Public Opinion and Policy in Wartime

Public Interest in Foreign Affairs

For the most part, Americans' principal focus is on domestic matters; they are inclined to pay little attention to foreign policy issues, including those of war and peace, unless there appears to be a direct threat to the United States. Their attention can be caught by major threats or by explicit, specific, and dramatic dangers to American lives overseas, but once these concerns fade, people return their attention to domestic issues with considerable alacrity—rather like “the snapping back of a strained elastic,” as one analyst has put it (Almond, 76).

For example, in the 1930s domestic problems dominated Americans' attention even as a major war loomed in Europe. Only when war actually began after Hitler's forces invaded Poland in September 1939, and as war against Japan approached in the Pacific from late 1939 through November 1941, did foreign affairs come to the forefront of Americans' professed concerns. Once World War II ended, attention to international concerns dropped to almost nothing. Intermittent interest arose at various points during the crises and wars of the Cold War, but only a very few issues and incidents—most notably the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001—have superseded domestic concerns since 1973.

Public Evaluation of Military Engagements

In general, the American public seems to apply a fairly reasonable, commonsense standard of benefit and cost when evaluating issues of war and peace. An assessment of probable and potential American casualties is particularly important in this evaluation. Accordingly, in contemplating the application of military force, a president typically considers the degree to which the public values the venture, the degree to which it is willing to tolerate U.S. battle deaths to accomplish the goal, and the potential for the political opposition to exploit the situation should American deaths surpass those considered tolerable by the public.

After Pearl Harbor, the public had no difficulty accepting the necessity, and the cost, of confronting the threats presented by Germany and Japan. After the war, it came to accept international communism as a similar threat and was willing to enter the wars in Korea and Vietnam as part of a perceived necessity to confront communist challenges in those countries. However, as the Cold War's two hot wars progressed, they were continually reevaluated, and misgivings mounted about the wisdom of those wars. This decline of support appears to have been related primarily to mounting American casualties, not to television coverage or antiwar protests; the decline of enthusiasm followed the same pattern in both wars, although neither public protest nor television coverage were common during the Korean War.

Policy in the Persian Gulf War of 1991 seems to have followed a similar calculus. A fair number of Americans accepted Pres. George H. W. Bush's claim that it was worth some American lives—perhaps one or two thousand, far lower than were suffered in Korea or Vietnam—to use armed force to turn back Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. But the poll data made clear that support for the effort would have eroded quickly if significant casualties had been suffered—something that happened with Pres. George [Page 679]W. Bush's war in Iraq in 2003. A similar pattern (at much lower casualty levels) is evident when the public has been asked about peacekeeping ventures in places like Bosnia.

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