A warming world and frosty Aussies

President Bush has had a pretty good foreign policy run as of late. Last month Europe decided to maintain its arms embargo on China (though this issue hasn’t gone away) and this month accepted Paul Wolfowitz’s nomination as World Bank President without firing a rhetorical shot. The French have returned to their usual exercises in Anglophobe hysteria — now they’re worried about the hegemony of Google. In the rest of thw world, that whole “freedom on the march” deal is looking pretty good. Kyrgyzstan’s transition to democracy “has been largely peaceful” according to the BBC. Syria has now set April 30th as the actual deadline for its military withdrawal from Lebanon. Finally, President Bush just had a fruitful meeting with Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, promising help in getting Ukraine into NATO and the WTO (though he didn’t go as far as Slate’s Peter Savodnik would have liked). In Iraq, the news is also trending upwards. 64 Sunni scholars recently issued a fatwa declaring that Sunnis could join Iraq’s security forces in order to prevent the country from falling into the “the hands of those who have caused chaos, destruction and violated the sanctities.” The violent insurgency has died down as of late; Britain’s senior military official in Iraq declared that the insurgents were “running out of steam.” So things are apparently going swimmingly for Bush. But — you knew there was a “but” — there’s this Australian poll reported in the Economist that’s nagging at me:

THERE are few stauncher allies of America than Australia. John Howard, the prime minister, was one of the first leaders to commit troops to the war in Iraq, and recently dispatched another contingent. His conservative coalition government has forged a free-trade agreement with the United States. Mr Howard may be right when he boasts that Australia’s relationship with America has never been closer. But he is on shakier ground when he says that the American alliance is “very central to the Australian psyche”. An opinion poll published on March 28th asked Australians to rank a list of 15 countries and regions by their “positive feelings”. America came eleventh, at 58%, just behind Malaysia and Papua New Guinea. Only Indonesia, the Middle East, Iran and Iraq rated worse. The highest rating country (surprisingly, given their neighbourly rivalry) was New Zealand, which 94% of Australians felt positive about, followed by Britain, the EU and Japan. The doubts about America did not stop there. Among ten potential threats from the outside world, 57% of Australians believed American foreign policies were as dangerous as Islamic fundamentalism. While 72% of Australians saw the American alliance as important for their country’s security, more than two out of three thought Australia took too much notice of the United States in shaping its foreign policy. Asked if Australia should support America in any conflict with China over Taiwan, 72% said no.

Click here for the whole poll, which was sponsored by the Lowy Institute. One could dismiss this as an irrelevant poll in a country led by a very pro-American government. Or one could think of this as one of those data points suggesting that other countries/populations are just biding their time until they can act to subvert U.S. interests. I’ll leave that debate to the readers.