Bush stands by his controversial man

Aug 1st 2005
From The Economist Global Agenda

George Bush has bypassed Congress to appoint John Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations, to the annoyance of his political opponents and the dismay of many at the UN. But conservatives are delighted that the tough-talking Mr Bolton is being sent to an institution they feel needs reform, fast. Can he deliver?

THE United Nations can be a bewildering, not to say boring, place. Those posted there, even more than most diplomats, speak in a code intelligible only to insiders, filled with jargon, acronyms and polite phrasings that conceal their positions from all but the most experienced hands. Into this environment, enter John Bolton, of whom none of the above is true.

The man George Bush appointed this week to represent America at the UN isn’t boring, and he certainly isn’t bewildering. What he thinks is never hard to guess, because he uses the bluntest, most vivid language available. Life in North Korea, he has said, is a “hellish nightmare”. Of the body to which he is being sent, he has said it would make no difference if its New York secretariat building lost ten storeys, and that “There is no such thing as the United Nations.”

Hence the hand-wringing, both among America’s liberal internationalists and many foreign diplomats at the UN itself, about Mr Bush’s decision to appoint Mr Bolton. Democrats in the Senate have been unsatisfied with the answers to some of the tough questions they put to Mr Bolton in his confirmation hearings. They threatened a filibuster, in which 60 votes are needed (the Republicans have only 55) to bring a final vote on a nomination. But now Mr Bush has used his constitutional power to make a “recess appointment”, installing Mr Bolton while Congress takes a break in August. This allows Mr Bolton to serve until the next congressional term begins, in January 2007.

Democrats have expressed outrage. They had wanted to see more documents related to Mr Bolton’s involvement in several controversies. One allegation is that, in his previous job as undersecretary of state for arms control, he tried to fire a mid-level official who disagreed with his assessment of Cuba’s weapons capacity. There have been other reports of bullying and shouting at junior staffers. He is also accused of publicly inflating the threat of weapons of mass destruction in Syria. And Democrats want to know why he requested to see the classified, blacked-out names of some of his State Department colleagues that appeared in intelligence intercepts.

The fight against Mr Bolton has not been purely partisan. While most prominent Republicans supported him, several broke ranks. George Voinovich, a Republican senator on the foreign-relations committee, opposed his nomination, drawing out the confirmation process. Richard Lugar, the Republican chairman of the committee, supports Mr Bolton but has also supported Democrats’ efforts to get more information. And Colin Powell, Mr Bolton’s boss as secretary of state in Mr Bush’s first term, is said to have his doubts that Mr Bolton is the right man for the UN.

But almost every failing that Democrats and multilateralists see in Mr Bolton, conservatives view as a strength. To them he is strong-willed, assertive and relentless in pursuit of America’s interests. He does not fetishise the UN, but sees it as one tool, among many, that can allow America to achieve its foreign-policy goals. He does not wholly dismiss the world body, or presumably he would not want to be sent there. He sees a flawed institution that nonetheless can be put to good ends when competently led—by its most important member state, not by the full-timers in the secretariat.

While the iron is hot

In other circumstances, Mr Bolton’s fiery language about the UN might make him a politically unacceptable candidate at home. But he is being appointed at a time when the organisation is under heavy scrutiny over various scandals. So there is strong support among Americans for his belief that the place needs a shake-up, not business-as-usual diplomacy.

The oil-for-food scandal, in which billions of dollars were either stolen by Saddam Hussein or funnelled to foreign politicians to buy support, has put the UN on the back foot. Paul Volcker, a former chairman of America’s Federal Reserve, is leading a UN-sponsored investigation into the affair. So are various committees in America’s Congress, who feel that the Volcker committee is dragging its heels and burying the most damaging evidence against the UN. In particular, the question of how much Kofi Annan, the body’s secretary-general, knew about his son’s involvement in a company that won a UN contract, hangs heavy in the air.

Spurred not only by the scandals but also by having been sidelined in the Iraq war, the UN has begun an extensive reform process. Mr Annan has pushed for changes that would expand the Security Council, define terrorism more clearly, enable the UN to react more effectively to humanitarian crises, and more. Most members accept the need for at least some of these reforms.

How will Mr Bolton’s arrival affect the reform process? In another famous Boltonism, he said: “If I were redoing the Security Council today, I’d have one permanent member because that’s the real reflection of the distribution of power in the world.” That was in 2000, when the Republicans were out of office and freer to make rash statements. Now, Mr Bolton works for a president who supports Security Council expansion (at least to take in Japan, if not other claimants such as Germany, India and Brazil). And it is Mr Bush who makes policy, not his messenger.

But that messenger is still, to many diplomats, one of the ugliest faces of America’s policies. Will Mr Bolton change his tone in the hushed corridors of the UN? Or will continued shouting drown out all calls for fresh co-operation? The most likely outcome is that, whatever the differences in style, America’s new man at the UN and his interlocutors will find a way to talk to each other. There is too much at stake—the future of Iraq, nuclear crises in Iran and North Korea, atrocities in Sudan—for either side to give up on the other entirely.

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