Ian Williams

Robinson became the second United Nations high commissioner for human rights in June 1997 after resigning as president of Ireland. Before Robinson, Ireland’s presidency was a ceremonial office, whose holder was expected to do little more than shake hands with VIPs and open schools and hospitals. But when Robinson — a woman with socialist and feminist leanings — was elected, it symbolized the changes in what had been a traditionally conservative and religion-dominated country. She stretched the boundaries of the presidency to fit her concerns, one of the most prominent of which was human rights. She made trips to places like Somalia and Rwanda, and in the Great Lakes region of Africa she coined the memorable phrase, “the cycle of impunity,” to describe the process by which leaving mass murder unpunished encouraged others to do the same.

Her name had actually been raised as a replacement for Boutros Boutros Ghali at the head of the U.N., but although she was the right gender, Ireland was not in Africa, and that was where the consensus said that the next secretary general should come from. And when he did, Kofi Annan tapped her for the human rights job. As high commissioner for human rights, she brought a sense of urgency to the position, and the authority of a recently retired head of state. It irked the type of U.N. bureaucrats who would much rather file reports of massacres at the bottom of a cabinet than upset governments. For her, human rights transcended national affiliations. For example, just because China was big, or Israel had friends in Washington, was no reason to stay silent.

The word went around in the corridors of power in Washington and New York’s U.N. headquarters. She was “difficult to work with.” Just because the U.S. and Israel walked out of the Durban Conference, she saw no reason to close it down when the rest of the world stayed. She was forthright about abuses of human rights by both Israel and the Palestinian Authority: In Washington she was damned.

However, though she leaves the U.N. in a matter of weeks, Robinson refuses to limp like a lame duck. Recently, she was in New York to report to the Security Council on the massacres and the human rights situation in the Congo and was as forthright as ever before giving up what she calls “the day job.”

Putting it politely, from the outside it looks as if the Middle East issue was the one that led to, shall we say, diminished enthusiasm for your renewal in office. Is that a fair assessment?

Indeed. It’s ironic in a way, because the issue I’m most committed to is the integrity of the human rights agenda, and shaping it so it’s not politicized. I applied that faithfully to addressing the problems both in the occupied Palestinian Territory and in Israel, and I have mentally, emotionally and intellectually tried to be bound by it. I may have made some mistakes but that is where I’m at, because that is essentially the core of why I took this job.

It was very interesting to me that it is not so perceived on the Israeli side. It may be because I’ve been over-appreciated on the Palestinian side. But I have condemned unequivocally suicide bombing, and reiterated the need for human security in Israel for political debate.

Even then, in 2000, it was very evident that the occupation is at the root of many of the human rights problems, and the intifada, which had started then, was only at the stage of stone throwing and young people being killed. Since then we have drive-by shootings and suicide bombing which is of course appalling and cannot be condemned strongly enough, certainly not justified by any cause — but the Israeli responses are also excessive.

It worries me that in this great country [the U.S.] that’s not the perception: They don’t see the suffering of the Palestinian people; they don’t see the impact of collective punishment. They do immediately see and empathize — and rightly — with the suffering of Israeli civilians who are killed, or injured, or just frightened, and of course I do too. But I find it very disheartening that there is not more understanding here of the appalling suffering of the Palestinian population, nor appreciation that this is not going to lead to a secure future. It’s going to lead to greater hatred and desperation, of further suicide bombings.

You believe your views on this issue were the reason why the U.S. so vigorously opposed an extension of your term?

Yes, combined with the Durban conference. I urged and begged the U.S. and Israel to stay. I told them that all the draft language, which was unacceptable, would be taken out — and it was. But once they left, there are those who refuse now to accept that any good came out of Durban.

I’m not defensive about my record on the Middle East or the Durban conference. I think we achieved an extraordinary breakthrough in Durban against all the odds. But there are two very different perceptions. I was in Mexico last week for the first of the follow up regional conferences from Durban, and it was a joy to see how much it means for countries in Central and Southern American, Mexico, the host, Brazil, Chile, the way it has brought new hope for indigenous peoples, for people of African descent, for black Brazilians. I was hearing the plans for action to follow up on Durban from civil society and government — and I thought, “At last! The true agenda is resurfacing.” Of course, we need it more than ever following the Sept. 11 attacks.

Now, after five years as high commissioner, do you think you have made a difference?

Certainly there’s been a change … I [recently] addressed the Security Council on the Democratic Republic of the Congo and they will publish my report as a document. Five years ago, the S.C. would not have listened to a high commissioner!

There’s also been a dramatic shift, and one that I do take some credit for, in the developing world’s attitude. When I started back in September of 1997, I was quite taken aback by how many leaders of developing countries told me: “Don’t you know human rights is just a Western stick to beat us with? It is politicized, nothing to do with real concern about human rights.”

You know, there was an element of truth in that, and so I found it necessary to find, first of all, the true agenda of human rights at the international level. That is to be strong in civil liberties, in the protection and promotion of civil and political rights, and strong in the protection and promotion of economic, social and cultural rights, and to fulfill the express vision and mandate of the establishment of the high commissioner’s office, which was to seek consensus on the right to development. That’s an individual and a collective right, the right of the people to gain the full flower of their human rights.

