GLOBAL opinion of the United States keeps falling as long as the country is ruled under President Donald Trump, finds a new survey by the Pew Research Centre.
The survey, which polled 13 democracies including numerous staunch American allies, found that there was a significant decline in America’s reputation, due to both low opinion of Trump and the country’s difficulties in handling the Covid-19 pandemic.
“In several countries, the share of the public with a favourable view of the US is as low as it has been at any point since we began polling on this topic nearly two decades ago,” the research centre said in a Sept 17 note.
In Britain, for example, only 41% of those surveyed expressed a favourable opinion of the US, which was a record low for the Pew project. In France, the figure was at 31%, rivalling the lows that Pew charted in Mar 2003 when Paris and Washington feuded over the American rush to invade Iraq. Meanwhile, Germany only has 26% that remained positive about US.
“I still think there is admiration for the US, but it may be waning very quickly, especially if Trump gets re-elected,” German Marshall Fund senior employee Sudha David-Wilp said in the same note.
The US also led the world in terms of confirmed Covid-19 related deaths since April 2020, which doesn’t help the country’s reputation.
That ignominious marker has disillusioned many citizens of countries closely allied with Washington. 93% of South Koreans believed that the American response has been ‘bad’.
They are certainly justified in thinking so, given how much better authorities in Seoul implemented safety measures, mass testing and contact tracing protocols. In the countries surveyed, a median of only 15% of respondents thought the US had managed the pandemic well.
“Despite the trillions of dollars the US has spent on national security in the past two decades, it was not prepared to combat this wholly predictable threat,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s non-resident scholar in geo-economics and strategy programme Rozlyn Engel wrote in a recent study.
“Its emergency response was challenged by a heavy reliance on foreign medical equipment and highly interdependent supply chains. The pandemic may now leave American middle-class households more disillusioned with globalisation and less willing to pick up the costs of military and diplomatic engagements, obligations to international organizations, and new trade and investment deals,” she added.
But of course, perhaps the most damning indicator is that the public surveyed, on the whole, placed less confidence in Trump doing ‘the right thing’ regarding global affairs.
Although Trump and his nationalist supported may not be that bothered with views from abroad, he and his allies are finding themselves in the minority. Only time will tell of the nation’s fate come the next US presidential election. – Sept 18, 2020
