Bret Stephens: Bolton Will Restrain the Isolationist Impulses at the Heart of Trump’s Foreign Policy

EXCERPT:

STEPHENS: "I don’t think the president has very much of an ideology on most subjects which is reflected in choices of advisers who disagree with him fundamentally on all sorts of things that he has said. Look, something like 78 percent or 77 percent of Americans supported the United States going into — going into Iraq. So I don’t think Bolton was adopting radical position there. What I would like to know is that -- you know, what worries me about Trump is that here’s a guy who I suspect for the sake of the art of the deal would go into a room with Kim Jong-un, and say, you know, it’s a great idea, we’re going to pull out U.S. -- we're going to pull U.S. troops out of South Korea and you’re going to promise to denuclearize, and then I’m going to get my own Nobel Peace Prize. I think someone like Bolton is going to restrain the isolationist impulses that have been really at the heart of Trump’s foreign policy thinking. Impulses not ideology." [crosstalk]