WASHINGTON – Young adults in France, Germany and Britain are critical of both the United States and China, but for different reasons, a new report has found.

They perceive hypocrisy and unilateralism in Washington’s foreign policy, saying that the US acts as the world’s policeman “to the detriment of the world community”.

Meanwhile, they criticise China for its track record on human rights.

“The US is seen as the ‘world’s policeman’ with a self-interested history of interventionism that is disappointing to Western allies, while China is labelled the ‘world’s factory’, respected for its economic dominance but strongly criticised for its expansionism and record of human rights violations,” says the report by Pew Research Centre, which was released on Wednesday morning in Washington.

The findings are a result of focus group sessions that Pew conducted in November 2022 with people aged 18 to 29 in Paris, Berlin and London. It is the second release from a project that explores opinion on international cooperation using qualitative methods.

Pew Research noted that qualitative data is not meant to be an exhaustive representation of public opinion on these issues, or of particular demographic groups or countries.

Participants of the sessions were grouped into four categories per country, based on their ideological affiliation – left or right – and views towards their own country’s involvement in world affairs.

The US is seen not to be taking allies’ interests into account when acting internationally – a criticism seen regularly in its surveys, says Pew.

Participants are especially critical of US military interventions, such as the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan. The majority see the withdrawal from Afghanistan as botched and the 20-year war as a failure.

Across the board, young people in France, Germany and Britain want to avoid military interventions, even among those eager for their countries to engage on the world stage, the report finds.

As for China, the report finds that young Europeans are also concerned about the country’s growing economic clout as well as its policies on Taiwan and Hong Kong, apart from human rights.

Chinese military actions in the South China Sea are another issue of concern.

The participants are “largely pessimistic about future relations” with China, but they are also pragmatic when it comes to the superpower’s economic clout.

“There is also a strong sense of pragmatism among these young adults who have largely resigned themselves to China’s economic power and see few, if any, ways to disentangle relations with China without collapsing their own economies,” the report says.

“Some level of cooperation with China seems to be just as inevitable as partnership with the US to young Europeans,” it adds.

Many in the focus groups also suggest that Washington has been hypocritical in arguing for human rights and democracy abroad without fixing its problems at home.

Some participants expressed concerns about the state of American politics and society. And US action on climate change is also seen as lacking.

“The focus groups’ discussions led to a common conclusion: Young people are eager to see their countries maintain a strong, more independent presence on the world stage without relying on policy cues from the US,” the report states.

Still, the US gets significantly higher marks than China over which country should be the world’s leading power. Most of the focus groups’ participants saw the US as at least a somewhat reliable and important partner to their country.

“(They) want to engage and cooperate with the US, and they remain cautiously optimistic about the future of trans-Atlantic relations because the US and Europe share fundamental democratic values,” says the Pew report.