View From a Height

Nuts and Bolton

That's the title of the latest from Mark Steyn in the Spectator. Steyn usually cuts down the Spectator column for American syndication, and if you've got less time this morning, you can get the gist of it here.

Okay, I get the hang of this game. 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 sending a bunch of child-sex fiends to man UN operations in the Congo. And the Central African Republic. And Sierra Leone, and Burundi, Liberia, Haiti, Kosovo, and pretty much everywhere else. All of which happened without the UN fetishists running around shrieking hysterically. Why should America be the only country not to enjoy an uproarious joke at the UN’s expense?

Steyn goes on to argue that America is simply honoring its traditions by refusing to play by the stale rules of an archaic game designed by others. Unlike some others who would like to do the same thing, America can make it stick.

Bolton simply isn't interested in being liked. He's interested in promoting a policy, which is actually what diplomacy is about.

My guess is that that’s what Bill Clinton and Eason Jordan were up to when they respectively hailed the progressivism of Iranian politics and defamed the entire US military. You’re with a bunch of foreigners and you want them to like you and it’s easy to get carried away.

That’s what was so stunning about Bolton. In a roomful of Euro-grandees, he was perfectly relaxed, a genial fellow with a rather Mitteleuropean moustache, but he thwacked every ball they served back down their gullets with amazing precision. He was the absolute antithesis of Schmoozer Bill and Pandering Eason: he seemed to relish their hostility. At one event, a startled British cabinet minister said to me afterwards, ‘He doesn’t mean all that, does he?’