When an audience member interrupted Barack Obama's June 4 speech in Cairo with an emphatic "we love you," it only confirmed what poll after poll has shown: U.S. standing in the world is on the mend. But as American backpackers swap Canadian flag patches for the Stars and Stripes, the American Political Science Association warns in a report released today that those gains mask deeper global dissatisfaction with American economic and military policies.

First, the good news: A Pew poll released July 23 showed America's image around the world making huge gains in 2009, thanks in large part to Obama's election. The U.S. made the biggest inroads in Europe and Latin America, where approval numbers had tapered off the most during the Bush years.

But those improvements distract from the longer-term erosion of U.S. standing in the world, the APSA report argues. And no public opinion poll can get at deeper undercurrents affecting U.S. standing, said Cornell University professor Peter Katzenstein, immediate past president of the association, at a panel discussion today.

The report points to the U.N. General Assembly, where support for U.S. positions has been steadily slipping for four decades, a trend that accelerated during the Bush administration. Agreement in the General Assembly between the U.S. and countries in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and East Asia dropped by 50 percent since 2000, as measured by votes on General Assembly resolutions. The U.S. now votes with non-European countries less often on average than it did with the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

"If U.S. standing is eroding, we ought to see it here," said George Washington University professor and report co-author Martha Finnemore at the panel. "This is the canary in the coal mine."

Even some of the gains in public opinion are less impressive on closer inspection. The U.S. made the most inroads in the Pew poll with longstanding allies, whose recent anti-Americanism is closer to friendly criticism than outright hostility, with France (42 percent approval in 2008 to 75 percent in 2009), Germany (31 to 64) and Mexico (47 to 69) leading the way.

In regions where the U.S. has weaker diplomatic ties, the Obama bounce has been less pronounced. The U.S. saw more modest gains in the Middle East, China and India in the Pew poll, while approval numbers in Russia and Pakistan actually declined. And in a Sept. 22 Gallup poll, eight Asian countries gave U.S. leadership similarly tepid reviews.

Still, good international standing isn't the only element of effective diplomacy. In 2005, when global opinions of the U.S. had reached their nadir, the Princeton Project on National Security found that "evidence of the practical impact of anti-Americanism is less widespread than some might expect."

Jeffrey Legro, a professor at the University of Virginia and a co-author of the report, agreed. "We are not claiming that standing is the silver bullet of American foreign policy," he said.