As for Amb. John R.Bolton, who is now the National Security Advisor of the United States, please refer to my previous postings (http://d.hatena.ne.jp/itunalily2/archive?word=John+Bolton). Regarding the editor, Dr. Adam Garfinkle, I listened to his lecture in Kyoto a few years ago (http://d.hatena.ne.jp/itunalily2/20151118)(http://d.hatena.ne.jp/itunalily/20151119)(http://d.hatena.ne.jp/itunalily/20160718). (Lily)
Foreign Policy Research Institute（https://www.fpri.org/contributor/adam-garfinkle/）
Member - FPRI Board of Advisors
Senior FellowAdam Garfinkle is a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and serves on its Board of Advisors. He is founding editor of The American Interest. Before founding The American Interest in 2005, he served in 2003-05 as principal speechwriter to the Secretary of State (S/P, Policy Planning). He has also been editor of The National Interest and has taught at the School for Advanced International Studies (SAIS), the Johns Hopkins University, the University of Pennsylvania, Haverford College and other institutions of higher learning. Dr. Garfinkle served as a member of the National Security Study Group (as chief writer) of the U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century (the Hart-Rudman Commission), and as an aide to Senator Henry M. Jackson. A widely published scholar, he has received awards and grants from the U.S. Department of State, the Fulbright Fellowship Program, the American Academy in Berlin, the German Marshall Fund, the United States Institute of Peace, and the Moshe Dayan Center for the Study of Middle Eastern and African Affairs (Tel Aviv University). Dr. Garfinkle’s most recent book is Jewcentricity: How the Jews Get Praised, Blamed and Used to Explain Nearly Everything (Wiley, 2009). His Telltale Hearts: The Origin and Impact of the Vietnam Antiwar Movement (St. Martin’s) was named a “notable book of the year” (1995) in the New York Times Book Review. Among Dr. Garfinkle’s publications are several on Jewish subjects. He also publishes an occasional fiction or humor piece.
Dr. Garfinkle received his Ph.D. in international relations from the University of Pennsylvania.
(End)
American Interest（https://www.the-american-interest.com/2007/03/01/exit-interview-john-bolton/）
Volume 2, Number 4
1 March 2007
John Bolton
On January 10, 2007, TAI editor Adam Garfinkle sat with the outgoing U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations to discuss political philosophy, foreign policy and bureaucratic craft.
(The following is a lightly-edited transcript.)
The American Interest: To get us started, tell us a bit about your background—home, school and the like.
John Bolton: I come from a working class family in Baltimore, which gave me most of the values I still have now: hard work and patriotism most of all. I progressed through a fairly standard educational route: public schools, college and then law school, after which I practiced law here in Washington. But I’ve always been interested in political philosophy, even in junior high school, and over the years I’ve followed that interest in one way or another. Even when I was practicing law, a lot of what I did was constitutional law. I was one of the lawyers in the Buckley v. Valeo case in 1976, for example—the challenge to the post-Watergate financial reform laws.
And I’ve always been interested in international affairs, too. As a high schooler looking to apply to colleges and as an undergraduate at Yale, too, I considered a career in the Foreign Service. Though I eventually became a lawyer and never entered the Foreign Service, I retained an interest in foreign policy and was fortunate enough to be able to follow through on that, beginning with the Reagan Administration, then in a series of other jobs, and then with both the Bush 41 and Bush 43 Administrations.
TAI: What influential persons or books sent a shiver up your spine when you were young?
John Bolton: As for a lot of people in my generation, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, which I read as a kid, had a big influence on me. But so did Adam Smith, John Locke and Edmund Burke. Also, I was a volunteer in the Goldwater campaign in 1964—my first real lesson in politics. It was a very salutary lesson, too, because Goldwater was humiliated, but that didn’t turn me off politics. It only made me a more determined libertarian conservative. At Yale in the late 1960s, the campus climate was not exactly conducive to conservative thought, and that just hardened my attitude further. I’d say it prepared me well for the State Department in later years.
TAI: Let’s talk about the times before the 2000 election for a moment. You were in the Bush 41 Administration State Department, the IO [International Organizations] bureau, right? What did you learn from that and other pre-Bush 43 experiences about the nature of the policy process?
John Bolton: I’ve had the advantage of being in several different positions. I was at the White House at the beginning of the Reagan Administration; then at USAID; then I worked for Dick Thornberg at the Justice Department; then I stayed with [Secretary of State] James Baker from Bush 41 to Bush 43. So I saw different bureaucracies under different presidents. One thing I learned was that to have a maximum impact on policy, it’s important to go into bureaucracies that don’t initially seem to be very friendly places. For example, at the start of Bush 43 in January 2001, many of my friends wanted to go to the Defense Department, or stay on the NSC staff at the White House. I knew immediately that I wanted to go to the State Department, because that was the place needing the greatest degree of change. That’s where the greatest challenges would be. The experience of being a conservative at Yale, and other earlier experiences, too, taught me that you can effect the maximum degree of policy change in perhaps the least likely environments.
