Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton joined SiriusXM host Alex Marlow on Thursday’s Breitbart News Daily to talk about recent American and Israeli military actions in Syria.
Bolton saw Iran’s invasion of Israeli airspace with a surprisingly advanced unmanned aerial vehicle, and Israel’s strong military response against Syrian air defenses, as an example of “just how complex the situation is throughout that part of the Middle East, and therefore why anyone incident has a potential to escalate.”
“Most people think this was an Iranian drone flown out of Syria,” he elaborated. “What this means is that Iran is right on Israel’s border. Iran has long been the largest state funder of international terrorism. We know they’re trying to get nuclear weapons, their ballistic missile program is well advanced, so Israel and many of the Arab states in the region are threatened.”
Bolton said Israel retaliated “quite properly” to Iran’s action, regrettably losing an F-16 fighter jet in the process, which he believed was the first Israeli F-16 to be shot down in ten years.
“You have to ask: did the Syrians suddenly get a lot better? I think the answer to that is no. Probably what that means is there is a more sophisticated anti-aircraft air defense system now deployed in Syria. Is it a Russian S-300? Maybe something less sophisticated? Is it manned by Iranian soldiers? Quite possibly. Were there Russian advisers nearby? Did the Russian advisers participate in the air defense? We don’t know. It’s a question worth asking,” he said.
Bolton linked the incident to defensive U.S. airstrikes in Syria over the past week, as forces loyal to the regime in Damascus approached Syrian rebel positions where American advisers were present.
“It turns out that the result of the airstrike by American forces was dozens—or, if you look at some press reports, a hundred or two hundred—so-called ‘Russian mercenaries,’” he noted.
“Now, ask yourself this question: what Russian is sort of going to sign up, kind of walking down the street one day in Moscow and decides he wants to go fight in Syria? It is not credible to believe that these people suddenly pitched up in Damascus looking to sign on,” he contended, comparing the situation to Russia’s infamous use of “little green men” to set up the annexation of Crimea.
“Russia is projecting power in the Middle East. They are aligned with Iran. This is a very dangerous moment there for Israel, for some of the oil-producing monarchies—and obviously it’s dangerous for us, too,” he warned.
Bolton said it was important to “re-establish that the dominant external player in the region is the United States.”
“Under Barack Obama, we essentially walked away from it, basically as part of the Iran deal,” he recalled. “The Iranians wanted a less visible, palpable American presence, and Obama was happy to give it to them like he would give them essentially everything else to get that nuclear deal.”
“The Trump administration has a lot of ground to make up here,” he advised, noting that American withdrawal from the region under Obama led to greater instability and increased risk of regional conflict. He added that some changes for the worse that took place under Obama will be difficult to reverse, such as Russia establishing a much stronger military presence in the Middle East.
“I’m willing to bet that U.S. forces had no clue there were ‘Russian mercenaries’ there, but nonetheless, if these press reports are true, it looks like Americans have killed Russians,” he pointed out, speculating that the incident was among the subjects discussed by President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in their phone call over the weekend.
“I have to say, the Russians—at least publicly so far—seem to have behaved responsibly, Bolton added. “They did admit they had ‘mercenaries,’ quote-unquote, there. They didn’t overreact to it. That’s about the best sign from Russia, frankly, I’ve seen in a long time.”
He cautioned there are good reasons to worry that more incidents would occur, with less carefully controlled responses, due to the increased influence of Russia and Iran, which “remains the principal threat to peace and security in the region.”
Bolton suggested one reason for the restrained Russian response to the incidents in Syria is that “they recognize, among other things, that they’ve got a different kind of cat in the White House from the Obama administration.”
“They understand that when America comes back into the game, their ability to push everybody else around diminishes significantly,” he said. “That doesn’t mean that we’ve eliminated the risk. What we’re trying to do is correct the mistakes that the Obama administration made, in a very difficult circumstance.”
Bolton concluded with some thoughts on the American intelligence community’s latest worldwide threat assessment, which he felt underestimated the dangers of nuclear proliferation.
“We are facing a very hard decision with North Korea in the very near future. Iran is right behind them. If these two countries get deliverable nuclear weapons, I think you’re going to see a massive spread to other wannabe nuclear weapons states,” he warned.
John Bolton is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and head of his own political action committee, BoltonPAC.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. Eastern.
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