They say a picture is worth a thousand words. But the recent snapshot of Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Brazil's President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva embracing Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has launched tens of thousands of words of commentary. Rarely has a single photograph irritated so many people.
The target of the most criticism, however, was a man who was not even in the picture. "Full credit for this debacle goes to the Obama administration," declared The Wall Street Journal. The conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer was less restrained. Writing in The Washington Post, he thundered, "that picture—a defiant, triumphant, take-that-Uncle-Sam—is a crushing verdict on the Obama foreign policy. It demonstrates how rising powers, traditional American allies, having watched this administration in action, have decided that there's no cost in lining up with America's enemies and no profit in lining up with a U.S. president given to apologies and appeasement."
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