And that led to more linkage being made by leaders of developing countries between human rights and economic and social development. They began to realize that if you got your human rights right, you accelerated human development, economic development … What is very clear is that human rights need protection at national and local level, and therefore unless there is more attention to strengthening human rights, and law and administration of justice at national level, then we are not really going to make great progress.

It’s reflected very dramatically in the New Economic Partnership for African Development, the NEPAD. The text of that is an extraordinary indication of how far human rights have moved to become the priority tool of developing countries in making progress. They identified the four priority areas: to strengthen the administration of justice, the rule of law, tackling corruption, and adhering fully to international human rights norms and standards … To me it is a moral as well as a practical issue. If countries give priority to these issues and cannot find the resources domestically — then that’s certainly an area I’m going to address by trying to build quiet alliances for it for when I quit the day job.

Do you have a new day job lined up?

I do feel energized at the end of this quite demanding job, so I have a real sense of wanting to bring this experience into a different and broader field. I have specific ideas for what I want to achieve, but I need to work out practical ways to do it.

I’m very interested in the whole debate on shaping globalization and I think that the international human rights norms and standards have a contribution to make to a more ethical globalization.

We have the international norms and standards, we have the treaty bodies working more effectively, we have the rapporteurs, there’s an ability to name and shame, it’s accepted that human rights don’t stop at borders — that if there are violations in a country, the international community is rightly interested. The crucial issue now in human rights is national capacity building.

Your concerns have not always been shared by some international organizations: the World Bank and IMF traditionally never let a few prison camps interfere with their appreciation of a good GDP growth rate. Have you turned them round yet?

Certainly, our office is working, particularly with the World Bank but also the IMF and WTO, and we’re engaged in a very significant analysis of poverty reduction strategies and we’re developing human rights guidelines for them, with close involvement of the W.B., the IMF, and the WTO. This would not have happened two years ago. It’s a really interesting intellectual development. Human rights lawyers are listening to economists and vice versa in seeing how the human rights norms and standards can be a positive framework for addressing poverty, because they address participation; it gives civil society tools to measure whether there is progressive implementation of the right to education, right to health, to food, without discrimination against minorities, indigenous people.

The World Trade Organization especially has been seen as totally heartless and ethics-free by design. Have you really given them a heart transplant?

It’s true that trade ministers going into the WTO meetings don’t bring with them, as I believe they should, a consciousness of the commitments their governments have made to ratify covenants and conventions. Equally, we don’t have a situation that it’s in the front of the mind of the IMF. In a country like Argentina, where there are problems, is there sufficient consciousness to help such a government that has ratified the covenant on economic, cultural and social rights, or the Convention on the Rights of the Child to carry through on that, and to progressively implement these rights, or is the emphasis all on structural adjustment? So we need “joined up” government that brings the human rights commitment into the WTO.

At the moment, many governments all over the world are joining up to throw human rights overboard as part of the struggle against terrorism using Sept. 11 as an excuse. If you think you’d made progress before, don’t you see lots of it evaporating?

It’s a very serious concern. I was struck last month when we had the annual meeting of the rapporteurs and the coming together of the chairs of the treaty bodies, that all these experts were concerned about the deteriorating situation after Sept. 11. We all recognize the importance of human security, of coalitions against terrorism, of Security Council Resolution 1473 [calling for joint action against terrorism], but nonetheless the impact on the ground is very worrying for human rights. Governments are using it to clamp down on human rights and freedom of expression — human rights defenders branded as terrorists; the harsh climate for asylum seekers and refugees. The worrying thing is that secure democracies such as the U.S. are not holding the standards properly. Just look at the treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, and even more so those who have been arrested under immigration laws with no access to lawyers and no information. Nobody knows exactly what his or her situation is.

You have worked hard to engage China, and you were attacked by some of the Irish press for pandering to the occupiers of Tibet. How successful has your engagement with the Chinese been?

In fact, I was impressed by how far we’ve been able to come since that first visit [to China] in September 1998. When I go back in August for a workshop on the independence of lawyers and judges, it will be my sixth visit as high commissioner. We’ve had an intensive series of workshops with them, on reeducation through labor, on the police and human rights, devising a human rights training manual for the police, on human rights education and to insert human rights values in the [school] curriculum on secondary and tertiary levels.

But I have no illusions. None of this means we have changed things overnight. On the other hand, nor does a technical cooperation program mean that I don’t speak out on human rights issues. Every time I’ve been in China, I’ve been very tough on how they treat the Falun Gong, on their treatment of political dissidents. When I went in November after Sept. 11, I made the point to them that they were using it to be more severe on the Uighur population, branding them as terrorists in a way that had not been done before.

So I take up all these issues: They do say to me now, “We know your habits.” But that being said, I’m impressed with the progress we’ve made. When the Chinese sign a covenant, they do it for Chinese reasons — and they are quite serious about it. So we shouldn’t underestimate what can be done. Even some of the federations, like the All China Federation of Women, are becoming more and more independent and more and more concerned with the rights of women.

Also, the last time I was there they were taking courageous stands as women in their own area to bring home that the denial and stigma attached to HIV/AIDS meant that there would be a rampant HIV/AIDS problem.

One phrase you coined that will surely live on is “the cycle of impunity.” You used it in Central Africa to describe how each person who committed genocide thought they could get away with it because their predecessors had. Has the International Criminal Court put the brake on the cycle, or is it just symbolic?

