One
of the more remarkable underreported stories of 2008 was a speech in
which the State department’s legal adviser John Bellinger admitted that
there “are also realities about the International Criminal Court that
the United States must accept.” He also stated that the Bush
administration would work with the Court to maximize its chances of
success in Darfur. Bellinger did not say that the United States might
actually join the Court, but acknowledged that it enjoyed widespread
international support and legitimacy, and that the United States could
fruitfully cooperate with it on areas of mutual benefit.
Neither
mea culpa nor volte-face, the speech nonetheless indicates the distance
the administration has traveled in seven years. While Bellinger’s
oratory went largely unnoticed by foreign policy wonks and the
attentive public alike, it did not escape the scrutiny of John Bolton,
who dismissed it as Clinton-era “pabulum” and reflective of “the
yearning the Rice State Department has for acceptance” by academics and
foreign intellectuals. He added ominously, “the fight resumes after
Jan. 20.”
Bolton has been a powerful influence on
Republican foreign policy for the last twenty years. Before his
appointment as ambassador to the United Nations in 2005—which was
achieved without Senate confirmation—Bolton dominated arms-control
policy in the first Bush term. He killed the Anti-Ballistic Missile
(ABM) Treaty, negotiations with North Korea, and the Biological Weapons
Convention verification protocol. During the Clinton years, he
campaigned tirelessly from his Heritage Foundation perch for missile
defense and against global governance, which he seems to equate with
global government. In 1998, when then-Secretary-General of the United
Nations Kofi Annan released a report critical of both the United
Nations secretariat and member states for the failure to prevent
genocide in Srebrenica, Bolton chastized Annan for having the temerity
to criticize governments for what they did or did not do in the former
Yugoslavia. He added menacingly: “I think if he continues down this
road, ultimately it means war, at least with the Republican Party.”
Bolton
came of age politically during Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign.
The future policy heavyweight was a high schooler in Baltimore at the
time. He honed his conservatism at Yale College and Yale Law School,
ducked Vietnam through a National Guard posting (“looking back, I am
not terribly proud of this calculation”), and got his first taste of
Washington as an intern to Spiro Agnew. During the Bush Sr. presidency,
Bolton was Assistant Secretary for International Organization Affairs
in James Baker’s State Department, and was one of the first people who
Baker called when he needed a posse of chad-disputing lawyers in
Florida in November 2000. Bolton’s name keeps showing up in various
articles about the fight inside the Republican Party for the soul of
John McCain’s foreign policy.
All of this makes it
imperative to read his memoirs, which clarify the stakes in the
forthcoming election. Although it is hard to imagine Bolton in a McCain
administration—his memoirs offend so many within his party, across the
aisle, and overseas, that Bolton could not win Senate confirmation for
capitol dog-catcher—Bolton will be plotting, pressing, and pushing to
force McCain’s foreign policy back to the unilateralism of George
Bush’s first term, when the war on terror meant never having to say
you’re sorry. And there are important national security posts that do
not require Senate approval.
The memoir
reads like an international relations primer done in the style of a
modern morality tale—imagine Kenneth Waltz's classic Man, the State, and War as written by Ayn Rand.
To
Bolton, the United Nations is a “target rich environment,” and I had a
front row seat to watch his gunslinging. In 2005 I served as Special
Adviser to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. I was responsible for
developing member-state support for his efforts to overhaul the United
Nations. In that capacity, I was in Brussels in March 2005 when
President Bush nominated Bolton as Ambassador to the United Nations.
One high-ranking EU official recoiled in horror, and, to share his
agita, repeated two of Bolton’s more famous lines: that “UN
headquarters could lose ten floors and no one would know the
difference,” and that “there was no United Nations.” How in the world,
the official asked, could such a man be Ambassador to the United
Nations?
Amidst nodding heads and shared pained looks, I
offered that if I could pick the ten floors, I would agree with Bolton.
