Trump ousts McMaster, picks Bolton as national security adviser

US President Donald Trump on Thursday chose as his new national security adviser John Bolton, a hawk who has advocated using military force against Iran and North Korea and has taken a hard line against Russia.

Trump said in a tweet that Bolton would replace H R McMaster, his current national security adviser. 

Bolton, 69, who has long been a polarising figure in Washington foreign policy circles, became Trump's third national security adviser in 14 months.

Bolton, a neoconservative, joins a Trump national security team that with the planned replacement of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson by CIA chief Mike Pompeo, is increasingly populated by figures who share Trump's penchant for exercising US power unilaterally.

TRT World spoke to Leone Lakhani in Washington DC.

As the State Department's top arms control official under President George W Bush, Bolton was a leading advocate of the 2003 invasion of Iraq – which was later found to have been based on bogus and exaggerated intelligence about President Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and ties to terrorism.

“There is no such thing as the United Nations,” Bolton once assailed the world body in a speech.

“If the UN Secretariat building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn’t make a lot of difference,” he added.

In recent years, as a conservative media commentator, Bolton has advocated hard line positions on stopping Pyongyang from getting nuclear weapons that could threaten the US. 

He has also advocated getting rid of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, a pact Trump has also heavily criticised. 

Tension between Trump and McMaster

Tension between Trump and McMaster has grown increasingly public. 

Last month, Trump took issue with McMaster's characterisation of Russian meddling in the 2016 election after the national security adviser told the Munich Security Summit that interference was beyond dispute.

"General McMaster forgot to say that the results of the 2016 election were not impacted or changed by the Russians and that the only collusion was between Russia and crooked H, the DNC and the Dems," Trump tweeted on February 17, alluding to frequent GOP allegations of impropriety by Democrats and Hillary Clinton.

Tillerson's exit also forecast trouble for McMaster, who had aligned himself with the embattled secretary of state in seeking to soften some of Trump's most dramatic foreign policy impulses.

The military strategist, who joined the administration in February 2017, has struggled to navigate a tumultuous White House. 

Last summer, he was the target of a far-right attack campaign, as conservative groups and a website tied to former Trump adviser Steve Bannon targeted him as insufficiently supportive of Israel and not tough enough on Iran.

McMaster was brought in after Trump's first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, was dismissed after less than a month in office. White House officials said he was ousted because he did not tell top advisers, including Vice President Mike Pence, about the full extent of his contacts with Russian officials.