TWO RATHER different views of the United Nations have been on display in America this week. In cinemas across the country, trailers are advertising the release next week of Sidney Pollack’s glossy new thriller set at the UN headquarters in New York.

In The Interpreter, Nicole Kidman plays what would have to be described as something quite rare these days, even in the fevered imagination of Hollywood liberals — the multilateralist, polyglot, diplomatist heroine. Ms Kidman is a UN official who believes, so the trailers say, in the “power and sanctity of words” to resolve conflicts. She uncovers a plot to assassinate an African president and, in trying to derail it, butts heads with a crusty US agent who favours a more aggressive approach.

I haven’t seen the film yet, but given the cast (which includes Sean “Christmas in Baghdad” Penn) and the fact that the UN allowed unprecedented access for its production, I would offer no prizes for correctly guessing whether it is the peaceful, diplomatic, violence-eschewing Ms Kidman who wins the day, or the other one.

In Washington, meanwhile, US senators have been putting on their own show for the cameras, grilling President George W. Bush’s nominee for ambassador to the UN, John Bolton.

Mr Bolton also believes in the power of words, but his tend to be decidedly less sanctified than Ms Kidman’s and uttered in a more direct form. Indeed, if they were making a movie about this veteran of foreign policy conservatism, it would probably be called, No Need for an Interpreter.

And yet Mr Bolton has been playing a rather different role this week, trying to reassure senators that he actually likes the UN and wants it to work. This may look like a rather transparent bit of acting and Mr Bolton is no Nicole Kidman, in any sense. But, I’m bound to say, against the current tide of clever opinion, that I’m starting to buy it. I’m starting to believe that Mr Bush’s second term is going to be very different from the first.

It has been generally assumed in the rarefied world of foreign policy practitioners and pundits that Mr Bolton’s nomination is a kind of lie-detector test applied to the Administration’s second-term rhetoric. For all the nice language of the President’s garland-strewn trip to Europe in February, for all Condoleezza Rice’s sharp suits and winning smiles, for all the talk of pages turned and pasts behind us, the Bolton nomination is said to reveal that the second Bush term is going to be a straight rerun of the first.

But the truth, I think, is precisely the opposite. Mr Bolton has gone to the UN not just because Dr Rice wanted him out of the State Department building. His job will be not to pour scorn on multilateralist approaches to international problems, but, however improbable it may seem, to use his rather special skills to make them work. The second Bush term will place a much higher premium on the value of international support, and work much harder to get it.

Two big developments lie behind this change of approach. The first is the remarkable ascendancy of Dr Rice. She did not distinguish herself much as National Security Adviser in the first Bush term. Seeing her job as one of interpreting events and mediating disputes for the President, she did not play the part of a foreign policymaking principal.

Now she is, in truth, in charge of foreign policy. Donald Rumsfeld is still around but he is a diminished figure, assumed to be on his way out within a year or so. Dick Cheney is still there, but his influence over the President has waned as the Secretary of State’s has waxed. The fact is that Dr Rice now enjoys the closest relationship a secretary of state has had with a president since Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon more than 30 years ago.

Although her own world view is still a little cloudy, it is very clear that it is not the robust, UN-despising, Europe-denigrating one in vogue at the Pentagon and in the Vice-President’s office. She won a clear victory on the first big foreign-policy question of the new term — whether to back Europe’s diplomacy on Iran; and she has won a host of other, smaller arguments.

But there is an even bigger reason why change is now in the air in Washington. There is a growing confidence across the Bush Administration that the hard and unpopular choices made in the first term have begun to bear fruit. Iraq is rapidly becoming the success the Left has feared. There is talk at the Pentagon that the first withdrawal of US troops could take place next year. There is evident excitement and optimism about the broader Middle East; democratic change from a free and peaceful Palestine to Afghanistan is no longer a neocon fantasy.

This has created not simply a sense of vindication in Washington but also a belief that the second term need not be so preoccupied with divisive issues. This has made the Bush team less defensive about the decisions made in the first term. They know Europeans won’t ever admit that the Iraq war was wise, but they know too that even the French cannot continue to insist that it was a disaster.

Difficult decisions lie ahead – another terrorist attack might reopen old fissures, Iran retains the potential to revive transatlantic tensions. But in these early days the right historical model for the second Bush term is the second Administration of Ronald Reagan. In the first term the President overturned the diplomatic card tables, terrified allies and ignited world opinion against America. But that stormy background noise smothered signs of real progress in the principal foreign-policy goal of asserting and promoting America’s values over the enemies of human freedom. Though the allies never much warmed to the President, the US felt confident enough to steer a less confrontational path in the second term, and the verdict of history was favourable.

gerard.baker@thetimes.co.uk

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