FP: What then? Assuming the United States pursues some kind of regime-change option in Iran, for example, how would the United States be able to sustain that, given the current situation in Iraq and elsewhere?

JB: Once upon a time, we knew how to do clandestine regime change. We need to reacquire that capability. I don’t think overt support for Iranian dissidents is necessarily very helpful, and it may well impose a political cost on the dissidents themselves. But I think there’s enormous dissatisfaction with the Iranian regime, for economic reasons, for religious and political reasons, for ethnic reasons. I don’t think that regime is as stable or as secure as you might think from the outside. By the same token, I don’t think that necessarily means it can be brought down quickly, and we’re in a race against time here with the nuclear program. But certainly as a preference to military force, I would hope that regime change could succeed.

FP: Do you see any parallels between the reporting on Iran’s nuclear facilities today and Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction in 2002–03?

JB: Much of what we know about Iran today is public information that’s come from the IAEA. In any case, I don’t think that the concerns that the United States and almost everybody else had about Iraq’s chemical weapons program in particular was the result of distorted or incorrect intelligence. It stemmed from Iraq’s own 1991 declaration of its chemical weapons stockpiles. So the people who are saying that this is just Iraq redux are ignoring the critical differences between the two cases.

FP: As the presidential campaign is heating up, you’re likely going to be listening as closely as anyone for any bold pronouncements about U.S. foreign policy and the United States’ role in the world. What do you want to hear from a candidate this year about U.S. foreign policy?

JB: They need to be concerned to articulate what America’s core interests are. [They need] to identify the threats they see, from the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction; to the possible reversion of Russia to an aggressive, negative policy; to how to handle the rise of China, whose future is very uncertain—issues like that. Not feel-good rhetoric, but concrete proposals on how to respond to these challenges.

Ambassador John Bolton served as U.S. representative to the United Nations from 2005 to 2006 and as under secretary of state for arms control and international security from 2001 to 2005. He is senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and his new book, Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations and Abroad, will be published in November by Threshold Books.

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