Posted on 09/29/2014 2:56:56 PM PDT by jazusamo
President Obama insulted many Americans last week when he raised events in Ferguson, Missouri, during his United Nations speech. They chafed at the implied moral equivalence of a shooting still in legal dispute with the many lethal foreign threats besieging the world. While such rhetoric is divisive at home, there is another problem. The president does not seem to understand that most of the world is completely unmoved by such apologies.
Most of the world does not see an earnest moralist struggling with America’s complicated past or a humble man admitting his own foibles. Instead, they see a weak leader uncertain about the cause of his country.
If as a rhetorical device, these apologies were working — if they were moving world opinion in our favor and getting more countries to embrace our policies — then perhaps they could be justified as a matter of Realpolitik. But that clearly is not happening.
World opinion of the U.S. has steadily declined under Barack Obama. In 2009, after he rode into Washington on a high, Pew’s Global Indicators survey found 33 percent of Germans held unfavorable views of America. Today, it is 47 percent. In Russia, after the famous “reset,” America’s unfavorability score has grown from 44 percent to 71 percent; in Egypt, from 70 percent to 85 percent; and in Turkey — a NATO ally — from 69 percent to 73 percent.
There may be many reasons why world opinion is steadily getting worse. There’s the unpopularity of U.S. drone and other counterterrorism policies in the Middle East and parts of South Asia. There are the controversies surrounding U.S. surveillance which are especially unpopular in Germany. But the point is that these policies are unpopular despite Mr. Obama’s apologies, which at the very least should raise questions about their efficacy.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
Nothing about the man is sincere or genuine. What else would you expect?
I think the flies coming out of satan’s minions mouth give the lie to his sincerity.
Get that man another Nobel prize stat!
Well said, he lacks those qualities along with many others.
I hate to break the news, but that's not the case under those studies.
Pew doesn't take measurements every year, nor from every country, but countries like Canada, Japan, the UK, Australia, India, Spain, Italy, Tanzania, and Peru still have a higher opinion of the US under Obama than they did under GWB. That's just a start. My guess from going through the map is more than half the countries measured by Pew still show an increase in opinion of the US over GWB.
Apparently Kool-Aid is available worldwide.
Perhaps it depends on the Pew chart you go to. You picked the favorable and the author picked the unfavorable.
http://www.pewglobal.org/database/indicator/1/country/81/response/Unfavorable/
The author cherry-picked the few unfavorable countries.
Most countries on the Pew Chart don't have a rating during both the GWB and Obama presidencies, so the author can't say the rating dropped. In the majority of the other countries, the rating has gone up under Obama.
Where you think it counted - UK, Spain, Italy, Canada, India, Brazil, Australia, Japan . . . - the favorability rating has gone up under Obama. France has not moved.
Okay, I just checked the UK but maybe the rest of them are as you say.
In UK:
The favorability rating 2009 69%, 2014 66%. It’s down.
The unfavorability rating 2009 20%, 2014 27%. It’s up.
Confidence in US President 2009 86%, 2014 74%. It’s down.
I’m sorry. You are correct regarding the UK. Trust me, I was disappointed by what I found in general around the world.
That’s okay, no problem. I thought it was just a mistake and I checked a couple others that you were right about.
It is disappointing because we’ve always been looked up to by most, 0bama has hurt us here and around the world.
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