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U.S. is far more globally popular under Biden than it was in Trump era
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| President Biden arrives to deliver a speech marking the first anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, on Feb. 21, in Warsaw. (Evan Vucci/AP) |
Former president and 2024 Republican front-runner Donald Trump has launched myriad broadsides at President Biden. In statements from the campaign trail, Trump has decried Biden’s “calamitous and failed presidency,” and singled out a string of supposed foreign policy disasters, including the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, the spiraling war in Ukraine and the looming confrontation with China. In March, Trump seized upon Biden’s slip of the tongue during a speech to Canada’s Parliament, where he accidentally applauded “China for stepping up,” before swiftly correcting himself and saying “Canada.”
“Mistakes like this, a really big one in Canada’s Parliament, are just not allowed to happen,” Trump posted on his social media platform. “We are a laughing stock all over the WORLD!”
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But whatever Biden’s propensity for gaffes and underwhelming approval ratings at home, international attitudes toward the United States during his time in office are far rosier than what they were under Trump — a reality underscored by new polling data from the Pew Research Center published Tuesday.
A median of 54 percent of those surveyed in 23 countries in the early months of this year said they trust Biden to “do the right thing regarding world affairs.” Pew’s selected countries include a cross-section of global societies, from traditional U.S. partners in Western Europe and East Asia to developing economies in Nigeria and India to middle-income nations like Argentina and South Africa.
According to Pew’s data, Trump’s four years in office marked a dramatic drop in trust in American leadership on the world stage, with surveys showing record low levels of confidence in the U.S. president in countries as diverse as Germany, Brazil and India. Biden’s victory, which followed a campaign where he promised to bring the United States “back” from a period of Trumpist disruption and turbulence, immediately led to a swing in global attitudes. In the years since he took office, confidence in him has dipped marginally in some countries, and been buoyed in others, particularly as Washington took a lead role in galvanizing and organizing the Western defense of Ukraine from Russian invasion.
The bottom line, though, is a world where Democratic administrations have appeared more favorable to respondents elsewhere, especially citizens of many close U.S. allies. “In each country, current ratings for Biden are higher than those for Trump, but lower than their peak during Obama’s presidency,” Pew noted.
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There are obvious limits to what can be gleaned from polling like this. The 23 nations selected, though arguably representative of broader regional views, don’t comprise the totality of global opinion on the United States. Nor is popularity abroad a measure of foreign policy success. But the trends do reveal a genuine impact in the shift from Trump to Biden, who sought to bolster U.S. partnerships with allies unsettled by the Trump years, from the Indo-Pacific to Europe.
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Pew noted that “the share of the public that thinks the U.S. listens to countries like theirs has been on the rise, and in 12 countries, it is at the highest point we’ve seen in any of our surveys. For instance, in Poland, Germany and the United Kingdom — three key NATO allies of the U.S. — the share saying the U.S. considers their interests is larger now than at any point over the past two decades.”
Biden was also significantly more popular than Trump in “middle-income” countries from Mexico to Kenya to India, which shows that the statistical warming to his profile is not simply a question of the geopolitical West finding reassurance in Biden’s leadership.
At the same time, perceptions of American economic power have increased in several countries during the Biden years, reversing what seemed a new coalescing perception in 2020 that China had already supplanted the United States in terms of economic clout. The effect of the pandemic and China’s draconian shutdowns may have a role to play here, while 70 percent or more in Nigeria, Kenya, India and Mexico see American investment as a net positive for their domestic economies, according to Pew, which plans to publish parallel data regarding attitudes to China in the coming weeks.
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Biden’s presence in the White House has led to a general shift in countries viewing the United States in a favorable light. “Many countries gave the U.S. record low ratings during former president Donald Trump’s administration and the start of the coronavirus pandemic, then saw a marked improvement after Biden took office,” Pew added. For example, 63 percent of Mexicans now rate the United States positively, compared with a low of 30 percent in 2017, Trump’s first year as president.
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The one intriguing exception to this in the data is Hungary, whose illiberal government, led by nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban, has yoked itself to the right-wing movement in the United States and also has remained the conspicuous outlier in the European Union for its approach to the conflict in Ukraine. On Tuesday, Orban told a German publication that he saw Ukraine as a Western proxy, parroting rhetoric familiar to the Kremlin.
“Ukraine is no longer a sovereign state,” Orban said. “It has neither money nor weapons. It can keep on fighting only thanks to the assistance being provided.”
Contrast Hungary’s position with its erstwhile ally in Poland, whose right-wing illiberal government shares many of Orban’s ideological priors when it comes to social policy and discussion of migration in Europe, but has become a bulwark of anti-Russia sentiment and a major strategic actor on the continent.
Biden journeyed to Warsaw to mark the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and hailed its role in facilitating the defense of Ukraine. According to Pew’s research, “favorable” perceptions of the United States among the Polish public — a startling 93 percent — reached a record high this year in two decades of polling.