Bush's hatchet man in the State Department

While Colin Powell tries to present a kinder, gentler America to the world, his hard-line underling John Bolton is pushing an America-über-alles doctrine -- and winning.

By Ian Williams

May 10, 2002 | Monday was a busy day for Undersecretary of State John Bolton. In a speech to the conservative Heritage Foundation, he added new enemies to the administration's axis of evil hit list, telling the audience that Cuba, Syria and Libya had joined Iran, Iraq and North Korea as enemies and evildoers extraordinaire. That same day, Bolton sent a letter to the United Nations reversing President Clinton's decision to back the founding of the International Criminal Court.

The U.S. "does not intend to become a party" to the International Criminal Court, Bolton wrote, and therefore "has no legal obligation arising from its signature" on the Rome statute that established the ICC.

Reversing the ICC agreement was a strange role for Bolton, since as undersecretary of state for disarmament affairs and international security he does not exactly have the court in his bailiwick. But the busy Bolton has never let his job title blunt his ambition, and he has emerged as an energetic force trying to return the Bush administration to its pre-Sept. 11 habits of unilateralism, thumbing its nose at the rest of the world.

Bolton's usurping the ICC decision would seem to mean that he is successfully building a power base for unilateralism in the State Department, which his allies on the right have traditionally regarded as the bastion of soft, liberal multilateralism. At the time Bolton was appointed, Beltway scuttlebutt held that he was forced on Colin Powell against the latter's (much better) judgment. Certainly their positions and styles are poles apart.

So who is Bolton, and is his growing power worrisome? It depends on what you think of Sen. Jesse Helms' political legacy. The two men share the same contempt for the United Nations, and most of the rest of the world. Helms has praised Bolton as "a treasured friend," "a patriot" and "a brilliant thinker and writer." He served in the first Bush administration, as assistant secretary of state for international organizations, under another key mentor, James Baker.

During the Clinton years, Bolton endured his exile as vice president at the American Enterprise Institute, the conservative think tank that has housed Newt Gingrich, Richard Perle, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Lynne Cheney and others. He can also play the good soldier, heading down to Florida in November 2000 to help the Bush team recount disputed ballots in Palm Beach, under the leadership of recount czar Baker.

And despite years of attacking the U.N. -- in 1994 he said, "There is no such thing as the United Nations" and "If the U.N. Secretariat building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference" -- he was not above becoming James Baker's assistant on the egregiously stalled U.N. mission to the Western Sahara in 1997. Nor did his contempt for the U.N. stop him from taking $30,000 from the Taiwanese to write position papers on how they should go about becoming members of the organization whose credibility and very existence he has questioned.

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