Former U.N. ambassador John Bolton marked the 16th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks by warning of an impending nuclear threat from Iran and North Korea.
“North Korea and Iran don’t pose a military danger to the United States. Their principal threat is to kill innocent American civilians,” he told an audience from the Endowment for Middle East Truth, or EMET, at the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington. “They’re terrorist weapons.”
EMET, a conservative think tank, is calling for President Donald Trump to end certification of Iran’s compliance with its 2015 nuclear agreement with six world powers.
Bolton — who served as ambassador to the United Nations from 2001 to 2005 — was joined by Lebanese-American scholar and pundit Walid Phares, who argued that the United States stopped winning the “war of ideas” against jihadists actors during the Obama administration.
Phares singled out the Muslim Brotherhood as having a particularly insidious influence on terrorist groups in the Middle East.
“We have won the Cold War, we have won the war against the fascists — the real fascists — of the Nazis and Mussolini, in much shorter time,” Phares said. “What is wrong with our ability in not winning this war? Well, because they are winning the war of ideas against us.”
