As President Bush meets today with French President Nicolas Sarkozy and the head of the European Commission, he might keep in mind the view of the United States from Europe, Japan and elsewhere.
It isn't pretty -- and has grown notably ugly during his presidency.
A poll conducted by eight major newspapers found that opinions of the United States had dropped sharply over the past eight years.
According to a report in the Guardian, of Britain, among the French, 75% said their view of the United States had gotten worse or much worse since Bush became president. In Canada, 77% made a similar statement.
And in Switzerland -- notwithstanding die anmut,la douceur, la dolcezza (OK, for those of you not conversant in three of Switzerland's four languages, the sweetness) of Heidi and its chocolates, and its appreciation of Bush-like efficiency -- the percentage of those with an increasingly negative view of America under Bush topped out at 86%.
The credit-banking-financial maelstrom will be the central topic of Bush's meeting this afternoon with Sarkozy at Camp David, Md. Maybe the Swissies are thinking of late about the banking crisis?
In its report, the Guardian noted:
Many people now fear rather than warm to America. In France 25% of voters say relations with the U.S. are tense, against 38% who say they are friendly and 39% who think they are neutral. In Japan only 16% say friendship and 19% tension, with 62% neutral. In no country does a majority think relations should be described as friendly.
Even America's two neighbouring states are sceptical of U.S. intentions. Only 23% of Mexicans describe relations as friendly and 28% say they are tense. In Canada, which has just re-elected a Conservative minority government, voters are strongly supportive of a Democratic presidency; 43% say relations with the U.S. are friendly and 14% tense.
The survey also finds strong opposition to any attack on Iran and -- in the six countries questioned on the issue -- majority support for a rapid withdrawal of US forces from Iraq.
Indeed, it found that in each country polled, with the exception of Britain and Poland, a majority opposed military intervention in Iran.
As for views of the U.S. presidential election, John McCain and Barack Obama, the blue and red in the chart above says it all.
The setting was familiar--the rostrum backed by the massive green marble. So, too, the message.
President Bush was speaking to the U.N. General Assembly, giving his valedictory address. And in tenor and content, it could have been the introductory speech he delivered in a meeting delayed as New York, and the world, recovered from the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
Delivering a message of preemption, Bush told the U.N. today:
But, if one sentence in his address--delivered with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran looking on--summarized Bush's message after eight years of occasionally rocky relations with the world body, it was this:
The United Nations and other multilateral organizations are needed more urgently than ever.
Was this the same President Bush, then, who made it clear in his 2002 address that the United States was headed toward a showdown with Saddam Hussein. And that while Washington would appreciate U.N. support, the mission would go forward regardless?
For eight years, Stephen J. Hadley has observed President Bush up close.
As the president's national security advisor throughout the second term, and on many occasions before that as the deputy national security advisor, Hadley has traveled the world with the president, has cleared brush with him in Crawford, and briefed him daily on developments around the world.
He was there for discussions leading up to the surge in Iraq. Afghanistan? 9/11? North Korea? Iran? Hugo Chavez? Human rights and the Beijing Olympics? Russia? Georgia? All were in his portfolio.
If the word "crisis" was attached to it -- save, perhaps, for the stock market and Katrina -- it is only a slight exaggeration to say there's a good chance the debate went through Hadley's office at the northwest corner of the White House West Wing.
The vantage point for tracking the president could hardly be better.
Bush, Hadley said today, is "remarkably unaffected by eight years as president in terms of who he is, what he stands for, what he thinks of himself."
He spoke with a small group of reporters in the Roosevelt Room, across a small corridor from the Oval Office.
He was responding to a question about whether in its second term the administration had adopted a more pragmatic and less ideological approach to both foreign policy and economic matters, compared with the first term.
"Situations change," Hadley said, referring specifically to the Middle East, which he said was "a very different place" these days compared with 2001. Therefore, he said, the way the administration approaches it has naturally undergone change.
Of course no presidential aide wants to say the boss has eased back on his core principles. Nor would one want to say that the boss had not grown and adapted over eight years.
Hadley put it this way: "We've tried to be flexible. We've tried to learn."
