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The top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will ask the panel's Republican majority to delay a vote scheduled for Tuesday on the nomination of John R. Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations, according to Democratic Senate officials. The Democrat, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, will urge Republicans to allow the panel more time to review allegations that Mr. Bolton has acted abusively toward subordinates and others, the Democratic officials said. However, the panel's Republican chairman, Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, plans to urge the panel to vote in favor of Mr. Bolton. "I do...

New allegations of bureaucratic bullying are unlikely to change minds on the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations committee over whether to confirm John Bolton as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, the Republican chairman said on Sunday. Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana said he would press ahead with the committee vote set for Tuesday, while the leading Democrat on the panel, Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware, said Democrats were waiting for further responses from Bolton before deciding whether to demand more hearings. "Hopefully not, but we're waiting for Bolton's answers to find out whether or not he's giving us honest responses,"...

FULL DISCLOSURE (okay, partial disclosure--let's not get carried away with media ethics breast-beating): John Bolton has been an occasional contributor to this magazine. He served in the late 1990s as a director of the Project for the New American Century, which I chair. And he is a friend. More than all that, though, he is an exceptional choice to serve as our next U.N. ambassador. He should be confirmed quickly and easily by the Senate. He has, after all, been confirmed for high government positions four times before. He has served in those posts with distinction during three administrations, untainted...

Back in the early part of the Iraq war I was intrigued that Anthony Lake, who had been a national security adviser to President Clinton, held this perspective on the foreign policy debate between President Bush and his Democratic critics: That this policy conflict was really between conservatives and radicals and it was the Democrats who had emerged as the conservatives and the Republicans who had become the liberals, or "radicals." Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne Jr. elicited that from Mr. Lake in a November 2003 interview. It was part of Lake's assessment of his own Democratic Party's ideological...

Gerhard Schröder, the German chancellor, on Monday said he would support the nomination of Paul Wolfowitz as new head of the World Bank, in effect ruling out any concerted European opposition to his appointment. European officials have complained in private about President George W. Bush's nomination last week of the US deputy defence secretary and about the lack of proper consultation on the matter. Academics, development experts and campaign groups have protested about Mr Wolfowitz's nomination and lack of opposition from Europe. Mr Wolfowitz is expected to be confirmed at a World Bank board meeting on March 31. By convention,...

TODAY SENATOR JOE BIDEN, vice chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a leading Democratic foreign policy voice in that body, voiced strong support for Paul Wolfowitz as President George W. Bush's choice to head the World Bank. Biden described Wolfowitz, currently deputy secretary of defense, as a man with an "active and fertile mind" who believes in the work of multilateral institutions. Asked for his reaction to the selection, Biden responded with one word: "Solid." He then elaborated. "Paul is a brilliant guy and a serious person. My differences with Paul relate to his assessment of what we...

The leaders of about half of Egypt's rickety opposition parties sat down for one of their regular meetings this week under completely irregular circumstances. In the previous few days, President Hosni Mubarak opened presidential elections to more than one candidate, and street demonstrators helped topple Lebanon's government. The mood around the table in a battered downtown Cairo office veered between humor and trepidation, participants said, as they faced the prospect of fielding presidential candidates in just 75 days. "This is all totally new, and nobody is ready," said Mahmoud Abaza, deputy leader of the Wafd Party, one of Egypt's few...

Paul Wolfowitz, US deputy secretary of defence, has emerged as a leading candidate to replace James Wolfensohn as the president of the World Bank. Mr Wolfowitz is one of a small number of people being considered for the US nomination, administration insiders said. The nomination of Mr Wolfowitz, one of the chief architects of the Iraq war and a former US ambassador to Indonesia, would likely be highly controversial, and could raise new questions about the process by which the World Bank chief is selected. One administration official said his nomination “would have enormous repercussions within the development community”. Others...

Dear Senator Frist, Senator Reid, Speaker Hastert, and Representative Pelosi: The United States military is too small for the responsibilities we are asking it to assume. Those responsibilities are real and important. They are not going away. The United States will not and should not become less engaged in the world in the years to come. But our national security, global peace and stability, and the defense and promotion of freedom in the post-9/11 world require a larger military force than we have today. The administration has unfortunately resisted increasing our ground forces to the size needed to meet today's...

President Bush's Inaugural address may have bothered traditional conservatives but it brought joy to the hearts of the neoconservative wing of the Republican party, the Los Angeles Times reports. Described by the Los Angeles Times as "that determined band of hawkish idealists who promoted the U.S. invasion of Iraq and now seek to bring democracy to the rest of the Middle East," the neocons couldn't have been more enthusiastic about the policy enunciated by the President. In one dramatic gesture, the President speech revived what had been seen as the sagging fortunes of the neocons who had virtually disappeared from...

