Say you're the president. U.N. ambassadors of your closest allies come forward to say, "Your guy at the U.N. is impossible to work with." What do you do?

That's the question President Bush will have to answer, now that six U.N. Ambassadors - all from countries closely allied with the United States - have come forward to speak out against Bolton's dysfunctional diplomacy.

Hoge describes one incident, in which Bolton brought a cordless mike into negotiations and lectured fellow Ambassadors out of turn and out of order. When the Chair silenced him, he replied, "“Well, so much for trying something different.”

There's plenty more in the Hoge piece. On the U.S. approach to the Human Rights Council:

"Peter Maurer, the ambassador of Switzerland, characterized the American approach as "intransigent and maximalist."

""All too often,” he said, “high ambitions are cover-ups for less noble aims, and oriented not at improving the United Nations, but at belittling and weakening it."

From other Ambassadors:

An envoy of a country close to the United States complained that Mr. Bolton often stayed away from meetings, leaving ambassadors in the dark about American positions, then produced 11th-hour amendments and demands for reopening points that had been painfully muscled into consensus.

“We are all like cooks, and the U.S. is sitting on the sidewalk and when we have this platter cooked, the U.S. comes in and says it was the wrong dish, you were cooking chicken and we wanted meat,” said an envoy from a country close to the United States.

Another incident relating to mandate review and management reform:

On June 30, Mr. Bolton stunned a group of allied ambassadors. As they waited in the office of Jan Eliasson, the president of the General Assembly, to approve a plan to review thousands of outdated and redundant directives, word arrived that Mr. Bolton had cut a side deal to postpone the effort. And he had done so with the three countries viewed as the proposal’s most vocal opponents, Egypt, India and South Africa...

...[A]n envoy from a country that always votes with the United States said: “That came as very shocking and disappointing to us. We usually work very closely with him, but sometimes, I guess, you get surprised.”

From an Ambassador that gave him the benefit of the doubt:

“My initial feeling was, let’s see if we can work with him, and I have done some things to push for consensus on issues that were not easy for my country,” said an ambassador with close ties to the Bush administration.

“But all he gives us in return is, ‘It doesn’t matter, whatever you do is insufficient,’ ” he said. “He’s lost me as an ally now, and that’s what many other ambassadors who consider themselves friends of the U.S. are saying.”

Finally, from Ed Luck, a respected Columbia professor who has been critical of Kofi Annan's approach to management reform:

“I actually agree with Bolton on what has to be done at the U.N., but his confrontational tactics have been very dysfunctional for the U.S. purpose,” said Edward C. Luck, a professor of international affairs at Columbia who has followed the United Nations for three decades. “To be successful at the U.N., you have to build coalitions, and if you take unilateral action the way Bolton has, you’re isolated, and if you’re isolated, you can’t achieve much.”

A U.N. Ambassador's job is to make deals and represent his/her country's interests. If America's closest friends can't stand Bolton - and we know how U.S. adversaries feel about him - what exactly is his value? That's the question that senators must be asking themselves these next few weeks.