John Bolton, who served as national security adviser during the Trump administration, said on Jan. 6 he will run for U.S. president in the 2024 election “primarily on the basis that we need a much stronger foreign policy.”
Bolton’s announcement to seek the Republican nomination for the presidency followed about two months after former President Donald Trump announced his bid to return to the White House.
Bolton told ITV’s “Good Morning Britain,” in an exclusive interview about his ambitions, that his priorities would be to “completely reset U.S. foreign relations with countries like Russia and China.”
“I think it’s important that it’s understood not just in Moscow but [also] in Beijing that unprovoked aggression against your neighbors is not something the United States and its allies will tolerate,” the 74-year-old former diplomat said.
“I wouldn’t run as a vanity candidate. If I didn’t think I could run seriously, then I wouldn’t get in the race,” he told the program, which isn’t broadcast in the United States.
Bolton, a longtime diplomat who had previously worked in the Reagan and George W. Bush administrations, joined the Trump administration in April 2018, replacing H.R. McMaster. Trump ousted Bolton in September 2019. At the time, Trump expressed that he and others in his administration had “disagreed strongly with many of” Bolton’s ideas.
Trump and Bolton weren’t aligned on many fronts, including matters related to U.S. relations with North Korea, Syria, Afghanistan, and Venezuela.
After being fired from the White House, Bolton became a critic of Trump and, in 2020, published a memoir titled “The Room Where It Happened.”
The Trump administration in June 2020 sued Bolton over the book; officials asserted that it contained classified information that would compromise national security if it were published without a government review.
Trump, at the time, accused Bolton of “disseminating, for profit, highly classified information.” But prosecutors in June 2021 dropped the case as well as a grand jury investigation related to the book.
