Ask yourself two questions and try to respond to them as
honestly as you can. First, would North Korea have been tempted to develop
nuclear weapons, were no American troops stationed in South Korea? Second,
would Iran have created the formidable military machine that it did, had
America not armed and encouraged Iraq's Saddam Hussein when he attacked Iran?
If you answered no to both questions, you are a
well-adjusted, normal and objective human being who sees things as they are and
not as you imagine them to be. Of course, you could be wrong because you're not
a super being that can see hidden things. But until you see evidence to the
contrary, you make sure to limit your speculative ability to the task of speculating
without acting on such speculation.
The problem is that some people are not like that. Whether
they know something or they don't; whether they know a little about it or they
know a lot, they speculate about what they don't know. And they do so even if
they know that the chances are close to nil there is more to know about
something. And then, however uncertain they may be about their speculation,
they still ask someone to act on it as if it were a proven fact.
For a long time, this had been the attitude that John Bolton
took with regard to every foreign subject he handled. As to asking someone to
act on his speculations, he advocated an American or a NATO military response
to everything every time. But because he was harshly criticized from all sides for
being an unabashed warmonger, he modified his position a little. He now says
basically the same thing as he did before, but he says it in a more subtle way.
That position comes out clearly in the article he wrote
under the title: “How Little We Know About North Korea” and the subtitle: “The
fact that we still can't explain Kim Jong Un's recent absence should be
unsettling.” It was published on October 24, 2014 in the Wall Street Journal.
From this alone, you can see that he admits he is unsettled for knowing so
little about North Korea. As the rest of the article will demonstrate, this
lack of knowledge is what motivates him to call for the measures that he does.
He says the following in the first paragraph of the article:
“One theory is as good as the next for assessing what actually happens inside
North Korea.” And he says the following in the second paragraph: “North Korea
has conducted three nuclear tests. Rumors of a fourth circulate constantly.”
Thus, after saying he has no clue what is going on in North Korea, he admits to
relying on rumors to assert that the intent behind North Korea's
ballistic-missile program is “to provide delivery vehicles to reach targets
world-wide, most notably in the U.S.” What a magnificent pretzel-like logic!
But he does not lack tactics because he now tactfully makes
the following stark admission: “what the U.S. doesn't know about North Korea's
leadership it also doesn't know about the country's nuclear capabilities.” And
he laments: “Our inability to do more than speculate means that if something is
happening behind the veil, our capacity to respond is impaired.”
So then, what to do under these circumstances? Well, he has
a two-part answer to that question. First, he says: “the focus must shift to
stopping [Pyongyang] from cooperating with Iran and other would-be nuclear
powers.” Second, this will require revival of “the Bush Administration's
Proliferation Security Initiative.”
He doesn't even hint at what he sees in that Initiative.
This is deliberate because his intention is to interpret it the way that will
suit him when the time will come. And as far as we are concerned, it would not
be engaging in speculation to say that what suits him will be to being his old
self again, and advocate war, war, war.
But for now, he wants the world to think of him as having
converted to a dovish stance. And so he ends the article on the sweetest note
that he can imagine: “The U.S. objective is reunifying the Korean Peninsula as
peacefully as possible ... [what] threatens this objective is North Korea's
very existence. The U.S. should redouble its effort to reach that goal.”