Diplomatic Gaffes

The Obama administration was supposed to make the world like us again, but so far it has proven embarrassingly inept in the art and the niceties of diplomacy. Great Britain is our closest and most important ally, but when Prime Minister Gordon Brown came for a visit, he received, contrary to custom, no state dinner and not even a joint news conference. In the traditional exchange of gifts, the Prime Minister gave our president a penholder carved from the wood of a famous ship that battled the slave trade, along with a seven-volume biography of Winston Churchill. In return, our president gave his British counterpart a box set of American movies, in a format that won’t even work on British DVD players. British feelings were also hurt when Obama gave back a bust of Churchill that had been in the Oval Office for years. When a London reporter asked a state department official about why the administration was dissing England, he received this loutish, unprofessional, and most undiplomatic response: “There’s nothing special about Britain. You’re just the same as the other 190 countries in the world. You shouldn’t expect special treatment.”

Meanwhile, our Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, has been going around mispronouncing the names of international leaders and showing for all the world to see how Americans do not understand foreign languages. She tried to make a little joke with the Russians, playing with Vice President Joe Biden’s call for pushing a “reset” button in the relationship between the two countries. So she had a little model made of a plaque with a red button–itself an embarrassing trivialism–with what she thought was the Russian word for “reset.” Instead, the word meant “overloaded.”

So now the Russians, our emerging adversaries, are making fun of us and the British, our closest friends, feel rejected. So far the new chapter in American diplomacy.

Sources: Can’t anybody here play this game? and Farewell to Britain