John Bolton was such a controversial nominee for the post of U.S. ambassador to the United Nations that President Bush had to do an end-run around the Senate and make a recess appointment to get him into the job earlier this month. Now in office, Bolton has issued a reckless blast that will put even his critics back on their heels.
Five years ago, the United States signed the Millennium Development Goals, a U.N. effort to cut abject poverty by half, curb pandemics worldwide and achieve universal basic education for children. Next month, heads of state from nearly 180 nations will hold a summit to promote the goals, which include stopping the spread of TB and malaria, providing access to AIDS treatment and ending ecological destruction.
Embarrassingly, Bolton is trying to undermine the upwelling of international support for the Millennium Goals. In recent days, he sent several memos proposing changes that would effectively gut the goals. He not only wants the United States to wriggle out of any commitments, he also wants to stop other nations from fulfilling theirs.
His memos contradict what the United States agreed to when it signed the Millennium Goals as well as a 2002 document from the Monterey Conference: Industrialized countries should try to fund development aid proportionately to their gross national product. Now, Bolton says, “The U.S. does not accept global aid targets.”
Most of the industrialized world wants to relieve developing nations of their enormous debt burdens, but Bolton extols the virtues of having impoverished countries take on debt as a way to finance development. Bolton even wants to watered down language in the U.N. documents that seek to eliminate child labor (which in many parts of the world is tantamount to slavery for impoverished kids). He’s against eliminating primary school fees, yet such fees make it impossible for poor families to send all their kids to school – and girls are usually the ones left behind. Bolton would delete calls for “quick wins” against disease and poverty, such as free distribution of bed nets that prevent malaria-carrying mosquitoes from infecting sleeping people. He wants to end calls for “home-grown school meals programs using locally produced foods.” Instead, Bolton wants language promoting property rights, commercial development and “investment climate reforms.”
Bolton’s failure to acknowledge basic factors that contribute to pandemics, poverty and illiteracy could prove costly in more ways than one: Impoverished countries become havens for terrorism and epicenters of worldwide epidemics. Bolton has ignored the warnings that a hurricane of human misery is brewing across the globe. Ironically, this human-made storm might be prevented – if the United States joined with other world leaders to do so.
Was the Bolton manifesto cleared with his minders at the State Department?
