For the past ten years, Japan has undergone aggressive, government-driven reforms aimed at changing its financial systems, labor markets, and corporate governance institutions. Faced with the challenges of globalization and an ageing population, Japan undertook these reforms to regain its former competitiveness. What remains uncertain, however, is whether these reforms will also be effective in creating an environment
that is more favorable to entrepreneurship and innovation. If the reforms are effective, at what pace, and in what shape will new firms emerge? Will Japan’s system mirror the institutions that have evolved in regions such as Silicon Valley, or will it develop into a new framework of innovation?

The persistent decline in Japanese asset values during the 1990s engendered many policy and legal responses. Among these was a series of business policy and associated legal reforms intended to foster the creation of new companies, new industries, and new financial institutions. Starting in 1997, these reforms included changes in how firms are formed. For example, the capital required to start a stock-issuing firm was reduced from ten million yen to a mere one yen. The yugen kaisha—a secondary form of Japanese company—was also abolished and the limited liability partnership created instead. Holding companies were allowed, mergers were deregulated, treasury shares were authorized, and the liability of company directors was limited.

Additional reforms were promulgated to encourage new forms of financial intermediation. Tax benefits created for “angel” investors, foreign venture capitalists, foreign private equity, and foreign lawyers became common. Purchase of shares with shares, triangular mergers, and repurchase of shares were all allowed. Moreover, several new stock exchanges were created expressly for relatively new companies.

Corporate governance laws were also revised. For one, Japanese firms may now use U.S.-style board of director committees, with an upper limit placed on directors’ liabilities. Japanese auditors are now required to be outsiders, and consolidated accounting is likewise compulsory, as well as “mark-to-market” rules for financial reporting. These are just a few of the changes, all of which combine to increase transparency in Japan’s markets.

The results were noticeable. By 2006, new companies were garnering price-to-earnings ratios of greater than 100 to 1 in the new markets; the number of IPOs per year was comparable to the rate during the U.S. Internet bubble; and the mergers and acquisition market was transformed from one of the most moribund in the world to one of the most dynamic. Venture capital firms proliferated, as did new law firms, private equity firms, and foreign banks. Existing Japanese banks merged, new banks formed, and money-lending began again. Some new companies even gained sufficient liquidity and stature to turn their founders into celebrities and some of the wealthiest people in Japan. Rakuten, Mixi, ValueCommerce, and Cybird are just a few of these success stories. Japan is currently in its seventy-first month of economic expansion—the longest of the postwar period.

The future, however, is unclear. As Professor Yoko Ishikura, of Hitotsubashi University, recently observed at a SPRIE seminar at Stanford, “Japan is at a turning point and it is uncertain which direction it will choose.” For 2008, IPO valuations have returned to levels more comparable to those in the United States, and the climate for startups has moderated somewhat. New company startup rates are flat and IPO rates have recently dipped significantly. Some prominent studies of the entrepreneurial climate in various countries rank Japan among the least favorable. Many observers are impatient for more evidence of results from the reforms. It remains an open question whether Japan is being affected by the U.S. slowdown and commodity price increases, or if the country is simply retreating from it entrepreneurial gains.

In light of these developments, scholars remain curious: Are the reforms permanently changing the Japanese economy? Are the reforms sufficient to meet the challenges that Japan faces? Will the reforms be effective? Alternatively, are these reforms even desirable? SPRIE and the U.S.-Asia Technology Management Center, in cooperation with selected experts and research organizations in Japan, are undertaking
a major project to study the seemingly contradictory corporate and social climate in Japan, which is at present stretched between entrepreneurial and more conservative forces.

Japan’s economic relationship with the countries of the Pacific Rim—and indeed with the rest of the world—is vital to all of the economies involved. If Japan is transforming into a new economic culture, an understanding of that transformation is relevant both to global economic development and to the study of entrepreneurial growth.

