"A few days earlier, the former US ambassador to the UN John R. Bolton had called for bombing of Iran at a fringe meeting of the Conservative Party conference.In Williams's Humanitas Programme lecture at the University of Oxford in January 2014, he "characterized the impulse to intervene as a need to be seen to do something rather than nothing" and advocated for "a religiously motivated nonviolence which refuses to idolise human intervention in all circumstances."