George Bush is a liberal. Stop. A pansy liberal. Yes, you heard me right. I am a real republican. I support (and have put some of my paycheck behind Representative Ron Paul) Ron Paul is a real republican. The kind that I vote for, and my father voted for before me. Why? Because my father came from a Communist country, half of my family was killed or imprisoned there, and we know what oppression looks like. George Bush is using the same tactics of Communists that we had to live through. Constantly instilling fear of an attack from the outside....

MEMORANDUM TO: OPINION LEADERSFROM: WILLIAM KRISTOLSUBJECT: Toward Regime Change in North KoreaRecent reports suggest the presence of emerging cracks in the Stalinist power structure of North Korea, and even the emergence of serious dissident activity there. These should remind us that one of President Bush's top priorities in his second term will have to be dealing with this wretched regime. Nicholas Eberstadt provides useful guidance for an improved North Korean policy in the current issue of the Weekly Standard, ("Tear Down This Tyranny: A Korea strategy for Bush's second term," November 29).To move beyond a policy that is "long on...

Neoconservatism’s Liberal Legacy By Tod LindbergTod Lindberg, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, is editor of Policy Review. This essay appears in slightly different form in Peter Berkowitz, ed., Varieties of Conservatism in America (Hoover Institution Press, 2004). Neoconservatism” is the name of a robust strain in American intellectual life and American politics, a strain with a very rich history. But although even some of its leading figures over the years have pronounced the end of neoconservatism usually on grounds of its merger with (or perhaps takeover of) the conservative mainstream, the term remains very much alive....

What the cabinet shake-up means for Bush's continuing war efforts. WITH THE NOMINATIONS of Condoleezza Rice as secretary of State and Stephen Hadley to replace her as National Security adviser, the shape of the supreme command of Bush II is pretty clear: Rumsfeld is staying; Bush II will be like Bush I, only more so.It's not that the neocon cabal is preparing for the next invasion or that the "hardliners have won." In some sense, the hardliners "won" in the moment of the president's immediate reaction to the September 11 attacks. And the true neocons remain largely outside the...

...Her book is thus animated by dismay and perplexity over the way the French Enlightenment is seen as the main intellectual event of the 18th century, whereas a parallel and in many respects more successful movement in Britain is routinely relegated to an inferior status. Her heroes, therefore, are not Voltaire, Diderot and Rousseau as much as Adam Smith, David Hume and Edmund Burke. In a similar spirit, she invokes and concurs with Hannah Arendt's notion that the American revolution, rather than the revolution in France, was the great political watershed of modern times. For Himmelfarb, the contrast between the...

HEADLINE: CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK; How Books Have Shaped U.S. Policy BYLINE: By MICHIKO KAKUTANI BODY: President Bush has never been known as a bookworm. An instinctive politician who goes with his gut, he has usually left the heavy reading in the family to his wife, Laura, a former librarian. He is "often uncurious and as a result ill informed," his former speechwriter, David Frum, wrote in a memoir this year, adding that "conspicuous intelligence seemed actively unwelcome in the Bush White House." It is curious then that books by historians, philosophers and policy analysts have played a significant role in shaping...

RARELY HAVE THE HOLDERS of any set of political views and policy preferences been so thoroughly caricatured as the "neoconservatives" of the Bush years. To critics, this group of policymakers (preeminently, in the Defense Department and the Office of the Vice President), along with their allies on the outside (preeminently, in the pages of THE WEEKLY STANDARD), is responsible for a kind of hijacking of U.S. foreign policy in the wake of 9/11. Intoxicated by American power and blinded by a utopian vision, the neoconservatives (in the critics' telling) set the country on a disastrous and unnecessary attempt to remake...

Foreign policy - Hopes that Kerry, with his fluent French, will take a more multilateral approach, are mistaken, argues Lindsey Hilsum It is the first globalised US election. Non-voters of the world have united in their desperation to get rid of President Bush. In 30 out of 35 countries polled in a recent survey by the organisation Globescan, an overwhelming majority wanted John Kerry to win. Feeling was strongest in traditional US allies such as Germany and Norway. Only in Nigeria, the Philippines and Poland did a majority favour Bush. The former French foreign minister Hubert Vedrine put it bluntly...

As citizens of the Euro-Atlantic community of democracies, we wish to express our sympathy and solidarity with the people of the Russian Federation in their struggle against terrorism. The mass murderers who seized School No. 1 in Beslan committed a heinous act of terrorism for which there can be no rationale or excuse. While other mass murderers have killed children and unarmed civilians, the calculated targeting of so many innocent children at school is an unprecedented act of barbarism that violates the values and norms of our community and which all civilized nations must condemn.At the same time, we are...

Where Pat Buchanan Went Wrong A review of Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency by Patrick J. Buchanan Patrick J. Buchanan is not a man who any conservative should dismiss lightly. He fought the good fight for a long time. He was an effective conservative commentator back in the lonely days of the Great Society, and a stalwart Cold Warrior who articulated the anti-Communist case brilliantly when he directed communications for President Reagan. Today, Pat Buchanan commands a sizable following and continues to offer insight into the mindset of...