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.
Bolton is widely considered a foreign policy hawk and advocates military action and regime change by the U.S. in Iran, Syria, Libya, Venezuela, Cuba, Yemen, and North Korea. A member of the Republican Party, his political views have been described as American nationalist, conservative, and neoconservative, although Bolton rejects the last term. He is a former senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and a Fox News Channel commentator. He was a foreign policy adviser to 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. In October 2025, Bolton was indicted on eight counts of unlawful transmission and ten counts of unlawful retention of national defense information between 2018 and 2025. On June 26, 2026, Bolton pled guilty.
In 2022, Iranian IRGC member Shahram Poursafi was charged with attempting to hire individuals in the United States to assassinate Bolton.
Bolton was born on November 20, 1948, in Baltimore, Maryland, the son of Virginia Clara "Ginny" (née Godfrey), a housewife, and Edward Jackson "Jack" Bolton, a Baltimore fireman. He grew up in the working-class neighborhood of Yale Heights, and won a scholarship to the McDonogh School in Owings Mills, Maryland, graduating in 1966. He also ran the school's Students For Goldwater campaign in 1964.
Bolton attended Yale College, earning a Bachelor of Arts and graduating summa cum laude in 1970. He was a member of the Yale Political Union. He attended Yale Law School from 1971 to 1974, where he shared classes and student housing with his friend Clarence Thomas, earning a Juris Doctor in 1974.
In 1972, Bolton was a summer intern for Vice President Spiro Agnew. He was hired for the position by David Keene.
Bolton was a supporter of the Vietnam War, but avoided combat through a student deferment followed by enlistment in the Maryland National Guard. During the 1969 Vietnam War draft lottery, Bolton drew number 185. (Draft numbers were randomly assigned to birth dates; someone born on December 31 could have received Number 1. Numbers 1 to 195 were eventually called up.) As a result of the Johnson and Nixon administrations' decisions to rely largely on the draft rather than on the reserve forces, joining a Guard or Reserve unit became a way to reduce the chances of service in Vietnam.
Before graduating from Yale College in 1970, Bolton enlisted in the Maryland Army National Guard rather than waiting to find out if his draft number would be called. He attended Active Duty for Training (ADT) at Fort Polk, Louisiana, from July to November 1970. After serving in the National Guard for four years, he served in the United States Army Reserve until the end of his enlistment two years later.
He wrote in his Yale 25th reunion book: "I confess I had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy. I considered the war in Vietnam already lost." In a 2007 interview, Bolton explained his comment in the reunion book saying his decision to avoid service in Vietnam was because "by the time I was about to graduate in 1970, it was clear to me that opponents of the Vietnam War had made it certain we could not prevail, and that I had no great interest in going there to have Teddy Kennedy give it back to the people I might die to take it away from."
In his 2007 book, Surrender Is Not an Option, Bolton described his perception of the war as a "futile struggle", and that "dying for your country was one thing, but dying to gain territory that antiwar forces in Congress would simply return to the enemy seemed ludicrous to me. Looking back, I am not terribly proud of this calculation..."
From 1974 to 1981, Bolton was an associate at the Washington, D.C. office of Covington & Burling; he returned to the firm again from 1983 to 1985. Bolton was also a partner in the law firm of Lerner, Reed, Bolton & McManus, from 1993 to 1999. He was of counsel in the Washington, D.C. office of Kirkland & Ellis from 2008 until his appointment as National Security Advisor in 2018. In September 2015, Freedom Capital Investment Management appointed Bolton as a senior advisor.
Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations
During the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations, his governmental roles were within the State Department, the Justice Department, and the U.S. Agency for International Development. He was a protégé of conservative North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms.
His Justice Department position as an assistant attorney general required him to advance Reagan administration positions, including opposition to financial reparations to Japanese-Americans held in World War II-era internment camps; the insistence on Reagan's executive privilege during William Rehnquist's chief justice confirmation hearings, when Congress asked for memos written by Rehnquist as a Nixon Justice Department official; shepherding the judicial nomination process for Antonin Scalia; and the framing of a bill to control illegal immigration as an essential drug war measure. He was also involved in the Iran–Contra affair.
Bolton's government service included positions such as:
Assistant secretary for International Organization Affairs at the Department of State (1989–1993)