Barack Obama loves to tell us that he’ll repair relations with our allies and make America loved again. Well, aside from the fact he’s already knocking china off the shelf and upsetting our friends, there is reason to question what he really has in mind and what he is going to do to earn praise from around the planet.

In a must-read column, Thomas Friedman makes the argument that there are more important things than earning applause or making ourselves inconspicuous. He writes:

Maybe Asians, Europeans, Latin Americans and Africans don’t like a world of too much American power — “Mr. Big” got a little too big for them. But how would they like a world of too little American power? With America’s overextended military and overextended banks, that is the world into which we may be heading. Welcome to a world of too much Russian and Chinese power. I am neither a Russia-basher nor a China-basher. But there was something truly filthy about Russia’s and China’s vetoes of the American-led U.N. Security Council effort to impose targeted sanctions on Robert Mugabe’s ruling clique in Zimbabwe.

After a much needed recap of the latest U.N. circus and the vile behavior it thereby permitted to continue in Zimbabwe, Friedman gets to the nub of the matter:

Which brings me back to America. Perfect we are not, but America still has some moral backbone. There are travesties we will not tolerate. The U.N. vote on Zimbabwe demonstrates that this is not true for these “popular” countries — called Russia or China or South Africa — who have no problem siding with a man who is pulverizing his own people.So, yes, we’re not so popular in Europe and Asia anymore. I guess they would prefer a world in which America was weaker, where leaders with the values of Vladimir Putin and Thabo Mbeki had a greater say, and where the desperate voices for change in Zimbabwe would, well, just shut up.

It brings to mind Obama’s warning that Hillary Clinton’s vow to bomb Iran if it launched a nuclear attack on Israel would just drum up “sympathy” for Iran at the U.N. So she would should, Obama argued, pipe down. If earning kudos at the U.N. and avoiding the ire of tin-pot dictators is our aim, Obama certainly will mark a change in our foreign policy, and not one for the better.

And that I think is what is troubling about Obama’s formulation — that we have somehow made it oh-so-hard to be loved by the world. If we are really looking out for our own and the world’s best interests, we are going to ask our allies to do things they had rather not — like contribute more troops to Afghanistan and draw the line with tyrants and bullies. And we’re going to do a whole lot of things that our adversaries don’t like, such as impose sanctions and use military force when needed. That doesn’t mean we can’t be constructive, cooperative, and cordial in getting our allies on board, or go the extra mile to avoid military conflict with our foes. But this notion that we can get everyone to like us by simply sending George W. Bush into retirement is hooey.

We can and should be firm (like which world leaders we will meet with), predictable (with regard to seeing through our military and moral commitments in a war, for instance), respectful of our agreements (trade agreements, even) and look for common ground. But unless we put our own interests on the back burner and allow the world to run amok, as Friedman puts it, a lot of countries aren’t going to like what we’re doing. And being resented or even disliked? Not always a bad thing.