Correcting some public opinion misperceptions
Lawrence Kaplan has an excellent New Republic essay on public tolerance for casualties during war (subscription required). Elites generally assume that the public is unwilling to tolerate combat deaths — here’s an example from the Economist a few weeks ago: America has changed since September 11th. The new mood allows for more nationalism, more assertiveness, ...
Lawrence Kaplan has an excellent New Republic essay on public tolerance for casualties during war (subscription required). Elites generally assume that the public is unwilling to tolerate combat deaths -- here's an example from the Economist a few weeks ago:
Lawrence Kaplan has an excellent New Republic essay on public tolerance for casualties during war (subscription required). Elites generally assume that the public is unwilling to tolerate combat deaths — here’s an example from the Economist a few weeks ago:
America has changed since September 11th. The new mood allows for more nationalism, more assertiveness, less patience with allies, a greater readiness to go it alone. But there is no appetite to spend a lifetime in a sweaty country in the service of a noble cause. The memories of Vietnam, where every effort to withdraw or hand over to the locals seemed to lead to further entanglement, have not departed.
Kaplan’s essay is essentially a literature review demonstrating plainly that this assumption is a crock of bull@#$t. The key grafs:
The public has long been less fearful of casualties than America’s political and military elites assume–and, for that matter, less fearful than the elites themselves…. Specifically, polls demonstrate that Americans will sustain battle deaths if they think the United States will emerge from a conflict triumphant, if they believe the stakes justify casualties, and if the president makes a case for suffering them. Each of these measures has important implications for the operation in Iraq. “The public is defeat-phobic, not casualty-phobic,” Christopher Gelpi and Peter Feaver conclude in their forthcoming book, Choosing Your Battles: American Civil-Military Relations and the Use of Force , which culls a mountain of data to prove the point.
Another excellent and recent source of data on this point is Steven Kull and I.M. Destler’s Misreading the Public: The Myth of a New Isolationism. A perusal of these books also reveals another interesting fact — the American public is far more enthusiastic about multilateralism than some experts believe. Beyond the Kull and Destler book, go check out this paper by Benjamin Page and Dukhong Kim for more on American support for international cooperation.
Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast. Twitter: @dandrezner
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