John Bolton's Moment
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The New York Sun applauds President Bush’s nomination of John Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations: Bolton’s Moment.
This is an editorial about President Bush and his new ambassador to the United Nations, not about The New York Sun, but it’s one of those moments when it’s impossible to resist a brief toot of our own horn. We ran our editorial on President Bush’s nomination of John Bolton as American ambassador to the United Nations back on January 12, 2005, nearly two months before Mr. Bush made the nomination public. The editorial, headlined, “Bush and Bolton,” concluded, “He would make an extraordinary ambassador to the United Nations. It’s not the only job we could think of for him, but it’s one where he could make a mark like another great scholar-bureaucrat did in the 1970s - Daniel Patrick Moynihan.”
Well, you heard it here first.
Now that the nomination is official, both Messrs. Bolton and Bush are to be congratulated. It has been said of Mr. Bush that he is the right man at the right time at the right place, but the same could be said of Mr. Bolton in the role at the United Nations. In a chapter for a 1996 book issued by the Cato Institute, Mr. Bolton wrote, “Some Americans simply want to withdraw from the United Nations, believing that it can never really be fixed. I understand the frustrations and disappointments that lead to that view, even though I disagree with it. We should tell the world community instead, ‘Let’s make one last effort to put things right at the UN. And make no mistake, our patience is not unlimited.’” It’s now nearly a decade into that “one last effort,” and what the U.N. has to show for it is an oil-for-food scandal in Iraq, peacekeepers accused of rape in the Congo, and failure to prevent a genocide in Darfur. It’s responded to these failings by asserting it needs to do a better job of public relations. If the U.N. was ever in need of a forceful reminder that American patience is not unlimited, this is the moment.
Jacob Heilbrunn at the LA Times rather grudgingly admits the U.N. May Need Bolton’s Bitter Medicine.
Bolton has made no secret of his disdain for the U.N. “There is no such thing as the United Nations,” he said as early as 1994. “There is an international community that occasionally can be led by the only real power left in the world and that is the United States, when it suits our interest and we can get others to go along.”
Despite the rhetoric, it would be foolish to dismiss Bolton, now undersecretary of State, as an obstructionist conservative troglodyte. In fact, there is a rich GOP tradition of appointing critics of the U.N. as ambassadors to that body, a tradition that has proved remarkably effective.
It began with President Ford’s naming of Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1975. Moynihan did not just display contempt for the U.N., he flaunted it.
When the General Assembly passed a resolution calling Zionism racism, Moynihan declared: “This is a lie.” After Idi Amin spoke to the General Assembly in October 1975 and called for the “extinction of Israel as a state,” Moynihan did not hide behind the diplomatic niceties usually on display in the chamber — he called Amin a “racist murderer.” Moynihan was defending liberal democracy against what he saw as the despotic Third World countries that were perverting the true mission of the United Nations. ...
Where does this put Bolton? Like Moynihan and Kirkpatrick before him, Bolton’s well-known antipathy to the U.N. means that he is well suited for the job of trying to rebuild the institution, which has accomplished the remarkable feat of squandering what little credibility it has left. |
