Europeans see in Barack Obama as an intelligent, public-spirited leader, a far cry from their own, and ignore his actual record. In Germany, France, Spain and Britain, more than 70% said they trusted Obama "to do the right thing in world affairs". The strange thing is that much of what Europeans loathed about the Bush era remains intact. Moreover, Europe is implicated in many of the areas where foreign policy has stalled. Part of the problem with Guantánamo is that European governments refused to take many of the prisoners. Some applauded America's intensification of the war in Afghanistan even as they planned to unilaterally draw down their own troops.
Why do Europeans love him so much? Many of the original reasons still stand. He isn't George Bush, although how long that negative qualification remains meaningful is a moot point. He also emerged at a moment when European political leadership was in a particularly parlous state. Europeans don't just love Obama more than Americans do. They love him more than they love the people they have elected themselves. One reason Obama is so popular in Europe is partly because he has emerged at a time when European leadership was in such a parlous state.
But in many ways Europe's Obamaphilia has always been as much a reflection of its weaknesses as his strengths. Like royalists in search of a benevolent monarch in whom they could invest great hopes but over whom they had no democratic control, they have sought not to leverage their own power but instead to trust in somebody else's.
And those weaknesses have grown. In the continuing fallout of the financial crisis, the continent is struggling to keep itself together. The fate of the euro has been openly questioned.
And while many of the problems that dogged transatlantic relationships remain, almost everything else has changed. The Arab spring laid bare both the US's and Europe's waning influence on the world, while demands to retain the chairmanship of the IMF smack of anachronistic entitlement against the rising power of more dynamic developing economies.
European's attitudes towards Obama tell us more about Europe than they do about the US president. And what they say about both is not particularly impressive.
