The last time I met John Bolton was in a urinal at the US State Department. I was Britain’s ambassador to America, the America’s ambassador to the United Nations. A brief and surly response to my chirpy greeting emerged through the overhanging shagginess of his trademark moustache.

I remember being rather hurt because we had – I thought – got on well enough over the years. In an earlier incarnation in the Washington embassy, I had dealt with him when he was running the State Department’s UN division. He even invited me once to a lunch at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-wing think-tank, where his formidable intelligence and ferocious sense of the national interest found a natural home.

Now that I have read his angry book, I wonder whether I, too, have been consigned to Bolton’s monstrous regiment of enemies. There are an awful lot of them: liberals, Democrats and moderate Republicans; the “High Minded”; “flaccid” Europeans, or EUroids as he calls them; his own State Department; the UN, including Bolton’s hate figure, Mark Malloch Brown, then Kofi Annan’s chief of staff and now in the Lords as a junior Foreign Office minister; and, in the end, even his boss, Colin Powell. These for Bolton are the Lilliputians who seek to tie down the American Gulliver.

Contempt for the Lilliputians drips from almost every page. Much is reserved for the British. It will come as a shock to the apostles of the special relationship to learn that “throughout the Bush administration, Australia was our closest ally...the most like us and the most sympathetic”. As for the Brits, they “believed that their role in life was to play Athens to America’s Rome, lending us the benefit of their superior suaveness, and smoothing off our regret-table colonial rough edges”. A number of individuals get it in the neck. Jack Straw emerges feeble and out of his depth, marginalised by Downing Street and desperately trying to carve himself a foreign-policy niche. Straw chooses Iran; and, in Bolton’s account, after making a hash of it, is sacked by Blair. Emyr Jones Parry, Britain’s then ambassador to the UN, is memorably shafted: “Watching Jones Parry in action, I often wondered how Britain had acquired an empire, although he proved why they had lost America.”

Surrender Is Not an Option is the story of how Bolton, the son of a Baltimore fireman and disciple of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, confronts and sometimes confounds his enemies in a series of diplomatic engagements. He is the working-class hero of his own narrative. By his side the Forces of Light are few, but dazzling. President Bush; Dick Cheney; Donald Rumsfeld; sundry neocons and right-wing Republicans; Israelis; Australians. Only one Brit is admitted to this elite force: the diplomat, William Ehrman, now Britain’s ambassador in China, who “was an Atlanticist, a diminishing breed at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office” (only too true).

Right-wing American nationalists, such as Bolton (not quite the same thing as a neoconservative), have become in Europe objects of fear, loathing and derision. When I told a former diplomatic colleague that I was reviewing this book, his comment — “I suppose it’s completely bonkers” — was pretty typical. But it is far from bonkers. Its idiosyncrasies and attitudes may be more than the British reader can handle. Yet — pass the smelling salts — it has lessons to teach about the national interest and diplomacy from which today’s Foreign Office could learn a thing or two.

The book is for the most part a highly, sometimes painfully detailed account of his service under President George W Bush, first as a senior official in the State Department, and second, and more famously, as US ambassador to the UN in 2005-06. The book is well enough written in a clear, unadorned style. But it is hard to see it having a wider readership beyond professional diplomats and those with an interest in the minutiae of international negotiation. As such, it is a pretty good handbook on how the UN works. It will also be useful for academics researching the history of the UN’s dealings with Iran, North Korea, the Arab/Israel dispute, Darfur and so on. I found Bolton’s account of his failure to secure Senate confirmation of his appointment fascinating: a mini-primer on how political horse trading works in Washington.

Above all, the Lilliputians infest the UN. Bolton says, without too much hyperbole, “all 192 nations pursue their national interests at the UN . . . but only the US is criticised for it”. An apologia for American unilateralism or even isolationism? Not really. America, Bolton argues, must avoid the trap of channelling most of its efforts through the UN; unilateral action, bilateral alliances, multilateral alliances, ad hoc military coalitions, regional organisations and coalitions of the willing are all legitimate alternatives. “America should choose the instruments that serve its interests best.”

I don’t see what is wrong with that. It is an exact description of how America has conducted itself abroad since 1945 under both Republican and Democratic administrations. It is, ironically, the quintessence of the “realist” school of foreign policy that Bolton disdains. He says other common-sense things about diplomacy. At the heart of these is his wholly justified belief in the continuing relevance of national interest in an age that bends the knee to the fashionable but ill-defined notion of globalisation.

So, what makes Bolton so controversial? There is the abrasive manner that jars horribly on the sensibilities of diplomacy as it is practised at the UN and EU. Yet you can only sympathise with his impatience at these organisations’ addiction to procedural fixes over real problem-solving. There is also more than a whiff here of class war against snooty Europeans, especially Brits. But the heart of the matter is Bolton’s world-view. It has deep cultural and moral roots, unique to America, going back to the Founding Fathers and before; and it is not confined just to the right. It sees the world as a Manichean struggle between good and evil, in which America, the chosen people, buckle on the sword of righteousness. It is a vision

that has done much good in the world. But it can be impatient with compromise, impatient with allies, impatient with understanding what makes others tick, insistent that American values are the only ones that matter. Perversely it can lead, as it has done in the Middle East, to actions that aggravate threats rather than diminish them.

In its most extreme form, it is an ideology that inverts reality. The title of Bolton’s book says it all. Surrender Is Not an Option suggests America the victim, under siege. The world’s only superpower is, of course, no such thing. I used to know in Washington a senior official in the defence department — he is even more senior now — whose favourite film was the Burt Lancaster western, Valdez Is Coming, a tale of vengeance and retribution. He saw himself as Lancaster. Bolton, I fancy, would see himself as John Wayne in The Alamo, under siege from foreigners in fancy uniforms, choking with emotion at the mention of the word “republic”, and dying a hero’s death.

Surrender is not an option: Defending America at the United Nations by John Bolton
Simon & Schuster pp496

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