Striking title, shame about the content

By Gideon Rachman, Financial Times
Published: Dec 10, 2007

Acontroversial stint as American ambassador to the United Nations can be a good career move. Both Daniel Moynihan in the 1970s and Jeane Kirkpatrick in the 1980s became famous for their fierce anti-communism and outspoken defence of Israel.

John Bolton - who served as US ambassador to the UN in 2005-2006 - stands very much in this tradition. He will certainly not disappoint his conservative fan club with his scathing criticism of the "high-minded" and self-serving elite who he believes runs the UN. They are not the only objects of his scorn. The US state department gets it in the neck, so does the "Eastern Establishment" and the EUroids (his term for European diplomats), with their tiresome obsession with multilateral diplomacy.

But Bolton is a much less interesting figure than either Kirkpatrick or Moynihan. His illustrious predecessors were genuine intellectuals. Moynihan did pioneering work on the welfare state; Kirkpatrick developed important ideas on the distinction between authoritarianism and totalitarianism. Bolton, however, is not interested in ideas - and his book suffers as a result.

This is not to say that Bolton is stupid. He has a lawyer's tenacity and command of detail. But, while he is prepared to devote pages and pages to listing the reactions of individual senators to his nomination to the UN, he spends frustratingly little time explaining his approach to the world. Perhaps his principles - American nationalism and a distrust of international institutions - seem so self-evident that they require no elucidation. But it means that Bolton will often make striking statements and then fail frustratingly to expand on them.

In a chapter on arms control, he writes that he saw international "treaties as essentially only political documents, and the whole debate over what was 'legally binding' in 'international law' as just another theological issue". This is a statement full of interesting implications - particularly for anyone who might, in future, try to negotiate a treaty with Bolton. But the former ambassador just leaves it at that.

A lack of intellectual curiosity might not matter if Bolton were a gifted storyteller, or interestingly introspective. But that is not the case. If he has ever had difficult personal or moral choices to make, he is not letting on. At one point, he does acknowledge that he took steps to avoid being drafted to fight in Vietnam. He writes: "I made the cold calculation that I wasn't going to waste time on a futile struggle," adding: "Looking back, I am not terribly proud of this calculation." The whole episode is dealt with in a paragraph.

Many people of Bolton's generation made similar decisions. But it would be interesting to hear a little more on this subject, from a man who has given his book the bellicose title Surrender is Not an Option . When it came to Vietnam, surrender was not an option for Bolton because he never got close enough to the enemy to make it feasible.

Bolton is a strikingly stilted writer, which makes his book rather lifeless. At one point he records a car ride to the UN in the company of President George W. Bush. "I observed that both Bill and Hillary Clinton had graduated a year ahead of me from Yale Law School and Bush said: 'Before you had the moustache?' to the general merriment of the ladies in the car." Perhaps you had to be there.

Like many gut conservatives, Bolton sees himself as an outsider and hates the idea that "elites" are looking down on him. The British seem to rub him up the wrong way and he got on very badly with the UK delegation to the UN. He writes: "Many Brits believed that their role in life was to play Athens to America's Rome, lending us the benefit of their superior suaveness and smoothing off our regrettable colonial rough edges."

The fact that Bolton found it so hard to get on with one of America's closest allies suggests that he was not ideally cut out for the role of diplomat. That is not a verdict that would upset Bolton, who gloried in the role of cussed outsider. And, to be fair, there were times when his unwillingness to go along with the UN consensus was vindicated. His refusal to endorse the new UN Human Rights Commission has been amply justified.

Those with a professional interest in issues such as nuclear proliferation or UN reform will probably want to read what Bolton has to say. American conservatives might also be tempted to buy the book. But overall this is a disappointing work. Bolton writes badly, cannot tell a story and has no interesting new ideas. Other than that, highly recommended.

The writer is the FT's chief foreign affairs commentator