"In his ?rst six months at the UN, John Bolton has offended allies, blocked crucial negotiations, undermined the Secretary of State -- and harmed U.S. interests. We expected bad; we didn’t expect this bad."
Bolton was the man most responsible for the complexity of the negotiations at the mid-September 2005 United Nations World Summit. "A month earlier, the newly minted, recess-appointed U.S. ambassador had sent negotiations into a tailspin when he submitted some 750 alterations to a 39-page text known as the “summit outcomes” document. Bolton’s most eye-popping suggestion at this summit, billed as a renewal of the UN’s 5-year-old pledge to help poor countries, was that all 14 references in the document to the anti-poverty Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) be deleted......
"The Prospect has learned that, in the end, it took (U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza) Rice’s personal intervention to set things right. On September 5 she participated in a conference call with UN Secretary-General Ko? Annan and British Foreign Minister Jack Straw on the subject of UN reform. The next day, Bolton sent a letter to his UN counterparts relenting on the issue. Finally, to put all lingering questions about U.S. support of the MDGs to rest, President Bush himself stated America’s ?rm commitment to them in his September 14 speech to the UN General Assembly.......
"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. Ko? 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.
"The rumor mill at the Vienna Café (in the basement of the UN building in New York) 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."
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