Bolton's mission: to reassert US power and glory
John Bolton at the UN this week.
When Kofi Annan gave a diplomatically innocuous reaction to the appointment of John Bolton to the United Nations, he had his left arm in a sling.
He had undergone shoulder surgery, but, with Mr Bolton now at the UN, the Secretary-General was probably more worried about his right wing.
Mr Bolton arrived as the first US ambassador not to receive the endorsement of Congress. But the fact that George Bush appointed him while Congress was in recess clearly shows Mr Bolton will be speaking with the authority of the US President.
Mr Bolton has said what many countries think, but never dare to say, about the UN - that it is worthwhile only when it serves their own purposes.
"There's no such thing as the United Nations," he said in 1994. "There is an international community that occasionally can be led by the only real power left in the world and that is the United States, when it suits our interest and we can get others to go along."
The US has one vote, the same as any tin-pot African dictatorship. To get anything done, it has to negotiate its way through the Security Council, where four other countries can veto any decision.
To win any reform of the UN, it has to deal with 190 other countries in the General Assembly. That is Mr Bolton's problem, and his challenge.
Mr Bolton arrives at a critical time for the UN. In the lead-up to its world summit of leaders next month there has been intense bargaining, with blocs of nations trying to hammer out a deal to get one part of the reform agenda under way - the expansion of the Security Council.
The council has five permanent members - the US, Britain, France, Russia and China - plus 10 rotating members.
A group of countries known as the G4 - Germany, Japan, Brazil and India - are pushing hard for a plan that is designed to give them all permanent spots, give two additional permanent seats to Africa, and expand the council's membership to 25.
But this push faces opposition from regional rivals: Italy opposes Germany, China opposes Japan, Pakistan opposes India and Argentina opposes Brazil. And there is a separate plan that would give African nations two permanent seats - and a veto.
The G4 countries were hoping to persuade the Africans to drop their demands for veto power and support their plan, but this appears to have collapsed during talks in Addis Ababa, leaving the proposal's future uncertain.
And Mr Bolton's personal position on expanding the council? "If I were redoing the Security Council," he once said, "I'd have one permanent member because that's the real distribution of power in the world."