Analysis - By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, May 13 2005 (IPS) — The failure of U.S. President George W. Bush’s U.N. ambassador-designate to get the unanimous support of Republican members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has dealt a new setback to the coalition of unilateralist hawks that led the drive to war with Iraq and is strongly opposed to diplomatic engagement with Iran and North Korea.

While John Bolton may still be confirmed in the post by the entire Senate, where Republicans hold a 55-44-seat advantage, the defection of Ohio Republican Senator George Voinovich, who delivered a blistering denunciation of Bolton during committee debate Thursday, made clear that the opposition cannot be blamed on Democrats alone, as the administration has claimed.

As Bolton’s biggest booster, Vice President Dick Cheney, whose influence over U.S. foreign policy was unequalled during Bush’s first term in office, has lost the most in what has turned into the fiercest fight over a foreign-policy nomination in recent history.

“If I were George Bush, I’d be asking who the hell got me into this mess,” said one Congressional aide whose boss opposes Bolton. “Even if Bolton is confirmed – and you can’t count on that – Bush loses because of the political costs and embarrassment that this has caused.”

The Committee’s failure to recommend approval of Bolton’s nomination was not the only setback to the administration’s hawks as lawmakers in the lower house moved to kill the Defence Department’s proposed programme to design “bunker buster” nuclear bombs, a project that Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld has made a priority.

Under the leadership of another Republican, David Hobson, two House committees eliminated proposed 2006 funding for the bomb, which, if developed, would further undermine the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), according to arms-control specialists. The committees transferred the project from the Energy Department, which has exclusive jurisdiction over the nation’s nuclear laboratories, to the Pentagon.

“We wanted to be unambiguously clear that we didn’t want any (nuclear) research going on and that we wanted to have the Pentagon specifically concentrate on conventional weapons,” said Democrat Ellen Tauscher who worked with Hobson, the bete noire among Republican nuclear hawks, on the legislative manoeuvre.

Both Congressional moves point to growing troubles for the coalition of aggressive nationalists, neo-conservatives, and Christian Right activists who have supported the administration’s more hawkish and unilateralist policies, particularly among moderate Republicans.

Bush’s overall approval ratings have fallen fairly steadily over the past three months, while support for the U.S. war in Iraq, which enjoyed a brief resurgence after the elections there last January, has plunged to its lowest levels.

Sobered by the recent upsurge in fighting and suicide bombings, U.S. military officers have become noticeably less confident about plans for a substantial reduction in U.S. troops in Iraq by the end of the year; indeed, for the first time since the elections, some are saying once again that more troops are needed on the ground – a message that is not well received at the Pentagon or the White House.

Meanwhile, the balance of foreign policy power within the administration appears to be shifting steadily toward the State Department whose boss, Condoleezza Rice, continues to spout neo-conservative rhetoric even as her appointments and policy initiatives appear ever more realist and pragmatic.

As noted by the Washington Post’s Jackson Diehl, Rice overruled another right-wing ideologue and Bolton associate, Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Roger Noriega and the anti-Fidel Castro lobby late last month by backing Chilean Interior Minister Jose Miguel Insulza, for the next secretary-general of the Organization of American States (OAS).

Noriega and other right-wingers had initially backed former Salvadorean President Francisco Flores and then Mexican Foreign Minister Luis Ernesto Derbez in an apparent effort to deny Insulza the post because he did not share Noriega’s hard-line views on Cuba or Venezuela. The result was a protracted and demoralising impasse broken by Rice’s decision to support Insulza.

Diehl compared the move to Rice’s earlier decision – over Bolton’s strenuous objections – to back a U.N. Security Council move to refer charges of genocide and war crimes allegedly committed in Sudan’s Darfur region to the International Criminal Court (ICC).

As undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, Bolton, who believes that the ICC threatens U.S. sovereignty, made undermining the ICC a personal crusade that included cutting military and other assistance to friendly governments that ratified the ICC treaty. State and Defence department officials have said those cuts are likely to be reconsidered soon.

When added to Washington’s decision earlier in the term to back, however sceptically, Europe’s negotiations with Iran’s nuclear programme, as well as to publicly assert U.S. support for European integration – a policy clearly at odds with the hawks’ preferences of “divide and rule” – “the emerging picture is of a secretary of state focused on solving problems and cutting deals with key allies,” in Diehl’s words.

Similarly, Bush’s top two deputies, former Trade Representative Robert Zoellick and Undersecretary for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns – both realists and confirmed Atlanticists – have made little secret that repairing relations with traditional allies must be considered the administration’s top priority.

“I think we’ve been through the worst with Europe,” Burns, a career foreign service officer, told a Washington audience last week. The youthful former NATO ambassador even cited “global climate change” as the first in a list of “global and transnational challenges” he said were moving to the top of the administration’s agenda.

“It means we have to be committed to a certain degree of multilateralism,” he stressed. “America can’t fight any of these problems alone across the aboard,” an assertion that Bolton and other unilateralists would undoubtedly find distressingly evocative of former President Bill Clinton.

The State Department’s new assertiveness is not only due to a strong leadership team and Rice’s close personal ties to Bush, however. According to David Rothkopf, a former policymaker who has just published ‘Running the World’, a detailed account of the National Security Council, Stephen Hadley, formerly Rice’s deputy and now her successor as National Security Advisor, is working closely with Rice, despite his long-term ties to Cheney and other unilateralists. It was Hadley who reportedly played a decisive role in the decision to back the U.S.-Iran talks.

At the same time, shifts in the Pentagon’s leadership with the imminent departure of its two main foreign-policy ideologues – Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary for Policy Douglas Feith – and Wolfowitz’s replacement by a technocrat, former Navy Secretary Gordon England, have also effectively boosted the State Department’s influence.

Rumsfeld, who is increasingly pre-occupied with military “transformation,” as well as extracting U.S. forces from Iraq, “is happy to leave foreign policy to others at this point,” according to James Mann, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and author of “Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet.” His absence from the policy debate would leave Cheney relatively isolated.

In this context, the nomination of Bolton, whose year-long campaign to be chosen as her deputy was firmly rejected by Rice herself, appears increasingly incongruous, as Voinovich himself seemed to suggest Thursday when he noted that Rice herself agreed that Bolton would require “supervision” during his tenure at the UN.

“It is my concern that the confirmation of John Bolton would send a contradictory and negative message to the world community about U.S. intentions,” he said. “I’m afraid that his confirmation will tell the world that we’re not dedicated to repairing our relationship or working as a team, but that we believe only someone with sharp elbows can deal properly with the international community.”