I really think the ICC is an extraordinary step forward, a very important institution, a way of symbolizing that we are going to end impunity for egregious human rights violations. It may take time, but now there is going to be a permanent court, and you can be brought before it if you haven’t been before a national court.

I really regret, first of all, the “unsigning” of the statute by the United States. You know, we deal with the integrity and strength of what we build up in human rights, and part of it is that when we sign and ratify instruments we stand by them. What the U.S. has done is to create uncertainty. Signing is usually an indication that ratification is on the way. Now if other countries are under pressure on human rights instruments they’ve signed, they may say “Well, the U.S. can unsign a treaty, then so can we.”

Secondly, I found the controversy about peacekeepers to be very sad. The political resolution of it has angered the human rights community, but it’s more important that we get back to strengthening the court. There have been 76 ratifications. Mexico and others are on the way. There will soon be 100 or more.

One of things about the U.N.’s Human Rights Commission in Geneva is that it certainly contains, shall we say, a statistically significant number of human rights offenders: many of them unlikely to rush to ratify the ICC. Even the worst of enemies, like Iran and Iraq, tend to team up there. It must embarrass your office. Can anything be done about that?

It is true that some countries with poor human rights records do try to get onto the commission, to thwart its protection mission. But I’ve emphasized that it’s vital that there be a strong protection role. I also strongly suggested to the commission with both my opening and closing speech in Geneva that membership should mean something to members. It should be open to all members because that’s the U.N. way, but becoming a member of the Human Rights Commission should mean a commitment to put the country in a better shape in ratifying and implementing instruments.

You were a head of state yourself. Has that made it easier to bust the bureaucracy and get things done with countries?

I think I was always clear that I came into this position to do a job, not try to keep a job. I got very wise advice from a friend of mine when I started — “Mary, remember, if you get too popular in that job, it means that you’re not doing a good job.” So I didn’t actively seek to be unpopular, but I knew that to do the job well and bring out what is really the culture of human rights, you have to stand up to bullies, you’ve got to be prepared to criticize both developed and developing countries. When I took issue recently with Australia over their harsh detention policy for asylum seekers, they were outraged — “We’re a democratic country, we don’t need you here” — as if international standards only applied to developing countries. There is that mentality. Whereas if you believe as I do in the integrity of human rights, then they must be applied without fear or favor. And if that’s my legacy, I’m happy about that, that can resonate on, and that’s very encouraging for those who work on the coalface of human rights and risk their lives. The most I risked is being criticized in press or parliaments.

Do you think your successor will have the same flexibility and force?

I hope for as smooth a transition as possible, to be as helpful as possible and then to clear the field for my successor, which is very important … I think there’ll be a lot of encouragement from the international human rights community, and from my own office. It took quite a lot of building up, but I now lead a great team of very dedicated people and that’s the way they want it. And that’s the way the rapporteurs and the human rights NGOs want it, so there will be a lot of encouragement.

Not long after you took office and I spoke to you, you referred to the “terrible bureaucracy” of the U.N. Have you mellowed?

I wouldn’t alter a word of it. There are enormous frustrations with working in the U.N. system, not least that the office of high commissioner does not have control over its own financial position, its own personnel. There are so many bureaucratic ways … a lot of mini managing, which isn’t always well intentioned, but it’s crucial to have a strong human rights voice in the U.N. in the office of the commissioner. But even so, one of things I’ve been very happy with is to see the fruits of this mainstreaming in the wider U.N. system, into the executive committees, into peacekeeping, development, into the work of country teams. They now focus more and more on a rights-based approach to development and poverty reduction.

We have achieved at an initial stage the mandate of mainstreaming, and now it needs to be brought to a deeper stage with the U.N.’s millennium goals for which the office is preparing human rights guidelines. It will be interesting to see if we can make this part of a U.N. that is value-led with a strong human rights input.

President Bush tried to justify the recess appointment by the urgent need to have a permanent representative in place at the United Nations for another 60th anniversary — the summit to commemorate the founding of the international governing institution in 1945. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has tried to put forward a reform package that will guarantee a new lease on life for the organization. Bolton has repeatedly made it plain that he wants it pensioned off. His notorious pre-retirement package for the organization famously included knocking 10 floors off the U.N. headquarters building. His like-minded colleagues in Congress, like Henry Hyde and Norm Coleman, are already trying to bilk the U.N. of half the dues the United States owes. Out of loyalty to the White House, Bolton has not publicly supported the call, but he has hardly repudiated it either, since it is in line with his lifetime’s prejudices. If there is an urgent need to reinvigorate the U.N., then the last person who is “needed” there is Bolton.

There has been loose talk about a Democratic filibuster of his appointment, but that is inaccurate. A filibuster in its strict sense is an attempt to hold off a decision procedurally. The Democrats in the Senate have been raising serious and substantial questions about Bolton’s behavior and suitability for the job — and it is in fact the administration that has been stalling, refusing to release information that, one can only assume, is damning for Bolton, for instance, about his rough ways with anyone who disagrees with his idiosyncratic views of the world.

