Bush Seeks to Restore Tattered U.S. Image With Heavy '08 Travel

By Edwin Chen

Dec. 24 (Bloomberg) -- President George W. Bush's diplomatic passport will acquire a slew of new country stamps during his final year in office as he tries to rebuild the U.S.'s international standing and create a foreign-policy legacy beyond Iraq.

The president plans trips to the Middle East, Africa, Asia and South America, which would make 2008 his busiest year abroad. While his major domestic initiatives may get stalled by a Democratic majority in Congress and the gridlock caused by election-year politics, he still has an opportunity to exert his influence overseas.

``When it comes to foreign policy, he's not a lame duck; he can do a lot,'' said Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, who served as director of policy planning at the State Department until June 2003.

Bush, 61, came into the White House promising a humble foreign policy and eschewing nation-building and foreign entanglements. That changed after the Sept. 11 attacks, when he adopted a style supporters hail as visionary and critics call cowboy diplomacy.

While the president will strive to strengthen alliances, it won't come at the expense of continuing to prosecute the war on terror, said Jim Jeffrey, the deputy White House national security adviser.

``We want to be well-perceived in the world,'' Jeffrey said in an interview. ``But more importantly, we want to formulate policies that will protect the American people.''

Travel Itinerary

In early January, Bush flies to Israel for his first visit as president. While in the region, he also will visit the West Bank, Kuwait, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The trip is a follow-up to the Israeli-Palestinian talks that the U.S. hosted in Annapolis, Maryland, last month.

In February, Bush will tour Africa, where U.S. public health initiatives are popular. That will be followed by an April North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit in Romania, a June U.S.-European summit in Slovenia, a July meeting of Group of Eight leaders in Japan, the summer Olympics in China and a November Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Peru. Bush is likely to visit other, nearby countries during those trips.

Many presidents focus on international affairs in their final year as a way to compensate for their waning influence at home. For Bush, it's unlikely to provide an escape.

``Bush also has problems at home, but he has even bigger problems with the rest of the world,'' said Andy Kohut, president the Pew Research Center in Washington.

Attitudes Overseas

A Pew study of public opinion in 47 nations found ``extensive'' anti-Americanism and ``increasing disapproval'' of the cornerstones of U.S. foreign policy.

A perception that Washington acts unilaterally was shared by 89 percent of the French, 83 percent of Canadians and 74 percent of Britons. America's image in most Muslim nations is ``abysmal,'' Pew said.

The exception, Pew found, is Africa, where the U.S. image remains positive, especially in Ethiopia and Kenya.

Given such results, ``going around the world won't make things necessarily worse'' because ``it's difficult to see how they could be any worse,'' said Ivo Daalder, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and former national security council aide in the Clinton administration.

Bush will have considerable U.S. public support for trying to improve the nation's image abroad, according to Joseph Nye, a political scientist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who co-chaired a study of U.S. foreign policy in November.

`Unbalanced'

``There's a thirst in the country to restore America's standing in the world, a feeling that we've been unbalanced in our approach,'' Nye said.

The report of the commission headed by Nye and Richard Armitage, a former deputy secretary of state under Bush, said the U.S. must reinvigorate multilateral alliances and abandon its post-Sept. 11 ``angry face.''

Democrats long have criticized Bush's doctrine of pre- emptive war to prevent terrorist attacks and the rhetoric he used to confront adversaries such as Iran. Some of the president's fellow Republicans have started to call for a reversal as well.

Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, 52, who is seeking the Republican presidential nomination, wrote in the January/February edition of the journal Foreign Affairs that the administration's ``arrogant bunker mentality has been counterproductive at home and abroad.''

Jeffrey rejected the idea that Bush acts unilaterally, citing the multilateral talks with Iran and North Korea.

Coalitions

``The model is multilateral: Form a coalition of countries,'' Jeffrey said. ``This is what people accuse us of not doing. We're doing it all over the world.''

As Bush engages in global diplomacy between now and Jan. 20, 2009, he and his counterparts will be doing ``a very fine calculation,'' said Jim Steinberg, dean of the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas in Austin, who served as former President Bill Clinton's deputy national security adviser.

He said some world leaders will prefer to deal with Bush rather than his successor, who will be an unknown quantity. Others, he said, will wait to deal with the next president, setting up ``an interesting dynamic at the end of an administration.''

To contact the reporter on this story: Edwin Chen in Washington at echen32@bloomberg.net .

Last Updated: December 24, 2007 00:03 EST

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