John Bolton's appearance this morning before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was both enlightening and hopeful. I covered the hearing live, so if you want the minute-by-minute commentary, scroll up the blog starting with John Bolton: Live From the SFRC.

In this post and the previous ones, I refer often to talk of a UN shutdown, spending caps, and budget battles. If you need a crash course, Mark Turner has a great overview in the Financial Times.

Today, we got a lot of insight into how senators view Bolton's performance, how UN reform is going, and where U.S.-UN relations are headed. I'll do my best to summarize the key points.

• Bolton ended the hearing with a quote by Joseph Schumpeter, calling for a “gale of creative destruction” at the UN. Is there any way to interpret that as a constructive remark?
  
  
  
• Some news on the U.S. strategy on UN reform. First and most importantly, Bolton indicated that the U.S. will NOT be forcing a shutdown in June. Instead, the U.S. is willing to move the spending cap so that the UN won't run out of money until September 30. Bolton says this is meant to illustrate that he wants to avoid a meltdown and is negotiating in good faith. Indeed, it will be perceived as a nice gesture, but only removing the spending cap altogether could possibly restore the developing world's trust in the U.S. To put it plainly, the spending cap has not worked to accelerate reform, nor will it work, for a simple reason: heavy-handed approaches fuel suspicion and obstruct the kind of give-and-take diplomacy that yields progress at the United Nations. Also, Bolton refused to indicate what combination of reforms passed would lead him to remove the spending cap permanently. Bolton says he wants to be flexible, but senators on both sides of the aisle pointed out that other countries (and I too) believe he’s moving the goalposts on what he considers “acceptable progress” on reform. He needs to be clear on what we expect, and so far, he has been anything but.
  
  
  
• Senators put the onus of advancing U.S. goals squarely on Bolton and the Bush Administration. They’re not buying his assertion that such and such policy or reform battle is a test of the UN’s relevance. With the notable exception of Norm Coleman, who sees political opportunity in the demise of the UN, the three Republican senators and four Democratic senators in attendance view policy debates as indicative of Ambassador Bolton’s influence – not the UN’s relevance. Bolton no doubt comes away from the hearing today feeling substantially more pressure to deliver.
  
  
  
• Contrary to popular belief in Washington, the UN is not politically radioactive. In fact, there is a fair amount of optimism in the U.S. Senate regarding the value of the United Nations right now. Some of us – myself included – have worried that the budget crisis, Iran, Darfur, the Human Rights Council, and contentious reform battles would make the UN’s die-hard opponents come out of the woodwork and its longtime friends duck for cover. Today, however, Senator Coleman was the lone UN-basher present. Not even George Allen, whose favorite pastime is lamenting UN waste, bothered to show – and he’s in the middle of a senate race and preparing for a presidential campaign for which exciting the conservative base will be critical. Fortunately, the UN is not the political red meat I thought it might be at this point in time for conservatives Republicans. Senators who support a strong and effective United Nations on both sides of the aisle (I put Republicans Lugar, Hagel, and Voinovich in this category), who I feared might be shying away by now, came out swinging. Russ Feingold gave an opening statement attesting to the importance of the UN to the U.S. And Paul Sarbanes, as I wrote earlier, boldly called out Bolton for denigrating UN reform progress and for his glass-half-empty assessment (for a refresher, see here, here, and here). As of today, America’s most authoritative elected officials on U.S. foreign policy still very much see the value of a strong U.S.-UN relationship.
  
  
  
• Confirmation prospects. As far as I can tell, the SFRC is still hostile territory for Bolton. Democrats still seem pretty down on him. Bolton seems to have scored a few points with Voinovich, but lost a few with Lugar and Hagel.
  
  
  

I’m doing my best trying to find the list of priority mandates that the JUSSKCANZ (Japan, U.S., South Korea, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) group is circulating to member states. Hopefully I’ll have more on that soon.