John Bolton for Secretary of State

Reuters photo: Chip East

And just like that Donald Trump needs to govern. The outsider who shocked the world with his upsets in the primaries and the general election will have to arrive in Washington and take control of a vast and often hostile bureaucracy. With allies nervous and a challenge from adversaries abroad likely to materialize quickly, the choice of secretary of state is his most important appointment.

Naturally, names have already been mentioned in the press as possibilities, and none is better suited to the job than former U.N. ambassador John Bolton.

First, the other possibilities: Newt Gingrich is a brilliant thinker and glib talker who would always be one slip of the tongue away from creating an international crisis; Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee was last seen facilitating President Obama’s Iran-deal path through Congress, in one of the prime exhibits of GOP fecklessness in recent years; Rudy Giuliani has done yeoman’s work for Trump, but doesn’t have extensive foreign policy experience, to put it mildly.

Bolton has the advantage of being an experienced, straight-talking yet nuanced foreign-policy hand, who also fits the Trump sensibility on national security. Bolton is an American internationalist who believes in the importance of American power. He is a hard-headed realist whose focus is always the national interest. He negotiated the creation of the Proliferation Security Initiative, for instance, a global effort to counter illicit trafficking in weapons and materials of mass destruction. It was, and is, a diplomatic rarity—“an activity, not an organization,” as one U.K. diplomat put it. United Nations, take note.

Read the rest of this National Review editorial HERE.

If you like what you see, please "Like" us on Facebook either here or here. Please follow us on Twitter here.