Time Of The Tough Guys

As President George W. Bush limps through his lame-duck year, it won't surprise you to read that he's hugely unpopular. Now a new poll taken in 20 countries by WorldPublicOpinion.org and released exclusively to NEWSWEEK confirms the world's low opinion of the president—but adds a twist. No other major world leader enjoys significantly greater trust abroad. In a sense, they're all Bushes now.

Just as striking are the leaders who do best, albeit by a slim margin: Vladimir Putin, Gordon Brown and Hu Jintao. That's one democrat and two dictators. In other words, the bosses of what are often cast as the biggest, baddest authoritarian states—China and Russia—are among the planet's most trusted officials. That should seriously alarm the leaders of the West, and particularly President Bush and Condoleezza Rice, his secretary of State, who have made the export of democracy a centerpiece of U.S. foreign policy.

While it might be exaggerating to call this the year of the autocrats, the fact is that the poll found most of the world now seems to have more confidence in undemocratic than democratic leaders. The war of ideas may not be over, and a close reading of the poll suggests there's still room to turn things around. But at this point, the West clearly isn't winning the battle for influence—and freedom, to borrow Bush's phrase, is not reigning.

The WorldPublicOpinion.org survey, which is managed by the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA), asked 19,751 people in 20 countries how much confidence they have in each of seven key leaders "to do the right thing regarding world affairs." On average, only 23 percent of foreign respondents express "a lot of " or "some" confidence in Bush, and only Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad does worse (at 22). Ban Ki-moon—the U.N. secretary-general—gets 35 percent (but because he's not a national leader, he belongs in a different category). Then comes Putin at 32 percent, Brown at 30, Hu Jintao at 28 and France's Nicolas Sarkozy at 26. The results aren't much different if you tally them country by country: in only two states (Nigeria and India) do a majority of people express at least some confidence in Bush. Putin and Hu each come out ahead in just five nations, and Brown in just six. (Ban gets nine.) Moreover, virtually every leader's standing slipped slightly in the past year (though WorldPublicOpinion.org didn't conduct the same poll in 2007, Pew's Global Attitudes Project, which asked the same question, can be used for comparison).

What explains this universal vote of no confidence? The short answer is a serious bout of global pessimism: most people polled seem very unhappy about the state of the world. Ivo Daalder, a former staffer on the National Security Council who's now at the Brookings Institution, argues that the numbers, as much as they measure confidence in individual officials, are also a more general "reflection of how people feel about their own conditions." Richard Holbrooke, U.N. ambassador under President Bill Clinton, says the survey shows "people's dissatisfaction with the way the world leadership is addressing the current crop of problems."

The general malaise becomes especially clear if you look at our national "crankiness index"—which shows how each country responded to all the leaders as a group. All but two of the nations were relentlessly critical. Americans were extremely negative, giving the seven leaders in the survey an average confidence rating of just 29 percent, and their own leader 42 percent. That's probably a reflection of the slumping economy and the burden at home of two wars, plus an ongoing terrorist threat and high anti-Americanism abroad. Overall, the crankiest responses came from the Arabs—the Palestinians, Jordanians and Egyptians—all of whom live in moribund economies with corrupt, ineffective governments that tend to blame their condition on outsiders.