Jim Lobe

Just one week ago, conventional wisdom both in the US and in European capitals was that President Bush’s second term would see a modest turn toward multilateralism and a new readiness to compromise on key issues with traditional US allies. Today, however, that particular conventional wisdom is being questioned amid renewed anxiety that the unilateralist

trajectory on which Bush launched the US after 9/11 is back on track. The biggest single reason for the change was last Monday’s nomination of John Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control and international security during the first term, to the high-profile post of US ambassador to the UN. The problem, as pointed out by a number of Democrats, is that virtually everything Bolton has ever said about the UN suggests that he thinks the world, and particularly the US, would be better off without it, once opining (before 9/11) that if the UN secretariat building lost 10 stories, “it wouldn’t make a bit of difference”.

Before Bush’s election in 2000, Bolton told one interviewer that if the UN Security Council were re-organised according to his wishes, “I’d have one permanent member (the US) because that’s the real reflection of the distribution of power in the world.” “This nomination is a poke in the eye to the world diplomatic community and a signal that the Bush administration is going to continue its unilateralist approach,” noted Joe Volk, executive secretary of Friends Committee for National Legislation, one of the groups gearing up for a lobbying campaign to persuade senators to oppose Bolton’s confirmation. It also demonstrated that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who is supposed to serve as his superior if he is confirmed by the Senate, will likely play a much less powerful role in Bush’s second term than had been thought, particularly in the wake of her two tours of Europe last month. Knowing how much Bolton had undermined former Secretary of State Colin Powell during the first term, Rice resisted pressure from Bolton, his Congressional backers and Vice President Dick Cheney by refusing to appoint him as her deputy secretary of state in what was seen as a kind of declaration of independence from the hawks perched in Cheney’s office and around Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

But the nomination of Bolton — who really served as Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s cat’s paw at the State Department under Powell — has challenged the notion that Rice can stand up to them. The fact that her strongest argument in favour of Bolton when she was challenged by senators privately on the decision to send him to the UN was that his tenure there may persuade him to modify his hard-line views, just as former anti-communist President Richard Nixon decided to launch a strategic relationship with Communist China in the early 1970s, confirmed to many here that Bolton was being forced down her throat. While Bolton’s nomination was the immediate cause of the reassessment that is now taking place, there have been other signs that the balance of power within the administration has indeed shifted strongly toward the hawks. Perhaps the most important was the little-noted appointment of J D Crouch as the deputy national security adviser under Rice’s former deputy, Stephen Hadley.

While Hadley’s foreign policy views were seen as a mixture of realism and Cheney’s aggressive nationalism, Crouch, who served most recently as ambassador to Romania, is regarded as a right-wing extremist on both domestic and foreign policy issues. — IPS