A year after the Cairo speech, Pew finds Muslim antipathy to Obama and his foreign policies, the outlier to a poll that generally finds foreign receptivity to the U.S. to have increased in the Obama era. What’s that demonstrate? That public diplomacy, plus or minus substantive policy changes, equals… well, the results of the new Pew poll of international attitudes. Here’s what Marc Lynch observed in my Washington Independent piece this morning:

Lynch, who also recently evaluated Obama’s counterterrorism efforts for CNAS partially through the prism of Muslim acquiescence, disputed that the Pew numbers demonstrate that Obama’s outreach to the Muslim world was in vain. “It’s more that he said he would do things, but thus far hasn’t delivered,” Lynch said, “so the words lose their meaning. It’s a real problem for the broader counterterrorism strategy, since winning over mainstream support is absolutely key to the strategy.”

Malcolm Nance has the good idea that we ought to reorient our strategic communications and public diplomacy not to tell America’s good story, but to tell a bad story about al-Qaeda. He calls his plan the cool-sounding CIRCUIT BREAKER in his new book An End to al-Qaeda, and you can almost hear Jim Glassman and Mike Doran and everyone else who views public diplomacy as a counterterrorism tool — and you guys know I find a lot of merit in that perspective — standing up and applauding.

Over beers this week, Malcolm mostly convinced me that his strategy has the virtue of being agnostic about Muslim antipathy to the U.S., but I still retain some concern that if we’re the ones telling the CIRCUIT BREAKER story we still run into a credibility problem, particularly if we don’t demonstrate more vigorous leadership in the Arab-Israeli peace process or other issues of resonance in the Muslim world. By the same token, if Obama can make some headway on those issues, the dividend payoff for CIRCUIT BREAKER could be great.

Also, to dispense with a canard: public diplomacy and foreign public opinion is not about winning a popularity contest and it’s not its own virtue. It’s to build up trust amongst foreign publics so that when you occasionally take steps that they disapprove of, it doesn’t wreck your relationship. One of the chief mistakes of the Obama administration’s foreign policy to date is that the administration assumed more trust existed amongst chief allies and partners — Israel is a good example — than actually existed, hoping to pocket the extant relationship while turning its attention to outreach to adversaries or rapproachement with Russia. But it turns out, like in any relationship, you can’t take anything for granted and you need to constantly cultivate your traditional allies and partners, too, especially if you’re going to ask them to do unpleasant things.