John Bolton has been saying for years that he wants to overthrow the Iranian government, but this time he seems to have gone too far, writes Joe Lauria, editor-in-chief of Consortium News and former correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, Sunday Times of London and many other newspapers.

“I met John Bolton and interacted with him almost daily with my colleagues in the press corps at United Nations Headquarters in New York, when he was the United States ambassador there between August 2005 and December 2006. Most of his diplomatic colleagues, officials and journalists were surprised that Bolton was appointed as the representative of the United States for his long and public disdain for the UN.

In 1994 Bolton had said publicly that “the United Nations Secretariat in New York has 38 floors and if it lost ten floors, nothing would change.” Even more revealing was when in that same conference he confessed that “no matter what the UN decides, the United States will always do what it wants”.

For Bolton, these frank admissions classify as signs of force, should not be taken as reasons for alarm.

He is a man without a sense of humor and, at least at the UN, he always seemed to think that he was the most intelligent person in the room. In 2006, he gave a conference at the United States mission to correspondents at the UN, on nuclear enrichment. Its objective was to convince the audience that Iran was close to having an atomic bomb despite a 2007 National Intelligence Calculation of the United States that Tehran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 2003.

But arrogance may have finally defeated Bolton. At the top of that agenda has maintained the stated goal for years: bomb and overthrow the Iranian government.

Bolton has a very high judgment on himself, rooted apparently in a sincere belief in the myth of American greatness. He always seems angry and one can never define if the reason for the dispute is personal or diplomatic. He personally takes on political or other differences with nations that disagree with the positions of the government of the country he represents. In this field, he links his sense of personal power with that of the United States as a nation.

It is more than any ideology. It is fanaticism. Bolton believes that the United States is exceptional, indispensable and superior to all other nations… and is not afraid to say so in public. He is not the typical government official who moves from passivity to aggression. He is aggressive always. He is always willing to make intimidation something personal in the name of the country he represents.

He is, of course, a vociferous instigator of the US coup in Venezuela and it was he who organized the “Brooks Brothers mutiny” that interrupted the vote count in Florida in the disputed presidential election of 2000.

He practices the tactic that is common in the US ruling class of describing the disobedient leaders who are about to be overthrown: Saddam was Hitler, Milosevic was Hitler, Noriega was Hitler and Hillary Clinton called Putin Hitler. This derives from a false rebirth of the glory of the USA after World War II: painting the adventures abroad as moral crusades, and not as naked aggressions in search of profit and power.

Bolton is the distillation of the pathology of American power.He is unique in the purity of this pathology.

He was chosen for the position by a president with very limited knowledge of international affairs – except in the case of real estate.

Two months after Bolton was appointed national security adviser, in June 2018, Trump withdrew the US from the six-nation agreement under which Tehran reduced its nuclear enrichment program in exchange for a relaxation of US and international sanctions. In response to increasingly stringent sanctions, Iran said on May 5 in Tehran that it would restart partial nuclear enrichment.

If this were a White House that worked properly, it would be the president who would order a military action, and not a national security adviser. “I do not think Trump is smart enough to realize what Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are doing to him. They are manipulating him,” former US Senator Mike Gravel told RT this week.

The New York Times recently reported: “Privately, several European officials described Mr. Bolton and Mr. Pompeo as pushing a confident Mr. Trump through a series of steps that could put the United States in the process of war before the president realizes it.”

- Manuel E. Yepe http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/

(Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann. https://walterlippmann.com/john-boltons-dangerous-psychopathology/)