John Bolton: how's he doing?

I know, I know: the question has dominated your every waking moment! Well, don't you worry - Mark Leon Goldberg has the answer for you over at the American Prospect!

The short answer, for those that just can't wait? He's a disaster!

Okay, we all expected that. The real question was always whether the Secretary of State could control his behavior when push came to shove, and the evidence now supports a big, loud belch of a "No." Ms. Rice had a success in September, when she personally intervened in negotiations (feeding into the UN World Summit) to restore references to the Millennium Development Goals that Mr. Bolton had wanted excised from the program. Apart from that, though, her record has been more mixed.

Here's how our Secretary of State and UN Ambassador have worked together to address escalating tensions with Syria, for example.

Indeed, it was Rice, not Bolton, who achieved the one significant success of Bolton’s first 100 days at the United Nations: a unanimous October 30 Security Council vote requiring Syria to fully cooperate with a UN investigation into the suspected Syria-sponsored assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. The Prospect has learned that in the days and weeks leading up to the late October UN report on Hariri’s assassination, Rice sought to sideline Bolton from the negotiations over the Security Council resolution that the report inspired. She also made the State Department, not the U.S. Mission to the UN, the central address for discussions on the resolution.

One of the first signs that a bureaucratic battle was brewing between Bolton and Rice over Syria came on October 18, when the State Department press corps was shocked to find that Rice had unexpectedly flown to New York to meet Annan. A State Department spokesman explained that the two met to “compare notes” in advance of a widely anticipated report by Detlev Mehlis, the secretary-general’s special investigator for the Hariri assassination. Yet Bolton, the man in charge of the United States’ day-to-day operations at the UN, was conspicuously absent from that meeting. In what appears to have been less of an accident than a matter of intentional timing, Rice made her trip to New York on the very morning that Bolton had to be in Washington, testifying before the Senate on the progress (or lack thereof) of UN reforms.

The Prospect has further learned that, rather than forging Security Council strategy with America’s European allies at the UN building in New York, much of the diplomatic legwork has been carried out in Foggy Bottom. On October 22, a French delegation from the UN traveled to Washington for initial discussions on the Syria resolution (later called Security Council Resolution 1636), of which the French were the original authors. According to a diplomatic source, Bolton was not initially invited to that meeting. The French, however, insisted on his presence. So Bolton attended, but not without three chaperones: Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs David Welch, Welch’s deputy (and vice-presidential daughter) Elizabeth Cheney, and National Security Council Middle East chief Michael Doran. “It’s like they stuck a strong team from the [State Department and National Security Council] to watch him,” said the diplomat.

Despite Rice’s tight oversight of the resolution negotiations, the unanimity of the council was still in doubt one day before the Security Council meeting. Finally, in a last-minute lunch meeting with her foreign-minister counterparts from the veto-wielding permanent five Security Council members, Rice personally removed references to sanctions that had been inserted by the United States. With those obstacles to unanimous consent gone, Resolution 1636 passed 15 to 0.

Rice’s involvement came after Bolton had won round one in the Syria battle. Bolton and Rice’s bureaucratic tiffs over Syria had actually boiled over two weeks prior to the Security Council vote. Journalist Ibrahim Hamidi, writing in the Arabic-language newspaper Al-Hayat, reported -- and the Prospect has independently confirmed -- that Bolton had leaked to British newspapers that the Bush administration had signaled its willingness to offer Syria a “Libya-style deal” -- a reference to Libyan President Muammar Quaddafi’s decision last year to give up pursuing weapons of mass destruction and renounce terrorism in return for a restoration of relations with the United States and the United Kingdom. According to The Times of London, Syria responded positively to the secret U.S. offer, which was made through a third party. But after Bolton publicly aired the details of the potential deal -- which would require Syria to cooperate with the Mehlis investigation, end interference in Lebanese affairs and alleged interference in Iraqi affairs, and cease supporting militant groups like Hamas and Hezbollah—Damascus quickly denied that such a deal was in the offing.

Just to spell it out: the man sabotaged ongoing negotiations, leading to his (perhaps unwitting) exclusion from subsequent stages of deliberation, and when he was finally returned to the process in the process, it was against Ms. Rice's will and under the watchful eyes of three - three! - handlers.

You know what that says to me? That says professionalism, baby! That says, here's a man who cares so much about his job (that job being, in layman's terms, fucking up American diplomacy) that his superiors have to have him tethered! Oh, see how far a can-do attitude can take you?

The relationship was already in evidence in June, when Ms. Rice had to keep international policy discussions pertaining to Iranian nukes secret from Mr. Bolton.

Rice was playing hardball with Bolton, too. During the first Bush term, Bolton had effectively blocked U.S. support for a French, German, and British plan for confronting Tehran’s nuclear ambitions. Soon after Rice moved to Foggy Bottom, she sought to keep Bolton out of key policy discussions about Iran. In June, The Washington Post reported that Rice sought to keep secret from Bolton a meeting of French, British, German, and American officials who flew to Washington for a “brainstorming session on Iran.” Of the Iran meeting a European diplomat told the Post, “It was the American side that didn’t want him there.”

Our man at Turtle Bay, ladies and gentlemen!

But, wait, J.! you may be thinking, Condi caught him every time! Maybe it's good cop-bad cop! Maybe he's crazy in exactly the same way Mel Gibson was crazy in all those Lethal Weapon movies - and everybody knows Hollywood crazy gets results!

