Bolton

Bolton and the UN:

Joe Conason has a piece this week called "Bolton's Nomination an Insult to the U.N.: Latest in Bush Pattern of Appointing People Who Hate The Institutions They Are To Serve."

Not quite.

Twenty years ago, the then Secretary of State George Schultz used to welcome the Reagan administration's ambassadorial appointments to his office and invite each chap to identify his country on the map. The guy who'd just landed the embassy in Chad would invariably point to Chad. 'No,' Schultz would say, 'this is your country' -- and point to the United States. Nobody would expect a US ambassador to the Soviet Union to be a big booster for the Soviets. And, given that in a unipolar world the most plausible challenger to the US is transnationalism, these days the Schultz test is even more pertinent for the UN ambassador: his country is the United States, not the ersatz jurisdiction of Kofi Annan's embryo world government.

Bolton's nomination is an affront to the UN, but it's not an insult. The UN has no dignity to insult.

Sending John Bolton to be UN ambassador is like ...putting Sudan and Zimbabwe on the Human Rights Commission. Or letting Saddam's Iraq chair the UN conference on disarmament. Or...

The challenge posed by Bolton may be bracing, or it may destroy the organization. I'm rooting for the latter, myself. The world would be better off without the United Nations. I join with The New Republic in holding that the UN "performs the magic of evil."

The destruction of the UN isn't the point, however. The point is this: Bolton understands what Conason does not. The ambassador's job is to serve the US, not the UN. This is his country. It's permitted for an ambassador to be of service to his host if it does not interfere with the interests of his country. It is not permitted to go native.