By Peter Foster World Last updated: July 11th, 2013
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*** Peter Foster Peter Foster is the Telegraph's US Editor based in Washington DC. He moved to America in January 2012 after three years based in Beijing, where he covered the rise of China. Before that, he was based in New Delhi as South Asia correspondent. He has reported for The Telegraph for more than a decade, covering two Olympic Games, 9/11 in New York, the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, the post-conflict phases in Afghanistan and Iraq and the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan. ***
Barack Obama. (Photo: AP)
A fascinating new poll is out today that shows Barack Obama's foreign policy approval rating has plummeted over the last two months.
On May 1 the Quinnipiac poll found that 47 per cent of Americans approved of Mr Obama's handling of foreign policy, while 43 per cent disapproved. Two months later the same pollster has Mr Obama running a 12-point negative rating – 52 per cent disapprove, compared with 40 that approve.
That's a sharp fall, given the fact that it comes after one of the busiest periods in Mr Obama's presidency for foreign policy. There was the shirt-sleeve summit with China's new president, the decision to do more in Syria, the announcement of talks with the Taliban and now, of course the coup-that-wasn't in Egypt.
The numbers are telling because they point to a central contradiction of the Obama presidency – how is it that man who expresses such a clear vision at home can look so muddled abroad?
The same polls shows that Obama is seen as "trustworthy" (50-44) by a majority of Americans, caring for the common man (52-45), and a strong leader (52-46) who also get's the thumbs-up for his handling of "terrorism" (52-43).
And yet those qualities don't translate into his foreign policy ratings, and the reason is that in that arena, Mr Obama has displayed none of those characteristics lately.
The frustration in Washington is not so much what Mr Obama has done in Egypt, or even for many in Syria, but the manner of his doing it.
The polls might show that Americans don't care about foreign policy – that they want out of Afghanistan and don't want to be too entangled in Syria, but as Bill Clinton rightly pointed out recently, that doesn't mean they don't want to see leadership.
This doesn't mean boots on the ground or needless wars – though the polls also shows 49-38 per cent support for cruise missile or drone attacks on Syrian government targets - but it does mean providing direction, setting a moral compass for others to follow.
It doesn't mean Mr Obama should be expected, or is able, to solve all these thorny problems, but he does need to pin his colours to the mast.
Mr Obama does this on domestic policy all the time, even though he knows actually achieving his goals on immigration or healthcare reform are incredibly difficult.
His favourite phrase is the "right thing to do", but on foreign policy there is only the "expedient thing to do", or more often a sense of "nothing to be done at all".
It's not that there's a serious majority of people who want to cut off US aid to Egypt, but Mr Obama hasn't even felt the moral obligation to condemn – in person and publicly – the killings in Cairo and urge the restoration of a real political process, as he has behind the scenes.
You could say this was just cosmetics, but the public face of the "Leader of the Free World", as we still see the US president, does matter.
This is not about having naive expectations, but matching the expectations of the American public, who for all their war-weariness still feel in their bones (like it or not) that America is there to make the world a better place.
Mr Obama is visibly weighed down by the limitations of what the US can do in Egypt or Syria, but then makes the mistake of project the burdens of his office to the American public and wider world when – as Clinton intuitively knows - they expect their president to be a winner, not a weakling.
I suspect these numbers reflect much of that.
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Read more: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/peterfoster/100226120/obamas-foreign-policy-ratings-plummet-americans-want-a-winner-not-a-weakling
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Quote:
"You could say this was just cosmetics, but the public face of the "Leader of the Free World", as we still see the US president, does matter."
End quote.
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