In 2016, 48 percent of the world's citizens approved of the United States from a leadership perspective. By 2017, just 30 percent did. What changed, of course, was the leader. President Donald Trump has overseen a destructive period for America's reputation abroad since he took the reins from Barack Obama a year ago. Support for U.S. leadership has gone underwater—that is, more people disapprove than approve—on every continent except Africa, where a slim 51 percent maintain a favorable view. Approval fell 10 points or more in 65 countries. Gallup, the source for all this good news, conducted its polling between March and November of 2017—that is, before the U.S. president dismissed the nations of Africa as "shitholes." Perhaps that 51-percent figure is out of date.

The state Trump expressed a preference for in that now-infamous Oval Office immigration meeting, Norway, tells its own story. Support for U.S. leadership among Norwegians plummeted an astonishing 42 points between President Obama's final year in office and Trump's first. That was part of a catastrophic showing from European nations, particularly the United States' NATO allies. Approval fell by 10 points or more in 24 European countries, including 18 NATO members. In Portugal, it fell 51 points in a year. The United States is above water in just three European countries: Kosovo, Albania, and Poland. Overall, among European citizens, approval fell from 44 to 25 percent. That's still better than the lowest ebb of the George W. Bush administration, deep into the Iraq War, when just 18 percent of Europeans approved of the job he was doing. It took Bush six years to fall that far, and to sink to 35 percent worldwide. It took Trump roughly six months.

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We can expect steeper losses among democratic allies, according to Robert Keohane, a professor of international affairs at Princeton University. "People that hold liberal values—constitutional, democratic values—are favorable to the United States when it seems to follow those values," Keohane told me, "and unfavorable when it doesn't." Approval plunged among our liberal democratic allies at the height of the Iraq War (and is plunging now) because these countries are full of educated people in a sophisticated media environment who are appalled when they feel the U.S. is betraying their shared values. Keohane calls this "liberal anti-Americanism," a current in public opinion that can be reversed if the U.S. makes changes to its policy or leadership.

(Autocratic states are a different story. Their governments are, by definition, more immune to shifts in public opinion, and usually exercise more control over what information the public is exposed to anyway—thereby influencing opinion.)

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Popularity matters because it allows the United States to exercise what political scientists call "soft power." That's a means of enticing other countries to do what you want because they view your country and your society and your leadership favorably. "Leadership is one aspect" of soft power, Keohane says. "So is the attraction of Hollywood. There are lots of elements, but certainly, if the American leadership is disliked, it hurts American soft power." The Gallup write-up adds more fuel to the fire:

A quantitative report by academics from Dartmouth and Australian National University also finds “public opinion about U.S. foreign policy in foreign countries does affect their policies [toward] the U.S.”

Approval for the leadership of the United States has now drawn about level with China, both in Europe and the wider world. China is at 31 percent approval worldwide, a percentage point ahead of the U.S. Both nations now trail Germany by a solid 10 points, and the U.S. has only a three-point edge over an increasingly belligerent and authoritarian Russia. But it is China, a bona fide autocratic state, that has long been making aggressive plays in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, expanding its footprint and rivaling the United States as a premier trading partner and global power. And it is China that has the most to gain when the United States loses ground.

Trump with Chinese President Xi Jinping Getty Images

In the Americas, disapproval of U.S. leadership rocketed from 27 percent to 58 percent in a year, as Trump abandoned the Trans-Pacific Partnership and saber-rattled about tearing up NAFTA. Support in the region was essentially cut in half, from 49 to 24. There were double-digit decreases in approval in every country in North and South America except Venezuela, where the decline was nine points. Meanwhile, China has overcome the U.S. as the top trading partner in some parts of the region, and now enjoys better ratings—particularly in the "disapprove" column—though respondents in the Americas were more likely to say they didn't know enough about the world powers in question to make a judgment.

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While this all might seem dire, however, Keohane insists public opinion abroad should not be the chief concern. "Opinion is volatile," he says. "That the U.S. is unpopular right now is a direct reflection of Trump. It tells us little about long term trends." The United States can make up the steep drop-off in support among democratic allies in Europe and the Americas, along with Australia, New Zealand, and others. The evidence for that is the dramatic recovery that greeted Obama's ascension to the presidency after the low point of the Bush era. Instead, the concern is whether today's negative opinion will calcify into bias.



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"When the Egyptian revolution took place and the Muslim Brotherhood took over for about a year," Keohane offers, by way of example, "the U.S. was clearly leaning against the Brotherhood and in favor of the military. When the military took control again, the U.S. protests were mild, if anything. So it was pretty clear what side the U.S. was on, even somewhat passively. Not surprisingly, 99 percent of Brotherhood supporters were anti-American. You couldn't find any that were pro-American. But also, something like 82 percent of the al-Sisi [military] supporters were anti-American. That means even people for whom the U.S. is essentially on their side thought the U.S. was against them. That's bias."

Egypt, along with much of the Middle East and North Africa, is a prime example of entrenched anti-American bias. (Most of the positivity towards the U.S. comes from sub-Saharan Africa.) Bias, here, does not have the traditional connotation it carries in American domestic politics. It simply means hardened negative opinion that cannot be shaken loose with a quick policy or leadership change. In much of the mideast, the consensus among members of the public is that the U.S. is simply a bad actor. Keohane calls this "radical anti-Americanism," and it isn't easily remedied. That's why approval for the U.S. did not improve in the Middle East when President Obama took over from George W. Bush in the way it did in Europe around the same time.

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"If negative opinion persisted over time," Keohane says, "long enough to make people abroad feel in large numbers that the U.S. was simply a terrible country—it wasn't just they'd picked a bad leader, or followed a bad policy like Iraq—that would be very serious." For now, it's unlikely that kind of sustained resentment would take hold in Europe, or even Latin America and southeast Asia. It's also unlikely, for Keohane, that a collapse of soft power will lead to the end of U.S. hegemony. Like all great empires, the United States' weakness lies within.

"A society that is as divided as the U.S. is now cannot long maintain a position of global hegemony or global dominance," Keohane says. We'll have to come to some sort of agreement, or it'll be China making the rules.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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