Extending such an honor to the leader who hosted a conference of Holocaust skeptics and deniers, often predicts Israel will disappear from the map, stole his last election and is stiffing the West on Iran’s nuclear program is clearly a poke in the eye of Barack Obama.

Nor is this the only dissing of Obama and America by Lula. ~Pat Buchanan

The other “dissing” is supposed to be the ongoing support Brazil has given to Manuel Zelaya, the deposed Honduran president, but this cannot really be a show of direspect to Obama and America when the administration has taken the same pro-Zelaya position as Brazil’s government. I think the administration has been horribly wrong in how it responded to Zelaya’s deposition, and its subsequent treatment of Honduras has been outrageous, but if Obama and Lula are both backing Zelaya it is hard to see how the latter’s backing can be seen as an anti-American gesture.

So what of Ahmadinejad’s visit to Brazil? Certainly, that is a bit more provocative, or at least the Brazilian government should have known that it would be seen as something of a provocation, but a good question might be why this matters. Brazil is a rising power, a country of almost 200 million people and the eighth-largest economy in the world, and Lula has somewhat unrealistic aspirations of making Brazil a major player in international affairs. Brazil is Iran’s largest trading partner in the hemisphere, most of Iran’s neighbors accept Ahmadinejad as the elected Iranian president, and Lula believes that isolating Iran achieves nothing. Washington has made Iran’s nuclear program one of its top priorities, so it is conceivable that Brazil’s government sees an opportunity to insert itself into a major international issue and raise its profile by representing the position of many non-aligned states that simply do not see Iran’s nuclear program as a problem. Once again, the trouble may not be that other states are “failing” to get on board with our Iran policy. The trouble could be that our Iran policy is so ridiculous that few other major states see any reason to support it.

What other displays of disrespect have we seen? Mr. Buchanan believes that the new DPJ government’s foreign policy shift, which I think American realists and non-interventionists should welcome and encourage, represents some disrespect for America. The disagreement about renegotiating basing rights on Okinawa stems from long-standing local complaints about the ongoing U.S. presence there and the DPJ won some of its support because of this Japanese dissatisfaction with the existing negotiated arrangement.

64 years after the end of WWII, why do we still have bases in Japan at all? To the extent that the DPJ’s decisions represent moves towards less Japanese dependence on U.S. military power and a more independent Japanese foreign policy, this is the natural and long-overdue result of Japanese postwar development and something that critics of empire and overstretch should be happy to see. If Japan is otherwise reverting to “checkbook diplomacy” abroad, providing financial aid for Afghanistan and Pakistan but not participating in military operations, that seems to me to be the best of both worlds. If Japan moves towards greater economic and political cooperation with China, as the DPJ seems interested in doing, that could reduce the likelihood of future hostilities between them and relieve the U.S. of at least one of its numerous security responsibilities. Unless we are going to be the guarantor of Japanese security forever, something like this will have to happen sooner or later.

Mr. Buchanan says that Iran has “slapped away Obama’s open hand,” but this is because of a fundamental flaw with the Iran policy of the last three administrations: we demand that they scrap a program that they will never abandon. Russia and China will not support sanctions, but I am reasonably sure that Mr. Buchanan also believes additional sanctions on Iran to be useless and unnecessary. Likewise, scrapping the missile defense program in central Europe has not resulted in a direct quid pro quo as some, including people in the administration, seem to have expected, but the decision was right on the merits, it has removed an irritant from the relationship with Russia and undid one of the most unnecessary provocations of the last years of the Bush era.

Buchanan mentions Moscow’s opposition to Yushchenko’s re-election, but when Yushchenko was first elected he did not see this as a great success for the Bush administration. If Yushchenko was “our man in Kiev,” so much the worse for both us and Ukraine. As I recall, Yushchenko’s Western backing combined with the insane idea of bringing Ukraine into NATO were precisely the things that drew Mr. Buchanan’s criticism of Western interference in Ukraine’s presidential election. If Yushchenko is on the verge of humiliating defeat, which is as much a result of Ukrainian disillusionment with his failed tenure as it has anything to do with Moscow’s meddling, that seems to me to be an almost entirely good thing. During the tenure of the “pro-Western democrat” Yushchenko, Ukrainian confidence in multiparty democracy has collapsed, and the aftershocks of the financial crisis have similarly shaken Ukrainian confidence in market economics. Not all of this can be laid at Yushchenko’s door, but like any executive presiding over bad times he is taking the blame. If Yanukovych becomes the new president, that will likely mean less antagonism between Moscow and Kiev, there will be fewer disputes over natural gas pricing and delivery and therefore fewer shut-offs (the two governments have already negotiated a new deal that should make these less likely), and this means that Europe’s supply of natural gas is less likely to be jeopardized by political quarrels to the east. All of this points towards a decrease in tensions over the Crimea and Black Sea Fleet and a gradual improvement of ties between Russia and Europe, all of which should come as a relief to Americans, who need no more crises and conflicts to manage than we already have.

It is probably true that the administration’s policy on Israeli settlements is the one where the other government has demonstrated that it has no respect for Obama and his demands, and on this one Obama really has no one but himself and the members of his administration to blame. Unlike our Iran policy, where we do not have the means to achieve the stated objective, our Israel policy is defined by refusing to use the means of leverage we have. In short, Netanyahu called Obama’s bluff. In reality, the policy did not fail because Obama made the demand, but because in the end he was unwilling to exact a price for refusal and Netanyahu already knew that he would not even try.

As Mr. Buchanan acknowledges in this column, none of the things he mentions “represents a grave threat to any vital U.S. interest.” It is also difficult for me to see how most of these things demonstrate contempt or disrespect for America. In almost every case, local political conditions beyond American control or unrealistic policy goals account for all of the “setbacks” listed here.