There is credible evidence that he has commissioned intelligence reports on people in the State Department, and indeed he seems to have at least been in the vicinity of the Valerie Plame leak. In 2003, the State Department’s inspector general questioned Bolton as part of an investigation into the Niger-uranium controversy that led to Plame’s outing — a fact that Bolton conveniently “forgot” when he came before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee earlier this year. If he treats “dissident” civil servants, and indeed his own party colleagues in the administration, as if they were foreign agents when they show insufficient enthusiasm for his obsessions, what does it say about how he will treat actual foreigners when they have the temerity to demur?

If the Democrats were really as partisan as Bush says, and put party affiliation above national interest, they should be overjoyed that as incompetent a diplomat as Bolton would be at the U.N., provoking even greater resistance to Bush’s foreign policies by other nations.

For example, to work successfully on the U.N. Security Council, the U.S. envoy has to, at the very least, win over the other permanent members, let alone any new ones that may be added as a result of Annan’s proposed reforms. Bolton is on record as thinking there should only be one permanent member with a veto: the United States. He has dismissed Europe — which of course includes veto-holders Britain and France — as having had a free lunch at Washington’s expense. And China is unlikely to be impressed that his résumé includes a recent spell as a paid consultant for Taiwan. He may actually have been right about the issue — there are good arguments for U.N. membership for the island nation — but an American ambassador to the U.N. has to spend a lot of time persuading China not to veto resolutions. There may be people better qualified for the task, not least since Bolton, as he once said, does not “do carrots.” Diplomacy is about horse-trading. All stick and no carrot leads to rapid stalemate.

Among Annan’s core proposals, apart from the Security Council reform, are a new Human Rights Council with real teeth, an explicit definition of terrorism as violence against civilians and a definition of the “responsibility to protect,” which would allow the Security Council to intervene in internal affairs to protect civilian populations. The latter should at least provide an occasion for harmony between Bolton and the Russians and Chinese. None of them is particularly enthusiastic about woolly liberal ideas like rescuing populations from genocide. Bolton disagreed with the neoconservatives and opposed U.S. intervention in the Balkans.

Although he is often lumped in with the neocons, he has none of their enthusiasm for spreading democracy or rescuing the victims of tyrants. He does share their commitment to the American right to take unilateral action, but is in fact a paleocon, an American exceptionalist. The only foreign country that he has shown serious signs of affection for, apart from Taiwan, is Israel, particularly in its robust militaristic and unilateral mode, with Likud in control.

Bolton’s distaste for the U.N. has been ominously revealed by recent reports and allegations from insiders at the State Department. Under Democrats, U.N. ambassadors, such as Madeleine Albright, have been included in the Cabinet, while Republicans have traditionally downgraded the position. Even so, equipped as they were with large premises in New York, previous U.S. envoys to the U.N. have only had a small suite in the State Department. Bolton clearly has no intention of being downgraded and has been lobbying for much larger offices at State, since he intends to spend a lot more time in Washington than previous incumbents, away from all those foreigners, one presumes. The expanded State Department office, and the extra time Bolton spends in Washington, will not be spent representing the best interests of the United Nations to the administration.

To look on the bright side, Bolton may even drive a wedge between Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, whose policy on issue after issue is diametrically opposed to Bolton’s public pronouncements.

The appointment also does not bode well for Condoleezza Rice, whose fan club has been applauding her support for Bolton at the U.N. as a cunning move to get him out of the State Department, where he spent the last four years frustrating Colin Powell’s efforts to keep the United States on speaking terms with the rest of the world. The U.N. ambassador is unique among American envoys in that he or she has a high profile domestically, appearing on television every time there is a world crisis. That has caused friction in the past between career diplomats and secretaries of state. On past form, Bolton’s big mouth and small-mindedness are guaranteed to undermine any leanings Rice may have toward maintaining normal diplomatic relations with the rest of the world, including the recent attempt to repackage the “global war on terror” — which so many other countries found indigestible because of its misapplication in the invasion of Iraq — as the “struggle against violent extremism.”

For that rebranding to have credibility, maybe the United States should offer a pact to outlaw chimerical weapons: the entirely spurious weapons threats that Bolton has specialized in reporting in any country that his alma maters, the conservative think tanks Heritage Foundation and American Enterprise Institute, dislike.

For most of the diplomatic corps and the world’s ambassadors, Bush’s message to the U.N. with the Bolton appointment is the same as the famous headline from President Ford to New York: “Drop dead.” Despite their privately expressed shock, it is unlikely that many of the other U.N. ambassadors, let alone the senior U.N. staff, will have the temerity to speak out in public. But in private discussions, they may well relish challenging Bolton’s credentials to speak on behalf of a nation whose legislature has failed to endorse him.

But the real conflict between the colonists and Britain began over taxes on molasses, not tea. And that’s where the French come in. The Founding Fathers not only loved the French, but they also loved the molasses that Paris’ Caribbean colonies produced — and they loved even more the rum that New England distillers made from it.

Years of temperance pressure and Prohibition — and probably the Walt Disney Co. and Hollywood — have essentially shoved the real history of the Revolution down a memory hole, and nowhere is that more apparent than in the iconic Currier & Yves print of Washington’s farewell to his officers.

The 1848 version, above, has the first president hoisting a glass to toast his comrades in arms, with a carafe on the table behind ready for refills. In the 1867 version, below, after 20 years of relentless temperance agitation, the carafe has morphed into a cocked hat, and the president’s glass has disappeared, leaving Washington clutching his lapel in a strange Napoleonic gesture.

