But the revulsion on the Left against John Bolton is occasioned by much more than his robust positions on Iran and North Korea. It includes, for example, his support of Brexit and his rejection of the demand that the West provide a home for Syrian refugees. At the end of the day, what Bolton’s enemies really hate is his insistence on the central importance of national sovereignty to the maintenance of that world order bequeathed to us by the peace of Westphalia in 1648. They hate John Bolton because he is a patriotic nationalist and they are utopian globalists. As he put it a few years ago in How Barack Obama is Endangering Our National Sovereignty, ‘advocates of ‘sharing’ or ‘pooling’ U.S. sovereignty with international organisations to address ‘global’ problems are really saying we should cede some of our sovereignty to institutions that other nations will also influence or even control. That is unquestionably a formula for reducing U.S. autonomy and reducing our control over government’. In Bolton’s view, nationalism is a good thing, a support, not a threat, to freedom. And sovereignty is an indispensable adjunct to nationalism.

John Bolton is thus an appropriate counsellor for a President whose signature policy is ‘America First’—which does not mean, as he hastened to add, ‘America Alone’. Some news outlets have made heavy weather out of the fact that Bolton is Donald Trump’s third national security advisor in fourteen months. But that is laughable. A cabal in the CIA and FBI destroyed Trump’s first national security advisor, Michael Flynn after a few weeks. General McMaster was hurriedly slotted into the position. De dimissis nil nisi bonum dicendum est: about the sacked one should say nothing but good. H.R. McMaster is a great and noble warrior (the fact that that phrase sounds odd to our effete ears tells us a lot about ourselves). But apparently he never really meshed with his boss. Rumours of his departure have been rife for months. Last week, the President called Vladimir Putin after his election. He congratulated Putin on his victory even though his briefing memo admonished DO NOT CONGRATULATE, something we know because it was leaked to The Washington Post, to the fury of the President, McMaster, and all responsible actors in the White House. That seems to have been the proverbial straw that did in the dromedary.