Britain's Guardian newspaper reported on Thursday that 31 percent of 17,000 adults in 24 countries around the world surveyed on behalf of the Policy Institute at Kings College London viewed Iran as the country most likely to use its influence for bad, followed by Russia and Saudi Arabia (25 percent), Israel (24 percent) and the United States (22 percent).
The findings are being published to accompany a major speech by the former British foreign secretary David Miliband who argues that international relations are now governed by a new age of impunity in which war crimes and attacks on humanitarian workers are typically left unpunished. Although the US is seen by a high number as going backwards in the past 10 years, a balancing 17 percent say the US is more likely to use its influence for good now, higher than in Russia (13 percent), Israel (10 percent), Saudi Arabia (nine percent) and Iran (seven percent).