A Vote on Mr. Bolton

ON APRIL 19 the Senate Foreign Relations Committee unexpectedly postponed a vote on the nomination of John R. Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations, citing concerns that he had engaged in a pattern of abuse of subordinates and manipulation of intelligence. Three weeks of further digging, mostly by Democratic committee staff members, have not produced evidence of such a pattern. The committee ought to give Mr. Bolton a vote today. Ours would be an unenthusiastic, deference-to-the-president yes.

It's as clear now as it was on April 19 that Mr. Bolton is a contentious figure who has both strong admirers and impassioned critics in Washington. He engages in hand-to-hand bureaucratic combat, and on a couple of occasions he pushed too hard. He challenged intelligence analysts, but it's naive to think that such analysts are always ideologically neutral and beyond politics -- that they should never be challenged. What emerges from the interviews conducted by committee staffers is how intensely policy-driven, as opposed to personal, were most of Mr. Bolton's clashes in the State Department, during President Bush's first term, under Secretary of State Colin L. Powell.

If anyone might have been expected to provide evidence of dysfunctional behavior, for example, it would be Lawrence B. Wilkerson, who was Mr. Powell's chief of staff. Mr. Wilkerson has said that he does not believe Mr. Bolton is fit to be U.N. ambassador, and by his description he knew pretty much everything that was happening at Foggy Bottom: "I was also a sponge, sopping up everything I could about the Department, about its efficiency, about its effectiveness, about its people . . . and reporting to Powell."

Yet in an interview last Friday, Mr. Wilkerson was unable to provide any fresh examples of misbehavior by Mr. Bolton. Instead he complained about policy differences: Mr. Bolton was too eager to sanction Chinese companies that violated the nonproliferation regime, thereby making diplomacy more difficult. He was too zealous in carrying out his mission to persuade other countries to exempt U.S. soldiers from the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. When Mr. Bolton delivered a speech vilifying North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, "Rich was very angry" -- that would be former deputy secretary Richard L. Armitage -- but, Mr. Wilkerson acknowledged, he was angry because the speech had been cleared by the assistant secretary for Asia, a Powell ally.

The committee interviews have provided some colorful details without breaking new ground on what has long been a well-understood split in the first Bush administration: a split between those who saw themselves as pragmatic diplomats (the Powell camp) and those, like Mr. Bolton, who saw themselves as more willing to bruise feelings here and abroad in standing up for U.S. interests. Our view was that Mr. Bolton often, though not always, had the worse end of those arguments; he helped hamstring diplomacy toward Iran and North Korea, and his single-minded focus on the International Criminal Court endangered relations even with allies who were supporting the United States in Iraq.

Moreover, the first-term divisions themselves were harmful to U.S. policymaking. Will Mr. Bolton perpetuate the divisions from a new perch in New York? That seems to us a risk. But it also strikes us as a risk that a president is entitled to take on if he wants. Mr. Bush surely knows what role Mr. Bolton played in the first term, and he says he wants to put Mr. Bolton's bluntness to work at the United Nations. The nominee is intelligent and qualified; we still see no compelling reason to deny the president his choice.