 Good morning everybody. Can I ask you the folks? We've got lots of places, seats up here in the front, so please, please come on up and sit down. We want you to join us for what I think is going to be an exceptionally interesting session this morning. We welcome Andrew Kohut to CSIS. He's a very good friend and he's been here many times with us. And we sought an opportunity to feature his most recent work. Of course, that's the Pew Global Attitude Survey. First of all, you all know that Andrew is the head of the Pew Research Center here in town. He comes to this from a very, very rich background, probably one of the premier polling intellects. And frankly, that misstates, I think, his impact in America. The fact he's a highly regarded commentator across the board on issues, but that's because he comes to it with a discipline science of trying to understand how people in the world are thinking about these matters. And in recent years, the Pew Research Center has been undertaking a systematic review of attitudes around the world about America. Now, I've got some American friend to say, so what? Who cares? Who cares what other people think about this? But I remind them that we didn't win the Cold War because we fielded bigger armies than the Soviet Union. We succeeded in the Cold War because we had ideas the rest of the world wanted. And people decided they wanted to be a part of this larger campaign because of the values we stood for and the ideas we held up. And so it is important for us to know what people in the world are thinking and their attitudes. And I think you're going to find some very interesting results in this year's survey. Every year I read it with deep interest and some surprise. Probably this year with greater interest and surprises. It popped out in very interesting ways. And so we're exceptionally fortunate to have Andrew Kohut with us. Would you all please welcome him for this very interesting presentation this morning? Thank you very much. I'm delighted to be here. That was quite a nice introduction. Often the words polling and intellect don't go together in popular discussion, but I was happy to hear that description. In any event, the Pew Global Attitudes Project is the largest ever series of multinational surveys focusing on worldwide issues. It began in June 2001. We received a grant from the Pew Charitable Trust where most of the funding for what we do both domestically and internationally comes from. And it was to study globalization and democratization. Well, by September 12 we were studying other things. We began our focus shifted to the image of the United States and how it was dealing with efforts and anti-terrorism efforts and issues related to combating terrorism and Islamic extremism. But over the years we've covered a range of top international issues as well as economic well-being, social values, and a host of other topics that lend themselves well to making comparisons across the many countries in which we do polling. We've conducted more than 240,000 interviews in 57 countries since 2001. I think we're probably most famous for chronically in the rise of anti-Americanism over the course of the Bush years. And now we've been documenting how the global image of the United States has changed as Barack Obama has become president. The poll I'm going to discuss today, our new poll, is based on 24,000 in-depth interviews in 22 countries. It was done April 9th through May 7th. What I'd like to do is tell you about the findings for a bit and then maybe we can look at some of the numbers that give you a fuller sense of what I've been describing. Our headline this year was that Obama remains highly popular in most parts of the world even though his job approval rating in the United States is not so great. In many respects he's more popular overseas than he is here. And this benefits the image of the United States worldwide. Opinions of the U.S. remain far more positive in 2010 and as they were in 2009 compared to the way they were in the Bush years. The U.S. rating in Western Europe in particular is quite strong. 73% of the French have a positive view of us, one of the highest numbers we've ever recorded in France and 63% of the Germans. These are very good numbers for the U.S., particularly relative to the numbers we had seen over the past decade. Opinions were also highly positive toward the U.S. and other nations around the world. We were impressed to see or surprised to see the extent to which opinions of the U.S. improved in Russia and China. Very significant jumps between 2009 and 2010 and also in Japan. The disappointing news is that Muslim publics continue to hold a very unfavorable view, in fact an overwhelmingly negative view in many places of the United States. Over the course of the year one of the secondary headlines was that Muslims have become more critical of Barack Obama. It's a bit of a sense of disappointment with him compared to views of Obama in 2009. The views back then weren't very positive but they were fairly positive, particularly relative to the way Muslim publics had regarded President Bush in the many surveys we did in that period. In Egypt or in Turkey and Pakistan just 17% of the people we polled had a favorable view of the United States. In Egypt we saw the U.S.'s favorability rating dropping from 27% in 2009 to just 17% this year which makes it among the lowest, it makes it the lowest rating that we've obtained in Egypt since we've started doing polling there in 2006. Closer to home, one of the most disappointing, the most unfavorable findings was we found an image of the United States tumbling in Mexico in response to the new Arizona immigration law. Before the bill was signed 62% of Mexicans gave the U.S. a favorable rating. We were in the field and we decided well something very significant has happened so we then did a follow-up survey, an identical follow-up survey and we saw that 62% tumbling to 44%. We also saw Barack Obama's image affected by this in Mexico, a much more negative read on him after the bill even though obviously Barack Obama was not a proponent of the bill. This is a critic of the law but nonetheless he was tarred by that brush in Mexico and I'll show you a bit of this when we get to the numbers. More generally though Obama's image remains very positive in most of the countries in which we did polling outside of the Muslim world. 