John Bolton
American lawyer and diplomat (born 1948)

John Robert Bolton (born November 20, 1948) is an American attorney, diplomat, Republican consultant, and political commentator. He served as the 25th United States ambassador to the United Nations from 2005 to 2006, and as the 26th United States national security advisor from 2018 to 2019.
Bolton also acted as a United States assistant attorney general for President Ronald Reagan from 1985 to 1989. He served in the State Department as the assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs from 1989 to 1993, and the under secretary of state for arms control and international security affairs from 2001 to 2005. He was an advocate of the Iraq War as a Director of the Project for the New American Century, which favored going to war with Iraq.
He was the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations from August 2005 to December 2006, as a recess appointee by President George W. Bush. He stepped down at the end of his recess appointment in December 2006 because he was unlikely to win confirmation in the Senate, of which the Democratic Party had control at the time. Bolton later served as National Security Advisor to President Donald Trump from April 2018 to September 2019. He repeatedly called for the termination of the Iran nuclear deal, from which the U.S. withdrew in May 2018. He wrote a best-selling book about his tenure in the Trump administration, The Room Where It Happened, published in 2020.
The public source identifies “John Bolton” as american lawyer and diplomat (born 1948). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around John, Bolton and American.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q311269. VIAF identifies the subject as 25806519. The Library of Congress control number is no89017580. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1948, 2005, 2006 and 2018.
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This entry incorporates text from “John Bolton” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.