Watching the Bush administration’s international diplomacy is akin to watching a student’s first public performance of the Star Spangled Banner: You have to applaud – wrong notes and all. At least he’s singing the right song. Were it a Gore administration, he would be singing “Ode to a universal mother earth.”

Bush said “no” to the International Criminal Court, for good and valid reasons. When the ICC opened shop on July 1, he said the U.S. would pull out of U.N. peacekeeping missions, unless the U.S. was guaranteed immunity from ICC prosecutions. Europe, and the U.N. Security Council went bonkers.

Amid public rants and charges of arrogance by our European allies, behind closed doors, the Security Council worked out an agreement to provide U.S. peacekeepers with immunity from the ICC for one year.

This is most interesting, since the ICC is not bound by U.N. Security directives. This is the primary reason the U.S. voted against the ICC in Rome in 1998. The U.S. insisted that the U.N. Security Council have veto power over the ICC, but the rest of the world refused. So technically, the Security Council’s grant of immunity has no teeth – it is simply a “gentleman’s” agreement that the ICC will not prosecute U.S. peacekeepers for one year.

What the agreement really does, is postpone the inevitable confrontation that must come between the U.S. and the U.N.

Bush said “no” to the Kyoto Protocol, for good and valid reasons. Europe, and the U.N. went bonkers. Then, from deep within the bowels of the EPA, there emerged a report to the U.N. that says the Bush administration recognizes that “human activity” causes global warming. Neither the EPA Administrator, nor George Bush knew that the report contained this language, nor that it was being released. Sabotage?

Kyoto enthusiasts quickly took their efforts to Congress, and to state legislatures. California has passed its version of “Little Kyoto,” forcing state regulation of carbon dioxide. A similar bill is floating around in Congress.

Secretary of State, Colin Powell, is dancing on a very narrow tightrope, attached on one end to the Bush administration, with the other end attached to the U.N.’ s World Summit on Sustainable Development, scheduled for August 26 through September 4, in Johannesburg, South Africa.

On July 12, his speech to a gathering of folks preparing for the WSSD was entitled: "Making Sustainable Development Work." It would be easy to condemn the Bush administration for dignifying the WSSD by even recognizing it, but that would surely bring more howls from Europe, and ridicule from domestic opponents. So Powell is doing a sort of U.N. Hokey Pokey – where “you put your left foot in, and take your right foot out … and then you shake it all about”

Powell’s speech was carefully drafted. He said many of the right things to comfort the sustainable-development crowd. But if the crowd was listening closely, he said some things that should scare them to death. Powell selectively replaced the term “sustainable development” with the term “sustained development.” The two things are not at all the same. Terms such as “good governance,” and “entrepreneurship” were sprinkled throughout his speech, instead of the usual “global governance,” and “economic equity.”

Rather than simply dismissing the U.N. as irrelevant, and ignoring the political backlash, the Bush administration appears to be trying to go the extra mile to interject into the U.N. some awareness of the principles of freedom.

If this is an accurate read of the intentions of the Bush administration, he can’t be faulted for trying. Realistically, however, it only postpones the inevitable.

The purpose and mission of the U.N. is to secure world peace by controlling every possible threat to peace, which means controlling the United States and its people.

The purpose and mission of the United States is to guarantee and protect the freedom of its people. People cannot be free if they are controlled by any government.

These purposes and missions are in direct conflict. The Bush administration seems to be resisting U.N. control, where it is blatant, as in the Kyoto Protocol, and the ICC. Where the control is less blatant, so is the resistance. Land-use control, for example, is a top priority for the U.N. The Clinton-Gore administration greatly expanded government control of land use and, so far, the Bush administration has not stopped, nor reversed the trend.

Sooner or later, the people must decide whether or not they want to be free, as our Constitution envisions, or be controlled by a hierarchy of “stakeholder councils,” designed by the U.N. to implement global governance.