In Trinidad, Mr. Obama sat quietly -- and, apparently, attentively -- through a mind-numbing anti-American rant by Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, during which the Sandinista leader accused the U.S. of heinous crimes. When it was over, Mr. Obama was asked his opinion. He replied, "It was 50 minutes long." No rebuttal. No defense of America or his predecessors' efforts to offer others the hope of freedom.

When Venezuela's Hugo Chavez gave him a homework assignment -- to read the virulently anti-American screed "Open Veins of Latin America" -- Mr. Obama accepted it with a smile for the cameras. Perhaps we should be grateful that he didn't bow to Mr. Chavez, as he did to Saudi King Abdullah. Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana, a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, described the Obama-Chavez photographs as "an enormous propaganda victory for the Socialist dictator." They were also another stab in the back to former President George W. Bush, whom Mr. Chavez once called "the devil" in the U.N. General Assembly.

The Obama administration's penitent foreign policy is evident in its approach to the U.N. and the International Criminal Court, which is a U.N. body hostile to American service members -- the same ones the Obama administration describes as "Disgruntled Military Veterans." America's new willingness to be pilloried publicly was apparent in Geneva this week at the U.N.'s Durban Review Conference on racism.

There the "star performer" was Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, with whom Mr. Obama wants to sit down and parley about nuclear weapons. Mr. Ahmadinejad's text accused the United States of "military aggression to make an entire nation homeless on the pretext of Jewish sufferings and the ambiguous and dubious question of Holocaust." His diatribe depicted America's closest ally in the Middle East as "racist perpetrators of genocide," and he said, "It is time the ideal of Zionism, which is the paragon of racism, be broken."

Though the U.S. delegation rightly did not attend this virulently anti-American, anti-Israeli bashing session, it is regrettable that the Obama administration has yet to object formally to the language or the "findings" of this U.N. conference. The deafening silence from the White House undoubtedly makes Mr. Ahmadinejad eager to get those nuclear negotiations on Mr. Obama's calendar of coming events.

Co-written by Thomas Kilgannon. Thomas Kilgannon is the president of Freedom Alliance and the author of "Diplomatic Divorce: Why America Should End Its Love Affair With the United Nations." He contributed from Geneva, where he is reporting on the U.N.'s Durban Review Conference for Radio America.