Our anti-Bolton at the U.N., &c.

[Geee]

National Review:

In December, I wrote a longish piece about John Bolton, the Republican foreign-policy whiz. (Actually, he whizzes on other issues as well — so to speak.) In that piece, I mentioned that Bolton called Jim Baker “the best secretary of state since Dean Acheson.” One thing about Baker, said Bolton, was that he was the president’s man in the State Department, not the State Department’s man in the White House. That makes a very, very big difference.

Bolton also said this — something that did not make it into my piece (which is here, by the way): Colin Powell, unfortunately, became the State Department’s man, largely. To some, this made him a hero. To others — to people like Bolton and, well, me — it made him something less.

And you know what a lot of us said about Bolton himself, when he went to Turtle Bay: At last we had a U.S. ambassador to the U.N., not a U.N. ambassador to the United States. For years, the job of our ambassador at the U.N. was to represent the world body to Americans. Bolton, bizarrely — where does he get these notions? — represented Americans to the U.N.