While Republicans and other right-wingers claim that President Barack Obama has inflicted unprecedented damage on Washington’s global reputation, a major new global survey suggests that the image of the U.S. remains generally positive.

The survey, which was based on nearly 50,000 interviews of respondents in 44 countries, found that the U.S. remains substantially more popular than China, widely considered Washington nearest geopolitical rival, in every major region except the Middle East.

A global median of 65 percent respondents said they held a positive view about the U.S., with majorities in 30 of 43 nations (not including the U.S. itself) expressing a favourable opinion.

By contrast, a median of 49 percent said they felt positively about China, while 55 percent said they had an unfavourable view of the Asian giant. The most negative opinions were expressed in Europe and among some of Asia’s closest neighbours, particularly those which are contesting Beijing’s increasingly assertive territorial claims.

As for Obama himself, the first U.S. African-American president remains broadly popular, with a median approval rating of 56 percent – about 15 percentage points higher than in the U.S. itself — with half or more of the public in 28 of the 44 countries expressing confidence that he will “do the right thing” in world affairs.

But, like the U.S. itself, Obama’s image remains poorest in Arab countries, Turkey, and Pakistan. By contrast, Obama’s approval ratings climbed some 10 percentage points (to 71 percent) in Israel between 2013 and 2014.

Indeed, Israel was the only country of 21 nations surveyed in 2009, when he became president and expectations for his tenure were highest around the world, where Obama’s approval ratings improved over the five-year period.

The latest survey, however, also found major plunges in his popularity in Germany and Brazil, compared to 2013, which Pew analysts attributed to revelations that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has been conducting major spying operations on the phone conversations of the two countries’ leaders.

It also found a sharp drop in positive assessments of Obama in Russia – down to only 15 percent of respondents – which Pew said was most likely related to the sharp uptick in bilateral tensions over ongoing crisis over Ukraine and Moscow’s annexation of Crimea.

The Pew poll, which was conducted between mid-March and early June, is the latest in an annual series that the organisation’s “Global Attitudes Project” has carried out since 2002. The surveys have covered public opinion on a broad range of international issues in as few as nine and as many as 47 each year over that period.

The survey is quite comprehensive in scope, and its results are released in instalments over the summer. Last week, for example, Pew released findings regarding Russia’s global image, which, according to the survey, had suffered in every region of the world over the past year, particularly in Europe and the U.S. where nearly three in four respondents reported unfavourable views of Moscow.

The 44 countries polled in the latest survey, for which full results will be released in stages over the coming weeks and months, included nine European countries – France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland, Russia, Spain, the UK, and Ukraine; seven countries in the Greater Middle East – Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Tunisia, and Turkey; and 11 Asian nations – Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Pakistan, Philippines, South Korea, Thailand, and Vietnam.

In Latin America, the survey included Argentina, Brazil. Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru, and Venezuela; while seven sub-Saharan countries were surveyed – Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda. The U.S. itself was included in the survey.

In addition to comparing perceptions and images of the U.S. and China, the latest showed focused on international reaction to disclosures by former NSA employee Edward Snowden about Washington’s use of electronic surveillance of foreign leaders and citizens, as well as Washington’s reliance on drone aircraft to kill alleged terrorists in foreign countries.

The survey found strong opposition nearly across the board – except in the U.S. itself — to both activities, although it also found little evidence in most countries that they had significantly harmed Washington’s image.

In 37 of the 44 countries, half or more of respondents said they disapproved of drones strikes against suspected terrorists. In 26 countries, more than seven of 10 respondents said they opposed the practice.

As important, perhaps, the survey found that opposition to drones strikes has grown steadily – and significantly in a number of countries, particularly Senegal, Uganda, France, Germany, the Philippines, Mexico, Japan, and even within the U.S. itself – compared to 2013, when Pew asked the same question.

Overall, opposition was found to be strongest in Latin America, the Greater Middle East, Greece, Senegal, Spain, and Japan. On the other hand, pluralities and majorities in Israel, the U.S., Nigeria, and Kenya said they approved of Washington’s use of drone strikes.

As to the NSA’s monitoring activities, majorities in most countries said they approved of efforts to spy on terrorists. At the same time, majorities in nearly all of the countries said they opposed U.S. monitoring of emails and phone calls of foreign leaders, and particularly average citizens. That latter sentiment was particularly strong in Greece, Brazil, Egypt, Jordan, and Tunisia, according to the survey.

On China’s image, pluralities or majorities in all Latin American and sub-Saharan African countries covered by the survey held positive views. In other regions, however, impressions were far more mixed.

Majorities in the U.S., France, Spain, Poland, Germany, and Italy held said their overall views were negative, while in Ukraine and Russia, nearly two thirds of respondents said they had a positive image of China. The Greater Middle East was similarly split, with the most positive views found in Tunisia and Palestine, while Jordan and Turkey were strongly negative.

Majorities in six of the 10 Asian countries (not including China itself) of up to 78 percent (Pakistan) expressed favourable views, while respondents in the three countries with which China has ongoing maritime disputes – Philippines, Vietnam, and Japan – were strongly negative. In India, where the land border with China remains in contention, a plurality of respondents voiced negative view of their northern neighbour.

The survey found a growing belief — compared to 2008 when Pew asked the same question — that China will eventually replace the U.S. as the world’s greatest superpower or has already done so.

