“I HAVE MET MORE LEADERS who can’t go out and say it publicly,” John Kerry said in March, “but, boy, they look at you and say, ‘You gotta win this, you gotta beat this guy, we need a new policy’–things like that.” He was talking about foreign leaders, ministers and deputy commissioners and assistant to the vice secretaries of other countries. The idea was that some governments are fed up with President Bush and would like to see him go, and that’s no doubt true. But not every foreign leader backs John Kerry. In fact, as far as I can tell, only two foreign governments have gone on the record to support the Democratic presidential candidate, and one of those governments is no longer in power: Specifically, the government of foreign Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamed. The other government supporting Kerry, according to London’s Financial Times, is North Korea. So, for those keeping score at home, you can put one-third of the axis of evil in Kerry’s column.
And, as surprising as this may seem, you can put the other remaining third in Bush’s. (Saddam’s vote no longer counts.) On October 19, Hasan Rowhani, who heads Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, endorsed Bush . . . more or less. In an interview on Iranian state television, Rowhani said, “We haven’t seen anything good from Democrats.” Iranians, Rowhani continued, shouldn’t “forget” that “most sanctions and economic pressures were imposed on Iran during the time of Clinton,” nor that “despite” the president’s “hard-line and baseless rhetoric,” Bush hasn’t taken, “in practical terms,” any “dangerous action” aimed at the mullahs. When the interviewer asked Rowhani if that meant he supported Bush on November 2, he replied, “We do not desire to see Democrats take over.”
In other words, the axis-of-evil vote is a draw. And yet President Bush’s support among non-homicidal world leaders is at least as strong as Senator Kerry’s. There is Japanese politician Tsutomu Takebe, for example. Takebe is the Liberal Democratic party secretary. On October 15, according to the Kyodo news agency, he told a Japanese radio program that “I think there would be trouble if it’s not President Bush.” And he went on: “For instance, Mr. Kerry wants to handle the North Korean issue bilaterally, which is out of the question. We’re now in the era of multilateralism.” Takebe was referring to the current six-party talks on DPRK disarmament. (Imagine: A foreign politician dissing Kerry because the senator isn’t multilateral!)
The day before Takebe’s interview, Japanese reporters asked Junichiro Koizumi, the prime minister, what he thought of the U.S. election: “I am very close to President Bush,” Koizumi replied. “So I want him to do his best.”
The Saudis don’t like Kerry, either. While there has been no formal endorsement from the House of Saud (and the Bush campaign probably wouldn’t want such an endorsement, anyway) one Saudi official has spoken out. “Kerry has taken U.S.-Saudi differences to a new extreme. He has attacked the House of Saud, not just Saudi Arabia,” Jamal Khashoggi, an adviser to Saudi Arabia’s London ambassador, told Reuters. “He has personalized the differences.”
Bush’s support extends to Europe. On October 20, Antonio Martino, the Italian defense minister, told the Italian daily Corriere della Sera that if John Kerry were elected, “Nothing [would change]. The political orientation does not change. Kerry voted in favor of the intervention [in Iraq].” However, Martino went on, “The only thing that worries me is that the man appears to change opinions with a certain ease.” And a few days earlier, Russian president Vladimir Putin came out swinging for Bush: “The attacks of international terrorism in Iraq are directed not only at international coalition forces but at President Bush personally,” Putin said. “International terrorism has given itself the goal of causing maximum damage to Bush in the election battle, the goal of blocking the reelection of Bush for a second presidential term.” But, Putin added, “We will, of course, respect any choice by the American people.”
The Russian people, on the other hand, have pretty much chosen Kerry over Bush. In a poll conducted by the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes and the polling firm Globescan, 20 percent of Russians supported Kerry, while only 10 percent supported Bush. (The other 70 percent didn’t bother responding.)
It’s the same in the other countries whose governments support Bush. The Globescan/UMD poll showed that 58 percent of Italians support Kerry, while only 14 percent share their government’s views of Bush. Bush’s popularity in Saudi Arabia also is limited to members of the ruling class. And according to a poll in the Japanese daily Asahi Shinbun, 51 percent of Japan is rooting for Kerry.
And so it goes. Once again President Bush is responsible for a chasm between the ruling parties of other countries and those the ruling parties rule. Think back, and the situation is not so different from that prior to the Iraq war, when many governments in the coalition–most of the governments, in fact–went against their populace’s wishes and supported the president. Certainly Democrats hope the American electorate will listen to its global brethren on November 2.
Matthew Continetti is a reporter at The Weekly Standard.
