Outside the depleted ranks of the United States’s neoconservatives, few tears are likely to be shed over John Bolton’s resignation as US ambassador to the United Nations. Bolton’s political fate was effectively sealed, like that of Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon, when the Republicans suffered their crippling defeat in the Congressional elections last month: two senior administration figures who were closely associated with the multiple disasters of the Iraq war have now happily paid the price.
Bolton was a polarising figure who intimidated others to support his hawkish views. But his influence went far beyond Baghdad and preceded the fall of Saddam Hussein. His blunt speaking and abrasive manner were harnessed to a visceral hostility to multilateral institutions and agreements he saw as inhibiting the US’s pursuit of its own vital interests. This dictated his obstructive approach to the international criminal court, the very embodiment of multilateralism. To Chris Patten, he was the “Pavarotti of neoconservatism; his views have taken the roof off chancelleries around the globe”.
Bolton’s disdainful excesses helped the US’s worst enemies, such as the North Korean propagandists who called him “human scum”. He was wrong to scorn European diplomatic efforts to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions. When this diehard unilateralist arrived at the UN in March last year, it was utterly at odds with the pledge that, after Iraq, the US would hold a “conversation” with the rest of the world, not a monologue. John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic candidate, was right to say that sending Bolton to Turtle Bay was “the most inexplicable appointment the president could make to represent the US to the world community”.
It is only a coincidence that Bolton’s departure follows an outburst of frankness from Kofi Annan, the outgoing secretary-general. Asked last week if Iraq was now in a state of civil war, he said: “We are almost there.” Then, in a valedictory BBC interview, he went further to argue that things were now “much worse” than during Lebanon’s civil war. Annan was right to talk about the effect of the war on ordinary Iraqis (but wrong to duck the question of its legality) because the fate of the country is too often discussed in terms of geopolitics and the nuances of diplomacy. The US may find the UN more helpful to a lonely superpower without Bolton at the Security Council’s horseshoe-shaped table. The UN will be of more use to the world it is supposed to serve if the secretary-general speaks his mind more often — and before it is too late. — Â