BRUSSELS, Sept 6: United States and EU citizens are increasingly fearful of global terrorism but they do not agree on how best to counter the threat nor how to deal with Iran’s growing nuclear activities, a study released on Wednesday showed.
Growing numbers of Americans and Europeans feel that international terrorism is an “extremely important” threat, though US citizens are still more concerned than those in the EU, according to the Transatlantic Trends annual survey.
Seventy-nine percent of US respondents listed international terrorism as an “extremely important” threat, up from 72 percent from a year earlier, while 66 percent of EU nationals agreed, up from 58 percent in 2005.
Islam and Muslim extremists were particularly under the spotlight in the study, that has been charting US and EU sentiment on a range of issues for the past five years.
“Both Americans (58 percent, up from 45 percent) and Europeans (52 percent, up from 41 percent) increasingly see Islamic fundamentalism as an extremely important threat,” the report said.
Just over half of those questioned on both sides of the Atlantic felt that Islamic values were not compatible with the values of their democracy, though they conceded that the problem was with particular Muslim groups and not Islam in general.
Citizens from both continents were questioned on how to deal with Iran’s nuclear activities, which Tehran says is a drive for civilian nuclear power but which the Unites States says hides a covert atomic weapons programme.
Seventy-nine of Americans and 84 percent of Europeans said that efforts to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear arms should continue and most Americans (53 percent) said they would support military action if talks fail compared with a minority of Europeans (45 percent).
Despite France’s opposition to the US-led campaign in Iraq, the French bucked the European trend on this issue with 54 percent voicing support for a military option if necessary, against 46 percent of Britons and 40 percent of Germans.
For the first time in the survey’s history, more Americans disapproved of US President George W. Bush’s handling of international affairs than approved — 58 percent compared to 40 percent.
The figure is even rising amongst Republicans, with 19 percent disapproving.
European disapproval of Bush’s foreign policy, already high, shot up from 56 to 77 percent over the last year while the number of EU respondents seeking US leadership in world affairs plummeted from 64 to 37 percent, according to the study.
Despite their misgivings, most Europeans (55 percent) continue to see NATO, in which the United States plays the major role, as an essential security alliance.
However that figure is down from 69 percent in 2002.—AFP