New England had an insatiable thirst for molasses, since a gallon of it made a gallon of rum, and the inhospitable lands of the Northeast did not produce enough grain to make whiskey. The colonists drank a lot of the New England rum they produced and sold the rest to the Indians, with devastating social results, or bartered the rum for slaves from West Africa, with equally devastating results there. Benjamin Franklin chillingly put it that “indeed if it be the design of Providence to extirpate these Savages in order to make room for cultivators of the earth, it seems not improbable that Rum may be the appointed means. It has already annihilated all the tribes who formerly inhabited the Sea-Coast.”

However, they could not get molasses from the British colonies in the Caribbean, who used it to make their own — and much better — rum. Franklin actually wrote poetry about punch made with Jamaica rum!

So the colonists got their molasses from the French islands. Paris would not let its colonies produce rum for export lest it compete with French wine and brandy, so the French had a lake of molasses left over from sugar refining.

The ticklish problem was that for much of the 18th century the French and the British were locked in a life-or-death struggle — and no more so than in North America, where the French and their Indian allies posed a constant threat to the British settlers.

However, business is business, and the colonists did not let little details like wars interfere with commerce. They traded with the French enemy throughout the wars being fought for the survival of the American colonies. At one point the British Royal Navy ships based in Jamaica were unable to go to sea because they did not have enough flour to provision themselves, while as British Adm. Augustus Keppel pointed out, the French ships and garrison in Hispaniola had no such difficulties because of “the large supplies they have lately received from their good friends the New England flag of truce vessels,” which sailed there under the guise of returning prisoners.

When New York merchants heard that Britain was about to go to war against France’s ally, Spain, their response was to try to get permission from the governor to sell supplies to the Spanish garrison in Florida quickly, before the official declaration arrived. The end of what is known here as the French and Indian War shaped the modern world. The British chased the French out of North America completely — but they ended up paying a quarter of their GDP in taxes to pay off the deficit that had secured the victory. They thought the colonists should help, and they knew that local officials could be bribed and bullied. So they gave the Navy the job of collecting customs duties on the molasses — and the Navy was not gentle with the colonial merchants who had been trading with the French enemy so recently.

Freed from the French threat, the colonists increasingly regarded the British connection as a burden rather than a protection and ended up welcoming the French fleet and armies to get rid of the British. Even during the war, rum was the lifeblood of the opposing forces. In 1775 Abigail Adams wrote indignantly to her husband that British Gen. Thomas Gage in Boston had “ordered all the molasses to be distilled into rum for the soldiers: taken away all licenses, and given out others, obliging to a forfeiture of ten pounds if any rum is sold without written orders from the General.” Equally concerned with a rum gap, Washington wrote to Congress in 1777 suggesting “erecting Public Distilleries in different States.” He went on to explain, “The benefits arising from the moderate use of strong Liquor have been experienced in all Armies and are not to be disputed.” Indeed, he anticipated modern patriots when in 1781 he complained to Gen. William Heath because the latter was providing French wine to Continental soldiers, when everybody knew that they preferred rum. Washington laid down firmly, “Wine cannot be distributed the Soldiers instead of Rum, except the quantity is much increased. I very much doubt whether a Gill of rum would not be preferred to a pint of small wine.”

New Hampshire rose to the call and levied each town to provide 10,000 gallons of West India rum for the Revolutionary Army. It is ironic that Gen. Washington thought so highly of the martial virtues of rum, since one of his few outright military victories in the field — over the 1,300 Hessians at Trenton, N.J., on Christmas Day 1776 — was reputedly because the enemy was overfortified with the Christmas spirit.

Of course this is all ancient history. But President George Washington made and drank rum in prodigious quantities, and President George W. Bush, like the Taliban, is a total abstainer. Which one would you prefer to lead your country?

Without saying it quite as explicitly as Bolton has said it in the past, the American position was to deny that the treaty has any force over the United States while at the same time demanding that it be applied vigorously against those it has unilaterally nominated as bearings on the “axis of evil.” The Bush administration refused to allow anything else substantial, such as previous American commitments in the treaty and at earlier conferences, onto the agenda.

The failure of the conference led most of its delegates and observers to conclude that the chances of runaway nuclear proliferation are higher than they have been for many decades. Although most countries did not want to add themselves to future putative axes of evil by laying blame explicitly from the rostrum, their speeches and even more their off-podium talk made it clear whom they hold responsible for the failure of the conference: It was above all Washington, in its intransigence and seemingly untrammeled capacity for saying, “Do as we say, not as we do.”

With no such inhibitions, Alice Slater of the anti-nuke organization Abolition 2000 declared, “By refusing even to discuss the commitments it made at past meetings, the U.S. has turned the world of nuclear proliferation into the Wild West, with a complete disrespect for the rule of law. The U.S. delegation is using cowboy politics to sabotage the [treaty] review conference.”

Indeed, she and others accuse the die-hard nuclear hawks in the administration of deliberately trying to provoke North Korea into a nuclear test, since that would make it politically more feasible for the Pentagon to restart its own testing. And of course North Korea’s nuclear ambitions provide the latest excuse trotted out by the administration for expansion of the Strategic Defense Initiative, aka the “Star Wars” program. “They think they are going to bomb [their] way out of proliferation,” Slater comments sardonically.

