What is a sophisticated position on the United Nations? As the old saw goes, I’m glad you asked that question. I say that having served in the U.N. as a public member of the U.S. delegation and written a book on the U.N. One feels the special pangs of John Bolton right now, up for ambassador to the U.N. Poor John; he was once derisory at the U.N.’s expense, using very amusing language to bounce off the bureaucratic density of the organization. His barb was to the effect that if you lopped off the top 10 stories of that big building, nothing much would be missed. But – no jokes in church.

And church is what the United Nations is, in solemn quarters. There is even an organization called Citizens for Global Solutions. It has spent $20,000 on ads in Rhode Island urging the citizens of that monolithic state (10% GOP) to send disciplinary messages to Senator Lincoln Chafee, whose vote on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is critical to the success of Mr. Bolton’s candidacy. Without Chafee, the committee is tied, and Bolton can’t therefore get pre-emptive consideration in the Senate, where he would be passed.

What we are seeing is a tug-of-war involving not President Bush’s authority to send his own man to the United Nations, but rather the reelection, in 2006, of a senator in Rhode Island. Chafee is a Republican. If he feels bound to stay with the GOP, that’s because, as he reminded everyone recently, he was named after Abraham Lincoln. So he has not changed party affiliation, but his voting record would fit nicely within the bounds of Democratic orthodoxy. At the last national election, he said that he would not willingly vote for Bush, but would vote for Bush’s father, who, however, wasn’t running.

The president is looking for a strong man at the United Nations, and here is the problem. The strength of the organization depends heavily on the strength within it of the United States. To the extent that the U.N. goes its own way, you get such as the Commission on Human Rights, which has in recent years been headed up by Tunisia and Libya, and includes such human rights devotes as Sudan, Zimbabwe, China, Cuba and Saudi Arabia. That kind of thing may appeal to the Citizens for Global Solutions, but it doesn’t really do very much for the United Nations, except to remind us how many stories of it the next hurricane could whisk away without hurting anybody.

The United Nations’ duties fall roughly under two dispensations. The first has to do with clerical concerns. How do you divide up the airwaves? What are the obligations of nation states to other nation-states? The second category has to do with policy. Here the powerful nations have to exercise the dominant voice. It is in anticipation of this, of course, that the Security Council was devised, giving permanent positions to the five major world powers. For 45 years, in fact, there were two contending powers, not five: the United States and the Soviet Union. Now there is a single power – the superpower. On critical matters, it has to prevail. To the extent it does not do so, the United Nations becomes marginal.

Bright and reasonable people know this, and it was because of this that the choice of John Bolton, coming in from undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, was so very much welcome. He told the Foreign Relations Committee that he recognizes that ambassador to the U.N. is not an independent policy-making role. The ambassador, he shrugged, even gives speeches that are actually written in Washington.

Bolton is perfectly prepared to play in New York the role of surrogate for President Bush. He gave the committee no reason to doubt that he would proceed as a civil servant, operating at the pleasure of the president of the United States, who, as Senator Chafee reluctantly acknowledged, was voted into that office athwart the will of the majority of people who live in Rhode Island.

That said, Mr. Bolton is in the tradition of singular people who, while serving their presidents faithfully, nevertheless leave their personal stamp on their ambassadorships. Jeane Kirkpatrick was a mountainous moral presence in the United Nations, while Daniel Patrick Moynihan reminded us that Socrates still lives, even if he couldn’t predictably win a Senate seat in Rhode Island. It would be a sign of great democratic health if one or two Democrats on the committee were to vote to confirm Bolton, but meanwhile, all rests on Lincoln Chafee, who was named after Abraham Lincoln.