AS America’s ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton was no tame diplomat. Armed with his feared red pen, ready to strike out waffling resolutions, he was an able and aggressive defender of US interests, but he often had to uphold policies with which he was not in tune.
“To the great chagrin of many people, I followed my instructions at the UN,” he said in his first newspaper interview since relinquishing his post. He is a free man now and eager to have his say.

 
 
Bolton engaged in tortuous negotiations over sanctions for Iran and North Korea’s nuclear programmes with little confidence they would work.

“I wouldn’t have engaged in negotiations with Iran in the first place,” he said, evidently disdainful of Britain, France and Germany’s years of reaching out to Iran. “The policy has failed. Sanctions won’t stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons.”

Bolton thinks the Bush administration would “rather find a way for diplomacy to succeed but time is running out”. He added as an afterthought, “That’s me speaking” — a rueful acknowledgment that he is no longer the voice of America.

Bolton’s disillusion with the UN is such that he would like it to face competition from other international organisations. “The choice is to fix it or go somewhere else.” He favours building up Nato as a rival in the belief that it could expand into a “caucus of democracies” — a permanent coalition of the willing.

“Fifteen years ago people said Nato would either go out of area or out of existence and now it is in Afghanistan and it is all but Nato — absent Germany and France — in Iraq,” he said. “I think Nato should go global. There is no reason why Japan and Australia shouldn’t join.”

Nato could also make room for Israel. “Why not?” he said. “It’s a European country, fundamentally. Turkey is a European country and it is further east.”

Bolton believes that Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, is wasting her time trying to restart the Middle East peace process. The Arab-Israeli conflict was “not a priority”, he added. “I don’t see linkage to Iraq, and Hamas and Fatah are in a state of civil war.”

When the walrus-moustached Bolton, 58, was appointed ambassador in August 2005, Rice was eager to give diplomacy a chance — whether on Iran, North Korea or the Middle East.

Bolton was then under-secretary of state for arms control and nuclear proliferation. He was notably belligerent on Iran, and was sent to the UN in the face of opposition from Congress, including Republican “wets”, as one of his heroes, Margaret Thatcher, might describe them. Yet his mission, defined by Rice, was to talk, not to bite.

The same politicians balked at confirming Bolton in the job after he had served at President George W Bush’s discretion for little more than a year. He toyed with the idea of hanging on as an acting ambassador, but thought better of going for a “jury-rigged” selection. So out he went last month to the evident satisfaction of his arch-enemy Sir Mark Malloch Brown, the former British UN deputy secretary-general, who departed weeks later.

“I was very pleased that I . . . could at least hold the door for him to go first,” Malloch Brown said witheringly on Channel 4 News last week. “He was only saying publicly what he had been leaking for two years,” Bolton retorted.

Malloch Brown represented everything the US ambassador detested about the United Nations and its air of superiority. Bolton famously observed the organisation could lose 10 floors without anybody noticing, irritating UN bureaucrats.

Bolton approves of Ban Ki-Moon, the new South Korean secretary-general, but advises him to “move quickly to put his stamp on his tenure” before the bureaucracy sucks him in.