TAI: We’ll come back to Bush 43, but first let’s discuss an issue that concerned you when you were not in government: the International Criminal Court. As I recall, you weren’t fond of the idea in general, and even less fond of U.S. participation in it—but your reasons were not only or mainly the conventional ones: danger to American servicemen overseas, or the theatrics of high U.S. and allied officials being sued and harassed for political purposes. You emphasized the ICC’s lack of democratic accountability. Has your critique mellowed, seeing as how the dire predictions made by some opponents of the ICC really have not come true?
John Bolton: What I predicted for the ICC were two radically different futures. One was that it could become very powerful and dangerous; the other was that it could become almost irrelevant, like the International Court of Justice, which was created at the same time as the UN. So far, the second alternative turns out to be the more accurate prediction, but that doesn’t necessarily tells us what the ICC will be like forty, fifty or a hundred years from now. The concern I had was that the ICC—not so much the court itself as the prosecutor—represented the creation of a potential source of enormous power that was not elected by anyone, and that had no democratic accountability whatsoever, even indirectly. I thought the creation of that sort of power without being tied to any democratic base was a real threat, and I continue to believe that.
This goes to an issue that is not well understood—in academic circles, certainly, but even among policy professionals in the United States and overseas—and that’s the concept of sovereignty. Sovereignty is not an abstraction, in America at least. Sovereignty is a reflection of the will of the people. Sovereignty is not an abstraction, in America at least. Sovereignty is a reflection of the will of the people. In America, the people are sovereign—not a monarch or a distant government. We are sovereign. So infringements on our sovereignty have a direct impact on our control over our own government and governments that deal with us. That’s what I was concerned about as much as anything: the transfer of potential authority over us without our having the ability to bring it to account.
TAI: But you’re not against sharing sovereignty in alliances or other inter-governmental alliances when that advances American interests, are you?
John Bolton: It’s a question of what leaves power with the United States. An alliance can be a very effective way of enhancing our security and our reach in the world. I think the difference is between—and this is a crude distinction, admittedly—intergovernmental organizations, on the one hand, and super-governmental organizations on the other. It is one thing to have the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico; it’s another thing to create a European Commission in Brussels, or any of the various predecessor organizations that were either super-national organizations or aspired to become such. If European nations want to do that with their sovereignty, that’s up to them;although it’s not so clear that European national electorates want in fact to do that. For the United States, it is not at all unnatural to be concerned with conglomerations of power like the ICC that are often not even accountable to their member governments, let alone to the citizens of their members.
TAI: So accountability is the standard by which we should judge and select the array of items on the global governance menu?
John Bolton: Accountability and legitimacy, because under our system legitimacy comes only from the people. There’s no airy sense of legitimacy out there in the international system for most Americans, as there is for many Europeans, who have an almost natural law sense of legitimacy.
TAI: So, to take one example, the International Bank of Settlements is an organization that is very effective, in part because it bears a low political profile. That’s an intergovernmental organization, so that’s fine.
John Bolton: Right, and look at the International Postal Union, created in the mid-19th century, or, more recently, the International Civil Aviation Association—
TAI: Or the International Organization on Migration?
John Bolton:—another excellent example, right. None of these organizations purports to have a reach beyond its specific mission, and one reason they’re successful is that they don’t try to expand their mission or politicize it. They’re single-minded in their approach to problem-solving. We need those organizations, and we will probably need more of them as the world becomes more integrated. But that’s a different need and a different model of effectiveness and legitimacy from what has happened over the years at the UN itself, which is best described by what many people call the “norming” function—namely, the idea of basing international order not on the cooperative decisions of sovereigns but on super-governmental institutions based on transnational norms. Many people view this in a very positive light; I view it very negatively.
TAI: One more question about the ICC: There’s been a little give in U.S. foreign policy recently with respect to the ICC, and it has had to do with Sudan—specifically with Darfur. What’s your take on this: a sensible tactical adjustment under difficult circumstances or a slippery slope where we should not have set foot?
John Bolton: The practical consequences of what we did with the Darfur resolution you are referring to, Resolution 1706, are not great, but they do represent a foot on the slippery slope. It is not intellectually acceptable to say that it’s okay to prosecute Africans, but not okay to prosecute Americans. That was one of the arguments made by those in our own government who wanted to agree to the resolution—that it’s not going to have any effect on us or on our service people. That, to me, is not a compelling argument, because it does not address the illegitimacy of the ICC itself.
In addition, I think that a number of other countries, including some of our friends represented in New York, saw that they had the Bush Administration in a tough predicament. They put us in a contradictory position, where to get them to lean forward on Darfur, we had to swallow ICC involvement. There wasn’t a good alternative for us, and they knew it. During my time at the UN, this was one of the things I concentrated on avoiding—having even our good friends in New York put us in a similarly impossible positions on other issues.
(To be continued.)
