A recent Foreign Affairs article by Amaney Jamal and Michael Robbins of the Arab Barometer public opinion project carries a blunt headline: “America Has Lost the Arab World.” Drawing on surveys conducted across eight Arab countries in the second half of 2025, Jamal and Robbins document a collapse in US standing in the region that goes well beyond opposition to the specific policies of any single administration. Only 25 percent of respondents in Egypt, for example, believe the United States upholds international law, compared to 58 percent who say that China does. Asked whether US or Chinese policies better protect freedoms and rights, more respondents in all countries said that China protected freedoms and rights more than the United States does. The percentage of respondents in multiple countries who chose the United States as the best third party to help resolve the Israeli–Palestinian conflict numbered in the single digits.
The Arab Opinion Index—the largest longitudinal public opinion survey in the Arab world […]—shows a steady trajectory of deepening public disillusionment with the United States.
The article’s headline conveys urgency, but the trend that it describes has been building for more than a decade. The Arab Opinion Index—the largest longitudinal public opinion survey in the Arab world, conducted by the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies (ACRPS) across 15 countries since 2011—shows a steady trajectory of deepening public disillusionment with the United States. The share of Arab citizens who identify the United States as the greatest threat to the Arab nation has hovered between 21 and 29 percent across each of the nine survey rounds conducted since 2011—second only to Israel. The proportion of respondents rejecting the claim that the United States protects human rights rose from 49 percent in 2014 to 55 percent in the most recent survey. Seventy-six percent view US policy toward Palestine negatively. ACRPS polling reveals that America’s poor standing in Arab public opinion predates the war in Gaza by many years.
Arab public opinion is not simply expressing a backlash against the Gaza genocide, the Iran war, or even the Trump administration. Instead, Arab perceptions of Washington’s role in the region reflect a much deeper crisis in the US-led international order
An Order That Was Never Universal
For decades, the dominant account of the post-World War II international order held that American power was different in kind from that of previous hegemons. The United States, so the argument went, had constructed a rules-based architecture—multilateral institutions, democratic norms, open markets—and had even accepted constraints on its own behavior in exchange for the legitimacy that this international system provided. It presided over an order that the democratic club of states, primarily in the West, genuinely regarded as legitimate.
The Middle East, however, was governed through a different logic. In this region, the West’s overriding imperative was to secure freedom of navigation through critical strategic infrastructure—the Strait of Hormuz, the Suez Canal, the Bab al-Mandab—and shoring up the authoritarian regimes that could be trusted to protect these locations in line with Western interests, regardless of their human rights records or respect for liberal freedoms. This position was repeatedly demonstrated by Washington’s policies in the Arab world: its 2003 invasion of Iraq, which destroyed a state and led to a catastrophic power vacuum; its unconditional support for Israeli governments regardless of their conduct; and its backing for the ongoing war in Gaza.
Declining Legitimacy, Global Consequences
Perhaps the most significant finding in the Arab Barometer data is precisely what it reveals about how Arab public opinion sees the international system, not just the United States. Between 40 and 50 percent of respondents say the United Nations (UN) sides more often with Israel than with Palestinians. As Jamal and Robbins conclude, many Arab citizens no longer see the problem as one of double standards alone: the root cause is the bankruptcy of the entire international system.
Many Arab citizens no longer see the problem as one of double standards alone: the root cause is the bankruptcy of the entire international system.
Importantly, this criticism does not imply a rejection of democracy. The 2025 Arab Opinion Index found that 68 percent of Arab citizens still support democracy as a system of government, suggesting that the values themselves retain purchase even as the political institutions for realizing them lose credibility. But even if the loss of US legitimacy has not translated into a wholesale rejection of democratic values by Arab publics, it has certainly closed off a space that previously existed. For those who believed in democracy and accountability, there had always been a gap between American rhetoric and American practice. In that gap, Arab liberals, civil society activists, and democracy advocates could find leverage, pointing to America’s own founding principles and demanding that US government policy be brought in line with them.
That gap has disappeared. The Trump administration has dispensed entirely with the pretense of a rules-based order. The United States no longer even claims to be bound by international law or to oppose territorial expansionism. It has rewarded aggressors and sidelined their victims. President Donald Trump’s “Donroe Doctrine” and his Board of Peace have discarded the pretense of a rules-based order. His administration has invited authoritarian rulers charged with war crimes to sit alongside other world leaders on a board that seeks to manage, rather than resolve, conflicts. For democrats in the Arab world, there is no longer anything to leverage.
The Erosion of Potential
The genocide in Gaza, and the international community’s failure to stop it, has devastated a people and delegitimized institutions such as the UN that were intended to sustain liberal internationalism. This has handed a rhetorical gift of incalculable value to authoritarian governments in Iran, in Russia, in China, and across the Arab world: proof that the liberal order was always, as they insisted, merely a facade for Western domination.
What is being lost is not just American credibility, but the possibility of a more equitable rules-based order.
If human rights and democracy are universal, their meaning cannot be extinguished by American hypocrisy. But the institutions intended to uphold these values—however imperfectly they provided some counterweight to raw power—are now being dismantled. What is being lost is not just American credibility, but the possibility of a more equitable rules-based order that could one day exist.
Recommendations
The path to restoring any semblance of a rules-based order runs through the same place where that order was most comprehensively violated. The 2025 Arab Opinion Index is instructive: 44 percent of respondents say that a change in US policies toward Palestine—protecting Palestinians and halting support for Israel—would improve their view of the United States.
Future US administrations should also reconsider their approach to multilateral institutions, restoring rather than undermining mechanisms of international accountability. The United States should meaningfully engage with international institutions such as the International Criminal Court, not sanction them; support rather than block UN resolutions on Gaza; and stop treating international law as a tool to be deployed selectively in service of strategic interests.
These recommendations describe ideal scenarios. Given the current political climate in the United States, achieving such changes would require structural changes in the American political establishment—something for which Palestinians, among others, cannot afford to wait. For those who study and live through the consequences of international order and its absence, the task now is to think clearly about what comes next. If the idea of democracy and human rights has not been completely eroded in the eyes of Arab publics—and the polling data suggests that it has not—then something worth preserving remains. But preserving it requires honesty about how we got here, and, for civil society advocates in the United States and abroad, developing strategies that do not rely on US domestic politics. This means thinking about building multilateral efforts to uphold a rules-based order without waiting for the American establishment to shift course.
Any international order that emerges in the aftermath of the war on Iran and the Gaza genocide must take seriously the injustices that the United States systematically ignored.
Any international order that emerges in the aftermath of the war on Iran and the Gaza genocide must take seriously the injustices that the United States systematically ignored, reckon with the ongoing dispossession of peoples whose rights were never honored, and refuse to mistake the collapse of American hegemony for the death of the values that it claimed to champion yet never consistently practiced.
The views expressed in this publication are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the position of Arab Center Washington DC, its staff, or its Board of Directors.
