You voted for Obama and all you got was health care reform, stem cell research, ungagging of scientists, reduced nuclear weapons, an improving economy, greater rights of states to legalize marijuana, more rights for gays, and an improved image on the world stage.

Monday, April 19, 2010

Title taken from here, with the added bonus of a new BBC World Service poll showing that a year and a bit after the beginning of Obama's presidency the image of the US has continued to improve, leaving Turkey and Pakistan the only countries expressing more than a 50% negative view of US influence. Turkey is up seven points from last year from 63% to 70% negative, and perhaps this has a lot to do with Armenia.

Taking a look at the poll findings in detail (pdf), there are some other interesting parts:

The country with the strongest negative opinion on China's influence? Italy. -- 14% positive, 72% negative.

Japan's influence is rated positively by almost everybody, and even China only sees Japan 47% negatively.

North Korea: exactly 1% (!) of Japanese view North Korean influence positively, 90% negatively. In South Korea we see a similar number with 5% and 90%. The country that likes North Korea the most is Nigeria, with 35% positive.

UK influence: once again we have Turkey and Pakistan being the most negative, with 18 and 9% positive, 53 and 38% negative.

After that it gets into a lot of other countries, even into views on South Africa.

But the interesting thing is that Turkey doesn't seem to be happy with anybody's influence. Take a look at this:

Turkey on US: 13% positive, 70% negative
Turkey on China: 21% positive, 47% negative
Turkey on Japan: 34% positive, 35% negative
Turkey on North Korea: 11% positive, 45% negative
Turkey on the UK: 18% positive, 53% negative
Turkey on Pakistan: 15% positive, 46% negative
Turkey on India: 15% positive, 40% negative
Turkey on France: 17% positive, 53% negative
Turkey on South Africa: 13% positive, 35% negative
Turkey in Israel: 6% positive, 77% negative
Turkey on Canada: 16% positive, 35% negative
Turkey on the EU: 29% positive, 45% negative
Turkey on Russia: 16% positive, 50% negative
Turkey on Iran: 13% positive, 54% negative
Turkey on Brazil: 19% positive, 34% negative
Turkey on Germany: 30% positive, 33% negative
Turkey on South Korea: 17% positive, 30% negative

So not once does Turkey view any country more positively than negatively. This is important to note because it would be easy to think that Turkey views the US mostly negatively in the poll but probably sees countries like Iran and Russia in a positive light, but that's not the case either. It's pretty much all negative.

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