70 median average percentage who said they have confidence in him to do the right thing in world affairs was 71% and 64% expressed approval of his policies in general. His ratings were greatest in Western Europe and they continue to be very high. Only the Kenyans gave Obama a better rating than did Western Europeans. Now this is not to say that there hasn't been some tempering of what we describe as Obama mania that we saw last year. We found fewer in Asian and Latin American countries saying they were having, they have confidence in Obama and strong endorsement of Obama saying you have a lot of confidence in him declined in a number of countries in Western Europe. And it went from strong to moderate in terms of the polling. This was the case in Britain and France and Germany. But as I said earlier there were clear signs of disillusionment in the Muslim world. In Egypt Obama's confidence in him fell from 41% last year to 31% in Turkey from 33 to 23%. In Pakistan we saw the numbers slip from 13, not very good, to 8% even worse. I think outside of the Muslim world one of the most significant findings of the survey was that generally positive views of Barack Obama and of the United States now coexist with concerns that people around the world have about America's approach to world affairs and key policies. This was not the case in the Bush years. In the Bush year specific criticisms of the U.S. and its policies ran hand in hand with anti-American attitudes and anti-Bush sentiment. That isn't the case here. Attitudes where the policies aren't that different but they haven't translated into the negative views of the country. Here are the doubts about the American approach to world affairs that remain. The U.S. has continued to be seen as acting unilaterally and not taking into consideration the interests of other countries and making its foreign policy. There's opposition in many countries to U.S.-led efforts to combat terrorism. That is not true in Western Europe. In Western Europe there is strong support for anti-terrorism efforts and that's quite different than it was in the Bush years and I'll show you that in the slides. The war in Afghanistan gets an even more mixed review around the world and the poll finds Obama with subpar approval ratings on Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran. So people say they generally approve of Barack Obama's policies but when we get to these trouble spots, how is he dealing with Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran? The numbers aren't so good and I'll show you that too. It's worth noting that Obama's worst ratings were for dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Now this poll was conducted before the Flotilla incident. Not sure what the numbers would have been like if we had conducted it after the incident. Obama's best ratings are for dealing with the world economic crisis. In fact, he gets much better ratings for dealing with the economy overseas than he does in the United States. And overall his approval ratings run or his confidence ratings run 43 percentage points higher than President Bush's did back in 2008. Now enough of Obama and the image of the United States, we covered other things. We covered economic attitudes and we found not too surprisingly that global publics are mostly glum about the way things are going in their country. They're dissatisfied and despite signs of economic recovery in many parts of the world, people everywhere complain that their economy is doing poorly and there isn't that much. There's certainly not across the board optimism. The notable exceptions are China, India and Brazil where there's just a much more positive outlook. Disgruntled majorities everywhere fault their government for their economic troubles. They also blame the banks and themselves. Relatively few blame the United States, which I thought was interesting. An important side note to all of this doom and gloom about the economy is it took no toll on attitudes toward international trade and a free market approach. We also found the same relatively high percentages of people saying that they thought the free market approach, even though it has ups and downs, is the best approach for their country and for themselves. In the wake of the European financial crisis, support for the EU and the euro remain surprisingly strong, but negative views of economic integration are clearly there. And there's a divide in the major countries in which we did polling about financial assistance to troubled EU members. The Brits and the Germans are reluctant to French less so. With respect to terrorism, which is one of the things as I said earlier in my presentation that we've been tracking, support for terrorism in the Muslim world remains well below the 2006 levels when it really peaked. In no country did we find a majority of Muslims endorsing suicide bombing Osama bin Laden or al-Qaeda. It's not the case years ago. But still it's not