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EDITOR'S NOTE: Reprinted
with permission of The
Wall Street Journal
© 2001 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
 en.
Joe Biden (D., Dela.) paid John Bolton a compliment during the fight
over his confirmation as undersecretary of state for arms control
and international security last spring. "This is not about
your competence," Mr. Biden told the former Reagan and Bush
official. "My problem with you over the years is that you've
been too competent. I mean, I would rather you be stupid and not
very effective."
Of course,
the Bush administration is stacked with high-powered critics of
arms control. But what makes Mr. Bolton seem dangerous to the likes
of Mr. Biden is that he's at the State Department, Washington's
principal redoubt of arms-control orthodoxy. Mr. Bolton's mere presence
at Foggy Bottom risks heresy, which is why even more Democrats opposed
his confirmation (43) than voted against John Ashcroft. At the moment,
Democrats could be forgiven for believing that their worst fears
have been realized.
The president's
stiffing of a new protocol to the Biological Weapons Convention
and his stunning withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty
— coupled with the Senate's rejection of the Comprehensive
Test Ban Treaty two years ago — represent a paradigm shift
in international relations as drastic as the one signaled by welfare
reform in domestic politics. The new change is about as popular
at State as the old one was at Health and Human Services.
How lonely
is Mr. Bolton? "He is not the boy with his finger in the dike,"
comments a Republican congressional staffer. "He's the boy
with 10 fingers and 10 toes in the dike."
Bureaucratic
cultures change slowly, and eight years of Clinton reinforced the
worst tendencies at State, where appeasing other countries for the
sake of "good relations" is often confused with pursuing
the U.S. national interest. Secretary of State Colin Powell has
been so conventional about the Middle East partly because he is
fed nothing but cliches from career Foreign Service officers at
State's Near East desk. One of Mr. Bolton's roles has been to provide
Mr. Powell a hard-headed counterweight to the department's Arms
Control Bureau, also stocked with professional multilateralists.
"In some
ways John is the opposite of a State Department person," says
his former employer, American Enterprise Institute head Christopher
DeMuth. "He doesn't think diplomacy should be an end in itself."
Whether or
not Mr. Bolton, as has been widely reported, was foisted on the
secretary of state by Dick Cheney — Mr. Bolton rejects the
notion as a Washington urban legend — Mr. Powell called Mr.
Bolton within days of the end of the Florida fiasco. Mr. Bolton's
bushy mustache was a fixture at the Palm Beach recount, where he
decamped with his knowledge of campaign-finance law (he had worked
on the famous Buckley v. Valeo case) after his old
boss James Baker called. After Florida, Mr. Bolton was a cinch for
a big job. He had been working at AEI on issues related to U.S.
sovereignty, putting him in perfect sync with Mr. Bush's national-interest-based
approach to arms control.
The Bush administration
isn't against all arms-control pacts (Mr. Bolton, for his part,
praises the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty that eliminated
a whole class of nukes in Europe in the late 1980s). But the administration
wants agreements only if they enhance U.S. security, not for their
own sake. The Europeans, in contrast, often seem to regard agreements
as hortatory exercises: The terms of a treaty like Kyoto can be
flouted so long as it stands as a symbol of good intentions.
Mr. Bolton
describes Mr. Bush's more straightforward approach: "We'll
undertake obligations only when it's in our interest. But if we
sign a treaty, we'll abide by it."
The rest of
the world, needless to say, doesn't have such an ethic. The administration
sent Mr. Bolton a few weeks ago to deliver an uncomfortable message
to the great and the good gathered in Switzerland to consider revisions
to the Biological Weapons Convention: Iraq, North Korea, Iran, and
Libya were in flagrant violation of the already-existing convention.
As for the
ABM Treaty, it had become worse than window-dressing. It was in
direct conflict with what even the Clinton administration had conceded
was an urgent national need: protecting the U.S. from rogue-nation
missile threats. It also had become an irritant in U.S-Russian relations,
giving the two sides something to disagree about over and over,
and contradicting talk of U.S.-Russian friendship (we don't have
an ABM Treaty with the British).
The Bushies
initially adopted the gabby Clinton approach of talking to the Russians
about the treaty, then talking some more. Mr. Bolton, among others,
had traveled to Moscow eight times in recent months. But the goal
of the Bush talk was different: to tamp down international criticism
with relentless "consulting," and to make the Russians
realize that the coming U.S. withdrawal was simply a fact.
"We had
to let the Russians know," Mr. Bolton says, "that Bush
was serious in a way that Clinton wasn't." The administration's
theory was that the Russians would essentially accept withdrawal
once it seemed inevitable.
It's a strategy
that has been borne out by Vladimir Putin's muted reaction to Mr.
Bush's announcement. That will, in turn, make it harder for all
those Democrats who voted against Mr. Bolton a few months ago to
scream about the administration's supposedly dangerous arms-control
agenda. They, like countless career employees at State, will just
have to fume.
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