It seemed like a sideshow at the time, but the incident in Santiago last weekend in which U.S. President George W. Bush intervened to "rescue" one of his Secret Service agents from a scuffle with Chilean police has been mushrooming all week. In retrospect, that melee -- and a dispute last Sunday involving U.S. security requirements for a Chilean banquet for Mr. Bush -- almost overshadows the serious stuff on the agenda for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, which the president was in Chile to attend.
The double clash over security and protocol wasn't just gossip-column fodder, either. As front-page editors quickly grasped, two seemingly trivial incidents brought into dramatic focus the gap between the way the United States sees itself and the way other countries often see it.
The image of the ugly American abroad is, of course, as old as the America's history as a superpower and has reflected others' envy and misunderstanding as often as American misdemeanors. Yet that image has worsened during Mr. Bush's tenure, and it is to be hoped that the spats in Santiago will prompt the administration to pay more attention to the potential offensiveness of its attitudes. It is not just about being in the right -- as appears to have been the case in the intervention incident. It is also about being sensitive to appearances and feelings: to how, for instance, a foreign government's police force feels when a massive U.S. presidential security contingent blows into town and proceeds to take over the place. Might that have had something to do with the Chileans' antagonism toward their U.S. counterparts?