Politics

Bolton’s admirers hailed him as a dedicated and clear-headed reformer, unafraid to challenge a U.N. bureaucracy that is corrupt, profligate, and reflexively hostile to the U.S.—the country that provides the organization with its single largest annual financial contribution—detractors called him a rude, reckless ideologue, an enemy rather than a reformer of the U.N., and a neoconservative determined to throw over decades’ worth of international agreements in a shortsighted display of American power.