Senior Fellow John R. Bolton

Well, it is a great honor to be here again at CPAC. And I want to thank Dave and Wayne and Michael and everybody up here and everybody who has put this together. The first thing I want to do, though, is thank everybody in this room and the people you represent back in your home states and in your various organizations and, perhaps, many of the people watching tonight. I want to thank you for all of the work that I know so many of you did to try and get me confirmed to be Ambassador to the UN.

It was a really--it was a great honor to be nominated by President Bush. But I have to say it was an equal or perhaps even a greater honor to see the kind of support that so many people who had never met me, did not know anything about me but who spent enormous effort with their senators, their congressional delegations, in the mail, in newspaper articles, on the blogs in a whole range of activity to try and help out, and I'm really deeply grateful for that. I'm sorry it did not work out for a lot of reasons. I'm sorry. Your effort was in vain, but I'm very grateful. I just wanted to say thank you as strongly as I can for that.

We are at a difficult time in an administration--the seventh year; the President cannot succeed himself. Sadly, Vice President Cheney has said he is not running for the Republican nomination. The administration's popularity has been besieged because of the war in Iraq and a variety of different other reasons. And what is happening is an effort by the Liberals in this country, by people on Capitol Hill, the media to try to dispirit us; to try to say that things are so bad in this administration that there is no hope that a Conservative is going to win in 2008, and not only from the electoral point of view but from the policy point of view. They are trying to discredit the policies that we have stood for. They are trying to say that even the Bush administration is giving up on its policies. It is forgotten why he was elected in 2000 and 2004 and that pragmatism is taking over and that all of those things that we believe in and the reason we supported the administration are being overtaken by events. And by the way, that is probably due to the fact they are going to lose the election in 2008, and this horrible interregnum of Conservative rule is going to disappear.

I think it is the responsibility of everybody here, as Vice President Cheney said in his closing remarks, to put the lie to those kinds of comments, to stop this kind of spin and to recognize that the Liberal media is not going to tell us what we think. It is not going to tell us what is respectable to believe. We will tell them, thank you very much. I think it is important for the administration to know that, too, that the people in this room represent the base of support. When the President, as the latest polls says his approval rating is 26 percent, he and the administration, I hope, will remember the people who brought them to this place and to realize that the reporters and editorial writers of papers like The New York Times are not going to improve that 26 percent rating. If anybody is going to do it, it is going to be the people right here tonight.

But I think over the longer term, as well, we are involved in politics not because we seek government jobs, not because we are there for political patronage, not for any of the reasons, the traditional reasons that so many Democrats are involved in politics. We are involved in politics for philosophy and policy. And this is where, I think, the current attack is at its most insidious because the implication of much of the debate we hear in Congress today, and much of the commentary in the media is to try and discredit our ideas and lower our morale, perhaps, even lower than it is now. We need to resist that. We need to turn that around, and we need to remember some of the lessons that we have learned over these particularly difficult past six years, not related to individuals, not related to particular candidates; related to our philosophy.

And in the field of foreign affairs, I think there are several important lessons. The first is that what President Bush did in overthrowing Saddam Hussein was to defend the critical national security interest of the United States. He did this because the regime itself represented a threat to peace and international security. You can argue about what the intelligence showed before the war. You can argue about what level of weapons of mass destruction Saddam actually possessed. You can argue about what happened to him. But the quantity of weapons of mass destruction he possessed before the war was never the real issue. The real issue was that the threat was Saddam Hussein himself and that the decision to eliminate that threat to our security and the peace and security of our friends and allies was the right decision.

Now, there is a lot of debate about what happened after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and historians will pick over it for years, I'm sure, and there is not really even time to get into it tonight. But let us just be clear what the issue is for us right now. The issue for the United States continues to be what is in our national interest. And what is in our national interest in Iraq is that whatever shape the country takes in the future, whether it is one centralized government, a federal system or even three Iraqs, the real issue for the United States and why our troops are there is to prevent any part of that country from becoming a base for terrorists who can later attack the United States or our friends or allies. That is the strategic interest we need to keep in mind. And if there are other countries around the world that do not understand that, I acknowledge we have a burden to try and persuade them. But if we fail to persuade them and they still do not like it, that is just too damn bad.

And that brings me to my next two subjects, the remaining two-thirds of the axis of evil, Iran and North Korea. In many respects, although our headlines and our minds are filled with the struggle in Iraq and Afghanistan, over the long term the success or failure of the United States in preventing Iran and North Korea from acquiring or keeping their nuclear weapons program will be the real determinant whether we have succeeded in securing America into the future. The threat of the proliferation of all weapons of mass destruction, chemical, biological, or nuclear, is real and it is growing. And particularly, the nuclear threats posed by the North Korean and Iranian programs are serious.

Now, we have seen efforts by the Liberals in the media and on the Hill, and, yes, in the permanent bureaucracy of our own federal government to overturn the administration's policies; to say that North Korea, Kim Jong Il, can be talked out of his nuclear weapons: "Certainly, he is a reasonable person. We will just bargain with Kim Jong Il, and he will voluntarily give his weapons up." Do we not all believe that? There are people who would believe that.

