Lack of Trust hurts US

Justin Gardner at Donklephant is passing along an interesting little tidbit from MSNBC on the result of State Department and Pew Research group survey data:

To compare 1999 State Department data with recent surveys by the Pew Trust, favorable views of the United States have dropped in Britain from 83 percent to 56 percent, in Germany from 78 percent to 37 percent, in Morocco from 77 percent to 49 percent, in Indonesia from 75 to 30 percent, in France from 62 to 39 percent, in Turkey from 62 to 12 percent and in Spain from 50 to 23 percent.

This massive distrust of US motives, goals and execution as well as the perception that the US has betrayed both its ideals and the implicit and explicit civilized norms in the previous dominant rule schema that we were both the founder and main beneficiary has significantly made life harder for the United States. If the public does not trust the US, foreign political leaders are severely restricted in what aid they can give to the US when it is in their evaluation of mutual best interest. Indeed, the fact that this calculation must be made on a regular and explicit basis instead of falling back on a relationship of credible trust that this new event/need/information is to the best of a pretty good ability is a valid shared concern.

Restoring and rebuilding this trust will take much longer than it took George W. Bush and his neo-con uber-nationalist allies to destroy.