The United States is the greatest threat to world peace. That’s the finding of an end-of-the- year, WIN/Gallup International survey of people in 65 countries.

Of the 66,000 people polled, just under a quarter named Uncle Sam as the greatest threat to world peace.

Other menaces didn’t even come close: 8 percent named Pakistan, putting that country in second place, while 6 percent named China. A mere 4 percent found Iran threatening — which tied it with Israel.

As we were reading the results, we couldn’t help thinking we had seen it all before. And when we looked, we found a 2006 Pew Research Center poll of 17,000 people from 15 different countries that found something very similar: More people thought the US intervention in Iraq a threat to world peace than Iran.

Back then, of course, the press summarized the findings this way: It’s all because of Bush. As Britain’s Guardian newspaper put it in its lead sentence on the survey: “George Bush’s six years in office have so damaged the image of the US that people worldwide see Washington as a bigger threat to world peace than Tehran.”

In 2008, President Obama would go on to campaign about how Bush’s policies had harmed America’s standing in the world, at one point suggesting that attitudes in the Muslim world would be transformed simply by his election.

It hasn’t turned out that way, as these Gallup numbers suggest. Maybe we’d do better to accept the real message of all these global surveys: There are many people in this world who don’t like the US and will regard us as a threat no matter who’s president.