd be a very difficult humanitarian problem in the short run, both for China and South Korea, in the long run it would lead to reunification.

The real issue of dealing with proliferation of weapons of mass destruction: nuclear, chemical or biological is: What is your tolerance for risk? And my tolerance for risk for WMD proliferation is pretty close to zero. Because otherwise, we and our allies are at the mercy of regimes like Ahmadinejad and the mullahs in Tehran, or Kim Jong Il and the Hitler-in-the-bunker mentality in Pyongyang, or others who don't share our calculus on the value of human life.

I don't think Hamas will be satisfied simply ruling the Gaza Strip.

THe Chinese like the satellite state [North Korea] between China and our forces, they fear that in a reunified Korea, American troops would be at the Yalu River and they've seen that movie before. They didn't like it the first time they saw it and they don't like it any better today. So they are quite happy with the divided Korean peninsula and that's a fundamental difference between the way they see things and the way we see things.

My philosophy is not a bean-counting, accounting 'look at this.' It is a philosophy that smaller government is better government, and government that is closer to the people is best of all.

What we want for the Iranian people is control over their own government, which they don't have now. So you would do it through supplying resources and support from the outside to the indigenous people who are already quite unhappy. The mullahs have made hash of the economy since 1979, there's a huge amount of economic dissatisfaction. The young people, who are pretty well educated and sophisticated, know they could have a better life than this strict Islamic law.

I think the International Criminal Court could be a threat to American security interests, because the prosecutor of the court has enormous discretion in going after war crimes. And the way the Statute of Rome is written, responsibility for war crimes can be taken all the way up the chain of command. This is the sort of investigation that some people who live in Fairyland might like to undertake, but which bears no relationship at all to conditions in the real world.

Our biggest national security crisis is Barack Obama.

I think the regime in North Korea is more fragile than people think. The country's economic system remains desperate, and one thing that could happen for example would be under a new government in South Korea, to get the South Korean government to live up to its own constitution, which says any Korean who makes it to South Korea, is a Korean citizen. A citizen of the Republic of Korea. And you could imagine the impact that would have inside North Korea if people thought, "If I could get out and make it to South Korea, I could have a different life."

Obama sees America as another country on the UN role call. Somewhere between Albania and Zimbabwe.

Iran is barely over 50% Persian, and Arabs, Baluchis, Azeris, Kurds and many other groups feel left out of the society. That regime has a lot more weaknesses than people see.

A strong State Department to me means a corps of career officials who believe that their job is to advocate America's interests and who are trained in effective advocacy, not schooled in accommodation.

There's no such thing as the United Nations. If the U.N. secretary building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference.

I think the International Criminal Court could be a threat to American security interests, because the prosecutor of the court has enormous discretion in going after war crimes.

If I were doing the Security Council today, I'd have one permanent member, the United States, because that's the real reflection of the distribution of power in the world. All international laws are invalid, meaningless attempts to constrict American power.

Don't get me wrong: I would love to be president.

There is no patriotic obligation to help advance the career of a politician who is otherwise pursuing interests that are fundamentally antithetical to your values. That's not the call of patriotism.

Iran has essentially mastered all of the complex science and technology that they need to have a completely indigenous nuclear weapons program. That means that our options on Iran are extremely limited, to regime change or as a last resort, the use of force.