08 Dec Is the U.S. Public Both “Realist” and “Uninformed?”
08.12.09
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Dan Drezner’s take at Foreign Policy on the latest Pew Research Poll on U.S. foreign policy attitudes uses a more provocative term than “uninformed,” but the point is the same. Can the public be “realist” in its attitudes to the world when those attitudes are based on factual assumptions that don’t exactly align with reality? Lots of interesting comments over at Drezner’s post.
Also at FP, check out the survey of their “top 100 thinkers” for a different take on world events than the Pew “wisdom of the crowd” approach.
Drezner’s article asserts that the US public is uninformed because it believes that China has more economic power than the US, while in fact the US has a larger GDP. Power is the ability to use something to achieve results. Large numbers of Americans buying golf clubs and Twilight posters does not translate to power. Today there are relatively few factories in the US capable of turning out simple parts for manufactured goods. The machine tools needed cost hundreds of thousands of dollars each, so they are not difficult to count. You may find some in Mexico, but more in China. In the US, those factories went out of business because they were outbid a few cents per thousand units by foreign factories. During WWII the US almost brought German industrial production to a halt by bombing the ball bearing factories in Schweinfurt Germany. Today, American industrial production depends on parts made overseas that could be simply cut off. This is not just an American problem. A few years back the manufacture of computer parts was reduced world-wide by a fire in the one factory in Taiwan that made a particular industrial resin. Mao said that power derives from the… Read more »