During my stay at the American Academy in Berlin, I was asked by a number of Europeans how it was possible to reconcile the nominations of Condoleezza Rice as Secretary of State and John Bolton as UN Ambassador. This is apparently a question because Secretary Rice is seen as a conciliatory figure while Mr. Bolton is seen as a hardliner or unilateralist. The implication is that President Bush has sent different and inconsistent messages with these two appointments. With the nomination of Paul Wolfowitz to be President of the World Bank, some European commentators have now suggested that with the Bolton and Wolfowitz choices President Bush is rewarding US conservatives for their election support.

These complicated theories and critiques are unnecessary and inaccurate. In choosing Ms. Rice, Mr. Bolton, and Mr. Wolfowitz, President Bush is simply trying to deal with two entirely different kinds of problems.

The attitude of many Europeans toward the United States may reflect a failure of US public diplomacy. It appears that the United States did not adequately explain why it undertook the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and refused to deal with Yassir Arafat as a supporter of terrorism. Most Europeans do not, for example, seem aware that President Bush, well before the invasion of Iraq, based his policy on the hope that the overthrow of Saddam would trigger democratic reform throughout the Middle East. The President’s view was that the only way to prevent the growth of jihadist terrorism is to defeat it with a better idea--democracy. Yet the notion seems widespread in Europe that Bush’s pro-democratic policy is a post hoc rationalization for the Iraq invasion, when it was in fact a fundamental tenet of the President’s post-9/11 plan for reducing future threats to the United States.

President Bush did not and does not want to act unilaterally, without allies. Acting without allies as a policy makes no sense. But as the president of a country that is the principal target of a group of homicidal maniacs, he must act to protect the United States as he sees fit, even if no one else agrees. Any president would do the same thing, as would any leader of a European country that found itself in similar circumstances. Most Europeans would probably agree with this, but they have never been asked by effective US public diplomacy to consider seriously the responsibilities of a US president after September 11. One of Secretary Rice’s roles is to make clear what those responsibilities are, as well as the fact that in the future the views and advice of Europeans and others will be sought and weighed. That President Bush sees her job in this light is demonstrated by the appointment of Karen Hughes, one of his closest advisers on communications, to a top position as an adviser to Secretary Rice.

President Bush’s problem with the United Nations is of an entirely different order, and the Bolton nomination in this sense has more in common with the choice of Paul Wolfowitz for the World Bank than with the selection of Condi Rice to be Secretary of State. Many Americans see both the UN and the World Bank as dysfunctional organizations. The World Bank has achieved little to reduce world poverty despite an expenditure of roughly $30 billion each year, and the UN has been more of an obstacle than an instrument for the achievement of peace. The scandal associated with the Iraq Oil for Food program, the inability to stop the slaughter in Darfur or the genocides in Rwanda, Bosnia and Kosovo, the failure to take any action despite Saddam Hussein’s repeated violations of UN resolutions, and many other failures have sapped Americans’ support of the UN. If this support is to be restored--and if the UN is to have any future it must be restored--difficult steps will be necessary. To the extent that this is a question
of communication, it is one of stubborn insistence on change.

John Bolton has been at the UN before. He knows the organization and its potential for success. His job, like the boy who pointed out that the emperor has no clothes, will be to speak the truth about the failures of the UN that the rest of the world refuses to acknowledge. Only when these failures are acknowledged can effective reform take hold. His job, like Wolfowitz’s, is thus not a conciliator’s job--the UN’s dysfunction is well beyond that point--but much more like the role of a shareholder’s representative, who is appointed to join the board of a failing organization and see to its reform. Viewing the Bolton and Wolfowitz appointments in political terms, or as sending inconsistent signals to the world, is again to misunderstand the responsibilities and perspective of the American president.

Peter J. Wallison is a resident fellow at AEI.