When Germans were given a choice among five world leaders and asked who poses the greatest threat to world peace, one person came out on top of all others. And it wasn’t even close. A bit more than four in 10 Germans said in a poll that President Donald Trump was the most dangerous of the five, according to a YouGov survey. The next in line, North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, came a distant second at 17 percent, followed by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, at 8 percent each. China’s Xi Jinping came in last with 7 percent.
In July of last year, YouGov carried out a similar survey in which it found that 48 percent of Germans said Trump was more dangerous than Kim and Putin, although that survey did not include Xi or Khamenei.
The poll is only the latest illustration of how Trump has changed the way the world views the United States. Earlier this year a Pew Research Center survey revealed that more people around the world see the U.S. as the biggest threat to their countries when compared with others. Of the total number of people who responded in 26 large countries, 45 percent said the United States posed “a major threat to our country,” compared with 36 percent who said the same thing about Russia and 35 percent about China. That marked a stark change from 2013, when only 25 percent said that about the United States.
