The Foreign Service Journal, September 2006

Bolton’s proposed approach besides the U.S. were spoilers such as Cuba, Venezuela and Egypt, who preferred failure to letting the West have its way. This marriage of convenience would endure over the ensuing weeks. At the end of August 2005, Bolton issued a series of “Dear Colleague” letters, each accom- panied by an extensively rewrit- ten version of a section of the draft document. The “amend- ments” on disarmament and nonproliferation, for example, proposed to eliminate more than half of the existing language, and to erase all references to disarmament, the regulation of small arms and treaties the U.S. opposed. His draft text on develop- ment issues struck out every reference to the so-called Millennium Development Goals, which until that moment the Bush administration had never found excep- tionable, as well as to commitments on aid and debt reduction that Washington, and in some cases only Washington, opposed. With two weeks left before the world’s heads of state arrived for the much-touted 60th- anniversary session of the General Assembly, Washington was suggesting a deal which, even viewed as a maximalist negotiating position, looked like a calculated insult. The debate, not surprisingly, became increasingly poi- sonous. Moderate G-77 states were unwilling to stand up to the spoilers, who had been empowered by Washington’s intransigence. Diplomats met in a group of 30, and then 15, but made little headway. Core issues like nonproliferation or guidelines for the use of force had long since been discarded for lack of common ground; on others, the group could agree only on broad principles. Bolton seemed to view compromise as surrender. “He would not give anything away to get his priorities — even rhetoric,” recalls a U.N. official deeply involved with the process. Bolton struck this official as oddly nonchalant about the prospect of losing core elements of the U.S. agenda. The ambassador’s attitude, he says, seemed to amount to, “It’s either my outcome and we walk out of here alive, or leave the place a smoldering ruin.” It was only owing to the kind of adroit, difference- splitting diplomacy to which Bolton seemed allergic that the reform package was rescued from the American emissary’s all-or-nothing position. The day before the heads of state were to arrive, Annan presented Bolton with a compromise document which his staff had been secretly preparing all along. Bolton was outraged at this subterfuge. Secretary of State Rice has said (in an interview with me) that she had expected such an out- come, and was fully aware of the consequences of Bolton’s brinks- manship, but some of her subor- dinates were sending very different messages to U.N. secretariat officials. In retrospect, Bolton looks like a madcap pilot who kept his hand firm on the tiller even as the roar of the waterfall ahead grew louder and louder. Perhaps he wanted to plunge off the precipice. The drive for reform has not been an out-and-out fail- ure, but it has fallen drastically short of the no-doubt hyperbolic hopes of the secretary-general and his staff, and of the Bush administration’s more measured expec- tations. John Bolton is scarcely the only party responsi- ble for this anticlimax, to be sure. The absurd lengths to which the G-77 has gone to obstruct management reform leave the clear impression that many countries prefer a hamstrung, ineffective secretariat. Arab nations blocked a straightforward definition of terrorism. The opposition of China and dozens of other countries killed all hopes of expanding the permanent membership of the Security Council to include Japan, Germany, India and Brazil. China and Russia, with allies like Pakistan, drew the teeth from the proposed Human Rights Council, ensuring that authoritarian states like Cuba and Saudi Arabia (and China) will be able to serve on the organization and use their position to block resolutions criticizing their behav- ior. The Bush administration, which had talked about the Human Rights Council as its highest priority on U.N. reform, ultimately voted against it and refused to stand for election to the new body earlier this year. A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy Bolton’s unique contribution has been to make failure a self-fulfilling prophecy. Apparently convinced from the outset that the U.N. was an inhospitable place for the F O C U S 26 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / S E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 6 The Bush administration seems uncomfortable with the premise that the U.S. enhances its authority, and its security, by accepting the strictures that come with membership in a global body.