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U.S. Relations and Wehner’s Fantasy World

Pete Wehner recites the party line: The efforts to “re-set” relations with Russia have failed. During the Bush presidency relations with Japan, China, India, Mexico, Colombia, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Great Britain (to name just a few countries) were better than they have been during the Obama years. Many Republicans hear these things somewhere, […]

Pete Wehner recites the party line:

The efforts to “re-set” relations with Russia have failed. During the Bush presidency relations with Japan, China, India, Mexico, Colombia, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Great Britain (to name just a few countries) were better than they have been during the Obama years.

Many Republicans hear these things somewhere, and then they repeat them religiously without bothering to think through whether they are true or what it might mean if they are. If we look at how the U.S. is viewed overseas, we generally see significant improvements in favorability ratings from 2009-2011 over ratings from 2003-2008. According to Pew, U.S. favorability ratings improved in five of the eight countries Wehner mentions when Obama took office, and for the most part they have not declined significantly since then. The 2011 ratings from these five countries are all above the 2008 ratings. The survey did not include Colombia or the Czech Republic, and it had just one result for India from this year.

The myth that changes to missile defense plans in Poland and the Czech Republic represented a grievous betrayal of these allies is one of the most often repeated and baseless arguments of the last three years. The decision was not handled as well as it could have been, but most Poles and Czechs didn’t want the installations anyway. Despite the passage of a free trade agreement that will harm many Colombian cultivators, U.S.-Colombian relations are now hardly any worse than they were during the Bush years. The nuclear deal between the U.S. and India may be in jeopardy, but this is partly because of India’s liability law. Relations with China have deteriorated somewhat, but this is because the U.S. has been asserting itself more in the region and showing support for China’s neighbors, and it is doubtful that Wehner disapproves of these moves. Better U.S.-China relations in the last decade were the product of benign neglect.

Last year, relations with Japan were in fairly bad shape, but why was this? The Obama administration compelled the Hatoyama government to climb down and accept an Okinawa basing deal that it had pledged to oppose. Presumably, Wehner doesn’t disagree with the administration’s position on the basing deal, and he isn’t likely to fault it for the rift that this created with the Japanese government. Since then, because of U.S. support for Japan in its disputes with China and U.S. aid following the tsunami, the relationship has recovered, and Pew found that 85% in Japan had a favorable view of the U.S., which is the highest rating of the last decade. The same improvement can be found in France, Germany, Russia, and all of the other places where the world is supposedly souring on America. Some of the countries where U.S. favorability has dropped below Bush-era levels are those countries that the Obama administration has gone out of its way to insult or antagonize, such as Turkey and Pakistan.

If we’re not judging this by public opinion, Wehner’s charges are still hard to take seriously. The “reset” has not been a failure. This is by far the most ridiculous charge, since critics of the “reset” only complain about it because it has succeeded in repairing a U.S.-Russian relationship that they don’t want to cultivate. The “reset” has improved the bilateral relationship, reduced regional tensions, and provided some cooperation on policies on Iran and Afghanistan that Wehner presumably supports. Improved U.S.-Russian ties have contributed to the thaw in Polish-Russian relations, and the reason Polish foreign policy has become less reflexively pro-American is that Poland was shortchanged and abused by the previous administration after it lent its support to the Iraq debacle. Nonetheless, U.S. favorability in Poland is slightly higher now than it was for most of Bush’s tenure. Wehner writes that relations with France and Germany are worse than they were in Bush’s second term, but even if true this avoids the inconvenient fact that relations with both countries plummeted to historic lows during the first term.

This brings me to what is so tiresome about these complaints. Many Republicans spent eight years dismissing foreign public opinion and the views of foreign governments as irrelevant. Despite the Bush administration’s generally horrendous record on this score, many of them insist on claiming that U.S. relations with other states have worsened when they have mostly stayed the same or even improved significantly. Where U.S. relations with other states have actually soured, they have done so mostly because the Obama administration has continued or escalated Bush-era policies that these states reject.

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