Fed Up With The Rest Of The World
Saturday, Dec. 5, 2009
by Bruce Stokes, National Journal
Selling the American people on engagement with the world has never been easy. Even the advent of a president who talks the talk of internationalism has not persuaded the public to walk that walk.
And it seems that the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression combined with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have convinced Americans that the world is a more dangerous place than it was during the Cold War. Indeed, Americans are turning inward. They are more isolationist and more unilateralist than at any other time in recent history, according to America's Place in the World, a new survey conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.
The survey underscores the stiff challenge that the Obama administration faces in rallying support for the troop surge in Afghanistan and for combating global warming, two of the president's principal international initiatives. Making the White House's task more difficult is a deep partisan divide among Americans on key foreign-policy issues.
Furthermore, a serious gulf is emerging between public views on foreign affairs and opinions held by the policy elites who often shape government decisions, according to the poll. The survey, conducted in October and early November, involved 2,000 members of the public and 642 foreign-policy opinion makers who belong to the Council on Foreign Relations, a nonpartisan nongovernmental organization. It was taken before President Obama announced that he will send more troops to Afghanistan.
For the first time in more than four decades of polling, a plurality -- 49 percent -- of Americans say that the United States should "mind its own business internationally" and let other countries get along the best they can on their own. This surpasses U.S. isolationist sentiment -- 41 percent -- recorded in 1976, not long after the Vietnam War ended.
In addition, more than two in five -- 44 percent -- of those surveyed think that America should go its own way on the international stage and not worry too much about whether other countries agree. That is by far the highest percentage holding such sentiments since Gallup first asked the question in 1964. This unprecedented support for what has been termed "unilateralism" could undermine Obama's avowed goal of closer cooperation with U.S. allies and multinational coalitions.
Complicating matters further for the Democratic administration, a majority of Democrats (53 percent) express isolationist attitudes, as do nearly half of independents (49 percent) and a significant proportion of Republicans (43 percent). Since 2002, Democrats' isolationist sentiment has grown 13 percentage points, independents' isolationism by 22 points, and Republicans' by 21 points.
Obama's plan to dispatch an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan exposes sharp differences of opinion between the public and the foreign-policy elite with regard to the eight-year-old war. Half (50 percent) of the Council on Foreign Relations members surveyed agree with increasing the number of troops, suggesting that the move will receive support from the foreign-policy establishment. But only a third of the public (32 percent) favors the troop surge, and this scant support reveals a deep partisan divide. The proportion of Republicans who back a troop increase is more than double that of Democrats (48 percent compared with 21 percent).
Climate change is also not a popular passion, the polling shows. Despite Obama's plan to attend the Copenhagen climate summit on December 9 and climate-change legislation pending in the U.S. Senate, less than half of the American public (44 percent) sees global warming as a major threat to the United States. This finding seems to agree with other opinion polls that show a sharp decline over the past year in the percentage of Americans who say there is solid evidence that global temperatures are rising.
But foreign-policy elites have a different take on climate change as well, with 59 percent seeing global warming as a major threat. There is a sharp partisan division on this issue, too, which doesn't bode well for pending congressional action. A majority of Democrats (56 percent) want global climate change to be a top administration priority, compared with just a quarter of Republicans (23 percent).
Afghanistan and climate change are immediate administration challenges, but more Americans cite Iran as posing the greatest danger to the United States in the long run. In the wake of the International Atomic Energy Agency's censure of Tehran's nuclear program and in light of long-standing Israeli threats to attack those facilities, the U.S. public's concern complicates White House efforts to restrain the Israelis and peacefully curb the Iranians' nuclear ambitions.
More than six in 10 Americans (63 percent) approve of using force if it were certain that Iran had produced a nuclear weapon. Yet another partisan divide and differences between elite and mass opinion make Iranian policy a tricky issue for the administration. Eight in 10 Republicans (79 percent) approve of a possible pre-emptive strike against Iran, but significantly fewer Democrats (57 percent) and independents (59 percent) agree. Only a third of the Council on Foreign Relations members surveyed approve of a military strike on Iran's nuclear facilities.
The Pew poll also highlights why the Obama administration's decision to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility and to try terrorism suspects in New York City has stirred such controversy, even within the president's own party. And it exposes yet another disconnect between foreign-policy experts and other Americans.
Half of the public surveyed (49 percent) disapproves of the president's decision to close Guantanamo, while the shutdown is backed by four in five of the Council on Foreign Relations members (81 percent). The public's opposition may be rooted in a growing fear of terrorism: 29 percent of Americans now say that terrorists have a greater ability to launch an attack than they had on September 11, 2001, up 12 percentage points since last February. This total includes 27 percent of Democrats surveyed, whose concern has grown 20 percentage points since their party took control of the White House. Two-thirds of those surveyed (67 percent) think that terrorists have the same or less capacity to launch another major attack, down from four-fifths (79 percent) earlier this year.
The administration's attention to civil liberties, which in part motivated its decision to try five 9/11 suspects in civilian court in New York City, is seemingly not shared by the general public. More than half of those polled (54 percent) say that using torture on suspected terrorists to gain important information is justified. This is the first time since Pew began asking the question five years ago that a majority of Americans have expressed such a view. Likewise, support for extreme interrogation measures is up 18 percentage points among Democrats since Obama took office.
But it is the public's views of America's changing stature in the world that are possibly the starkest evidence of growing partisanship infecting foreign-policy attitudes. More than two-thirds of Republicans (68 percent) think that the United States is less respected today than in the past, up from 55 percent who felt that way in September 2008. In contrast, over the same period, there has been a 28-percentage-point increase in the proportion of Democrats who say that America is more respected than before, and a similar 15-percentage-point increase among independents.
Unlike many foreign-policy attitudes, America's stature in the world, as judged by opinion polls abroad, is measurable. Support for the United States is indisputably and dramatically up in most parts of the world since Obama's election, according to the 2009 Pew Global Attitudes survey, the German Marshall Fund's 2009 Transatlantic Trends survey, and several other recent international polls. It seems that GOP judgments on this issue reflect Republicans' general disaffection with Obama rather than the reality of U.S. stature abroad.
Obama took office vowing to re-engage with the world. He has turned to the Europeans for help on Afghanistan; to the Chinese and the Russians for cooperation on Iran; and to the Indians and the Brazilians for aid on trade and climate change. It may be too early to judge the success of those efforts, but it is clear that the administration and the U.S. foreign-policy establishment have failed to convince the American public that such engagement is worthwhile.