Obama's Foreign Policy Needs Some Re-Thinking

With anti-American riots and attacks on U.S. Embassies and Consulates spreading across the Middle East, there has been a lot of discussion about the President's Foreign Policy. Some Obama supports say it has been an unqualified success which has improved our relations abroad. At the same time there are a lot of experts that say is has been a failure which has weakened trust in America and hurt our relations, even with our allies. Common sense tells us that there are a lot more protests, violent protests, against the United States now then we have ever seen before, so something we are doing is obviously not working.

There is an interesting survey, the Pew Global Attitudes Project survey done this spring, which has some very eye opening figures. I think they give us a clearer picture about how our Foreign Policy is working. Here are just the "favorable" numbers (the percent of people the the named countries that have a favorable opinion of the America). I think some of these will surprise you.

Italy -74%, Japan -72%, Poland 69%, France -69%, Brazil -61%, Britain -60% (the French like us better then the Brits do), Spain -58%, Mexico -56%, Czech Republic -54%, Germany -52% (both the Brits and the French like us better then the Germans do), Russia -52% (they like us as well as the Germans do), Lebanon -48%, Tunisia -45%, China -43%, India -41% (China likes us better then India? Whats wrong with that picture?), Greece -35%, Egypt -19% (how much did you say we are giving them in aid?), Turkey -15% (I've been warning you about Turkey), Pakistan -12% (and these guys are supposed to be close allies in the war an terror getting billions and billions of our tax dollars? Really?), Jordan -12% (9 out of 10 people in Jordan have an unfavorable opinion of America? Why? What have we done to piss them off?).

I don't know about you, but those numbers don't look like the Presidents attempts to increase America's standing in the world have been anything he should be bragging about... In case you missed it, that means that over half the people in these countries don't like us very much...

Maybe we are looking at this Foreign relations thing wrong right from the beginning. Maybe we should be working harder on the "Fear" and "Respect" side of things and less on the "love us" stuff for a while. At least then maybe they'd stop killing our ambassadors and burning our Embassies... I'm just saying...

Live Long an Prosper....