Loudly, With a Big Stick

David Brooks editorialized in the NYT I don't like John Bolton's management style. Nor am I a big fan of his foreign policy views.

Although I agree with most of this article, I disagree here. I like his kick ass management style. I might not want to work under him, but I certainly want someone like that representing us at the UN

He doesn't really believe in using U.S. power to end genocide or promote democracy.

As long as he can kick the UN into shape, I really don't care.

But it is ridiculous to say he doesn't believe in the United Nations. This is a canard spread by journalists who haven't bothered to read his stuff and by crafty politicians who aren't willing to say what the Bolton debate is really about. The Bolton controversy isn't about whether we believe in the U.N. mission. It's about which U.N. mission we believe in.

Absolutely!!!

From the start, the U.N. has had two rival missions. Some people saw it as a place where sovereign nations could work together to solve problems. But other people saw it as the beginnings of a world government.

The former is a good idea; the latter absolutely is not.

This world government dream crashed on the rocks of reality, but as Jeremy Rabkin of Cornell has observed, the federalist idea has been replaced by a squishier but equally pervasive concept: the dream of "global governance." The people who talk about global governance begin with the same premises as the world government types: the belief that a world of separate nations, living by the law of the jungle, will inevitably be a violent world. Instead, these people believe, some supranational authority should be set up to settle international disputes by rule of law. They know we're not close to a global version of the European superstate. So they are content to champion creeping institutions like the International Criminal Court. They treat U.N. General Assembly resolutions as an emerging body of international law. They seek to foment a social atmosphere in which positions taken by multilateral organizations are deemed to have more "legitimacy" than positions taken by democratic nations.

They are idiots.

John Bolton is just the guy to explain why this vaporous global-governance notion is a dangerous illusion, and that we Americans, like most other peoples, will never accept it.

I agree completely

We'll never accept it, first, because it is undemocratic. It is impossible to set up legitimate global authorities because there is no global democracy, no sense of common peoplehood and trust. So multilateral organizations can never look like legislatures, with open debate, up or down votes and the losers accepting majority decisions. Instead, they look like meetings of unelected elites, of technocrats who make decisions in secret and who rely upon intentionally impenetrable language, who settle differences through arcane fudges. Americans, like most peoples, will never surrender even a bit of their national democracy for the sake of multilateral technocracy.

Which is one good argument for closing the UN down and setting up a Union of Democratic Nations.

Second, we will never accept global governance because it inevitably devolves into corruption. The panoply of U.N. scandals flows from a single source: the lack of democratic accountability. These supranational organizations exist in their own insular, self-indulgent aerie.

The current problems at the UN certainly prove this.

We will never accept global governance, third, because we love our Constitution and will never grant any other law supremacy over it. Like most peoples (Europeans are the exception), we will never allow transnational organizations to overrule our own laws, regulations and precedents. We think our Constitution is superior to the sloppy authority granted to, say, the International Criminal Court.

Absolutely. As I understand it, some European countries are finding it difficult to persuade their voters to accept the EU constitution.

Fourth, we understand that these mushy international organizations liberate the barbaric and handcuff the civilized. Bodies like the U.N. can toss hapless resolutions at the Milosevics, the Saddams or the butchers of Darfur, but they can do nothing to restrain them. Meanwhile, the forces of decency can be paralyzed as they wait for "the international community." Fifth, we know that when push comes to shove, all the grand talk about international norms is often just a cover for opposing the global elite's bêtes noires of the moment - usually the U.S. or Israel. We will never grant legitimacy to forums that are so often manipulated for partisan ends.

I agree

John Bolton is in a good position to make these and other points. He helped reverse the U.N.'s Zionism-is-racism resolution. He led the U.S. rejection of the International Criminal Court. Time and time again, he has pointed out that the U.N. can be an effective forum where nations can go to work together, but it can never be a legitimate supranational authority in its own right. Sometimes it takes sharp elbows to assert independence. But this is certain: We will never be so seduced by vapid pieties about global cooperation that we'll join a system that is both unworkable and undemocratic.

Barbara O'Brien blogged As near as I can determine, the "wrong" mission is the one that attempts to promote international peace and security. The "right" mission is the one that relieves the United States from all responsibility for international peace and security.

You need to take off your rose colored glasses and reread it. He said that the "right" mission is one where the UN is a place where sovereign nations could work together to solve problems. The "wrong" mission is one where it is the begin of a world government, where we have to yield our sovernity to an undemocratic organization.

Betsy Newmark blogged And that is why JOhn Bolton should go to the U. N. so that he can articulate why we do

Matthew Yglesias blogged As usual, there are various things one could take issue with in the latest David Brooks column, but I'll just pick the assertion that Americans "will never allow transnational organizations to overrule our own laws, regulations and precedents." Now since treaties have the force of law, in a sense all international agreements overrule our own laws, regulations, and precedents. Less tendentiously, trade agreements like NAFTA and the WTO have set up transnational arbitration mechanisms that are empowered, on certain issues, to overrule our own laws, regulations and precedents. In other words, this thing that we'll allegedly "never allow" is something we have, in fact, already allowed. NATO's Article V guarantee that we will regard on attack on, say, Denmark as an attack on the United States also de facto overrides Congress' power to declare war, though the document uses some ambiguous wording to get around the constitutional problems here.

Gee, is the Left suggesting we are TOO Multilateral?

Treaties do have the force of law, but they must be ratified (approved). What Bolton was talking about is allowing other countries to decide how we should do something, without our review. That is why we withdrew from the International Court, and never ratified it.