Post-Election Temperature Check:
Citizen Views on Foreign Policy
Leveraging US Strength in an Uncertain World
Stanley Foundation Conference on National and Global Security
Washington, DC,
Thursday, December 7, 2006
Last month's elections clearly reflected disapproval of the current direction of national security policy. The Stanley Foundation commissioned a national opinion poll to probe the basis of that disaffection. Steven Kull, director of the Program on International Public Attitudes (PIPA), who conducted the research, will analyze Americans' perceptions as to why current policy has run aground. He will present comparative research looking at the mutual views of Americans and Iranians over their relations.
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Post-Speech Summary
The following summary of Steven Kull's presentation, "Post-Election Temperature Check: Citizen Views on Foreign Policy," was drafted by Michael Roston. It has not been approved or reviewed by the speaker.
Steven Kull, director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes, presented the results of a poll—conducted by his organization and fielded by Knowledge Networks—entitled "Americans Assess US International Strategy." The Stanley Foundation commissioned the poll to analyze Americans' perceptions as to why current policy has run aground. The fully random poll had 1,326 respondents, was conducted nationwide from November 21 to 29, and the margin of error varied from 2.7 to 3.9% depending on the question asked.
In the November election, Kull noted, foreign policy questions played a strong role in how people voted. It seemed there was steady dissatisfaction with the current US approach to foreign policy, as well as the American position in the world, and a perception that the threat of terrorist attacks had grown. This poll, he explained, sought to dig deeper and ask what Americans did and did not like about the current approach to foreign policy, how they believed US military power should be used, and if they thought American policymakers should spend more time negotiating and perceiving the United States as bound up in an interdependent world. He explained that the United States under the administration of President George W. Bush had been in an experiment to reduce American reliance on the rest of the world, and now it was time to assess how people think it worked out.
Kull presented some of the poll's key findings. When Americans were asked whether the fear of US military force made it more likely that other countries would try to acquire WMD, 80% overall believed it increased the likelihood, including 68% of Republicans. The same percentage of Americans, 80%, also believed it was important for the rest of the world to have goodwill toward the United States.
The poll also found that 72% of Americans on a bipartisan basis believed that announcing the goal of regime change was a bad idea, and 82% believed that talking with countries who did things the United States opposes was a better approach than isolation For example, 75% of Americans, including 56% of Republicans, believed that the United States should try to build better relations with Iran. On the question of Iraq, 60% of Americans believed that the American military presence in Iraq was provoking more conflict than it was preventing. Additionally, 58% of Americans supported a withdrawal according to a variety of different timelines, although only 35% of Republicans were in favor of this approach. Reflecting on this last point, Kull pointed out that when an issue triggers association with the Bush administration's position, self-identified Republicans would line up behind it.
Kull's conclusion from the poll was that the public believed that the Bush administration's experiment had backfired and decreased American security. He thought the poll's data pointed to the American people thinking that the Bush approach, particularly on Iraq, had stretched Americans away from their basic orientation on international affairs, to which they were now returning. For a new approach, they were seeking less emphasis on military threats and more willingness to embrace a framework of interdependence and a feeling of mutual vulnerability.
Speech Transcript
This text has been professionally transcribed; however, for timely distribution, it has not been edited or proofread against the tape.
Jeffrey G. Martin: The Foundation's mission calls for us to work with both policy experts and the broader public, as we put it in quotes. We take that charge seriously and have streams of programming that work - programming that is directed primarily toward policy experts, and then other programming that is directed primarily toward the broader public in the specific audiences that we've identified.
The - we try to plan that and carry it out in a way that intersects and is not done in separate rooms, and we're pleased at this conference that we've been able to do that, and we made a very intentional effort to do that in a couple of ways. One of the ways is that we brought with us 10 citizen leaders from around the United States who we've worked with in their locales. We brought them here to participate in this conference, but even before, they got started yesterday when we took them around to a number of different institutes in Washington D.C., and then took them to the Hill for briefings and discussions in all of those places. So that's a piece of it.
