Two questions to start off our discussion at this new blog:

1. How important is it for the President of the United States to have good personal relationships with foreign heads of state? Does it help to have friends?

2. Is there anybody President Obama could identify as his friend?

I’m serious. We don’t expect every president to be George H.W. Bush, whose principal virtue as President was his immense Rolodex of contacts around the world, which he deployed to great effect in smoothing the way for German reunification and building the coalition to drive Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. But compare his son, Obama’s predecessor. George W. Bush got on famously with British Prime Minister Tony Blair; despite their domestic political differences, theirs was as much a partnership as an alliance. He had strong and natural ties with Australian Prime Minister John Howard. He bonded with Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koziumi. He inherited his father’s close ties with the Saudi Ambassador, Prince Bandar, and came to office already having a strong relationship with Mexican President Vicente Fox. He seemed to hit it off with Vladimir Putin. He worked closely and well with Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, and Colombian President Alvaro Uribe. And he spent a lot of time, under the most trying of circumstances, working with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. And I’m sure I’m overlooking some people.

Not all of those friendships were necessarily for the best: the Saudi relationship with the DC establishment in general and the Bushes in particular has been overly cozy over the years, and Bush got little of practical value and much grief from playing nice with Putin. And certainly Bush had his failures in bilateral diplomacy, like the inability to bring Turkey into the Iraq War. But on the whole, by investing time and personal capital in getting to know foreign heads of state, Bush does seem to have helped ease, around the margins, some of the strains created by a stormy era in American foreign policy.

Obama is supposed to be, in the public mind, a superior diplomat, given that he loves to tell us how much better he’s doing for our relations with the world. But where are his friends? He’s gone out of his way repeatedly to insult Gordon Brown, disparage Karzai, abandon Uribe, undermine Benjamin Netanyahu, and generally exacerbate tensions with one ally after another (Canada, India, etc.). And while he’s made diplomatic overtures to states like Iran and Venezuela, even Obama’s staunchest defenders would not call Chavez and Ahmadenijad his buddies. I can’t for the life of me think of who his friends are, what world leaders he’s really spent time building a relationship with. A cynic would say that he thinks them unnecessary, preferring as he does to rely on multilateral institutions rather than bilateral relationships. But Obama was a legislator for 12 years; surely he knows that even in a legislative body, it helps to have somebody to watch your back and play poker with. Yet, even among the NGOs I don’t see who he has bonded with.

Have I missed someone? Is it too early to be asking this question? Or does the personal touch just not matter?