trivial to find as many as one in five people and major in many of the Arab countries in the Middle East saying that they think that suicide bombing that targets civilians in defense of Islam can be justified. Those are still pretty substantial numbers. Excuse me. Majorities in nearly every country including the predominantly Muslim nations oppose a nuclear armed Iran. There's widespread support for economic sanctions and less support for considering military force, but not insignificant, not an insignificant amount of it. I'll show you that too. And what was significant is there's a good deal of support for using force in Jordan, Egypt and Lebanon to prevent Iran from going nuclear. And that's an overview. I'd like to take you through the numbers and maybe give you a little bit of a better understanding of what I've been talking to you about. So here are the countries in which we did our interviewing, 24,000 interviews. We've been back to many of these countries many times over the course of the years. Again, the interviewing was April 7th through May 8th. It takes a long time to cover this many countries. Some are relatively easy. They're done by telephone in the West and the United States and Japan. But almost all of these are personal face-to-face interviews. We have 22 countries, but that means about 35 different languages in which the survey is administered. Here's the U.S. favorability rating. You can see how, in Western Europe, you can see how that jump-up occurs in 2009 and remains high in 2010. The numbers are still a little bit lower than what the State Department was getting back in 2000 in the Clinton years. But these are pretty impressive relative to the lows that we saw in the middle of the last decade in response, largely in response to the war in Iraq and discontent with President Bush's policies. Opinions in Russia went up rather significantly over the course of the past year. Not sure whether that reflects the START Treaty or what, but numbers remain pretty high in Poland. Now the Polish interviewing was done immediately after that tragedy. So who knows about the Polish interviewing, but the Polish number is pretty consistent with what we've seen in the past. The numbers are much more negative in the Muslim world if you see. They've been consistently so. In Indonesia's views of the United States improved upon Obama's election. That was true in Nigeria. The Indonesian numbers have come down, but the other Muslim numbers on the United States remain very low. The Lebanese number is a little bit misleading. It's a combination of the Shia and the Sunni. The Shia number is about zero. I'm serious, it's one or two percent. And the Sunni number is up in the sixties somewhere. In Asia, the numbers are pretty positive. Look at the Chinese number. Jump from 47 to 58 percent, and that's true. Solid numbers are apparent across the board. Look at Japan from 59 to 66 percent. In other countries, largely positive save Mexico. The Mexican number is a combination of the pre and post, so we'll ignore that. And we remain highly popular in Africa. The United States was popular in Africa even in the Bush years, but certainly popular in these two countries in the Obama years. Here's the trend on rating the United States pre-knowing about the Arizona law, post-knowing about the Arizona law. 62 percent favorable falls to 44 percent, pretty clear. The Obama numbers have come down a little bit in most places. He fell from 93 to 90 in Germany, caused for real concern. But if you make the comparison with President Bush in Germany or France, when the numbers were 14 and 13, it's pretty clear what's going on here. In Asia, we see the, and of course the world, we see the same general pattern of a little less positive than it was last, the ratings a little less positive than last year, but still pretty darn positive. Among the Muslim public, the numbers have declined in the same percentage point difference, but proportionately they're down a good deal from 33 to 23 in Turkey from 42 to 33 in Egypt and so on and so forth. Lebanon is relatively flat. Pakistan was so low it didn't really matter, and we do see a bit of a decline in Indonesia. This is a comparison of the point I was trying to make earlier, that there's a positive view of the United States remains despite some persistent negative views of how we conduct ourselves. Favorable views of the United States are 20 points higher than they were in 2007 from 40 to 60, confidence in the President 43 points higher, but there's not much difference in the median, these are median percentages, in the median percentage saying the U.S. considers the interests of other countries or my country in conducting its foreign policy. We see us as similar evaluations with respect to Obama, the media, we found 16 of our countries approving the majorities or pluralities approving of his overall international policies, 5% disapproving, and strong balances of opinion on climate change and world economic crisis divides on Iran, Afghanistan and Iraq and on balance more countries disapproving than approving of how he's been dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Now, this is a rather significant trend which is the increase in Western Europe in support for U.S.