I want to very quickly just sort of run through who those people are, and if you just want to put your hands up, that'll be fine to indicate where you are. Veronica Canton from Board of Directors of Americans for Informed Democracy in San Francisco.
Tanya Dawkins who is the founder and director of Global-Local Links Project in Miami. Tanya, are you in the room? There she is.
Seth Green who is president of Americans for Informed Democracy and who is at Yale Law School right now. In his spare time he's going to law school while he's running this organization.
Katy Hansen who lives in our neighborhood in Iowa City, Iowa, where she's the co-director of the United Nations Association chapter there for Iowa - for the state of Iowa.
Reverend Bud Heckman who is the executive director of Religions for Peace USA, from New York. Is Bud in the room? There he is.
Trina Janes, who is the president of the Chicago Area Peace Corp Association; she's back there.
Amy Langham, who is up front here, who is executive director of Citizens for Global Solutions in Pittsburgh.
Lallie Lloyd, Episcopalians for Global Reconciliation, from Chapel Hill, North Carolina. And Lallie's back there.
And Robert Ricigliano who is a director of the Institute of World Affairs at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Milwaukee, my home town. That's where I was born and raised, though I haven't lived there for a long time. Rob is with us as well.
So we're really pleased to have them with us, to have done the special programming with them yesterday, and then to integrate them into the program that we're having today and have them experience the same kind of thing that we're doing for others as well.
The other way in which we try to bring the two streams of programming together is by injecting into the deliberations that we're having today, public opinion. And to that end, we commissioned the Program on International Policy Attitudes to conduct a poll for us, which was just out in the field in the last couple of weeks, and the results of which are going to be released to you here today by Steven Kull, and it is my pleasure to introduce Steven Kull as director of PIPA and the Center on Policy Attitudes. He directs the PIPA Knowledge Networks Poll that conducts ongoing surveys of the U.S. public, plays a central role in the BBC World Service Poll of Global Opinion, and is directing a major study of social support of anti-American terrorism in Islamic countries.
He regularly appears in the U.S. and international media. His articles have appeared in Political Science Quarterly, Foreign Policy, Public Opinion Quarterly, Harpers, The Washington Post, and other publications. His most recent book, coauthored with I.M. Destler, is Misreading the Public: The Myth of a New Isolationism.
So it's my pleasure to introduce now to show you the results of the polls, polls just conducted by PIPA, Steven Kull.
Steven Kull: Good afternoon. One of the most unique features of the November election is how much foreign policy played a role in the way people voted. That's rather unusual. Polls that we and others conducted show that going into the election, people were quite dissatisfied with U.S. foreign policy. A majority said that they were looking for candidates that would have a new approach to U.S. foreign policy. There were trend-line questions that showed some real - a real sharp drop in satisfaction with America's position in the world, the perception of the threat of terrorist attacks was up and the perception was that things were getting worse in that dimension. The perception that goodwill toward the U.S. was down.
So we wanted to, in this poll, dig deeper into this. What do they not like? What do they want to see more of? And particularly, how do they see the way the U.S. has been using military power and the threat of military power. Do Americans feel that the preponderance - the overwhelming character of U.S. military power puts it in a unique position where it doesn't really need to negotiate with other countries. It can really impose its will. Or is the U.S. - or do they perceive that the U.S. is in a kind of interdependent relationship derived from a significant vulnerability relative to other countries.
Now, in a way, the Bush Administration, has tried to, over the last years, increase the utility of military power that was a somewhat conscious effort to reduce the constraints of the multilateral process, and you might think of it as an experiment. What we're trying to do here is assess the outcome of this experiment to see how they think this has worked out.
So what we did was - shall we get this up on the screen here? Good. We did a poll using Knowledge Networks, a company in California. The sample was 1,326 respondents. Some questions went to the whole sample, some went to half the sample; thus the margin of error varied between 2.7 percent and 3.9 percent, and it was fielded November 21 to 29. This is a nationwide sample, randomly selected by telephone and then the questions were administered over the Internet. If people didn't have Internet access, they were given Internet access so it's fully a random sample.
