Polls: US
Is ‘the Greatest Threat to Peace in the World
Today’
By Eric
Zuesse
August 09,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
-
It has
happened again: yet another international poll
finds that the U.S. is viewed by peoples around
the world to be the biggest threat to world
peace.
But,
to start, let’s summarize the first-ever poll
that had been done on this, back in 2013, which
was the only prior poll on this entire issue,
and it was the best-performed such poll: “An
end-of-the-year WIN/Gallup International survey
found that people in 65 countries believe the
United States is the greatest threat to world
peace”,
as the N.Y. Post reported
on 5 January 2014.
On
30 December 2013, the BBC had reported of that
poll: “This
year, first [meaning here, ‘for’] the first
time, Win/Gallup agreed to include three
questions submitted by listeners to [BBC’s]
Radio 4’s Today programme.” And,
one of those three listener-asked questions was
phrased there by the BBC, as having been “Which
country is the biggest threat to peace?” The way
that WIN/Gallup International itself had
actually asked this
open-ended question, to 67,806 respondents from
65 countries, was: “Which
country do you think is the greatest threat to
peace in the world today?” #1,
24% of respondents, worldwide, volunteered that
the U.S. was “the greatest threat.” #2 (the
second-most-frequently volunteered ‘greatest
threat’) was Pakistan, volunteered by 8%. #3 was
China, with 6%. #4-7 were a four-way tie, at 5%
each, for: Afghanistan, Iran, Israel, and North
Korea. #8-10 were a three-way tie, at 4% each,
for: India, Iraq, and Japan. #11 was Syria, with
3%. #12 was Russia, with 2%. #13-20 were a
seven-way tie, at 1% each, for: Australia,
Germany, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, South
Korea, and UK.
The
way that W/G itself had phrased this matter, in
their highly uninformative press
release for their year-end survey (which
included but barely mentioned this finding, in
it — as though this particular finding in their
annual year-end poll, hardly even deserved to be
mentioned), was: “The US was the overwhelming
choice (24% of respondents) for the country that
represents the greatest threat to peace in the
world today. This was followed by Pakistan (8%),
China (6%), North Korea, Israel and Iran (5%).
Respondents in Russia (54%), China (49%) and
Bosnia (49%) were the most fearful of the US as
a threat.” That’s all there was of it — W/G
never devoted a press-release to the stunning
subject of this particular finding, and they
even buried this finding when mentioning it in
their year-end press-release.
I had
hoped that they would repeat this excellent
global survey question every year (so that a
trendline could be shown, in the global answers
over time), but the question was unfortunately
never repeated.
However,
now, on August 1st of 2017, Pew Research Center
has issued results of their polling of 30
nations in which they had surveyed, first in
2013, and then again in 2017, posing a
less-clear but similar question (vague perhaps
because they were fearing a similar type of
finding — embarrassing to their own country, the
U.S.), in which respondents had been asked “Do
you think that the United States’ power and
influence is a major threat, a minor threat, or
not a threat to (survey country)?” and which
also asked this same question but regarding
“China,” and then again but regarding “Russia,”
as a possible threat instead of “United States.”
(This wasn’t an open-ended question; only those
three nations were named as possible responses.)
On
page 3 of their
32-page pdf is
shown that the “major threat” category was
selected by 35% of respondents worldwide for
“U.S. power and influence,” 31% worldwide
selected that for “Russia’s power and
influence,” and also 31% worldwide said it for
“China’s power and influence.” However, on pages
23 and 24 of the pdf is shown the 30 countries
that had been surveyed in this poll, in both
2013 and 2017, and most of these 30 nations were
U.S. allies; only Venezuela clearly was not.
None of the 30 countries was an ally of either
Russia or China (the other two countries offered
as possibly being “a major threat”). And, yet,
nonetheless, more respondents among the 30
sampled countries saw the U.S. as “a major
threat,” than saw either Russia or China that
way.
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Furthermore, the trend, in those 30 countries,
throughout that four-year period, was generally
in the direction of an increase in fear of the
U.S. — increase in fear of the country that had
been overwhelmingly cited in 2013 by people in
65 countries in WIN/Gallup’s poll, as
constituting, in 2013, “the greatest threat to
peace in the world today.”
Consequently: though WIN/Gallup never repeated
its question, the evidence in this newly
released poll, from Pew, clearly suggests that
the percentage of people in the 65 nations that
WIN/Gallup had polled in 2013 who saw the U.S.
as being “the greatest threat to peace in the
world today” would be even higher today
than it was in 2013, when 24% of respondents
worldwide volunteered the U.S. as being the
world’s most frightening country.
Perhaps people
around the world are noticing that, at least
since 2001, the U.S. is wrecking one country
after another: Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria,
and Ukraine.
Which is next? Maybe Iran? Maybe Russia? Maybe
Venezuela? Who knows?
Regarding the 2013 WIN/Gallup End-of-Year
international survey, you can see the
nation-by-nation results here.
For example, their sampling that year of 4,556 Americans found
that residents of the U.S. answered to “Q8.
Which country do you think is the greatest
threat to peace in the world today?”: #1 Iran
20%, #2 Afghanistan 14%, #3 N. Korea 13%, #4
United States 13%, #5 Iraq 6%, #7 Syria 5%, #8
China 5%, #9 Russia 3%, #10 Pakistan 1%. A
remarkably high 13% of Americans gave the
correct answer. And, late in that year, U.S.
President Obama pulled the
trigger on his long-planned
bloody overthrow and replacement of Ukraine’s
government, which was portrayed throughout the
Western press as being a ‘democratic
revolution’, though it actually ended democracy
in Ukraine.
And
the U.S. has just increased its ‘defense’
spending, which already
is three times China’s, and nine times higher
than Russia’s.
Do the owners of America’s military-industrial
complex own the U.S. government, and own the
U.S. ‘news’media, to permit this rabid military
to control the government’s budget, in a ‘democracy’?
Is that how it happens?
Investigative historian
Eric Zuesse
is the author, most recently, of They’re
Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican
Economic Records, 1910-2010, and
of CHRIST’S
VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created
Christianity.
This article was originally published by
Strategic Culture Foundation.
The
views expressed in this article are solely those
of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
opinions of Information Clearing House.