-led efforts to fight terrorism. The numbers were relatively low in the Bush years and they remain pretty positive in the two Obama surveys that we've conducted. Not so in the Muslim world. In the Muslim world, U.S. efforts to deal with terrorism are not well regarded, save Indonesia, and in Lebanon, again, it's that same mix. Our surveys have found, not this survey in particular, but other surveys have found that the public in Muslim countries look at American anti-terrorism efforts as anti-Muslim efforts and not genuine legitimate anti-terrorism efforts, even though the Muslim publics have not much regard for terrorism and are very concerned about terrorism in their own countries. Here are the EU numbers. The EU favorability numbers remain pretty positive. They were not favorable in Britain prior to this year and they remain lower than in other countries. The German number is pretty strong and there's a pretty broad endorsement in France, Germany, and Spain of keeping the euro. There's a real divide about the impact of economic integration as a positive or a negative and the percent who say positive is a minority in each of these three major countries. It's a very big positive in Poland. And as I said earlier, there's a divide about financial assistance to other troubled EU countries. NATO favorability remains pretty positive except in Germany where it's tumbled from 73% fall of 2009 to 57%. In the survey, there's a pretty strong linkage between attitudes toward Afghanistan and a decline in support for NATO in Germany. There's the trend on suicide bombing. As you can see in 2004 or 2005, these numbers were pretty high. They gradually came down, country by country. They have come down mostly in response to countries experiencing suicide bombing and then attitudes toward Osama bin Laden, attitudes toward this strategy or tactic becomes much less favorable. On Iran, as I said earlier, there's worldwide concern about a nuclear armed Iran and worldwide support for economic sanctions, but a relatively strong endorsement for preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons with some sort of military option compared to placing your priority in a military conflict. That's even the case in Egypt at Jordan and to a degree in Lebanon among people who are concerned about nuclear armed Iran, which is most people in these countries. But in Western Europe, there's not overwhelming support for this but a fair amount of it. And that's a general overview of a survey that has a lot more in it than I could possibly tell you about. I hope you have copies of the report and go on our website, puresearch.org and read all the details of what we did. Thank you all again for coming. We're going to open it up to questions and I know you'll have many following Andy's really thorough presentation here. As moderator, and by the way, my name is Andrew Schwartz. I'm vice president here at CSIS and I have the honor to preside over this today and Dr. Henry Zabsons. I want to use this opportunity to ask one question of Andy. How much of the data and notion of America, our favorability and our disfavorability, was driven, did you find anything in there that was driven by the notion of American competence? I know you did this before the oil spill, but one of the things that towards the end of the Bush administration that drove some of the opinion on President Bush was the notion of competence and I've heard that narrative come up time and time again with this president as well. Did you find anything in your work on that? Well, in a word, no. I think it's a legitimate concern, particularly a light of the oil spill. But the issues that really have driven public opinion about the United States have had less to do with American abilities and more to do with American policies and intentions and the greatest concern is almost the flip side of worries about competence and that is power. What we saw in the Bush years was the trouble in the minds of many people with America's unchecked power become vital and come to the surface in people's minds in the Obama years it seems there's less concern about American power and it's almost the opposite of what you're mentioning but nonetheless this is a dramatic event. Interesting. We're going to open it up for questions. I have some microphones so if you want to just raise your hand we'll call on you individually. Questions? No questions? Over here in the front, I'm sorry, I couldn't see you. Actually, two questions. One for most of these slides, what is the margin of error and also for the question on Iran getting weapons were there any countries in which a significant number of people favored Iran getting a nuclear weapon? The margin of error on most of these for most of the chance error which is only one kind of error in surveys but the one that you're referring to is about plus or minus three. I don't think there were any countries where there wasn't concern about a nuclear armed Iran. Richard, did we find one country? Pakistan. In the back, over here. Gentleman in the blue shirt. Gentleman in the blue. Hi, did you find anything in your poll about expectations about American power in the sense that someone from China or India felt that American power was on the decline or anything like that? That's a good question. We did find growing numbers of people thinking that China will overtake or has overtaken the United States with regard to economic power. We have a chart in front of our report showing the percentage of countries growing over the past three years. But in terms of overall power including military power I suspect that there isn't much of a trend on that. We did a good deal of work in the Bush years about how people felt about America's power and not just economic power and it was pretty substantial the concerns about the misuse of that power or its unrivaled nature were substantial. They're less substantial now where Obama has alleviated concerns about that. But in terms of economic power there's certainly a sense that the Chinese either have or will overtake us on the part of many people but not