So Much for Excellence: John Bolton Steps Down

Ambassador John Bolton, the most effective U.N. Ambassador the United States has had in two decades, has announced that he will step down  when his current term ends.  His remarkable accomplishments  on Resolutions 1695 and 1718  on North Korea, Resolution 1706 on  Darfur,  and his valiant efforts at reform all  notwithstanding, Bolton became a victim of partisanship and a target of UN-topians  for his refusal to acquiesce to evil or surrender U.S. interests to its foes.  Although no Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee was willing to give Bolton’s performance or qualifications a fair hearing, or offer any compelling reason to oppose him, we should long remember that it was Lincoln Chafee and Richard Lugar who actually stabbed Bolton in the back for the dubious, and ultimately fruitless, cause of saving Chafee’s Senate seat.  We will never know how the full Senate  would have voted.  Bolton, to his credit, didn’t really didn’t seem to care.  When I met with Amb. Bolton for 30 minutes last year, to talk about famine and human rights in North Korea, I sensed that  he didn’t think he’d be  confirmed, and I’ve heard others who knew him say the same.  My  lasting impressions of John Bolton  as a person were of  his factual precision, his command of the issues, his application of common sense to complex problems, and his sense of humor. 

Whatever relevence ancient  questions about  Bolton’s “management style” had in relation to  his qualifications to serve should not have persisted after that sterling record, but this is Washington.  John Bolton will be missed, and both America and the United Nations will be worse off without him.  During his tenure, the United Nations, ever so briefly, worked as it was intended —  as a reasonably effective, nonviolent way to check the actions of thugs and killers.  If the U.N. collapses back into the corruption and fecklessness that marked most of the Kofi Annan and Boutros-Ghali eras, the  widespread  disillusionment of the American people with the U.N. will increase, and this country  will return to doing what it did under the Clinton Administration and  what most other Security Council members have done all along:  pursue their interests without a second thought of a U.N. debate. 

Given the  awful performance of the new,  “reformed” U.N. Human Rights Council, and the emerging desire of South Korea and China to ignore Resolution 1718, President Bush will need to nominate someone just as confrontational as John Bolton to save that institution from its own worst elements.  Can you say, “Ambassador Santorum?”

[typos fixed]