What would it take for the US to regain a decent reputation?

Rashak Mani, you’re a little over the top with the “execute Bush” thing, as well as the exceedingly tacky comments about the deaths of the Columbia astronauts “serving us right.” If you think opinions like that are the sort of thoughtful, foreign viewpoints that are worthy of American’s consideration, think again.

We get it. You hate Americans. (Yawn.)

We just don’t care.

(Incidentally–isn’t there something-- anything-- going on down in Brazil that would be a more fruitful application of your time than obsessing over the minute details of everything WE are doing? Slow news day down there? Year? Decade?)

Well that goes without saying.

Mehitabel yes they were covered but as we keep getting told the US is HUGE with a LOT of people. All the pro war talking heads we see on tv like Richard Perle(who was rarely off BBC before and during the war) for example constantly talk about the high approval ratings that the war and Bush have received and from the cites given on this site they seem to be accurate.

I realise the approval ratings are now falling but they were very high when almost every other country I’ve heard reported about were the complete mirror image. eg the UK which was No.1 supporter politically and militarily was overwhelmingly against the action if you looked at the polls as was my country which the US labeled a member of the “Coalition of the Willing”[sup]tm[/sup] while the leader of the government was saying we were most definitely not a member(in actions we were BTW, a large %age of planes on their way to war were refueled in Ireland but it would have been very damaging to him politically if this were officially announced)

He lost my vote BTW

Thank you for proving that non-US opinion is utterly worthless and should never even be considered in the first place. If those are the attitudes of the world, we would be utter morons to even THINK of trying to “salvage our reputation” with such monsters.

No Dogface those are the opinions of one pretty spectacularly silly Non-American.

I don’t think you are a racist scum bag although it was your fine country that gave the world the KKK.

Ignore the guy. Such statements prove he’s not worth your time.

Rashak Mani <insert lots of Pit worthy stuff here>

Several Dopers have made the suggestion that ousting the Bush Administration would be a good start to improving the American reputation. I readily agree. This administration has been an embarassement to this country from the election debacle in Florida until now. A lanslide ouster of this administration would be an indication to the international community that the People of America do not represent the USG (to borrow an abbreviation from Rummy). That would go a long way to starting the process of repairing the American name. I do NOT have a cite for this, but is it not logical to assume that the continued high (but falling…slowly) approval rating for Bush and his cronies only adds salt to the wounds opened by the imperialistic actions the USG has taken since the Sept 11th terrorist attacks? Granted, in some parts of the world, like the Arab nations, we are unlikely to be respected, or for that matter trusted again for generations. But an overwhelmingly successful, legal, popular revolt followed by a more representative administration could even begin to make inroads into the staunchest anti-American culture.

Repairing our international reputation would also be well served by a more balanced, less jingoistic representation of us (the People) in our national and international news outlets. Although we export a large amount of entertainment media (i.e. movies, sitcoms, etc.), the practical thinking person can still recognize these images as American-egocentric fantasy. The news, however, would be expected to paint a much more realistic view of American popular opinion. That image, at the moment, appears to be little more than flag-waving support for this administration with tacit expressions of dissent.

msmith537:

Did we pull out of the International Criminal Court or the Kyoto Treaty because the time had come for tough action and we were doing the right thing alone?
Eve:

As the self-appointed Leader of the World, surely we should hold ourselves to higher standards than the worst offenders.

If you didn’t harbor some level of hatred for the USA, why did you feel it necessary to bring up the KKK at all.

Count me amongst those who feel that unless your current pResident’s voted out in the next election, things will only go from bad to worse. Meaning that as much as people in other countries try to differenciate between your Gov’s actions and Americans in general, such distinction will become harder and harder to make if Bush finally manages to get elected by a majority of your electorate. I think the fact that he lacks legitimacy in the eyes of many abroad has acted as a quasi buffer, to some degree preventing a complete Bush = Americans meld. Obviously, said buffer would all but disappear should he reign supreme in '04 as many will – correctly – read that as sign that most Americans actually agree with the hubristic agenda set forth by the Neocons.

