Even George W. Bush's supporters admit his diplomacy is crude.

But his White House believes it is calling the United Nations back to its original, forceful purpose - American domination included. Is the UN becoming

another weak League of Nations? BARRIE McKENNA reports from Washington

Huddled in San Francisco in the spring of 1945 to draft the first United Nations charter, delegates from 50 countries paused for a day to remember Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The former U.S. president, who had died just weeks earlier without seeing the end of the Second World War, had championed scrapping the feeble League of Nations in favour of an international body with enough muscle to ensure lasting global peace - and with a strong U.S. presence at its core.

The delegates drove across the Golden Gate Bridge to Muir Woods, a dense forest of ancient redwoods, some jutting more than 110 metres above the moss-covered ground. At the spot where the UN first met - a stand of some of the world's largest trees, known as Cathedral Grove - the U.S. Park Service later erected a plaque, quoting Dag Hammarskjord, the UN's first Secretary General.

“Persons who love nature find a common basis for understanding people of other countries, since the love of nature is universal among men of all nations,” it reads.

The UN could probably use a wilderness retreat right about now. The organization, now numbering 191 members, is facing one of the greatest threats ever to its existence as the United States - its co-founder, and host of its headquarters in Manhattan - squares off against much of the rest of the world over Iraq.

U.S. President George W. Bush has warned that the UN is perched on the brink of irrelevance unless it agrees to sanction a war to disarm Iraq and depose its leader, Saddam Hussein.

The crisis has been decades in the making. Critics say it is a byproduct of a set-up that has frozen post-Second World War international power structures in place, and failed to keep pace with 21st-century threats of terrorism and rogue regimes.

Even Mr. Bush's supporters agree that his rhetoric has been harsh and his diplomacy clumsy. But it's also true that the UN showdown has exposed just how far the organization has strayed from the mandate envisioned by its framers in San Francisco.

With the Second World War winding down, UN architects had seen the organization as a sort of global cop, capable of keeping the peace by drawing on the collective military might of its members. It was to be everything the maligned League of Nations was not - tough, united and effective.

It hasn't worked out that way. The UN has used its clout only sparingly, sanctioning full-scale wars only twice - in Korea in 1950 and the Gulf War in 1991. Mr. Bush has set up Iraq as a test case of that long-lost UN model, which he insists must match words with force.

At the same time, the structure of the UN has fallen badly out of step with global geopolitical realities, most notably the emergence of the United States as the world's only genuine military and economic superpower. The 15-member Security Council grants equal weight to the United States and France or Britain, among the five Second World War victors that enjoy permanent seats and veto power.

The other 10 members of the council are chosen on a rotating basis among the 186 other member nations, which can give tiny countries such as Guinea and Cameroon (both current council members) more clout than Japan or India.

The showdown has become a “graphic lesson in international power politics,” suggested Ted Galen Carpenter, vice-president for defence and foreign policy studies at the conservative Cato Institute in Washington. “In truth, the United States has always regarded the UN as selectively useful. Occasionally, it provides a good multilateral facade for U.S. policy. But the U.S. has never let the United Nations get in the way of what it wanted to do.”

And the lesson the UN's detractors in the United States are already drawing from the current saga, Mr. Carpenter warned, is that Mr. Bush and future U.S. administrations would be better off making an end-run around the international community.

“A lot of people in the administration were suspicious about the UN going into this crisis,” he said. “This will simply confirm their worst suspicions. Their contempt toward the world body will grow and they will try to navigate U.S. policy around the UN in the future.”

Indeed, prominent conservatives are already calling on the Bush administration to jettison the UN and go to war, with a small coalition of the willing in tow. Calling the UN a “farce,” Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer urged Mr. Bush this week to “walk away” from the organization.

“You've exposed the United Nations for what it is: the League of Nations, empty, cynical and mendacious,” Mr. Krauthammer said.

The numerous UN skeptics among Mr. Bush's circle of advisers are also poised to flex their muscles, regardless of what happens at the UN in the coming days.

The United States has long had a stormy relationship with the United Nations. U.S. critics have long complained about hypocrisy at the organization, such as when Libya chairs the UN human-rights commission. In the late 1990s, Congress withheld a hefty chunk of U.S. dues, a bill that once reached nearly $2-billion (U.S.). The issue was resolved, but ill will persists, particularly between the UN and the U.S. Congress.

The Bush administration is quick to point out that France didn't seek UN approval to send troops to the Ivory Coast earlier this year. The United States and its allies similarly didn't get UN approval before attacking Kosovo in 1999, when Russia threatened to veto.

According to the White House, Kosovo and Iraq are examples of a disturbing pattern of inaction on crucial issues. Said White House press secretary Ari Fleischer: “It happened when the United Nations Security Council failed to take action in Kosovo. It happened when the United Nations Security Council failed to take action in Rwanda. So if the United Nations Security Council fails to take action here, it will not be a first. It will be a repeat of a pattern.”

