How the U.S. Lost the World’s Respect

All polls and even informal observations by well-connected people confirm that the world’s opinion of the United States as a serious world power has eroded markedly. As President Obama and his entourage and imperishable following persevere in their conviction that this president’s benign championship of non-intervention, arms control, and giving rogue states the benefit of the doubt is winning hearts and minds to a new conception of a kindly, detached America, it is clearer every week that this administration’s foreign policy is contemplated with astonishment and contempt by practically everyone else.

The Europeans, putative allies — a fact that, since the U.S. abandoned isolation, has meant a ready preparedness to have the U.S. liberate them from the Nazis and then protect them from the Soviet Communists, but means almost nothing now — are almost uniformly incredulous at the syncopations of recent American foreign policy .... http://www.nationalreview.com