Amity Shales launches a feeble defense of John Bolton that appears to be a textual infomercial for Bolton produced by his PR firm rather than a thoughtful analytic assessment of the pros and cons of John Bolton as U.N. Ambassador. But it’s evident after a close reading of Shales’s straw-man arguments that she needs to review John Bolton’s record again.

She writes:

Tomorrow, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will vote on whether to recommend that the full Senate confirm Bolton, who now serves in a recess appointment. A former opponent, Senator George Voinovich of Ohio, has recently voiced support for Bolton. Still, now is the moment, Bolton's critics at the UN argue, to replace Rough John with a smoother envoy. Mark Malloch Brown, the UN deputy secretary general, has been especially vociferous in his criticism of the Bolton-led U.S. mission.

This line of argument is weak, and for two reasons. The first is that Bolton has actually played well since he came to the UN last summer, brokering important agreements that strengthened both the U.S. position and that of its allies. The second is that a docile, traditional UN ambassador would be bad for both the U.S. and the UN.

But start with Bolton's negotiating achievements. The troubles between Israel and Hezbollah notwithstanding, the biggest threats to world peace are North Korea and Iran. Just last week Bolton successfully lobbied both China and Russia to back Security Council Resolution 1695, condemning North Korea's recent launch of ballistic missiles.

This week, he is spending a good share of his time brokering a similar resolution in regard to Iran. The resolution on Iran says Tehran must suspend enrichment of uranium for a sustained period, rather than play its habitual game of ``now I am doing it, now I am not.''

I don’t doubt Bolton handled himself reasonably well in the North Korea discussion which this site has even acknowledged. But he has certainly gone to great lengths to ratchet up rhetoric against Iran earlier this year in the hopes of provoking an immediate punitive response. And after the administration chose to follow Secretary Rice’s path to direct talks with Iran, Bolton continually remained off message trying to undercut talks before they even began.

And let’s not forget to compare his few successes to his litany of mistakes when he’s actively sabotaged Secretary Rice’s agenda and wandered off the reservation, for example, by scuttling a deal with Syria that could have brought them back into the international community (much like we have with Libya) and possibly even stifled this provocation by Hezbollah before it erupted into an all-out war. Talk about your chickens coming home to roost.

Shales then offers “Feats to Consider”:

Bolton is also capable of making soft concessions -- endorsing the UN's Millennium Goals to cut poverty and hunger, for example, as he did with President Bush last September.

But there are also older Bolton feats for the Senate to consider. Back in 1975 the General Assembly passed a resolution equating Zionism with racism. Resolution 3379, its formal name, stood on the books right through the first Gulf War. But in September 1991, shortly before the beginning of his last year in office, President George H.W. Bush tapped Bolton, then at the State Department, to start a petition for a repeal.

Bolton went door-by-door around Turtle Bay collecting signatures, and by December of that year, the repeal was international law. Those who say that Bolton's personality often gets in the way should note that he did this job almost without notice.

As much as she’d like to believe it, these hardly constitute “feats” of diplomacy. The first (endorsement of the President’s MDGs) is not even an accomplishment but a personal decision by Bolton to support his administration’s plan to address world poverty rather take on another opponent.

And the second touted feat, beating back a toothless resolution declaring Zionism equivalent to racism, while a good deed and certainly advantageous for Israel, does little to advance U.S. interests. But—as an aside—this should hardly be a surprise coming from the man whom the Israeli Ambassador to the U.N., Daniel Gillerman, declared to be the Israeli delegation’s 6^th man and “secret weapon.” This certainly doesn’t help win us the hearts and minds of the Arab street (actually a declared U.S. interest) when the Arab and Muslim worlds perceive our lead delegate stumping for Israeli interests as much as our own. And it makes it hard for Arab governments to back the United States when Bolton makes callous remarks asserting that there’s no moral equivalence between Lebanese and Israeli civilian casualties.

In fact, the real test of Bolton’s ability was not these minor issues but U.N. reform and the Human Rights Council. After a year of being on the job, we did not get the Human Rights Council we wanted (largely due to Bolton’s calculated absenteeism and brinksmanship) and we are no closer to U.N. reforms due to Bolton’s strident attitude that has galvanized opposition, especially amongst the G-77. Shales charges:

The big flaw in the anti-Bolton argument is the premise that a softer ambassador is better. This idea comes out of the Cold War. The crude reality of that period was that all that mattered on the foreign front was the arms competition between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.