In 1970, faced with the prospect of dozens of new nuclear states, almost everyone in the world greeted the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty with relief. The only nonsignatories were Israel, India and Pakistan, for reasons that are now all too apparent. With an original term of 25 years, the treaty was basically a deal among the five “public” nuclear powers — Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States — that they would move toward eventual nuclear disarmament in return for the nonnuclear powers staying that way. The nuclear powers also agreed to assist the others in the development of “peaceful” nuclear technology.

When the treaty was expiring in 1995, the Clinton administration tried to extend it indefinitely, without qualifications, but other countries had already become suspicious of the sincerity of the nuclear powers, and in particular of Bill Clinton’s inability to restrain the Pentagon’s fixation on nuclear weaponry. The nonnuclear powers therefore exacted a price for extending the treaty, part of which was a review every five years of how it was working.

Both in 1995 and in 2000, when the first review occurred, the United States joined in a unanimous agreement that included a pledge by all nuclear powers to reduce existing nuclear weapons and to refrain from working on new ones. It also supported a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East. In this year’s review, however, the United States refused even to allow those previous commitments onto the agenda and made it clear that the Bush administration had now “unsupported” them. It now regards these as “historic,” opening the way for other signatories to regard the treaty itself as historic and defunct, since they agreed to extend its 25-year life in return for those commitments.

Specifically, the U.S. delegation refused to allow any discussion of Israel’s nuclear weapons or of the failure of the nuclear states to meet their obligations under the treaty. Instead, the delegation wanted to concentrate on Iran, which, with some justice, claims that its present activities are permitted under the treaty, and North Korea, which had dropped out of the treaty — perhaps following the example of Bolton’s “unsigning” of the International Criminal Court treaty.

Unfortunately for the administration, the news about its plans to weaponize space — also a violation of existing treaties — broke in the middle of the conference. Adding to the undiplomatic signals it is sending the rest of the world, the administration has refused to send the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty to the Senate for ratification, has earmarked billions in preparations for resumed nuclear testing, and has budgeted funds for research on new “bunker-busting” nuclear weapons while continuing to conduct computer simulations of new weapons.

The United States of course has long been complicit in Israel’s and, to a lesser extent, India’s and Pakistan’s becoming nuclear powers. Its reaction to their successful programs has been to try to sell them more conventional weapons, such as planes that can deliver the bombs, and to court them diplomatically.

And while the United States pressures Pakistan to “render” motley Islamists for incarceration, it has failed even to interview Abdul Qadeer Khan, the “father of the Pakistani bomb,” who has spent the past several decades hawking do-it-yourself A-bomb kits around the world in a fashion that makes the al-Qaida threat seem jejune. In convenient amnesia, the Bush administration even seems to have forgotten that his work was originally touted as the “Islamic bomb.”

Nor did it help the administration’s posture that while delegates were considering the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in New York, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s annual convention in Washington was featuring a sort of ghost train touch-and-see exhibit on Iran’s potential for developing nuclear weapons. In contrast, Israel’s estimated nuclear arsenal of more than 200 weapons has gone completely unremarked by anyone in Washington.

The treaty clearly has some holes that need patching, but the Bush administration is ripping off the existing patches, not cooperating in creating new ones. The developments in North Korea highlighted one major flaw. A country can (and indeed did) use the cover of the treaty to build “peaceful” reactors with foreign help and then withdraw from the treaty, as Iran is also threatening to do. The problem is, if you build a nuclear-powered reactor, your byproduct is the fixings for a fission bomb.

Among the patches that the conference could, and probably would, have considered if the majority of countries had had their way are the addition of a no-exit clause and better enforcement and inspection. Some have suggested that a complete ban on enriching uranium may be in order, since there are no serious peaceful purposes for it, but in some ways that would be rendered nugatory by the trade in plutonium that some reactors produce as a byproduct.

Under the circumstances, it is perhaps surprising that more countries have not followed the nuclear path. In an otherwise gloomy outlook, the one bright spot of the conference review is that so many signatories so sincerely want it to succeed — even though the country that blusters most about nonproliferation sabotaged the conference so successfully.

All in all, it was a fitting curtain raiser for Bolton’s likely new job, since his publicly stated peculiar views on international law, and his previous job performance as head of the State Department’s disarmament affairs desk, are in large measure responsible for driving the North Koreans to nuclear weapons and for getting the Iranians to think wistfully about them. As the old curse has it, we face interesting times, certainly more so than in any period since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Rarely has a nominee been damned with such faint praise by his own party. Indeed, from their public disquiet about Bolton’s qualifications, we must assume that only the deepest party loyalties — or the fear that Karl Rove would put the severed head of their favorite horses in their beds while they slept — kept the likes of Lincoln Chafee, Chuck Hagel, George Voinovich and Lugar from outright rebellion.

It was reported late Thursday that Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., had put a “hold” on the nomination, raising the stakes for the White House, which will now need 60 senators to toe the line to push Bolton through. The lack of endorsement by the Foreign Relations Committee will make that even more difficult.

Appropriately enough for someone whom former Sen. Jesse Helms once looked forward to having at his side at Armageddon, Bolton’s nomination could be tied into the Republicans’ “nuclear option” aimed at ending the filibuster in the Senate.

In the course of these protracted hearings, the sound of silence from some quarters has been almost deafening. While previous GOP secretaries of state have been rolled out in support, Colin Powell has not said a public word in favor of the man whom Dick Cheney planted as a fifth column in the State Department.

