How Americans Perceive Threats from China and Russia

The American perceptions of the Russian and Chinese threats are exaggerated.

Pew Research released the results of a new survey of U.S. and German public opinion this week, and it contained some interesting findings about how Americans and Germans perceive foreign threats to our two countries. Americans were more likely than Germans to perceive China and Russia as military threats to their country’s security, and they were much more likely to perceive both as major threats rather than minor ones. The gap in threat perceptions is interesting, but the more remarkable thing about the results is the near-unanimity in the American responses. That tells us something important about the role of threat inflation in shaping public threat perceptions and how public threat perceptions relate to the real capabilities of other states.