The appointment of John Bolton as US representative to the UN signals rocky times ahead, writes Hassan Nafaa* After months of manoeuvring to secure congressional approval for his nominee John Bolton as Washington's permanent representative to the United Nations, President George W Bush decided he had no choice but to wait until Congress left town for the summer in order to make a recess appointment. Although the president has this right under the constitution, the presumption has always been that it would only be exercised in the event of compelling circumstance crucial to higher national interests. As concrete evidence for such circumstances appears to exist only in Bush's mind many felt that the president was unjustifiably overbearing in wielding his constitutional authority on this issue. Why was Bush so determined -- to the extent he was willing to anger and alienate the Congress -- to appoint a man notorious for his hostility to the UN and everything the UN stands for as Washington's permanent representative to the international organisation. To me there can be only one reason, which is that Bush remains determined to press ahead with the agenda of the neo-conservatives he champions. The Bolton appointment is certain to usher in a new phase in the relationship between the US and the UN. In order to better discern what this phase holds in store, we should attempt to place it in the historical context of the US's relationship with the international order in general, and the UN in particular. It is a complex relationship in which the US has always appeared as both the problem and the solution. It is possible to delineate several distinct phases in this relationship. The first, chronologically bounded by the two world wars, might be termed the period of prevarication. In 1917 the US was drawn out of the isolationism to which it had adhered since the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 and entered World War I on the side of the allies. The horrors of that war lent impetus to a trend in American opinion advocating the need for the US to take part in the post-war international order. At the vanguard of this trend was President Woodrow Wilson who chaired the Versailles peace conference committee charged with forming the League of Nations. The majority of US opinion, however, lacked the political maturity to accept what would be tantamount to a permanent rupture with America's long- established tradition of isolationism. Congress refused to ratify the peace treaty, preventing the US from becoming a member of the first international organisation intended to safeguard world peace and security, despite the fact that the American president was one of the prime architects of this organisation. The US's refusal to participate was one of the reasons the League eventually collapsed in the storms that would sweep the world into WW II. But domestic sensibilities alone are not enough to explain the US's reluctance to participate in the League of Nations. The concrete circumstances that would enable the US to stake a leading role in world affairs were not yet in place. While the European powers that had long dominated the world remained powerful and robust the US preferred to focus on securing its own dominance within the American hemisphere before casting its sights overseas. It was not long, however, before WW II would catapult the US to the forefront of the international arena. With Europe crippled by the war and its global sway receding, and with the Soviet Union poised to assert its global ambitions, the way was paved for the US, which had emerged from the war as the strongest economic and military power the world had ever known, to take its place at the helm of the post-WW II international order. The war effort had geared the American public into accepting and sustaining a new policy of internationalism. The war years had witnessed a period of intensive cooperation between the US government and civil society over a formula for American participation in an international organisation that would obtain the approval of the American people. The result was a charter for the proposed international organisation, the United Nations, over which Washington first negotiated with the Soviet Union and Britain. This time round the rest of the world was determined to offer every possible encouragement to ensure the US would actually take part in the second international organisation whose mission it was to safeguard global peace and security. It was agreed, for example, that the constitutional assembly would be held in San Francisco and that New York would be the UN's permanent headquarters. The Senate voted overwhelmingly (98 to two votes) to ratify the UN charter. The US was the first country to do so. The Senate vote set the tone for the second phase of America's relationship with the international community. Lasting from the founding of the UN to the end of the 1960s it was characterised by active and enthusiastic participation. Although the US had initially balked at joining it soon discovered that its membership offered a number of important advantages. It had a permanent international forum on US territory through which it could keep abreast of the general tides and more elusive subtleties of international affairs, and it had a broad array of open and relatively inexpensive channels of communication with most other countries of the world. At the same time, the nascent UN could do little to restrain the will of the US or check its international designs. On the one hand this weakness was structurally ingrained in the UN. The Security Council