Moreover, I said, any sentient being who spends time in Turtle Bay—the
Manhattan site of the United Nations—will at some point in frustration
say to themselves that there is no United Nations. Bolton’s sin was to
say it publicly. Finally, I suggested that John Bolton was irrelevant:
“If the President of the United States and the Secretary of State want
a strong, effective United Nations, then Bolton will have to deliver.
If they don’t, you could have John Kerry as the U.S. ambassador, and
nothing will happen.”
Oh well; win some, lose some. Which
is what Condoleeza Rice is rumored to have told a friend who asked how
John Bolton could have possibly been nominated for the position under
her watch.
Or more accurately, I was half right, half
wrong. Reading this book, one can almost feel sorry for how unsuited
Bolton was for his new job. For four years he had been the point man
for breaking American commitments abroad, insulting allies and enemies
alike, ditching the ABM Treaty, and unsigning the Rome Statute, which
established the International Criminal Court (“my happiest moment at
State”). In the heady days of the first Bush administration, when it
believed the United States was so powerful it could get anything that
it wanted without friends, partners, or institutions, Bolton was the
“say no” guy, a job he performed with great brio. How could he know
that in 2005 his big boss, the President, and his nominal boss, the
Secretary of State, would actually decide that international
cooperation was necessary, and that maybe we should start worrying
about America’s free fall in world opinion? A pit bull in the first
term, Bolton would be a yap dog in the second, grating on the Secretary
of State, the President, and most American allies.
Almost
sorry, for whatever else you say about John Bolton, he is not of the
“we can disagree without being disagreeable” school of American
politics. This is one of the nastiest, pettiest memoirs in the annals
of American diplomatic history. Among the many targets of insults and
catty remarks are former and present U.K. ambassadors to the United
Nations Emyr Jones Parry, Adam Thomson (“I could never look at or
listen to Thomson without immediately thinking of Harry [Potter] and
all his little friends”), and John Sawers; recent U.K. foreign
ministers; just about every UN civil servant mentioned; indeed, just
about every U.S. civil servant mentioned, along with countless
journalists and politicians.
The memoir reads like an
international relations primer done in the style of a modern morality
tale—imagine Kenneth Waltz’s classic Man, the State, and War as written by Ayn Rand. Bolton, usually singlehandedly, takes on what
he calls the High Minded, the Normers (those who create international
norms of behavior or try to “[whip] the United States into line with
leftist views of the way the world should look”), the EAPeasers (career
State Department officials who advocate negotiations with North Korea),
the Risen Bureaucracy, the Crusaders of Compromise, the Arms Control
True Believers, and the EUroids.
The book has the
formulaic allegories typical of the genre—the young, innocent female
(Kristen Silverberg, Assistant Secretary for International Organization
Affairs) driven to tears after being berated by the cold-hearted career
bureaucrat (Nicholas Burns); the noble knight (Bolton himself) fighting
against the political higher ups who care only about “positioning
themselves” (Rice) or their legacy (Colin Powell). And of course
Bolton’s plaintive cries that the 2005-06 changes in administration
policy occurred against the will of the President. One sees the
peasants now: ‘If only the King knew what was happening, this would
never go on.’
Now add a heaping dose of xenophobia.
Foreigners, appeasing foreigners, foreigners claiming to know us better
than we know ourselves: all loom large in Bolton’s memoirs. He insults
the former Swedish foreign minister and President of the General
Assembly Jan Eliasson as not only having “an ethereal Hammarskjöldian
vision problem, but also a Gunnar Myrdal problem, yet another foreigner
who ‘understood’ us better than we did ourselves.” (This is the Myrdal
who shared the 1974 Nobel Prize in Economics with Friedrich Hayek, and
whose classic book on race, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy,
was cited in Brown v. Board of Education.) At one point in his
belittlement of a Bush political appointee, a special assistant to
Condoleeza Rice, no less, Bolton adds that she was “a naturalized
citizen originally from Pakistan,” in case we wondered why she could
not possibly understand America’s real foreign policy interests. In
Bolton’s worldview Zbigniew Brzezinski is probably a naturalized
American citizen originally from Poland; Henry Kissinger, a naturalized
American citizen originally from Germany.
