Most Americans Don't Support War with Russia

It is a measure of how warped our foreign policy debate is that something as deranged as initiating a war with a nuclear-armed state is being debated as if it were a serious policy option.

A new Pew survey finds that only 35% of Americans want war with Russia:

And there is limited support among both Republicans and Democrats for taking military action, even if it risks a nuclear conflict with Russia: About a third of the public (35%) and nearly identical shares of Democrats (35%) and Republicans (36%) favor this. 

Fortunately, the rest of the country is opposed to such an insane course of action, but it is disturbing that there could be this much support for a potentially catastrophic war. Only 12% strongly support doing this. Presumably some of this support is very shallow and would vanish once the full costs of war were spelled out, but it is a measure of how warped our foreign policy debate is that something as deranged as initiating a war with a nuclear-armed state is being debated as if it were a serious policy option. Decades of waging war against much weaker adversaries that have no effective means to strike back have encouraged many Americans to think of war as something that only really happens in other countries and that it is something that our military does at relatively low cost. No one born after WWII really knows what great power conflict is like, and I assume that is why there is so much loose talk about courting such a conflict today.