Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations | John Bolton

Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations | John Bolton | Bolton for President!

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Surrender Is Not a...

	Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations John Bolton Threshold Editions, 2007 - 496 pages average customer review:based on 54 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A great patriot tells it like it is. Recommended.

There are basically two groups of people in this country, when it comes to the big topic of relations with allies, the UN, and US global diplomacy.

One group feels we need to "reach out" to allies and listen to them before formulating policy (or, perhaps just do what they want, so they'll stop hating us), respect and follow "international law", and for the most part, subordinate our considerable power to international institutions, which mostly means the United Nations.

The other group believes there is no such thing as "international law", it being a catchy buzzword for a collection of politics, largely unenforceable treaties, and anti-US "norming" by non-state actors; no such thing as an "international community", an absurd construct that implies a a global "consensus" which doesn't exist but from which we're constantly accused of being "isolated"; that yes, of course we should have allies and friends but pleasing them should not come before defending and promoting our own national interests, and that the UN is a corrupt and unaccountable bureaucracy which oscillates between "total uselessness" and "serious liability to the United States" - an organization that, if we're going to continue participating in at all, should at least be forced to serve as a useful tool of American interests, as was clearly the intent at its founding.

Of course, those are opposite ends of a continuum, and there are many people in the middle.

John Bolton, former US Ambassador to the UN, is the world's leading proponent of the latter camp - the UN skeptics who don't necessarily think we should ditch the UN, but who do believe strongly that we should be leveraging the UN to extend American power, and should more strenuously fight the UN's ongoing evolution into the key global collection point for anti-US propaganda and policy.

If you are already a Boltonite (as I am, obviously), you will not only find this book convincing and authentic, but hugely refreshing, too, in confirming what you believe, backing it up with facts and the "inside scoop", and articulately stating the fundamental arguments against US submission to the UN or "international community" agenda. I have so many times asked myself questions like: Why exactly do we care what Belgium thinks? What specifically is an "international community", and where does it live? What gives the UN, an unelected colony of bureaucrats who we don't get to choose, evaluate, hold accountable, or fire, the right to pass judgment on or influence the policies chosen by democratic peoples via their elected representatives (in the US and elsewhere)? Is that not completely antithetical to the basic thrust of history since the 18th century - power to free people, expressed through their elected officials? Aside from the dismal practices of the UN, even the underlying theory of the UN is such a huge step backwards: subordination and gradual erosion of the sovereignty of freely-elected governments to a secretive, unelected elite. That should bother people a lot more than it does, and is a point made very articulately and persuasively in Bolton's book. Finally, UN skeptics ask what all those UN committees, memoranda, reports, "high level groups", "special rapporteurs", etc. etc., actually accomplish - would the world be any worse off if it was all just tossed in the garbage? With so many people, worldwide and in the US, too, supporting the UN monstrosity, it's easy to feel self-doubt as a UN skeptic, because not many of us have the self-confidence and knowledge-base of a John Bolton. Well, this book will get like-minded people back on track and confident that, yes, in fact, the special rapporteurs and high level groups and UN special committees - all of it is a bunch of pointless nonsense, or worse, basically a way for second-rate European powers to regain through soft power and "norming" what they've already lost in the arena of hard power, combined with a way for thousands upon thousands of anti-US bureaucrats all over the world to come together in one place to do some serious US ankle-biting, and maybe score some gains for their own countries' or regions' interests while harranguing us for pursuing our own. All under the banner of the UN, with its post-WW2 legitimacy and grandeur which we bestowed on it, and continue to fund. And house.

If you are one of the "We need to work with the International Community" or "we need to respect international humanitarian law" (whatever that is!) crowd, you'll probably disagree with most of this book, or just plain not understand what the heck Bolton is talking about.

It's a damn shame Bolton's out of the US government. It really is. He is a unique individual with a powerful voice. Without him, the current administration is adrift. He was the antidote to the sappy, Europhile lefists running the State Department, along with a third or so of the US public, who are falling all over themselves trying to meet an impossible, insatiable global demand for apologetic regret on the part of the US for being what it is - successful, powerful, and dominant. I highly recommend this book to people who want to learn the real deal about Bolton and the incredibly tedious, and implacably obnoxious, American-power-sucking institution known as the United Nations.

P.S. I was quite taken aback by how funny this book is. Bolton has some superbly witty and humorous observations on many topics in government and diplomacy, and especially, as you'd expect, the United Nations. I literally laughed out loud at least a dozen times. Sounds strange, but it's true. There's just a level of poignant directness in this book that leads to some very amusing and telling observations about politics.

I start many, many books on current events and politics, but I rarely finish them, usually getting bored after around 100-150 pages. This book - I read every single word on every page, and I'm going to go back and reread it.

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Bolton for President!

