How Do Americans Typically View Their Country's Role In Global Affairs, And What Are Some Of The Key Debates Surrounding American Foreign Policy?

Americans know a great deal about certain world leaders and institutions. For example, nearly eight in ten American adults can look at a photograph of Kim Jong Un and correctly identify it as identifying the leader of North Korea and almost two-thirds know that Boris Johnson is the current Prime Minister of the United Kingdom A small majority also know that Ukraine is not a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).< /p>

But a new poll from the Pew Research Center shows that Americans are less familiar with other topics. Despite U.S. While the government has called the events in China's Xinjiang a genocide, only one in five Americans know it is the region of China with the highest number of Muslims per capita. And only 41% can identify the flag of the second most populous country in the world, India.

On average, Americans give more right than wrong answers to all 12 questions in the study. The average number of correct answers is 6.3, while the median is of 7. However, the survey shows that the level of international knowledge varies by answering the right questions more often than women.Older Americans and those more interested in foreign policy also tend to do better.

Political party groups are more or less similar in rank to internationally known generals, but conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats tend to score higher on the scale than their more moderate counterparts.

International knowledge is also linked to people's general interest in foreign policy: those who say they are very or somewhat interested in the topic answer 7.4 questions correctly on average, compared to only 4.6 good questions for those who are not or not at all interested in foreign policy. Those who follow international news also tend to be more internationally informed than those who are less engaged. Those who have visited at least one country outside of the United States also score higher on the international knowledge scale than those who have not traveled abroad, even after accounting for differences in education and income.

Part of the survey's goal was simply to understand these factors: what Americans know about international affairs, and specifically how knowledge varies across demographic subgroups. But another focus of the survey was also to understand how knowledge might affect the settings.

We have found that people who know a topic best often have different points of view on the subject. For example, people who know that Ukraine is not a member of NATO are more likely to have a positive attitude towards NATO and to say that the United States benefits greatly from its membership in the organization. than those who do not know that Ukraine is not a member. of NATO. The same group also tends to hold negative attitudes towards Russia, distrusting Russian President Vladimir Putin and calling Russia an enemy.

Similarly, the survey also reveals that those familiar with the Afghan capital are more critical of the US withdrawal and the way it has been handled than those who know and do not know the capital. Those who know where the US Embassy in Israel is located (from the 2018 move) are also more likely to say that US-Israeli relations are good than those who don't. But there's little difference between the 17% of Americans who know Xinjiang is the region of China with the most Muslims per capita and those who don't when it comes to opinions about China or work. of Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Beyond the question of how specific knowledge questions relate to attitudes towards the question, e.g. how knowledge of NATO relates to opinions about NATO, we can also examine more generally whether people with more international knowledge think differently about a variety of global issues than those with less international knowledge. To do this, we can use the full 12-item scale and divide people into groups of high knowledge (those who answered 9-12 questions correctly), intermediate knowledge (5-8 questions), and low knowledge ( 0-4 questions). About a third of the American public belongs to each of these three groups.