American Public Opinion and 'Overseas Militarism'

No one can seriously look at the last two decades and conclude that the U.S. has become overly attached to non-interventionism.

Edward Luce has a very strange recollection of the last 15 years:

The US public turned against overseas militarism when the Iraq war began to go wrong under George W Bush. It has stayed that way ever since. Fifteen years on, it is easy to presume American “non-interventionism” has become the settled view of its people. But US history — and common sense — suggests that the climate can switch rapidly from cold to hot when confronted with new facts. Think of what happened after 9/11. Now imagine hordes of Ukrainians fleeing as Russian tanks churn up their towns this winter.

I wish it were true that there had been a sharp turn against “overseas militarism” back then, but this doesn’t describe public opinion or U.S. policies during the last 15 years. The public definitely did turn against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but within just a few years of withdrawing the bulk of U.S. forces from Iraq there was broad public support for bombing ISIS in Iraq and then in Syria. This supports Luce’s point that public opinion is fickle and changeable on these issues, but it also makes the rest of his column seem rather odd.

Luce imagines that China and Russia are intent on taking advantage of what he calls American “sullenness,” but this seems like an absurdly American-centric way of understanding their views. The Russian government is not convinced that the U.S. has turned non-interventionist. The current crisis is the result of their assumption that the U.S. and NATO are too involved in Ukraine, and the Russian government is now insisting that this change. There is misreading going on here, but it is a Western misreading of the causes of the crisis.

No one can seriously look at the last two decades and conclude that the U.S. has become overly attached to non-interventionism (no scare quotes required) in response to the failures of Iraq and Afghanistan. Quite the contrary. There has been a steady drumbeat of interventionist talk on Taiwan, Ukraine, and in favor of attacking Iran for much of the last year. Despite the obvious dangers of over-commitment and catastrophic wars, the mood in D.C. seems alarmingly confrontational on all fronts. Hawks have already been trotting out their Munich references before Biden has done anything.

The public has been moving in a more hawkish direction for some time. Surveys show that the diet of propaganda has had an effect in making the public at least nominally more supportive of sending U.S. forces to fight for countries where the U.S. has no vital interests, including Taiwan and Ukraine. The numbers vary depending on the survey, but support for intervention in all cases is trending upwards. That is not a response to “new facts,” but something is changing because political leaders and media outlets are driving public opinion in this direction. Public opinion doesn’t just “turn hawkish.” It is shaped to become so. Because public opinion is so malleable, it is also safe to assume that these views are lightly held and don’t tell us how deep the public’s support for military options is. Judging from how quickly the public soured on our previous failed wars, we should assume that the public will also “turn” on any new major wars early on.

I remain skeptical that Russia will launch an attack, much less the full-on invasion that Luce conjures up here, but if there is an attack it isn’t going to be because Moscow believes that the U.S. is insufficiently interventionist and militaristic. The consistent Western failure to understand how threatening the U.S. government’s military presence and activities appear to other states is a massive blind spot. That blind spot prevents us from understanding why other states react the way that they do, and that makes it much more difficult to avert unnecessary conflicts. Unfortunately, our overseas militarism is thriving, and it is contributing to instability in several different parts of the world as we speak.