A Realist Ambassador to the UN?

In its latest round of newspeak, the Bush administration is trying to sell and arch unilateralist/statist, John Bolton, as a great fit at the UN.

Bolton is on record numerous times as being a critic of the UN. What's worse, his choice of tone for his criticism was unprofessional and childish. For example, a story in the LA Times reports that Bolton once said, "The Secretariat building in New York has 38 stories. If it lost 10 stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference." I'm sure there are people rotting away in Gitmo for saying similar things about any of the other tall buildings in New York or Chicago.

Bolton is a realist. That means he believes world politics is fully explained in terms of unitary, rational, power maximizing states. For example, the same LA Times story reports that "in 2000, Bolton told National Public Radio that the U.N. Security Council needed only one permanent member, the United States, 'because that's the real reflection of the distribution of power in the world.'" For more Bolton quotations see this link at the LA Times.

Realists chose that label for their theory because they intend it to make people think that anyone who disagrees with them is unrealistic or "idealistic." But their theory is actually a gross distortion of how the world real works. I've posted about that before.

Now Bolton claims that he's all for the U.N.. The man is lying when he claims that. Just like Rice is lying when she holds up Bolton as a paragon of "effective multilateralism." He has a strange combination of opposing the existence of international organizations (because they hinder US goals) while at the same time declaring them to be irrelevant. Dr. Von Brawn has great deal to say about this internal contradiction within realism and I would love it if he were to share his views on the matter with us!