Via WaPo: Policy Shifts Felt After Bolton’s Departure From State Dept.
For years, a key U.S. program intended to keep Russian nuclear fuel out of terrorist hands has been frozen by an arcane legal dispute. As undersecretary of state, John R. Bolton was charged with fixing the problem, but critics complained he was the roadblock.Now with Bolton no longer in the job, U.S. negotiators report a breakthrough with the Russians and predict a resolution will be sealed by President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin at an international summit in Scotland next month, clearing the way to eliminate enough plutonium to fuel 8,000 nuclear bombs.
The prospective revival of the plutonium disposal project underlines a noticeable change since Bolton’s departure from his old job as arms control chief. Regardless of whether the Senate confirms him as U.N. ambassador during a scheduled vote today, fellow U.S. officials and independent analysts said his absence has already been felt at the State Department.
Without the hard-charging Bolton around, the Bush administration not only has moved to reconcile with Russia over nuclear threat reduction but also has dropped its campaign to oust the chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and made common cause with European allies in offering incentives to Iran to persuade it to drop any ambitions for nuclear weapons.
One has to love mono-casual analysis. I would point out that one could have almost written the same story (at least the first several paragraphs) and, after tweaking a few adjectives, substituted “Colin Powell” for “John Bolton”–after all, the breakthroughs listed all have taken place not only after the exit of Bolton, but also the exit of Powell. For that matter, they also correspond with the installation of Rice as SecState.
Which overly simplistic explanation would you prefer to use to explain the outcome?
I write this not to argue on Bolton’s behalf (although I have been generally supportive of the nomination), but to note that this hardly passes muster as good analysis on the part of WaPo.
Essentially the piece is predicated on simplistic post hoc, ergo propter hoc reasoning plus a vague statement (“fellow U.S. officials and independent analysts said his absence has already been felt at the State Department”) to reach a position that removing Bolton led to the solution of a set of problems.
Again: that’s poor analysis.
Further, the story represents a format that is often used in newspaper stories that drives me crazy: it presents a theory or set of possibilities about a story (usually by using quotes that reach a conclusion that the article itself can’t) and then later concedes, halfway or more down the story (or on the jump page) that the theory that led the piece was just that: one possibility among many.
That kind of writing bothers me, because many people only read portions of newspaper stories. As such, one can affect perceptions by the way one structures the piece.
Hence, we do get, in paragraphs eight, nine and ten:
Whether the shifting policies reflect Bolton’s absence or his absence reflects shifting policies remains a point of debate. When she took over as secretary of state in January, Condoleezza Rice moved to sideline Bolton and reverse some of his approaches, U.S. officials said. By proposing him for the United Nations, she effectively moved him out of the policymaking center at the department’s Foggy Bottom headquarters.“It’s less a question of these decisions being taken because John was no longer in the policy loop,” said Robert J. Einhorn, who was assistant secretary of state for nonproliferation at the beginning of the Bush presidency. “It’s that John was no longer in the Washington-based policymaking loop because the second Bush administration wants to adopt a different approach to dealing with the rest of the world.”
Still, other specialists cautioned against overstating the extent of the changes since Bolton’s departure and noted that he was always acting in concert with the president’s broad wishes. “He was a lightning rod because of his strong and blunt statements,” said Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, an advocacy organization. “But this Bush administration is not going to become the Adlai Stevenson administration just because John Bolton has left the State Department.”
It just seems to me that to build a hypothesis in the first seven paragraphs sans direct quotes and using poor logic is also poor journalism, when there is a more plausible hypothesis that has some direct backing that is later used in the piece.
There are some direct quotes that back the overall thesis in the later half of the piece.
It may well be that Bolton was the problem in some, or all, of these areas. However, it strikes me as implausible that one man was able to so direct policy and that all that was needed to fix the problems was his ouster.
To get to the substance of the matter beyond the journalism and analysis: if Bolton was that big of a problem, then it does raise questions about his ability to be appointed to a diplomatic post of importance. So, we shall see.
No doubt there will be more on this topic.
June 20th, 2024 at 6:53 am
Because the article doesn’t give enough information to determine exactly which “obstacle” was recently cleared, it is hard to tell exactly what the heck they are talking about. However, some of the “problems” we were encountering were that the Rusky’s didn’t think we were giving them enough money, that we we wanted to know exactly what they were spending the money on, and that we wanted to actually confirm the results of the spending (i.e., we wanted to see that the materials were secured rather than just taking their word on it).
If we “resolved” these problems by caving in and giving them more money without demanding any accountability or verification measures, then maybe the tragedy here is that Bolton was taken out of the “Washington policy loop”!
June 20th, 2024 at 8:50 am
I had the exact same questions as Terry when reading that. Meaning Terry must be a genius, of course.
June 20th, 2024 at 8:04 pm
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Monday, June 20th, 2024 @ 9:04 pm in [ Blogging ]
Steven Taylor describes a form of news lead that he dislikes. I’m not so enamored of this type of news peg myself, and [...]