Simplistic analysis? Perhaps. But in simplicity you’ll often find truth.

In related news, the hits just keep on coming:

Latin-America has dismal view of Bush

Mehitabel:

But don’t you think there may be “some group” out there for whom it does matter and ho may or may not support the US depending on whether or not we’re worthy of it?

OH grow up people. Yu cant seriously state that Bush is the cause of all of our problems. Talking about egocentric fantasies.

When/if Bush is gone, his predecessor has to continue the same policies Bush has had to take from Clinton.

Sure there was alot of sympathy after 9/11. We wee the fookin victims. victims always recieve the sympathy. It it did not take a week for many people to shrilly proclaim that the us was gonna nuke everyone.

Nixon was hated just as much as Johnson was, or more, for Vietnam. Any incumbent cannot drastically change the US policies without seriously hurting the national interests.

bump:

Spoken like a representative of a true Christian Nation. :rolleyes:

Oh please.

You say “non-US opinion is utterly worthless and should never even be considered” due to a single poster’s statement and I say that you should make those kind of leaps.

That is all I meant. I have no “level” of hatred for your country. I disagree with a lot of your politics but that is your right. I disagree with some of your foreign policy but I don’t hate you or your country by default. Prove to me that you personally are hateful and I may hate you. How could I hate ~300 million people just for living there? That would be very very stupid IMO

I’m sure you have no love of the IRA but does that mean you have a level of hatred for Ireland?

Don’t put me in the same category as our Brazilian friend please.
A thread I started a while ago. A European’s anti-war and anti-anti-war feelings/ramblings (NOT A DEBATE)

That was directed at Dogface

The United States have a huge lot going for them that is bound gets them admired by most people outside the US: a society thoroughly grounded in democracy, which by the exertions of its citizens avoids committing a lot of wrongs and will address and eventually right all those wrongs that it does commit; a society that supports an incredible amount of creativity and productivity on the part of its people.

What tempers this admiration is IMO four things:

  1. the unavoidable one: some resentment bred by envy.

  2. another unavoidable one: some (relatively few) people outside the US are mad or bad.

  3. another unavoidable one: objective differences of interest with other countries. That’s no obstacle to being friends, though, when mutually handled in a polite manner.

  4. the eminently avoidable one: US politicians gratuitously kicking the rest of the world in its collective teeth, and the US population not noticing or not caring.

That last one can be further divided ito:

4 a) substance: The American people thinking they only elect an US president and associated domestic policies but not noticing they also elect a de facto World Emperor and not much caring about the interests of the people who don’t get to vote in that emperor’s election.

b) style: American politicians thinking that they address a domestic audience but not noticing that they are speaking to the world. “Plain-spoken” to a local audience translates to “gratuitously insulting” to a foreign audience’s perception. “Patriotic” to an audience used to rhetoric flag-waving translates to “barking mad, whom will he attack?” to a foreign audience’s perception.

One example of the “style” thing: on the occasion of the late UN General Assembly session on Iraq, M. Chirac, after making his speech, took a seat in the audience with the French delegation, heard the subsequent speeches and politely applauded. Mr. Bush made his speech and left.

I’m sorry. Did I miss a little piece of history known as Nazi Germany?
Yes sqweels, the average Arab, Euro, Asian, etc on the street hates us because we pulled out of Kyoto and the ICC.:rolleyes:
I fear the day when we as Americans even consider the opinions of someone like Rashak Mani when deciding foreign policy. Go seek therepy.
Look, as the rich jock with the fancy sports car on the block, we can do no right. If we are isolationist, people criticize us (remember the League of Nations?), if we get involved, we’re imperialists. We are expected to solve the Israel/Palestine problem but not the Saddaam Husain problem. While people are screaming for us to get out of Iraq, people are screaming for us to go IN to Liberia. We are “stupid” yet people from all over the world go to school in our universities. They criticize our “capitalism” yet resent that we are the wealthiest nation in the world. They criticize our culture, yet there is a McDonalds and a Coke machine in every nation (for any European who dares criticize American taste, I have two words for you - David Hasselhoff).

yojimbo - People look down on leftist intellectuals because they are widely perceived as not DOING anything other than sitting around coffee shops, criticising everything in the world and patting themselves on the back about how smart they think they are. Any jerk can make a cardboard sign and stand with a bunch of other jerks while a hundred policeman stand by to make sure no one gets hurt.

