Bolton changes tune on UN relations

By Mark Turner
May 30, 2006
The Financial Times
Original Source: http://news.ft.com/cms/s/f30de67a-ef77-11da-b435-0000779e2340.html

After a recent Security Council resolution on Lebanon, John Bolton, the iconoclastic US ambassador to the United Nations, invoked the wisdom of the Rolling Stones to assembled reporters.
You can't always get what you want, he intoned, but if you try sometimes, you just might find you get what you need.
It was an interesting statement from the ambassador of a country more often characterised in UN circles as coming late to negotiations and rejecting them if it does not get exactly what it wants.
Senator Paul Sarbanes upbraided this tendency in the Senate foreign relations committee last week. I'd hate for you to be the coach of an athletic team, he told Mr Bolton. This role of the constant scold, I'm not sure it's the best way to induce change.
Yet the recent US record at the UN is more complex than that put-down would suggest. For a start, in spite of personal rivalries, significant progress has been made in relations between the transatlantic powers, which appear once more broadly in harmony during UN debates.
But that may no longer be enough for the US to get what it wants. China is exerting growing influence over a range of Security Council debates and tensions with Russia are rising. Both regularly find common cause against Washington, undermining attempts at action by the council.
Meanwhile, in the General Assembly, a bloc of developing countries is growing increasingly vocal about the US vision, with India, Egypt and South Africa, all US allies, among those to the fore of the dissenting chorus.
In the Security Council, the US did manage, after much wrangling, to win a unanimous statement urging Tehran to cease nuclear enrichment. But its subsequent efforts to threaten sanctions quickly ran into Sino-Russian opposition.
US policy at the UN, with French backing, also did much to achieve a withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon. But recent efforts to clamp down on the Lebanese Islamic party Hizbollah and its Iranian backers have been considerably less successful.
And on Sudan, a recent US-European push to punish alleged war criminals overcame Chinese objections but fell short of securing backing to target key regime figures. While a new US-backed resolution should speed up efforts to deploy UN peacekeepers, it is still unclear which countries will offer troops and success is far from assured.
The picture gets worse in the General Assembly, where the US has suffered outright defeats. It was isolated in its opposition to a new Human Rights Council and a coalition of developing countries recently forced through a rejection of American-backed management reforms.
These countries that are coming into their own are not going to put up with the 1945 order any more, said Mark Malloch Brown, UN deputy secretary-general. Ultimately, if the US price of paying 22 per cent of the budget is to keep the UN ever more imprisoned in that 1945 arrangement, they are reaching the point where they are as likely as the US to say 'enough's enough'.
This has prompted some searching questions. Is the US failing diplomatically or has its ability to wield influence at the UN been fundamentally diminished? On the other hand, could its recent compromises in the council mark not a decline in influence but emergence of a more mature foreign policy?
The problem, say analysts, is that it is not always clear what the US objectives actually are. Mr Bolton is often suspected of pursuing a different set of policies to Condoleezza Rice, secretary of state, leading to significant confusion among diplomats. Mr Bolton, for his part, claims there is little evidence of a new Russia-China axis and suggests the developing-world attack is part of a cyclical pattern.
By contrast, he says the permanent members of the Security Council are actually working more closely than before and that he has recently taken a more conciliatory approach to the assembly's reform debate, alongside Japanese, Canadian and Australian allies.
Mr Bolton also warns against drawing too many conclusions from events at the UN. By and large, what happens in the Security Council reflects larger geopolitical realities, he told the Financial Times, but what happens here in New York doesn't necessarily affect what goes on in the bigger world.
I don't think that much of what happens here reflects the status of bilateral relationships. Sometimes it's like being in the twilight zone - it's a different environment that operates under practices that are decades old.