most. We had another question right back here and if you could identify yourself and let us know. Taylor Denerman. Just a question about methodology. In places like Pakistan and China and other places which traditionally have been difficult to do accurate polling in did you take any special precautions to make sure that you got an accurate survey? Sure. What we do is we try to use the very best local vendors in each of these countries. We do a very good job in making sure that the language issues are resolved. We do translations and then back translations and we put our faith in the people who have done this polling for years in these countries. In China the pollster is a very good one that works for a range of interests in China and we have a lot of faith in his ability to do accurate sampling. In fact it's relatively easy to sample in China because the records are good. However in both Pakistan and China we're not getting complete national samples. We're not up in the territories in Pakistan and we're not out in the west in China. We're only covering I think about 65% of the Chinese population and maybe 80% of the Pakistani population and each year we've covered less of the Pakistani population because our survey research partner there doesn't feel confident that they can do a good job. Right in the middle, the green shirt right here. If you could identify yourself in the organization you're with. Hi, I'm Megan Curtis with International Development Systems and you had mentioned that there remains overwhelming support for free and open trade and I was curious if you could speak to trends across regions and how that changed through the Bush years as well. Say that last part, what do you mean by trends? Have you noticed more support in Africa versus Southeast Asia? What's been the trend in Muslim countries? I think that the, first of all it's not our question doesn't talk about free trade it talks about trade. You might get a different answer if you asked about free trade. But there's general support for globalization and there's general support for trade. And I think what we find is pretty much support across the board with relatively few variations. Richard, what are the most important variations that were worth pointing out? Thank you. Great, we have a question over here, sir. We're going to bring the microphones down. Bruce Van Boerster, Time Magazine. On procedure, how does a typical interview take place? You begin with a questionnaire and where do you go from there? A typical interview. A typical interview depends on where the interview is being done. In the West it's a telephone interview so there is a standard dial-up procedure that the German pollster uses, a random sample of German telephone numbers both land lines and cell phones and they conduct a poll pretty much the way they're conducted here. Overseas there are area samples so a interviewer is sent to a neighborhood, let's say, or a village or a block within a city and they have a systematic approach for contacting potential respondents, generally a quote of men and women the only interview adults. The interviews are conducted from a prescribed questionnaire that we're responsible from and our polling partner in these countries takes responsibility that the distribution of the samples reflect the distribution of the population, they send it back to us and we double check it, triple check it because we check it once and Princeton Survey Research which is the vendor checks it even before that so it's pretty rigorously controlled which isn't to say that there isn't that this is as cut and dried as doing a poll in the United States but it's a pretty robust procedure thanks by the way to market research most of the people that do the polling for these kinds of purposes work in market research. We're going to stay on the side of the lady right here in the white and then we're going to go directly to the gentleman behind her. Hazel Denton, Johns Hopkins I wonder with all this data whether you have sufficient information to break it down by age structure and if so do you see any significant difference in attitudes between the young and the old which of course would have rather significant implications in a country like say Pakistan? Yeah, speaking of Pakistan we have a major election from the poll that we did last year and we have a major analysis of Pakistan yet to come out we have many questions that we ask in Pakistan that have yet to be released that there weren't differences by age but we do have, we have found differences by age in general and attitudes toward the United States in a number of years where the younger people are more positive than the older people. Great, sir. Thank you Alan Key-Switter and thanks to all the resources it's a common analytical assumption that in regard to Muslim public opinion that the driving issue is the Arab-Israeli peace process and that doing something about that would change perceptions of America. Is there any polling evidence to suggest that that's true? I think there's a lot of polling evidence to suggest that's true. We did a very significant bit of, we've done a significant polling about that over the years and last year in particular with the Cairo speech we looked at attitudes toward the United States and President Obama both pre and post that speech and found it didn't change things it didn't move the needle all that much but it moved it somewhat and it changed people's idea about whether the United States would seriously consider the Palestinian point of view we're going to go back and re-examine these questions probably next year we didn't poll in Israel and Palestine this year and my guess is