It is reported today (4th December) that John Bolton has resigned as US ambassador to the UN. President Bush said: "I am deeply disappointed that a handful of US senators ... chose to obstruct his confirmation, even though he enjoys majority support in the Senate, and even though their tactics will disrupt our diplomatic work at a sensitive and important time." Bush obviously minds, but should we?
Writing in the Washington Post (22nd March 2005), Peter Beinart of the Brookings Institution commented that Bolton owed his then recent nomination -
"to an analogy. It goes something like this: in 1975, when anti-Americanism was on the march, Gerald Ford chose a distinctly undiplomatic diplomat, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, to represent the US at the UN. Unlike his predecessors, who had listened politely while America was defamed, Moynihan denounced the tin-pot dictatorships running wild at the UN. And a new movement called neoconservatism - of which Moynihan was a leading voice - made its entrance onto the international stage. Six years later, Ronald Reagan gave the UN job to another prominent neocon, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and she proved equally blunt.
Bolton - a fierce UN critic - is the supposed heir to that tradition. When Condoleezza Rice announced his nomination, she specifically invoked Moynihan and Kirkpatrick. Numerous right-leaning commentators have done the same. To some members of Congress, sending a man who has repeatedly trashed the UN to be America's representative there seems perverse. But for neocons with a sense of history, that's precisely the point."
Further back, Barbara Slavin and Bill Nichols wrote in USA Today (30th November 2003) that -
"As the troubled US occupation of Iraq continues to sharpen debate about President Bush's approach to foreign policy, Bolton ... is widely seen in Washington as a central influence on Bush's tough-talking, black-and-white view of the world. Largely unknown outside foreign policy circles, [he] is one of a small but influential group of hard-line conservatives who have a major hand in shaping US foreign policy."
And they noted that -
"Bolton played a leading role in derailing a 2001 bio-weapons conference in Geneva that sought to endorse a UN proposal on how to enforce the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. US officials, led by Bolton, argued that the plan would have put US national security at risk by allowing spot inspections of suspected US weapons sites. Without US participation, any enforcement plan would be meaningless, so US opposition essentially killed the proposal. As a result, there is no practical mechanism to stop the spread of biological weapons."
During his brief tenure Bolton - who once said that "it is a mistake for us to grant any validity to international law even when it may seem in our short-term interest to do so" - emphasised UN "reform", suggesting that the US should consider cutting back on paying its dues if sufficient reform had not taken place by the end of 2006. But of course there is reform and reform: did he mean to make the UN more effective as a constraint on the powerful and the unscrupulous, or to make it more malleable to the purposes of the US? In the event Bolton himself has gone, but the question remains as to whether the newly elected US Congress will seriously pressure the Bush presidency to adopt a more multilateral course for the country's foreign policy.
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