All right, so we want to look at the role of U.S. military power relative to Americans' perception of U.S. security. One of the more interesting that came in the previous poll was that we found that there was uneasiness there, a feeling that things were out of balance in U.S. foreign policy, and here's an example:
"In the effort to fight terrorism, do you think that in the future, compared to what it has been doing, the Bush Administration should put more emphasis on military methods or more emphasis on diplomatic and economic methods?" And there was a clear majority calling for more emphasis on diplomatic and economic methods, even among 52 percent Republicans, though the Bush Administration was identified in the question.
So then we wanted to, again, find out more about how they see other people around the world reacting to military - U.S. military power, so we asked, "Over the last few years, do you think that people around the world have grown more afraid or less afraid that the U.S. will use military force against them?" And a very large majority, 63 percent overall, said that people around the world have grown more afraid, including 57 percent of Republicans.
Well, guess what, they're actually right. Pew asked, "How worried are you, if at all, that the U.S. could become a military threat to our country someday?" And a very large majority said that they were somewhat or very worried, and these are primarily Islamic countries but also include Russia and Nigeria.
So now then we asked what's really kind of a key question, "As a general rule, if leaders of some countries grow more afraid that the U.S. will use military force against them, do you think on balance this tends to be good for U.S. security because then they are more likely to refrain from doing the things the U.S. does not want them to do? Or bad for U.S. security because that makes them seek out new means of protecting themselves from the U.S. such as acquiring weapons of mass destruction?" A pretty balanced argument, and so the answer was that overall, 63 percent say that it's bad for U.S. security because it makes them seek out new means of protecting themselves.
In a way, you could say that this is - that the use of the threat of military force has backfired. Now, this is not a bipartisan view. A slight majority of Republicans, 53 percent, said that it is good for U.S. security. Independents were definitely on the side of bad for U.S. security.
"As a general rule, if leaders of some countries grow more afraid that the U.S. will use military force against them, do you think on balance this tends to increase or decrease the likelihood the countries will try to acquire weapons of mass destruction?" And here, you have bipartisan agreement that it increases the likelihood that they were gonna go after weapons of mass destruction, including 68 percent of Republicans.
Now, we asked a question that we also asked back in 2003, just in April 2003. At that, we asked, "Since the U.S. has invaded an occupied Iraq, some people think that Iran is now more likely to make weapons of mass destruction to deter the U.S. from attacking Iran. Others think that Iran is now less likely to make weapons of mass destruction because it is more afraid that the U.S. will attack Iran if it does make them." It's the argument that the U.S. had to go to war with Iraq to increase the credibility of its threat, which are threats in general and would have a generalized applicability. I don't know how many of you heard that argument.
"So do you think that since the U.S. has invaded an occupied Iraq, Iran is now more likely to make weapons of mass destruction or less likely to make weapons of mass destruction?" And this is probably the most interesting finding of the study. Now, 61 percent say it has made Iran more likely, but back in April of '03, 68 percent assumed that it would make Iran less likely. So going into Iraq, one of the arguments that this is going to increase the credibility of our threats and make other countries less likely to challenge us and less likely to threaten us by acquiring weapons of mass destruction, that argument worked with the public. A lot of them bought that, but now they've changed. There's been a sharp reversal and they say no, that's not working. It's having the opposite effect.
Now, this is kind of a part of a larger perception that Americans have related to interdependence that we were trying to explore a bit, and we asked this question. "Some people think that when people in other parts of the world are facing instability and feeling insecure, this creates conditions that diminish U.S. security. Others think that the U.S. is so strong that conditions in other parts of the world have little impact on U.S. security. How much would you say instability and insecurity in other parts of the world impact U.S. security?" A very large percentage say somewhat or a great deal, and that's a bipartisan perspective. So this idea that the U.S. is just so powerful that it's just immune to what happens to the rest of the world just does not fly with the public.
