Nuts and Bolton

Spectator, The, Mar 19, 2005 by Steyn, Mark

Mark Steyn says that the new US ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, is making the transnationalists very cross indeed

New Hampshire

If you're going to play the oldest established permanent floating transnational crap game for laughs, you might as well pick an act with plenty of material. What I love about John Bolton, America's new ambassador to the UN, is the sheer volume of 'damaging' material. Usually, the Democrats and media have to riffle through decades of dreary platitudes to come up with one potentially exploitable infelicitous soundbite. But with Bolton the damaging quotes are hanging off the trees and dropping straight into your bucket. Five minutes' casual mooching through the back catalogue and your cup runneth over:

The UN?

'There is no such thing as the United Nations.'

The UN building?

'If you lost ten storeys, it wouldn't make a bit of difference.'

Reform of the Security Council?

'If I were redoing the Security Council, I'd have one permanent member . . . the United States.'

The International Criminal Court?

'Fuzzy-minded romanticism . . . not just naive but dangerous.'

International law in general?

'It is a big mistake for us to grant any validity to international law.'

Offering incentives to rogue states?

'I don't do carrots.'

But he does do shtick. I happen to agree with all the above statements, but I can see why the international community might be minded to throw its hands up and shriek, 'Quelle horreur!' It's not just the rest of the world. Most of the American media are equally stunned. The New York Times wondered what Mr Bush's next appointment would be:

'Donald Rumsfeld to negotiate a new set of Geneva conventions? Martha Stewart to run the Securities and Exchange Commission?'

Okay, I get the hang of this game. Sending John Bolton to be UN ambassador is like . . . putting Sudan and Zimbabwe on the Human Rights Commission. Or letting Saddam's Iraq chair the UN conference on disarmament. Or sending a bunch of childsex fiends to man UN operations in the Congo. And the Central African Republic. And Sierra Leone, and Burundi, Liberia, Haiti. Kosovo, and pretty much everywhere else. All of which happened without the UN fetishists running around shrieking hysterically. Why should America he the only country not to enjoy an uproarious joke at the UN's expense?

In recent years, I've had the pleasure of watching John Bolton in action on a couple of occasions at semi-private gatherings comprised mainly of - what's the word? - foreigners. They were remarkable performances. Most of the Americans who hit the international cocktail circuit are eager to please. In Davos the other week, for example, CNN honcho Eason Jordan declared that US troops in Iraq were deliberately targeting journalists. Thanks to an enterprising blogger in attendance, this got him into hot water back home, and he wound up having to resign, mainly because it's completely untrue. Also in Davos, Bill Clinton endorsed the mullahs: 'Iran today is, in a sense, the only country where progressive ideas enjoy a vast constituency. It is there that the ideas that I subscribe to are defended by a majority.' That's true in the very narrow sense that in both Mr Clinton's sex life and the ayatollahs' repressive theocracy it's the gals who wind up as the fall guys. But surely that can't account entirely for Slick Willie's effusions on Iran: 'In every single election, the guys I identify with got two thirds to 70 per cent of the vote. There is no other country in the world I can say that about, certainly not my own.'

I've never been to Davos, but I've sat next to the hot-looking Eurototty in the Alpine bar and tried to wangle me a little après-ski action and there comes a point in the evening when she says, 'Zat George Boosh. What an idiot, hein!' And you start to bristle, but then you realise that America and Old Europe are riven by as deep a divide as the magnificent plunging cleavage beckoning from her low-cut Fahrenheit 9/11 T-shirt and maybe now would be a good time for some transatlantic outreach in a very real sense, so you say. 'Yeah, Bush. What a chump. Not like that Ruud Lubbers, eh?' And you stare down her cleavage and catch your creepy sweaty face reflected in her shoes and feel momentarily ashamed, but not for long. My guess is that that's what Bill Clinton and Eason Jordan were up to when they respectively hailed the progressivism of Iranian politics and defamed the entire US military. You're with a bunch of foreigners and you want them to like you and it's easy to get carried away.

That's what was so stunning about Bolton. In a roomful of Euro-grandees, he was perfectly relaxed, a genial fellow with a rather Mitteleuropean moustache, but he thwacked every ball they served back down their gullets with amazing precision. He was the absolute antithesis of Schmoozer Bill and Pandering Eason: he seemed to relish their hostility. At one event, a startled British cabinet minister said to me afterwards, 'He doesn't mean all that, does he?'

But he does. And that's why the Bolton flap is very revealing about conventional wisdom on transnationalism. Diplomats are supposed to be 'diplomatic'. Why is that? Well, as the late Canadian prime minister Lester B. Pearson used to say, diplomacy is the art of letting the other fellow have your way. In other words, you were polite, discreet, circumspect, etc., as a means to an end. Not any more. None of John Bolton's detractors is worried that his bluntness will jeopardise the administration's policy goals. Quite the contrary. They're concerned that the administration has policy goals - that it isn't yet willing to subordinate its national interest to the polite transnational pieties. In that sense, our understanding of 'diplomacy' has become corrupted: it's no longer the language through which nation states treat with one another so much as the aide-speak consensus of a global elite.