People Who Know Where Ukraine Is, Don't Want to Go to War Over it at Frankly CuriousFrankly Curious

Now you know where Ukraine is. But maybe you already did. Most readers around here are pretty liberal and are not inclined to think that going to war over the slightest provocation is a good idea. I say this because a The Monkey Cage conducted a new poll that found that only 16% of Americans could locate Ukraine on a map, and the further off they are, the more likely they are to think that we ought to “intervene with military force.”

According to the article:

Even controlling for a series of demographic characteristics and participants’ general foreign policy attitudes, we found that the less accurate our participants were, the more they wanted the US to use force, the greater the threat they saw Russia as posing to US interests, and the more they thought that using force would advance US national security interests; all of these effects are statistically significant at a 95 percent confidence level. Our results are clear, but also somewhat disconcerting: the less people know about where Ukraine is located on a map, the more they want the US to intervene militarily.

They also indicate (if you look behind the numbers) that more Americans think that Obama is a Muslim (18% as of 2010) than know where Ukraine is. So it is very sad indeed. Just the same, they did find that college graduates were 50% more likely to know where Ukraine was, with 22% being able to find it on a map. But being a college graduate doesn’t make someone smart. I suspect that what is driving the correlation between “location ignorance” with the “go-to-war mentality” is general stupidity. I mean, what are we to make of the people who thought that Ukraine was inside the United States?

H/T: Political Wire