His exasperation with the UN process that substitutes consensus or the unity of the security council for actual results will resonate with those who watched with horror Slobodan Milosevic's resolution-strewn trail to Srebrenica or, even now, Khartoum's juggling with resolutions and statements from atop a pile of corpses.
He even, albeit
briefly considering that he spent several years working on the issue,
belabours the US and the UN for allowing Morocco to duck its promises and
legal obligations to allow a referendum in western Sahara.
Similarly he takes to task "the EU's proclivity to avoid confronting
and actually recognising problems," he says, and he does have a
point, even if many observers would feel that one of the biggest problems
it has been avoiding has been the unilateralist tendency of the US.
It would be refreshing for those Labour types fawning over the White House
to read Bolton's scathing dismissal of the alleged special
relationship.
Indeed, if anything, he seems to have a visceral hatred of Brits, especially those who disagree with him, like the former UN ambassador Emyr Jones Parry, who makes him wonder how Britain won an empire but explains why it lost America, and indeed his successor John Sawers, but with special vitriol for Jack Straw and Mark Malloch Brown.
He sneers: "Many Brits believed their role in life was to play Athens to America's Rome, lending us the benefit of their superior suaveness, and smoothing off our regrettable colonial rough edges."
In fact, he is
speaking about an older policy, in which British diplomats tried to bridge
the gap between American unilateralism and the rest of the world. Blair's
complete abdication of independent policy gets no thanks whatsoever.
And that of course reminds us that Bolton is not a presumptuously
precocious little boy. He is a blustering boor with a chip on each
shoulder, one on his own account as the working class kid made good, and
the other for the conservatives who he thinks represent the real America,
who have been thwarted by his lengthy list of liberal demons.
Indeed one senses a deep personal insecurity, since he frequently records
words of polite praise, but never any of the numerous criticisms that he
attracted. Since he lacked the diplomatic niceties himself, he fails to
look beneath the surface of the pleasantries that the UN diplomatic corps
used with him, although he seems to have the subliminal message from Jones
Parry.
Of course no one
was going to tell the US representative at the UN that he was a blustering
boor, whatever they said to each other.
Bolton is free with abuse for others, but he is surprisingly thin-skinned
when it comes to criticism from others.
Almost breathtakingly, he praises Terje Roed-Larsen of Norway for "a propensity for speaking his mind ... always a source of delight to me."
Clearly, it was
the Norwegian's slavish assent which delights the author, since similar
outspokenness from the "petty bureaucrat", Malloch Brown, Kofi
Annan and Bolton's numerous other hate figures sends him into petulant
rage.
This is not mere xenophobia: his enemies begin at home, with the
"eastern elitists", state department "careerists", the
"High Minded", the "True Believers", the "EAPeasers"
(state department East Asia and Pacific staffers) and eventually those
whom the "Risen Bureaucrats" seduced - Colin Powell, Condoleezza
Rice and, although he avoids direct criticism, George Bush.
Indeed, he claims that he left the UN not because of the poor prospects of
Senate confirmation but because of the success of his internal hate list
in suborning "real conservative" foreign policy, and this book
is a lengthy Parthian shot at them all.
His opposition to
the EU and "EUroids" is rooted in his visceral dislike for what
he sees as a social democratic counter to the United States, and thus a
potential rival, and of course, the British and French and all the other
pretentious Lilliputians who would tie down the American Gulliver with
ropes of international laws and multilateral treaties.
This is an obsessive book packed with minutiae of bureaucratic feuds and
internal crusades, and as such, in a strange way, provides valuable
insight into how the US formulates its foreign policy and, one could
almost say, consequently, the UN fails to implement effective policies.
But while he attacks the processes of the UN, he frankly claims that
"consensus" was supposed to mean that the United States was
satisfied. In his indignation he fails to acknowledge that the other 191
could also play and thus paralyse the decision-making process.
With complete
lack of self-awareness, he does not acknowledge the role of his
undiplomatic unilateralism in antagonising opponents and frustrating the
efforts of allies.
Above all, we should remember that while Bolton can be faulted for
thinking that bullying and blustering produce dividends, he is not being
innovative in the essence of American foreign policy.
He strips the
skin off the skull of much of American foreign policy since the end of the
second world war, but in doing so does little to advance it. Compromise
being excluded, so essentially is diplomacy or anything like normal
alliances.
Bolton quite clearly does not share the neocon illusions of spreading
democracy at the point of a bayonet. How foreigners suffer is no concern
of his. But he is quite prepared to threaten and use force to advance what
he sees as American national interests, as judged by himself and his
conservative cohorts.
In that sense it is refreshing. What you see is what you get. If the EU, the UK and others have interests, they should stand up for them, instead of deferring to a presumed automatic altruism on the part of Washington.
