If nothing else, Bolton has proved unerringly true to his philosophical views. During his tension-filled career at the U.N. and State Department (he once told me in a 2002 interview that he felt surrounded by “enemies” at State), he consistently brooked no interference from allies and fulminated at interference from anyone, especially U.N. “civil servants.” Before he became U.N. ambassador—in a recess appointment because even many Senate Republicans would not back him—Bolton infamously proposed that if the U.N. Secretariat in New York “lost 10 stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.” When the No. 2 official at the U.N., Mark Malloch Brown, suggested that Americans were acting against their own interests when they bashed the world body, Bolton exploded. Malloch Brown, in a speech, warned Americans they could “lose” the organization if they continued “the prevailing practice of seeking to use the U.N. almost by stealth as a diplomatic tool while failing to stand up for it against its domestic critics.” In response, Bolton declared that Malloch Brown, as a mere “international civil servant” rather than a representative of an individual country, had no right to say such things. “It’s just illegitimate,” Bolton said.

Arriving at a time when Trump appears to be giving voice more to his own anti-globalist and unilateralist instincts, Bolton will no doubt encourage these tendencies with a kind of career-vindicating glee. He will lend eager validation to the “America First” views that Trump has embraced since his presidential campaign: that the United States can and should act alone as it pleases. “We will no longer surrender this country or its people to the false song of globalism,” Trump said in his defining foreign-policy speech as a candidate in the spring of 2016. “The nation-state remains the true foundation for happiness and harmony. I am skeptical of international unions that tie us up and bring America down.” The language of Trump’s in-your-face inaugural address echoed these views: “From this moment on, it’s going to be America First,” he said.