CATO inst.: The Foreign Policy Disconnect between Washington and America

[TomSea]

The Foreign Policy Disconnect between Washington and America
By A. Trevor Thrall
Share

During the Cold War, Washington’s foreign policy establishment operated comfortable in the knowledge that sizeable majorities supported vigorous American global leadership in the struggle with the Soviet Union. More recently, however, many observers have started worrying about the growing disconnect between the Washington’s elites and the public. The scholar Walter Russell Mead argued in a recent Wall Street Journal opinion piece that the most important question in world politics today is “Will U.S. public opinion continue to support an active and strategically focused foreign policy?

The answer is a qualified yes. Americans on balance remain committed to international engagement but advocates of the status quo are right to worry because Americans increasingly disagree with Washington about how to engage the world.

Americans are not isolationists. As the 2018 Chicago Council on Global Affairs revealed, 70% of Americans want the United States to take an “active part” in world affairs. But the more important question is what does an “active part” really mean? A recent study by the Eurasia Group Foundation, for example, found that 47% of elites subscribe to the “indispensable nation” vision for foreign policy, which calls on the United States to maintain overwhelming military superiority and continue intensive efforts to manage world order, while just 9% supported a more restrained vision of foreign policy. The same study, however, found public preferences to be the reverse of elites: 44% supported a more restrained approach to foreign policy and just 10% supported the indispensable nation approach.

Read more at: https://www.cato.org/blog/mind-gap-foreign-policy-disconnect-between-washington-america