Senior Fellow John  R. Bolton

Negotiations with North Korea are on a knife's edge. Rumors of secret Israeli raids on alleged Syrian nuclear facilities and possible U.S. airstrikes on Iran are roiling political salons from Washington to Riyadh. In this week's Seven Questions, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton offers some advice for those confronted with a dangerous world.

Foreign Policy: It's been a tense week on the nuclear front, with Syria accusing Israel of invading its airspace, and then North Korea blasting Israel for doing so. You've been one of the only people who have spoken openly about the likelihood that Israel bombed nuclear facilities in Syria. If that were the case, why do you think Israel wouldn't announce it had done so?

John R. Bolton: Well, I don't think we really know what the target of the Israeli raid was. There seems to be a lot of indication that there was a North Korean-Syrian project in the nuclear field, although obviously the details of that are not known. And what that suggests is that we need very clear answers from the North Koreans in the context of the six-party talks [as to] whether indeed they are proliferating nuclear technology, whether they're outsourcing their program--or just exactly what it is they're doing.

Now, what the Israeli raid actually hit, I don't think people know. I was certainly reacting against the notion that it was an attack on a shipment of missiles bound from Iran to Hezbollah, because I don't think the Israelis would take the risks inherent in an attack on Syrian territory against a target like that. To me, it suggests that it was a higher-value target, and a nuclear facility of some kind would definitely qualify. But what exactly the target is, I don't know myself, and I'm not sure that there's anything but speculation out there at this point. There has been at least some public acknowledgment through official U.S. sources that there are concerns about not just North Korean ballistic-missile cooperation with Syria, which we've known about for some time, but the possibility that there's cooperation on the nuclear front as well.

Foreign Policy: You're obviously aware that the six-party talks have been indefinitely postponed. How do you respond to criticism that characterizes Bush administration hard-liners as happy to see these talk scuttled? Do you think that's considered progress?

John R. Bolton: Well, I'm not in the administration, so it doesn't apply to me in any event.
I don't think North Korea is ever going to voluntarily give up its nuclear weapons. I don't think you can chat Kim Jong Il out of what he sees as his trump card against Japan, the United States, South Korea, and others. So, in a sense, the entire six-party talks are a way of subsidizing Kim Jong Il with tangible economic and political benefits, relegitimizing him after his ballistic missile and nuclear weapons test of last year, and propping up a regime whose two main objectives are staying in power and keeping its nuclear weapons. So from that point of view, I don't think the six-party talks can solve the North Korean nuclear problem. I think they're perpetuating it.

Foreign Policy: So could you not imagine a scenario wherein Kim Jong Il knows he's better off without nuclear weapons than with them?

John R. Bolton: I don't think he can imagine such a scenario. He has repeatedly promised to give up nuclear weapons, or the regime has [via] the North-South Joint Denuclearization Declaration and the Agreed Framework. There have been any number of statements during the course of the six-party talks, not just the February 13 [2007] agreement or the September 2005 agreement, but earlier during the first Bush term. The difference is that in February of this year, Kim Jong Il was feeling the effects of the credit squeeze because of [the Banco Delta Asia issue] and keeping the North Koreans out of international financial markets. I think he was feeling the squeeze and the isolation as a consequence of his October nuclear test, and he needed to get himself out of the corner he had painted himself into. Once he's out of that corner, I think he'll simply revert to past practices.

Foreign Policy: Switching gears to Iran, the Iranians are showing little sign of slowing down their nuclear program. If the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) refuses to enforce its mandate and Iran crosses uranium red lines once again, what should the United States do? 

John R. Bolton: Well, I think more than four years of diplomacy has given the Iranians the one asset they otherwise couldn't purchase for any price, and that's time. And during that long, unsuccessful period of negotiations, they have now--by the IAEA's own information--perfected all of the critical steps to achieve indigenous mastery over the nuclear fuel cycle. And so by allowing diplomacy to proceed as long as we did, we have dramatically limited our options. I'm afraid now we're past the point where even strong Security Council sanctions could dissuade Iran from continuing to follow the strategic decision to acquire nuclear weapons. What that means unfortunately is that our options may be down to regime change or the use of force against the nuclear program.

Foreign Policy: What then? Assuming the United States pursues some kind of regime-change option in Iran, for example, how would the United States be able to sustain that, given the current situation in Iraq and elsewhere?

John R. Bolton: Once upon a time, we knew how to do clandestine regime change. We need to reacquire that capability. I don't think overt support for Iranian dissidents is necessarily very helpful, and it may well impose a political cost on the dissidents themselves. But I think there's enormous dissatisfaction with the Iranian regime, for economic reasons, for religious and political reasons, for ethnic reasons. I don't think that regime is as stable or as secure as you might think from the outside. By the same token, I don't think that necessarily means it can be brought down quickly, and we're in a race against time here with the nuclear program. But certainly as a preference to military force, I would hope that regime change could succeed.

Foreign Policy: Do you see any parallels between the reporting on Iran's nuclear facilities today and Iraq's weapons of mass destruction in 2002–03?

John R. Bolton: Much of what we know about Iran today is public information that's come from the IAEA. In any case, I don't think that the concerns that the United States and almost everybody else had about Iraq's chemical weapons program in particular was the result of distorted or incorrect intelligence. It stemmed from Iraq's own 1991 declaration of its chemical weapons stockpiles. So the people who are saying that this is just Iraq redux are ignoring the critical differences between the two cases.

Foreign Policy: As the presidential campaign is heating up, you're likely going to be listening as closely as anyone for any bold pronouncements about U.S. foreign policy and the United States' role in the world. What do you want to hear from a candidate this year about U.S. foreign policy?

John R. Bolton: They need to be concerned to articulate what America's core interests are. [They need] to identify the threats they see, from the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction; to the possible reversion of Russia to an aggressive, negative policy; to how to handle the rise of China, whose future is very uncertain--issues like that. Not feel-good rhetoric, but concrete proposals on how to respond to these challenges.

John R. Bolton is a senior fellow at AEI.