LOS ANGELES -- Asia -- home to something like 60 percent of the earth's people -- is a vast multitude of ethnicities, nationalities, religions and cultures.
Even so, since they have some objective distance on the United States and at the same time an intense interest in what happens here, they tend to form overall impressions about us that are widely shared. Based on my years of traveling to Asia and writing this column, here are a few of them:
1. Asians do not hate Americans. Many wish us the best. But they do resent our bigmouthed, big-footed ways, our arrogance and our tendency to make decisions (like Iraq) without consulting them -- and then pressuring them to send troops or write out supportive checks afterward. Right now, our president is not popular in the region, but that could always change, especially if there's a settlement of the North Korean tension, a U.S.-brokered calming across the Taiwan Strait and a clear exit strategy for Iraq.