Closely related to that is their perspective on the importance of goodwill toward the U.S. We gave them two options. "Goodwill towards the U.S. is important in order to obtain cooperation in dealing with important threats to U.S. security, and because the opposite, hostility towards the U.S., can lead people to actively work against the U.S. For instance, good will is not really critical for the U.S. because it is so much stronger than all the other countries. Trying to be popular can tie the U.S.'s hands and distract the U.S. from pursuing its security." So it overwhelmingly went for the position that goodwill is important, again, that we are in this interdependent relationship, that we are not immune to conditions in the rest of the world, that we need to work together with the rest of the world. Which, again, points in that direction of the importance of diplomacy.
Okay, dealing with problem countries, getting into some specifics here. The whole idea of announcing the goal of regime change. "Currently there is a debate about whether the U.S. government should announce that it has the goal of removing the existing government of another country that it sees as a problem, such as the government of Iran. Some people say this is a good idea. It creates moral clarity and strengthens opposition to the government, both inside and outside that country. Others say it's a bad idea because it violates the principle of national sovereignty, and when countries feel threatened, they are less cooperative or more likely to use dangerous means to protect themselves."
So, "Do you think announcing that the U.S. has the goal of removing an existing government that it sees as a problem is a good idea or a bad idea?" And overwhelming, 72 percent say it's a bad idea. Again, a bipartisan perspective.
The idea of talking with problem countries, something that you have heard a lot in the news these days. We gave them two pairs of arguments. We think it's always important. You don't just say, "Is it good to talk or not?" But to give them, here, arguments on both sides.
"When countries are doing things the U.S. opposes, the U.S. should, (A) not talk to such countries, but isolate them so as to pressure them to change their behavior; or (B) be willing to talk with such countries because isolating them often provokes them increase the behavior the U.S. opposes." Then another pair, "Talking to such countries because - the U.S. should talk to such countries because communications increases the chance of finding a mutually agreeable solution, versus the U.S. should not talk to such countries because talking to them gives them recognition and effectively rewards their behavior."
Again, I imagine these are all echoing things that you've heard. Well, in both cases, the argument in favor of talking was overwhelming endorsed by 8 out of 10 Americans. I thought we gave the argument against talking a pretty good chance.
All right, dealing with terrorism. Can we just - is our - can we use, basically, military power to deal with terrorists, and we offered two positions. "The only way to counter the threat of terrorism is to find and destroy terrorists. It is naïve and pointless to try to understand their intentions or imagine that we can address any of their concerns or do therapy with them." Right. "Versus trying to destroy terrorists is not enough because if we are too heavy handed, it just breeds more hostility and more terrorists. It is necessary to address the sources of the hostility in the largest societies the terrorists come from."
So when you put these together overall, 61 percent clearly go for the second position, but here you have partisan division. Fifty-five percent of Republicans went for the initial position.
"Please indicate which of the following two statements comes closer to your own view. The threat of terrorism is the most important issue of our time and we should be willing to do whatever it takes to fight it. Versus, while terrorism is an important threat it is important to remember that it is not the only one we face. We should not let our concern about terrorism overwhelm all other priorities." So this kind of absolutist, making terrorism the centerpiece.
And here you have 71 percent overall endorsing the second position, that we shouldn't make it so dominant, and even a slight plurality of Republicans.
Dealing with Iran. "Do you think the U.S. should deal with the government of Iran primarily by trying to build better relations or pressuring it with implied threats that the U.S. may use military force against it?" This, again, to us is sort of the central question that we're looking at here is how much does - how much utility is there in the implied threat to use military force versus building diplomatic relations. Overwhelmingly, trying to build better relations is preferred, a bipartisan position.
"Do you think that if the U.S. demands that Iran stop enriching Uranium and threatens to use air strikes against us, enrichment facilities, Iran would or would not stop enriching Uranium?" Seventy-nine percent say that they do not think that this is going to work.
"Do you think it is possible or not possible to fully destroy Iran's nuclear program through air strikes?" Is it just, on a military basis, is it a viable option. They're not talking about anything Normandy here, and 59 percent say that it is not possible.
