Does White identity stop at the water's edge? White solidarity and racialized perceptions of foreign adversaries in the United States
2026-07-13
What is the effect of racial in‐group identity on white Americans' policy preferences? Although a robust strand of literature has investigated this relationship in the context of domestic politics, little is known about how white solidarity shapes foreign policy attitudes. This article provides the first examination of whether white racial consciousness “stops at the water's edge”—namely, whether racial solidarity affects how white Americans process information about white versus non‐white foreign adversaries and evaluate the threats they pose. Leveraging recent applications of political psychology in racial politics, this article delineates competing theoretical expectations about the role of white identity in the formation of foreign threat perception. With evidence from a preregistered survey experiment on a nationally representative sample of white Americans that randomized the racial categorization of a hypothetical foreign adversary, this study finds that higher levels of white identity are associated with lower perceived threat when the adversary is portrayed as white, and higher perceived threat when the adversary is portrayed as non‐white, even after accounting for out‐group racial resentment. These findings elucidate the microfoundational determinants of interstate conflict and contribute to cross‐subfield efforts in Political Science to study the transnational effects of in‐group identity politics.