On his maiden visit to Asia, US president Barack Obama has been presenting — in word and deed — a kindler, gentler face of America and a willingness to accept, and even defer to, Asian powers. It’s part of his endeavour to repair America’s image overseas, which was dented during the George W Bush years of go-it-alone isolationism and shrill “you’re-with-us-or-against-us” rhetoric.
But conservative critics in the US say that with his exaggeratedly deep bow to Japanese Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko in Tokyo on Saturday, Obama is taking his notion of American ‘humility’ to humiliating depths.
Arriving at the Imperial Palace, Obama bent from the waist, which cross-cultural intermediaries say perhaps went beyond the requirements of protocol. In any case, other world leaders, including prime minister Manmohan Singh, offer no more than a formal handshake while meeting the Emperor; even when a bow is offered, it is merely symbolic.
US right-wing commentator Michelle Malkin noted trenchantly that although the “Left complained that George W Bush was too much of a cowboy on the global stage, it’s better than having a waterboy.” Malkin added, “everyone else in the world seems to know how to greet the Emperor without scraping the floor…”
Donald Douglass, an associate professor of political science in California, reasons that “Obama’s breach of protocol is of a piece with the substance of his foreign policy… He declares that the US is a country like any other, only worse, because we have so much for which to apologise.”
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