Pig Herder

In another gem of a column, this one in the current Speccie, Mark Steyn argues that Bush's recent appointment of Mark Bolton as ambassador to the UN is a very good choice indeed. Bolton has the temperament, knowledge and experience to actually do some good there. Bolton's critics, especially those in the vaunted transnational community, would like us to believe that their angst-ridden rhetoric in opposition is nothing so much as the reciprocal of Bolton's history of overt and bumptious criticism of just about every tenet these tranzies hold dear. The trouble for the tranzies is that events have more than vindicated Bolton while making a mockery of the entire edifice of transnational progressivism.

But it's a lot more than a case of tit-for-tat, to be sure. Steyn, it should be pointed out before I excerpt some of his column, has recently enunciated what I think is a very important insight - one that goes a long way toward explaining the contentiousness with which all recent US foreign policy initiatives have been greeted. Perhaps others have said it, I don't know. But I haven't it heard it put so simply and so clearly. It is this: that the greatest threat America faces in the world today is transnational progressivism. Terror, tin-pot dictators, even the crazed mullahs we can and will handle, bloody though it may be. No, the enemy is much stealthier - you could even say viral - than these admittedly thorny adversaries. The infection that threatens us from within and without is the onslaught of the notion- ideology, really - that American sovereignty and interests should be subordinated to a self-appointed global elite that answers to no political constituency.

As a result, any perceived threat to the tranzie ideology must be met with the fiercest opposition and rhetoric. With that said, let's follow Steyn through his characteristically funny yet perfectly logical analysis of why Bolton will be a very good ambassador to the UN. Good, that is, if you define the word as in this case describing a guy who will represent the interests of the US (and oppose the reach of transnational progressivism, or T.P.)

If you’re going to play the oldest established permanent floating transnational crap game for laughs, you might as well pick an act with plenty of material. What I love about John Bolton, America’s new ambassador to the UN, is the sheer volume of ‘damaging’ material.... [W]ith Bolton the damaging quotes are hanging off the trees and dropping straight into your bucket.

The UN?
‘There is no such thing as the United Nations.’
The UN building?
‘If you lost ten storeys, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.’
Reform of the Security Council?
‘If I were redoing the Security Council, I’d have one permanent member ...the United States.’
The International Criminal Court?
‘Fuzzy-minded romanticism ...not just naive but dangerous.’
International law in general?
‘It is a big mistake for us to grant any validity to international law.’
Offering incentives to rogue states?
‘I don’t do carrots.’

If you were looking to reduce to a few words a position that was guaranteed to tweak the very heartstrings of tranzies, you could save yourself a lot of time and just go with those responses. In fact the New York Times, a key mouthpiece for T.P., in a fit of Dowdian sarcasm, exhibits its pique by speculating that if Bush is willing to appoint Bolton to a position like ambassador to the UN, what could be next? "Donald Rumsfeld to negotiate a new set of Geneva conventions? Martha Stewart to run the Securities and Exchange Commission?"

We rejoin Steyn:

Okay, I get the hang of this game. Sending John Bolton to be UN ambassador is like ...putting Sudan and Zimbabwe on the Human Rights Commission. Or letting Saddam’s Iraq chair the UN conference on disarmament. Or sending a bunch of child-sex fiends to man UN operations in the Congo. And the Central African Republic. And Sierra Leone, and Burundi, Liberia, Haiti, Kosovo, and pretty much everywhere else. All of which happened without the UN fetishists running around shrieking hysterically. Why should America be the only country not to enjoy an uproarious joke at the UN’s expense? ....

[T]he Bolton flap is very revealing about conventional wisdom on transnationalism. Diplomats are supposed to be ‘diplomatic’. Why is that? Well, as the late Canadian Prime minister Lester B. Pearson used to say, diplomacy is the art of letting the other fellow have your way. In other words, you were polite, discreet, circumspect, etc., as a means to an end. Not any more. None of John Bolton’s detractors is worried that his bluntness will jeopardise the administration’s policy goals. Quite the contrary. They’re concerned that the administration has policy goals — that it isn’t yet willing to subordinate its national interest to the polite transnational pieties. In that sense, our understanding of ‘diplomacy’ has become corrupted: it’s no longer the language through which nation states treat with one another so much as the code-speak consensus of a global elite. [emphasis mine -- ed.]

For much of the civilised world the transnational pabulum has become an end in itself, and one largely unmoored from anything so tiresome as reality. It doesn’t matter whether there is any global warming or, if there is, whether Kyoto will do anything about it or, if you ratify Kyoto, whether you bother to comply with it: all that matters is that you sign on to the transnational articles of faith. The same thinking applies to the ICC, and Darfur, and the Oil-for-Fraud programme, and anything else involving the UN.

That’s what John Bolton had in mind with his observations about international law: ‘It is a big mistake for us to grant any validity to international law even when it may seem in our short-term interest to do so — because, over the long term, the goal of those who think that international law really means anything are those who want to constrict the United States.’ Just so.

I'll leave it at that. I recommend that the entire column be read, as it fleshes out other important aspects of this entire debate - not to mention makes a mockery of some of the familiar plaints and prevarications of the global elite. But I think from what I've excerpted you can see very clearly the thing I think is so valuable about Steyn's late insight. We face a determined foe in the form of transnational progressivism; and its cover is blown the louder it agitates against Bolton's appointment.