Some Democrats have seen the vote as a particular rebuff to the Bush administration and its attitude. But defeat should really be seen as the result of a long-standing American neglect of diplomacy. Certainly, the Bush administration has made some embarrassing mistakes: Picking a major campaign contributor who does not speak French to serve as U.S. ambassador to France was unfortunate. So was the failure to push the appointment of the U.S. ambassador-designate to the United Nations, John Negroponte, through the Senate. Many of the diplomats at the United Nations complained of being taken for granted by a low-level, low-energy U.S. campaign for the rights-commission seat.

And there are indeed key multilateral issues on which the White House attitude has annoyed other countries: treaties on child soldiers, land mines, the Kyoto emissions agreements, the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the threat that the nuclear missile defense (NMD) poses to nuclear disarmament treaties. But most differences between the Clinton and Bush administrations have been in the spin of their rhetoric rather than in pragmatic reality.

Clinton fudged on NMD, for instance, keeping the program alive. And he signed the ICC explicitly to keep open the possibility of subverting it, not so the U.S. would implement it. Indeed, while editorialists harrumphed in horror at countries like Sudan, China and Libya being on the Human Rights Commission without the United States, they ought to have remembered that the U.S., alone among democratic states, joined this small select band of recidivist human rights violators in voting against the Rome Treaty on the ICC. And it was not, as some of the headlines implied, these "rogue" countries that defeated the United States for the Human Rights Commission, but France, Austria and Sweden, which were the successful contestants for the West European and other seats.

Both the Bush and Clinton administrations' double standards on the ICC epitomized why the U.S. lost the support of enough allies to lose the seat. The bipartisan American position is that the ICC should only apply to non-Americans, because we don't do things like that, and if we do, we deal with it ourselves. Of course, the families of those killed by former Sen. Bob Kerrey and his Navy SEALs at Thanh Phong might disagree with that.

On the issue of U.S. arrears in paying U.N. dues, Clinton was little better. Despite eight years of rhetorical support for the United Nations, neither he nor his secretaries of state secured payment of arrears, though last year they cut a deal that has yet to be implemented. Even on the appointment of an ambassador to the U.N., the Clinton administration left Richard Holbrooke dangling in the wind for almost a year before sitting him in the U.S. seat in the Security Council.

And while the vote has been widely depicted as a U.N. rebuke to the Bush administration, in fact, Kofi Annan and his team seem very happy with the relationship with this White House, and even more so with Colin Powell and the State Department. It must be a relief not to be hectored by Madeleine Albright. Both administrations needed to contend with die-hard isolationists on Capitol Hill, but if anything, Bush and Powell have been doing a better job of controlling the dinosaurs than their predecessors.

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