If you consider Donald Rumsfeld the unacceptable face of American power, you probably haven’t met John Bolton. Even muscular rightwingers at the Centre for Policy Studies, whom the American ambassador to the United Nations addressed in London last week, squirmed like cheese-eating surrender monkeys when he seemed to suggest countries such as Ethiopia should have reduced voting rights at the UN because they are stingy with their budgetary contributions.

But Bolton, appointed by President Bush in defiance of Congress, has one virtue even his greatest detractors could not dispute: he shoots straight. If you want to know how America really sees the world, listen to Bolton.

So in an interview with The Sunday Times, he cheerfully lays into Britain for deferring to the European Union rather than pursuing its own policy and says Tony Blair has no chance of leading the UN because the post is bound to go to a Third World functionary. He warms up by doling out a mighty good kicking to the Brit Mark Malloch Brown, the deputy secretary-general, who last week made an unusually robust attack on America’s policy towards the UN.

Bolton wasted no time firing his bolt: unless Kofi Annan, the secretary-general, disowns the remarks there will be “consequences” that will throw the UN into “turmoil”. If Malloch Brown broke diplomatic convention with his rather sneering suggestion that Bolton uses the UN to play to middle America, Bolton shows he can do contempt pretty well too.

He says of the plummy Malloch Brown, who lives in a swanky pad provided by the financier who broke the Bank of England, George Soros: “Maybe it’s fashionable to look down on middle America and those who have not had the benefit of a continental education. But as a UN official what he said is illegitimate.”

Bolton utters “continental education” as if it were something scraped off his shoe. But you can trace a smile dancing under his walrus moustache: he clearly enjoys the panic he excites in others.

What does he say to Malloch Brown’s contention that America uses UN resolutions to chide enemies then quietly ignores ones it finds inconvenient? “The United States pursues its foreign policy interests through the UN,” he says. “It can be an effective tool of American foreign policy.”

Hah! A critic would say that lets the cat — or tiger — out of the bag: how dare he consider the UN an American “tool”? “I don’t think that distinguishes it from any member government,” he hits back. “To say we use it when it is useful, and we don’t when it is not useful, is accurate — and accurate of the other 190 members. Why are we the only one criticised?”

Perhaps because, as the nearest to a world policeman, America really matters. “Then ask yourself the political question: what benefit is it to the secretary-general to have his number two attack the most important nation in the UN?”

Bolton has called on other countries to follow America’s global leadership. But why should they if he admits American foreign policy is merely the single-minded pursuit of its own interests?

“Well then, fair enough, I don’t have any illusions, but then (other countries) have to ask themselves why we should pay for (the UN) if it is fundamentally opposed to our interests.”

But hang on, your excellency: isn’t the entire point of the UN that it is democratic? “We never saw it that way.”

What? So the biggest guy in the playground wins. Might is right.