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I find it hard to understand how someone like Bolton can be appointed to a dilpomatic position like UN Ambassador when he has no diplomacy skills whatsoever.
One of the greatest diplomatic skills anyone can possess is the ability to persuade others to adopt your way of thinking without making them feel like complete idiots who aren't worthy of your time and effort. In fact, it is only through making them feel like they aren't complete idiots that you will stand any chance of making them agree with you. Actually being right is secondary. That is basic human nature and it even applies to people like Bolton himself.
Part of my job involves making presentations to large groups of people in order to persuade them to make use of me and my company's services. In almost all of these I will encounter people who do not agree with what I've presented or suggested and when I first started doing this I felt quite affronted that they would disagree with me - couldn't they see that they were wrong? How could they even think what they were suggesting would work? After a while, when my somewhat abbrasive responses led to very heated and protracted 'debates' I was forced to amend my style. Instead of telling them they were wrong, I agreed with them that they made a valid point and one that we had considered at length when developing our proposal (which was usually true), but that we had eventually decided upon our route because of XYZ. The client usually agreed with our assessment, he felt he had made a worthwhile contribution, posed an intelligent question and hadn't been branded a complete idiot, and we usually got our way in the end. Everyone's a winner. The fact that I was right to begin with was secondary.
Bolton's style led to him alienating those he had to work with and made him completely inneffectual, apart from the fact that he was the actual embodiment of the generalisation of the US being inconsiderate bullies who didn't want to play when they didn't get their way. Whether he was right or not didn't matter in the end.
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