Global gorilla

Bush's jaw-dropping nomination of John Bolton as ambassador to the U.N. is a slap in the world's face.

By Ian Williams

Read more: Ian Williams, United Nations, Kofi Annan, State Department, Iraq, Rwanda, Taiwan, Opinion, Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney, Darfur

March 9, 2005 | In the old days, Sen. Marcus Cato used to tell the Romans in every speech, "Carthage must be destroyed." Even the Romans were never crass enough to send him there as an ambassador. It takes an imperial America to send to the United Nations a representative who has spent decades preaching that the organization should be destroyed, and that the United States should disregard the whole concept of international law on which it is based. But in and out of government, John Bolton has at least had the dubious virtue of consistency.

President Bush's appointment sends an eloquent message of utter contempt for the U.N. and all its members -- which happen to include almost every country in the world. Indeed, the only significant country without a vote in the U.N. is one of the few that will be happy with the appointment. Taiwan had hired Bolton as a consultant for $30,000 to advise it on its, as it transpired, unsuccessful bid to join the organization.

There is still the chance for a sanity clause to be resurrected in Washington. When it comes time for confirmation, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is relatively evenly balanced at 10 to eight, and its majority chairman, Richard Lugar, is eminently sane and surely realizes the damage that this appointment will do to American diplomacy.

Bolton will be presenting his credentials to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, whom he accused in the Weekly Standard of a "power grab," denouncing his "doctrine that force is unimportant while 'international law' is practically everything," which he scornfully admitted "is widely held in Europe" and was also "popular here, particularly in the Clinton administration." He also dismissed Annan, whose cooperation Bush is trying to secure in Iraq, as a "chief administrative officer."

There will be few public negative comments from governments or diplomats about Bolton's appointment, but there have been few signs of public ecstasy either. And behind the scenes, diplomats are scratching their heads trying to work out what the appointment reveals about American foreign policy. Certainly one major inference that the United States' European alliance may draw is that the recent road show that the president and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice staged across the Continent's capitals was all sound and furry, in the pseudo-cuddly sense, signifying nothing.

The bad news is that there is every reason to fear that Bolton's job is to repeat in Iran and Syria the fiasco of Iraq. Indeed, Cuba and North Korea are on the "axis of evil" he has kept expanding in successive speeches.

The good news is that he is almost certain to fail even more abjectly than his predecessors in winning support for these neocon wet dreams. They could at least compromise and cajole, and invoke international law and treaties. That is not the way Bolton has done things so far.

Examining the thinking behind the appointment further leads to two rational conclusions, neither of them reassuring. Was Bolton appointed as a deliberate insult to the organization, or is the Bush White House so absolutely unaware of how other countries, even allies, think that he just saw this as putting a "strong advocate" in position?

When Colin Powell was appointed as secretary of state, Vice President Dick Cheney and his entourage regarded him as dangerously liberal and unreliable. After all, even former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright had chided him for his unwillingness to put U.S. soldiers in the firing line. Their solution was to put the tried and trusted Bolton in the State Department as undersecretary for arms control and international security, whose explicit function was to be the conservatives' commissar in the State Department, reporting to Cheney.

Next page: Bolton makes the neoconservatives look like indecisive, hand-wringing liberals