that we might find something quite different than what we found sure we'll find something different than what we found last year but more generally we, you know, one of the underlying assumptions about anti-Americanism in the Muslim world based upon the data that we've collected a lot of it has to do with the United States is being seen as not fair in how it deals with this relationship deals with this problem one of the key findings you mentioned were that Obama's worst ratings were on the Israeli-Palestinian issue was there, is there more you can tell us about that finding that we should know? well it reflects the view that in Europe in particular and certainly in the Muslim world that the U.S. favors the Israelis there was a little less of that last year post Cairo and we had 27 countries and the only country where the U.S. favorability rating actually declined was Israel in response to the Cairo speech but for most countries the prevailing view is that the United States is on Israel's side and it's not genuine and it's efforts to deal with this problem a lot of people think there hasn't been quite enough follow up on the Cairo speech has that played out in any of your research? I can't answer a question as specific as that but clearly the decline across the board in the Muslim world got to be related to something like that interesting in the middle right here really in the research intern here at CSIS I'm having a little trouble hearing you speak more I'm a research intern here at CSIS just had a general question there were similar questions already on the demographics of the respondents who took the survey and more specifically if you have a percentage of how many of the respondents were women in the Muslim countries I believe about 50% is that right Richard? 50% of the respondents in the Muslim countries were women and we try to do the interviews are matched by sex and we try to have the female interview and the male interview separate so that there's privacy in their responses Great, we have a question in the front Hassan Azar, Turkey at Eili Was there any question about nuclear weapons in the Middle East? What was the reason not to be asked about Israel's nuclear weapons? Do you consider to ask this issue in future surveys? I'm sorry, I didn't quite follow that question do you want to restate it? Did you ask any question about nuclear weapons in the Middle East especially Israeli nuclear weapons? Ask questions about nuclear weapons especially what? Israel's nuclear weapons No, we have not asked questions about Will you consider about them? Will you consider? Yes, I think that's a reasonable consideration Brett Baptist, right here in the middle Hi, Brett Baptist of CSIS I'm wondering in your introduction you mentioned that people around the world blame either governments or banks for the economic woes that they're currently in and I'm wondering if you can expand on that specifically were we talking central banks were you talking their own countries banks or were you talking Wall Street? I can expand on it because it's one category in a question which says who do you fault most? Certainly in the United States if we use the United States as a model I do know a lot about American public opinion the bigger the institution the greater sense that they're culpable Wall Street writ large rather than the local bank probably bears more of the responsibility here and my guess is that's the case there I was surprised by how few people in the United States or said they blame the United States In the back, right over here right behind you Teddy Cherry from congressman Ed Mackey's office since you look at all places around the world what do you think would be the chances that the Latin American country will create a union similar to the EU or union and what possibility do you think that the United States will support a venture knowing that in the past because the Middle East had interest in helping them they didn't support such an approach from Latin American country That's a good question but I certainly don't feel qualified to answer that question that's beyond my expertise Any more in the back over here? Right in the middle back middle Daniel Magalaudi and I'm an intern with the Middle East program I know in a lot of Gallup worldwide polling they have a really high rate of abstention especially in developing countries like India where they have like 70-80% answer don't know or refused I was wondering how you push undecided in your methodology and why you have such a low rate of abstention You know I'm not aware of the rates of no opinion and the Gallup surveys being that high and the rates of no opinions in India seem comparable to what we see in other South Asian countries I mean it's no different than Pakistan In fact the greater problems we've had have not been in India, they've been in Pakistan where people have became at various points in time very leery about answering our questions Great in the front Thanks, Edmund Bruce Jones, British Embassy Do you have anything that speaks to aspirations to live in the United States or to change their own countries to the US model other state capitalist models and so on and so forth on the rise, do you have anything on that? Yeah we have quite a bit on both of those subjects not in this particular survey but over time What we saw over the past decade is fewer people saying that they would advise young people who wanted to leave their own countries to come to the United States many mentions of Australia, New Zealand Canada all kinds of places but with the US image being fairly low over that era those percentages were a good deal lower than we expected We did find