Where's the Old Bolton When We Need Him?
John Bolton, President Bush's nominee to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, once said that if the top 10 floors of the U.N. headquarters disappeared, "it wouldn't make a bit of difference." But in hearings last week, Bolton pledged to "forge a stronger relationship between the United States and the United Nations" and to take "important steps to restore confidence" in the international body.
This kinder, gentler Bolton is exactly what the U.N. does not need. If the U.N. is going to stop being a major impediment to multilateral cooperation and international law, it needs the radical skepticism of the old Bolton, the kind of skepticism that will remake it from the top down.
By design, the U.N. inhibits multilateral action. The five permanent members of the Security Council -- Britain, France, Russia, China and the U.S. -- all have an absolute veto over authorizing military action, applying sanctions and sending peacekeepers. Because these states rarely can reach a consensus, the Security Council rarely acts.
In the past, the U.S. accomplished its foreign policy goals by working around the U.N., not through it. Washington's successful anti-Soviet containment policy, implemented with allies as diverse as France, Germany, Turkey and Japan, proceeded independently of the U.N. U.S.-led efforts to stop British and French seizure of the Suez Canal and to end the Israeli-Arab wars occurred with little help from the U.N. NATO's intervention during the wars in the former Yugoslavia was, in large part, a violation of the U.N. Charter.
More recently, efforts to contain North Korea, to limit conflict between India and Pakistan, to keep the peace between Taiwan and China and to remove Saddam Hussein have owed little or nothing to the U.N.
Historically, then, the U.N. has been mostly irrelevant, but with the end of the Cold War, it acquired new prestige, based mainly on the hope that the relaxation of superpower tensions would finally allow it to act. The foreign veto-holders on the Security Council have an interest in maintaining the U.N.'s new popularity because it gives them a kind of equality with the U.S. that they lack in reality.
