| Publication |
2014.
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| Summary/Abstract |
The presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama suggest what doesn't work in efforts to promote US influence in the world. By ordering an ill-conceived invasion of Iraq, Bush alienated US allies. His policies of secretly imprisoning Islamist militants and then subjecting them to "enhanced" interrogation and indefinite detention at Guantánamo struck Muslims everywhere as evidence of a war on Islam. Barack Obama, elected as the most explicitly anti-war president since Woodrow Wilson, came into office determined to undo the international damage done by his predecessor. "The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand," Obama said in Berlin in 2008, and a year later, speaking in Cairo, he promised "a new beginning" with the Muslim world, with relations "based upon mutual interest and mutual respect." As promised, he withdrew US combat troops from Iraq. By 2013, however, Obama had fared little better than Bush in his global outreach. According to the Pew Research Center, support for the United States in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Pakistan was actually lower than it had been in the last year of the Bush administration. In Europe, the US favorability rating was higher than it was under Bush, but it had fallen steadily in the years since Obama took office, and it remained far below where it stood in 2000. One possible lesson from these years is that presidential personalities, speeches on foreign stages, and the changing international opinions of US policies matter less than we might think. Perhaps the most reliable measure of America's standing in the world is how appealing the country is to all those who are considering migration. Since 2007, Gallup surveys in more than one hundred and fifty countries have shown that the United States is far and away the number one favored destination. The most recent survey projected that one hundred and thirty-eight million people worldwide would like to move permanently to the United States, more than three times the number who would choose the United Kingdom, the second most favored destination. Those numbers show the United States still represents opportunity and promise to people around the world, and it is clearly in the US global interest to maintain that reputation.
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