The Most Dangerous Man at State
John Bolton and arms control.

December 18, 2001 12:20 p.m.

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.