Occams' Razor is an argument which suggests that the simplest explanation for an event or mystery is almost always the explanation which turns out to be true. With this in mind, when one reads Bolton's book, one begins to see that there is such clarity here--such straightforward explanations (and solutions) for the problems which the United States faces in our dealings with other nations and the UN--that to believe any other version of events would be to invite levels of complexity and absurdity which simply do not and cannot apply.

This book is a triumph of logic and reason over the forces which threaten us all.

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A good book about the UN from a recent US ambassador to it

John Bolton has written an interesting book about his adventures at the United Nations. Of course, he's a conservative and I am a liberal, so I found plenty of places where I disagreed with his views. But I still like the book.

As an example of where I disagree with the author, Bolton says that the Supreme Court, "quite correctly, as a matter of law" ended the 2000 election in Bush's favor. But it is very difficult to believe that the Supreme Court would have made a decision anything like that had the political situation been reversed! I think this shows a side of advocacy that is counterproductive in the long run.

Bolton did try to defend American interests at the UN, and he did try to encourage some reform there. One idea that he strongly favors is "voluntary funding," which would indeed reduce some of the less useful UN programs.

The author tells of some of the problems he encountered in trying to get the UN to respond reasonably to threats from an Iran which is building nuclear weapons as well as delivery systems for them, from North Korea, and from the Sudan (which is engaging in genocide in Darfur). In addition, he tells of the new Human Rights Council, a failed attempt to reform the disgraced Human Rights Commission. As Bolton says of the US State Department as an institution, it likes the UN but does not "like it enough to fix it."

Bolton argues that the United States ought to stay in the United Nations and that we ought to try to advance our interests there. I think that is a long-term error, and I think it shows a fundamental error of conservative thinking to try to turn such a counterproductive organization into one that might benefit us.

I know that my liberal counterproposal may appear more extreme than anything Bolton (or possibly anyone else) would dream of. And it may take centuries to fulfill. But here it is.

The United Nations is not a world government, but it does represent the opinions of some people. In a sense, it represents what ought to be the Decent Opinion of Mankind, but is in fact more like the Indecent Opinion of Mankind. It's out of line, and if a world government were based on it, that government would quickly degenerate into a counterproductive global tyranny.

What does one do in such a situation? Well, we can, in effect, disobey the UN, sometimes by using our veto in the Security Council and sometimes by simply defying it. But in the long run, it will not work to break rules that are voted for by the majority of a group we appear to endorse. I'd prefer to use diplomacy to make our use of the veto unnecessary.

Another option is to withdraw from the UN, but even then, we would appear to accept the UN as expressing some sort of decent opinion of Mankind, even if by our non-membership, we were not bound by it. In the long run, we would still have to submit to most of what it decreed. We would still look as if we were breaking international laws, whether we were a member of the UN or not.

My choice, even if it takes a very long time, is to outlaw the UN. Only in such a manner do I think we can get away from being regarded as criminals for simply behaving ourselves. I know that it will be decades or centuries before there is the slightest hope of accomplishing this, but for the sake of human civilization, I think it needs to be done.

In spite of my fundamental disagreement with Bolton about what our long range goals ought to be with respect to the UN, I think he does make some good points in this book:

1) The United States Mission to the United States is supposed to report to Washington on what the United Nations is doing, not to argue the UN's case.

2) There is a serious problem among diplomats involving advocacy (sometimes great advocacy) of the interests of the country or region for which the diplomat is responsible. Again, the UN is not the client of the US mission to the UN; the US itself is the client.

3) The UN is unable to agree on a definition of terrorism, in part because so much of it approves of terrorism against Israel.

4) We should take the words of the UN seriously.

5) "In the UN world resentment is actually much more likely against the country that is reasonable rather than the opposite. After all, if you can't pressure the unreasonable country, why not pressure the reasonable one?"

6) In the absence of two superpowers which the Third World could play off against each other, "accumulating goodies in the process," kicking Israel has become "one of the few enjoyable pastimes left."

7) Diplomacy always entails benefits and costs. The costs of engaging in diplomacy include "legitimizing outlaw regimes and giving them political acceptability and increased opportunities for propaganda and disinformation." Should the US have engaged Arafat? Bolton tells of Colin Powell asking "Who else am I supposed to talk to?" Bolton's reply is "Sometimes, the answer is `silence is golden.'"

8) UN officials may have made some mistakes, but one of the worst was a speech by Mark Malloch Brown, who attacked the American people in a rather undiplomatic manner (and, I would add, topped this by demanding more money from America).

I found this book fascinating and I recommend it.

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Duty

I put off reading Surrender Is Not an Option as I had much reading in front of me when your book came out. I always hoped our country would dump the UN in the dust bin of history and I didn't need to provoke my anger reading about that sewer. Finally, deciding the read was a duty of citizenship; I started the read yesterday and finished this morning. I couldn't put it down! I haven't encountered so many slim balls since I flushed my pet rabbit's crap down the toilet as a kid. And I thought America Alone was the best book I read this year! Thank you John Bolton!