Okay, here's what happens when Condoleezza Rice loses the fight:

When he arrived at Turtle Bay, Bolton stepped into the middle of negotiations on the most extensive set of UN reforms since the world body’s founding 60 years ago. On the table was a wide-ranging set of reforms, most of which had been championed by the United States: replacing the discredited Human Rights Commission (notorious for including such beacons of freedom as Sudan) with a new and improved Human Rights Council; increasing administrative oversight in light of the oil-for-food scandal; creating a new “Peace Building Commission” to help with postconflict reconstruction; working toward a strong definition, and condemnation, of terrorism; and making a forceful statement on nuclear nonproliferation.

Bolton, however, has been unable to deliver on most of these reforms. When he submitted his 750 edits to the working draft of UN reforms two weeks after arriving, he had insisted on going line by line through the document as a way to maximize U.S. gains. But rather than bolstering the United States’ bargaining position, the approach largely backfired. It gave spoiler countries like Pakistan, Cuba, and Venezuela the opening they needed to pursue maximalist positions on their own pet issues, and allowed countries with less-than-stellar human-rights records to undermine America’s insistence that the new Human Rights Council must exclude countries under UN sanction.

To make matters worse, once the negotiations devolved into a painstaking process of debating each word of the document, spoiler countries were rewarded by striking temporary bargaining alliances on single issues, or sometimes even on single sentences. Again, this was largely to the detriment of U.S. interests. For example, when Bolton tried to purge the section concerning nonproliferation of any mention of disarmament, the alliance of Israel, India, and Pakistan -- nuclear powers that are not parties to the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons -- retorted by introducing language emphasizing disarmament and deleted references to the non-proliferation treaty. “We could not get back the balance between nonproliferation and disarmament [from earlier drafts],” a European diplomat told Jim Wurst of the Global Security Newswire. Eventually the entire section was scrapped. By the time heads of state signed on to reforms, the document contained not a single word on nuclear nonproliferation, and had even lost its pledge to keep weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of terrorists.

Could there be more? Why, yes!

By December, a looming crisis over the UN budget was testing Bolton and Rice’s relationship once again. At the time of this writing, the United Nations was in chaos. Kofi Annan had just canceled a trip to Asia to oversee negotiations over the UN’s biennium budget, which was being derailed by an American threat to withhold support for the UN’s two-year operating budget until a number of management reforms are passed. With a December 31 deadline looming, Bolton proposed that the world body adopt a three- or four-month interim budget -- just enough time to force other member states to accept the reforms.

These reforms are backed by Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and the secretary-general himself. Yet Bolton’s strong-arm tactics led their representatives to warn that his proposal would starve the United Nations and disrupt other important UN business like peacekeeping operations.

. . .

Bolton achieved this feat just a few short weeks before the December 31 deadline by threatening to withhold U.S. support for the UN’s $3.9 billion budget. Since the 1980s, the UN’s biennial budget has been adopted by consensus, a system encouraged by none other than the Reagan administration to ensure that poor countries could not frivolously increase the budget, the bulk of which is paid for by a handful of wealthy nations. Now that fear has been reversed: The UN’s largest contributor is threatening to use the consensus process to block the UN’s budget. Bolton has argued against passing the new biennial budget which begins January 6, without implementing management reforms that are generally opposed by the G-77 bloc of developing countries and favored by Annan and the Western world. Instead, he proposed an interim budget that would last a few months, during which time he would be able to push through the managerial reforms.

The reforms that Bolton advocates are badly needed; they would at once streamline the UN’s ossified bureaucracy and expand the office of the secretary-general to ensure greater accountability and oversight on the part of UN programs. Bolton, however, is alone in the view that the budget need be delayed until these reforms are passed. Annan and his staff forcefully oppose any budgetary postponement—as does virtually every other UN member state. On November 30, The New York Times reported that Warren Sach, assistant secretary-general and controller of the UN, said that Bolton’s interim budget would give the UN a deficit of $320 million in the first quarter of 2006. Among the options to close the deficit is taking money from the separate peacekeeping budget. “This place does not run on air,” he lamented. Should an interim budget be adopted, the United Nations would have to significantly curtail expenditures for the first quarter.

Bolton’s budget proposal was also the subject of a rare public dispute between the United States and one of its closest allies at the UN. On November 23, Britain’s habitually soft-spoken UN ambassador, Emyr Jones Parry, openly rebuffed Bolton’s overture to have Britain join him in opposing the budget. “We are not in favor of holding any individual items or the budget hostage to other issues,” he announced. Echoing his concern was the UN’s second-largest financial contributor and staunch advocate of managerial reforms, Japan, which contributes 19 percent of the total UN operating budget. Not to worry: As one South American diplomat dryly ridicules, “[Bolton] can probably still bring along his usual allies—Palau and the Marshall Islands.”

And, for the record, the word on the street is that Ms. Rice isn't happy.

The rumor mill at the Vienna Café has suggested that Bolton must have bypassed Rice and received support for holding the UN budget hostage from the president himself -- a view widely held as the truth among UN diplomats. Regardless of the accuracy of this rumor, Bolton’s move is paradigmatic of his self-defeating approach to the UN: Instead of banding together with powerful allies, he alienates them. And in doing so he empowers adversaries like Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, and other spoilers content with a UN that is tied in knots. Critics feared that Bolton’s tenure would be problematic for American interests. The evidence suggests it’s been even worse.

This brings us to the original, awful question behind Mr. Bolton's interim appointment: does the White House want to have a maniac throwing procedural bombs right and left in the midst of its diplomacy apparatus? Do the major players want the UN crippled?

Maybe, maybe not. Either way, it's painfully clear that the president and his relevant advisors value a show of executive infallability - Congress wouldn't confirm the guy, so now he has to get the job, or we look weak! - above the prospect of actually having an agent in that office that could get positive things done.

I never thought I'd write this, but my heart goes out to Condoleezza Rice. Until the interim term expires, she's got a lot of work ahead of her that shouldn't be necessary.