Early one Sunday morning in the summer of 2003, I drove into the center of a little South African beach town on the Indian Ocean to pick up the Cape papers. Local news agents still employed the English custom of putting front pages on A-frame stands on the sidewalk. It was during the first months of the Iraq war, and from two blocks away, I could see the headline, in big block type: “WHY BUSH IS WORSE THAN BIN LADEN.”
It was disheartening to see – especially so far from home – but it did correspond to something familiar: American favorability around the world tends to swing sharply with wars (especially ones America starts) and who the US president is. Within weeks of the American attack, the international support the US had after 9/11 was squandered.
In 2003, after the invasion of Iraq, American global favorability was at a modern low: in the 30-40% range. It had been above 50% for Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George HW Bush, and got into the 70% range for Bill Clinton. (Some wars are more popular than others: George HW Bush’s Gulf war to liberate Kuwait was globally popular.) After the decline of the Iraq war, American favorability shot upward again with the election of Barack Obama, whose favorability reached 75-80% in some countries.
