Former Ambassador John Bolton is aiming to influence the 2016 GOP presidential election, so he’s releasing a new campaign advertisement on Tuesday to encourage voters to make national security their priority when choosing the next president of the United States.
“My overall aim is to place national security where it ought to be, which is at the top of the list of priorities, because if the country isn’t safe, in my view, all the other issues are secondary” Bolton told Breitbart News on Monday.
This is the second set of TV ads that Bolton’s non-profit group, The Foundation for American Security and Freedom, has released. Starting in May, they are spending a total of $150,000 to broadcast ads in New Hampshire, Iowa, South Carolina and Nevada.
He has not endorsed anyone for president yet, and it is unclear if he will, but the former U.N. Ambassador said he launched his foreign-policy PAC and SuperPAC in March after becoming frustrated with both political parties.
“I don’t have much faith in the Democratic Party on national security grounds,” the former ambassador to the UN said in an exclusive interview. “I think there’s hardly a national-security wing left in the Democratic Party.”
In March, “I didn’t think frankly at that point that Republicans were doing a very good job of explaining to citizens that ignoring foreign problems doesn’t make them easier to resolve, it makes them harder to resolve,” he told Breitbart News. “Republicans, too, had fallen prey to the political operatives conventional wisdom that no one cases about foreign policy,” he said.
Last week, Bolton released the “Bolton test” which is a foreign policy litmus-test made up of five questions regarding America’s place in the world. “The most important job of the president is protecting the country and therefore the most important question that voters should be asking themselves is who is best capable of doing that,” Bolton told Breitbart News.
“My interest really is convincing citizens that national security needs a higher priority especially in the early states, but more generally to be putting these questions to the candidates and not to simply rely on stump speeches that their staffs have written.”