President Barack Obama is clearly liked overseas – adored, in many quarters.

But is he respected?

Americans bathed in glowing press coverage of his trip evidently think so, judging by results in the latest CBS-New York Times poll. By 67 percent to 18 percent – including 45 percent of Republicans – respondents said they thought world leaders do respect Obama, though 52 percent still said that the United States is not respected.

Obama made himself popular partly by emphasizing as much as possible his differences from his utterly disliked predecessor, George W. Bush.

Even though every slight and slap at Bush was interpreted by some conservative commentators as Obama’s denigrating the United States itself, some of it was legitimate. And some of it was not.

At his town hall meeting in Strasbourg, France, Obama said that “in America, there’s a failure to appreciate Europe’s leading role. ... There have been times where America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive.”

Well, he was puffing Europe’s “leading role,” but it’s true that, during Bush’s first term, arrogance, even derisiveness, was a common theme.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and others gibed at “old Europe” and acted as though the United States – “the world’s only superpower” – could handle all the world’s problems alone and preferred to do so.

Obama did not give Bush credit for changing his tone in his second term, but that change was never noted by European publics, even though it was by a new generation of European leaders like France’s Nicolas Sarkozy and Germany’s Angela Merkel.

Obama was evenhanded in his chiding. He said, “In Europe, there is an anti-Americanism that is at once casual but can also be insidious. Instead of recognizing the good that America so often does in the world, there have been times where Europeans choose to blame America for much of what’s bad.”

Where Obama was needlessly (if only implicitly) negative toward Bush was in Istanbul, Turkey, where he said that “the United States is not and will never be at war with Islam.” The truth is that it never was, as Bush said again and again.

Conservative critics have tried to brand the Obama administration’s dropping the term “global war on terror” as an abandonment of the war on terror itself, but that’s not fair, either.

Obama clearly has dedicated himself to fighting terrorists – and he calls them that – with a huge new commitment of money, troops and civilian aid workers to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

He has also committed American prestige and has taken political risk to do so.

In the CBS poll, only 39 percent of respondents – 33 percent of Democrats – said they favor the increased troop commitment, and 33 percent opposed it.

To merit the world’s respect, Obama’s effort to neutralize Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan has to show progress. He’s doing the right thing in pledging $1.5 billion in U.S. aid to Pakistan and trying to get other nations to provide more.