-- James Gerstenzang
Photo: Stephen J. Hadley, left rear next to Vice President Dick Cheney, in the White House Roosevelt Room, 2006. Credit: Eric Draper / The White House
The verdict has been in for nearly two years: The American population does not approve of the way President Bush has done his job. His approval rating has been below 40% for nearly two years, and has, of late, hovered around 30%.
Along comes Fareed Zakaria, writing in Newsweek, with this counterintuitive idea: The widespread criticism under which the president has labored month after month "misses an important reality."
The criticism has come from all over, he notes: "Democrats, Republicans, independents, foreigners, Martians, everyone." But it has been directed at an administration that is not the one running things now.
The foreign policies that aroused the greatest anger and opposition were mostly pursued in Bush's first term: the invasion of Iraq, the rejection of treaties, diplomacy and multilateralism. In the past few years, many of these policies have been modified, abandoned or reversed.
As a result, he notes, the administration has put in place foreign policies that "are more sensible, moderate and mainstream."
It took a long time, but the turnaround in our policy in Iraq has been significant. The United States has made broad overtures to the Sunni community, and now actively supports Sunni fighters it had once jailed. We've concentrated on stabilizing Shiite neighborhoods, helping to free them from dependence on militias.
Could the Bush administration or Israel accomplish anything with a surprise attack on the heart of what the United States contends is an Iranian nuclear weapons center?
Probably not, a Washington think tank -- and former U.N. weapons inspector -- contend, in a detailed report that has quietly cast a skeptical eye on a central focus of U.S. foreign policy and national security attention.
It is not an idle question. It continues to dog President Bush, with critics expressing the fear that he is determined to attack Iran before leaving office.
The little-noticed study published Thursday by the Institute for Science and International Security cast doubt on comparisons between potential attacks on Iran's Natanz enrichment plants and its Esfahan uranium conversion facility, on the one hand, and, on the other, the surgical strikes by Israel on a clandestine Syrian nuclear reactor in September 2007 and Iraq's Osirak reactor in June 1981. Those attacks set back efforts to produce a plutonium bomb by several years, the report noted.
But any analogy between an attack on the Iranian facilities and the Syrian and Iraqi sites "is grossly misleading," it said.
The report stated:
It neglects the important differences between a gas centrifuge uranium enrichment program and a reactor-based program, and fails to account for the dispersed, relatively advanced, and hardened nature of Iran's gas centrifuge facilities.
Besides, it said, Iran has purchased reserve stocks, in many instances, from abroad, and "an attack on Iran's enrichment program could not just rely on a single strike."
Among the authors is David Albright, the president of the Institute for Science and International Security and a former U.N. weapons inspector.
"Following an attack, Iran could quickly rebuild its centrifuge program in small, easily hidden facilities focused on making weapon-grade uranium for nuclear weapons," he said, in a Washington Post report.
Bush has said repeatedly that his focus on dealing with Iran is diplomatic -- built on trying to isolate the country on the world stage and increase the cost of what he says is its pursuit of nuclear weapons (and which Iran's leaders say is a civilian nuclear power program).
When first we heard that term, it was ringing in President Bush's 2002 State of the Union Address -- a phrase that summed up the good guys-bad guys division of the president's no-shades-of-gray worldview. Evoking the Allies and Axis of World War II, it put Iraq, Iran and North Korea on the side of Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany.
Iraq? Wherever it is going, it is no longer part of any axis -- though it is clearly at the moment in the United States' orbit.
Iran? With the talks this weekend in Geneva, in which Under secretary of State William J. Burns (left, walking in Geneva) met with an Iranian official, the United States is showing a willingness to ignore its prohibition on sitting down with Iranian representatives before Tehran suspends enrichment of uranium. Iran enriches, and the United States is talking.
And along comes North Korea: No senior official had met with representatives of the Pyongyang regime since Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright conferred with North Korean leader Kim Jong-il. But Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is planning to meet with her North Korean counterpart, Pak Ui-chun, this week in Singapore.
What's going on here?
To be sure, White House officials continue to present Iran and North Korea in a very dark light.
As Helene Cooper reports in The New York Times: "The Bush administration began long ago to step down from its vow not to talk to America's foes."
"But," she adds, "its recent concessions to Iran and North Korea -- and to Iraq, another charter member of the axis -- have further muddled the old message."
