Surrender Is Not an Option

Candid, plain-spoken, and indomitably courageous, John Bolton served for sixteen tumultuous months as our Ambassador to the United Nations. While there he engaged in furious battles with weapons-of-mass-destruction proliferators, terrorists, Islamic supremacists, and rogue states such as Iran and North Korea — all of which he carried through with verve, eloquence, and unapologetic patriotism. Now, in Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations and Abroad, John Bolton tells the whole story. Here the straight-talking former Ambassador takes you behind the scenes at the UN and the State Department— and reveals for the first time ever why his efforts to defend American interests and reform the UN resulted in so much controversy.

In this revealing and often blunt memoir, Bolton recounts his 2005 appointment as Ambassador to the United Nations, and the headline-grabbing confirmation battle that followed— resulting finally in his recess appointment and sixteen-month tenure at the UN. Bolton here offers piercing and never-before-revealed insights into international crises— many of which are still simmering, such as North Korea’s nuclear test, Iran’s fanatical pursuit of nuclear weapons, the Muslim-on-Muslim genocide in Darfur, the month-long negotiation that in the summer of 2006 produced the controversial end of hostilities between Israel and the terrorist group Hizballah, and more.

Bolton is frank throughout Surrender Is Not an Option in detailing both his successes and his failures. He explains why it is so difficult to mount an effective response in the UN against those who are bent on combating the United States and sowing havoc in the world, exposing the operational inadequacies that hinder the UN’s effectiveness in international diplomacy. Bolton exposes the UN’s deeply ingrained biases against Israel and the United States, and criticizes in no uncertain terms the bureaucratic inertia and timidity in the State Department— which has done so much to undermine presidential policy. He also details how the U.S. can once again lead the way to a realistic and workable global security arrangement for the twenty-first century, and identifies the next generation of threats that our children will face.

This book is at once both a fascinating career retrospective from one of the most outstanding statesmen on the scene today, and a clear-sighted prescription for the foreign policy steps we must take now in order to preserve American sovereignty and strength.

Insights, revelations, and prescriptions from a great defender of America:

• How the UN was sidelined by the Cold War, and never regained its footing — and how it has continued to be a sounding board for anti-Western and anti-American propaganda even after the demise of the Soviet Union
• Why North Korea will never give up its nuclear weapons voluntarily, and why it is only a matter of time before their cheating is exposed
• Darfur: why Sudan steadfastly refused a UN peacekeeping force, despite Secretary General Kofi Annan’s rosy predictions to the contrary
• How the bias toward Israel pervades the UN at the highest levels — and how Kofi Annan wouldn’t even answer Bolton’s probing questions about it
• How Bolton tried to remove UN funding from the Palestinian Authority’s Hamas government, but ran into enormous opposition from the UN bureaucracy and Europe
• Why the Bush Administration was not able to pursue its plan to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons
• How Bolton went after North Korea at the UN — and why he had to do it without much help from the State Department
• Condoleeza Rice: her surprising role in watering down beyond all effectiveness attempts to call upon the various Palestinian factions to renounce violence
• How the UN’s new Human Rights Council performed just as badly or worse than the original — as Bolton predicted
• How Kofi Annan undercut the Bush Administration diplomatically and proved consistently unhelpful in Iraq, both before and during the war
• How China has both improved and slipped backward during the Bush Administration — improving in large part because of the effective use of sanctions against some of its major trading companies
• The American Left’s strategy: building international support for their proposals, so as to leave the United States isolated in the world
• Iran: why it will never voluntarily give up its nuclear program, and why a policy based on the contrary assumption is both delusional and dangerous — and is the road to a Nuclear Holocaust
• The UN’s record: why it is so uniformly disappointing, and what can be done about it now

Tags: John R. Bolton, Surrender Is Not an Option