If the United States is the Earth’s last great imperial power, then the election of its leader is indeed a global event. On this event, in fact, the world has already spoken — in opinion poll terms at least. According to a recent Program on International Policy Attitudes poll (pdf format) of 35 countries on their election preferences, in only three (the Philippines, Poland, and Nigeria) was George Bush by relatively close margins the preferred candidate; in two (India and Thailand), the vote was split; in the rest the response was resounding. Kerry, for instance, swept Latin America and took Europe, Poland aside, by enormous margins (Norway, 74% to 7%; Germany, 74% to 10%; France, 64% to 5%; Italy, 58% to 14%; Spain, 45% to 7%; and Tony Blair’s UK by a remarkable 47% to 16%). Overall, Kerry was favored globally by a 2-to-1 margin. Even in most countries whose governments had contributed troops to Iraq, significant majorities favored Kerry and believed strongly that U.S. foreign policy was “on the wrong track.”

This may simply be an accentuation of the anybody-but-George vote in the United States raised to a global level and magnified. Because we Americans live in our own off-planet bubble, we have at best only a partial sense of exactly how much dismay, puzzlement, and anger has built up globally around Bush administration policies and George’s own person — and how much this has affected views of the United States. In Egypt, for instance, “just two years ago, Zogby [International] found that 76 percent of Egyptians had an unfavorable impression of the US. Today, that number is 98 percent.” On a planet never lacking in at least a modest percentage of “don’t knows,” such figures are unheard of.

As it happens, of course, only Americans are eligible to vote on the fate of the planet — and only a little more than half of those eligible to do so will. Still, part of John Kerry’s amble to the rescue here, has been a claim, when it comes to our disaster in Iraq, that he will fix matters by somehow bringing our allies and their troops into the mix. His is really a Vietnamization policy globalized — others should die for our mess — that’s hardly likely to appeal to those allies. To give him credit, though, his plan is far less vague (and a good deal more venal) than it’s usually made to sound. If you look at his NYU speech on Iraq, given last week, buried deep inside it is the following telltale, if hardly discussed, line:

“The president should convene a summit meeting of the world’s major powers and of Iraq‘s neighbors, this week, in New York, where many leaders will attend the U.N. General Assembly, and he should insist that they make good on the U.N. resolution. He should offer potential troop contributors specific but critical roles in training Iraqi security personnel and in securing Iraqi borders. He should give other countries a stake in Iraq‘s future by encouraging them to help develop Iraq‘s oil resources and by letting them bid on contracts instead of locking them out of the reconstruction process.”

While the Bush plan had been to turn over the “development” of what his administration carefully referred to as Iraq’s sacred “patrimony,” aka its oil, to American energy companies like you know which one (and in the process cut the weakling Europeans and clamoring Russians out of the mix), Kerry’s is clearly to reshuffle the deck and redistribute some of those Iraqi oil rights to our allies. Swiss journalist Bruno Giussani, in a calm review of European attitudes toward a future Kerry administration, has suggested that, when it comes to Iraq at least, whatever the offer, help will not be on the way.

Interestingly, even in the months before our invasion of Iraq, polls reflected the American public’s desire not to go to war essentially alone; and evidently the unending war in Iraq has only magnified an American urge toward multilateralism that was never on the Bush agenda. In the latest, authoritative (if underreported) Chicago Council on Foreign Relations poll, according to Jim Lobe of Inter Press Service, “overwhelming majorities of both the public and the elite said that the most important lesson of 9/11 is that the nation needs to ‘work more closely with other countries to fight terrorism’ as opposed to ‘act more on its own.’” Similarly large majorities rejected both a vision of the United States as the globe’s sole “policeman” and the President’s policy of “preventive war.” (“Only 17 percent of the public and 10 percent of leaders said that war was justifiable if the ‘other country is acquiring weapons of mass destruction that could be used against them at some point in the future.’”)

And yet, if the Europeans aren’t going to ride to John Kerry’s rescue in Iraq, neither will they be capable of doing so in the election campaign. Kerry’s recent attacks on the President’s Iraq and al-Qaeda policies — (“The president continues to live in a fantasy world of spin”) — have been simple, clear, effective, and backed up by the news from Iraq. But if his only solution to the Iraqi mess is bringing in allies, he’s in trouble nonetheless.

[This article first appeared 9/29/04 on Tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news, and opinion from Tom Engelhardt, long time editor in publishing and author of The End of Victory Culture and The Last Days of Publishing.]

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