A bit of excitement is being caused by the promise of the former speaker, Newt Gingrich, that if he is elected president he will nominate Ambassador John Bolton to be state secretary. It is said to be giving reassurance to conservatives that Mr. Gingrich is a man they can trust. But the impact of the promise is amplified by the moment. We have just watched the State Department turn around and do nothing after the American ambassador to Belgium blamed Israel for Muslim anti-Semitism and suggested that such anti-Semitism is not as bad as the old fashioned kind of anti-Semitism.

This happened in the same few days that the defense secretary, Leon Panetta, who is a relatively strong supporter of Israel among the Democrats, stirred up a controversy by suggesting to the Saban Forum that Israel’s diplomatic isolation was her own fault. Secretary of State Clinton is herself in the midst of a controversy stemming from her remarks at the same Saban Forum, where she worried that Israel’s democracy is moving in the wrong direction because accommodations have been made for religious Jews on buses and religious soldiers who do not want to violate religious teaching by listening to women singing.

Whatever one can say about Mr. Bolton — the left accuses him of being crusty, high-handed, and ideological — one would be hard put to suggest he’s going to be caught flat-footed in respect of these kinds of issues. He was, after all, the point man in the administration of President George H.W. Bush in the campaign that succeeded in winning a repeal of the United Nations resolution equating Zionism and racism. He is very much steeped in this issue; it is hard to remember an ambassador who got it quite the way he did since Daniel Patrick Moynihan. And it would certainly be nice to have that savvy at the State Department.