Joe Cirincione, chief of the disarmament group Ploughshares, has a cogent analysis of why the Hanoi summit of President Trump and North Korea leader Kim Jong-un failed. The opportunity, he notes, was this: In Hanoi, North Korea wanted to trade some of their nuclear capability for most of the sanctions. Trump offered some of the...
Tag: John Bolton
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The False Story of Venezuela’s ‘Burning Aid Convoy’
Not for the first time, a U.S. “regime change” policy is generating false claims to support the campaign to remove a government out of favor in Washington. The “burning aid convoy” story in Venezuela is an echo of the “babies torn from incubators” story in Kuwait of a generation ago. It’s the same familiar narrative:...
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Barr and Bolton Undermined Congressional Oversight of CIA
The past is prologue to the Trump administration. Thirty years ago, National Security Adviser John Bolton and Attorney General Nominee William Barr were fighting congressional oversight of the CIA. As legal advisers to President Reagan, they insisted that the president did not need to disclose all covert operations to Congress, that Congress’s power of the...
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No Intelligence Supports Bolton’s Iran Charges, Analyst Says
“We have little doubt that Iran’s leadership is still strategically committed to achieving deliverable nuclear weapons.” So said national security adviser John Bolton in Israel last week. The problem is, says Joe Cirincione, president of Ploughshares Fund, a global security foundation, U.S. intelligence does not agree. In a piece for Defense One, he writes Director of...
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5 Easy Tweets: How Bolton Walked Back Trump’s Syria Withdrawal
President Trump’s plans to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria have been disrupted by his national security adviser John Bolton. After consulting with senior Israeli officials, Bolton announced Sunday that 2,200 U.S. troops will remain in the war zone for longer than the president announced on December 19. “The timetable flows from the policy decisions that...