BOLTED. As you've heard, John Bolton will go to the White House today to personally hand his resignation to President Bush. Scott Paul at Bolton Watch (where I also blog) says he's likely to hit the speaking circuit and write a book blasting the Bush administration for abandoning ultra-conservative foreign policy principles. Whatever he's up to next, it will be new morning in Turtle Bay.
Since Bolton took the helm of the U.S. mission to the UN, he has been a singularly pernicious influence on American foreign policy. As an unnamed diplomat told the Economist a couple of weeks ago, "It is extraordinary how badly he has served American interests. To be embraced by America is now seen as a kiss of death."
Bolton's resignation comes at a time when the administration is increasingly looking to the United Nations to take on a greater share of global peace and stability maintenance. In August the United States, along with the other veto-wielding members of the Security Council, voted for three new UN Peacekeeping missions for Darfur, Lebanon, and East Timor. If all three resolutions are implemented in full, the number of Blue Helmets in the world will increase by 50 percent, to about 115,000 troops worldwide. With American forces overstretched by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for the foreseeable future, the United Nations will bear primary responsibility for stabilizing global hotspots from Haiti to southern Lebanon.
With Bolton out, progress is now also possible on a host of important UN reforms that would make the UN a more efficient bureaucracy. These reforms stalled this summer amid threats by Bolton that the U.S. may withhold its support for the UN's budget unless the reforms were adopted. With threats like this one, Bolton showed an uncanny ability to torpedo UN reform by simultaneously uniting a previously fractious alliance of underdeveloped countries generally hostile to reform and dividing a previously united coalition of European and northern states that supported many of the proposed reforms.
With a new Secretary General on the way in, and Bolton on his way out, reform efforts may be reinvigorated. Like I said, it's a new morning in Turtle Bay.
--Mark Leon Goldberg
