Bush burning up the goodwill of U.S. allies

www.thehill.com JOSH MARSHALL

What profiteth a man if he gain regime change in Iraq and lose the whole world order in the process?

Back in 1999 and 2000, one of then-candidate George W. Bush’s chief campaign trail applause lines was his pledge to “strengthen our alliances.” He said they’d fallen into disrepair under the Clinton administration. Yet today — aside from a few autocracies in Central Asia — it’s difficult to find any countries in the world with which our alliances are stronger than they were two years ago.

Europe and the Middle East are getting the most attention today. And we’ll get to them in a moment. But look at the rest of the world.

In East Asia, our historic alliance with South Korea is in shambles. Partly because of the administration’s bellicose and shambling policy toward North Korea, the South Koreans recently elected the first president in their history to openly question the alliance. Incoming President Roh Moo-hyun is trying, as he must, to calm the waters with the United States. But behind him is a Korean electorate that remains embittered at Bush administration policy and increasingly alienated from the United States itself. Not all South Koreans feel this way, of course. But it’s a bad sign that America’s supporters there are concentrated among the old.

Nothing so worrisome has occurred in our relations with Japan. But there, too, frustration with our brusque mismanagement of the Korean situation has led them to question and buck the U.S. line as never before.

Or take Latin America.

Improved political and economic ties with Latin America were supposed to be a centerpiece of the new administration’s foreign policy. Remember that? The idea was to embed improved relations in expanded free-trade agreements that would eventually encompass most or all of both continents.

The events of Sept. 11 were bound to pull a lot of attention away from these goals. And the struggling world economy has put a drag on support for free trade. But it’s astonishing to see just how badly things have gone. The prospects for hemispheric free trade have been pushed back years, if not decades.

The United States stood by while the Argentine economy swirled down the drain. The crisis in Venezuela remains a bizarre running wound complicating our dealings in the Middle East by wreaking havoc on global oil markets. And Brazil has just elected an America-bashing president who now publicly presses his country’s need to acquire nuclear weapons. Even the president’s much-ballyhooed relationship with Mexican President Vicente Fox has withered under the weight of our policies abroad and perceived inattention to relations with Mexico.

Knee-jerk left-wingers claim that the opposition of the world means that we’re in the wrong. Meanwhile, whiny right-wingers see only our allies’ perfidy, betrayal and opportunism. But both camps’ sides miss the point.

Diplomacy is above all about pragmatism, a task of managing our relations with sometimes querulous and petty foreign leaders who always have their own domestic and foreign political ambitions.

Are the French preening and self-aggrandizing? Yes, far too often. But this is one of those things we pay presidents to handle, not complain about.

Our current predicament is the product of the administration’s dogged pursuit — often strong-arming and brusque — of what it perceives to be America’s interests. But managing the world requires hard choices. And burning through goodwill and trashing old relationships for insignificant or ephemeral gains has its consequences, as we’re now beginning to see.

Was dealing with Saddam important enough to rile our Arab allies? Probably so. But then we might have smoothed our path considerably by taking a different approach to the Middle East peace process. Leaning hard on NATO might have been similarly unavoidable. But then we might have helped ourselves by not spurning more NATO involvement in the war on terrorism or taking such an intransigent stance on issues like global warming and other international agreements.

This isn’t about right or wrong, just foresight and setting priorities. As most of us eventually learn from our personal and professional lives, success almost always requires the willingness to anger some folks. But angering everyone at the same time almost never makes sense since it leaves you isolated and friendless when you need to call on others for help.

Awash in a sea of so much bad blood, the administration has now taken to treating alliances like it does fiscal discipline – making a virtue of necessity by pooh-poohing the importance of something it’s already squandered away. Like the budgetary red ink they’re churning out at the White House today, this will be a mess left to others to clean up.

Josh Marshall is editor of talkingpointsmemo.com. His column appears in The Hill each Wednesday.