Criticism of Bush's ineptitude in foreign diplomacy often gets brushed aside as just a stylistic difference or sometimes even flipped around as a good thing: that his bumbling is the sign of a genuine guy. But there's really more to Bush's ignorance of foreign issues than just a slip of "the nation of Africa."
Newsweek editor, Fareed Zakaria, compares Bush's appearances abroad to Chinese president Hu Jintao's. In Australia, the two made back to back visits. Between the leader of a totalitarian communist country and the leader of a country that stands for freedom and capitalism, who got the standing ovation from the Australian Parliament? Not us.
At the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in Thailand, Hu was similarly loved and Bush hated. Zakaria quotes one Malaysian writer, who explains it best: "Bush came to an economic group [APEC] and talked obsessively about terror. He sees all of us through that one prism. Yes, we worry about terror, but frankly that's not the sum of our lives. We have many other problems...We're trying to address health, social and environmental problems. Hu talked about all this; he talked about our agenda, not just his agenda."
If Bush is so obsessed with making the US look strong, he certainly doesn't accomplish that goal with confronting each country as a possible terrorist haven. In fact, the US looks paranoid. The true sign of a nation's strength is its ability to concern itself with more than just survival.
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