Heads of international organizations and foreign policy leaders from around the world met in Berlin, Germany on July 15 and 16 to discuss the future of international security and cooperation. Convened by the Managing Global Insecurity Project (MGI) and the Bertelsmann Stiftung, the event -"Responsible Sovereignty: International Cooperation for a Changed World" -was the MGI project's fifth and capstone advisory group conference. The Berlin meeting was convened by three members of MGI's Advisory Group - Strobe Talbott, Brookings President; EU High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy Javier Solana; and Wolfgang Ischinger, Chairman of the Munich Security Conference - in partnership with Gunther Thielen, Chairman and Chief Executive of the Bertlesmann Foundation.

Also in attendance were the co-directors of the Managing Global Insecurity Project, Stephen J. Stedman, CISAC Senior Fellow and Director of the Ford Dorsey Program in International Policy Studies at Stanford University, Carlos Pascual, Brookings Vice President and Director for Foreign Policy, and Bruce Jones, Senior Fellow and Co-Director of the New York University Center on International Cooperation (CIC). The MGI advisory group is made up of U.S. Bipartisan and international leaders.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon; German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier; and Rajendra Pachauri, Nobel Peace Prize winner and Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change opened the event. Notable international officials and other participants included Mohamed El Baradei, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency; former Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin; former Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov; former Indian Foreign Minister Lalit Mansingh; and former U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Sadako Ogata. Also present were Francis Deng, Ban Ki-moon's Special Advisor for the Prevention of Genocide and the originator of the idea of Responsible Sovereignty in the 1990s.

The meeting brought together high-level representatives from influential nations with members of the MGI Advisory Group and world leaders on climate change, nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament, and conflict prevention and response. In particular, the session focused on the idea that all states, whatever their politics and interests, share duties to their citizens and to each other in tackling common threats like terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and global climate change. The goal of the Berlin session was to generate momentum toward a 2009-2010 campaign to expand global partnerships and rejuvenate international cooperation to address today's most pressing global challenges.

The Stanford Program on International and Cross-cultural Education (SPICE) has just announced a major new interdisciplinary, interactive initiative for middle school and high school students on the road to the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. “The Road to Beijing” initiative includes a new documentary featuring world-renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble, a new documentary developed by NBC that features Olympians who will participate in the Beijing Olympics, curriculum materials addressing Beijing and issues raised by the Olympics, an interactive website, and teacher professional development. SPICE serves as a bridge between the interdisciplinary work of Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and K–14 schools in the United States and independent schools abroad by developing multidisciplinary curriculum materials on important international themes.

“Learning about other cultures and about the migration of ideas among communities is vital in today’s world. In presenting a full range of perspectives, SPICE curricula broaden students’ views of the world and deepen their understanding of their own lives.” Yo-Yo Ma

The Road to Beijing initiative has four major educational components. First is a four-lesson curriculum unit, geared to middle and high school students, that (1) introduces students to the modern city of Beijing through its history, geography, and major attractions and sights; (2) explores some economic, environmental, political, and social issues of modern China and the challenges of hosting the Olympics; (3) introduces some of the Olympians participating in the 2008 Beijing Olympics through a documentary by NBC; and (4) examines musicians’ reflections on Beijing and China through a documentary produced by Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble. Stanford scholars, such as Andrew G. Walder, the Denise O’Leary and Kent Thiry Professor of Sociology, served as advisors of the curriculum unit.

A second component focuses on two documentaries that are available through the SPICE website. The documentary, The Road to Beijing, produced by the Silk Road Project and narrated by Yo-Yo Ma and featuring music of the Silk Road Ensemble, is available with the Road to Beijing curriculum unit as well as through the SPICE and Silk Road Project websites. An accompanying teacher’s guide is available as well. Olympics broadcaster NBC joined the collaboration with SPICE and has produced a short documentary that features U.S. and Chinese Olympians. The first interview features Stanford alumnus and U.S. gymnast David Durante. The NBC documentary and an accompanying teacher’s guide is also available on the SPICE website.

