In the United States, confidence in President Obama’s leadership and policies may have taken some serious knocks since his inauguration, but America’s head of state frequently boasts that his presidency has revitalized the nation’s tarnished reputation and clout around the world.

“Tonight we can say that American leadership has been renewed and America’s standing has been restored,” the president boasted during his State of the Union address in January.

At the United Nations this week, the president may be in open disagreement about statehood with the leaders of one of his (and America’s) strongest detractors -- the Palestinians -- but he’s also selling the U.S. role as indispensable helper. Tuesday’s example was the U.N.- and NATO-backed interventions that helped drive Libyan strongman Moammar Gaddafi from power.

The lesson in Libya, Obama said during a speech in New York, was that the finest results are achieved when allies “stand together as one.”

“You will have a friend and partner in the United States of America,” he promised the Libyan people during his U.N. remarks. (The president will give a formal address to the General Assembly Wednesday morning.) “We will stand with you as you seize this moment of promise, as you reach for the freedom, the dignity, and the opportunity that you deserve.”

A little more than a year before he faces economically distressed voters at home, Obama’s reputation for leadership on the world stage remains on solid footing in most countries, according to polls, even as international assessments of the political newcomer have grown more equivocal around the world since his historic 2008 election.

By most measures, Obama’s favorable reception abroad now outstrips his standing at home, even as public criticisms of his policies in other countries become more evident. Eighty-eight percent of Germans in 2011 expressed confidence in Obama to do the right thing in world affairs, according to a leading U.S. survey of world opinion, conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project. That’s a fall-off of only 5 percent for Obama in Germany since Pew’s global survey in 2009, and it remains 74 percentage points higher than when President Bush left off in 2008.

Similarly in Great Britain, Obama continues to be appreciated as the un-Bush president. Obama’s election attracted an 86 percent confidence measure in 2009 in the U.K., compared with just 16 percent for Bush in 2008. President Obama’s standing in the U.K. has dropped 11 percentage points since his election, but three-quarters of Britons continue to say they support Obama’s handling of foreign affairs, according to the Pew survey this year.

Confidence in Obama’s international leadership is at 84 percent in France, just seven points below the stratospheric 91 percent seen in 2009. His regard in France compares with consistently low confidence measures expressed in that country for the unilateralist policies of his predecessor.

Where erosion of support abroad for Obama’s leadership becomes easier to see is in the number of countries surveyed by Pew since 2009 in which majorities of global publics say they are not confident in his handling of world affairs. In 2009, that number was seven out of 23 countries; in 2010, it was eight out of 21; and this year, it had risen to 12 of 23 countries surveyed.

Two-and-a-half years into his presidency, Obama revels in the international repair work he promised during his campaign, even as some of the tangible results have been slow to materialize. The United States is not yet out of Iraq, and Obama surged additional troops into Afghanistan. Terrorists -- striking in Afghanistan and Turkey just this week -- still manage to use violence to register opposition.