Quote Originally Posted by jmm99 View Post
I can't come up with any consistent rationale which might explain these results.

The real crossover point (40-40-20) is Denmark; but Japan (43-44-13) gets the first heaveho in the chart.

Anyone ?

Astan = 30-54-16 - not a surprise to me.
What struck me about that is that 20% said eithe "no" or "unsure" to defending Canada, and over 20% said "yes" or "unsure" to the rather absurd notion of defending North Korea.

From this I assume that there's a portion of Americans that disapprove of any defense of a foreign country, a portion that automatically approves, and a portion that is fundamentally undecided.

In between I have no explanations, but 'd be interested to see a survey of general positive-negative impressions of the same list of countries and put them side by side. I suspect you'd see that it correlates less with any perceived strategic desirability than with a general like/dislike scale. It need not be added that many of the respondents would likely have only very rudimentary knowledge about many of the countries on the list. If we excluded results from individuals who couldn't find the country in question on a map or name the country most likely to invade the country to be defended, we might get fairly different results.