The Foreign Service Journal, September 2006

U.S., he ensured that it would be so. In fact, the U.S. has an extraordinar- ily strong hand to play as the U.N.’s largest funder, and as the world’s ultimate guarantor of security. A seasoned diplomat can win wholly undeserved victories there, as Richard Holbrooke proved in 1999 when he persuaded the institution to lower the U.S.’s annual dues payments even after Washington had withheld payments for years, and to accept the suffocating “reforms” upon which conserva- tives in Congress insisted. The U.S. can get away with bullying the members — within limits. By surpassing those limits, Bolton managed to play a strong hand as if it were a weak one. Should one conclude that the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations was simply maladroit? Did Bolton, that is, mistakenly calculate that threatening to leave the U.N. a smoking ruin would sufficiently terrify the members that they would submit to Washing- ton’s demands? (It’s an approach that seems to be working fairly well for the North Koreans, after all.) According to an American official deeply involved with the negotia- tions, “I think we on the U.S. side, and the radicals on their side, thought huge portions would fall out because of disagreement, and we would salvage the heart of it.” In fact, they would have salvaged nothing had secretariat officials not intervened. It is also possi- ble that Bolton didn’t count on the backlash he would produce by arriving at the eleventh hour and casually toppling the house of cards that others had been patiently — if perhaps deludedly — building for months. You would think, however, that someone of his intelligence and experience would be able to foresee such consequences. Or perhaps Bolton is not so much an ineffective diplo- F O C U S S E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 6 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 27 Bolton has managed to alienate some of Washington’s best friends at the U.N.