however when we talked to people in the Middle East who had friends and relatives living in the United States that they had a very high regard for the experience of these emigres Now the second part of your question was about aspirations, say that one more time I see Well the most consistent admirers of the United States are found in Africa when we ask about the American approach to politics democracy the way we do business it's in Africa more than anywhere else in Europe views about the American approach have been less positive despite our improved ratings they continue to be less positive but region by region it varies one of the most surprising findings consistently in our surveys have been that in the Middle East where we're poorly regarded there's such a high positive response to the American way of doing business so it's very varied there's quite a bit of work material in our work over the years on these questions Question in the far back Nick Rosalini, Roosevelt Campus Network in regards to the extremely low numbers in Pakistan could you comment on the interplay between presumably negative views on American operations against terrorism in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere and also United States policy towards India especially in light of the nuclear deal signed in 2005 Yeah I can comment on what we found last year which I suspect is not going to be too different than what we found this year the American in Pakistan there's a good there's much more concern much more concern about terrorism al Qaeda and the Taliban in recent years than there was three or four years ago and they share with the United States the Pakistani public shares with the United States great concerns about Islamic extremism and terrorism but that has not led to an improved opinion of the United States because the United States has seen as going off and and conducting its own campaign to deal with terrorism without without reference to the government of Pakistan and challenging the sense that the United States has its partner in this anti-terrorism effort so while there's greater there's a much greater shared concerns about terrorism in Pakistan it hasn't improved the image of the United States We're going to go directly back here and then we're going to come back on this side Thomas Gulbunas Embassy of Lithuania Did your survey also explore the attitude towards issues like democracy and human rights in those countries We did not do that in this survey but we've done it in many other surveys over the years but not much well I guess in the Pakistan survey which we've yet to release we do look at the issues of democracy and human rights but this was not a general topic of this particular survey but it has been over the course of the years we're going to go right over here bringing the microphone down front Marissa Kramer of the Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies I wanted to ask about the distinction if you tested that in your surveys between the views of Obama in terms of will he do the right thing and the confidence people place in him versus views of America and Americans in general and the American political system in general Well what we see is a tremendous correlation between the positive views that people have of Obama and the trend in the way they regard the United States the issue has been I think the issue continues to be how how strong is this linkage on how to what extent will it persist over time if the publics around the world become disaffected with Obama's approach on Afghanistan or Iran or Israel and affect the improved image of the United States to my view I'll come back to a theme and that is the issue that really affected the image of the US in the Bush years was the sense that America's power was unchecked, unbridled and went off and did its own thing contrary to world public opinion on Iraq and on other issues from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib and so on and so forth and unless we get to a situation where people around the world begin to think that way about the United States, probably the image of the US will will remain improved even if there's more disappointment with Obama over time We've got time for about two more we're going to go on the way back over here My name is Henderson Trevskir I'm from the Roosevelt Institute since Obama took offices drastically increased the amount of predator drone strikes in the border regions between Afghanistan and Pakistan although we've seen the numbers very low already in Pakistan could you give us a sense about how that has affected public opinion in Pakistan I can't but I will we have a report that will be out in a few weeks that looks at that very question We'll look forward to hearing that we're going to last question right here in the front Thank you, Carl Dahlman George Sun University One issue that I found very interesting given that there's so much concern about economic future the question on trade the people were very supportive of trade I wondered if in this survey or in others you explore more the concern about increasing protectionism in the world giving more competition and global restructuring that's going on Well I think that as a rationalist it may sound there are often two thoughts that run hand in hand we want more trade but we want to be protected at the same time I think many of our surveys have shown that sentiment that sentiment exists here With that I'd like to thank Andy Kohut for this terrific presentation and for all the great questions were asked today let's give Andy a round of applause Thank you We'll have this presentation up at CSIS.org later and please visit CSIS.org Thanks