YOU COULD almost hear the jaws hitting the tables in New York this week when the White House announced the name of its next Ambassador to the United Nations.

John Bolton, an unabashed promoter of an assertive American foreign policy, is to diplomacy what Michael Jackson is to parenting. As UnderSecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security he rattled a few walls with his bellicose talk about Iran and North Korea. For Europeans this bête is especially noire. He has a low opinion of the EU and its works, especially the idea of a common security policy.

But by comparison with his views on the UN, this is tame. He has, among other things, said, “there is no such thing as the United Nations”, that if the UN secretariat building in New York lost ten storeys it wouldn’t make a bit of difference. He described the day he signed the letter removing the US from the treaty establishing the International Criminal Court as “the happiest moment of my government service”.

And now, just as the world was starting to think George Bush’s second term was turning into the second coming of St Francis of Assisi, this arch-unilateralist UN-sceptic becomes, after Condoleezza Rice, the most visible exponent of US foreign policy.

The State Department, which has hosted Mr Bolton these past four years as a body hosts a deadly virus, vigorously opposed his promotion. But it did its best to put on a brave face. Explaining to the world why the US had put one of the most avaricious of foxes in charge of the chicken coop, its spin was magnificent: at a time when opinion in the US is increasingly unfavourable to the UN, it said, there was no better way to bring Americans round to its great value than by putting its chief critic in charge. If an iconoclast like Mr Bolton can be persuaded that the UN can work, then the American people will surely view the institution in a much more favourable light.

Here’s a rough translation: yes, the fox has been put in charge of the chicken coop. But this is excellent news for the chickens. The fox community has been extremely unhappy with the way the chickens have been behaving for quite some time and have started looking rather hungrily in their direction. But if we let a fox in, then all foxes will come to understand that chickens can have a viable future as partners in the fox’s long-term development. And we look forward to the day when fox and chicken will coexist peacefully.

My bet: a blur of chicken feathers and one very satisfied member of the fox community.

Which, of course, would be the best thing that could possibly happen. Mr Bolton’s appointment is a stroke of pure genius by the Bush Administration. It might finish the UN. It might save it. What it will certainly do is inject a much-needed dose of realism into the debate about the institution.

Outside America there is something approaching a fetishism about the UN, a delusional obsession with the idea that it is the only source of global legitimacy in international relations. It is understandable, I suppose. Countries and peoples that have been ravaged by international aggression for centuries can be expected to invest their highest hopes for security in a supranational organisation that promises to preserve peace and justice. But this lofty ideal, enshrined in the UN Charter, is at serious variance with the facts of the UN’s history.

After the Korean War, the UN stood by and did nothing for four decades as some of the worst crimes against humanity were committed across and within borders. It did nothing when the Soviet Union imposed its will by force on Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan. It did nothing to stop Pol Pot’s genocidal wars in South East Asia or the Indonesian cremation of East Timor. Just as Mao Zedong was busy executing anyone who expressed the slightest reservation about the wisdom of the Cultural Revolution, he was rewarded by being given a seat on the Security Council.

At the very moments when these hideous events were falling like blows on the face of freedom, the main obsession of the UN was with condemning Israel’s attempts to ensure its own survival in the face of Arab determination to wipe it out. Though it apparently could not be persuaded that totalitarian dictatorship was incompatible with its founding principles, the UN General Assembly did find the time to condemn Zionism as racism.

Of course, its defenders say, that was in the Cold War, when the world was regrettably divided into hostile camps, and the UN Security Council was checkmated by the veto from doing anything of substance.

Since then things have changed. Look at the first Gulf War. Didn’t that show how international co-operation through the UN can confer legitimacy on the use of force in the defence of law and justice? Well, perhaps. Some of us would argue that it was the need to keep that unwieldy coalition from collapsing that the war was not prosecuted to its proper conclusion — the removal of Saddam Hussein.

But even if this was a fine moment, it was also clearly the high-water mark of post-Cold War UN action. The UN quickly fell back into its familiar torpor. It failed in the Balkans. It did nothing to stop genocide in Africa. And Iraq — well we know about Iraq. The truth is, if we had waited for the UN’s say-so to promote the cause of freedom in the past 50 years, we’d still be waiting.

Freedom is on the march around the world. What the UN needs now is to get in front of that glorious procession, rather than lag behind it. John Bolton may be the man for the task.

His diplomacy has earned him some serious opprobrium. North Korea once described him as “human scum”. Which, if you stop to think about that country and its contribution to human history, is one heck of a compliment.

gerard.baker@thetimes.co.uk

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