What’s truly insidious about the president’s behavior overseas is the sneaking suspicion it generates: that Obama – who never misses an opportunity to aggrandize himself – is equally incapable of passing up an opportunity to denigrate his country.

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For all the volumes that are filled about the foreign policy predilections of American presidents, a commander-in-chief’s attitude towards foreign affairs can often be captured in a single iconic moment.  There’s John F. Kennedy staring into a camera while explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis to the American people; Jimmy Carter scolding the nation about its “inordinate fear of communism;” Ronald Reagan boldly challenging Mikhail Gorbachev in front of the Brandenburg Gate, and George W. Bush, bullhorn in hand, standing defiantly atop the ruins of the World Trade Center.
 
If Barack Obama has had such a watershed at this early stage in his presidency, it took place in Tokyo last weekend, when the President grandly bowed from the waist upon meeting Japan’s Emperor Akihito. 
 
By aesthetic measures alone, it was a voyage into the absurd.  Rather than any of the presidential hallmarks delineated above, Obama’ s cotillion moment had more in common with Michael Dukakis implausibly helming a tank or Jimmy Carter doing battle with a river rabbit.  In the hierarchy of deferential body language, the president could have only gone further with a genuflection or a full kowtow.
 
To be fair, it was not just symbolism that made Obama seem something less than presidential. One only need look to the photographs of western leaders clothed in traditional Asian garb at the APEC summit to be reminded that sometimes being a head of state means debasing yourself in ways you would never tolerate as a private citizen.  What’s truly insidious about the president’s behavior overseas is the sneaking suspicion it generates: that Obama – who never misses an opportunity to aggrandize himself – is equally incapable of passing up an opportunity to denigrate his country.
 
The bow to Akihito comes only seven months after Obama demonstrated similar fealty to Saudi King Abdullah at the G-20 summit in London.  In both cases, the president, representing the oldest democracy on the planet – a nation predicated on universal notions of equality and individual rights – used a gesture of submission to greet an undemocratic and illiberal leader. For the sake of mannish diplomacy, a handshake would have sufficed.  If such meetings operated as meritocracies, however, it was the United States that should have been on the receiving end of the bow.
 
The case of Akihito is particularly troubling.  While the modern incarnation of the Japanese emperor is little more than a figurehead, the role has changed dramatically within living memory. One need only remember that Akihito’s father was a fellow by the name of Hirohito – a leader whose legacy included the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor and the Bataan Death March.  The reason Akihito is little more than a symbolic figure is that the emperorship was defanged by Allied military might.  The fact that the position still exists owes only to the forbearance of Douglas MacArthur, who thought it prudent to retain it out of a sense of national continuity, while forcing the emperor to swear off his divine status and rebuke the Shinto warrior cult that surrounded him.  But 65 years after MacArthur brought the imperial court to heel, Obama ended up groveling at the emperor’s feet like a court toady.
 
It’s becoming increasingly clear that when Obama doesn’t bow literally, he does so figuratively. He bows to Russia’s revanchist great power ambitions. He bows to China’s flagrant human rights violations.  He bows to Iran’s violent suppression of the nation’s reform movement.  He bows to the Latin American socialism of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Honduras’s Manuel Zelaya.  He bows to Kim Jong Il’s pretensions of legitimacy. And he bows to the notion that America is an ordinary power, rather than an exceptional nation.  Thus, less than a year into his presidency, we now know what the Obama doctrine looks like: bend at the waist.