Well, as you may know, Iran has been enriching Uranium against the wishes of the U.S. and the U.N. Security Council. Do you think the U.S. should demand first Iran - demand Iran first stop enriching Uranium before entering into talks or should not impose preconditions on Iran before entering into talks?" Here you get - it's only a slight - it's a plurality saying should not impose preconditions, but this is a very sharp division. It's just a mirror image between the parties.
Whenever there's a position - whenever you put forward a position and you associate it with the administration, or it's familiar enough to people that it triggers that association, then usually the Republicans will line up with the position that's associated with the administration. So that - though Republicans on many of the abstract themes will call for diplomacy and so on, in certain situations that they associate with the administration, they'll shift.
Now, this is a little bit complicated, and I'm probably not going to read the whole thing. But we wanted to know if they thought, given that we don't have a military option, they thought that we should negotiate with Iran over the Uranium enrichment option. And as you may know, the Iranian government has talked about - other foreign ministers talked about the possibility of eliminating enrichment to lower levels.
So we said, "Here's a proposal for resolving the impasse that Iran should be able to enrich Uranium, but only on two conditions. (1) That enrichment must be limited to low levels necessary for nuclear energy, while enrichment to higher levels needed for nuclear weapons would be forbidden. Then Iran must fully cooperate with U.N. inspectors, allowing full access to make inspections throughout the country to make certain Iran is limiting Uranium enrichment to low levels."
Proponents say this will be fine, the critics say that it's not a good idea. It would give them a good idea. It would give them technical experience that would put them in a strong position if they later decided to violate the agreement and build nuclear weapons, and so on.
Then, so we said, "Do you think it is a good - this is a good idea or not a good idea?" Basically you have a modest majority, 55 percent saying that it's a good idea, including 53 percent of Republicans. So there is, overall, some readiness under very, very specific conditions to negotiate with Iran.
Dealing with Iraq. Well, we were - we didn't know that this was going to come out just when the Iraq Study Group was delivering it's report, but fortunately we asked some of the questions about some of the key elements. We asked, "To try to address the problem of stabilizing Iraq, there is a debate about whether to work with Iraq's neighboring countries with whom we have other disputes. Do you think it's a good idea or a bad idea for the U.S. to have talks with Iran?"
We had to add something in there, like there's a debate to legitimate it, otherwise you're gonna have a talk and what's wrong with talking. So we have to emphasize that there is somebody out there who is arguing against it.
"So do you think it's a good idea or a bad idea for the U.S. to have talks with Iran?" Overwhelming support, 75 percent bipartisan.
"What about having talks with Assyria?" Same thing, overwhelming support, bipartisan.
"Would you fear having a major conference where leaders from the U.S., Europe, the U.N. and various Arab countries would meet with leaders of the new Iraqi government to coordinate efforts to help Iraq achieve stability and economic growth, or do you think it is best for other countries to stay out of Iraq's affairs?" And overwhelming support for a conference. Even the idea to stay out of Iraq's affairs, which always has a resonance to Americans, didn't get any traction.
"Which of the following do you think the U.S.-led forces in Iraq should do: withdraw according to a timeline of six months, one year, two years, or only reduce as the security situation improves?" This isn't exactly what the Iraq Study Group framed up but they did ask - they did say that the U.S. should not have an open-ended commitment.
Basically, overall 58 percent favored a timeline with variations between six months, one year and two years, and only 38 percent favored the open-ended situation. However, this is very divided along party lines again; 64 percent of the Republicans endorsed the open-ended commitment, which is something that is clearly stated by the president.
We asked, "At this point, do you think the majority of the Iraqi people want the U.S. to commit to withdraw within a year or stay longer than a year?" And overall, 58 percent assumed that the Iraqi's want the U.S. to withdraw according to a timeline of a year, but we had a big party division here. Fifty-nine percent of Republicans thought that they wanted them to stay.
Well, what is the case? We did a poll in Iraq in September, a nationwide poll, and in fact, 71 percent of Iraqi's want the U.S. to make a commitment to withdraw within one year. Yeah.
