Lawrence Kaplan has an excellent pro-John Bolton piece in the latest New Republic. Kaplan makes some deep points about the difference between conservative and neo-conservative foreign policy, but I just want to highlight here some of the points he makes about Bolton’s work. It’s good to see him get the credit he deserves:

-”The secret to Bolton’s record is that, in a foreign policy team divided roughly between ideologues with no managerial skills and managerial types with no ideas, Bolton is that rare commodity: an operator and an ideologue.”
-”During his 8:15 a.m. meetings with the assistant secretaries of state who report to him, for instance, the bureau chiefs stand the entire time, an indignity that has become part of Foggy Bottom mythology.”
-”At one point last year, Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Beth Jones went so far as to organize a mini-revolt against Bolton, penning a memo to Colin Powell, co-signed by the assistant secretaries from every regional bureau, which complained that Bolton’s campaign for bilateral agreements exempting Americans from prosecution by the ICC had been a failure and should be abandoned. In response to the memo, Powell called a meeting between Bolton and the assistant secretaries. Both sides argued their case, and Powell ended up granting Bolton permission to proceed. In the months since Jones tried to abort Bolton’s campaign, he has signed agreements with 81 countries.”
-”As one mystified career State Department employee puts it, ‘At first we thought that Powell and Armitage would control Bolton. We kept waiting, and now Bolton seems to be controlling them.’”
-”Indeed, while Bolton claims not to ‘do carrots,’ in both the Libyan and North Korean cases his ‘muscular approach,’ far from prompting a hardening of their positions, helped achieve the opposite result: Pyongyang’s agreement to the long-held U.S. demand that it negotiate with America and her allies across the same table and Tripoli’s decision to abandon its WMD programs.”
-”‘There’s absolutely no question that Bolton’s strategy of pressuring the iaea led its members to finally get serious about Iran’s weapons programs,’ says Ray Takeyh, an Iran specialist at National Defense University.”