Those tin-eared Americans

I noted here recently, as I have since time immemorial, that Chinese government spokesmen can often seem deaf to the concerns and mindset of their potential audience overseas. A reader from France says that maybe my own ears need to be inspected for metallic content:

"Put simply, I reacted myself mostly to the following phrase of Obama [in his Shanghai town hall presentation]:
      "We do not seek to impose any system of government on any other nation,"

"Read again slowly: 'We do not seek to impose any system of government on any other nation.'

"My take: the disconnect is as old as the CIA, Mossadegh or Cuba... I would have not reacted strongly when told the same by Kennedy, Reagan or Clinton. But now it is different. And my epidermic intolerance is now quite wide ranging, not only relating this affirmation as concerns Iraq, but extending to the sermons about sclerotic European Market, Global warming [etc].      

"I understand that Obama's task is among others to sell the American Brand, and marketing people have a tenuous obligation to stick to the product. Or if we want to be kind, they want to mold the public perception of a brand new product they are bringing to the market. Nonetheless: I suspect you didn't even react yourself to this sentence. Could you comment on the state of the American eardrums, as you did for the Chinese ones?

"My background: French with (European) multi-countries experience...and close relatives living in the US. As I consequence, I lost my patriotic Innocence, and often smile at the overblown universal moralistic discourse of my Presidents or Intellectuals. You?"

On the state of American eardrums, I've often explicitly compared the inward-looking nature of Chinese officials and much of the Chinese population to their counterparts in the U.S. These are both big, continental nations that are finally more interested in themselves than in how those teeming, confusing, often-touchy outsiders might feel, think, or act. This can lead to blunders and offense-giving, innocent and otherwise. Part of Obama's appeal in the outside world has been the sense that by background and mindset he should be more attuned to outside sentiments. And of course this very sense is what some Americans don't like about Obama -- that he seems "foreign," or "cosmopolitan," very much as John Kerry seemed "French."

When I read the "do not seek to impose" line again, slowly, of course I understand the "hey, wait a minute" retorts that might spring up from half a dozen sites around the world. I suppose the reason it didn't strike me the first time is that I was also assuming the background that many Americans would: that Obama marked a change from the "seek to impose" policies of recent years, that he could say that line without taking responsibility for complications of the past and some in the present. But I see, and take, the reader's point.