Christ almighty do I regretusing that particular strawman. Look, all I meant was that it’s fucking stupid taking one nimrods(of whatever nationallity) POV and expanding that to the rest of the us.

Those fucking Germans have a lot to answer for :wink: Europeans like the rrest of the world quite liked Pammy and her friends running around in their swimsuits but it was only the Germans that bought the guys records. You should cjeck out some of their own home grown “music” it would make you shit yourself laughing.

No argument with that but I’ve seen the Euro leftist intellectual argument used as nothing more than a stupid generalisation here in the same way that gobshites for this side of the pond use the “right wing gun toteing yahoos” generalisation.

From either side it’s fucking stupid.

Yojimbo:

I know that the US has no economic or military equal, but is there an example of a large, powerful country (China, Russia, UK, Germany, Francej Japan) that is actually admired around the globe? Can you hold up a country as an example? And I don’t me Switzerland (no office to the Swiss), but a country with at least the pretense of being a world power.

I’m with MSMITH on this. Everyone loves to hate the top dog. It’s very difficult to distinguish between constructive criticism and just plain old everyday resentment of the big guy.

Yojimbo, thanks for your reply. Yes indeed, there are plenty of foreign groups that have claims that should be taken seriously by the US, and many of them have been: the Marsh Arabs. The Tibetan exiles. The Taiwanese. The democrats of Burma. And so on and so forth. But a group that comes from a particularly, shall we say, dramatic sword-waving death-to-the-infidel martial mindset like the Chechens, NSM, even though their claims might be as valid as anybody elses’. There’s also the delicate issues of interference–you’re Irish, what about the rights of the Tinkers? Should America the Righteous take up their cause, or would you politely say that this is an Irish matter, and we’ll take care of it, thank you? How about the way Gypsies are treated all over Europe–what can America do when the supposedly most enlightened, well-off countries in the world don’t seem to mind leaving them in ghettos? How about the burakumin (sp?) of Japan? Turks in Germany, with their odd citizenship status? How much should we press our good friend and the largest democracy in the world, India, about caste and women’s rights? And so on, and so on. We also often feel as helpless and appalled at what happens in nations like Rwanda as people in your little country would.

One last thing–your fine post is missing one point. There’s a lot of military in my family and many have passed thru/been assigned to bases in Germany. Your high standard of living is in some part due to the fact that America was doing the heavy lifting for Europe as far as defense goes. That’s fine, that’s what friends are for, and modern Germany is a tribute to how a horrible history can be atoned for and a country healed and made a force for good. But, to put the shoe on the other foot, don’t you see how this affects how Americans see the world, especially Western Europe?

Thanks!

I would think to an intelligent man like you it would be quite obvious. One being constructive and the other based on resentment. Someone who is just come from a resentful POV usually falls down on the logic front after a very small time. As to the rest of your post I don’t see your point. I would guess that there isn’t a single country in the world that can’t be legitimately criticised for some action or another. US action affects the world sometimes and that is why it’s looked at closely. The British political scene is looked at and critiqued quite a bit in my country as we have very strong economic and personal ties with out nearest neighbour.

Well the treatment of travellers is not something that I or my country can’t be proud off and I would welcome any outside help with the matter as we seem incapable of breaking through a lot of hatred and intransigence on both sides.

We gladly accepted help from the US when it came to our biggest problem, terrorism and the troubles in NI. Clinton was actively involved in the peace process and we had your own Senator George Mitchell running the whole affair. Now we have a Canadian General looking after the process of decommissioning the IRA’s arms. I welcome help and constructive criticism from outside.