“According to Gallup polls in over a hundred countries”:http://www.gallup.com/poll/146771/Worldwide-Approval-Leadership-Tops-Major-Powers.aspx, average global approval for the leadership of the United States is higher than for other obvious candidate countries. While there was a slight decline in 2010 compared to 2009, approval under the Obama administration is markedly higher than it was under the Bush administration. The trends are not even across the globe, with approval for the U.S. “suffering especially in the Americas”:http://www.gallup.com/poll/146555/Leadership-Approval-Loses-Momentum-Worldwide.aspx in 2010. Perhaps Obama’s recent trip has some effect in that regard. China appears to have lost some momentum.
Whether all of this matters is a matter of debate. Global politics is, after all, not a popularity contest where you lose if you are voted off the island (no matter how much Thomas Friedman “may want that”:http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/09/opinion/vote-france-off-the-island.html). There is some evidence that it can be important. For example, Alan Krueger and Jitka Maleckova found in an “article”:http://www.sciencemag.org/content/325/5947/1534.full?ijkey=eYZ1CDBR05j9o&keytype=ref&siteid=sci published in _Science_ that there is
bq. a greater incidence of international terrorism when people of one country disapprove of the leadership of another country.
It is also often hypothesized (though I am not aware of good evidence) that it is easier to build coalitions on foreign policy issues when popularity is high. The rationale is that it may be easier for, say the French president, to cooperate with the U.S. when the French public values U.S. leadership than when it does not (this is “some evidence for the importance of electoral mechanisms”:http://jpr.sagepub.com/content/46/2/219.short). Nevertheless, increasing U.S. standing across the globe was one of the Obama administration’s main “campaign promises and an important issue in US public opinion in 2008.”:https://themonkeycage.org/2009/10/apsa_task_force_on_us_standing.html It is hard to deny that the initial numbers look good for Obama. We’ll see what happens after the Libya intervention.