And notably, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has said absolutely nothing to dispel the stories that he and other Europeans adamantly refused to allow Bolton’s participation in any of the multilateral talks with the various states that Bolton had designated as part of his eccentrically shaped “axis of evil.”

The old description of a diplomat as someone “sent abroad to lie for his country” is doubly inappropriate for ambassador-in-waiting Bolton. He will be dissimulating in New York, and based on past form, he will truly, deeply and sincerely believe every whopper he comes out with.

In the welter of accusations about whether he tried to browbeat, bully or transfer intelligence analysts, the committee seems to have lost track of the most salient point: He was wrong on the intelligence issues in question. Cuba did not have a biological weapons program; Syria was not hosting the “missing” WMD from Iraq.

Nor could he be, as his supporters have claimed, a strong representative of America in the world forum. In his own clumsy way, Bolton has epitomized the administration’s habit of inventing facts to back up preconceived policies and prejudices. Most Americans do not want more nuclear weapons, fewer inspections for chemical and biological weapons or more unregulated trade in small arms, as the Bush administration’s policies would lead one to believe. And if Americans knew the truth about the International Criminal Court, which Bolton and the U.S. have done so much to try to sabotage, they might even think that this much improved sequel to the Nuremburg trials represented a good thing.

The classic model for strong diplomacy is Teddy Roosevelt’s, which has a lot of validity: “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” Bolton clearly fails on the first point, and may not be as well endowed on the second as he pretends.

One relishes the prospect of a blustery Bolton, once a paid lobbyist for Taiwan, going to the Chinese ambassador on the U.N. Security Council to try to exercise his powers of persuasion and being asked, “Mr. Bolton, when do you want us to start selling the U.S. Treasury bonds that we own half of? Would this week or next week be the best time to trash the dollar? Or shall we just use our veto?”

President Bush has to be congratulated for inadvertently doing so much to improve Americans’ public consideration of foreign policy. Consider: In the Foreign Relations Committee the Democrats held firm from beginning to end, which is a much rarer event than conservative accusations of liberal partisan bias would have you believe.

One could be cynical and assume that one reason for such uncommon backbone is that no major domestic commercial lobbies had a dog in this fight. But certainly the legislators were also genuinely and sincerely appalled that the United States would be misrepresented abroad in such a public global forum by a bad-tempered, isolationist bigot like Bolton.

Significantly, the “grass-roots” conservatives who campaigned for Bolton by showering senators with e-mails and postcards did not do so on the “official” White House grounds that a now even-tempered and suave Bolton would help reform the world organization. They were pretty much the same people who want the United States to pull out of the U.N., for a variety of kooky reasons. In fact, the polls showed that the Democrats had called it right: An overwhelming majority of Americans opposed the nomination. (Polls have also shown a degree of support for the United Nations that you would never suspect from listening to the GOP’s representatives in Washington or to guests on conservative talk shows.)

While it would be easy to condemn Republican senators for not voting their consciences and blocking a nomination that had made many of them so visibly uneasy, we should also celebrate this first and most public revolt, no matter how low-key, by moderate Republicans against the members of the radical right that have taken over their party. We can assume that they too were watching those polls before breaking ranks.

If, as is far from certain, Bolton ever does find his way to the East River in New York, Democratic senators and their wobbly Republican colleagues on the Foreign Relations Committee have at least sent a message to the world that should help American self-esteem. Their resistance and visible distaste clearly signal that John Bolton does not represent Americans, at the U.N. or anyone else.

Along with his own lack of diplomacy, that will make him a broken arrow if he ever is fired in the direction of the U.N. When he stamps his feet and threatens to scream, scream, scream unless he gets his own way, other countries’ diplomats will simply shrug and say, “There, there, have your tantrum,” as they ask their aides to call Condoleezza Rice. Far from allowing him to wield a “big stick” to advance White House policy, the non-aye-sayers have ensured that Bolton’s diplomatic weaponry — if employed — will be distinctively detumescent.

It is emblematic that among the few actual changes he recommends to the text of the U.N. Charter are the deletion of its clauses penalizing Germany and Japan and the abolition of the Military Staff Joint Committee that was supposed to coordinate operations against any resurgence by those nations. The committee has met every two weeks for all those decades without making a single decision, and the “former enemy powers” are expected to be invited to join the former victors as permanent members of the U.N. Security Council.

Instead of rewriting the charter — which would almost certainly lead to a weaker document than the briefly united Allies could achieve in 1945 — what Annan proposes is in effect a reinterpretation of the charter to meet modern circumstances. Instead of being primarily about avoiding a repetition of World War II, he suggests that the United Nations should now focus on the new threats to peace.

In the biggest reinterpretation, he asks the Security Council, in place of the traditional sacrosanctity of national sovereignty, to deem mass murder, repression and ethnic cleansing to be threats to international peace and security that the international community has the right to intervene to stop — and to adopt a set of principles to ensure that such intervention takes place only when there is no other option.

In another bold step, he proposes a succinct definition of terrorism and the creation of an international convention against it, along with strengthened controls on weapons to stop terrorists from getting their hands on them.

In case you think that’s easy, remember that diplomats have been tying themselves in knots over a definition of terrorism since even before Sept. 11, 2001. The Bush administration’s apparent working definition of terrorists as people whom we do not like who use violence leaves as much to be desired as definitions that justify any act as long as it is aimed against imperialism.