was the only UN body that had the power to issue a binding resolution but such a resolution could never pass if the US exercised its veto. But even in the General Assembly the US could generally count on the support of a majority of the members, most of them US allies. The US also had enormous economic leverage within the organisation. At the outset, before a ceiling was set on individual members' dues, the US footed more than 40 per cent of the UN budget. Washington was confident that when the UN was not fully behind it, it would not impede America in its new role as a superpower. Interestingly, in this period the US never sought recourse to its right to veto, a practice that, instead, become associated with the USSR. But then Washington generally had its way. It secured a UN mandate to lead the war against North Korea in the early 1950s; it won UN approval for the Federation for Peace, the purpose of which was to circumvent the Soviet veto; and it succeeded in preventing the People's Republic of China from having an effective say in the UN by having China's permanent seat on the Security Council handed to Taiwan. However, as more and more newly independent developing nations entered the UN the winds began to turn against American sails. And America began to turn against the UN. In this phase, which lasted until the beginning of the 1990s, the US began to regard the UN and its subsidiary bodies as though they had fallen into the hands of a mob, made up by countries in the Soviet camp and upstart Third World members. Washington was increasingly rankled by resolutions passed by what it referred to as the "automatic majority". The proverbial straw was General Assembly Resolution 3379 condemning Zionism as a form of racism. It marked the point when Washington started to lash out at the UN with a venom that reached its peak under Ronald Reagan. Bent on showing the international community who was who, the US withdrew from specialised agencies such as the International Justice Organisation and UNESCO, and/or refused to pay its full dues to those agencies. But the US did not withdraw from the UN itself, which it calculated could still be useful. Following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, for example, the US could still obtain an overwhelming majority for a General Assembly resolution condemning the invasion, securing the cover of legitimacy it needed to support and build up armed resistance to the invasion. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the socialist camp ushered in a new phase, lasting until the US-British invasion of Iraq. If in the previous phase the US had decided to knock a few heads together, now it was time to take control again. The opportunity presented itself with the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Beneath the banner of a new world order Washington feigned to revive the UN's collective security mechanism paralysed by Cold War polarisation. However, no sooner did it obtain a Security Council mandate to use force against Iraq than it commandeered the UN's handling of the crisis in a manner that would hasten the ultimate demise of the Soviet Union and clear the way for US supremacy. The US has since pursued a systematic policy aimed at keeping the UN under tight control. If the UN was given a brief respite under the Clinton administration, which favoured a leadership style based on cooperation and mutual consultation, at least with the US's European partners, the return of the neo-cons to power under Bush Junior hastened the end of multilateralism. The 11 September presented the administration with the gift it needed to impose its will on the world unilaterally, and without the slightest regard for international law or legitimacy. In its determination to wage a new war on Iraq on the flimsiest of pretexts it was not going to let a matter as trifling as Security Council refusal to give it a mandate stand in the way. But while the Bush administration clearly regards the UN as an obstacle to its global designs it cannot remove this obstacle entirely, and perhaps does not even want to. Whatever the case, it is determined to keep the international organisation firmly in line. Towards this end it has produced a carrot in the person of Wolfowitz as head of the World Bank, and a stick in the person of Bolton as Washington's permanent representative to the UN, whether Congress likes it or not. Bush wants to score a number of successes before the end of his term. Among the areas on which his administration is keen to leave its mark are the Iranian and North Korean nuclear questions, the Arab-Israeli conflict and an expanded and reformed Security Council. Given the ideological outlook of the administration the likelihood is that it will go easy on North Korea but come down hard on Iran if Tehran shows any signs of venturing ahead with its nuclear programme. It will also do its utmost to impose Israel's conditions for a settlement on the Arab world, which may entail isolating Syria, disarming Hizbullah and even a military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. However, the most pressing issue on which Bolton will bring to bear his celebrated tactlessness is UN reform, his aim being to prevent any international agreement that would extricate the international organisation from its position beneath the American thumb. One of Bolton's first tasks, therefore, will be to forestall any agreement over an agenda for UN reform when the General Assembly convenes in September. And this will only be for starters. * The writer is professor of political science at Cairo University.
