No Way to Make Friends by Fareed Zakaria

December 8, 2003, U.S. Edition

No Way to Make Friends
Bush could surely have arranged to meet in Baghdad with troops from allied countries who are also fighting and dying in Iraq
By Fareed Zakaria

President Bush’s Thanksgiving trip to Iraq was a generous and bold-hearted gesture of support to American troops. What made it such a success, however, was that it managed to severely limit an otherwise unavoidable aspect of travel—contact with foreigners. When President Bush has had to go beyond U.S. Army bases in recent weeks, the tours have not gone so well.

Traveling through East Asia last week, I noted how poorly most observers rated President Bush's recent trip there. Even more striking, however, was the comparison repeatedly made between Bush's visit and that of Chinese leader Hu Jintao—with a thumping majority believing Hu had done better.

In Thailand at the meeting for Asia- Pacific Economic Cooperation, "there was no question that Hu was the better appreciated one," a Thai official said to me. "He outshone Bush in most of the attendeew' eyes." The trips ended with the two making back-to-back visits to Australia. Bush was greeted with demonstrations, his address to Parliament interrupted by hecklers. Hu, on the other hand, got a 20-minute standing ovation from Parliament. "It is Hu's visit rather than George W. Bush's that will provide a lingering sense of satisfaction and security about Australia's place in the region,"wrote The Australian, a newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch and not given to knee-jerk anti-Americanism.

What is going on here? How does the chief representative of the world's oldest constitutional democracy lose a popularity contest to the leader of a Leninist party?

Let's start with the atmospherics. Everywhere Bush travels, his security is handled with the usual American overkill—thousands of guards and aides, walled-off compounds, tightly scripted movements from one bubble to another. Hu, by contrast, had a modest security detail, traveled freely and mingled with other leaders and even the general public. (Tony Blair sometimes manages to travel abroad with a total of six people.)

Bush's trip to London two weeks ago is now being heralded as a great success. But here is how one of the president's most ardent supporters, his former speechwriter David Frum, saw it while in London himself. "Bush was sealed away from London for the entire visit. There was no drive down the Mall, no address to Parliament, no public events at all," Frum wrote in his Weblog on National Review Online. "The trip's planners reduced the risk of confrontations—but only by broadcasting to the British public their tacit acknowledgement that the visit was unpopular and unwelcome. By eliminating from the president's schedule events with any touch of spontaneity or public contact, the trip planners made the president look as if he could not or would not engage with ordinary British people." In Great Britain, Frum concluded, "the United States has a problem, a big one—and it was made worse, not better, by this recent visit."

The deeper problem, however, is not one of style but substance. Bush's trips to Southeast Asia and Australia focused single-mindedly on the war on terror. Karim Raslan, a Malaysian writer, explained the local reaction: "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 retooling our economies, we're wondering how to deal with the rise of China, we're trying to address health, social and environmental problems. Hu talked about all this; he talked about our agenda, not just his agenda."

There is a lack of empathy emanating from Washington. After the Bali bombings, which were Australia's 9/11, the administration did not bother to send a high-level envoy to a steadfast ally for condolences. Australians had to make do with a videotape of George Bush. Even last week, Bush could surely have arranged to meet in Baghdad with a few troops from allied countries who are also fighting and dying in Iraq.

What is most dismaying about this state of affairs is that for the last 50 years the United States has skillfully merged its own agenda with the agendas of others, creating a sense of shared interests and values. When Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy waged the cold war, they also presented the world with a constructive agenda dealing with trade, poverty and health. They fought communism with one hand and offered hope with the other. We have fallen far from that model if the head of the Chinese Communist Party is seen as presenting the world with a more progressive agenda than the president of the world's leading democracy.