Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations

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Product Description A former ambassador to the United Nations explains his controversial efforts to defend American interests and reform the U.N., presenting his argument for why he believes the United States can enable a greater global security arrangement for modern times. 150,000 first printing. About the Author John Bolton was appointed by President George W. Bush as United States Permanent Representative to the United Nations in 2005, and served until his appointment expired in December 2006. He was nominated for the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for playing a major role in exposing Iran's secret plans to develop nuclear weapons. An attorney who has spent many years in public service and held high-level positions in the administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, Bolton is currently a Senior Fellow at American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., and a commentator for Fox News Channel. He lives outside of Baltimore, Maryland, with his wife and daughter. From The Washington Post Reviewed by Joseph S. Nye Jr. These two works -- each part memoir, part treatise on diplomacy -- serve as bookends in our current debate about America's role in the world. John Bolton, most recently President Bush's ambassador to the United Nations, and Strobe Talbott, President Clinton's deputy secretary of state and now president of the Brookings Institution, have some things in common. Both attended Yale in the troubled 1960s: Talbott as a classmate of George W. Bush, Bolton two years later. Both are baby boomers who did not serve in the Vietnam War: Talbott went to England as a Rhodes scholar, while Bolton made a "cold calculation that I wasn't going to waste time on a futile struggle." Their differences, however, far outweigh their similarities. Bolton, the son of a Baltimore firefighter, was a scholarship student who seems to have a chip on his shoulder about those he dismisses as the "High Minded." Talbott has a patrician background and refers to several illustrious relatives in his book, including a distant connection to the Bushes. He also reports that the current president "mentioned a grudge he bore against me as a bookish, hyperearnest undergraduate and a representative of the East Coast liberal foreign policy establishment" that represented "much of what he wanted to get away from." After Yale, Talbott became a journalist for Time magazine, and Bolton became a lawyer, a fact he proudly mentions many times. Each writes with the grace of his original profession. Talbott's political approach is liberal in the old-fashioned sense of the word, and he quotes Edmund Burke that "nothing is so fatal to a nation as an extreme of self-partiality." Bolton's political style is aggressive, viewing diplomacy as "advocacy; advocacy for America." When Colin Powell, his former boss at the State Department, took a more multilateral approach, Bolton reports that he deliberately undermined Powell. "He knew it, and he knew I knew it." From start to finish, these books reflect their authors' very different sensibilities. Bolton opens with his experience as a student campaign volunteer for Goldwater in 1964 and spends most of the book recounting his political battles in great detail. Talbott begins with a wide-ranging and lofty discourse on the concepts of empires, nations and states in world history. Both books conclude with a discussion of global governance, which is where they wholly diverge. Talbott believes that global governance is coming -- that "individual states will increasingly see it in their interest to form an international system that is far more cohesive, far more empowered by its members, and therefore far more effective than the one we have today." Whether the United Nations will be the centerpiece of this new system is less clear to him. In Talbott's view, the U.N. has the advantage of universal membership, global scope and a comprehensive agenda that makes it indispensable as a convener of governments and