Third, a new Road to Beijing website showcases many of SPICE’s curriculum units on China, along with new interactive features on the modern city of Beijing and the historic Silk Road. In 2007, SPICE completed a curriculum unit called Along the Silk Road in collaboration with Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Project. A new Silk Road game, designed by David Cohn, Cammy Huang, Gary Mukai, and Johanna Wee, will now allow students to walk and explore the historic Silk Road. Yo-Yo Ma commented, “The wonderful work SPICE is doing to educate young people about the historic Silk Road trading route is significant on many levels. Learning about other cultures and about the migration of ideas among communities is vital in today’s world. In presenting a full range of perspectives, SPICE curricula broaden students’ views of the world and deepen their understanding of their own lives.” Other China-focused curriculum units that have been produced by SPICE include Chinese Dynasties Part One: The Shang Dynasty through the Tang Dynasty, 1600 BCE to 907 CE; Chinese Dynasties Part Two: The Song Dynasty through the Qing Dynasty, 960 to 1911 CE; China's Cultural Revolution; Ethnic Minority Groups in China; Hong Kong in Transition: A Look at Economic Interdependence; Religions and Philosophies in China: Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism; and 10,000 Shovels: China's Urbanization and Economic Development.

As a fourth component, the Road to Beijing initiative offers teacher professional development seminars, another hallmark of SPICE’s work over the past three decades. Many seminars have already been held at Stanford and for the East Asia Regional Council of Overseas Schools, the European Council of Independent Schools, and the Chicago Public Schools. Most recently, the SPICE staff and Albert Dien, professor emeritus of Asian Languages, gave four seminars for the Chicago Public Schools in May 2008. Each seminar featured a lecture by Albert Dien and interactive demonstrations of SPICE curricula by the SPICE staff. In October 2008, SPICE and the Silk Road Project will work with the New York City Public Schools.

In collaboration with organizations such as NBC and the Silk Road Project, SPICE will continue to channel its interdisciplinary work on key international issues (and their historical and cultural underpinnings) — political economy, security, the environment, and health — to schools in our nation and the world. SPICE invites interested teachers to visit its new website, show their students the new documentaries, and engage their students in a study of historic topics concerning China, such as the Silk Road, as well as contemporary topics concerning China, such as the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

“We are delighted that SPICE is once again sending the university’s path-breaking, interdisciplinary scholarship and research out into the world, educating a new generation of students and scholars about contemporary issues occasioned by the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing and China’s historic rise,” said FSI Director Coit D. Blacker.

Gary Mukai personally introduced the new Road to Beijing initiative to Stanford alumni in Chicago on June 16, 2008, at a Leadership Circle Event.

Prominent conflicts such as the India-Pakistan dispute over Kashmir and the conflict on the Korean Peninsula highlight the need for peaceful solutions to violent territorial disputes. Although the effectiveness of negotiated legal solutions to such conflicts is often questioned, a new Stanford study suggests that treaties that resolve territorial conflicts “work”— in the sense that they are associated with a large reduction in the probability of subsequent conflict.

The study by Kenneth A. Schultz, associate professor of political science, and Jennifer Jones, research fellow at the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation (SCICN), examined 141 pairs of states (dyads) that experienced at least one militarized territorial conflict between 1816 and 2001. Two-thirds (94) of these dyads made at least one legal commitment to resolve the territorial conflict. Two-thirds of those treaties “worked”; they were never followed by militarized conflict over the territory addressed in the agreement. A multiple regression analysis revealed that a legally binding agreement on territory is associated with a roughly 70 percent reduction in the probability of a subsequent militarized conflict.

Realist accounts of international relations predict that such treaties would work in preventing violence insofar as they allocate disputed territory in accordance with the prevailing balance of power between the affected states. Schultz and Jones’s study reveals that this “distributional” factor alone does not account for the reduced likelihood of subsequent militarized conflict. Some other variables must be at play in creating the “treaty effect."

