On Reputations, Confidence, and Expectations

In crawling the daily reading list today I came across a post over on Thomas Barnett's blog that is interesting to think about. In his post The "League of Democracies" prefers Obama—by a lot! Tom makes an interesting observation worth thinking about.

Polling data saying that if the election is held in Europe, Obama wins in a landslide.

It is interesting to consider what this means, if anything. My first reaction is to remind myself that when the founders of this nation produced a document called the Declaration of Independence, the opinion of Europeans regarding American politics became irrelevant.

But upon further reflection, there is more depth to this than my initial nationalistic reaction. There is a conventional wisdom put forward that America's reputation has declined in the world, and in Europe specifically. It is said that the decline of America's reputation is relevant to Americans, as if what other countries think about us is in constant motion and we the citizen must adjust our behavior to rebuild our popularity. This shame via reputation tactic to shape behavior is particularly popular among the global warming community.

We find this conventional wisdom regarding the relevance of European opinion of American reputation to be in direct contradiction with our concept of American independence and liberty. We see no evidence that an adjustment in the behavior of Americans will improve our nations reputation with Europe in any substantial way, indeed we see no evidence that our behavior has any effect on the nations reputation in any way.

As we think about the relationship between the US and Europe, we see no evidence that our 'reputation' has actually declined, nor that it ever moves much at all. It is important to understand why the terms matter, reputation is a personal term thus it inspires one to believe they have personal responsibility in upholding its value. These polls claim to measure reputation, but if you read the questions, they are actually measuring confidence, an abstract term that carries no personal attachment.

Europeans don't think less of Americans today than they did ten years ago, and the same is true in how Americans view Europeans. We each have perceptions of the other, if upon encounter the expectations are met during an encounter, the encounter is always pleasant. If expectations are not met, the encounter is recalled as less than pleasant. It really is that simple.

We tend to think the real issue behind all this "talk of America's bad reputation" is actually an issue of expectations. For example, the EU3 has absolutely failed miserably for at least 4 years now in trying to deal with the Iranian nuclear issue, and it is perhaps one of the greatest diplomatic failures in modern European history, and could potentially result in an incredibly costly war in the Middle East. Despite this absolute, total failure of European diplomacy, Americans don't think less of Germany, France, or Great Britain for their total failure in diplomacy. Why?

Because Americans never had any expectations the Europeans could solve the problem.

The reason the Europeans or anyone else might have a low opinion of the US, thus our terrible reputation, has everything to do with our leaderships inability to meet the high expectations our leadership set for the rest of the world regarding the influence and power of the United States. The reputation in America was unchanged even after the war in Iraq started, despite the lack of European approval for the war. The "reputation" of the US declined only after we failed to meet the expectations of a quick resolution to the Iraq war, expectations that US leadership set and did not meet.

Leadership is about setting expectations towards a positive goal, then meeting those expectations. Despite all the rhetoric about a bad reputation for the United States, if the next president can set reasonable expectations and meet or exceed those expectations, the "reputation" of America will make a 'remarkable' recovery.