Did Mike Waltz Just Go Down John Bolton’s Path?
The year is 2019. President Donald Trump has fired his hawkish national security adviser for being an obstruction to diplomacy. The year is 2025. President Donald Trump has demoted his hawkish national security adviser for being an obstruction to diplomacy.
Trump announced in a May 1 post to Truth Social that Mike Waltz, formerly national security adviser, will now serve as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Secretary of State Marco Rubio will take over the White House’s National Security Council in the interim. Although Trump praised Waltz’s service, the move was clearly a demotion, and officials told CNN that Trump had “lost confidence” in Waltz.
The firing came after a free-for-all struggle over foreign policy staffing involving Waltz, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and Special Envoy Steve Witkoff. Waltz stands out as a hawk among the three. Although Hegseth is far from a principled peace dove, he pushed back on plans to attack Iran. And Witkoff, who seems to have supplanted even Secretary of State Marco Rubio as Trump’s most trusted diplomat, is negotiating to wind down several wars.
Waltz’s rise and fall had some striking parallels to the story of John Bolton, national security adviser in 2018 and 2019 during the first Trump administration. Both of them were old-school Republican hawks, never really at home in Trump’s movement, and both were fired after (quite predictably) becoming an obstacle to diplomatic initiatives. Bolton served as U.N. ambassador before the Trump administration; Waltz seems to be ending this stage of his career in that same post.
And both of them drew staff from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a nonprofit that has become a central incubator for Washington’s hawks. Bolton brought FDD senior adviser Rich Goldberg onto the National Security Council, and FDD controversially continued to pay Goldberg’s salary while he worked under Bolton. Similarly, Waltz hired Merav Ceren, a former Israeli defense ministry official and a former national security fellow at FDD.
In Trump’s first term, it was negotiations with North Korea and Iran over their nuclear programs, and with the Taliban over ending the war in Afghanistan. Today, Trump is (again) negotiating with Iran over its nuclear program, and with Russia over ending the war in Ukraine.
Trump said that he initially brought on Bolton in order to project strength: “I’d be with foreign leaders, and I didn’t even have to act tough because they said, look, that moron John Bolton, he’s crazy…They’d give me everything I wanted because the guy’s a nut job.”
But months after being hired, Bolton had “become a vocal internal critic” of Trump’s Iranian and Afghan talks, PBS News reported. His most infamous example of obstructionism—the one Trump cited in his firing—came during talks with North Korea.
Bolton told CBS News in April 2018 that he was “looking at the Libya model.” Given that Liby
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