George Bush's decision to nominate John Bolton as the next ambassador to the UN is tantamount to releasing a fox in a chicken coop. Bolton, now undersecretary for arms control, has hardly bothered to hide his contempt for the world body. In 1994, he told a conference: "If the UN secretariat building in New York lost 10 storeys, it wouldn't make a bit of difference."
Writing in Slate online magazine, Fred Kaplan predicts that the Bush administration will regret its latest appointment. As Kaplan rightly notes, the UN has its problems. For starters, the organisation is being investigated by an independent panel for its handling of the oil-for-food programme, an episode that has unleashed a torrent of criticism from Congress, especially among rightwing Republicans. However, as Kaplan argues, while it is no bad thing for Bush to have appointed some hard-nosed official - a latter-day Daniel Patrick Moynihan - to run the US mission who has no problem with the concept of international law, Bolton, as a matter of principle, opposes everything about it. Or as Ian Williams puts it pithily on the Global Vision News Network, "calling John Bolton a diplomat is bit like calling Jack the Ripper a surgeon".
Of course, it is Bolton's contemptuous attitude towards international treaties and multilateral organisations that wins favour with the right. The RWDB blog quotes approvingly from a Right Web profile that calls Bolton a "treaty killer" and believes he is the right man for the job.
Whether you condemn or support the nomination, Bush's move raises some intriguing questions. Does it signal that the neo-cons are being moved away from the centre of power? Foreign policy is made at the White House and state department, not at the UN. Taken together with the recent report that Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defence, is on the shortlist for the job of World Bank president, maybe, just maybe, Bush has decided to take a more pragmatic attitude to foreign policy.
