How valid is the ally critique?

A persistent conservative critique of U.S. foreign policy at the moment is that the Obama administration treats U.S. allies more harshly than U.S. adversaries.  Obama is allegedly treating Israel worse than Iran, India worse than China, Eastern Europe worse than Russia, etc. 

Much of this is exaggerated — the U.S. is not treating Iran better than Israel by any stretch of the imagination.  Some of this is an example of Obama’s realpolitik-style strategy kicking in more than anything else.  Still, the fact that I was able to come up with three examples pretty quickly suggests that maybe conservatives are onto something.  What’s interesting, however, is that no one mentions Japan in this litany. 

This is a bit surprising:  Japan is an older ally than any of these other countries, and it’s a pretty important country.  According to the Financial Times’ Mure Dickie and David Pilling, the bilateral relationship with the United States has been fraught with peril as of late: 

Tokyo is "struggling" to resolve a dispute over moving a US marine base before a self-imposed May deadline, says Katsuya Okada, Japanese foreign minister.

Mr Okada insisted, in an interview with the Financial Times, that the seven-month-old Democratic party-led government was committed to Japan’s alliance with the US and determined to come up with a plan for the Futenma air base on the southern island of Okinawa that would be acceptable to Washington.

However, he said Yukio Hatoyama, DPJ leader and prime minister, was "not confident" that this could be done. He said Japan faced a "very difficult road" in winning approval for a plan to replace a deal to move Futenma from its city centre site to Okinawa’s less populated Henoko Bay.

DPJ efforts to move at least some of the functions of Futenma out of Okinawa and the ruling party’s call for a "more equal" relationship with the US have sparked concerns in Washington that Japanese commitment to the 50-year-old alliance is weakening….

Why isn’t Obama catching flak for this?  I reckon there are two reasons: 

1)  Much of the blame lies legitimately with Japan’s Hatoyama government.  As the FT story documents, made a fair number of foreign policy blunders.   

2)  The Obama administration is further to the right than the Hatoyama administration. 

My point here is not that this criticism is disingenuous — it’s just awfully convenient that the allies that keep coming up are the ones with conservative parties in power. 

And yes, this is a bipartisan thing, too — back in the day, Democrats assailed the Bush administration for giving the cold shoulder to Gerhard Schroeder, for example.  This suggests that the occasional ruffling of allies has less to do with the particular president and more to do with the inherent tension that exists between permanent alliances and the occasional shift in interests (realists tend to prefer the reverse situation).