In the Bolton
universe, you want Iran and North Korea to be referred to the Security
Council, so that when it fails to unite behind a resolute strategy, the
United States is then free to take the tough action it needs to take.
And in the case of North Korea, Bolton is clear about what that would
be: “unilateralist, interventionist, and preemptive.” Is it any wonder
that when it came to Iran and North Korea, our allies and adversaries
were loathe to refer them anywhere near Bolton?
Richard
Hofstadter’s 1964 article “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” was
prompted by the supporters of the Goldwater campaign. Bolton strides
right off the pages of Hofstadter’s essay:
He
is always manning the barricades of civilization . . . he does not see
social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the
manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a
conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is
not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the
enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he
must be totally eliminated—if not from the world, at least from the
theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This
demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly
unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely
attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of
frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of
powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens
his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he
opposes.
According to Bolton, we do not need
diplomats who negotiate, seek common ground, and strive for cooperative
solutions. We need litigators who will go to the wall defending
American interests, who will understand that when others say no, they
mean no, and that therefore compromise is illusion. But in a world
where the United States needs international cooperation for its own
peace and prosperity, what comes next? Bolton’s answers are
laughable—we stick with our “closest friends in the United
Nations”—Israel, Palau and the Marshall Islands. Or we forge a new
alliance with Japan, South Korea, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand to
overcome the parasitic and paralytic EU. The road to global primacy
runs through . . . Wellington?
There are, of course, some
glaring contradictions in the memoirs. Bolton is known as a sovereignty
hawk and he spells out the content of that doctrine as “greater
independence and fewer unnecessary restraints.” The job of civil
servants, politically appointed or career, is “to implement the
president’s policies.” So it comes as a double shock when we find
Bolton handing a draft Security Council resolution to the Israeli
ambassador, in case the ambassador wants to ask his Prime Minister to
appeal directly to Bush or Rice to change President Bush’s policy on
Lebanon.
Another example concerns Bolton’s recurring
beratement of UN officials for forgetting that they work for the member
states. He then describes how one Under-Secretary-General, American
appointee Christopher Burnham, surreptitiously showed him budget
documents that put the United States at an advantage in budget
negotiations. It is hard to see how you can have it both ways. Either
UN officials serve all member states equally or the organization is up
for grabs to the most powerful state.
But it is the big
betrayal that is at the heart of the book. Facing a quagmire in Iraq, a
faltering coalition in Afghanistan, a nuclear armed North Korea, the
possibility of a nuclear Iran, and a war against terror that was
creating more, not fewer, terrorists, Condoleeza Rice convinced
President Bush that maybe they should stop digging a bigger hole for
American foreign policy. And that meant actually trying diplomacy in
North Korea, Iran, and the Middle East.
The losers were
John Bolton and his acolytes; the winners were the professionals like
Nicholas Burns and Christopher Hill. Faced with defeat and repudiation
of the failed policies he advocated, Bolton’s response is familiar and
tiresome: the professionals had secretly hijacked the president’s
policy; the Secretary of State cares more about appeasing foreigners
than protecting American interests.
The moment of
reckoning for Bolton and for the President that nominated him is not
described in the book, but it took place two months after Bolton left
the administration. When the United States and North Korea reached a
deal in February 2007 that holds the promise of denuclearizing the
country, Bolton tried to scuttle it. Asked by reporters whether he was
loyal to the President, Bolton answered, “I’m loyal to the original
policy.”
What did Bolton achieve at the United Nations?
Very little, which was fine by him and fine by the cast of nonaligned
Ambassadors who oppose a more effective international organization. I
asked one of them in December 2006 if he was happy that Bolton was
leaving. He said, “No, we’ve learned how to deal with Mr. Bolton.” When
I sought clarification, he said, “Look, Bolton comes in and asks for
the sun, the moon, and the stars, and we say ‘no.’ He then says, ‘I
told you so’ and leaves. Everybody is happy.”
