The US international outlook has undergone a major shift in recent years, a new poll shows, with a majority now expecting that US relations with allies will stay the same or improve but that US dealings with traditional adversaries like Russia and North Korea will only grow more hostile.
Two years into the Biden administration, the assessments look much different from four years ago, at roughly the same point in the Trump administration. Now, 60 percent of US adults say relations with adversaries will get worse, up from 26 percent four years ago, according to the poll from the Pearson Institute and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Just 21 percent say relationships with allies will deteriorate, down from 46 percent then.
HYPERPARTISANSHIP
Photo: AFP
In general, 39 percent expect the country’s global standing to worsen, compared with 48 percent who said that in 2018. Crucially, the US’ own sharply divided domestic politics influences views of the country’s standing abroad.
“Those results really, clearly show that it’s hyperpartisanship” affecting how confidently or bleakly, respectively, Democrats and Republicans see the US standing abroad, said Sheila Kohanteb, a political scientist and executive director of the Global Forum at the Chicago-based Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts.
In terms of the opinions that people in the US are expressing on US dealings abroad, the key factor is “political bloc sticking with political bloc,” Kohanteb said.
Four years ago, three-quarters of Democrats expected US global standing to suffer. Now, roughly that same percentage see stability or improvement in the near future. By comparison, about six in 10 Republicans predicted improvements in 2018; now that same percentage expect the current administration to stumble.
Other countries are “probably laughing at us, waiting for us to fall apart,” said Kristy Woodard, a 30-year-old Republican in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. She said she saw the economy and US leadership as suffering under President Joe Biden.
“I don’t think we really have allies anymore because the United States is just a joke at this point,” Woodard said.
But David Dvorin, a 49-year-old Democrat in Pittsburgh who works as a price specialist, said Biden was winning respect abroad by rallying international allies to respond to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
“The war in Ukraine has shown the leadership of the Biden administration, to be able to hold most of Europe together,” Dvorin said.
Still, as Russia amps up its assault on Ukraine, tensions with China grow over Taiwan and other issues and the US confronts North Korea and Iran over those countries’ nuclear programs, similar percentages of Republicans and Democrats say that relationships with adversaries will get worse in the next year.
PROTECTING RIGHTS
The Pearson Institute/AP-NORC poll also shows strong support for a US foreign policy that protects women and minorities around the world — even though few people think the US is doing a world-beating job of protecting those same interests at home.
Majorities of US adults said they see preventing discrimination against women and minorities around the world as an important US foreign policy goal and that the US government has significant responsibility for protecting the rights of those groups. And 78 percent of people in the United States believe it should withhold financial support from other countries that are failing to protect the rights of women and minority groups.
However, only about 1 in 5 US adults thinks the country is leading the world in safeguarding the rights of women and racial, ethnic and religious minorities, or LGBTQ people. Many think the US is among several countries that are doing it well, but about a third say there are other countries doing better.
Rick Reinesch, 61, of Austin, Texas, who works as a project manager for a consulting firm and describes himself as a Democratic-leaning political independent, calls safeguarding the freedoms of women and minorities abroad “essential” for the US.
But the increasing Republican and Democratic divide at home means Americans’ performance on that point is a “mixed bag,” with rights deteriorating in states most influenced by former President Donald Trump’s dismissive outlook, he said.
Chris Ormsby, 53, of Edmond, Oklahoma, an administrator in higher education who describes himself as a political independent, pointed to women’s rights in Iran, where women are spearheading weeks of protests triggered by government demands that women cover their hair, as among the rights issues playing out overseas.
“Maybe we can take more proactive steps” abroad on that, Ormsby said. But “I think there’s other things to worry about, nuclear proliferation and things like that.” He called slowing climate change by moving the world away from fossil fuels a priority for US policy abroad.
That all makes for a strange split for those charged with shaping America’s policy on protections of human rights, Kohanteb, the Pearson Institute official, said.
“American policy is not as adamant about protecting our own rights as Americans believe we should be doing abroad,” she said.
Ajay Verma, a consultant gastroenterologist at Kettering general hospital in Northamptonshire, says our gut is a “complex machine.” “It is constantly providing us with the nutrition we need, initially to grow and develop, and then for us to survive, thrive and repair from injury and illness.” How can we keep it functioning well? Put simply: “Make sure what you put into it is balanced, and that you clear out its waste products adequately,” Verma says. “In a general gastroenterology clinic, the most common conditions we see are irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), gastroesophageal reflux disease, inflammatory bowel disease and constipation,” says Nisha
The arithmetic is straightforward and uncomfortable. By the end of 2025, Taiwan had committed itself to a 50-30-20 electricity mix — half natural gas, 30 per cent coal, 20 per cent renewables. The Ministry of Economic Affairs’s (MOEA) own monthly energy reports tell a different story. Natural gas reached 47.8 per cent of generation last year. Coal stood at 35.4 per cent, comfortably above its target ceiling. Renewables came in at 13.1 per cent, well short of the 20 per cent Taipei had pledged a decade earlier. Installed renewable capacity reached roughly half of the 12 gigawatts (GW) the government
Last week US President Donald Trump was asked by a reporter whether he would speak on the phone to the President of Taiwan. “l’ll speak to him. I speak to everybody. We have that situation very well in hand,” Trump said. This marked the second time in a couple of weeks he had said he would talk to the President of Taiwan. In 2016 he famously took a call from then-president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), when he was president-elect. Despite warnings that the apocalypse was nigh because of a phone call, the world quickly forgot about the conversation between two democratically-elected presidents.
May 25 to May 31 Few believed that apples could be cultivated on a commercial scale in Taiwan’s high mountains. When horticulturalist Cheng Chao-hsiung (程兆熊) first proposed the idea in 1955, both American and Taiwanese colleagues dismissed it as implausible, arguing that temperate fruit could not be reliably grown on a subtropical island, especially on rugged terrain. However, it was this terrain in the Central Mountain Range where many Chinese Civil War veterans were resettled in the late 1950s. With limited job prospects and no family in Taiwan, they were placed on cooperative farms aimed toward self-sufficiency. Some say the conditions
RSS