Even after a full year of Russian aggression, a recent Gallup poll confirmed the years-long trend that Americans still regard China as the U.S.’ greatest enemy. But if we break down the data by party commitment, an underlying division suddenly becomes apparent.
The survey, recently published by Gallup, used a simple open-ended question: which country do Americans consider the U.S.’ greatest enemy today? As expected, 50% of responders chose China, with Russia coming in second place at 32%, followed by North Korea (7%) and Iran (2%). There is nothing surprising in these results; China has been leading these polls for three years in a row. For a brief time from 2016-2018, North Korea outshone all other external threats with its repeated ballistic missile tests; Russia also came up on top in 2015 and 2019; while Iran’s time as the great evil appears to have passed since its peak in 2012.
These trends, of course, not only follow geopolitical developments—such as the signing of the Iran Nuclear Deal (JCPOA) or Trump’s peace process with the trigger-happy Kim Jong-Un—but also reflect on the state of internal public discussion within the U.S., including factors like which party is in power in Washington, what message it tries to convene, how it chooses to disseminate it, and how people react.
It is a long-standing truth in diplomacy (originally associated with British PM Henry J. Temple) that there are no eternal allies, nor permanent enemies in international politics, only permanent interests. But, according to Hegelian dialectics—which seems to be quite fashionable among governments these days—a political establishment needs enemies to define its virtues and successes, as struggle for the sake of struggling has long lost its appeal with contemporary masses.
All this combined means that whoever Americans—and anyone else, for that matter—believe to be their greatest enemy says more about what’s happening back in the States than on far-away battlefields, hidden nuclear labs, or threatening aircraft carriers. And even though the Biden administration has done everything to shift public perception toward Russia and the threat it poses to the ‘rules-based international system,’ the American public remains divided, to say at least.
When Gallup breaks down its data along party lines, the division becomes quite clear: Democrats think there is no greater enemy than Putin’s Russia, while Republicans refuse to subscribe to the same idea and instead are still picking China in overwhelming numbers. DNC voters seem to be more divided themselves, with Russia leading among them with only 53%, while GOP voters are the least likely to pick Russia at only 12%.
In most European countries (with a few notable exceptions), the mainstream Left and the Right found a common voice in supporting Ukraine with whatever it takes for Kyiv to repel the aggressors, including weapons, sanctions, and direct financial aid. In the U.S., however, conservatives increasingly define themselves as being on the “side of peace,” opposing further spending on a war that does not feel like theirs.
As Isaac Grafstein’s excellent analysis showed last week, the political shift around American interventionism started after 9/11, as the U.S. embarked on one catastrophic foreign war after the other. Suddenly, the anti-war movement, which traditionally had its roots in leftist protests against the Vietnam War, had been abandoned by the Left and picked up by a growing faction of conservatives, disillusioned with both liberal and neocon foreign policy.
What we see today with regard to the war in Ukraine is the culmination of this political shift. Since Trump, anti-war conservatives are the dominant faction among the Republicans, who now feel betrayed by the Biden administration’s perceived overspending on Ukraine instead of fixing America’s problems. Indeed, the U.S. is the largest ‘investor’ in this war, having pledged over €73 billion for Ukraine—more than all other countries, including the EU and its institutions, combined. It is easy to understand this feeling when you remember that Congress wouldn’t approve the $21 billion for Trump’s border wall, and as a result, illegal immigration has reached record numbers since then. But other domestic issues, such as inflation, unemployment, drug epidemics, and general poverty seem to them as equally neglected. As U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz put it, “Hemorrhaging billions of taxpayer dollars for Ukraine while our country is in crisis is the definition of America Last.”
Moreover, the liberal establishment’s way of treating the Ukrainian issue—and anyone who doesn’t share their enthusiasm—doesn’t help either. As Grafstein wrote,
in a country in which everything is red or blue, Republicans tend to see support for Ukraine (rightly or wrongly) as the latest in a growing list of things that progressives put in their bios. First it was pronouns. Now it’s the Ukrainian flag.
One might also add two years’ worth of bad experiences with mask mandates, vaccines, and the demonization of all those who have been against them. As more and more evidence comes out supporting how faulty the majority of anti-COVID measures were at the time, so grows American conservatives’ resistance to any position they see as being artificially pushed on them. Finally, with the whole narrative changing about the January 6th Capitol protests right now, it is near impossible to sell the idea that Ukraine deserves more attention than the domestic culture war.
No matter how hard Biden tries to portray it as such, Russia, for the moment, is not the enemy of the American people. This much is clear from the polls. Further escalations can, theoretically, change that, but it’s unlikely the country could truly unite facing direct external threats from Russia once more at this point. The bloodshot patriotism of the early-2000s is long gone, people only want peace. And even though the Democrats could use that kind of hawkish sentiment today, they can only blame themselves for its absence.