Annan’s definition cuts across talk about liberation struggles and state terrorism and states, “Any action constitutes terrorism if it is intended to cause death or serious bodily harm to civilians or non-combatants with the purpose of intimidating a population or compelling a Government or an international organization to do or abstain from doing any act.” Replying to critics who say this neglects misdeeds by governments, he notes that those are already covered by the Geneva Conventions and similar international laws against war crimes.

He also wants a more effective, and tyranny-free, Human Rights Council, to replace the current Human Rights Commission (whose members have included notorious violators of human rights), and new attention to building democracy and reconstructing failed states. While many developed countries have already called for such changes, Annan recognizes that a large majority of the world body still needs convincing, so he presents the package of reforms as a “deal” between the blocs of members. The developed world and the United States get what they’ve been asking for, in return for agreeing to put truth in the promises they made to the developing world five years ago about meeting specified goals to reduce poverty and underdevelopment with direct aid, loan forgiveness and an end to trade barriers, and to help combat AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis.

As Annan says eloquently in his report, “We will not enjoy development without security, we will not enjoy security without development, and we will not enjoy either without respect for human rights.”

The most visible change would be in the membership of the Security Council, a reform that will get far more attention than it merits, since most of the report is rightly concerned about what the existing members of the Security Council (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, the United States and 10 temporary members) and the General Assembly do and how they do it. Annan proposes two alternatives, both of which would increase the size of the council by nine seats. Plan A calls for six new permanent members — which would not have vetoes — and three new members elected for two-year, nonrenewable terms. Plan B envisions eight new “semi-permanent” members elected for four-year, renewable terms and one new temporary member.

Many U.N. members would like to do away with the veto, but the world war that gave us a Catch-22 in fiction also gave us one in fact. The five existing veto holders can veto any attempt to remove their veto, and adding six new vetoes would not make the council any more efficient.

The dilemma U.N. experts confronted in adding new council members was that Japan pays almost as much in dues as the United States does, and Germany pays more than four existing permanent members do, but since existing veto holders can’t be shifted, just adding new permanent members would leave the “South” even more underrepresented than it already is. There is a growing consensus on adding Japan, Germany, Brazil and India as permanent members, but the two proposed African seats are hotly contested, with Egypt, Nigeria, South Africa and Kenya angling for them.

Annan does not want the reform package to be held prisoner to the United Nations’ traditional preference for “consensus.” He suggests that these and other proposals be adopted by a two-thirds majority if necessary, since otherwise they might be held hostage by jealous states who were not nominated for permanent seats.

Adding to his case, Annan tactfully but accurately points out that the General Assembly, in which the developing countries have enough votes to call the shots, has failed in many respects to exercise its authority and has allowed itself to be marginalized, for example, by adopting resolutions that are watered down to ineffectuality in search of consensus.

With the arrival of unilateralist John Bolton at the United Nations, and possibly of interventionist Paul Wolfowitz at the World Bank, the time may not seem propitious for non-American interpretations of what the United States has said it wants, but Annan’s proposals are like Goldilocks’ porridge for most of the democratic world — just right. Canada, Europe, Japan, Latin America, South Africa and others are likely to broadly agree with almost everything in the report. Those who may need persuasion are China and other persistent human rights offenders jealous of their sovereignty — and some decision makers in Washington.

While some will see pandering to neo-imperial pretensions in Annan’s proposals to have the Security Council explicitly accept principles for humanitarian intervention, the John Boltons of this world will see its obverse — an attempt to set limits on U.S. action without Security Council approval, like the invasion of Iraq. Equally, one can doubt that the report’s robust support for the Kyoto Protocol and other measures against climate change, for the International Criminal Court, and for the land-mine and small-arms conventions is exactly what Bolton and his colleagues in the Pentagon have in mind when they talk about U.N. reform. Nor will the call for developed countries to send 0.7 percent of their gross domestic product in aid to developing countries exactly be music to congressional ears: That would involve a fivefold increase in current levels of U.S. aid, which have already risen since their low point under President Clinton.

American observers looking at the mire-storm that has been directed at Annan in the U.S. media may wonder at his powers of persuasion. Indeed, much of the news coverage in the United States has implied that the reform package is in some way an attempt to evade current charges against him and the U.N., such as allegations of mismanagement of the oil-for-food program in Iraq and sexual misconduct by U.N. peacekeepers. In fact, these proposals were signaled five years ago at the U.N. Millennium Summit and have been developing ever since.

In most of the rest of the world Annan’s prestige is undiminished — and it is worth remembering that the White House did not join the conservative feeding frenzy on the oil-for-food allegations. It still needs the U.N.’s help in Iraq, and is trying to enlist it against Iran and Syria, Bolton’s scorn notwithstanding.

In any case, Annan is not relying on his powers of persuasion alone. One of the purposes of the proposed deal is to get U.S. allies like Tony Blair to pressure the White House to go along with the package before the 60th anniversary summit at the U.N. headquarters in New York this September so that it can be ratified at that time. It would be silly to be too optimistic, but there are few such opportunities for a genuine change in how “we the peoples of the united nations” conduct our global affairs, and this package has a joint appeal to both altruism and self-interest — which often prove more potent than either on its own.