Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a special series of discussions about US politics and the Trump presidency, or as we journalists call it, the gift that keeps on giving.

I'm Freddie Gray, I'm deputy editor of the spectator. I'm joined today by Jacob Harbrun, who is editor of the national interest and also author of They

They Knew They Were Right, The Rise of the Neocons. And we're going to be discussing the appointment of John Bolton

and what that says about where the Trump presidency is going.

Jacob, we had the news yesterday that H.R. McMaster, the National Security Advisor, was out and John Bolton was in.

This news has been circulating for a while that this was about to happen. I think national interest, your journal, reported it first, I think, if I'm right.

And it was finally confirmed amid a blizzard of other news yesterday, other very big news, and it stole, probably

I'd say most of the headlines, the fact that Bolton, this mustachioed Uberhawk had come

into the Trump administration at last. What was your first thought when you heard the news?

Was it finally? What took him so long? Bolton had been angling for the job ever since Trump won the election,

and in many ways his muscular militarism is compatible with Trump's own America First doctrine.

While Bolton has close relations with many neo-conservatives, he tends to be more on the nationalist wing

of the movement and very much in the mold of Donald Rumsfeld or Vice President Dick Cheney,

who employed and promoted many neo-conservatives, but were ambivalent, if not hostile, to the idea of trying to democratize foreign nations.

Bolton is simply interested in regime change.

That's an interesting point because I think there's been quite a lot of it's become a sort of

on D on Twitter to say, oh, you're quite wrong if you think Bolton is a neo-conservative.

And Edward Luce, I think now former America correspondent for the Financial Times, said he was a paleo-conservative, like Dick Cheney and Donald Trump.

Could you, as a bit of an expert on neoconservatism, having written a book about it, could you clarify where Bolton might fall on if there's a neoconservative spectrum, where he is?

Well, these labels obviously only take you so far, and I don't think that Bolton is a paleo

conservative, which is its own endangered species within the conservative movement.

As you know, that tends to be more the Pat Buchanan isolationist wing, and Bolton is by no means an isolationist.

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