John Bolton's coming departure from the UN creates a real gap in President Bush's diplomatic team. There are few, if any, diplomats who are as hard-nosed as Bolton about the UN's incapacity for action, corruption and underlying anti-Americanism. And there is probably no such diplomat who could be confirmed by a Democratically-controlled Senate that is very UN-minded. Those facts combine to create an unusual political opportunity for President Bush.

The diplomatic community - centered in the UN -- has been unable to either act effectively through the UN or even use the UN as a bully pulpit to help solve international crises. In Iraq, in Darfur and in so many other crises the UN has failed to act. In effect, by simultaneously cornering the market on diplomacy and rendering it ineffective, the UN has become an agent of instability and war. The UN's chaotic conduct of its own affairs - the Oil for Food scandal, the waste of one-third of donated aid monies in the December 2004 southeast Asian tsunami relief on UN "overhead" and on and on - is best characterized by the actions of Iqbal Riza, Kofi Annan's chief of staff: personally shredding two years of "Oil for Food" papers kept in Annan's office. But as a great man once said (it was either Franz Kafka or Boris Badenov), "in chaos there is opportunity."

What if the president decided to keep the pressure on the UN? What if he wanted to push the UN to take action on the Iranian nuclear program, to reform its financial systems to reduce corruption, to push the new Secretary General, South Korea's Ban Kai Moon, to act as an agent of democracies, not an obstacle as his predecessor is. The president could do what he did with John Bolton: send a representative to the UN who will rock the boat. And to do that, he would have to choose someone who, like Bolton, would be impossible to have confirmed by the Senate.

The president should choose someone who is like our great UN ambassadors of the past: Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Jeane Kirkpatrick and - yes -- John Bolton. To find someone like that, the president will have to pick someone from outside the diplomatic community, someone who speaks clearly and resolutely, and supports the independence of US action without UN approval. George Mitchell cannot do that. Zalmay Khalilzad, an advocate of negotiations with Iran, also cannot. Someone such as Jeane Kirkpatrick's former UN deputy, Amb. Jose Sorzano, could. For that matter, so could Mark Steyn.

A New York Times editorial today says, "The United Nations doesn't need any further proof of how little the Bush administration thinks of it. And the Bush administration doesn't need to insult the world at a time when it is becoming increasingly clear how much help the United States needs to stabilize Afghanistan, extricate itself from Iraq, and curb the nuclear appetites of North Korea and Iran." That is comprehensively wrong. Anyone who believes that the UN will help us in any of those instances hasn't paid much attention to it in the past thirty years. If the UN's value is to be reconstructed, it will have to be by someone who can pick up precisely where John Bolton leaves off.