John Bolton



Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations 

Bolton served as the United States' permanent representative to the United Nations from August 2005 to December 2006. At the U.N., Bolton was a tenacious and outspoken advocate of U.S. efforts to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, push Syria out of Lebanon and bring African peacekeepers into shaky Somalia. Bolton helped shepherd a major sanction resolution against North Korea through the U.N. Security Council within days of Pyongyang's Oct. 9, 2006, nuclear test. Bolton and France's ambassador led the Security Council to approve a unanimous resolution to end the summer 2006 Hezbollah war on Israel.

During his tenure at the United Nations, Bolton was an advocate for human rights. He arranged the Security Council's first deliberations on Burma's human rights abuses. Bolton invited actor George Clooney and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel to brief the Security Council in September 2006 on Arab mass-murder of non-Arabs in Darfur, Sudan. He engineered the Security Council's approval of 22,500 U.N. peacekeepers in Darfur. Bolton pressured Sudan's government to accept these personnel atop the 7,000 African Union soldiers already on site.

Bolton is the author of Surrender is Not an Option: Defending America at the U.N. and Abroad, published in 2007.

Prior to his appointment at the U.N., Bolton served as under secretary of state for Arms Control and International Security from May 2001 to May 2005. Previously, Bolton was senior vice president of the American Enterprise Institute, a nonprofit public policy center.

Bolton has spent many years of his career in public service. Previous positions he has held include assistant secretary for International Organization Affairs at the Department of State; assistant attorney general, Department of Justice; assistant administrator for Program and Policy Coordination, U.S. Agency for International Development; and general counsel, U.S. Agency for International Development.

Bolton is also an attorney.  Currently, he is a senior advisor for Kirkland & Ellis LLC with a focus on counseling clients on domestic and international issues in complex corporate, litigation, internal investigations, regulatory and competition matters.