An online poll conducted by Reuters/Ipsos this month asked 2,809 Americans to assess the level of threat posed by various countries, organizations, and individuals to the United States on a scale of 1 to 5. According to the poll, 34 percent of Republicans considered Obama to be an imminent threat, surpassing Putin (25 percent) and Assad (23 percent). Western governments have accused Assad of using chlorine gas and barrel bombs on his own people. Sociologist Barry Glassner, author of "The Culture of Fear: Why Americans are afraid of the wrong things," noted that the results were not surprising given the polarization in American politics. Glassner suggested that demonizing the current office holder is common, and predicted that fear mongering by both Republican and Democratic parties will be prevalent in the 2016 presidential campaign. He stated that both the TV media and American politics heavily rely on instilling fear. The Ipsos survey, conducted from March 16 to March 24, involved 1,083 Democrats and 1,059 Republicans. According to the survey, 27% of Republicans viewed the Democratic Party as a looming danger to the country, while 22% of Democrats saw Republicans in the same light. The respondents expressed the most concern about potential terror threats, with 58% considering Islamic State militants as an imminent threat and 43% seeing al Qaeda in the same way. Thirty-four percent of respondents considered North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un a threat, while 27 percent viewed Iran's Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as a threat. Cyber attacks were seen as an imminent threat by 39 percent of those surveyed, while drug trafficking was perceived as a threat by one-third of respondents. Democrats were more concerned about climate change than Republicans, with 33 percent of Democrats seeing global warming as an imminent threat. Among Republicans, 27 percent did not view climate change as a threat at all. The data was adjusted to represent the US population and has a credibility interval of plus or minus 2.1 percentage points for all adults (3.4 points for Democrats and 3.4 points for Republicans).