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America’s Global Image Stops Sinking in a Poll
By MIKE NIZZA
The image of America abroad, which has been battered in recent years by an unpopular war and other policies, appears to have stopped deteriorating, judging by a worldwide survey by the BBC and GlobeScan:

While views of U.S. influence in the world are still predominantly negative, they have improved in 11 of the 23 countries the BBC polled a year ago, while worsening in just three countries.

The average percentage saying that the U.S. is having a positive influence has increased from 31 percent a year ago to 35 percent today, while the view that it is having a negative influence has declined from 52 per cent to 47 percent.

Looking just at the countries that have been polled in each of the last four years, positive views of the U.S. eroded from 2005 (38% on average), to 2006 (32%), and to 2007 (28%); recovering for the first time this year to 32 percent.

Israel, Iran and Pakistan were even more unpopular abroad than the United States, rated negatively by more than 50 percent of respondents.

Russia, which has begun an image burnishing campaign of its own, showed the greatest rebound in the poll, with 37 percent of respondents viewing the country positively, up from 29 percent a year earlier.

A total of 17,457 people were interviewed in 34 countries between October and January, the BBC said; the margin of sampling error varied from 3.4 to 4.6 percentage points, depending on the country.

Last June, the Pew Research Center’s survey of attitudes towards the United States showed a deepening of distrust in the Muslim world, a trend somewhat reflected in the BBC-GlobeScan survey released today. Negative views have grown in Egypt and Lebanon, but positive views have grown in Turkey and Indonesia; even so, the figures in those countries remain more negative than average.

Kurt Volker, a State Department official who has been nominated for NATO ambassador, told the BBC that the American gains are “a lagging indicator of what we are doing, working together with European governments and other elites.”

Steven Kull, a polling expert the University of Maryland, had a different take, saying that the upcoming presidential election may be playing a role. “Views of the U.S. are being mitigated by hope that a new administration will move away from the foreign policies that have been so unpopular in the world,” Mr. Kull said.

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But that theory was doubted by Nikolas Gvosdev of The National Interest back in January, when The Christian Science Monitor covered the presidential candidates’ plans for addressing the issue. “People have bought into a narrative that all this negativity is the result of one man, or maybe two men in the White House, the president and vice president,” he said. “But to suggest that on Jan. 20, 2009, everything will change to the world’s liking doesn’t take into account how the world has changed.”

Other experts have suggested that American policies regarding the Middle East, national security and Iraq would have to drastically change before hearts and minds would follow. Otherwise, it’s “Mission: Impossible,” as one observer termed Karen Hughes’s effort to address the problem as the State Department’s chief of public diplomacy.

She stepped down in November without many concrete signs of progress, while another diplomat was left disenchanted after trying hard to reverse the trend, as a Times article on her resignation summarized:

“This is the conundrum that I faced every day,” Price Floyd, a former State Department public affairs official, wrote in an op-ed article in The Fort Worth Star-Telegram in May, after he left the department. “I tried through the traditional domestic media, and, for the first time, through the pan-Arab TV and print media — Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya, Al Hayat — to reach people in the U.S. and abroad and to convince them that we should not be judged by our actions, only by our words.”

Is a full recovery even possible? Not according to Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner of France. “It will never be as it was before,” he said in an interview with The International Herald Tribune last month. “The magic is over.”