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How socialists in the US State Department and the UN undermine world safety

John Bolton's book, "Surrender is Not an Option," provides a detailed, some might say mind-numbing, insider look at the inner workings of the State Department and the United Nations. The mind-numbing aspect is the number of repetitious efforts the few conservatives at State, as represented by Bolton and others, to implement the reasonable policies of a conservative US president were obstructed and defied by Marxist-oriented bureaucracies at that agency and the UN. These traitors torpedoed all efforts at implementing foreign policy initiatives favorable to the US and then criticized Bush when his policies failed (this certainly includes the Marxists in the Democratic Party leadership in and out of Congress and the Senate). Bolton documents these processes with a detailed report of his knowledge of such chicanery in a book that I could hardly put down because it was so interesting and revealing. For example, conservatives and Republicans will be interested in the vignettes regarding General Powell and the contrast in Rice's views between the 1st and 2nd terms of "W's" administration, as well as the descriptions of Annan and others at the UN.

However, the overall mood that overcame me after concluding the book was one of depression and near despair at the way strong foreign policy efforts to protect ourselves and our allies were repeatedly defeated and watered down to nothing but stale platitudes by both our many enemies (inside our own government as well as at the UN), and our "allies" (China, Russia, France, Germany and the UK), leading inexorably to the possession of nuclear weapons by Saddam (See "Shattering Conventional Wisdom About Saddam's WMD's" by John Loftus, FrontPageMagazine.com, 11/16/2007 for the evidence of Saddam's nuclear program, stored in huge vaults under the Euphrates river and removed to Syria by the Russians as the allies invaded Iraq). Other nuclear nations include North Korea, Iran, and Syria all sponsoring state terrorism. There can be no doubt but what many of these regimes are perfectly willing to sell nuclear weapons and missile delivery systems to terrorists and that they have already been engaging in such weapons sales throughout the Clinton and Bush 43 administrations. Bush 43 tried valiantly to stop these practices, with some notable successes, but again, many of his initiatives were destroyed by the State Department and the Democrats in Congress.

For conservatives, the State Department and UN are issues that should be addressed by any presidential candidate in 2008 and in a very serious way. Bolton provides a chapter of recommendations regarding the destructive cultures of both that should be read and reread by anyone concerned about US foreign policy and US initiatives to make the world a safer place (Bolton's discussion of the difficulties of getting out of the ABM treaty of 1972 provide insight into how "W" has been attempting to protect the US). In Evan Stanton's new book, Blacklisted by History (see this authors review of that book), he presents overwhelming evidence that the State Department, since the earliest FDR administration, has been riddled with communists and Marxists - no conservative will doubt that this is largely the same culture as exists currently at Foggy Bottom as documented by Bolton where socialists and the hard left are busily chipping away at American sovereignty and like squirrel's hoarding nuts, ferociously busy at aiding our enemies. No conservative President or Congress can hope to implement any tough foreign policy and counter-terrorism measures without a complete overhaul of the State Department, which will have to consist of replacing socialists with Conservatives of either the Democratic or Republican parties. We must get a significant number of conservative voices in the State Department and its top leadership. If nothing else, this is one of the most important points Bolton makes and he deserves great credit for doing so. If we don't accomplish this task, all conservative foreign policy is largely doomed.

The culture at the UN is even more toxic than that of State and this comes as no surprise to conservatives and most Americans who loath this bureaucracy and wonder why our political leaders, both Democrat and Republican continue to suck the life blood out of American Taxpayers to waste trillions on an ineffective, incompetent, destructive, corrupt institution that rather than helping citizens of the world actively seeks to subvert the industrial democracies and replace them with "global, socialized governments." As Bolton makes perfectly clear, most of the countries in the UN general assembly are anti-American and view the only role of the US in the world as to extract tax money from the American Citizen and give it to, not necessarily their countries, but to the UN Representatives themselves, who live a mighty cushy existence in New York City all the while they spit in America's face. It's no wonder that Bolton titles one of his chapters "Sisyphus in the Twilight Zone: Fixing the Broken Institution, or Trying To." My conclusion, at the end of the book, was the US would be far better off completely withdrawing all funding and involvement with the UN and creating an organization of The Industrial Democracies. The only 2008 candidate to address the UN, as far as I know, has been Rudy Giuliani, who wrote a piece for Foreign Affairs, September-October 2007 Issue, in which he didn't envision the UN as providing any significant role in the world in future years, except perhaps, for Humanitarian Efforts, although it has failed at most of those, one only has to consider Darfur, Lebanon, and Bosnia in that regard. Obviously, Giuliani has been a careful observer of the UN and, in my opinion, would resist being used by the organization, as Bush 43 has tried to do.

The reader who finishes this book, may or may not agree with Bolton's recommendations, but it won't be because the arguments were not powerfully presented with endless documentation, it will be because of an a priori decision to savage the book out of a commitment to Marxism, or in the case of Republicans, globalism and "The New World Order." I highly recommend this book.

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