According to the November 1985 poll, 76 percent of Americans viewed the Soviet Union as a "very serious" or "moderately serious" threat. Only 32 percent of respondents classified the Evil Empire as a "very serious" threat. This week, CNN released a poll asking the same question, this time about Iran and other hostile nations. It estimates that 81 percent of Americans believe Iran is a "very serious" or "moderately serious" threat, with 48 percent calling it "very serious." While fear of Iran isn't yet on par with the absolute height of the Reagan-era Cold War (CNN fielded three polls during conflict-rife 1983, returning 90 percent, 87 percent, and 88 percent), it's up from June 2009, and has surpassed fear of the Soviet Union during one of the Cold War's most dangerous years.

Iran's dangers to the U.S. are real: it's been directly involved in anti-U.S. violence in Iraq and probably Afghanistan, threatened to cripple the global economy by closing the naval channel through which much of the world's oil passes, makes no secret of its hostility to America, and may have even tried to kill a Saudi ambassador staying in the U.S. If Iran weaponized its nuclear program, probably its greatest contributor to Western anxiety, an already unstable Middle East would get that much closer to conflict, and the list of national nuclear proliferators would grow, making the risks of unwanted nuclear war or loose nuclear materials that much higher.

But the Soviet Union had tens of thousands of nuclear weapons ready to fire into every American city. Iran has zero. The Soviet Union had was at the time one of the largest, most advanced conventional militaries in world history, proxies around the globe, and a proven track record of winning wars against, for example, Nazi Germany. Iran's last conventional war was a bitter 8-year stalemate with Iraq, which the U.S. defeated (in conventional military terms, at least) in a matter of weeks on two separate occasions. Iran's unconventional threat is real, but mostly limited to the far-away Middle East; its one recent attempt on U.S. soil was a spectacular failure.

So why do Americans see Iran today as a threat on par with the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s? In a Foreign Affairs piece arguing that the U.S. is safer than either Americans or U.S. policymakers think, Zenko and Michael Cohen suggest three reasons:

The disparity between foreign threats and domestic threat-mongering results from a confluence of factors. The most obvious and important is electoral politics. Hyping dangers serves the interests of both political parties.



Warnings about a dangerous world also benefit powerful bureaucratic interests. The specter of looming dangers sustains and justifies the massive budgets of the military and the intelligence agencies, along with the national security infrastructure that exists outside government -- defense contractors, lobbying groups, think tanks, and academic departments.



There is also a pernicious feedback loop at work. Because of the chronic exaggeration of the threats facing the United States, Washington overemphasizes military approaches to problems (including many that could best be solved by nonmilitary means). The militarization of foreign policy leads, in turn, to further dark warnings about the potentially harmful effects of any effort to rebalance U.S. national security spending or trim the massive military budget-warnings that are inevitably bolstered by more threat exaggeration.

Still, today's politics are not unique. Reagan ran in 1980 and 1984 as a tough, anti-Soviet leader who would confront the Evil Empire around the globe. U.S. politicians had been emphasizing Soviet dangers for decades, going back to the 1964 "Daisy" ad, often credited with aiding Lyndon B. Johnson's victory against Republican Barry Goldwater.