Following fast on the heels of the news that John Negroponte is to tbe US’s director of national intelligence, comes the word that John Bolton has been nominated by Bush as Ambassador to the UN.

For those unfamiliar, Bolton was until recently undersecretary of state for arms control and international security. A neo-con of the Wolfowitz school with ties to the Project for the New American Century, Bolton has been one of the administration’s leading hawks.

During the disputed Florida count of the Gore/Bush debacle in 2000, Bolton reportedly arrived in the state in a then legal capacity and announced: “I’m with the Bush-Cheney team, and I’m here to stop the count.”

Elevation to the administration did little to soften him. Notoriously, North Korea refused to deal with him in arms talks after he publicly referred to King Jong Il as a “tyrannical dictator” and a leader of an “evil regime”.

Bolton was also instrumental in the resignation of Jose Bustani, director-general of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) after Bustani led initiatives to have countries such as Iraq and North Korea sign up to the Chemical Weapons Convention thus making them accountable, at least on paper, to international inspection bodies. Bustani had been unanimously re-elected to his post the previous year.

On his watch, the US also withdrew from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty with Russia and refused to ratify the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. He also effectively torpedoed the 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention by undermining attempts to enforce the agreement. And this after the anthrax used in the attacks in the US in 2001 was sourced back to American laboratories.

Bolton, without any evidence, also accused Cuba of having a biological weapons programme.

So Bolton’s putative appointment leaves Bush’s recent pronouncements on “a new era of trans-Atlantic unity” sounding very hollow indeed. Just listen to what Bolton himself had to say about the UN in 1994:

“There is no such thing as the United Nations” and “if the U.N. Secretariat building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.”