PRESIDENT BUSH will hail today the rising tide of democratic reform across the Arab world as an important success in his pursuit of victory in the war against terrorism.

In what the White House is describing as a major address to the American public, he will say that the rise of “people power” in Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories is undermining Islamic extremism. To underline Mr Bush’s refusal to back down in his foreign policy, he has nominated one of his Administration’s most outspoken hawks to be US Ambassador to the United Nations.

John Bolton is a senior State Department official and advocate of the Iraq war who clashed frequently with Colin Powell, the former Secretary of State, in the first Bush term and needs to win Senate approval.

His nomination is likely to be seen by many at the UN headquarters in New York as an aggressive move by Washington. Mr Bolton has made clear he is no friend of the UN. He once said: “There is no such thing as the United Nations. There is only the international community, which can only be led by the only remaining superpower, which is the United States.” He also said: “If the UN Secretariat building in New York lost ten storeys, it wouldn ’t make a bit of difference.”

As the Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, Mr Bolton has been a critic of the regimes in Iran and North Korea, sometimes placing himself far to the right of Washington policy. He has vehemently criticised any efforts to start one-to-one talks with Pyongyang and opposes any dangling of carrots to persuade Tehran to renounce its nuclear ambitions.

Iran is likely to continue to be one of his main concerns in his new job. Although Mr Bush is supporting British, French and German efforts to win a pledge from Iran that it will not seek to arm itself with nuclear weapons, few in the US Administration give those talks much chance of success.

The US wants to move the issue to the UN Security Council where it will be Mr Bolton’s job to negotiate the terms of any sanctions with Russia, which is helping Iran to build a nuclear power plant, and China, which is unlikely to be compliant.

Mr Bush will use the speech today at the National Defence University in Washington to herald the recent democratic advances in the Middle East. Since his inauguration in January, Iraq has held its first post-Saddam elections, Lebanon has witnessed public protests for Syria to withdraw its occupying force of 14,000 troops, and Egypt has said it will hold its first contested presidential election in September.

Mr Bush, who has made the spread of freedom and democracy the goal of foreign policy in his second term, will say that the advances are directly linked to US foreign policy.

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