John Bolton: Is America too divided to offer global leadership?
The Interview
BBC
4.3 • 537 Ratings
🗓️ 23 October 2024
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Stephen Sackur is in Washington DC to speak to Donald Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton. With the election looming, Bolton calls his former boss a danger to America. But he won’t back Kamala Harris either. Is America too divided to offer global leadership?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Hard Talk from the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sacker in Washington, D.C. |
| 0:06.6 | My guest in this interview, recorded on the 21st of October, is one of the most influential voices in a school of American thought, |
| 0:15.0 | widely known as the Neocon movement. |
| 0:18.1 | John Bolton, easily identified by his extravagant moustache, was an arch-advocate of projecting |
| 0:25.3 | American power and values by way of military intervention and democracy building. He, Dick Cheney, |
| 0:32.9 | and Donald Rumsfeld held sway in the Republican Party in the period post-9-11 2001. |
| 0:40.3 | They drove the interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. |
| 0:44.6 | Underpinning their approach was an assumption about America's global supremacy and its duty to remake the world in its image. |
| 0:57.1 | He was appointed White House National Security Advisor by Donald Trump, but he lasted only 17 months. Trump labeled him a fool who only wanted to go to war. |
| 1:07.1 | Bolton described his former boss as vacuous and unfit to be president. |
| 1:12.1 | Trump, of course, is now running for the White House again, |
| 1:15.0 | and in just a few days from now, Americans will decide whether Trump, the arch nationalist, |
| 1:20.7 | protectionist, and some say isolationist, or Kamala Harris, the continuity candidate, |
| 1:31.3 | will shape America's foreign policy. The outcome will have significance far beyond America. But either way, is the reality that the U.S. is too exhausted |
| 1:38.5 | and too divided to lead the world? Well, John Bolton joins me now here in Washington, D.C. Welcome to Hard Talk. |
| 1:47.8 | Glad to be with me. To you, does this presidential election represent an exhibition of American strength or American weakness? |
| 1:57.6 | Well, it doesn't exhibit much of anything that I find very attractive. I don't think |
| 2:01.2 | either one of the candidates is fit to be president, so I'm not going to vote for either one of them. |
| 2:06.1 | And I think it portends real trouble internationally for the United States and its friends and |
| 2:11.6 | allies around the world. I wish we had two completely different candidates, but we have what we |
| 2:16.4 | have. See, people watching this |
| 2:17.9 | will, some of them will be surprised. You say you can't possibly vote for either of them, because |
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