Policy Perspective

The Foreign Policy Disconnect
by Benjamin I. Page

Fall 2006, Volume 28, Number 1

Critics of U.S. foreign policy often assume that unilateralism, militarism, and disdain for international law have deep roots in Middle America and in U.S. public opinion. But research that I have done with Marshall M. Bouton (to be published by the University of Chicago Press this fall) makes clear that this is not at all the case.

Survey evidence shows that large majorities of Americans strongly support the United Nations, the World Health Organization, and other international institutions. Most back concrete steps to strengthen the United Nations, such as giving it the direct power to tax certain international transactions. Large majorities of Americans favor participating in the Kyoto Agreement on global warming, the International Criminal Court, and other treaties. Most Americans favor joint decision making with allies even if we do not always get our way. Most favor complying with decisions from the World Trade Organization that go against us, accepting the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice, and giving up the power to veto U.N. Security Council decisions that other members agree on. Large majorities of Americans oppose major uses of military force without U.N. authorization.

Contrary to skeptics from Alexander Hamilton to Walter Lippmann and Philip Converse, these are not just volatile “doorstep opinions” based on ignorance. National surveys by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, conducted repeatedly since 1974, show a high degree of coherence and stability in the collective opinions of the American public. Over a 30-year period filled with momentous events (Cold War crises, the collapse of the Soviet Union, terrorist attacks), large majorities of Americans have steadily and consistently favored a cooperative and multilateral foreign policy: arms control agreements with the Soviet Union, nonproliferation and nuclear test-ban agreements, collective decisions through a powerful United Nations, and predominately diplomatic and multilateral responses to terrorism.

Moreover, individual Americans do not express random “nonattitudes” about foreign policy. Instead, extensive data analysis shows they tend to hold purposive belief systems, in which individuals’ policy preferences are connected—in a logical, instrumental fashion—to the international threats they perceive, the foreign policy goals they espouse, and their feelings and beliefs about particular foreign countries. Collective public opinion is generally “rational”—coherent, consistent, stable, based on shared values and beliefs—not only because random errors tend to average out over the population, or because collective deliberation provides fairly efficient policy cues to individuals, but also because individual Americans are capable of forming sensible, integrated belief systems about foreign policy.

Yet the evidence (including evidence from parallel surveys in which foreign policy decision makers were asked questions identical to those asked of the public) indicates that there have always been many large gaps between the foreign policy that Americans want and the foreign policy they get. About 25 percent of the time, majorities of the public have taken the opposite side from majorities of decision makers. Many gaps have involved economic issues, such as a failure to pursue job and environmental protections that the public favors in free-trade agreements, and military issues, such as greater willingness by decision makers than the public to use U.S. troops abroad. On diplomatic issues, including international law and multilateralism generally, the frequency and magnitude of gaps has reached an all-time high during the Bush administration.

How is it possible for officials to keep pursuing policies that the public opposes and yet win re-election to office? The answer is complex and follows from long-standing characteristics of our political system. It would not be easy to close these discrepancies entirely. But I find such large and persistent gaps—perhaps amounting to a “disconnect”—to be quite troubling for a deliberative democracy. They represent a chronic failure of our foreign policy officials either to respond to the preferences of the public or to persuade the public of the merits of the officials’ stances.

Benjamin I. Page is Gordon S. Fulcher Professor of Decision Making and an IPR faculty associate. His book, The Foreign Policy Disconnect: What Americans Want from Our Leaders but Don’t Get, written with Marshall M. Bouton, will be published by the University of Chicago Press this fall.