John Bolton, former Bush-appointed Ambassador to the United Nations, recently authored a book, titled Surrender Is Not An Option.
The American Enterprise Institute, the conservative think tank in Washington, DC at which Bolton is a scholar, describes the book:
“With no-holds-barred candor, the straight-talking former ambassador to the United Nations takes readers behind the scenes at the U.N. and the U.S. State Department and reveals why his efforts to defend American interests and reform the U.N. resulted in controversy. A veteran of three Republican administrations and a nominee for the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, Bolton shows how the U.S. can lead the way to a more realistic global security arrangement for the twenty-first century and identifies the next generation of threats to America.”
Bolton discusses the book, and answers questions about his criticism for the Bush administration in an interview with German news magazine Der Spiegel this past December.
A blogger on Global Poltician posted an excerpt of the book in which Bolton comments on his colleagues at the State Department:
“Anyone who has ever engaged in an internal turf struggles with State [Department] bureaucrats knows the true meaning of street fighting. Instead of fighting with ourselves, however, in a circular firing squad, we should be directing our energies against our foreign adversaries, which we are certainly not now doing adequately. This cultural problem is solvable, although we need to understand that, because it developed over decades, it will take decades to cure”
It should be noted that Bolton is widely known for his combative personality, which could shed some light into how his time at the Department was spent fighting. I doubt many of his colleagues would liken their internal relations to street fighting. But that certainly doesn't mean that internal struggles do not exist at the Department.
In the following passage Bolton rationalizes why he was one of the more undiplomatic diplomats to join the Foreign Service:
“Diplomacy should come to mean advocacy. Advocacy for American interests must be the priority, not compromise and conciliation for their own sake. Disagreement with foreign friends or adversaries is not itself distasteful, nor simply an unpleasantness to be overcome as rapidly and quietly as possible without regard to substantive outcomes. Disagreement reveals underlying issues that should be resolved consistently with our own interests Argument, which lawyers do all the time, but which diplomats shy away from, I neither unpleasant nor disagreeable, but actually critical to making the case for the interests we are advancing(pages 454-455).”
These two passages shed some light on his time at the Department, though I can't say I am dropping everything to read the rest of the book. Let's hope it isn't as bad as the political blog Wonkette paints it: “If his interview with Spiegel is any sort of harbinger for things to come, then the tome is sure to be the must-not-read of the century.”
