If personnel is policy, one man to watch as Mr. Bush forms his second term administration is John Bolton, the undersecretary of state for arms control. As the most prominent Bush loyalist and conservative voice at Foggy Bottom, his fate in the current reshuffle of senior administration posts will be tracked most keenly by friend and foe alike. In his four years in the job, he has become the diplomatic embodiment of America’s fight against the attempt by rogue regimes and substate actors to obtain weapons of mass destruction.

It is Mr. Bolton who has dogged the Iranian mullahs at such forums as the International Atomic Energy Authority in Vienna. If he is fired or, at best, shifted sideways, it will be taken as a signal in Tehran and elsewhere that it’s business as usual. They will conclude that the pseudopragmatists of the American foreign-policy establishment are in the ascendant and that the so-called true believers in the “Bush revolution” have had their day. If the administration cannot reward someone like Mr. Bolton, what signal does that send out inside the Beltway?

Mr. Bolton is often described as a “neoconservative” – a word that has become a derogatory term in Europe – but that is an inaccuracy. He is, in fact, a traditional conservative who first cut his political teeth in the Goldwater campaign of 1964. His first patron was James A. Baker III, under whom he served as assistant secretary of state and under whose tenure he worked successfully to secure the repeal of the U.N. General Assembly resolution of 1975 condemning Zionism as “racism.” As befits one of America’s preeminent experts on Edmund Burke, Mr. Bolton relies on experience and observation rather than first principles for his world view. He has looked closely at rogue states such as the Islamic Republic of Iran or the Democratic Republic of North Korea and found their behavior wanting time and again. Unlike most practitioners of foreign policy – and this is what does not endear him to the “professionals” — he does not hesitate to say so. His forceful comments on the “Dear Leader” at the time of the 2003 six-nation talks earned the rebuke of Pyongyang, which declared him persona non grata and asserted that “such human scum and bloodsucker is not entitled to take part in such talks.”

It is fashionable to complain that we can never persuade first-rate people to enter public life any more. Mr. Bolton is one such, and it would be a great loss if no berth were found commensurate with his talents. He would make an extraordinary ambassador to the United Nations. It’s not the only job we could think of for him, but it’s one where he could make a mark like another great scholar-bureaucrat did in the 1970s – Daniel Patrick Moynihan.