Review: Surrender is not an Option
| DOI | 10.1177/002070200806300222 |
| Published date | 01 June 2008 |
| Date | 01 June 2008 |
| Subject Matter | Review |
| Reviews |
| 502 | International Journal | Spring 2008 |
dahar for the future of Canadian foreign policy in this excellent book, but,
like many Canadian commentators, they miss the opportunity to provide fur-
ther answers.
Simon Collard-Wexler/Columbia University
SURRENDER IS NOT AN OPTION
Defending America at the United Nations and Abroad
John Bolton
New York: Threshold Editions, 2007. 496pp, US $27.00 cloth (ISBN
1416552847)
Before we get onto what this reviewer thinks of John Bolton’s memoir, it is
worth pondering what Bolton would think of this reviewer. He might not be
too positive, as I represent a lot of things the former American ambassador
to the United Nations doesn’t like. Firstly, I’m British, and he’s wary of intel-
lectually snobbish Brits (210).I’m even “the son of a British diplomat,” an ep-
ithet he applies with particular disdain to one minor opponent (201). There
are ideological as well as genealogical issues: I am a qualified believer in the
international potential of the European Union, which must make me one of
the “EUroids” (204), whose advocacy of international norms and multilater-
alism “profoundly threatens to diminish American autonomy and self-gov-
ernment, notions that to us spell ‘sovereignty’” (429). Worst of all, I think
that the UN also has real value (if you require page references, you’re missing
the point—
we’re talking about John Bolton
).
Unsurprisingly,
Surrender is Not an Option
is not aimed at the likes of
me. Bolton states that his audience is to be found in Middle America. He is
concerned that many of his fellow nationals are too easily beguiled by multi-
lateral institutions, and specifically the UN. For them, “the United Nations to
this day remains the UN of UNICEF trick-or-treating on Halloween, and of
famine-relief efforts in natural disasters, or combating diseases in developing
countries” (197). A prominent critic of the UN since the 1980s and an un-
remittingly controversial ambassador in New York from mid-2005 to Decem-
ber 2006, the author now sets out to disillusion “those who still think
glowingly of the UN as they had imagined it on Halloweens long ago” (198).
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