BOOK
REVIEW A neo-con in the works Surrender Is Not an Optionby
John
Bolton Reviewed by Alexander Casella
On merit alone, John Bolton, who served as the controversial US ambassador to
the United Nations between 2005 and 2007, cannot be faulted. The son of a
Boston firefighter, he graduated from Yale University and law school, which he
attended on a scholarship, with a summa cum laude.
A conservative at heart, it was during these formative years that he developed
a deep-seated contempt for liberal thinking, which he increasingly perceived as
a privilege of the rich.
Following graduation he
joined the Washington law firm Covington &
Burling and became a protegee of Jim Baker,
president Ronald
Reagan's future White House chief of staff. Reagan's election changed the
course of Bolton's career.
After a short stint as a
political appointee with the United States Agency
for International Development at the State
Department, he joined the team of attorney general
Edward Meese and became
part of the "Ronald Reagan revolution"
within the Department of Justice.
Following
the election of Bill Clinton he went into internal exile and found refuge in
the American Enterprise Institute, a right wing think-tank from which he
consolidated his conservative credentials.
The election of George W Bush brought Bolton back into the frontline when Colin
Powell, who had just been nominated secretary of state, offered him the post of
under-secretary of state for arms control and international security affairs.
By his own admission, having assumed that position his main concern consisted
in undermining Powell's less confrontational approach towards Iran and North
Korea. It did not endear him to Powell but it further consolidated his position
as one of the conservative hardliners within the Bush administration.
His reward, so he hoped, was due when Bush was re-elected and Condoleezza Rice
replaced Powell, but it was not to be. On December 14, 2004, so he writes, he
met with Rice, who asked him if he had any position in mind for himself. Bolton
saw himself as particularly suited to the position of deputy secretary of
state, but it was obviously the last job Rice would have wanted him in.
With his privileged relation to Vice President Dick Cheney and former secretary
of defense Donald Rumsfeld, not only would he have easily short-circuited her,
but also his confrontational approach to what he perceived, as a liberal State
Department career civil service staff would have created internal problems,
which she could do well without.
Clearly, with his conservative credentials, she had to keep him on board but
possibly in a position where he did not threaten her. She thus circuitously
raised the issue of the staffing of the US representative at the UN in New
York, the "USUN". It was not Bolton's first choice, but he relented when Bush
personally assured him of his support. My father, commented Bush, saw the job
as basically keeping everything flowing and not getting anyone upset. Bolton,
replied that he saw the job as "advocacy for America". Neither of the two men
seemed to realize that the two were not contradictory.
Bolton now had the job, but before taking over the post he needed senate
confirmation. But the tide had turned, the Democrats now had a strong showing
in the senate and his credentials, which included a longstanding ideologically
motivated aversion to multilateralism in general, and to the UN in particular,
proved obstacles difficult to overcome.
The confirmation battle, which started in April, went on until the end of July
at which point the senate adjourned without coming to a decision. It was the
opportunity Bush was waiting for. On August 1 he made a recess appointment and
Bolton became the first US ambassador to the UN to be assigned to the post
without senate confirmation.
When Bolton arrived in New York the UN was at an all-time low. Kofi Annan's
standing had been irreversibly damaged by the oil-for-food scandal and his
reform project, the so-called Outcome Document was coming under increasing
criticism for proposing too much in the eyes of some and too little in the eyes
of others. One of the main bones of contention was the reform of the
Secretariat. Both Annan and most of the Europeans wanted a stronger
Secretariat; the US wanted a weaker Secretariat which would be more subservient
to US policy while the third world countries also wanted a weaker secretariat
but only because they saw it as an instrument of the Western industrialized
nations.
Rather than trying to build a consensus in order to confront Annan with the
shortcomings of the Outcome Document, Bolton, by his own admission, decided to
go at it alone; and while his objections to many of the details of the document
actually made sense, his unilateralist approach actually deprived the US of the
clout it could have exercised if not operating alone.
In his frontal attack against practically all the ills of the UN system, ills
such as corruption, inefficiency and overstaffing which he had correctly
identified, Bolton also failed to prioritize. One of the issues that he sought
to address was funding. Under the current system, government contributions were
assessed and were based on a complicated formula, which took into account the
gross national product of the individual member states. Under this system, the
US paid some 22% of the dues; three governments - the US, Germany and Japan -
paid some 50% and eight governments paid some 80%. Bolton tried to alter the
system in favor of "voluntary" contribution, arguing that some UN agencies like
the High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) operated along these lines and were
far more efficient.
Actually he was wrong on both counts. Over the years, the UNHCR had developed
into an inefficient, overstaffed bureaucracy weighed down by its administrative
costs and in no way more efficient than the rest of the UN system. And as for
changing the system, this would have required a modification of the UN charter,
which the US would never have achieved without the strong commitment of the
other main donors; and in the context of the Bush administration it was support
that Washington would never have mustered.
Another of Bolton's complaints was that he did not have the support of the
bureaucracy in Washington. He argues convincingly that Rice's senior advisor on
UN affairs, the Pakistan-born Tahir-Kheli, sought constantly to undermine him.
However, he fails to note that ultimately Rice herself was simply not tuned
into the complexities of dealing with a multilateral environment. Nor had she
fully grasped the attributes of the post of UN secretary general.