With friends like fellow Texan Phil Gramm, does George W. Bush need Democrats to keep him on his toes?
Gramm sat down with folks from the Washington Times and when he was done, he left Bush in roughly the same position as Dick Cheney's hunting partner: full of lead pellets.
Maybe it's a Texas thing.
Gramm, the former Republican senator, came up with these choice tidbits about the current Republican president:
"We've had eight years of ever-increasing growth in government and in levels of spending."
"Bush should have vetoed a lot more [spending] bills."
On Iran, he said Bush hasn't been tough enough, and suggested "a naval quarantine."
For more of Gramm on Bush click here.. And he lots to say, according to our Top of the Ticket colleagues, on John McCain.
Of the hot-button issues that dominate the foreign policy of the Bush administration in its waning months, perhaps none puts people on edge as much as the question of what President Bush is planning to do about Iran and its nuclear program.
At its heart, the administration's policy has been built around trying to isolate Iran -- diplomatically and, importantly, economically. The idea is that the Iranian people will put enough pressure on President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that the Iranian government will back off and shut down what Washington says is a program intended to develop nuclear weapons. (Iran says it is seeking only to develop a civilian nuclear power program; a U.S. National Intelligence Estimate last year concluded that Iran had abandoned a clandestine nuclear weapons program in 2003).
So, the administration has been adamant: No business with Iran without Washington's approval. Of course, that means no centrifuges or smaller items that could be used to enrich uranium or feed in a lesser way into an effort to build nuclear warheads.
But, as the Associated Press discovered, that doesn't mean nothing gets through. In a lengthy account, it reported that among the items Iran is managing to purchase from the United States -- despite the stiff effort to crack down on Tehran's dealings with the West and indeed all outsiders -- are: cigarettes, brassieres, bull semen, vitamins, soybeans, medical equipment and vegetable seeds.
All told, the wire service found, "U.S. exports to Iran grew more than tenfold during President Bush's years in office." So far.
Are the Israelis going to deal with one of President Bush's biggest problems by bombing Iran before the president leaves office? Administration officials keep pooh-poohing the swirling reports, but the reports are convincing enough to cause flutters in the oil market.
After ABC News on Monday quoted an unidentified Pentagon official citing an increasing chance that the Israelis would attack Iranian nuclear facilities, oil again ticked up today to around $140 a barrel.
The ABC report followed stories last month reporting that Israeli air forces were conducting exercises to rehearse for possible strikes and other articles quoting Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Shaul Mofaz saying that an attack was "unavoidable" if international diplomatic efforts didn't halt Iranian enrichment of uranium.
Exasperated U.S. officials didn't want to get into an on-the-record discussion of the likelihood of such an attack, but ridiculed the use of all these unidentified sources. Tom Casey, a State Department spokesman, said: "You know, I need to find this guy, because apparently he's an expert on the Israeli military, an expert on Iran and an expert on nuclear issues at the same time. Let's get him a Nobel Prize."
One anecdote in Seymour Hersh's latest piece speculating about a possible White House attack on Iran's nuclear program is sparking special interest. It involves Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates.
According to the New Yorker piece discussed here Sunday, Gates told Democratic senators at a policy luncheon that if the United States staged a preemptive strike on Iran, "we'll create generations of jihadists and our grandchildren will be battling our enemies here in America."
The BBC's Justin Webb called the episode "most interesting" and dubbed the secretary "Gutsy Gates."
Truth is, Gates has said this sort of thing before -- and publicly. At his confirmation hearings in December 2006, Gates was asked by West Virginia's venerable Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd what he thought about attacking Iran over its nuclear program. Here's his answer:
I think that military action against Iran would be an absolute last resort, that any problems that we have with Iran, our first option should be diplomacy and working with our allies to try and deal with the problems that Iran is posing to us.
I think that we have seen, in Iraq, that once war is unleashed, it becomes unpredictable. And I think that the consequences of a military conflict with Iran could be quite dramatic.
And therefore, I would counsel against military action except as a last resort and if we felt our vital interests were threatened.
James Gerstenzang and Johanna Neuman are reporters in The Times' Washington bureau. Between the two of them, they have covered the White House, diplomacy, military affairs, the environment, international economics, trade and Congress. They have both spent time in Crawford, Texas.