The study accordingly examined whether the existence of a territorial treaty could itself constrain states from resorting to force to revise the agreement. In this view, the treaty effect stems from the unwillingness of the states involved to incur the costs — such as external sanctions or domestic outrage — that would stem from breaking a previously agreed-upon arrangement. Although tests indirectly support this hypothesis, the more frequent violation of simple nonaggression pacts suggests that treaties are not major constraints on state behavior. More research is necessary to determine exactly what types of salient constraints treaties place on states.

A third explanation for the treaty effect considers the domestic political costs of surrendering a state’s legal claim to territory allocated to the other party under a treaty when the claim itself is valuable, e.g., the claim to ownership over a whole piece of territory, as in Kashmir, or the claim to territory based on religious rights, as in Israel. In this view, a state would be reluctant to sign a treaty when the value of the claim to the disputed territory is particularly high. Treaties, then, serve as screening mechanisms — only those states that place a relatively low value on a claim to disputed territory will sign treaties. In this view, the treaty effect arises because states enter into treaties only when they do not want to keep fighting over disputed territory, rather than because of the inherent constraints of the treaty itself.

Although the results of the study are consistent with the view that territorial treaties work because they serve as screening mechanisms, the evidence remains unclear. There is no direct evidence that states employ a claimsbased rationale when declining to sign a treaty. Schultz and Jones are, however, working on creative ways to observe the role of this rationale for the treaty effect and expect future results to be more specific.

One of the more remarkable underreported stories of 2008 was a speech in which the State department’s legal adviser John Bellinger admitted that there “are also realities about the International Criminal Court that the United States must accept.” He also stated that the Bush administration would work with the Court to maximize its chances of success in Darfur. Bellinger did not say that the United States might actually join the Court, but acknowledged that it enjoyed widespread international support and legitimacy, and that the United States could fruitfully cooperate with it on areas of mutual benefit.

Neither mea culpa nor volte-face, the speech nonetheless indicates the distance the administration has traveled in seven years. While Bellinger’s oratory went largely unnoticed by foreign policy wonks and the attentive public alike, it did not escape the scrutiny of John Bolton, who dismissed it as Clinton-era “pabulum” and reflective of “the yearning the Rice State Department has for acceptance” by academics and foreign intellectuals. He added ominously, “the fight resumes after Jan. 20.”

Bolton has been a powerful influence on Republican foreign policy for the last twenty years. Before his appointment as ambassador to the United Nations in 2005—which was achieved without Senate confirmation—Bolton dominated arms-control policy in the first Bush term. He killed the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, negotiations with North Korea, and the Biological Weapons Convention verification protocol. During the Clinton years, he campaigned tirelessly from his Heritage Foundation perch for missile defense and against global governance, which he seems to equate with global government. In 1998, when then-Secretary-General of the United Nations Kofi Annan released a report critical of both the United Nations secretariat and member states for the failure to prevent genocide in Srebrenica, Bolton chastized Annan for having the temerity to criticize governments for what they did or did not do in the former Yugoslavia. He added menacingly: “I think if he continues down this road, ultimately it means war, at least with the Republican Party.”

Bolton came of age politically during Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign. The future policy heavyweight was a high schooler in Baltimore at the time. He honed his conservatism at Yale College and Yale Law School, ducked Vietnam through a National Guard posting (“looking back, I am not terribly proud of this calculation”), and got his first taste of Washington as an intern to Spiro Agnew. During the Bush Sr. presidency, Bolton was Assistant Secretary for International Organization Affairs in James Baker’s State Department, and was one of the first people who Baker called when he needed a posse of chad-disputing lawyers in Florida in November 2000. Bolton’s name keeps showing up in various articles about the fight inside the Republican Party for the soul of John McCain’s foreign policy.

All of this makes it imperative to read his memoirs, which clarify the stakes in the forthcoming election. Although it is hard to imagine Bolton in a McCain administration—his memoirs offend so many within his party, across the aisle, and overseas, that Bolton could not win Senate confirmation for capitol dog-catcher—Bolton will be plotting, pressing, and pushing to force McCain’s foreign policy back to the unilateralism of George Bush’s first term, when the war on terror meant never having to say you’re sorry. And there are important national security posts that do not require Senate approval.

