NOTHING MORE HAWKISH THAN REMOVING AN ISOLATIONIST:

Throughout his history of public service -- particularly to the Republican Party's 21st-century presidents -- Bolton has earned a reputation as a diplomat disdainful of diplomacy, as a hawk's hawk who never met a potential war he didn't like.

But it also appears he helped trigger the current impeachment process by refusing to play along with Rudy Giuliani's shadow Ukraine policy on Trump's behalf. A former White House official has already told impeachment investigators that Bolton was so disturbed by the effort to pressure Ukraine to investigate Biden's son that he told an aide -- Fiona Hill -- to bring it to the attention of White House lawyers.

"Giuliani's a hand grenade who's going to blow everybody up," Bolton reportedly told Hill.

If Bolton's testimony to House investigators falls in line with such reports, there will be an attempt to reassess his legacy: He may be a warmonger -- but he's a warmonger with a heart of gold.

Maybe. But it is also true that Bolton has long been known as a master bureaucratic infighter, uniquely able to undermine even higher-ranking officials if he disagreed with their policy goals. During the George W. Bush administration he became known for undermining then-Secretary of State Colin Powell on relations with Iran and Iraq, Syria and North Korea, and did much the same with Powell's successor, Condoleezza Rice.

Bolton's term in the Trump administration wasn't much different. He and Trump were often at odds over the president's conciliatory approach to North Korea and its nuclear arms program. And his longstanding enmity toward Iran even prompted Trump to joke frequently that Bolton was trying to push him into war. Trump finally got tired of the conflict and fired Bolton in September.

So if Bolton ends up testifying against the president, it is not necessarily a tale of a mustachioed bureaucrat taking a brave stand against power. Instead, it is probably another in a long trail of anecdotes about John Bolton doing John Bolton things -- and making life miserable for his bureaucratic rivals. It's just that his rival, in this case, is the president of the United States. Refusing to testify without a subpoena helps him have his cake and eat it too -- allowing him to stay in good graces with fellow hawkish Republicans who hate Trump's vacillating on Syria, while also allowing him to insist that his truthful testimony was legally required.

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