The secretary-general is powerless to stop this kind of thing. Contrary to public perception, he’s not like a CEO but a chief administrative officer. His powers are few, and every year, because members add more rules, his powers diminish even more. In 2002, Kofi Annan sought to give himself the ability to move at least 10 percent of his employees—970, out of a total of 9,700—according to need, to meet the demands of a tsunami, say, or an earthquake. One year later, the Fifth Committee gave him 50—and this was after the U.N.’s Baghdad headquarters had been bombed. It took sixteen months more to bulk up security at its other posts around the world, because Annan lacked the authority to do it on his own.

It’s hard to imagine another organization with similar mandates—keeping peace, feeding the hungry, overseeing elections—operating under the same constraints. It’s a miracle, given this kind of information, that the U.N. works at all.

And yet the U.N. does work, in some cases quite well. For all its shortcomings, it remains the best hope the developing world has to make its voice heard, and it’s the one organization that can legitimize the use of power by larger nations. The U.N. today feeds 89 million through the World Food Program and has more soldiers on the ground (in eighteen countries) than any army besides the United States’. The Rand Corporation recently came out with a study showing that U.N. peacekeeping troops are far less expensive to maintain than U.S. troops. Last year, the U.N. oversaw elections nearly every two weeks. And it was one of the first organizations on the ground during both the tsunami and the Pakistan earthquake.

To expect the U.N. solely to be a house of reform is, in the end, rather parochial. Its mandate is broad and wide. Reforming the U.N. is hardly what smaller countries care about. They care that the U.N. expand the Security Council and make the council’s meetings more transparent. They want commitments to the Millennium Development Goals, designed to drastically reduce poverty, illiteracy, and the spread of aids by 2015. Certainly, making the United Nations more efficient and accountable would improve the organization—and Annan has just hired Rajat Gupta, a senior partner from McKinsey & Company, to advise him on this subject—but from their perspective it’s hardly the most urgent matter facing the institution.

The irony is, these countries probably would benefit from the reforms Bolton is so crudely pushing. “The biggest problem at the U.N. is not the United States,” says Dauth, “but the G-77, whose tactics are too often screwing the place.”

Baali, Algeria’s ambassador, tells a great story about Richard Holbrooke, Clinton’s U.N. ambassador who hoisted the United States out of its arrears after years of deadbeat neglect. “He knew I had my pride,” says Baali, sitting in his office. He’s imposing and attractive, fluent in Arabic, French, and Spanish. Some find him too slick, but he’s also outspoken and funny, which in this organization counts for something. “He would tell me, ‘Oh, Mr. Baali, you know that you’re the star of Africa,’ ” he continues. “Or, ‘You are the best diplomat.’ This kind of stuff. And I’d say, ‘Okay, Dick. What do you want?’ ”

Each diplomat has his own style. Holbrooke flattered and bullied by turns, which often worked, because he was insanely charming when he wasn’t rude, and he was so cerebral he could get away with it. Bill Richardson, his gregarious predecessor, was more of a sunny politician, glad-handing his way through the halls, smoking cigars and chatting with representatives in the delegates’ lounge. (Until a colleague suggested he stop, he greeted Sir John Weston, the extremely stiff ambassador from Britain, by thumping him on the back and shouting, “Hey, Weston!”)

Bolton’s calling card is directness. For some colleagues, this style works just fine. “People are grateful to you when you put on the table all your cards,” says Baali. “Our discussions have always been to the point and rational,” says a European ambassador. “But if I told this to my local press, they’d question my mental health.”

At the Security Council, Bolton speaks linearly and without notes, but he takes them when others speak, which is the reverse of the usual pattern. He has little patience for procedural rituals; once, in the middle of a long Security Council debate about how best to handle the Iranian president’s call to “wipe Israel off the face of the map,” he grabbed a piece of blank paper in exasperation and drew a map of the region without Israel, exclaiming to colleagues, “This is what we ought to be discussing.” At press stakeouts, he’s proved quite accessible, speaking in colorful hyphenates, garnishing his observations with sarcasm. “Reform is not a one-night stand,” he recently told a group of reporters. Shortly after: “Green-eyeshade, bean-counting business-as-usual is not the solution.” A few days later: “I’d be delighted to address that question . . . I haven’t given up on the possibility that sweet reason will prevail.”