Which
returns us to the question of why anyone would want to wade through
these 500 self-serving pages. The best answer: to remind yourself of
the stakes of this upcoming election and why the United States needs
more old-fashioned diplomacy and less paranoia and arrogance. A McCain
presidency might not eschew diplomacy, but in the political
free-for-all that is the Republican party, Bolton and his minions are
always there, ready to denigrate any agreement or compromise, to
sabotage and subvert real diplomacy.
Asked by reporters whether he was loyal to the President, Bolton answered, "I'm loyal to the original policy."
To
understand the stakes, consider the little known and even less
appreciated record of American negotiations with North Korea since
1994. Between what was called the “Agreed Framework” that brought North
Korea back into the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1994 and the end
of 2000, the United States and North Korea reached twenty agreements on
a wide array of issues. Certain of these agreements foundered in
implementation, but an objective assessment shows that some of the
noncompliance stemmed from constraints placed by American domestic
politics.
The Bolton strategy killed the Agreed Framework,
hoping through threats, sanctions, and use of force to end the North
Korean regime. Unfortunately for Bolton—fortunately for the rest of
us—our ally South Korea and our necessary partner China did not want to
deal with the consequences: either a war or a collapsed, deadly state
on their borders. In the end, they did not have to because North Korea
left the NPT, developed a nuclear bomb, and tested it, bankrupting the
Bolton policy and producing the sharp change of strategy that has born
fruit in recent North Korean steps to end its nuclear program.
Writing
about the successes of American negotiators in bringing North Korea and
the United States back together in February 2007, former State
Department negotiator Robert Carlin and Stanford Professor Emeritus
John Lewis have described why Bolton and his crowd loathe diplomacy is
loathed by Bolton and his crowd, and why it is so necessary:
Diplomats
strive to put down words all of them can swallow and hopefully their
superiors in [the] capital can stomach. Written agreements are
difficult to reach. The pain often comes not so much in dealing with
the other side but in dealing with your own. Unless you are dictating
terms to a defeated enemy, you are going to have to compromise on
something, probably several somethings, that will make many people
unhappy. That was done for the February 13th agreement, and there is no
shame to it.
John Bolton did much damage to
American interests in the first Bush administration, but he was
implementing the president’s policy. President Bush deserves the blame
for putting Bolton in a position to continue hardming American
interests even when the overall direction of policy changed.
Given
that many countries treated the United States as radioactive in 2005;
given that trust and confidence in the United States were at all time
lows; given that our record was one of a violator of international law
and human rights; President Bush, had he truly wanted to start to move
the United States out of the hole he had been so assiduously digging,
would have had to send to the United Nations an ambassador with
extraordinary listening skills, who could work across various
international chasms, rebuild respect for American diplomacy, and, yes,
advocate agreements that would make a lot of people unhappy. Someone,
in fact, a lot like our present Ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, a
naturalized citizen originally from Afghanistan. Instead he sent . . .
Yosemite Sam.
So back to January 20. A new American
president will take office with grinding wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,
a nuclear-armed North Korea, an Iran headed that way, and crises in
Sudan, Israel and Palestine, Lebanon, and Pakistan. Our foreign policy
is anathema; our reputation in tatters. Throw in big issues like global
warming, non-proliferation, catastrophic terrorism, and a potential
pandemic of a deadly new influenza. It is hard to see how any of these
crises or issues can be solved without sustained international
cooperation and strong international institutions. Take global warming:
protecting Americans from its ravages will depend on exercising
sovereignty to strike deals with other countries whose domestic
behavior threatens us and whose security our domestic behavior
threatens. A narrow view of sovereignty as the ability to do as we
damned well please will be—quite literally—the death of us all.
Surrender Is not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations and Abroad by John Bolton. Threshold Editions, $27.00 (hardcover)
