Building an American island.

• Author: Howell, Llewellyn, D.
• Position: WORLD WATCHER

"IF YOU BUILD IT, they will stay away." This seems to be the theme of the Bush Administration when you have a chance to I look at the U.S. from the outside. An island of fences--stricter controls over Canadians entering the U.S., isolation on climate change issues, clumsy foreign policy initiatives, limitations on free trade, intelligence failures, and slogging on in the unpopular and unjustified sectarian Iraqi conflict--has come to characterize America in the world. These are the headlines and the ready conversations that you find in Paris these days. Not so much from the French as among Americans.

It is refreshing, if also disappointing, to get outside of the country sometimes and get a feel for other perspectives on the U.S., as I am doing now in Paris--and there are plenty of perspectives. Not only from Americans away from the controlled information atmosphere of the U.S., but from the French and other Europeans, who are mixing across Europe at a rate that counters the restrictiveness being imposed in U.S. isolationism.

The news about the U.S. has its range, but there are consistencies that radiate. The Bush Administration is circling the wagons, they all say, closing America into an island in the vast sea of globalization. The fence along the Mexican border gets attention here as much as it does in Arizona. French TV has been presenting an interview with former Pres. Jimmy Carter in which he argues that it really is not a security fence so much as it is a wall. U.S. passport requirements for travel to and from Canada were highlighted in the International Herald Tribune. Pres. Bush's refusal to accept the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) from his own Administration's intelligence services on Iran's nuclear weapons program sheds a terrible tight on Bush's foreign policy capabilities. Global leadership seems out of the question anymore. The U.S. is not in synch with European agendas, including those of its erstwhile allies, at least according to the news here.

This seemed to be especially true in the December 2007 Climate Change Conference in Bali, Indonesia. All of the other industrialized states have gotten on board with the Kyoto Protocol while the U.S. clings to "voluntary" compliance, which means the U.S. can go its own way and ignore the realities of global climate change. Australia hurled out Bush ally John Howard (who lost his reelection bid for prime minister), changed governments, and altered direction on Kyoto compliance.

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