So then we said, "Well, if the majority of the Iraqi people say they want the U.S. to commit to withdraw U.S. forces according to a one-year timeline, do you think the U.S. should or should not do so?" Then you get bipartisan agreement, very large, 73 percent, including 67 percent of Republicans. So this is very key in the minds of Americans as to how the Iraqi people feel.
Now, then we kind of really upped it even further. "Well, what if the large majority of the Iraqi people want the U.S. to commit to withdraw but the Iraqi government wants the U.S. to remain longer?" Which is, arguably, what the real situation is.
Then you get - then it sort of breaks up again. You've got 52 percent overall commit to withdraw, but then you get a big party division between the Republicans and Democrats about whether you should focus on the will of the Iraqi people or the will of the Iraqi government.
Now, just to dig a little bit more into why do they want to - whey are they eager to see U.S. troops out. We did some analysis and we found that this is actually the factor that is most predictive of support for withdrawal, which is, "Do you think the U.S. military presence in Iraq is currently a stabilizing force or provoking more conflict than it is preventing?" You now have 60 percent, up from 55 percent in March, saying that it is provoking more conflict than it is preventing.
Well, what do the Iraqi people think, by the way? Seventy-eight percent think that the U.S. military presence is provoking more conflict than it is preventing.
Now, as I said, this is attitudes about this perception are highly predictive, and here is the correlation. Among those who think that U.S. troops are provoking conflict, more conflict than they're preventing, only 19 percent favor an open-ended commitment. Among those who believe that it's a stabilizing force, 68 percent think that it's a - favor an open-ended commitment. So the question of whether it's doing any good is really driver here, not so much an American interest.
All right, just a quick one, dealing with North Korea. "As you may know, the U.S. has been trying to get North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons program. North Korea said that it will only do so under certain conditions. Here are two of the key conditions, though there are others. Please state whether you think the U.S. should or should not be willing to agree to each condition.
"The U.S. and North Korea sign a formal declaration stating that they will not attack each other, and the U.S. increasing food aid to North Korea." And 71 percent favor this - the security guarantee, basically, and 58 percent overall favor increasing food aid, including a plurality of Republicans.
So just to close with a few comments. Basically, the Bush Administration has pursued an experiment in trying to increase the utility and effectiveness of U.S. military power, and basically the American public feels that this effort has backfired, that it has decreased U.S. security. And it's important to remember that throughout the last few years that the U.S. public went along with the Bush Administration on a lot of fronts.
Going into Iraq, they were not enthusiastic about going into Iraq the way we did. They wanted U.N. approval, they wanted allied participation, and they said, "Well, if the president goes ahead and does it, okay, well we'll back him." It was, like, we'll give him the benefit of the doubt. We'll make an exception in this particular case but this is not the kind of thing that we really want to be doing.
And they said, well - when they said or were told, effectively, this is going to be good for the U.S. on a variety of fronts. Well, then maybe that's gonna work. But they basically felt stretched. They felt pulled away from their basic orientation, from the norms that they use when they think about international affairs. It was kind of like a rubber band stretching. Basically, what I see happening now is that rubber band just got stretched too far and now it's starting to come back and sweeping down chess pieces as it goes.
They're now looking for a new approach, and it has become large self-conscious that they want this, with less emphasis on military threats, more ready to negotiate. And more ready to be inside a framework that says that we are in a relationship of interdependence, that we're in a relationship of basically mutual vulnerability.
During the Cold War, they understood we were in this relationship of mutual vulnerability, and that conditioned how they thought about a lot of issues. And they - the idea that well maybe in this, maybe that's different now, maybe we are so dominant that we are not in that condition of mutual vulnerability that requires that we enter into a kind of negotiated relations, rules of the game, quid pro quos, things like that.
They're now basically back. They never left it. They just kind of made an exception and now it's reasserting itself in what they want to see in how the U.S. approaches international affairs.
Thank you. Any questions, comments? Is there a mic or something?
Jeffrey G. Martin: Yeah, there are handheld mics.
