U.S. Sen. John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, has made - over and over again - statements that indicate the United Nations would play a prominent roll in a Kerry Administration.

Those remarks included this one:

"And I'll tell you, after I'm sworn in, one of the first things I'm going to do is go to the United Nations and turn over a new chapter in America's relationship with the world, one that strengthens our security and our safety."

That was before revelations that the U.N.'s Oil-for-Food program for Iraq was actually turned into a Saddam Hussein slush fund to bribe international officials. Last week, when Alan Colmes interviewed him and asked about his U.N. strategy in light of the scandal, Kerry didn't exactly make the United Nations a "one-of-the-first-things-I-would-do" priority:

COLMES: Do we ignore-we go to the U.N. Do we ignore the oil-for- food scandal?

KERRY: I'm not talking about...

COLMES: We're talking about asking them to help us.

KERRY: I'm not talking about primarily going to the U.N. I laid out in Fulton, Missouri, a very specific set of steps, which require presidential leadership.

Step No. 1 is for the president to sit down with, talk to, in a very personal way, the leaders of these other countries, to help persuade them, No. 1, that he's prepared to share decision-making and reconstruction, and No. 2, persuade them of their interests in making certain that, even though the United States may have made some mistakes, they all share an interest in the outcome.

And once you have that shared interest, and shared responsibility and decision making, then you can go to the U.N. or to NATO, put together a group of international players who are prepared to recognize our global responsibility, get the U.N. to pass a resolution authorizing what we're doing, so that it has the international stamp of approval...

Kerry never did address the Oil-for-Food Scandal. He's never addressed U.N. disasters in the Balkans and Rwanda.

But where the U.N. once was the lynchpin of Kerry's foreign policy, now it's, at best, Step 3 on his list of foreign policy priorities. And Oil-for-Food is a non-issue.