Pew Report: Faltering Perception of U.S. in Middle East

The Pew Research Center has released its Global Attitudes Project report. Their latest findings show that public opinion of the U.S. and President Barack Obama in several Middle Eastern and North African countries remains fairly low. Overwhelming majorities of Egyptians, Jordanians, and Turks held unfavorable views of U.S. foreign policy, while in Lebanon and Tunisia public opinion on the subject was more evenly divided. In all those countries, approval ratings of U.S. drone strikes in Muslim were extremely low, the highest rating being 24 percent in Lebanon.

Majorities in all of the above countries also did not want to see Obama reelected, and feel that the U.S. has not sought sufficiently multilateral approaches to international issues. While approval ratings of Obama in 2009 were significantly higher than those of Bush in 2008, opinions of the current president have fluctuated since he took office. Some questions did field more positive responses, though; the “American way of doing business” is particularly popular in the Arab world.