Many other countries, on the other hand, complain that the UN is too often used as an instrument for the policies of its most powerful members, most notably the United States. As a result, the council picks and chooses the resolutions it will enforce, while blatantly ignoring others.

The UN-U.S. rupture was perhaps inevitable, given the hardline positions staked out by some of Mr. Bush's most trusted advisers. Three years before Mr. Bush became president, a prominent group of conservatives gathered in Washington to draft their vision of U.S. foreign policy in the post-Cold War era: unapologetically robust, self-interested and disdainful of the non-democracies that inhabit the UN.

Among that group was Florida Governor Jeb Bush, the current president's brother, along with a handful of officials from past Republican administrations, including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Zalmay Khalilzad and Paula Dobriansky. All of them are now working in top jobs at the White House, the State Department or the Pentagon.

Known as the Project for a New American Century, the group has argued that the United States should act more like the Cold War victor that it is - rounding up coalitions of democratic states, and unabashedly using its military might to keep the peace around the globe.

These conservatives liken the role of the UN in carrying out that agenda to a “blue-ribbon commission.” If it votes with you, it enhances your case. If not, you can just ignore it.

Based on its Iraq experience, the Bush administration will increasingly opt for the latter, said Gary Schmitt, executive director of the Project for the New American Century and a former top intelligence official in the Reagan administration. The UN would be relegated to dealing with marginal regional conflicts, war reconstruction, peacekeeping and humanitarian relief.

“The systemic problem is pretty simple,” Mr. Schmitt said. “The UN operates by consensus, but when you break that out it means operating by the security interests of the lowest common denominator, whether that's China, France or Cameroon. Without a complete reordering of the UN, it's hard to imagine everybody agreeing on matters of war and peace.”

Speaking at a conference last month, White House adviser Richard Perle starkly laid out how the administration views its relationship with the UN. The United States, he said, would never abdicate its own self defence to an outside entity.

“We want support in the UN. We want the approbation of the UN,” Mr. Perle insisted. “But no American government can allow the defence of this country to depend on a show of hands at the United Nations or anywhere else. If that sounds unilateralist, so be it.”

Even longtime UN supporters are growing pessimistic about the UN's future in a world where its most important member country increasingly bypasses the organization on matters it deems important.

The current crisis “has very little to do with Iraq and a great deal to do with the future of the U.S. relationship to other countries,” sug-gested Edward Luck, professor of international relations at Columbia University and director of the Center on International Organization.

According to Mr. Luck, who has been studying UN decision-making for decades, “The other members of the council are saying that they are as ambivalent to American power as the United States allegedly is to international organizations.”

The UN was founded on the principle that collective force should be used to keep the peace, enshrined in Chapter 7 of its charter. But other countries on the Security Council, unable to match U.S. military might, are increasingly activist in using their vetoes to curtail U.S. power.

“The UN is not the problem,” Mr. Luck said. “The UN is just the stage on which other problems are played out.”

France, China and Russia, he said, appear to want a return to the League of Nations, a weak organization that shied away from taking action in the face of aggression. The League stood by when Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931 and when Italy seized Ethiopia four years later. It was also powerless to stop the rise of Hitler in Germany.

Mr. Luck said the UN hasn't sunk to that level. But given a choice, France, China and Russia appear to want a UN that shies away from issues of critical importance to the United States, such as Iraq - and that's exactly how the League of Nations would have dealt with Saddam Hussein.

“If you don't want a tough organization, choose the League of Nations,” he remarked. “But to choose what San Francisco was all about is to accept U.S. dominance.”

The Iraq episode now appears to be seriously depleting the well of goodwill for the UN among Americans that has endured for more than half a century. Nearly six out of 10 Americans now think the UN is doing a poor job, according to a poll by the New York Times and CBS News this week.

The tragedy is that successive administrations have treated the UN as part of a “multilateralism of convenience” exercise, noted Rick Barton, senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International relations in Washington and a former UN deputy commissioner for refuges in Geneva.

“What the United States needs to do is give the United Nations consistent, committed tough love,” Mr. Barton said.

“What they are giving them now is inconsistent, uncommitted love-hate.”

But it's probably too early to give up on the UN just yet. After a war, the administration will surely want the UN to help with a multi-billion reconstruction of Iraq, keeping the peace and dealing with potentially millions of refugees.

And while the United Nations may seem irrelevant now to many Americans, lurking around the corner is the issue of nuclear-armed North Korea - which cries out for UN intervention, Mr. Barton suggested.

“It's irrelevant until the next time you need the UN, at which point it's relevant again,” he said. “And the next time is going to be very soon.”

Barrie McKenna is a member of The Globe and Mail's Washington bureau.