George A. Lopez

As appears in La Opinion, Sunday, March 13, 2005

Relations between the United Nations and Washington are at an all-time low. The crisis ignited two years ago with the US pursuit of pre-emptive war against Iraq without Security Council support. It was further inflamed by Kofi Annan’s condemnation of the war as illegal, and his critique of US assaults in Fallujah. In recent months Congress-ional and independent investigation of the so-called oil-for-food scandal have piqued the crisis. Now, in naming John Bolton to be the new US Ambassador to the UN, President Bush may have pushed the US-UN tensions to the edge of disaster.

Rarely has a Presidential ambassadorial appointment generated as much negative commentary as did Mr. Bolton’s recent nomination. But the opposition is not simply from Democrats or the likely suspects on the political left. There is considerable grumbling among mainstream Republicans, puzzled by a President who takes a major, conciliatory trip to Europe, only then to make such a polarizing appointment. And the backroom diplomatic disdain for this action is just beginning among the permanent members of the Security Council.

Both his substantive positions and his abrasive style make Bolton a contentious – some would claim catastrophic - choice for the head of the US Mission. Bolton’s assessment of three particular international issues illustrate why his nomination is so ill-advised.

First, he has been actively hostile to the UN for more than a decade. Previous right-of-center Ambassadors, such as Jeanne Kirkpatrick for the Reagan Administration, asserted a skeptical and sometimes chiding approach to the UN. But they also led on important measures and adapted to UN importance over time. Never has a US President designated as his representative someone who is on record calling the UN irrelevant and irredeemable. How can the US maintain credibility during Security Council debates when these are the well-known sentiments of its chief diplomat?

Secondly, Bolton has consistently opposed multilateral treaties and the creation of new global institutions which have been embraced by nearly every other democratic nation. In 1998, as one of the neo-con’s assault team members on the International Criminal Court, Bolton characterized the Court as ‘not just naïve, but dangerous’. This is a rather dysfunctional outlook for the US representative to hold because so much recent UN success has come in the form by stimulating new treaties and institutions.

Thirdly, throughout the 1990s Bolton articulated Cold War era claims about the right of Taiwan to a seat in the UN. This position – directly opposite long-standing US foreign policy - makes him a unique liability for the US leadership role at the UN during this perilous time in Chinese relations.

These past statements and actions are not selective nominee-bashing dredged up out of context, or twisted interpretations of a single speech or article. Rather, in John Bolton we have a figure who has been writing, speaking and acting in full public view for two decades. Because so many of his positions were inconsistent with mainline Republican thinking and what then Secretary of State Powell interpreted as US national interests, he actually tried to talk his Bush Administration colleagues out of appointing Bolton to his Under-Secretary post.

But Powell lost that fight (among others). If the Secretary of State had hoped for Bolton to moderate his style and positions with the level of representative responsibility his Under-Secretary of State provided, that expectation was soon dashed. Bolton devastated two major international conferences in 2001 at a time when US participatory leadership was badly needed.

In the first, he not only led the US position against the adoption of a global ban on small and light weapons, but in doing so he chastised the role on international non-governmental organizations for their “meddling” in trying to bring such international legislation into being. That same year he stood adamantly opposed to adding verification proposals to the international biological weapons convention.

As damaging to the US image and US efficacy in the UN which Bolton’s appointment will be, it appears unlikely that the US Senate will reject the President’s nomination. Even with Bolton’s confirmation, there are a number of positive steps which Congress can take to improve the US-UN relationship over the near term. A first and necessary action is for the Congress to sharpen its deliberations on UN reform.

Since its release over a month ago, the Republican run Congress has made political fodder of the interim report of the Independent Investigative Committee on the workings of the UN’s Oil-for-Food program (OFFP) chaired by Paul Volcker. Rather than treating its important findings with the gravity they deserve, many legislators are pursuing the narrow goal of discrediting the UN at all costs. As the House International Relations Committee, for example, began sub-committee hearings on the Volcker report on February 9, some members gravitated to a story reported the day before on Fox News. It was a resuscitation of a 2003 story on the embezzlement of funds by an employee of the World Meteorological Organization. This report, hardly noted by any other news source, shifted the committee’s attention from Volcker’s actual findings. Instead, in condemning the United Nations as rife with corruption, Chairman Henry Hyde called for his Committee to move beyond Oil-for-Food and to investigate and audit the entire United Nations system.

Things were not much better the following week on the Senate side. The Senate’s Permament Subcomittee on Investigations (PSI), chaired by Senator Norm Colman, was charged with a particularly prosecutorial atmosphere of the OFFP. Not until Michigan’s Senator Carl Levin issued a plea to the Committee for honesty and perspective in assessing the program did at least some light begin to replace the political heat. Levin’s intervention should send a clear message to his peers: it’s time to stop kicking the UN while it’s down, and to use the real findings of the Volcker committee for reconstruction of this essential institution, not Congressional retribution.

There are still too many in Congress who want the UN to squirm for US forgiveness and – of course - for the US annual dues. Such political grand-standing may play well back in home districts, but this demeaning approach misses a major opportunity for UN reform so necessary to future US foreign policy. Now, spurred by the specter of Bolton allowed to roam free as US Ambassador, the Congress should exercise its full foreign affairs responsibilities and push ahead with the major UN reforms in appointment processes, procurement, and auditing that a variety of UN and independent sources have outlined as quite doable.

In light of the Bolton appointment, Congressional posturing against the UN now must give way to partnership for UN reform. Astute performance of its legislative and oversight powers regarding UN matters can send a strong message to Ambassador Bolton on behalf of US citizens. Congress can convey an expression of UN support and a mandated direction for the organization that – while not Ambassador-proof – will begin to draw US-UN relations back to the firm, compatible ground on which they belong.

George A. Lopez is a senior fellow at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame.

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