Bush aggravates the problem by shunning diplomatic doublespeak; he tends to say what he believes. His latest challenge to China is a case in point. For nearly 30 years, U.S. presidents applied “strategic ambiguity” to the standoff between Beijing and Taiwan. Then, last week, Bush said bluntly he would do “whatever it took” to defend Taiwan (a view popular with the American right).
Many people in other countries were taken aback by some of Bush’s early actions on the environment, notably his repudiation of the Kyoto Protocol on global warming. “Bush reserves the right to pollute the planet,” announced the left-leaning French daily Liberation. “Many countries had hoped that Mr. Bush the Texas anti-environmentalist would be transformed into something less hick once he got behind the desk in the Oval Office,” wrote The Press of New Zealand, adding the hope “has proved ill-founded.”
There are still other grievances. Mexicans were pleased when Bush chose their nation for his first foreign trip–and then displeased when he bombed Iraq during the summit. Russians look at Bush’s plan to expand NATO and build a missile-defense system, and conclude that he is out to get them. Yevgeny Volk, director of the Moscow office of the Heritage Foundation, says Russian “decision makers” think Bush is “anti-Russian.” South Koreans deplore Bush’s hard-nosed attitude toward North Korea. In a recent poll, 55 percent of the South Koreans surveyed thought Bush would hurt inter-Korean relations, while only 17 percent said he would help.
In Arab countries the main complaint about Bush is that he has pulled back from the Mideast peace process. In Israel, that’s a plus, at least to supporters of Ariel Sharon’s hawkish government, which shows little interest in talking peace. Bush has other defenders overseas. A few dissenting voices have pointed out that the Kyoto agreement hasn’t been ratified in Europe either. Many observers were impressed with the way Bush handled the China spy-plane crisis. Japan’s Nihon Keizai Shimbun said he was “surprisingly calm.”
But in a world with only one superpower, the American president makes a choice target. “In less than 100 days, he has turned America into a pariah, made enemies of the entire world, his only friends the dirty polluters of the oil industry who put him there,” Polly Toynbee, a perfervid liberal, writes in a British daily, The Guardian. In the conservative Daily Telegraph, Boris Johnson responds that “even if you are troubled by his syntax and his habit of turning the lights out at 9 p.m., you will surely agree that there is something magnificent in the way he has taken on the great transatlantic Left-liberal consensus-loving Third Way-ers and turned them into a state of stark, staring, bug-eyed, heaving- bosomed apoplexy.” In this game, there’s no penalty for overstatement.
