While Judt is an observer, and is very interesting, I think he's been thinking a little too far outside the box for [url=http://www.signandsight.com/features/2024.html]humanism[/url], lately:

[i]He has just published a new book "Ill Fares the Land", an impassioned appeal for social democracy in western societies, and he also working on a study of the modern railway. Here he explains why he does not believe in democracy without state control: "The question is, what do we do now, in a world where, in the absence of liberal aristocracies, in the absence of social democratic elites whose authority people accept, you have people who genuinely believe, in the majority, that their interest consists of maximizing self-interest at someone else's expense? The answer is, either you re-educate them in some form of public conversation or we will move toward what the ancient Greeks understood very well, which is that the closest system to democracy is popular authoritarianism. And that's the risk we run. Not a risk of a sort of ultra-individualism in a disaggregated society but of a kind of de facto authoritarianism."[/i]

That's a rather low view of man, and an evel lower view of the citizen-participant in public life, not that the idea wouldn't appeal to the editors of [i]The Nation[/i]

By transatlantic, it requires that it involve someone across the Atlantic.

Clegg has no influence in international affairs. In fact, his party is so internally focussed on social policy, that it is likely that he will have a very naive and awkward view of external affairs - peppered with obsessions of things he wanted to see banned from import because of one activist movement or another.

He's basically just another leftist. In fact the number of statesmanlike, geopolitical thinkers in Europe seems to be dwindling, if you look at it in historical terms. Basically there are a handful of academics, and some people who popularly follow them with the idea that the transnational non-nation that is the EU is making the rest of humanity (what with all of their voting, separation of powers, and the like) "obselete" - in favor of the top-down superstate with a active PR machine.

It's electioneering, just as it was when no. 10 made a "declaration" that the special relationship was over came 3 weeks ago. To boot, it means nothing, other than an observation of the meaning of those ties at this point.

Zum [url=http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/vote_2010/lib+dem+foreign+policies+++cleggampaposs+achilles+heel/3622587]beispiel[/url]: [i]"We first need to acknowledge the fact that we still too readily put ourselves in a position of unthinking subservience to American interests", Clegg has said, lambasting what he calls a "lopsided asymmetrical relationship".

Clegg will insist that he is not anti-American, merely repositioning that relationship. But his attack does open him up to a potential counter-attack from Gordon Brown.

A senior intelligence source recently told me that the US gives the UK four times the amount of intelligence that we give them. If Brown made more of the advantages of this intelligence-sharing in the battle against terrorism, then the accompanying scandals of torture and "extraordinary rendition" might lose some of their sting from Clegg tonight.

Ironically for Clegg, the "special relationship" has already cooled, though this has happened at Washington's end. George Bush was an Anglophile, while Barack Obama does not seem to be.[/i]

This is NOT the sign of a sophisticate ready to take on the world's problems, he's just a UK analog for the media-and-instiutionally-generated Obama effect. In fact neither of them, themselves, seem to show any natural capacity to be anything other than isolationists forced to hand an unusually large amount of tending to international relations thrust to appointees.

While they both seem like intelligent men, a grip on what the dealings of the world are really like isn't a strength with either of them. It is not a matter as it would be at home of showing up in a city and trying to be convivial, and then disappearing as though it was an election campaign or a llegislative-agenda-tour.

Clegg's foreign policy statements have been limited to issues sounding like little more than protester style angry sloganeering about the past. Face it: the guy is just another local politician with a campaign manager, (not a policy nerd) for every sectored voter issue.

Irrelevant. You want props for your guy, and are ignoring his wooden policy history with popularity with average consumers of media.

You're talking about a public opinion poll. HOW is that to translate into anything other than OTHER public opinion polls reflecting equally showy figures?
In any event, even if you believe that personal popularity results in, say, Putin actually listening to the State Department, what results from it 6 years from now? Zilch. Bupcus.

[i]THAT[/i] is ignorant, and even worse, self-deluding.

You'll also note from the item you're employing for [url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/160410bbcwspoll.pdf]domestic political purposes[/url], entirely unrelated to understanding America's foreign policy standing, that the nations who say Bush in a positive light were not polled in at all, and those most likely to have the social infrastructure that promotes "banging pots in the street for world peace" are.
Also providing pointless conclusions if, as you say, you want to use it to understand THE NATION's standing in the world, as opposed to THE PRESIDENT's popularity with people who neither have any policy influence, nor vote.

It's a specious poll, and will translate in no way to a benefit to the US, but merely to the President himself, if I'm to take your comment at face value - which seems to be all you care about.

You'll recall that after his election day, the German press was given to calling him things like "Daddy Cool". Take a trip in the wayback machine, and tell me how useful the president's popularity in a society that cranks out that kind of sputum does for the nation.

As far as responses from shopkeepers, high school students, etal, has the foreign policy relevance of asking people what flavor of gelato they would prefer on a sunny summer day.