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No surrender: John Bolton may no longer be in the Bush administration, but he’s still very much in the game.

FOREIGN POLICY: It’s been a tense week on the nuclear front, with Syria accusing Israel of invading its airspace, and then North Korea blasting Israel for doing so. You’ve been one of the only people who have spoken openly about the likelihood that Israel bombed nuclear facilities in Syria. If that were the case, why do you think Israel wouldn’t announce it had done so?

John Bolton: Well, I don’t think we really know what the target of the Israeli raid was. There seems to be a lot of indication that there was a North Korean-Syrian project in the nuclear field, although obviously the details of that are not known. And what that suggests is that we need very clear answers from the North Koreans in the context of the six-party talks [as to] whether indeed they are proliferating nuclear technology, whether they’re outsourcing their program—or just exactly what it is they’re doing.

Now, what the Israeli raid actually hit, I don’t think people know. I was certainly reacting against the notion that it was an attack on a shipment of missiles bound from Iran to Hezbollah, because I don’t think the Israelis would take the risks inherent in an attack on Syrian territory against a target like that. To me, it suggests that it was a higher-value target, and a nuclear facility of some kind would definitely qualify. But what exactly the target is, I don’t know myself, and I’m not sure that there’s anything but speculation out there at this point. There has been at least some public acknowledgment through official U.S. sources that there are concerns about not just North Korean ballistic-missile cooperation with Syria, which we’ve known about for some time, but the possibility that there’s cooperation on the nuclear front as well.

FP: You’re obviously aware that the six-party talks have been indefinitely postponed. How do you respond to criticism that characterizes Bush administration hard-liners as happy to see these talks scuttled? Do you think that’s considered progress?

JB: Well, I’m not in the administration, so it doesn’t apply to me in any event.

I don’t think North Korea is ever going to voluntarily give up its nuclear weapons. I don’t think you can chat Kim Jong Il out of what he sees as his trump card against Japan, the United States, South Korea, and others. So, in a sense, the entire six-party talks are a way of subsidizing Kim Jong Il with tangible economic and political benefits, relegitimizing him after his ballistic missile and nuclear weapons test of last year, and propping up a regime whose two main objectives are staying in power and keeping its nuclear weapons. So from that point of view, I don’t think the six-party talks can solve the North Korean nuclear problem. I think they’re perpetuating it.

FP: So could you not imagine a scenario wherein Kim Jong Il knows he’s better off without nuclear weapons than with them?

JB: I don’t think he can imagine such a scenario. He has repeatedly promised to give up nuclear weapons, or the regime has [via] the North-South Joint Denuclearization Declaration and the Agreed Framework. There have been any number of statements during the course of the six-party talks, not just the February 13 [2007] agreement or the September 2005 agreement, but earlier during the first Bush term. The difference is that in February of this year, Kim Jong Il was feeling the effects of the credit squeeze because of [the Banco Delta Asia issue] and keeping the North Koreans out of international financial markets. I think he was feeling the squeeze and the isolation as a consequence of his October nuclear test, and he needed to get himself out of the corner he had painted himself into. Once he’s out of that corner, I think he’ll simply revert to past practices.

FP: Switching gears to Iran, the Iranians are showing little sign of slowing down their nuclear program. If the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) refuses to enforce its mandate and Iran crosses uranium red lines once again, what should the United States do?

JB: Well, I think more than four years of diplomacy has given the Iranians the one asset they otherwise couldn’t purchase for any price, and that’s time. And during that long, unsuccessful period of negotiations, they have now—by the IAEA’s own information—perfected all of the critical steps to achieve indigenous mastery over the nuclear fuel cycle. And so by allowing diplomacy to proceed as long as we did, we have dramatically limited our options. I’m afraid now we’re past the point where even strong Security Council sanctions could dissuade Iran from continuing to follow the strategic decision to acquire nuclear weapons. What that means unfortunately is that our options may be down to regime change or the use of force against the nuclear program.