The problem with superpowers, wrote Henry Kissinger in 1979, is that they often act like “two heavily armed blind men feeling their way around a room, believing himself in mortal peril from the other, whom he assumes to have perfect vision.”
This principle from the realpolitik statesman, that the world’s most powerful nations are often oblivious to their opponents’ deep dysfunctions, may explain data compiled by U.S. News as a part of its 2018 Best Countries ranking, breaking down how respondents from particular nations view the world.
Though the U.S. ranks first among the world’s most powerful nations according to a majority of all respondents, Americans themselves do not consider their homeland to be the most prominent international player. Rather, they see China as most powerful, followed by Russia and then the U.S.
The results suggest that the widespread dissemination of inaccurate political rhetoric in countries like the U.S., Russia and China may have more of an effect than previously understood, according to analysts and experts in international influence. And it represents a marked shift from data as recent as 2016 — the inaugural year of the Best Countries project — when Americans ranked themselves as No. 1, before dropping that assessment to fourth-most powerful in 2017.
Undervaluing the strength of one’s homeland isn’t limited to America. Respondents in China consider Russia to be the most powerful, followed by the U.S..
Indeed, none of the countries home to enough respondents to make their responses statistically significant considers their native land to be the world’s most powerful. India and Turkey also considered Russia the most powerful — a particularly surprising result for Turkey, a NATO ally of the U.S.
Canada and the United Kingdom — also close U.S. allies — are the only nations of the six assessed that rank the U.S. as the most powerful nation. Canadians ranked Germany as the second-most powerful nation while the British, embroiled in diplomatic row over a Russian former spy poisoned in the U.K., ranked Russia as No. 2.
There were not enough respondents to the U.S. News survey in Russia to make the results statistically accurate.
The Power sub-ranking of U.S. News’ Best Countries report is based on responses from more than 21,000 people in four world regions and 80 countries, and equally weighted average scores for five attributes: the extent to which a country is a leader, is economically influential and politically influential, and has strong international alliances and military alliances.
Experts in international relations and foreign influence say the results are surprising, particularly amid the growing belief that Russian President Vladimir Putin‘s activities in recent years — reported interference in the 2016 U.S. election, and military intercessions in Syria and Ukraine — is igniting a modern version of the last century’s Cold War.
“The Russian part is mind-boggling in just so many ways,” says Richard Immerman, a professor at Temple University’s Center for the Study of Force and Diplomacy, “unless it’s a notion that if a nation can meddle in a country such as the U.S., then it has way more power than we thought it did.”
“And yet based on the information, the state of the Russian economy, the state of its military, its view of trying to get back up to where it was would seem to suggest that it would not be ranked above the U.S.”
Indeed, an international Pew survey released last year rated the U.S. as the world’s most popular country, followed by China and Russia. While each of their positions remained consistent compared to the previous year, the margins between 2016 and 2017 shrank significantly.
Economically, Russia’s growth has slowed considerably since 2010, with the country falling into recession during 2015 and 2016. It rebounded slightly in 2017, but international sanctions have weighed heavily on its progress. Meanwhile, the U.S. is currently tied for its second-longest economic expansion since the 1950s, with annual growth holding steady between 1 percent and 3 percent since the Great Recession ended in mid-2009.
And no major international survey of military power ranks Russia above the U.S. The Global Firepower index compiled by GlobalFirepower.com — based on a compilation of data including weapons stockpiles, economic status and geographic positioning — rates the U.S. above Russia and China. The 2015 Military Strength Indicator issued by Credit Suisse rates those three countries’ arsenals in the same order.
Yet that stability at home for these countries and their ability to fund operations abroad does not necessarily match news reports, politicians’ rhetoric and public perception about the power countries like the U.S., Russia and China can wield.
President Donald Trump won the White House on the promise to “Make America Great Again,” implying that the U.S. was not already great. This assertion, and his criticism of the Obama administration, may account for the sudden drop from 2016 to 2017 in Americans’ appraisal of their country’s power at a time when all factual indicators pointed to a positive trend.
It might also have something to do with the timing — the Best Countries survey took place between July and September 2017, roughly seven months after Trump took office and after he withdrew from international treaties like the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Paris climate accord.
Some experts see a more kinetic rationale in the results.
“The main explanation is activity. News-grabbing activity,” says William Wohlforth, a professor of government at Dartmouth College. “Russia is active. And activity attracts people’s attention. Activity, action, is what people see, and in many of these countries it is viewed as effective action, for Russia.”
In speaking to Americans during travels around the country Wohlforth believes they have a largely inflated sense of Russia’s importance, due in part to reports of its perceived success abroad. It has successfully convinced at least some observers that its intervention in Syria has succeeded in its goals of preserving the regime of Bashar Assad and contributed to defeating the Islamic State group, and perhaps showing that Russia is capable of sidelining the U.S. Meanwhile America remains locked in an intractable conflict in Afghanistan where the Pentagon is considering yet another surge of forces in support of a fledgling local military.
The contrast is stark amid the long list of U.S. interventions in the last two decades — Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Pakistan, Mali — versus a post Cold War Russia that has only recently returned to overt international operations.
“Russia’s emergence on the international stage as a powerful player moved Western media to ascribe to Putin — and Russia — omnipotent qualities,” says Ivan Kurilla, a professor at the European University at Saint Petersburg. “Putin was featured more than once on the cover of Time magazine, and Russia was in almost every single media outlet issue since the end of 2016. Certainly, it resulted in the growing perception of Russia as a powerful player. Cold War rhetoric legacy has also helped to frame ‘Russia debate’ in the West as debate about arch-enemy.”
Intelligence operations conducted by both Russia and the U.S. have also occupied headline space in recent months, largely based around reports that Putin directed his spy apparatus to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, drawing on his own experience as a KGB official.
“They see Putin as a mix of James Bond and Otto von Bismarck, beating us at everything,” Wohlforth says. “That’s completely incorrect, but a lot of people do. They see it as a hyper-effective, strategic genius kind of power.”
Among other world powers, Chinese leaders are purposefully trying to tamp down domestic expectations for what some consider nefarious purposes. Chinese consumer spending has been on the rise in recent months, demonstrated through Starbucks’ opening a new store in the country every 15 hours, and is on track to surpass the international influence of the American households that have helped drive the global economy since the end of World War II.
However, the government in Beijing, led by the newly appointed President for life Xi Jinping, regularly drills into its people that China is still a developing country and has a long way to go before it can claim to be a superpower, says Daniel Lynch, a professor of Asian and international studies at the City University of Hong Kong.
The Chinese Communist Party asserts moral infallibility regarding its foreign relations but not necessarily in international superiority. Lowering the bar allows China to dismiss international disputes as bullying and position itself at least in the eyes of its people with “the moral superiority of a victim,” Lynch says.
An increasing disparity among rich and poor in the U.S. also fuels the perception that China is more “have” than “have not.”
“In the case of the U.S., 90 percent of the population suffers from the growing inequality of the past four decades and meanwhile hears constant hype in the media about China’s rise,” Lynch says. “So it is no wonder that Americans who don’t think about these issues systematically would overestimate China’s power relative to that of the U.S.”
“The Chinese term ‘peng-sha’ is instructive,” Lynch adds. “It means something like, ‘promote someone to prominence so that they will then be killed.’ You can destroy someone by building them up and inviting people to dislike them out of jealousy and resentment, or otherwise scrutinize them mercilessly.”
Senior reporter Andrew Soergel contributed to this report.
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Data: Americans Consider China, Russia More Powerful Than U.S. originally appeared on usnews.com