The memoir reads like an international relations primer done in the style of a modern morality tale—imagine Kenneth Waltz's classic Man, the State, and War as written by Ayn Rand.

To Bolton, the United Nations is a “target rich environment,” and I had a front row seat to watch his gunslinging. In 2005 I served as Special Adviser to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. I was responsible for developing member-state support for his efforts to overhaul the United Nations. In that capacity, I was in Brussels in March 2005 when President Bush nominated Bolton as Ambassador to the United Nations. One high-ranking EU official recoiled in horror, and, to share his agita, repeated two of Bolton’s more famous lines: that “UN headquarters could lose ten floors and no one would know the difference,” and that “there was no United Nations.” How in the world, the official asked, could such a man be Ambassador to the United Nations?

Amidst nodding heads and shared pained looks, I offered that if I could pick the ten floors, I would agree with Bolton. Moreover, I said, any sentient being who spends time in Turtle Bay—the Manhattan site of the United Nations—will at some point in frustration say to themselves that there is no United Nations. Bolton’s sin was to say it publicly. Finally, I suggested that John Bolton was irrelevant: “If the President of the United States and the Secretary of State want a strong, effective United Nations, then Bolton will have to deliver. If they don’t, you could have John Kerry as the U.S. ambassador, and nothing will happen.”

Oh well; win some, lose some. Which is what Condoleeza Rice is rumored to have told a friend who asked how John Bolton could have possibly been nominated for the position under her watch.

Or more accurately, I was half right, half wrong. Reading this book, one can almost feel sorry for how unsuited Bolton was for his new job. For four years he had been the point man for breaking American commitments abroad, insulting allies and enemies alike, ditching the ABM Treaty, and unsigning the Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court (“my happiest moment at State”). In the heady days of the first Bush administration, when it believed the United States was so powerful it could get anything that it wanted without friends, partners, or institutions, Bolton was the “say no” guy, a job he performed with great brio. How could he know that in 2005 his big boss, the President, and his nominal boss, the Secretary of State, would actually decide that international cooperation was necessary, and that maybe we should start worrying about America’s free fall in world opinion? A pit bull in the first term, Bolton would be a yap dog in the second, grating on the Secretary of State, the President, and most American allies.

Almost sorry, for whatever else you say about John Bolton, he is not of the “we can disagree without being disagreeable” school of American politics. This is one of the nastiest, pettiest memoirs in the annals of American diplomatic history. Among the many targets of insults and catty remarks are former and present U.K. ambassadors to the United Nations Emyr Jones Parry, Adam Thomson (“I could never look at or listen to Thomson without immediately thinking of Harry [Potter] and all his little friends”), and John Sawers; recent U.K. foreign ministers; just about every UN civil servant mentioned; indeed, just about every U.S. civil servant mentioned, along with countless journalists and politicians.

The memoir reads like an international relations primer done in the style of a modern morality tale—imagine Kenneth Waltz’s classic Man, the State, and War as written by Ayn Rand. Bolton, usually singlehandedly, takes on what he calls the High Minded, the Normers (those who create international norms of behavior or try to “[whip] the United States into line with leftist views of the way the world should look”), the EAPeasers (career State Department officials who advocate negotiations with North Korea), the Risen Bureaucracy, the Crusaders of Compromise, the Arms Control True Believers, and the EUroids.

The book has the formulaic allegories typical of the genre—the young, innocent female (Kristen Silverberg, Assistant Secretary for International Organization Affairs) driven to tears after being berated by the cold-hearted career bureaucrat (Nicholas Burns); the noble knight (Bolton himself) fighting against the political higher ups who care only about “positioning themselves” (Rice) or their legacy (Colin Powell). And of course Bolton’s plaintive cries that the 2005-06 changes in administration policy occurred against the will of the President. One sees the peasants now: ‘If only the King knew what was happening, this would never go on.’

