Despite all the work the Obama administration has invested in wooing the Arab world, Islamic countries distrust the United States about as much as they did when George W. Bush was president, according to a Pew survey.

As president, Mr. Bush was described by pollsters as a gun-toting “cowboy” whose unilateral, uncompromising foreign policy inflamed tensions within the Arab world and severely injured America’s global reputation. The supposed remedy to this problem was the replacement of the Republican administration with one willing to take a softer, more multilateral tack on foreign affairs.

Despite an early Pew poll indicating that the election of President Barack Obama was helping restore America’s reputation, this “hagiographic storyline,” as Joseph Loconte put it in the American last week, “is evaporating like a morning mist.”

Citing a more recent Pew survey, conducted just after Mr. Obama’s address to the Muslim world in Cairo earlier this year, Loconte wrote,

A newer Pew survey suggests that most Islamic countries distrust the United States under the leadership of President Obama about as much as they did under President George W. Bush. Yes, majorities of the Muslim populations interviewed still believe that America plays a mostly destructive role in the world. Most view the United States as “an enemy” and “a military threat” to their own country. Most disapprove of the American-led effort to combat terrorism. Large numbers, in fact, voice strong support for terrorism and Osama bin Laden. Western Europeans, though expressing positive personal views of Obama, show little enthusiasm for key U.S. foreign-policy objectives. In other words, anti-Americanism is alive and well in the age of Obama.

And this is after months of the Obama administration courting the Muslim world with a steady stream of apologies, concessions and promises. The results are revealing, says Loconte, because they expose the liberal assumptions about radical Islam as “desperate falsehoods.”

Take Pakistan, for example. In recent years America has sunk literally tens of millions of dollars, countless political and military man-hours, and boatloads of aid and supplies into that country. For what?

[O]nly about 16 percent of respondents [in Pakistan] express a positive view of the United States—a drop of 3 percentage points from when Bush was president. … [M]ost Pakistanis (64 percent) view the United States as an enemy. The most alarming finding, in view of Pakistan’s nuclear capability, is that more people express positive views of Osama bin Laden than they do of Obama. Let that soak in. Nearly one in five respondents (18 percent) trust bin Laden to “do the right thing” in world affairs, compared to 13 percent for Obama. Given al Qaeda’s record of slaughtering Muslims as effortlessly as they do Western infidels, the Pakistani psyche seems headed for moral collapse.

The situation across much of the rest of the world is similarly grim. A recent World Public Opinion survey echoed the Pew findings, showing that many people in Muslim-majority states believe the U.S. is playing a largely negative role in the world.

The widespread assumption in the Obama administration and among liberals is that America’s past actions are the root cause of anti-Americanism. With this falsehood as their premise, liberals believe the chief way to overcome anti-Americanism and restore confidence in the U.S. is to maintain a policy void of self-interest and dominated by appeasement, diplomacy and compromise.

This approach, as the unrelenting attitude of anti-Americanism still prevailing in the world shows, is misguided—and ultimately, it will be ruinous. To learn the true source of anti-Americanism, read “Land of the Free and Home of the Hated.”