The US’ standing in the world declined in the past decade to below Cold War levels, a leading group of political scientists said.
Favorable attitudes have risen sharply under US President Barack Obama with his commitment to “restore American standing,” but confidence in him appears to be in conflict with unfavorable attitudes about US foreign policy, the American Political Science Association said in a report released yesterday.
“Many American leaders and citizens worry that this decline, despite a recent upturn, may be part of a long-term trend, one that will be hard to reverse,” the report said.
While Obama has raised US esteem, he has not produced more European troops for Afghanistan, secured concessions from North Korea or made headway with Iran, the academics said.
Twenty political scientists have worked on the report for more than a year. Two them dissented from the conclusions, saying that “political bias affects perceptions” and that “the academic community, unbalanced as it is between self-identified Republicans and Democrats, is not immune to such bias.”
The dissenters, Stephen Krasner of Stanford University and Henry Nau of George Washington University, said US standing was heavily influenced by political bias in the US and political attitudes in foreign countries. Krasner was director of policy planning at the State Department under former president George W. Bush.
The findings are based on analyses of public opinion surveys, votes in the UN General Assembly and the expert judgment of specialists in the field of comparative geopolitics, said Peter Katzenstein of Cornell University, a former president of the association.
The US’ standing plunged most sharply in the Middle East and Europe, although authoritarian regimes in the Middle East are more supportive of US policy than they can say publicly, the report said.
At the UN, support for US positions has declined since the 1960s and was especially pronounced during the Bush administration, while in Europe, there is a growing European identity and “a conscious political attempt to delink Europe from American policies,” the academics said.
After some initial success, such as toppling the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, the US grew mired in Iraq and Osama bin Laden remains at large. The success of the troop surge in Iraq may have helped improve attitudes toward the US, the report said.
Helping raise US esteem now are Obama’s rhetorical skills and “what his election signifies about the openness of America,” the report said.
“In policy terms, however, most [foreigners] believe that there has been little change in the U.S. disregard for the interests of their country, and that U.S. influence in the world is still mostly bad,” the report said.
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