After Israel's attack on Rafah, a German think tank spoke out at a sensitive moment: supporting Israel has become a negative asset of US diplomacy, the war continues to ferment, European countries are also standing against the United States, and Biden is pushing the world to China.
On May 8, the German think tank and polling agency Rattana Research Company published a report, saying that "in the course of the current round of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the United States' stubborn insistence on supporting Israel has seriously damaged the international prestige of the United States, resulting in a serious deterioration of its international image in the Middle East, Africa and other regions."
According to the agency, which collected the views of more than 63,000 respondents in 53 countries and regions around the world, the global popularity of the United States has declined by 5% overall since the outbreak of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on October 7, 2023, as of early May, with the Middle East being most pronounced in particular.
The poll also shows that people's perception of the United States in Europe has deteriorated significantly, and the proportion of respondents who have a positive view of the United States has dropped from 18% to 10%.
However, there are obviously some debatable points in this data, and the negative diplomatic impact of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict on the United States is indeed not small, but it obviously overestimates the degree of support of the European and American people for Palestine, and underestimates the results of the United States' deep cultivation in the economically developed regions of East Asia and Europe over the years, otherwise it is difficult for us to understand why Europe is now pro-American as a whole if only 10% of Europeans have a positive view of the United States.
But it is still a warning sign for the Biden administration: Israel's misdeeds are making them a negative asset for the United States at the diplomatic level, and the Biden administration's actions of allowing Israel to behave unscrupulously and paying lip service to a few words to dissociate themselves from Israel will not fool everyone.
Frederick Devoe, a researcher at the Ratana company who participated in the poll, pointed out to the media: The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is the most serious diplomatic test that the United States has encountered in recent years, and the Biden administration's foreign policy in the previous period has earned it a good reputation in Europe, but after the outbreak of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, many European countries have given a negative view of the Biden administration for the first time. Its image in Europe has gone through a process of negative (under Trump) to positive (before and during the Biden administration) to negative (after the outbreak of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict).
There is much evidence that the Biden administration should do something about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but they have not done so, and the United States is pushing the world toward China based on a variety of initiatives based on traditionally pro-Israel policies.
North Africa and the Middle East have seen the most positive views of Palestine in North Africa and the Middle East, up from 19 percent before the conflict to 30 percent, and in Europe, where the United States is intensively farming, the percentage has also risen significantly.
Although objectively speaking, China's influence in this Palestinian-Israeli conflict is relatively limited, and humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip will even be stuck at the port by Israel because it is entered through the United Nations channel. We have high expectations for the proper resolution of this hot-button issue.
At present, however, the direction of the development of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is still generally maintained, maintaining the trend of worsening the image of the United States and improving the diplomatic situation of China and Russia.
Around the time of the release of the poll conducted by the German agency, Israel had begun a large-scale attack on Rafah, a port in southern Gaza, where more than 1.4 million refugees had taken refuge, and which is also an important distribution center for Gaza's supplies, and Israel is likely to create a serious humanitarian crisis in Rafah, at a time when the Biden administration's actions are still as rhetorical as before. They claim that they will cut off the supply of military aid to Israel, but the problem is that no one knows if they will actually do so.
Americans have also always claimed that they are hostile to terrorist groups such as the Islamic State, but everyone also knows that the United States and Israel are behind a significant proportion of extremist armed groups in the Middle East.
After the outbreak of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the Biden administration has shown serious weakness in Israel's policy, on the one hand, they maintain the policy inertia of supporting Israel and are unwilling to break the status quo, on the other hand, they are also worried about the criticism of the international community, and they verbally oppose Israel, but the United States has never given any support for Palestine when the United Nations voted!
In fact, even in the United States, there is no way to hide the voice of support for Palestine, and most polls show that more than half of the people in the United States oppose Israel's continuation of the war and support an armistice. The pro-Palestinian student movement has also swept colleges and universities across the United States, and it can be said that it would be highly desirable for the United States to be able to calm the Israeli-Palestinian conflict right now, both inside and outside.
But the Biden administration does not dare to abandon Israel, they have done all the bad things in the Middle East in the past 30 years, the Middle East region has long been boiling with public resentment, Israel has been their last strategic fulcrum in the Middle East, without Israel the United States will lose the right to speak in the Middle East, do you want to expect Saudi Arabia to give the Americans a head?
So at the moment, the United States is in a very embarrassing situation, supporting Israel is to be their accomplice, if you don't support Israel, the Middle East strategy will usher in a comprehensive failure, no matter how you choose, the difference is just the size of the loss, so the Biden administration will continue to support Israel, it's just infamy, who cares? The risk of a strategic collapse in the Middle East is not something that anyone can afford to bear. As for supporting Israel and pushing the world's onlookers to China's side, this relatively small loss is naturally not taken into account.