Public Opinion on Foreign Policy Is Malleable

More than almost any other area, foreign policy is elite-driven and public opinion is shaped by the cues that Americans receive from their political leaders and figures in the media.

Damon Linker argues that the main obstacles to a less hawkish Republican foreign policy are Republican voters:

Then there's the related difficulty facing any Republican inclined toward foreign policy retrenchment. How is the Republican base likely to respond to an American president shrugging in indifference at a Russian invasion of Ukraine — or a Chinese invasion of Taiwan?

The unsettling truth is that Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, and other ambitious Republican office holders are likely staking out unilaterally hawkish, Jacksonian positions instead of a more dovish stance. They know where the party's voters are. The GOP base might be skeptical of grand plans to democratize the world, but they're unlikely to accept cheerfully a passive response to a power grab by a rival on the world stage.

Linker is right that polling shows that most Republican voters tend to favor more aggressive policies overseas, but the hawkishness of the Republican Party is not simply a case of voters’ preferences being reflected in Washington. More than almost any other area, foreign policy is elite-driven and public opinion is shaped by the cues that Americans receive from their political leaders and figures in the media. Republican and movement conservative leaders and their allied entertainers on cable news and radio deluge their audiences with fearmongering and threat inflation on a daily basis. Even when some of the entertainers express reservations about, say, policy towards Russia, they are usually doing so in the service of an aggressive policy somewhere else. Is it any surprise that the audience then tends to support hawkish politicians?