Muscatine

President Obama entered office promising a new dawn in America’s relations
with Muslim nations. He reached out to the Muslim world, offering apologies and
a warm embrace. The theory was that, by showing more understanding of Muslim
grievances, they would respond in kind.

It didn’t turn out that way. A recent Pew Research Center survey of opinions
in the Muslim world shows America’s image there has not improved. In Jordan,
Turkey and Pakistan - Muslim nations with which the U.S. maintains close
relations - views are more negative today than a year ago. Most Muslims
disapprove of how Mr. Obama has responded to the Arab Spring.

If anything, paranoia about the U.S. is worse today than it was a few years
ago. Most Muslims surveyed by Pew in March and April do not believe that Arabs
were responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Indeed, the survey found no Muslim public
in which even 30 percent accept the fact that Arabs conducted the attacks.
Particularly depressing, Muslims in Jordan, Egypt, and Turkey - again countries
with historically good ties to the West - are even less likely to believe it
today than in 2006. 

A paradox emerges in these findings. The more Westerners try to accept blame
for bad relations with the Muslim world, the more the Muslim world blames
Westerners. Almost 30 percent of Americans hold themselves responsible for bad
relations with the Muslim world. Muslims mainly blame Westerners. Majorities in
six of seven Muslim nations believe Westerners are mostly to blame. That figure
goes as high as 75 percent in Turkey and 72 percent in Pakistan.

Which raises a question: If Muslim people are anti-Western because they
believe, incorrectly, that Westerners are largely anti-Muslim, what can we do
about it? Their grievances are so entrenched that very little of what Americans
say or do will change their opinions because they are based not on reality, but
on imagination.

Most Muslims also blame the West for their economic ills, even though their
own economically oppressive governments are the root of the problem. America’s
support of Israel is a huge negative in their eyes, but so, too, is our support
for the regimes that rule over them. This may be understandable, but I doubt
that a wholesale U.S. condemnation of regimes in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and other
Arab states would make Muslim publics any less anti-American. After all, the
U.S. actually went to war to remove genocidal regimes in Bosnia and Iraq, and
all we got for our trouble was widespread condemnation in the Muslim world, not
to mention assertions that we did so mainly to kill Muslims.

Here’s the rub: The U.S. can try to do the right thing like removing
genocidal regimes and abandoning oppressive authoritarians such as former
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, but it does little or nothing to change Muslim
views of America. Muslims claim to want more democracy, of which America is the
standard bearer, but their anti-American complexes and grievances are so huge
that they are forever trying to find some third Muslim way that ignores hundreds
of years of historical experience, born mainly in the West, of what works and
what doesn’t.

This is not about who’s right or wrong. We can argue with Muslim nations all
day long about our support for Israel, but it won’t make any difference. In
fact, Israel could disappear tomorrow, and we would still have a problem. The
root of the problem is a great historical divide, going back centuries, which
will not be easily manipulated by public diplomacy programs or expressions of
good will.

This is a problem to be managed, not solved. No amount of Obama-like
engagement will change Muslim public opinion about America and the West. They
hold their views for historically complex reasons, which more often than not are
reflections of their internal problems rather than objective reactions to what
we do.

Kim R. Holmes, a former assistant secretary of state, is a vice president
at the Heritage Foundation.