Seth Green: Thank you very much for that. Seth Green, Americans for Informed Democracy, and my question is what you think the staying power of some of these polls and ideas is? Some of the questions that you asked were kind of general philosophy, almost human nature. One of them was is it better to be feared or trusted, essentially. And obviously if you had asked that question September 12, 2001, or even a year later, I bet a lot of Americans would have said we should be feared by the world because that's how we'll build security. Now, obviously, we've had an experiment that's taught us the opposite.
I'm curious. What level do you think these are, growing to be deep, what factors affect the longevity of beliefs? And I know you've been doing this for a long time so I'm curious to get a sense of what you think is the depth of some of these viewpoints?
Steven Kull: Well, the polling that was done immediately after September 11 showed a lot of support for multilateral cooperation. There was a question, "What's the most important less of September 11? We need to work together with other countries more, or we need to be more willing act on our own?"
And it was overwhelming we need together with other countries more. More than 90 percent said that it was very important for the war on terrorism to be seen as a multilateral effort, that the whole world is participating in, not just us. A variety of questions that pointed to limitations on U.S. full freedom of action, they still endorsed it.
So it's not - 9/11 did not undermine American support for multilaterals. In fact, they tend - when given a list of approaches to terrorism, dealing with the problem of terrorism, the ones that were getting and still get the highest are ones that involve multilateral cooperation, like working together with other countries, sharing intelligence, tracking down - to track down terrorists and things like that.
So this - these attitudes are rooted in the post-World War II period. There was - the trauma of World War II brought Americans together in a very powerful way to say, "We have to have a system of international law, collective security and so on." And that has not moved; it's still there. You can get them to move off of it, as a kind of special case, but in the end it tends to kind of reassert itself. So I don't see this as a kind of up and down kind of thing.
Charlie?
Charlie Brown: Hey, Steve. Charlie Brown, Citizens for Global Solutions. I noticed as your presentation went on that Independents kind of disappeared. I'm presuming that was more for presentation reasons than anything else.
Steven Kull: Right.
Charlie Brown: But I'd like you to just comment on what role - the changing role of Independents in this whole process, and with them now making up somewhere around 40 percent of the voting population, why when - and I'd like you to also talk about your personal philosophy on why you don't include them in the presentation since they're such a significant part of the electorate.
Steven Kull: We had a little argument about this at the office. You're gonna - the other guys are gonna gain something because you said that. I just think there's so much information up there, and breaking out the parties is a lot.
Basically, the Independents tend to be pretty much look like the overall number, and they're almost always on the same side as the democrats, so which is sort of the story of the last election as well.
Christopher Preble: Chris Preble with the Cato Institute. Steve, I have a question about Iraq and the timetable of withdrawal. Obviously you did this survey before the issuing of the ISG report, but it is true the ISG report calls for withdrawal, conditions permitting. We could withdraw troops by the first quarter of 2008, subject to conditions on the ground.
Is it your sense or is just a matter of we need to focus on this going forward, will there be now more support for a conditions-based withdrawal as we can, as opposed to a time table - a fixed time table calendar?
Steven Kull: Well, I think that we have going into the field now, it's already went into the field last night, we're going to ask about aiming for early 2008, and I anticipate that there will be majority support for that. It's been further made valid by the Iraq Study Group.
Whether it will be conditions-based, well, yeah, probably Americans will say under certain conditions you might have to reevaluate that. They're not necessarily set on it being hard and fast. But the main thing is that they want to see things moving in that direction, or even more fundamentally, they want the U.S. to not be going for maximal outcomes. They're ready to defer to the Iraqi people, and they're ready for it to be somewhat messy.
The president's language of victory and so on, these kind of maximal ends. The way I read this - these data is that that's not what they're - how they're oriented now.
Don Krauss: Don Krauss, Citizens for Global Solutions. Steve, you've done a lot of work in the past in taking a look at how the American public looks, and then how policymakers on Capitol Hill and in the executive look at particular issues. And there was - there seems to be, from my perspective at least, a lot more bipartisan agreement across some of the questions that you had here than we've seen in the past.
