At a time of rising threats, the U.S. Mission to the United Nations now resides in limbo, led by an ambassador who has turned in the best performance since Jeane Kirkpatrick — and who, for his pains, now seems all but certain to be gone when the Senate adjourns, possibly within about a week.

The cold comfort may be that the UN is an institution so bent that no lone ambassador, however decent, diligent and dilomatically skilled (the Heritage Foundation has assembled a list of testimonials ), can do much to set it straight. But as far as it matters at all to have U.S. interests well-represented there, the fate of Ambassador John Bolton serves by now as shorthand for a foreign policy turning to mush. It is passing strange that in a time of rising threats on many sides, we now have Condoleezza Rice’s State Department eagerly rolling over to “talk” with Syria and Iran; President Bush preparing to accept dog-eared advice from the Iraq Study Group; and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, courtesy of Rhode Island’s swing vote Senator-in-a-snit Lincoln Chafee, busy smothering for a second time the nomination of a diplomat who acts on the principle that he is serving not the interests of a blinkered and paper-pushing Washington bureaucracy, but of the American people.