US: The deputy secretary-general of the United Nations was last night accused of making "a very, very grave mistake" after calling the Bush administration hypocrites who were feeding a right-wing anti-UN frenzy in middle America.
Washington's ambassador to the UN responded with undisguised fury to a speech by Mark Malloch Brown, the deputy secretary-general, in which he accused Washington of using the international body "almost by stealth as a diplomatic tool" while failing to defend it at home.
"Much of the public discourse that reaches the US heartland has been largely abandoned to its loudest detractors, such as Rush Limbaugh and Fox News," Mr Malloch Brown said in a speech in New York on Tuesday.
Depending on the UN while tolerating "too much unchecked UN-bashing and stereotyping" was "simply not sustainable", he said. "You will lose the UN one way or another."
US envoy John Bolton, an outspoken critic of the UN, called the comments "a very, very grave mistake". He said he told the secretary-general, Kofi Annan, yesterday: "I've known you since 1989 and I'm telling you, this is the worst mistake by a senior UN official that I have seen in that entire time." He called on Mr Annan to repudiate the speech.
Tensions between the UN and George Bush's White House have been simmering since the war in Iraq, but they also encompass deep splits over the international criminal court and the new human rights council, whose formation the US was one of only four states to oppose.
The diplomatic tradition however, according to which UN officials do not publicly attack specific member states, has a longer history still.
Washington was angered by Mr Malloch Brown's references to middle America and the influence upon it of conservative commentators such as Limbaugh.
Mr Bolton said the speech demonstrated a "condescending, patronising tone about the American people. Fundamentally and very sadly, this was a criticism of the American people, not the American government, by an international civil servant. It's just illegitimate."
The deputy secretary-general, a Briton who was previously head of the UN development programme, called his speech "a sincere and constructive critique of US policy toward the UN by a friend and admirer". His term of office ends in December and he is understood not to be planning to stay at the UN.
Mr Malloch Brown also used his speech to defend 18 peacekeeping missions around the world and to criticise continuing efforts by the US to use its leverage to press for more rapid reforms. The UN needed to be overhauled, he acknowledged, but "in recent years the enormously divisive issue of Iraq and the big stick of financial withholding have come to define an unhappy marriage", he said.
A UN official said the speech was intended to be "a warning call" about a broader crisis. On many issues, including UN reform, "what the US is doing is absolutely right from our point of view", the official said. "It's just that almost nobody else, in the current environment, believes them".