John Robert Bolton II (born November 20, 1948) is an American attorney, diplomat, Republican consultant, and political commentator who served as the 25th United States ambassador to the United Nations from 2005 to 2006, and as the 26th United States national security advisor from 2018 to 2019.
Bolton served as a United States assistant attorney general for President Ronald Reagan from 1985 to 1989. He served in the State Department as the assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs from 1989 to 1993, and the under secretary of state for arms control and international security affairs from 2001 to 2005. He was an advocate of the Iraq War as a Director of the Project for the New American Century, which favored going to war with Iraq.
He was the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations from August 2005 to December 2006, as a recess appointee by President George W. Bush. He stepped down at the end of his recess appointment in December 2006 because he was unlikely to win confirmation in the Senate, of which the Democratic Party had control at the time. Bolton later served as National Security Advisor to President Donald Trump from April 2018 to September 2019. He repeatedly called for the termination of the Iran nuclear deal, from which the U.S. withdrew in May 2018. He wrote a best-selling book about his tenure in the Trump administration, The Room Where It Happened, published in 2020.
Bolton is widely considered a foreign policy hawk and advocates military action and regime change by the U.S. in Iran, Syria, Libya, Venezuela, Cuba, Yemen, and North Korea. A member of the Republican Party, his political views have been described as American nationalist, conservative, and neoconservative, although Bolton rejects the last term. He is a former senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and a Fox News Channel commentator. He was a foreign policy adviser to 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. In October 2025, Bolton was indicted on eight counts of unlawful transmission and ten counts of unlawful retention of national defense information between 2018 and 2025.
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