Our next “Worst President”
Obama Blunders Through Asia
Undoing Bush’s years of deft diplomacy.
The White House stated as Obama left Asia for home last week: “Overall, American leadership was absent from this region for the last several years.” Nonsense. Bush left office with U.S. relations with Asia’s big four–China, India, Japan, and Indonesia–taken together, better than ever in history.
Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh many times remarked that President Bush was popular in India, and so was the United States. U.S.-Japan relations were excellent under Bush, in partnership with Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and two successors. Nor were U.S. relations with Australia ever as good as in the years when Bush presided in Washington and John Howard in Canberra. In Southeast Asia after 9/11 the U.S. position improved sharply with Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand. And Bush drew Vietnam and, after 2007, South Korea, under its new president Lee Myung Bak, closer to the United States.
As for China, in his second Inaugural Address and his oration at Kyoto en route to Beijing in 2005, Bush treated the Chinese with respect but also as laggards in world-historical terms. “Free nations are peaceful
nations,” he said in Japan. “Free nations do not threaten their neighbors, and free nations offer their citizens a hopeful vision for the future.”
November 22nd, 2009 at 6:50 pm
I laugh to keep from crying.