Is America's Image Overseas Improving?

David Ignatius attempts this morning to give a six-month report card on the Obama foreign policy. Along the way, he breezily makes the point about America's image overseas having been raised, resuscitated, increased or whatever. And for evidence he cites.....two former American national security advisers.

How about consulting someone from the Polish government, whose bold steps in cooperating on central European missile-defense policy were turned into a political nightmare by the retrenchment of the Obama Administration. Or how about someone from the British Foreign Office--you remember them, right--our special friends--to see how "special" they feel nowadays. Or perhaps one could interview someone from the Israeli government, and ask whether Obama's ridiculous relativism in his Cairo speech (yes there was a Holocaust that killed six million Jews, but there are also Palestinian refugee camps....) makes our most important Middle East ally feel any better about their precarious position. Maybe Ignatius could talk to someone in either France or Germany's Ministry of Finance and ask them how they feel about the "stimulative" nature of Mr. Obama's spending proposals.

For further evidence of America's enhanced position in the world, Ignatius turns to that wizened arbiter of international relations....Rahm Emanuel, who happens to also be President Obama's Chief of Staff. Here's Emanuel on the state of play: "We have taken off the table reflexive anti-Americanism as a reason not to deal with us," says Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff. "We're not shimmying in the end zone. But we are a long way from where we began."

The naivete of these folks is stunning.