Policy? That's so ... Clinton-era. There was an illuminating article in Monday's Washington Post that I'm surprised hasn't gotten more attention in Blogovia, what with the fight over John Bolton heating up again and all:

For years, a key U.S. program intended to keep Russian nuclear fuel out of terrorist hands has been frozen by an arcane legal dispute. As undersecretary of state, John R. Bolton was charged with fixing the problem, but critics complained he was the roadblock.

Now with Bolton no longer in the job, U.S. negotiators report a breakthrough with the Russians and predict a resolution will be sealed by President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin at an international summit in Scotland next month, clearing the way to eliminate enough plutonium to fuel 8,000 nuclear bombs.

The prospective revival of the plutonium disposal project underlines a noticeable change since Bolton's departure from his old job as arms control chief. ... Without the hard-charging Bolton around, the Bush administration not only has moved to reconcile with Russia over nuclear threat reduction but also has dropped its campaign to oust the chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and made common cause with European allies in offering incentives to Iran to persuade it to drop any ambitions for nuclear weapons.

Bolton had also resisted using the so-called New York channel for communications with North Korea, a one-on-one meeting used sporadically through Bush's presidency and most recently revived in May. And fellow U.S. officials said Bolton had opposed a new strategic opening to India offering the prospect of sharing civilian nuclear technology, a move made in March.

Peter Baker and Dafna Linzer, "Policy Shifts Felt After Bolton's Departure From State Dept."

My first reaction reading this was, how could the Bush administration have suffered John Bolton to become such a policy obstacle? To the extent that, before he was entirely moved out of State, arms control negotiators had to contrive (with Elliott Abrams' connivance) to keep a multilateral "brainstorming" session on Iran with European allies secret from Bolton, presumably lest he throw bombs. His mere departure from the scene seems to have created a thaw across the entire arms-control landscape. And all the movement since would seem to carry the presidential imprimatur: so why was Bolton allowed to hold so many things up for so long?

The WaPo article, too, worries over that question, with limited results:

Whether the shifting policies reflect Bolton's absence or his absence reflects shifting policies remains a point of debate. ... "It's less a question of these decisions being taken because John was no longer in the policy loop," said Robert J. Einhorn, who was assistant secretary of state for nonproliferation at the beginning of the Bush presidency. "It's that John was no longer in the Washington-based policymaking loop because the second Bush administration wants to adopt a different approach to dealing with the rest of the world."

Still, other specialists cautioned against overstating the extent of the changes since Bolton's departure and noted that he was always acting in concert with the president's broad wishes. "He was a lightning rod because of his strong and blunt statements," said Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, an advocacy organization. "But this Bush administration is not going to become the Adlai Stevenson administration just because John Bolton has left the State Department."

Bolton interpreted his arms-control portfolio as a license to disrupt any policy initiative, however virtuous, that even smacked of legitimizing international cooperation—which means, pretty much by definition, any arms-control initiative whatever. Was he doing Bush's will? If not, how could he have held onto his job? If so, what could so dramatically have changed the policy landscape since the election, that seemingly everything Bolton dedicated himself to obstructing is back on track?

The problem with all these questions is that they reflect an outdated mindset. Even with more than four years' unhappy experience, we still tend to speak of Bush administration policy in the language of intention. But it should be obvious by now that, with few exceptions, there is really no such thing as intentional policy in this administration, and the Bolton example is as telling an illustration of that point as any I've seen.

Bolton wasn't given his job at State in order to articulate some set of policies, for whose accomplishment he'd be held responsible. He was put in place as a reward for past service, and because he could be trusted to make a reliably loyal fink: he was the capo, the Bush syndicate's inside guy in the external power center of Colin Powell's State Department. As such, he was free to do anything on the policy side he damn well wanted, so long as he kept his sponsors in the know about what was happening in the State bureaucracy (hence the NSC intercepts, and why they're so intent on keeping them under wraps) and worked hard to make Colin's life miserable. (Powell being essentially a Bush I Republican, and to some extent Poppy's foreign-policy minder for George during the 2000 campaign, we can think of Bolton at State as a rather raw expression of Bush II's Oedipal urges.)

Bolton, in short, represented and manifested Party power within what would otherwise have been an independent bureaucracy. It may be that allegiance to the Fuhrerprinzip represents the Bush administration's only genuine ideological commitment; certainly nothing in the working of that principle has changed with Gauleiter Bolton's departure from the State Department. Nor have any new policy directions been established, except in a purely contingent manner. (The current movement on the arms-control front merely reflects the management style of the administration's new capo, Condi Rice. Without Bolton's particular axes to grind, and more interested in her relationship with her husband than in hands-on management, Condi by default has more or less liberated the arms-control people to do what comes naturally.) The only significant thing is that Dear Leader have his personal representative running the show—or obstructing the running of the show, as need be. Bolton and Rice may seem like opposites in the policy dimension: but in the only dimension that counts in this administration, they're functionally equivalent.

posted by michael  10:48:36 PM  
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