At Duke, ex-U.N. envoy blasts president on foreign affairs

By Neil Offen

noffen@heraldsun.com; 419-6646

DURHAM -- The Bush administration's former ambassador to the United Nations gives President Obama "a very, very low grade" in foreign affairs and worries that the president's "naive Wilsonism is leaving us defenseless."

"I think his naivete is overwhelming," John Bolton told an overflowing lecture hall at Duke University's law school Thursday night. The president doesn't understand, he said, that "it's not American strength that's provocative, it's American weakness.'

Bolton, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who also served in high diplomatic posts in several Republican administrations, said Obama has not yet "transitioned from being a candidate to being a president."

Nor, he added, has Obama "transitioned from being a legislator to being an executive."

That lack of experience, Bolton said, combined with the naivete, is "a combustible combination.'

During a question-and-answer session at the end of his talk, a Duke law student challenged Bolton on his description of Obama as overly innocent. The student pointed out that a "naive state senator from Illinois" was right about the futility of the Iraq war and the Bush administration had been wrong.

Bolton defended the Bush administration's launching of the war in Iraq, however, saying that "the U.S. achieved a major strategic victory in overthrowing Saddam Hussein."

Although he acknowledged "mismanagement" of the period after the initial invasion, "that decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein was unquestionably correct," Bolton said. And now, he added, thanks to the surge in troops, "we are moving in the right direction" there.

The former ambassador focused much of his talk on two nations he said were emblematic of the "Axis of Evil" -- Iran and North Korea.

North Korea, he pointed out, already has nuclear weapons and "eight months into the Obama administration, Iran is eight months closer to achieving a nuclear weapon."

Nearly a decade of discussions with Tehran, Bolton said, have achieved little, and the Obama administration is simply following what Bolton said were the failed policies of his own Bush administration -- endless carrot-and-stick negotiations.

He said he believed Iran was now likely to get nuclear weapons and "if Iran goes nuclear, you can count on other countries in the region doing the same."

Right now, the U.S. faces a situation concerning Iran with "very little time remaining," Bolton said, suggesting that the only viable alternative was to use pre-emptive force, probably by Israel.

The U.S. itself should consider a pre-emptive strike, he said, because "we're really going to get blamed for it anyway."