IST Academy

[Mark Skarr]

Sorry, Rob.  They are a standing army.  Much like Star Fleet, they're an active, military force.  They wear a lot of hats, but, at the end of the day, their primary job is to kick butt and chew bubblegum.

Despite the IST's status as a deployed military force, though, it must abide by the non-intervention principle.

Poised between the COPPF and the individual IST is IST Command. Command (as it is called for short) is the level on which individual IST members are tracked and assigned. It is also the level at which organization becomes recognizably military in form.

To make matters worse (for new recruits, that is), IST Command has managed to obtain the services of the six most-hated drill sergeants in the United States Marines!

Besides performing their military and civic duties, the ISTs have become a new public face for world unity.

Since the IST is a military body, members who violate its regulations or the laws of their host country are subject to court-martial.

Seriously, Rob, I can keep finding stuff that spells out the IST are a standing military unit, not unlike an army.  They are a permanently deployed military peacekeeping force.  The COPPF's diplomatic function is secondary to their role as peacekeepers.  The U.N.'s job is diplomacy.  Dartz POV is fairly accurate.  I'm pretty much sticking with Bob's Star Fleet example, because that's a really good example.

Keep in mind, the IST Agenda (from page 8):

As set by the Security Council, this agenda constitutes the seven basic standing orders, in order of priority, that all IST must operate under.1) Enforce the ban on nuclear weapons2) Enforce the ban on military superteams.3) Combat international drug trafficking.4) Protect civilians.5) Discourage armed conflict between nations.6) Support global human rights.7) Provide a visible presence of the U.N. in member nations and maintain a positive public image.

Diplomacy isn't specifically listed in there.  Best-case, it's part of #7--the lowest standing order.  The IST isn't the diplomatic arm of the COPPF, they're the stick arm.  If you don't want the carrot from the diplomats, you get the stick in the form of a metahuman army.  Sure, they're going to try to be diplomatic, but, since the original book didn't require diplomacy for starting characters, it wasn't the goal of the individual teams to be diplomatic, but the Embassy overall--they had a diplomatic staff.

You don't ask your Star Trek redshirts to negotiate peace treaties.  That's not to say that, in certain circumstances, they couldn't do it.  But, their first job is to hurt their people before they hurt our people.  That's the job of the IST. 
However, honestly, this is something Bob will have to really figure out.  The war in China is going to change everything about the ISTs and the U.N.  In order to fight the war, they'll have to restructure to a pure, military organization to facilitate their needs . . . and it'll be hard to step back from that.