JUST TO MAKE IT MORE OBVIOUS FOR FOLKS...:

Obama Should Visit India--Soon: It's time for the Democrats to cement America's major new alliance. (Tunku Varadarajan, 02.16.09, Forbes)

Ironically, even as Mrs. Clinton was packing her valise for Beijing, a senior spokesman for the Congress Party, which heads the ruling coalition in New Delhi, made an impassioned freelance appeal for George W. Bush to be awarded the Bharat Ratna ("Jewel of India"), the country's highest civilian award. The Bharat Ratna is a big, big deal in India and has been awarded only 41 times since its inception in 1954--and only twice to non-Indians, one of whom was the sainted Nelson Mandela. The Congress Party quickly distanced itself from its spokesman's appeal, no doubt regarding it as a particularly impolitic show of nostalgia for Bush so early in the Age of Obama.

But the truth is that, for all his unpopularity in the U.S. (and Europe, and Latin America, and the Middle East, and practically everywhere else outside Albania and Georgia), Bush is a much-appreciated figure in India--at least in high policy circles. As many have noted, both in Washington and New Delhi, the one indisputable foreign policy success of the eight Bush years was America's invigorating new alliance with India--an alliance that is based as much in a sense of shared ideology (democracy, pluralism, etc.) as it is in strategic need (both countries want a reliable counterweight to China and face a common foe in Islamist terrorism).

...the itinerary should be India, Israel, Turkey, Liberia, Uganda, Botswana, Mali, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Japan, Indonesia, Mongolia, Australia, New Zealand. But there's no reason to believe he is as astute at geopolitics as W was.

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Posted by Orrin Judd at February 16, 2009 8:27 AM