Obama alienates our friends

Opinion: March 29, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

When Barack Obama came to office, the world cheered. President George Bush had angered so many nations over so many years that an Obama administration had to be a breath of fresh air. After all, he promised to open discussions with Iran, North Korea, Burma, Syria and the Taliban.

We all can see where those naive but well-intentioned initiatives have taken us so far. Of those states, only Syria has accepted the American embrace — while insisting it will not change any of its policies that Washington deplores. As for the Taliban, Karl Eide, who recently stepped down as the United Nations representative in Afghanistan, said the Taliban ended discussions with him after Pakistan arrested several of its leaders, as Washington had been insisting.

The point here is not that Obama erred. Arresting the Taliban’s leaders is a far more effective strategy than secret talks with a relatively obscure U.N. diplomat from Norway. And of course, fraudulent elections in Iran, a nuclear-weapons test in North Korea, as well as continued rock-solid intransigence in Burma did not bode well for openings with Washington.

None of that is a particular surprise, and you do at least have to give Obama credit for trying. But along with all of those efforts to make friends with many of our enemies, Obama has pursued a baffling parallel track: He is fast making enemies out of many of our friends.

Corrupt leader

You might wonder, for example, how Washington could possibly embrace Hamid Karzai, the corrupt and increasingly autocratic Afghan leader. But we should also ask how the United States can possibly win the war there without working with the nation’s president.

President Bush used to conduct regular video conferences with Karzai from the White House, even as Karzai’s reputation declined. Not Obama. He has virtually ignored the man, leaving Karzai insulted and bewildered. Hillary Clinton has picked up some of that slack. But for a national leader, successive visits by generals and presidential aides only serve to underscore the president’s absence. (Editor’s note: This was written before Obama’s weekend visit to Afghanistan.)

Bush was solicitous of China. The administration needed Chinese help for so many international initiatives, including disarming North Korea, supporting United Nations sanctions on Iran, climate change, economic and energy policies ... the list was nearly endless. None of these problems have gone away, but now the United States has the worse relations with China in many years.

The Chinese are not blameless. Over the last few years, the nation has sent tainted, defective or poisoned food, toys, medicines and other goods to the United States and other states. It is now the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter. It has started down the road of sponsoring cyber-assaults, helping to prompt Google’s decision to move its operations to Hong Kong

But does the Obama administration have any hope of moderating those policies by enraging and insulting Beijing at every turn? In short order recently he met with the Dali Lama, Beijing’s nemesis. He offered a major sale of advance weaponry to Taiwan, causing apoplexy among Chinese leaders. And he started a trade war over allegations that China “dumped” several consumer and industrial products at below-market prices.

In Israel, meanwhile, Obama’s is as unpopular as any president in the last 20 years, though it was Israel’s behavior in the East Jerusalem housing debacle earlier this month that made the problem notably worse. Still, Secretary of State Clinton tried to turn the debate back to a common concern last week, telling AIPAC delegates that “the United States is determined to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.”

Japan also feels slighted because the Obama administration appears to be dragging its feet over Tokyo’s request to relocate a U.S. Marine Corps base in Okinawa. Washington doesn’t want to do it, but others view his handling of the matter as inept.

Each of these episodes has a back story that could file a column or two by themselves, but in politics and foreign policy, perception is at least as important as fact.

Joel Brinkley is a former Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent for The New York Times and now a professor of journalism at Stanford University. McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.