Image problems hamper US on goals abroad

Stopping Iran's nuclear program. Limiting the growing influence of an increasingly authoritarian Russia over the former Soviet empire. Making more friends than enemies in the Arab world.

Those are just some of the major foreign policy challenges the Bush administration will confront next year. But to do that, experts say, it must shake off the legacy of 2005 - a year aimed at rebuilding America's bridges to the world that instead kept the US in the diplomatic doghouse.

Two disappointments, they say, stand out. First, despite some optimism earlier this year, America's allies still doubt whether the US has changed its unilateralist ways. And second, this year's domestic events - from the slow federal response to hurricane Katrina to the domestic spying controversy - are influencing US ties with the world as much as international issues.

"The administration didn't do quite as well at rebuilding bridges and reviving alliances as the early rhetoric suggested, and that is going to have a direct impact on the issues we face in 2006," says Nicholas Gvosdev, editor of the National Interest, a foreign policy review. America's allies and partners "have a sense that the administration hasn't measured up to the promise of renewed cooperation and consultation suggested at the beginning of the year," he adds.

The Bush administration did register a number of diplomatic successes - from cooperation with the European Union on Iran and new dialogue with North Korea, to pressure on Syria, in tandem with France, over its influence in Lebanon.

But recent revelations of clandestine prisons for terror suspects and other secret antiterror operations - including renditions of suspects to other countries involving unreported stops in allied nations - are likely to have a deep impact on issues the US seeks to address with international partners.

There's a particularly strong sense among Europeans, Mr. Gvosdev notes, that the US simply bypasses them when it finds it inconvenient to work together. "That sentiment could very well bite back at the administration as it seeks to develop cooperation on other issues," he says.

On Iran, for example, he says that "reactivated suspicions of the US" among Europeans means they have stepped back from a tacit US-Europe agreement to move beyond negotiations to at least United Nations Security Council action - and perhaps something more forceful - if European talks with Tehran failed.

Another early test of US relations with its European allies could come during elections in Belarus, scheduled for March.

Earlier this year, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that Belarus was Europe's "last true dictatorship." Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov countered that reform should not be imposed from outside.

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