Any possible US military action in the Gulf would not be supported by American voters as they look for a diplomatic solution to the crisis, according to this year’s edition of Foreign Policy in the New Millennium, a wide-ranging survey of American public opinion conducted by the non-partisan Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
War weariness is to be expected after the 10 years of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan with very dubious political results. With US combat troops scheduled to withdraw from Afghanistan by 2014 and with the departure from Iraq already complete, the Chicago Council shows a majority of Americans saying that neither war was worth fighting (67 per cent not worth it; 32 per cent worth it).
The Chicago Council started this annual survey in 2012 in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks, when American public opinion was firmly in favour of direct action, and willing to allocate almost unlimited attention and resources to countering the terrorist threat. But as the survey finds: “given the difficulty and cost in lives and treasure of reshaping events in far-off places and the bruising impact of the financial crisis and its aftermath, Americans have become increasingly selective about how and where to engage in the world”.
But it is interesting that the Chicago Council’s survey shows that Americans still see their country as a world leader, although, they want to be much more selective about where US focuses its efforts in foreign policy. They are now much more willing to work with other countries to achieve a result, and are less likely to support the use of force in many circumstances and more likely to endorse spending cutbacks, including on defence.
Respondents registered an encouraging shift in mood to support working within the structures of global governance. A miserable legacy of the Bush years was diminishing respect for international institutions like the UN. In 2004, 66 per cent of people polled thought that the US should be more willing to make decisions within the UN even if this means that the US will sometimes have to go along with a policy that is not its first choice, but by 2010 that had fallen to 50 per cent. Happily this has now increased back to 56 per cent in the 2012 survey, showing a more multilateral attitude to world problems from people, even if the US government has yet to show genuine willingness to work with the UN, despite Obama’s declared support for seeking international consensus in the search for answers to the world’s problems.
But Iran is a major issue for Americans. A majority of 64 per cent of respondents saw the Iranian nuclear programme as a critical threat, but even that view that did not translate into any call for military action. The preferred approach to ending the Iranian threat, endorsed by 80 per cent, is what is already happening as the UN Security Council has imposed tighter economic sanctions on Iran. In addition, a very similar number of respondents (79 per cent) approved of continuing diplomatic efforts to get Iran to stop enriching uranium, which was further backed by 67 per cent of Americans said that the US should be willing to meet and talk with Iranian leaders.
The continuing anti-Iranian rhetoric from all quarters of Washington has had a serious effect in exaggerating the popular perception of Iran’s actions. When respondents were asked what they thought was “the most recent assessment by the US intelligence services,” of Iran’s nuclear programme, only 25 per cent of respondents choose the correct answer that “Iran is developing some of the technical ability necessary to build nuclear weapons, but has not decided whether to produce them or not”.
At a wider level, it was encouraging that a growing (if still slight) majority of Americans do not see a fundamental conflict between Islam and the West with 53 per cent saying that “because most Muslims are like people everywhere, we can find common ground, and violent conflict between the civilisations is not inevitable.”
Nevertheless, a sizable minority of Americans (44 per cent) still thinks that “because Muslim religious, social, and political traditions are incompatible with Western ways, violent conflict between the two civilisations is inevitable”.
