In its approach to foreign policy, the Bush administration has been wrong about many things -- from its obsession with Iraq and its misguided support of Ariel Sharon's Israel to its unilateral trashing of treaties such as the Kyoto accord. But as folks in George W. Bush's Texas are known to say, even a blind hog finds an acorn now and then. Even critics of the Bush administration's overall strategy, if they are reasonable, must admit that the president is right to oppose the International Criminal Court in its present form.

The US threatens to use its vote as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council to veto the renewal of the UN peacekeeping force in Bosnia, unless American peacekeeping troops are exempted from ICC jurisdiction. It is easy to view this as yet another arrogant expression of the Bush team's reflexive unilateralism -- easy, but mistaken. It should not be forgotten that the Clinton administration, against European opposition, sought to empower the Security Council to protect peacekeepers on UN missions from trivial or politically motivated prosecutions. Let there be no mistake -- there is bipartisan concern in Washington that US soldiers will be falsely accused and maliciously prosecuted by the ICC. How genuine is that danger? In May 2001, Henry Kissinger, the former US secretary of state, on a private visit to Paris, was given a summons by a French magistrate to give testimony in a case about the disappearance and presumed murder of French nationals in General Augusto Pinochet's Chile. The implicit endorsement, by the French court, of the demand of the European left that Mr Kissinger be treated as a "war criminal" -- primarily for the actions of US allies, rather than the US itself -- was a signal that at least some European courts are willing to sacrifice justice to the ideological passions of the anti-American left.

Equally troubling was the fact that Spain demanded the arrest of Gen Pinochet by Britain, at the very moment that the Spanish government was playing host to Fidel Castro, whose regime in Cuba is guilty of imprisoning, torturing, executing and exiling vast numbers of political opponents. Moderate Americans did not fail to notice that many European governments treat rightwing dictators and leftwing dictators according to two different standards.

Nobody wants genuine war criminals to escape punishment. The question is about the methods. And here the gap is not between the US and Europe; it is between Europe and the world.

Not one non-European great power supports the ICC. Russia, China and India have refused to sign or ratify the treaty. The question is not why the US unites with most of the world's other big military powers in opposing the ICC, but why Britain and France have broken with the great powers to side with small European countries with traditions of pacifism or neutrality. After all, British and French troops on peacekeeping missions are as vulnerable to partisan prosecutions as US troops.

What is at issue here is much greater than the question of dealing with war crimes. The implicit dispute is one between three visions of world order following the cold war. The Bush administration supports unilateral, global US hegemony, even "empire". To this ill-conceived unilateralism, there are two "multilateral" alternatives. One is represented by the ICC -- a world government, or at least the beginnings of one. Another, less Utopian approach repudiates the idea of an incipient world government for the humbler approach of a global concert of great powers. These two visions of world order have two different institutional addresses. The world government enthusiasts look to institutions such as the ICC, staffed chiefly by citizens of small, militarily insignificant countries; the global concert proponents, to the UN Security Council and similar great-power forums such as Nato.

The global concert model provides a possible solution to the present impasse. The ICC treaty should be amended, along the lines proposed by the Clinton administration, to give the UN Security Council authority to punish crimes by UN peacekeeping forces or other international forces such as Nato. The Security Council might routinely negotiate "status of forces" agreements with local governments like those that govern the prosecution and punishment of crimes committed by US soldiers on the soil of US allies. Such an arrangement should meet the US objections, which are shared by Russia, China and India.

The Swedes, the Dutch and the Belgians may not be happy with the global concert model, which relegates small nations to the sidelines. But hopes for a civilised world depend less on the contributions of weak countries, however noble they may be, than on co-operation among the great military powers. The rules of a club limited to elephants are not likely to please the mice.