All of this brings us to Bolton. To be sure, he has some liabilities. Bolton has spoken on behalf of the People's Mujahadin, or MEK, a cult-like Iranian opposition group that was designated as a US terrorist organisation until 2012. Bolton is not alone here. Democrats including Howard Dean and Ed Rendell have all taken money from the group's supporters in the US. So has Giuliani. Even still, the People's Mujahadin getting a foothold in the Trump White House would not only complicate US outreach to Iran (if Trump is even interested in that), but also outreach to Iran's democratic opposition, which regards the MEK as authoritarians in waiting.
Since leaving the George W. Bush Administration, Bolton has also been far too close with the nuttier fringes of the anti-Sharia movement. For example, he wrote the foreword to Pamela Geller's 2010 book, The Post-American Presidency. In case you were wondering, this treatise is dedicated to the idea that President Barack Obama actually despises the country that elected him twice to the White House.
This kind of thing has earned Bolton some enemies. Joe Scarborough, the host of the MSNBC programme Morning Joe, has pointed to the Geller connection on Twitter. Republican Senator Rand Paul last month pledged that he would not support Bolton for the top State Department job. That's no small matter. If the Republican wins the runoff race in Louisiana this week, this will give the GOP 52 Senate votes to 48 Democrats. The minority will only need two more nays to derail a Bolton nomination.
That has happened before. In 2005, Democrats blocked Bolton's nomination as ambassador to the United Nations, when Republican Senator George Voinovich blocked the nomination. Bolton was appointed in recess, but he eventually resigned his position at the end of 2006 after Democrats won Congress in the midterms.
All of that said, there are strong reasons why Bolton would be a good fit for a Trump Administration. To start, unlike the other candidates for the job, he has significant experience navigating the State Department. Trump should expect resistance from the foreign-service and diplomatic bureaucracy to his foreign policy. Bolton is someone who knows where the bodies are buried at Foggy Bottom.
Bolton, despite his undiplomatic reputation, has also been a successful diplomat. In 1991, when he was assistant secretary of state for international organisation affairs, he led the fight at the UN to repeal resolution 3379, which said Zionism was racism. That resolution had passed 72 to 35 in 1975. In 1991 the General Assembly revoked it with a vote of 86 to 46.
In George W. Bush's first term, when Bolton served as undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, he had three important accomplishments. To start, Bolton negotiated the US withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which placed limitations on US development of missile defence systems. He managed to pull off this feat without any immediate consequences for the US-Russian relationship, which didn't begin to sour until Bush's second term.
Bolton was also instrumental in conducting the first round of diplomacy to exempt US soldiers from prosecution of the International Criminal Court. Bolton did some arm-twisting to get these bilateral immunity agreements. He cajoled and harangued ambassadors, threatening to cut off US assistance. In the end, it worked. More than 100 countries had agreed to exempt US forces from prosecution to the court by the end of the Bush Administration.
Finally, Bolton is the architect of an arrangement between US allies to interdict ships suspected of transporting weapons of mass destruction. This arrangement, known as the Proliferation Security Initiative, survives to this day. A testament to this is that President Barack Obama in his landmark 2009 arms control speech in Prague praised Bolton's brain-child as "an important tool in our efforts to break up black markets, detect and intercept WMD materials in transit, and use financial tools to disrupt this dangerous trade".
If Trump nominates Bolton, his critics will dust off their 2005 playbook against him again. In his nomination hearing that year, Carl Ford, who headed the State Department's Bureau for Intelligence and Research, described him as a "kiss up, kick down kind of guy". Another State Department intelligence analyst, Greg Thielmann, told journalists about how Bolton pressured analysts to get intelligence assessments he wanted.
Bolton also takes a hard line with rogue states. He was one of the most ardent opponents of Bill Clinton's nuclear agreement with North Korea. After Trump's electoral victory this month, Bolton called for regime change in Iran and said he hoped Trump would abrogate the nuclear deal with that regime.
Needless to say, Secretary of State Bolton would represent a sea change for US foreign policy. The man who currently heads the State Department, John Kerry, is in temperament and ideology Bolton's opposite. Kerry has bent over backwards to meet America's adversaries halfway, whether it's in talks with Russia over Syria, or the negotiations over the Iran nuclear deal.
But it's worth asking what the Kerry approach has got the US. As he finishes up his tenure, Iran tests missiles, arrests Americans and still demands new concessions from the US China builds artificial islands in the South China Sea. And Russia continues to bomb civilians in Syria. The Israelis and Palestinians are further away from a negotiated settlement than they were when Obama took office.
This is the Obama-Kerry legacy. The president-elect ran his campaign promising to take a different approach. In this respect, he couldn't ask for a better secretary of state than John Bolton.