The University’s LeMieux Center for Public Policy will host former White House National Security Advisor and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton 6:30 p.m. Jan. 19 in the DeSantis Family Chapel.
Register for the free event here. Bolton served as National Security Advisor from April 2018 to September 2019, and in that role, he championed a strong U.S. foreign and defense policy. He is recognized for his national-security influence and past experience, having served in the former presidential administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush.
“Ambassador Bolton is a leading expert on foreign policy issues,” said LeMieux Center founder and former U.S. Sen. George S. LeMieux. “He has literally been in the room where it has happened for the past 40 years. We look forward to learning from his unique insights.”
During his recent White House tenure, Bolton scored policy victories, such as overseeing the administration’s withdrawal from the 2015 international nuclear deal with Iran reached under former President Barack Obama. Bolton also served as a crucial force in strategic conversations with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, seeking broad concessions from him about his weapons of mass destruction. Bolton participated in key policy formulation on issues related to Russia, including strategic arms control, and on China.
As the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations from 2005 to 2006, Bolton defended American economic and security interests, as he did throughout his time at the State and Justice Departments. During his tenure, he voiced the need for the Security Council to take meaningful action against international nuclear proliferation and terrorism.
Along with France’s ambassador, Bolton led the Security Council to approve a unanimous resolution to end the summer 2006 Hezbollah war on Israel, to authorize UN peacekeepers and to create an arms embargo against Hezbollah. He also assembled an international coalition that blocked the bid of Hugo Chavez, Venezuela’s Marxist strongman, to join the Security Council.
Bolton is an advocate for human rights. While serving at the UN, he arranged the Security Council’s first deliberations on Burma’s human rights abuses. He invited actor George Clooney and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel to brief the Security Council in September 2006 on the mass murder of non-Arabs in Darfur, Sudan. “Every day we delay only adds to the suffering of the Sudanese people and extends the genocide,” Bolton said.
Released in June 2020, his book, The Room Where It Happened, is a White House memoir that is the most comprehensive and substantial account of the Trump administration, and one of the few to date by a top-level official. His op-ed articles have been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and other periodicals.
Bolton is the latest in a series of high-ranking U.S. and international officials hosted by the LeMieux Center in recent years. They include 70th Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, former White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Deborah L. Birx and Admiral James Stavridis, NATO’s 16th Supreme Allied commander and 15th commander of the U.S. European Command.
Learn more about Palm Beach Atlantic’s LeMieux Center for Public Policy here.
Photo: Former White House National Security Advisor and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton
