Op-Ed: Schizophrenic Administration Heightens U.S. Isolation

Schizophrenic Administration Heightens U.S. Isolation

By Jeffrey Laurenti

The Bush administration has put its foreign policy schizophrenia on very public display this holiday season, and as often happens, it is hard-line conservatives' obsessive- compulsive fixation with the United Nations that is triggering the current episode.

Just as President Bush was citing the support of the United Nations as the crucial international pillar of his strategy for victory in Iraq, his representative in New York was threatening its financial strangulation. In the same week that the United States insisted on Syria's complete cooperation with the U.N. investigation of the assassination of Lebanon's former prime minister, it warned it might itself walk away from the Organization.

"Either we need to fix the institution or we'll turn to some other mechanism to solve international problems,'' the president's emissary in New York, John Bolton, told guests of the Jesse Helms Center in North Carolina. And he elaborated for Britain's Financial Times: "The UN is simply one of many competitors in the global marketplace for problem solutions and problem solvers."

Mr. Bolton's threat to take America's international business elsewhere was unlikely to sway votes at the United Nations because it has already long been administration policy. Washington takes problems to the United Nations, not to do a favor for Secretary-General Kofi Annan, but only when it cannot achieve its ends in a more controllable setting.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/usnw/20051220/pl_usnw/op_ed__schizophrenic_administration_heightens_u_s__isolation314_xml

He's threatening to take his business elsewhere. Well, maybe he should. Not that anyone else would take him.