My judgment is that nuclear weapons for Kim Jong Il are integral to regime survival, and he is not going to give them up voluntarily. What we have to do is apply pressure, apply sanctions as we have been doing, isolate North Korea further and, finally, to achieve the real solution to the North Korean nuclear weapons problem, eliminate the regime in North Korea and reunite the Korean peninsula.

Similarly, when we look to Iran, we have a regime of fanatic mullahs that have been pursuing nuclear weapons for nearly 20 years. The Europeans, to show that they are not like those unilateralist American cowboys, have been trying to negotiate with the Iranians, have been trying to say to them, "You can have a different relationship with us and, potentially, with the United States if you just suspend your uranium enrichment activities and give up the pursuit of nuclear weapons." With one small exception for nearly four years, the Iranians have been thumbing their noses at the Europeans. And as time has gone by, the Iranians have come closer and closer to a completely indigenous control over the entire nuclear fuel cycle. And when they achieve that, the only limit on when they weaponize their nuclear capacity depends on how much money that they put into it. It is extremely important that President Bush follow through on what he has said, which is that it is unacceptable for Iran to have nuclear weapons.

Now, I do take President Bush to be a man of his word. And I think when he says, "It is unacceptable for Iran to have nuclear weapons," what he means is, it is unacceptable. And therefore, although we do not look for additional military encounters, it is critical, particularly, that the Iranian government understand that when the president says he never takes the military option off the table, that he is deadly serious because, ultimately, Iran is watching North Korea; North Korea is watching Iran. And a lot of other states that would like to acquire nuclear weapons are watching both of them. And they are particularly watching the United States.

Let's face it. While we should work with allies and friends like Japan in the case of North Korea and, hopefully, our European allies, particularly, Israel in dealing with Iran, the only country in the world--the only country in the world--that has the capability of stopping Iran and North Korea from getting nuclear weapons is the United States. And let us not have any illusions about it: That is not unilateralism. That is leadership.

And there is another front that I want to close on here that I spent a lot of time on in the last 16 months, and that is the United Nations and what to do about that. You know, this does not look like a United Nations audience, I can tell. We spent a lot of time, and it was a personal priority for President Bush to try and reform the United Nations, to try and repair the damage that the Oil For Food scandal had done, to try and overcome the problems of leadership, or rather, the lack of leadership demonstrated by the then-Secretary General Kofi Annan, who should have been fired for incompetence long ago.

I'm sorry we were not able to reach that decision. But we spent a lot of time and a lot of effort. The President personally spent a lot of time and effort; Secretary Rice was very devoted to the reform effort. We worked on it very hard. We formed coalitions in New York. We lobbied in capitals around the world. And I want to tell you: After all of that effort for reform, we achieved very little. We achieved very little. And I think it is important to be honest about it. I could get up here and tell you what a wonderful job we did. The fact is we achieved very little.

And that brings me to the one thing on the UN that I want to say tonight, the one reform that is critical, the one reform that could drive everything else, the one point it is extremely important to get through to all of our members of Congress and all of our groups that care about UN issues. Those groups are much broader than simply people who are interested in foreign policy. The UN member-states, the secretariats have a yen to get into every issue they can. What you think is domestic policy for the UN bureaucrats and many member-governments is just more room to play; whether it is Second Amendment issues, gun control, abortion rights, the death penalty, global warming, domestic economic policy, international taxation, these are just subjects they love to debate in New York. So everybody, every group represented in this room, even if your main focus is not foreign policy, you have an interest in what happens in the UN system.

This is the central change in the UN that we need. We need to move away from the current system of financing, which, by and large in most UN agencies, is funded through what are called "assessed contributions"; meaning, effectively, "mandatory contributions". In most UN agencies, the US pays 22 percent of the budget, 27 percent in the case of peace-keeping. It is no surprise when you look at the contributions of other member governments that they have a sense of entitlement that 22 percent American share will always be there.

I will just give you one statistic to show what it is like to deal with this question. There are 192 members of the United Nations; 97 constitute a majority. If you take the 97 members with the lowest assessment and add them all together, the lowest 97 contributing countries contribute less than three-tenths of one percent of the total UN budget; less than three-tenths of one percent. Meaning, the United States contributes approximately 70 times what a majority of UN members contribute. So, is it any wonder? It is fun to spend other people's money, and it is especially fun to spend our money.

So here is the one-key change, is that we move from a system of assessed contributions to a system of voluntary contributions. We will decide how much money we pay the UN, not them. We will decide how much money. How about that? This is a system that will allow us to pay for what we want and demand that we get what we paid for. How is that for a revolutionary principle? Now, this is going to be an enormous struggle, particularly with the Liberals in this country, but it is a struggle that can drive all of the other reforms before.

And just remember that if somebody says to you, "But the UN system would not work without assessed contributions. Purely voluntary contributions would not give the system enough money," ask them if they consider assessed contributions a kind of tax. Is that what they mean? Because many of them will simply answer, "Yes," and that tells you exactly where they stand on the agenda.

So, this is an increase in the freedom quotient. Let's ask for voluntary contributions to the United Nations. Let's get tough with the proliferators of weapons of mass destruction. And let's make sure this room dominates the agenda in 2008.

John R. Bolton is a senior fellow at AEI.