"It’s not American strength that’s provocative; it’s American weakness that’s provocative.”

Former UN Ambassador John Bolton told Breitbart News,

Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state “will go down as part of the larger Obama foreign policy of seeing American influence weakened all over the world.”

“I think their fatal mistake – I mean, they made so many, we don’t have time to go through them all – but their fatal mistake was not understanding the Arab Spring, not understanding that it was not an outbreak of democratic sentiment,” Bolton judged. “It was really the rise of radical Islam to an even more significant level than anywhere else. And so their policies during the four years she was at the State Department, and in the time since then, have been incoherent. They can’t seem to get a grip on just exactly what it is they want.”

“In Syria, we’ve seen the extraordinary circumstance of Russia building a new airbase in Latakia, just a few minutes’ flying time from the northern border of Israel. Unfortunately, whoever the next president is, it’s not enough just to say, ‘Okay, I guess we’ll reverse the Obama administration’s policies’ because the Russians, among others, have created facts on the ground that you can’t just snap your fingers and wish away. We are in a worse position today, across the Middle East, than we were on January 20, 2009, and I don’t think Hillary has a clue how to change that,” said Bolton.

...“When they think we’re growing weaker, they see the chance to advance their agenda,” Bolton said. “I think it’s a miscalculation on their part of fundamental American strength, and maybe even a miscalculation of the steel and the spine even of Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. It’s when you’re sending mixed signals, and signals of weakness, that your adversaries are most likely to miscalculate, and it’s a miscalculation that’s most likely to lead to war: an incident at sea of a Russian plane buzzing our ships, of coming too close in firing missiles from the Houthi rebels at U.S. destroyers in the Red Sea. You can see how these incidents can escalate.”

“If they faced a strong president, they wouldn’t even engage in this kind of harassment, and the risk of a miscalculation would be lower,” Bolton contended. “So I think continued American decline does increase the risk of hostilities because it’s not American strength that’s provocative; it’s American weakness that’s provocative.”