Over the years, Annan had built himself into the image of a lay pope who, in
his eyes, was the embodiment of the principals of the UN. This house of vanity
came tumbling down during the Iraqi crisis where his wooly disapproval of the
US intervention proved totally irrelevant. He did, however, succeed in being
perceived as a minor nuisance by the Bush administration and, having been
further weakened by the oil-for-food scandal, tempted Washington to push him
out of his job.
It would not have been the first time that a major power would have forced a UN
secretary general to resign. In 1952, two years into his second term, the
Norwegian Trigve Lie, who had fallen foul of the Soviets, was made to resign
and Annan could easily have been made to do likewise. That Annan, in Bolton's
words, was "not up to the job" was unquestionable, but his attempts to oust him
were blocked by Rice and Powell.
Theodore Roosevelt once said that America should speak softly and carry a big
stick. The Bush administration has presented the UN with the image of a
government that speaks loudly and carries no stick. Granted, the eviction of
Annan would have created some ripples were it only on principle, but it would
also have projected the image of a UN member state that was ready to act
decisively. Instead, Washington decided to put up with Annan, whose term was
coming to an end anyway, and set out to find a successor for the post.
In seeking a successor to Annan, Bolton comments that Rice indicated that the
US did not want a "strong secretary general". What neither Bolton nor Rice
seemed to have grasped is that a UN secretary general, by definition, cannot be
"strong". His administrative authority is non-existent, circumscribed as it is
by the UN's fifth commission, and his political clout does not measure up to
that of the member states. While Annan was a high-visibility secretary general,
he was neither weak nor "strong" but rather, when push came to shove over Iraq,
irrelevant.
The search for a successor to Annan proved another frustrating experience for
Bolton. The UN charter makes no reference to how a secretary general should be
identified and it became a custom, within the UN system, that the post should
rotate between the regional groups. While Washington kept on, over the years,
objecting to the system it made no attempts to find a better alternative and
Bolton found himself confronted with a situation which provided that the
successor to Annan would be an Asian.
By the summer of 2006, four Asian candidates had emerged for the post of UN
secretary general. Surakiart Sathirathai, presented by Thailand, had obtained
the endorsement of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) bloc,
thus ensuring there would be no other candidate for the region. On paper it
made him a strong candidate. However, as Bolton reveals, the US Embassy in
Bangkok had produced a highly negative report on Surakiart and, by locking in
ASEAN all he had achieved was to ensure that no one from the region would get
the post.
Shashi Tharoor, who was then UN under secretary general for communications and
public information, had obtained Indian support for the post but, as the
consummate UN insider, was the opposite of what Washington wanted. Actually,
Bolton shared an opinion current in the upper strata of the UN that the only
one who believed in the chances of Tharoor was Tharoor.
Jayantha Dhanapala, a former Sri Lankan ambassador, was a long shot and never
really considered. Since 2005, South Korea had been promoting its Foreign
Minister Ban Ki-moon and if Bolton did not find him particularly impressive, he
headed the short list set up by Rice.
To advance the selection process, the 15-member Security Council had decided to
hold a straw poll in which governments could anonymously indicate if they
"encouraged" or "discouraged" a candidate, with the understanding that a
"discourage" from one of the permanent five was equivalent to a veto. In
September, the second straw poll gave 14 "encourage" to Ban and one
"discourage", thus ensuring his election. While there was considerable
speculation as to which government cast the "discourage" vote, Bolton provides
the answer; it was Japan, signaling its uneasy relations with South Korea, as
opposed to China, which proved one of Ban's early supporters.
One of Ban's first decisions on assuming his post was to require the
resignation of all the senior UN officials appointed by Annan. This, in
retrospect, was Bolton's only achievement and, assured that he would never
obtain senate confirmation, he left his post on December 6, 2006.
Bolton's goal at the UN was to "improve America's position" rather that to
improve the organization. He failed on both counts essentially because his
ideological orientation pre-empted him from coming to grips with the fact that
both were linked. Ever since its creation, the UN has been an instrument of
American foreign policy. The end of the Cold War and the fragmentization of the
global political system eroded American pre-eminence, but as long as the US
remained the main contributor to the UN, and in particular to the UN agencies,
its leading role remained assured.
Granted, the UN General Assembly had always, as an institution, been beyond US
control, but as its resolutions were non-binding it was nothing more than an
empty drum. And as for the Security Council, its refusal to endorse the UN
invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with the UN as an institution and everything
to do with America's diminished international standing and the questionable
credibility of the arguments used to justify its position.
To his credit, Bolton correctly identified many of the shortcomings of the UN
system, including the need to set up a credible procedure to identify
candidates for the post of secretary general and the need for comprehensive
reform rather that an incremental process that had no chance of producing any
lasting change. However, neither Bolton nor the administration he represented
ever produced credible and comprehensive alternative solutions.
Ultimately, Bolton stood for a short-term, opportunistic and confrontational
approach based an ideologically motivated incapacity to deal with
multilateralism. The UN that Bolton had to deal with was already so weakened
that it was impervious to further damage. Bolton was not the man to improve
multilateral relationships and, in hindsight, both he and Bush would have been
better off following in the footsteps of George Bush Sr, in "keeping everything
flowing smoothly and not getting anyone upset". Such a strategy might not have
improved America's position in the UN system, but at least it would not have
further degraded it.
Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations by
John Bolton. Threshold Editions, November 6, 2007. ISBN-10: 1416552847. Price
US$27, 496 pages.
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