Appointment gratification

Even if Paul Wolfowitz and John Bolton weren’t two of the more farsighted thinkers in the Bush administration, appointing them respectively to the World Bank and the United Nations would be worthwhile just for the pleasure of watching the Europeans, Democrats and media stew over it.

The assumption seems that, with things going his way in Iraq and Lebanon and Egypt and Saudi Arabia, President Bush needs to reach out by stiffing counselors who called it right and appointing more emollient types who got everything wrong.

Each to his own. But, as I see it, the question isn’t why Mr. Wolfowitz and Mr. Bolton should hold these jobs, but why Kofi Annan, Jacques Chirac, John Kerry and assorted others still hold their jobs.

Still, if you’re to play the oldest established permanent floating transnational crap game for laughs, might as well pick an act with plenty of material. What I love about John Bolton, America’s new ambassador to the U.N., is the sheer volume of “damaging” material. Usually, the Democrats and media must rifle through decades of dreary platitudes to come up with one potentially exploitable infelicitous sound bite. But with Mr. Bolton, the damaging quotes hang off the trees and drop straight into your bucket. Five minutes’ casual mooching through the back catalog and your cup runneth over:

The U.N.? “There is no such thing as the United Nations.”

Reform of the Security Council? “If I were redoing the Security Council, I’d have one permanent member… the United States.”

International law? “It is a big mistake for us to grant any validity to international law.”

Offering incentives to rogue states? “I don’t do carrots.”

But he does do shtick. I happen to agree with all the above statements, but I can see why the international community might be throw its hands up and shriek, “Quel horreur.”

It’s not just the rest of the world. Most of the American media are equally stunned.

The New York Times wondered what Mr. Bush’s next appointment would be: “Donald Rumsfeld to negotiate a new set of Geneva Conventions? Martha Stewart to run the Securities and Exchange Commission?”

OK, I get the hang of this game. Sending John Bolton to be ambassador to the U.N. is like … putting Sudan and Zimbabwe on the Human Rights Commission. Or letting Saddam’s Iraq chair the U.N. Conference on Disarmament. Or sending a bunch of child-sex fiends to man U.N. operations in the Congo. And the Central African Republic. And Sierra Leone, and Burundi, Liberia, Haiti, Kosovo, and pretty much everywhere else.

All of the above happened without the U.N. fetishists running around shrieking hysterically. Why should America be the only country not to enjoy an uproarious joke at the U.N.’s expense?

That’s why the Bolton flap is very revealing about conventional wisdom on transnationalism. Diplomats are supposed to be “diplomatic.” I mentioned a month or so ago the late Canadian Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson’s bon mot: Diplomacy is the art of letting the other fellow have your way.

In other words, you were polite, discreet, circumspect, etc., as means to an end. Not anymore. None of John Bolton’s detractors is worried his bluntness will jeopardize the administration’s policy goals. Quite the contrary. They’re concerned the administration has policy goals — that it isn’t yet willing to subordinate its national interest to the polite transnational pieties. In that sense, our understanding of “diplomacy” has become corrupted: It’s no longer the language through which nation-states treat with one another so much as the code-speak consensus of a global elite.

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