Now add a heaping dose of xenophobia. Foreigners, appeasing foreigners, foreigners claiming to know us better than we know ourselves: all loom large in Bolton’s memoirs. He insults the former Swedish foreign minister and President of the General Assembly Jan Eliasson as not only having “an ethereal Hammarskjöldian vision problem, but also a Gunnar Myrdal problem, yet another foreigner who ‘understood’ us better than we did ourselves.” (This is the Myrdal who shared the 1974 Nobel Prize in Economics with Friedrich Hayek, and whose classic book on race, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, was cited in Brown v. Board of Education.) At one point in his belittlement of a Bush political appointee, a special assistant to Condoleeza Rice, no less, Bolton adds that she was “a naturalized citizen originally from Pakistan,” in case we wondered why she could not possibly understand America’s real foreign policy interests. In Bolton’s worldview Zbigniew Brzezinski is probably a naturalized American citizen originally from Poland; Henry Kissinger, a naturalized American citizen originally from Germany.

In the Bolton universe, you want Iran and North Korea to be referred to the Security Council, so that when it fails to unite behind a resolute strategy, the United States is then free to take the tough action it needs to take. And in the case of North Korea, Bolton is clear about what that would be: “unilateralist, interventionist, and preemptive.” Is it any wonder that when it came to Iran and North Korea, our allies and adversaries were loathe to refer them anywhere near Bolton?

Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 article “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” was prompted by the supporters of the Goldwater campaign. Bolton strides right off the pages of Hofstadter’s essay:

He is always manning the barricades of civilization . . . he does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated—if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.

According to Bolton, we do not need diplomats who negotiate, seek common ground, and strive for cooperative solutions. We need litigators who will go to the wall defending American interests, who will understand that when others say no, they mean no, and that therefore compromise is illusion. But in a world where the United States needs international cooperation for its own peace and prosperity, what comes next? Bolton’s answers are laughable—we stick with our “closest friends in the United Nations”—Israel, Palau and the Marshall Islands. Or we forge a new alliance with Japan, South Korea, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand to overcome the parasitic and paralytic EU. The road to global primacy runs through . . . Wellington?

There are, of course, some glaring contradictions in the memoirs. Bolton is known as a sovereignty hawk and he spells out the content of that doctrine as “greater independence and fewer unnecessary restraints.” The job of civil servants, politically appointed or career, is “to implement the president’s policies.” So it comes as a double shock when we find Bolton handing a draft Security Council resolution to the Israeli ambassador, in case the ambassador wants to ask his Prime Minister to appeal directly to Bush or Rice to change President Bush’s policy on Lebanon.

Another example concerns Bolton’s recurring beratement of UN officials for forgetting that they work for the member states. He then describes how one Under-Secretary-General, American appointee Christopher Burnham, surreptitiously showed him budget documents that put the United States at an advantage in budget negotiations. It is hard to see how you can have it both ways. Either UN officials serve all member states equally or the organization is up for grabs to the most powerful state.

But it is the big betrayal that is at the heart of the book. Facing a quagmire in Iraq, a faltering coalition in Afghanistan, a nuclear armed North Korea, the possibility of a nuclear Iran, and a war against terror that was creating more, not fewer, terrorists, Condoleeza Rice convinced President Bush that maybe they should stop digging a bigger hole for American foreign policy. And that meant actually trying diplomacy in North Korea, Iran, and the Middle East.

The losers were John Bolton and his acolytes; the winners were the professionals like Nicholas Burns and Christopher Hill. Faced with defeat and repudiation of the failed policies he advocated, Bolton’s response is familiar and tiresome: the professionals had secretly hijacked the president’s policy; the Secretary of State cares more about appeasing foreigners than protecting American interests.

The moment of reckoning for Bolton and for the President that nominated him is not described in the book, but it took place two months after Bolton left the administration. When the United States and North Korea reached a deal in February 2007 that holds the promise of denuclearizing the country, Bolton tried to scuttle it. Asked by reporters whether he was loyal to the President, Bolton answered, “I’m loyal to the original policy.”

