In his current job as undersecretary of state for arms control, he worked on the Moscow Treaty, which codified steep reductions in the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals. He was instrumental in the passage of U.N. Resolution 1540, urging countries to crack down on WMD proliferation. He was central in the creation of the Proliferation Security Initiative, a multilateral effort to block the transfer of WMDs. He was the lead U.S. negotiator in the creation of the G-8 Global Partnership Against the Proliferation of WMD, an attempt to secure Russian WMD materials. Just how multilateral can one guy get?
But there are two flaws in Bolton's approach for his critics. The first is that his multilateralism isn't indiscriminate. If an international agreement, like the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, is hopelessly outdated, he supports scrapping it. If a treaty ? like the one creating the International Criminal Court, which would potentially expose U.S. troops to international prosecution ? doesn't serve U.S. interests, he opposes it. It isn't enough to affix the words "multilateral" to any initiative for it to win Bolton's assent, whereas many Democrats are Pavlovian in their panting after anything that is a treaty, agreement, protocol or otherwise cooked up in the Hague or Geneva.
The second is that Bolton's multilateralism is always in the service of advancing Bush's foreign policy. Since Democrats oppose that foreign policy, they pretend Bolton rejects international cooperation altogether. His version of multilateralism vitiates what for many Democrats should be its chief purpose ? frustrating Bush goals abroad. Alas, John Bolton is determined to be Bush's ambassador to the U.N., rather than the other way around, making him the kind of diplomat the Democrats just can't abide.