As you point out, laws are only as effective as the people who make them. I think there is a strong cultural moral base, not necessarily religious, that is required before laws become workable in a culture.

As you also rightly point out, there are thousands of international laws that are accepted by most nations. Most of them have to do with mundane items like trade, international standards of engineering, borders, laws of the sea, and the kind of organizational things that are required when any two entities deal with each other.

The "international laws" and treaties that generally run into resistance in the United States involve regulations or mandates that impose standards on us that are not compatible with American standards of individual rights, or would create a precedent for loss of sovereignity (sp?) in areas where the standards of those imposing the regulations are either lower or more authoritarian than ours.

Remember, a lot of what comes out of the U.N. has the specific purpose of poking the West in the eye. The "Rights of the Child" treaty is not a glaring example of this, but there have been others. Most nations "sign" such treaties and ignore them, since the purpose is going after the U.S., and not actually accomplishing the purpose of the treaty.

It is obvious to most people in the world who have access to outside information that the United States is light years ahead of most other nations in how it treats human beings in general, never mind children. Treaty or no treaty, we--as you say--do our best for the world when we are leading by example.

It's a little annoying to have nations which are themselves littered with the skulls of thousands of children trying to tell us how it is.