What did Bolton achieve at the United Nations? Very little, which was fine by him and fine by the cast of nonaligned Ambassadors who oppose a more effective international organization. I asked one of them in December 2006 if he was happy that Bolton was leaving. He said, “No, we’ve learned how to deal with Mr. Bolton.” When I sought clarification, he said, “Look, Bolton comes in and asks for the sun, the moon, and the stars, and we say ‘no.’ He then says, ‘I told you so’ and leaves. Everybody is happy.”

Which returns us to the question of why anyone would want to wade through these 500 self-serving pages. The best answer: to remind yourself of the stakes of this upcoming election and why the United States needs more old-fashioned diplomacy and less paranoia and arrogance. A McCain presidency might not eschew diplomacy, but in the political free-for-all that is the Republican party, Bolton and his minions are always there, ready to denigrate any agreement or compromise, to sabotage and subvert real diplomacy.

Asked by reporters whether he was loyal to the President, Bolton answered, "I'm loyal to the original policy."

To understand the stakes, consider the little known and even less appreciated record of American negotiations with North Korea since 1994. Between what was called the “Agreed Framework” that brought North Korea back into the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1994 and the end of 2000, the United States and North Korea reached twenty agreements on a wide array of issues. Certain of these agreements foundered in implementation, but an objective assessment shows that some of the noncompliance stemmed from constraints placed by American domestic politics.

The Bolton strategy killed the Agreed Framework, hoping through threats, sanctions, and use of force to end the North Korean regime. Unfortunately for Bolton—fortunately for the rest of us—our ally South Korea and our necessary partner China did not want to deal with the consequences: either a war or a collapsed, deadly state on their borders. In the end, they did not have to because North Korea left the NPT, developed a nuclear bomb, and tested it, bankrupting the Bolton policy and producing the sharp change of strategy that has born fruit in recent North Korean steps to end its nuclear program.

Writing about the successes of American negotiators in bringing North Korea and the United States back together in February 2007, former State Department negotiator Robert Carlin and Stanford Professor Emeritus John Lewis have described why Bolton and his crowd loathe diplomacy is loathed by Bolton and his crowd, and why it is so necessary:

Diplomats strive to put down words all of them can swallow and hopefully their superiors in [the] capital can stomach. Written agreements are difficult to reach. The pain often comes not so much in dealing with the other side but in dealing with your own. Unless you are dictating terms to a defeated enemy, you are going to have to compromise on something, probably several somethings, that will make many people unhappy. That was done for the February 13th agreement, and there is no shame to it.

John Bolton did much damage to American interests in the first Bush administration, but he was implementing the president’s policy. President Bush deserves the blame for putting Bolton in a position to continue hardming American interests even when the overall direction of policy changed.

Given that many countries treated the United States as radioactive in 2005; given that trust and confidence in the United States were at all time lows; given that our record was one of a violator of international law and human rights; President Bush, had he truly wanted to start to move the United States out of the hole he had been so assiduously digging, would have had to send to the United Nations an ambassador with extraordinary listening skills, who could work across various international chasms, rebuild respect for American diplomacy, and, yes, advocate agreements that would make a lot of people unhappy. Someone, in fact, a lot like our present Ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, a naturalized citizen originally from Afghanistan. Instead he sent . . . Yosemite Sam.

So back to January 20. A new American president will take office with grinding wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a nuclear-armed North Korea, an Iran headed that way, and crises in Sudan, Israel and Palestine, Lebanon, and Pakistan. Our foreign policy is anathema; our reputation in tatters. Throw in big issues like global warming, non-proliferation, catastrophic terrorism, and a potential pandemic of a deadly new influenza. It is hard to see how any of these crises or issues can be solved without sustained international cooperation and strong international institutions. Take global warming: protecting Americans from its ravages will depend on exercising sovereignty to strike deals with other countries whose domestic behavior threatens us and whose security our domestic behavior threatens. A narrow view of sovereignty as the ability to do as we damned well please will be—quite literally—the death of us all.

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