The General Assembly in session last month.

“The initial reaction was startled amazement that he didn’t have horns,” says John Dauth, the Australian ambassador, and possibly the building’s funniest. “And that he was actually a highly courteous human being. There’s been a determination to see everyone, to leave no one out, and in that respect, he’s done a lot better than his predecessors—they weren’t nearly as active and engaged as this.”

Of course, Bolton has had more than enough incentive to prove his honorable intentions. To do so would both humiliate his critics and make his own life a great deal easier. The more urgent question, raised but never answered by his confirmation hearings, is what his true motives are. Has he come to the U.N. to change it? Or to lay dynamite beneath the floorboards and blow it up?

From the moment Bolton arrived, he spoke of a very particular agenda—namely, to make a nimbler, more transparent, more sensible institution out of a place that could produce the Oil-for-Food scandal, which wound up enriching Saddam Hussein by $10.1 billion, and the infamous Commission on Human Rights, a travesty of a body that includes countries with appalling human-rights records such as Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe, and Cuba. He said he wanted whistle-blower protection, an ethics office, a secretary-general with power to actually control the U.N. agenda.

All reasonable goals, and ones that most of our allies share. Yet starting in November, Bolton deployed a staggeringly confrontational tactic to get them, threatening to hold up the U.N. budget if real reforms weren’t in place by December 31 and to allow only a three-month interim budget to slip through.

No one was happy. Yet just before Christmas, Bolton more or less prevailed, with the General Assembly signing off on a six-month budget, the rest of its funding contingent upon its progress on management reform. It was an impressive feat, but not without cost: The EU had to bear the brunt of the negotiation, and Lord knows how many more brunts it will be willing to bear in the future. The developing world, meanwhile, got even angrier.

To a significant part of diplomatic New York and Washington—rational, unhysterical people, a group not especially prone to partisan paranoia—this was simply more proof that Bolton hadn’t come to the U.N. to reform it but to emasculate it. His tactics, in their view, say it all: He tends to talk off the top of his head; to float radical ideas in small settings before modifying his rhetoric in large ones; to bargain in as ham-handed a fashion as possible, pulling back from the brink (if he ever does) only after all hell has been loosed upon the halls and his bosses in Washington have intervened to restore the peace. How could such a person be sincere about reforming the U.N.? He’ll push for it, sure, but only in ways that ensure reform never happens (artlessly, with all the subtlety of a swinging fist), rather than by pulling together logical coalitions of nations who’d favor it. Then he’ll make a great show of giving up, leave the U.N., write a book about how unreformable the place is, become a hero of the Republican Party, and run for public office.

We’ve seen some version of it before. Daniel Patrick Moynihan ran for the Senate directly after his time at the U.N., which he called “a dangerous place.”

Many of these same people, in fact, believe that Bolton might not even be that interested in serving his boss—that Condoleezza Rice has far more interest in multilateralism than he does. “Bolton has his own agenda,” says Stephen Stedman, former special adviser to Secretary-General Kofi Annan. “He honestly believes that anything on paper is meant to constrain the United States, and the United States is so strong it can get whatever it wants without agreeing to constrain itself. Yet we couldn’t call Condoleezza Rice every day and say, ‘Do you know what your guy is doing?’ ”

It’s also possible, however, that bluster and brinkmanship are simply Bolton’s style—he asks for the moon because he believes it’ll help him control the tide. Abdallah Baali, the Algerian ambassador and only Arab currently sitting on the Security Council, remembers his reaction to America’s first draft of the resolution condemning Syria. “When I saw it, I knew what were the issues that were put there just to annoy us,” he says, laughing. “And then, at the end of the process, they would just disappear. I’m a professional diplomat. I know this kind of thing. You put in this and that, knowing it’s unacceptable to the other side. And then you drop this and you drop that, and you make it look like a huge concession.”