Former national security adviser John Bolton defended his use of the phrase “Libya model” to describe President Trump’s negotiations with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
Bolton said on Sunday that he does not regret using the phrase to describe Trump’s negotiations with North Korea in 2018, despite Trump calling it “one of the dumbest things [he’s] seen on television.”
He maintained that he was referring to the Libya model used in 2004 and not the Libya model used in the Obama administration, which ended with Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s body being drug through the streets during the Arab Spring. Bolton said he did not know if that was the moment that soured his relationship with Trump.
“I guess the president’s discontent with me ought to have him asking, ‘Who hired that guy to begin with?’ Maybe he’s the one who needs to be fired. You know, I don’t think I could be clearer in talking about the Libya model of 2003-2004. We had a clear strategic decision for Muammar Gaddafi to give up Libya’s nuclear weapons program. We have never gotten that from North Korea,” he told Face the Nation.
“So the fact that seven or eight years later in the midst of the Arab Spring, Gaddafi was overthrown, nobody predicted in 2003-2004. I’ll stand by my comment. One day the president will learn a little history, and he’d be better off for it,” he added.
Trump was outraged by Bolton’s decision to compare negotiations with Kim to the “Libya model” because he believes North Korea shut down negotiations to remove all nuclear weapons from the peninsula over a lack of trust that the U.S. government would follow through on protecting Kim’s leadership in the same way that the Obama administration allowed Gaddafi to be overthrown in 2011 after he gave up his nuclear weapons in 2004.
