John Bolton's "fixation on expanding missile defense is a useful example of a basic error in hawkish thinking that plagues our arms control debates."
Frankly, I'm a little bewildered by the fact that you continue to misunderstand what hawks want. You seem convinced that that they want to "win", to achieve a military dominance so great that we will know that we are "safe", that we have nothing to worry about, that the other side will have no way to threaten us, no choice other than to surrender. But that isn't what hawks want at all. They want to provoke the other side into its own frenzy of competition, building anti-anti-missiles to counter our anti-missiles (this was satirized by Mad magazine back in 1957). We, in turn, being existentially threatened once more, will have to build our own anti-anti-anti-missiles, and so on ad infinitum. That way, everyone has a guaranteed career, for like forever. It doesn't ever occur to hawks like Bolton that his constant threats might be taken seriously by the other side. Their whole lives are a Kabuki theater of threats and counter-threats, with no contact with the "real world", which they do not know even exists.
All of this is entirely intentional.
John Bolton's "fixation on expanding missile defense is a useful example of a basic error in hawkish thinking that plagues our arms control debates."
Frankly, I'm a little bewildered by the fact that you continue to misunderstand what hawks want. You seem convinced that that they want to "win", to achieve a military dominance so great that we will know that we are "safe", that we have nothing to worry about, that the other side will have no way to threaten us, no choice other than to surrender. But that isn't what hawks want at all. They want to provoke the other side into its own frenzy of competition, building anti-anti-missiles to counter our anti-missiles (this was satirized by Mad magazine back in 1957). We, in turn, being existentially threatened once more, will have to build our own anti-anti-anti-missiles, and so on ad infinitum. That way, everyone has a guaranteed career, for like forever. It doesn't ever occur to hawks like Bolton that his constant threats might be taken seriously by the other side. Their whole lives are a Kabuki theater of threats and counter-threats, with no contact with the "real world", which they do not know even exists.