How is that kind of bipartisan consensus that's being developed amongst Americans, including Independents, as Charlie would mention - how is that translating up to policymakers in Capitol Hill and within the executive. Do you have any information in terms of that, or at least based on your past experience?
Steven Kull: There's this thing called the Iraq Study Group, which I see as basically the foreign policy elite, the bipartisan foreign policy elite, coming together to really take a position that there are some real problems with U.S. foreign policy and something needs to be done. So I think as that becomes more prominent, that will probably only consolidate it more in the American public.
Amy Langham: Hi, my name is Amy Langham and I'm from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I sort of want to shift gears for a minute. I think your - I think the polls sort of undermined some stereotypes about Americans and their views on foreign policy, and their views on interdependence - our views on interdependence. Being from Pittsburgh, James Carville said something very famous about Pennsylvania. "What do you find in between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia?"
His comment was, "Well, you find Alabama."
It's this stereotype that really hampers people who work at the grassroots level because it's very patronizing and it's really not true. The further I go away from the city of Pittsburgh, the more I find that people really do understand interdependence, they really can think of these foreign policy problems in terms of contingencies, they can see options. They understand these things.
So I was wondering if the data that you've been collecting over the years do undermine this stereotype, based on religion, based on the level of education, based on your income? Like, does Joe Six Pack really exist? My expectation that Joe Six-Pack really doesn't exist, and I think we should work to sort of break that stereotype because those of us that do sort of work out in the provinces are really sort of hampered by that attitude because it's assumed that we carry those patronizing attitudes as well. So thank you.
Steven Kull: I'll tell a little story. In the 90s, this was suggested that there are these districts - Congress reflects the public. So if a member of Congress is really anti-U.N. or something like that, then you can be pretty sure that the district is that way too.
So we contacted, actually, staffers in a number of offices where the member had cosponsored legislation to withdraw from the U.N., and we asked people in those offices what they thought the views of their district were. We isolated some where they had said - where they said we think the majority in our district want to withdraw from the U.N. and completely eliminate foreign aide, to quote Alabama.
So I actually went to Boise, Idaho - one of them was Helen Chenoweth's district - and did a focus group, a few focus groups. At one point, I said, "How many people here like the idea of withdrawing from the U.N.?"
One goes, "Well, maybe we ought to talk about it."
Then somebody else goes, "You know what I think? I think the U.N. ought to have its own standing army. That's what I think."
And then I go, "Well, how many people agree with what he just said?" There were 12 people in the room, and 8 hands went up in Boise, Idaho. So it's - then we did a poll in the district.
In fact - now, I thought that in those districts, we had four of them. There was Sonny Bono's in Southern California, Joe Scarborough's in Florida, and David Funderburk in North Carolina. I thought, "Okay, they're probably going to be more negative about the U.N.," though I didn't think that you would have a majority wanting to withdraw. But they were not even different from the general public. The attitudes on foreign policy are so homogenous around the country, it is bizarre.
Now, that doesn't mean that there aren't certain areas where people feel different about what they can say or put on a billboard, like about the U.N. or something like that. And there are people who feel they are somehow the dominant ones. But when you ask them directly on the phone, they - or by other means - they are really not very different. And we have looked and looked, and we have tried to break it. We went searching for Joe Six-Pack through all the demographic wheeling and dealing we could do, and it's really hard to find them. I'm not saying that they don't exist, but as a kind of general group in the - in some region or something like that, it's really not there.
Now, that doesn't mean that there aren't some negative feelings about how things have been going at the U.N. The perception of the U.N.'s performance has been going down, has been down for a few years. But if you ask them, "So, well what do you want to see happen?"
They say, "We want the U.N. to be more powerful. We want the U.N. to have a standing peacekeeping force. We want the U.N. to play a bigger role, and we're angry at it because it's not, it's not being as effective as we want it to be."
A little commercial. If you are interested in getting on our email alert list to get announcements of our studies that are - we have one coming out that we are doing in Iran right now, as we speak, as well as one that just came out in Afghanistan and other places. There are sign-up sheets around and you will be the first to know.
Jeffrey G. Martin: Thanks very much, Steven.
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