Bush Tries to Remake Image as Team Player

President Bush, whose foreign policy is viewed in some countries as ill-conceived and arrogant, heads to an international summit this week intent on convincing the world that he knows the meaning of consensus.

Bush departs Tuesday on a four-day trip highlighted by the annual gathering of the Group of 8 heads of state and government -- arguably the world’s most powerful elected leaders, representing Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States.

The G-8 conference, which is to begin Wednesday evening at a heavily guarded resort in Gleneagles, Scotland, has become a focal point for activists, religious leaders and rock stars who want wealthy nations to do more to help the world’s poor and combat global warming.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the G-8 chairman and summit host, has served notice that aid to Africa and limits on greenhouse gas emissions are at the top of his agenda, and he wants Bush to make bigger commitments on both issues.

For Bush, the summit is an opportunity to repair America’s battered image with allies who perceive his administration as unilateralist, self-interested and stingy. For Blair, whose domestic popularity has plummeted in part because of his support for the U.S.-led war in Iraq, it is a chance to show that he’s willing to stand up to Bush, at least rhetorically.

In the days leading up to the summit, as rocker Bob Geldof orchestrated Live 8 concerts in 10 far-flung cities and thousands of activists began gathering in Edinburgh, Scotland, the president and his advisors did their best to dispel Bush’s image as global cowboy.

“I understand we have an obligation as an influential nation to reach out to others,” Bush said in an interview with the Danish Broadcasting Corp. Before arriving in Gleneagles on Wednesday, Bush will make an overnight stop in Denmark to express his appreciation for Copenhagen’s support for the war effort.

“We also have an obligation as an influential nation to help others,” Bush said, alluding to Blair’s emphasis on Africa.

Bush made those remarks shortly after announcing that his administration planned to double development aid to Africa by 2010, but not in the way Blair and other G-8 leaders had proposed. Bush is also expected to rebuff Blair’s efforts to secure a U.S. commitment to consider mandatory curbs on greenhouse gases.

Some Africa advocates welcomed the president’s pledge but said it departed substantially from what some allies were seeking.

“Bush’s position on this, like on many other issues, is ‘My way or the highway,’ ” said Susan Rice, a former assistant secretary of State for African affairs in the Clinton administration. “We’ll do it on our terms at our pace and through our own mechanisms. We won’t engage in multilateral endeavors on this, even when our best friend Tony Blair asks us to.”

The result, Rice said, was to “reinforce perceptions of American exceptionalism and unilateralism” rather than repair America’s reputation as an international maverick.

Recent opinion polls in other countries show how widespread those perceptions have become.

A survey of global attitudes conducted by the Pew Research Center in May showed that in 12 of 16 nations, substantial majorities viewed U.S. foreign policy as fundamentally self-serving.

Asked whether they believed the United States took other countries’ interests and concerns into account, just 18% of French respondents said yes, compared with 19% of Canadians, 21% of Russians, 32% of Britons, 38% of Germans -- and 67% of Americans.

“There’s a lot of concurrence about America between Americans and people around the world, except on one issue,” said survey director Andrew Kohut. “That is whether America does enough to solve global problems. The publics of the world say no. Americans say yes.”

America’s overall favorability rating has improved slightly in France, Germany and Russia since 2004, an uptick some analysts attribute to Bush’s recent outreach to Europe, his increasing emphasis on diplomacy and a new foreign policy team at the State Department. But in many countries, it remains well below the levels recorded before the Iraq war.

Bush said last week that he understood why some Europeans did not agree with his decision to wage war in Iraq. But he offered no apology for his decision to proceed without their endorsement or participation.

“People have got to understand my mentality,” he said. “It changed after Sept. 11. For some in Europe, Sept. 11 was just a moment, a sad moment. For me, it changed the way I looked at the world and changed how many Americans looked at the world because we were attacked.”

White House officials said Bush hoped to use the summit as a forum for the United States to forge consensus on important issues, including aid to Africa, climate change, energy policy, Middle East peace and the war on terrorism.

As the president prepared for the fourth European trip of his second term, it was not clear whether he had gotten off to an auspicious start.

In a flurry of activity designed to showcase concern for the estimated 300 million Africans living in extreme poverty, Bush announced a pledge to double U.S. aid from $4.3 billion a year in 2004 to at least $8.6 billion in 2010, including $1.2 billion to combat malaria and smaller initiatives to expand education and prevent sexual violence and abuse against women.

The Bush administration already had endorsed a plan developed by G-8 finance ministers to write off about $40 billion in debt owed by 18 poor countries, 14 of them in Africa. The deal is expected to reduce their obligations by about $1 billion annually.

The White House also announced that First Lady Laura Bush would visit South Africa, Tanzania and Rwanda at the conclusion of the conference. “She’s a really good ambassador for our country,” the president said.

Bush’s promise to double aid was met with broad applause, yet there was grumbling too. Some Africa advocates said it was mainly a repackaging of commitments that had been underfunded by Bush and Congress. It fell short, they said, of the investment needed to help sub-Saharan Africa achieve the U.N.’s Millennium Challenge goal of cutting poverty in half by 2015.

“The Bush administration provides a lot of compassionate showmanship for Africa,” said Marie Clarke Brill, director of public education and mobilization for Africa Action, an advocacy group in Washington. “But when you look at the details of the administration’s policy, it’s not all as good as it claims to be.”

Instead of channeling most aid through multilateral initiatives, the White House has set up its own U.S.-administered programs, such as the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief and the Millennium Challenge Accounts, which offer assistance to African countries that satisfy strict criteria for fiscal management and reform.

Bush has rejected a British proposal to participate in an international bond issue to finance African aid and has refused to join other G-8 countries in a pledge to increase public development assistance to 0.7% of gross domestic product -- the total value of goods and services produced annually -- by 2015. The United States currently devotes 0.16% of GDP to foreign aid, placing it 21st on a list of 22 wealthy nations.

Administration officials said the 0.7% standard was not appropriate for America because of the size of the U.S. economy and the substantial tax-sheltered flow of private contributions to relief organizations.

“If we did 0.7%, the aid budget would go from $19 billion to $91 billion. We couldn’t spend that money if we wanted to,” Andrew S. Natsios, the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, said Sunday on CNN’s “Late Edition.”

If the U.S. attempted to meet Blair’s challenge, it would be accused of dispensing “imperial aid” that might swamp the efforts of other countries and the World Bank, Natsios said.

Still, development advocates and foreign policy analysts said Blair might be satisfied with Bush’s promise to double assistance, which appears to match for now a separate British proposal to increase global development aid to the continent from about $25 billion a year in 2003 to $50 billion in 2010 and $75 billion in 2015.

“It’s not really all that Blair asked for,” said Steven Radelet, a former top Treasury official in the Clinton and Bush administrations and now a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development.

“But he’s got commitments from some G-8 countries to go to 0.7%, or double aid to Africa,” Radelet said. “He got the debt deal. It’s enough that everybody can declare victory and go home.”