THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

Should never be the description of the foreign policy of the world's leading nuclear threat but that is what you get when you elect a raging ignoramus as president. And his policy advisers could only be said to be on the same page if they were booklice munching on a coffee table book.

The incoming national security adviser has called for the “swift takeover” of North Korea by the South. He and the newly nominated secretary of state have urged withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. The pick for C.I.A. director once oversaw interrogations in which terrorism suspects were tortured.

The two generals celebrated by President Trump for their reputations for toughness are now considered the moderates — and at risk of falling out of favor.

Not since the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, have key national security leaders so publicly raised the threat of military confrontation if foreign adversaries do not meet America’s demands.

But George W. Bush’s war cabinet was responding to the biggest direct attack on the United States since Pearl Harbor. The current moment of peril arises from Mr. Trump’s conviction that the United States is being pushed around by adversaries who need to understand that “America First” means they have a brief window to negotiate a deal, or force may follow.

Now, the members of Mr. Trump’s newly constituted team are about to face multiple, simultaneous tests of their past proclamations and sometimes conflicting instincts. North Korea and Iran pose the most immediate challenge, with Mr. Trump setting negotiation deadlines that are only months away.

Over the longer term, they must straighten out the strategic incoherence surrounding Mr. Trump’s approach to Russia and China, defining the meaning of the administration’s policy declaration earlier this year that “great power competition — not terrorism — is now the primary focus of U.S. national security.”

Washington is now consumed by a debate over whether Mr. Trump’s new team plans to govern as far to the right as it talks.

So far, the incoming national security adviser, John R. Bolton, has declared that his past comments are “behind me.” Hours after his selection was announced, Mr. Bolton vowed that he would find ways to execute the policies that Mr. Trump was elected on, but that he would not tolerate slow-walking and leaks from bureaucrats he dismissed as “munchkins.”

Some who know Mr. Bolton and his operating style predict titanic clashes.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, the retired general who has argued for keeping the Iran deal intact and warned that military confrontation with North Korea would result in “the worst kind of fighting in most people’s lifetimes,” told colleagues on Friday that he did not know if he could work with Mr. Bolton. The White House chief of staff, John F. Kelly, another retired four-star general, was also unenthusiastic about Mr. Bolton’s hiring.

Mr. Bolton’s harshest critics — mostly Democrats, but their ranks include some members of the Bush administration — argue that the odds of taking military action will rise dramatically when he becomes the last person a volatile American president consults.

“John Bolton is not some gray bureaucrat whose views are unknown to us,” said Michael McFaul, the American ambassador to Moscow under President Barack Obama, and now a Stanford professor and the director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

“He’s very clear that there should be regime change in Iran and North Korea, and military force should be used to achieve those goals,” Mr. McFaul said. “If you hire him, you’re making a clear signal that’s what you want.”

But others who have worked for years with Mr. Bolton argue that Mr. Trump knows exactly what he is getting: leverage, not conflict.

“I think this notion everybody talks about, that the risks of war have gone up, is wrong,” said Stephen J. Hadley, who was Mr. Bush’s national security adviser and a major architect of the invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. “This is the peace-through-strength crowd who want to make clear to people that they’re tough and that no one should cross them. But the reason for that is to deter war.”

Dov Zakheim, a former senior Defense Department official who has known Mr. Bolton for 35 years, wrote on Friday that Mr. Bolton “may be a fire breather, but he is a man who cares deeply about his country,” in comparison to his boss, who “cares deeply about Donald Trump.”

Whatever Mr. Trump’s motives, his selection of this team would have been hard to imagine when he first came to office declaring that the continued American presence in Iraq was a “disaster,” that he was comfortable with Japan and South Korea getting their own nuclear weapons so the United States would not have to defend them, and that America would no longer be the world’s policeman.

Mr. Bolton has come to the opposite conclusion.

So the last voice Cheeto Mussolini will hear, aside from the ones in his head, is a guy who never lost sleep sending other peoples children to die in a hugely wasteful and probably inconclusive conflict. And with a president who envisions the Oval Office as his new reality show, the presence of those who see governing as a serious business may rapidly diminsh in the days and weeks ahead leaving us all in a constant state on BOHICA.