1. Foreigners screen information about America, it's history, and it's culture even more poorly than American progressives.
Mention George W. Bush and you will get a monsoon of insults against America's intelligence in electing him. Meanwhile they gladly ate up every word Obama said while praising him as a "European-minded" presidential candidate. For all the "ugly American" stereotypes, Europeans question authority with the vigor of a sloth. Their media is, if anything, worse than ours when it comes to biased reporting. Plus side: the accents are better.
Basically expect from most foreigners what you would a Democratic Party operative. Their news sources are effectively the same, merely multiple languages spewing the exact same drivel.
2. Foreigners like naive, malleable American presidents.
Again with George W. Bush being the prime counterpoint (even more to the point: Reagan), for all the chimp jokes and other insults, foreign leaders did whatever the hell Bush wanted. This is because Bush, for all his incoherent speech, was not an idiot and did not buckle to vain praise or pretend "world consensus" was desirable. Obama on the other hand is infinitely malleable and unfailingly incompetent. He has systematically weakened every one of America's old alliances thinking America's old enemies have suddenly turned over a new leaf. Obama's precursor in this regard was Carter, who was so weak that Iran held 53 US citizens hostage for over a year under his "leadership." The Euros had a good laugh at us over that one. It's a pity now Iran will probably try the same thing, only this time they'll have nukes. Pretty sure Belgium's in range too, and those bastards would sell out Tel Aviv long before Iran even threatened to do so.
What it boils down to is a weak United States is good for foreigners.
With a caveat. Once they realize that China or Russia (or previously, Germany or Russia) have come back with tanks, suddenly they want the old Cowboy America back to die on their soil and protect the entitlement state they've crafted largely by neglecting their own defense.
3. Foreigners which fit neither 1. or 2. are already here or in the process thereof.
Assuming you are a foreigner who has not bought into your entitlement state's propaganda (1) nor treat the security America has provided for the world as an irrevocable given (2), you are probably already here or are pursuing life here legally or illegally. You refer to your previous nation of residence in the past tense. You are as patriotic, if not moreso than the average American citizen. You detest our nation's slow creep into the habits of the nation you abandoned in order to get here.
America is the world's hyperpower. Whatever prattling goes on about us is done in buildings whose technologically advanced equipment we probably designed, whose people enjoy the comforts we likely originated, and whose land is probably secure only because we're stationed either there or in a formerly hostile neighboring nation who fucked up so badly Americans had to die all over both nations to get them to stop killing each other for a couple of decades.
America isn't perfect and we never claim to be. We're still the best country in the world as it stands, and as proof I point to people from almost every other nation literally violating their home nation's laws and ours just to set foot on our soil long enough to give birth to an anchor baby. People don't do that for nations that suck, people don't do that for nations run by imperialistic tyrants and filled with stupid arrogant pigs.
I doubt there's any actual problem Europeans have with Americans being "unable to point to Iraq on a map." It's more that we think of Belgium as a shopping center for chocolate and waffles. Nothing gets an internationalist's dander up like mocking their international relevancy.