Survey: US global image plummets
Attitudes sour toward Trump, except in Russia and Israel
The global image of the United States has deteriorated dramatically since President Donald Trump took office in January, according to the latest Pew Center survey.
In the survey of 37 countries in Latin America, North America, Europe, Asia and Africa, 49 percent said they have a favorable view of the US under Trump while 64 percent had a favorable view at the end of the presidency of Barack Obama. A total of 39 percent said they have an unfavorable view of the US now, compared with 26 percent under Obama.
Just 22 percent expressed confidence in Trump to do the right thing in world affairs, in sharp contrast to the final years of Obama’s presidency when the rating was 64 percent.
Those who expressed no confidence account for 74 percent, compared with 23 percent for Obama, according to the survey of more than 40,000 people conducted from Feb 16 to May 8.
“What we see this year is that if you look at the confidence measure, there is a big shift of how the world sees the US president,” Richard Wike, director of Global Attitude Research of Pew Research Center, said on Tuesday in a discussion about the survey at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
Across the 37 nations polled, Trump gets higher marks than Obama in only two countries: Russia and Israel.
China was not surveyed this year. Wike said that a variety of factors are used in choosing countries, without specifying them. He said Pew tries to pick some large countries that are politically and economically important, but occasionally a particular country can’t be included.
He said Pew will ask about Trump in the next survey in China.
The survey also examined attitudes toward five major policy proposals that Trump has supported. Globally, none of them are popular. They include Trump’ s pledge to withdraw from the nuclear weapon agreement with Iran, the pullouts from the Paris climate accord and major trade agreements, tighter restrictions on people entering the US from some Muslim-majority countries and the building of a wall along the US-Mexico border.
It also finds that attitudes toward US citizens are positive except in the Middle East.
Shadi Hamid, a senior fellow of the Project on US Relations with the Islamic World at the Brookings Institution, said that this is most likely due to US policies in the region.
“That’s not the problem of one president or another. That’s a five- or six-decade thing and pretty consistent,” he said.
Hamid dismissed the excessive negative view for Trump over the next few years, cautioning that personal dislike for the president makes it more difficult to be objective about his foreign policy.