NOT MALICE, JUST IGNORANCE:

Parochially Post-American: It wasn’t the “reset” button President Obama hit; it was the ejector-seat button. (Mark Steyn, 4/03/10, National Review)

It’s not just the president. The entire administration suffers, to put it at its mildest, from systemic indifference to American allies. It wasn’t Obama but a mere aide who sneered to Fleet Street reporters that Britain was merely one of 200 countries in the world and shouldn’t expect any better treatment than any of the others. It wasn’t Obama but the State Department that leaked Hillary Clinton’s dressing down of Prime Minister Netanyahu. Ally-belittling comes so reflexively to this administration that it’s now doing drive-by bird-flipping. I doubt Secretary Clinton intended to change American policy when she was down in Argentina the other day and out of the blue demanded negotiations on the Falkland Islands. I would imagine she is entirely ignorant and indifferent on the subject, and calling for negotiations seemed the easy option — works for Iran and North Korea, right? [...]

One of the oddest features of the scene is attributed to the president’s “cool,” which seems to be the euphemism of choice for what, in less stellar executives, would be regarded as an unappealing combination of coldness and self-absorption. I forget which long-ago foreign minister responded to an invitation to lunch with an adversary by saying “I’m not hungry,” but Obama seems to reserve the line for his “friends.” Visiting France, he declined to dine with the Sarkozys. Visiting Norway, he declined to dine with the king at a banquet thrown explicitly in Obama’s honor. The other day, the president declined to dine with Netanyahu even though the Israeli prime minister was his guest in the White House at the time. The British prime minister, five times rebuffed in his attempt to book a date, had to make do with a perfunctory walk ’n’ talk through the kitchens of the U.N. Obama’s shtick as a candidate was that he was the guy who’d talk to anyone, anytime, anywhere. Instead, he recoils from all but the most minimal contact with the world.

John Bolton calls him “the first post-American president” and is punctilious enough to add that he doesn’t mean “un-American” or “anti-American.” In his Berlin speech, he presented himself as a “citizen of the world,” which, whatever else it means, suggests an indifference to America’s role as guarantor of the global order. The postponement of his Australian trip in order to ram health care down the throats of the American people was a neat distillation of the reality of his priorities: A transformative domestic agenda must necessarily come at the price of America’s global role. One-worldism is often a convenient cover for ignorance: You’d be hard pressed to find a self-proclaimed “multiculturalist” who can tell you the capital of Lesotho or the principal exports of Bhutan. And so it is with liberal internationalism: The citoyen du monde is the most parochial president of modern times.