A global median of 49 percent of respondents agreed with that proposition, compared to 32 percent who disagreed. In 2008, just before the global financial crisis that broke out with the collapse of the U.S. investment firm Lehman Brothers, the split was 41 percent who agreed that China would surpass the U.S. and 39 percent who disagreed.

The latest poll found that the view that Beijing will indeed replace Washington as the pre-eminent global power was strongest in Europe (60 percent) and weakest in Asia (42 percent).

The poll also found significant generation gaps on several issues. Younger respondents were found to hold significantly more favourable views of the U.S. than their older fellow-citizens in more than half of the countries, particularly in Asia (including China), Latin America, and Africa.

Similarly, younger respondents also held significantly more favourable views of China than their older counterparts, particularly in Western Europe, Latin America, and Africa.

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

Vehicles of the UN Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) roll past during a ceremony marking the transition of Force Commanders in the Golan Heights, 2010. Credit: UN Photo/Arnold Felfer

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Sep 18 2013 (IPS)

On the eve of the 68^th session of the United Nations General Assembly, a newly released survey of 39 countries shows that the world body remains relatively popular around the globe.

According to the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project (GAP), clear majorities of respondents in 22 of the surveyed countries said they hold a favourable view of the U.N., as did pluralities in an additional six countries.

The median positive rating for the U.N. across the 39 countries was 58 percent, compared to 27 percent with negative views.

The survey also found that view of the world body tended to be significantly more favourable among younger adults than older respondents in about half of the countries that were polled. The generational differences were most pronounced in the U.S., Canada, and Turkey.

The same held true with respect to educational level. More highly educated respondents were significantly more positive about the U.N. than less-educated respondents, particularly in Turkey, Japan, Pakistan, and Canada, according to GAP.

Surprisingly, men tended to have more favourable views of the U.N. than women in a number of countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and East Asia, but also in Brazil and Pakistan, according to Bruce Stokes, a top GAP analyst.

He noted that women in these countries were also more likely to decline to answer the question on the grounds that they “don’t know”. In Pakistan, for example, nearly 80 percent of women answered “don’t know” to the question; in Uganda, 42 percent declined to answer for that reason.

“There’s no way to know why that is,” Stokes told IPS. “It may be that they indeed are less likely to know more about the U.N. [than their male counterparts], but it suggests that the U.N. may have a problem with women in these countries.”

Positive feelings toward the world body, which will see a cascade of world leaders addressing the General Assembly over the next two weeks, are strongest in East and Southeast Asia, followed by sub-Saharan Africa, according to GAP, which conducted its latest in its annual series of global surveys between March and May this year.

However, a 45-percent plurality of respondents in China – one of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and the only one from Asia – recorded an unfavourable view of the U.N., while only 39 percent had a positive impression overall. Four years ago, the view was substantially more favourable: 55 percent of respondents held a positive view, while only 32 percent said they had a negative impression.

And in Japan, favourable views only slightly outnumbered unfavourable ones – by a 45-to-40 percent margin. The differential only two years ago was 61-27 percent.

The region with by far the most negative opinion of the U.N., however, was the Greater Middle East. Israel recorded the highest percentage of respondents who said they had unfavourable views of the U.N. – 70 percent. That climbed to 75 percent among Jewish Israelis.

But residents of the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza strip were almost as negative – 69 percent overall said they had unfavourable views of the world body, as did majorities in Jordan (61 percent), Turkey (56 percent), Egypt (52 percent), and Pakistan, where a plurality described their views as unfavourable, and 62 percent declined to answer the question or said they didn’t know.

“It’s not because the public doesn’t like the objectives of the U.N. or its purpose.” noted Steven Kull of the University of Maryland’s Programme on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) and worldpublicopinion.org, about the negative views in the predominantly Muslim countries of the region.

“They think it’s not living up to that purpose, and, as an example, they point to the failure to follow through on U.N. Security Council resolutions 224 and 338 [to resolve the Israel-Palestinian conflict] in promoting international justice,” according to Kull, who has designed and overseen a number of in-depth surveys and analyses on international public opinion.

“And they see the U.S. as able to corral the U.N. Security Council into serving its ends.”

Nearly 38,000 people in the 39 countries took part in the survey, a massive undertaking that included in-depth interviews on scores of questions, the specific results of which have been and will continue to be released by GAP over a period of months.

In Asia, South Korea, home to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, was the most favourable of all 39 countries. Eighty-four percent of its respondents reported a positive view. It was followed closely by 82 percent favourable responses in both Indonesia and the Philippines.

Compared to the 2007 GAP results, the latest poll showed significant increases in favourable opinions in Argentina (+11 percent), and both South Korea and the U.S. (+10 percent). On the other hand, the greatest declines in favourable opinions were found in both China and Spain (-13 percent), Ghana and Kenya (-12 percent), Israel (-11 percent), and Mexico (-9 percent).

Kull noted that the implications of such a survey are not easy to assess, in part because it’s not clear whether the respondents is referring to the “ideal” of an institution like the U.N. or its actual performance.

“There’s frustration that the institution isn’t working as many people think it should, and that creates a negative feeling,” he told IPS.

“But there’s really no place in the world where you don’t find a majority of people who think that it’s a good idea to have a multilateral institution to further international law and cooperation.

“Overall,” he said of the latest results, “it’s still a pretty solid foundation of support, given the frustration over its performance.”

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.