John Bolton thinks diplomats are dangerous

Is diplomacy dead? Given the perils of the modern age, this might seem an absurd question. The more threats and crises we face, the more we need our suave, smooth-talking diplomats to get us out of trouble. It is only when every possible diplomatic avenue has been exhausted that it is permissible to reach for the proverbial big stick. At least, so goes the theory.

Con Coughlin: The road map to nowhere But does modern diplomacy actually work? Careful consideration does not make for comfortable reading. Kosovo, Darfur, North Korea and Iran suggest that more progress might have been made had a little more stick been employed than endless talk. Con Coughlin’s exclusive interview with John Bolton All the main aid agencies estimate about two million innocent civilians have been the victims of the Sudanese Islamic militias that have waged a genocidal campaign against the Christian and Animist tribes that predominantly inhabit the south of the country. There are 700,000 people in refugee camps in the Darfur province of western Sudan and eastern Chad and it is universally agreed that this is the one issue that demands immediate and effective attention. But four years after the start of a conflict former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan called "little short of hell on earth", the killing and deprivation goes on - despite the UN passing a resolution last summer which finally authorised the establishment of a 26,000-strong peacekeeping force to stop the bloodshed. Much of the blame for a conflict that Tony Blair, in typically melodramatic fashion, described as "a scar on the conscience of the world", must lie with the UN and those Western governments - such as Britain - that have assumed responsibility for resolving the conflict. The UN must take much of the blame for refusing to describe the wilful persecution of Sudan's non-Muslim population by government-backed militias as "genocide", which would have given the West the right to intervene militarily to bring the Sudanese government to its senses. Instead the Islamic fundamentalist regime in Khartoum has been allowed to continue its persecution of anyone deemed to live or act contrary to Islamic law, whether they are sub-Saharan Animist hunters or naive English teachers like Gillian Gibbons, who was sentenced to 15 days in prison yesterday for allowing her class to name a teddy bear Mohammed. As John Bolton, the former American ambassador to the UN writes in his new book, Surrender is Not An Option: Defending America at the United Nations and Abroad, Darfur "was the worst example of the UN's inability to address critical problems in Africa". As Mr Bolton was keen to point out when I met him during his British book tour this week, the world's diplomats have failed on virtually all the major issues they have tackled, even when the Americans have assumed the lead role. Washington's diplomatic efforts to persuade North Korea to halt work on developing an atom bomb, which went back to the Clinton era, resulted in the North Koreans test-firing a nuclear device at the end of last year even though, as part of the Agreed Framework negotiated between Washington and Pyongyang in 1994, the North Koreans had promised to halt nuclear research in return for American oil. In fact it turned out the North Koreans simply took the oil and carried on building their bomb. Mr Bolton agrees with former American Secretary of State James Baker that Clinton's Agreed Framework deal was "a policy of appeasement", and there are many other instances where the fine line between effective diplomacy and appeasement is crossed. So far as Mr Bolton is concerned, the greatest diplomatic failure of recent years has been the initiative by the "EU3" - Britain, Germany and France - to persuade Iran to come clean about its nuclear programme. While the Iranians have claimed all along that their nuclear intentions are benign, the evidence suggests otherwise, from the deliberate concealment of uranium enrichment facilities to the discovery of weapons grade uranium particles at a research centre. The fact that Iran has constructed a uranium enrichment production line of 3,000 centrifuges in Natanz is evidence enough of the failure of the European mission, but the true scale of the naivety and wishful thinking that underpinned the EU3's diplomatic effort is laid bare in Mr Bolton's coruscating deconstruction of the initiative. As he explains in graphic detail, every time the Iranians violated an agreement, the Europeans found an excuse to give them more time because they really wanted to believe that diplomacy would triumph, and Iran would be persuaded to renounce its nuclear ambitions. Mr Bolton concludes that this approach is "not just delusional but dangerous. This is the road to the Nuclear Holocaust." In fact the only memorable "diplomatic" success of recent years - convincing the eccentric Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi to give up his nuclear arsenal - was achieved without any diplomatic involvement, and was mainly the work of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, which had the relatively simple task of persuading Gaddafi that he would face the same fate as Iraq's Saddam Hussein if he persisted with his nuclear programme. The prospect of military action had the effect of concentrating Gaddafi's mind wonderfully, and his weapons were handed over to American custody. Not surprisingly, Mr Bolton is a strong advocate of finding international institutions that are effective in dealing with the world's trouble spots. The UN, so far as he is concerned, is a lost cause because its default position will always be to pander to political correctness as opposed to delivering results. Instead he would like to see more robust institutions, such as Nato, expanded into an international alliance of democratically elected nations that might persuade the world's despots to mend their ways.