U.S. image ‘plummets’ in leading democracies - Democracy Digest

 

U.S. image ‘plummets’ in leading democracies

Dalibor Roháč

Democracy Digest, September 2020

Opinion of the United States keeps falling in 13 advanced democracies, including staunch American allies, according to a new survey by the Pew Research Center, The Post reports.

“In several countries, the share of the public with a favorable view of the U.S. is as low as it has been at any point since the Center began polling on this topic nearly two decades ago,” Pew noted. Those surveyed, on the whole, placed less confidence in the U.S. doing “the right thing regarding global affairs” than authoritarian leaders like Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Eighty-five percent of people in other wealthy democracies believe the United States handled the coronavirus pandemic poorly.

“In at least seven nations, including key allies like Britain and Japan, approval ratings for the United States plunged to record lows,” The Post’s Adam Taylor observed. “In Germany, just 26 percent of the respondents held a positive view of the United States — the lowest rating since 2003, the year of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.”

The U.S. failure to address the Covid pandemic is a major factor in the decline in the country’s global standing.

“Despite the trillions of dollars the United States has spent on national security in the past two decades, it was not prepared to combat this wholly predictable threat,” wrote Rozlyn Engel of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“Its emergency response was challenged by a heavy reliance on foreign medical equipment and highly interdependent supply chains,” she observed in a recent study. The pandemic may now leave American middle-class households more disillusioned with globalization and less willing to pick up the costs of military and diplomatic engagements, obligations to international organizations, and new trade and investment deals.”

The US handling of Covid-19 does not make it a ‘failed state’ or a complete outlier, says analyst 

The number of per capita deaths in the US is lower than in the UK and on a par with Sweden’s – hardly a success story in the current pandemic but arguably a country at more-than-decent levels of economic development and governance. The US case fatality ratio (a somewhat tricky metric when the true number of cases is unknown) is close to global average, just below Germany’s. Death rates recorded in Belgium, Spain, the UK and Italy are worse than in the US.

The picture is by no means a flattering one. But in no other country has the pandemic been portrayed to the same extent as a fatal indictment of its social contract and system of government as in the US, he writes for The Critic.  

A survey of U.S. voters published this week by the Eurasia Group Foundation found majorities favored restoring international pacts like the Paris climate accords. More than twice as many  — 56 percent compared to 23 percent — sought to increase engagement with the world compared to those who wanted less.