The UN was little more than a convenient platform upon which other nations rehearsed the fiction that that they, too, had a role in geopolitics. The job of ambassadors and UN staff was to smooth the edges of a reality formulated elsewhere. The diplomats who served at the UN therefore tended to compensate for their lack of authority in sometimes juvenile fashion, placing an enormous premium on diplomatic process -- getting along. The whole culture was simultaneously trivial and tragic, for it provided diplomatic cover for abusive regimes.

Since 1990, U.S. administrations have taken the UN more seriously. Most Americans involved, Bolton included, harbor a desire not to repeat the hypocrisy of the Cold War. Both Clinton and Bush administrations have sought to work out differences with Iraq and other nations through the UN's tools -- resolutions and Security Council discussions. In this sense the institution is at least trying to function as its framers envisioned.

The trouble with this argument has always been that it posits being tough and yet diplomatic, determined and yet tactful as mutually exclusive postures. This is simply false and sells considerably short our diplomatic corps. With nearly 300 million people in the United States, don’t you think we can find someone who exhibits both qualities? One need look no further than former ambassador to the U.N., Richard Holbrooke who recently reminded the beltway that the path to the U.S.’s strategic interests runs through the U.N., not around it as Bolton would have us believe.

Any Business Negotiations 101 lecturer will tell you that the best way to win in diplomatic negotiations is by making the other sides believe that they have came away with the better deal. More often than not, Bolton seems to be securing symbolic pyrrhic victories while compromising the larger battle for our strategic interests. This is what Mark Malloch Brown meant when he decried the U.S. staking out maximalist positions at every turn. It simply leaves other countries with no diplomatic room to maneuver and no political cover (after all, they too have to answer in one way or another to a domestic polity).

Moreover, this is fuelled by Bolton’s relentless desire to pick unnecessary fights as Barbara Crossette described months ago in the foreign policy article on Bolton’s track record and more recently trying to stir up trouble with the NRA by hyping the threat of the U.N. taking away America’s guns.

Shales continues:

But a functioning UN has to be a place where diplomats say what they want, however unpleasant. As Bolton wrote me in an e- mail yesterday morning, ``I wonder if someone is popular, how forceful is he/she at advancing their interests? We can't always be the most popular, and that is not our goal.''

This seems illogical given that the most common measure of a President’s strength (or any politician for that matter) is his popularity, which channels directly into political capital. The degree to which he can push through his legislative agenda hinges on his appeal with the public. Why then, does this logic not hold in the case of U.N. ambassador’s lobbying for U.S. interests? Certainly some state positions are so intractable that even popularity cannot move them, but if there’s room for persuasion, it is most likely best facilitated by being perceived as a respected leader rather than reviled by the international community.

She goes on:

Thus, for example, Bolton led the U.S. in deciding not to take a seat on the UN Human Rights Council this year. Cuba, China, Pakistan, Russia, and Saudi Arabia were all elected to the council. Most Bolton critics argue that the U.S. did not want to seek a seat out of fear it would be rejected because of war prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

But there was another motive in the U.S. decision to refrain. To sit with Cuba, or even China, on a human rights body would be to show that the U.S. was, again, not serious about human rights. As Bolton also e-mailed me, ``a strong UN requires a strong U.S.''

Though the author’s only quote on Bolton is suspiciously from Bolton himself —almost as if he channeled his own defense through her—this argument stems from the faulty premise that the best way to peddle influence is to avoid the discussion entirely. Despite Bolton’s best efforts, the U.S. decided to support the U.N. even after failing to secure the 2/3 vote requirement they had wanted. However, even with the Human Rights Council deemed by many to be an improvement over the previous one, Bolton refused to run for a seat and in turn foreclosed on the opportunity to leverage better human rights practices from other countries.

Shales concludes:

The critics may not see it, but there is irony here. Veteran UN officials want nothing more than to see the organization become more important in the world. Yet, they are bent on ousting a U.S. envoy who agrees with them.

That might be true if Bolton made that expressly clear—that his intention is to strengthen the U.N—but he often falls short like in his most recent exchange with Bill O’Reilly where he tacitly concurred with O’Reilly’s charge that the U.N. is irrelevant to America.