The testy exchange in early June between Mark Malloch Brown, deputy secretary general of the United Nations, and John Bolton, US ambassador to the UN, is a reminder of what a dangerous game the Bush Administration is playing with the world body. Known within the UN as a pro-US Briton, Malloch Brown broke with diplomatic tradition and took his growing frustrations public--an action that likely reflects an awareness that Washington needs the UN more than the other way around right now, and the fact that his tenure will probably end when Secretary General Kofi Annan's term expires in December.

Malloch Brown criticized Washington's hypocritical approach as opportunistically using the UN to advance American interests while failing to stand up for it against its US critics. (He described the Administration as having largely abandoned the public discourse that reaches the American heartland to the UN's "loudest detractors, such as Rush Limbaugh and Fox News.") He also pointed to the impending crisis over UN reform that Bolton's heavy-handed, ideologically driven diplomacy has created.

The crisis stems from White House threats to withhold payment of its UN dues if the body does not adopt its agenda of administrative and managerial reforms. Yet Bolton's diplomacy at the UN has been so hamfisted that he has alienated even many of America's closest allies. According to Malloch Brown, rather than isolating the extremists who oppose reform and building a broad coalition of reform-minded nations, Bolton has reinforced "the widely held perception, even among many US allies, that the US tends to hold on to maximalist positions when it could be finding middle ground." He has thus given the impression that the United States would rather have no reform at all than permit the slightest dilution of its position.

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