Washington - On the day his administration turned its back on an international germ warfare treaty, US President George W Bush faced a broadside from one of his predecessors in the White House. Former US president Jimmy Carter savaged Bush's handling of a host of foreign policy issues, from missile defence to the Middle East.
Carter told a Georgia newspaper he was "disappointed with almost everything he (Mr Bush) has done," and accused him of abandoning his moderate promises and caving in to conservatives across the board.
Carter's remarks are scant surprise. Since his defeat by Ronald Reagan in 1980, he has carved out a niche as a respected, liberal-minded voice on foreign affairs, often acting as an independent emissary on foreign issues rather than as a representative of American power.
Still, it is most unusual for a former president to criticise the foreign policy of a successor, let alone in the blunt language used by Carter. His disquiet is shared by senior Democrats in Congress and many US allies.
Underlying Carter's alarm is a sense that the narrowness of Bush's victory obliged him to govern from the centre. "I hoped," he told the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, "that coming out of an uncertain election, he would reach out to people of diverse views, I thought he would be a moderate leader." Instead the opposite was taking place.
The complaints might have come from the mouth of any of Bush's myriad critics in Europe, exasperated by Washington's behaviour on a host of issues, from missile defence to the planned permanent international criminal court, to international treaties on global warming and small arms - and most lately its dismissal in Geneva on Wednesday of a pact to enforce a ban of biological weapons.
Carter urged Bush to embrace the Kyoto treaty, and called the Bush administration's missile defence shield "technologically ridiculous"; and he accused Bush of being too soft on Israel and its settlements on the West Bank.