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Kronologi over fredssagen og international politik 16 januar 2012 / Time Line January 16, 2012
Version 3.515. Januar 2012, 17. Januar 2012
01/16/2012
Americans Are Less Nationalistic than Flag-Waving Politicians
Think
By Lawrence S.
Wittner
Are American politicians out of sync with the public
when it comes to foreign policy? There is considerable reason to
believe so.
Throughout the scramble for the GOP presidential nomination, the
major candidates have certainly been rabidly nationalistic. In a
major foreign policy address on October 7, 2011, Mitt Romney
proclaimed that “the twenty-first century can and must be an
American Century.” Championing a vast military buildup, he
argued that, to secure this “American Century,” the
United States should have “the strongest military in the
world.” By contrast, he assailed the “shameful”
role of the United Nations and other international institutions and
declared that he did not see any reason to obey them—or the
international law they represented—when it did not suit the
U.S. government.
Romney’s newly-anointed top competitor, Rick Santorum, says
nothing about the United Nations, international cooperation, or
international law in the “10 Steps to Promote Our Interests
Around the World” posted on his campaign website. Instead, he
argues that the United States is “intrinsically better
prepared to lead than any other nation.” He adds: “I
truly do believe that we are ‘the last best hope of
earth,’” but, alas, under President Obama, “we
have been weak where we should have been strong and we have been
appeasing of evil.” Naturally, then, Americans should be
“increasing our military preparedness.”
By contrast, polls show that most Americans favor a more
cooperative world order based on international law, a stronger
United Nations, and a less dominant role for the United States in
world affairs.
In a World Public Opinion poll of sixteen nations in 2009, 69
percent of Americans supported the view that nations are obliged to
abide by international law even when doing so is at odds with their
national interest. Furthermore, a 2010 poll by the Chicago Council
on Global Affairs found 82 percent of Americans favored
ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (rejected by the
GOP-dominated Senate in 1999), 70 percent favored participation in
the International Criminal Court (rejected by President George W.
Bush), and 67 percent backed a new international treaty to combat
climate change. In December 2008, a World Public Opinion poll found
that 77 percent of Americans backed an international treaty
abolishing nuclear weapons.
Furthermore, most Americans favor expanding the role of the United
Nations in world affairs. Polling in 2010 by the Chicago Council
on Global Affairs found that majorities of Americans favored
creating a standing UN peacekeeping force (64 percent), giving the
United Nations the authority to enter countries to investigate
human rights violations (72 percent), creating an international
marshals service with the power to arrest leaders responsible for
genocide (73 percent), and empowering the United Nations to
regulate the international arms trade (55 percent).
Overall, as public opinion studies show, Americans want a
smaller—rather than a larger—global footprint for their
nation. According to a 2010 poll by the Chicago Council on Global
Affairs, only 8 percent favored the United States playing the role
of the preeminent world leader, while 71 percent favored a
cooperative approach. Gallup polls have turned up similar results.
In 2011, Gallup reported that only 16 percent of Americans endorsed
the option of the United States playing “the leading
role” in world affairs. According to Gallup, 32 percent of
Americans favored “a minor role” or “no
role” at all for the United States, while 50 percent wanted
the United States to “take a major role, but not the leading
one.”
Much of this opposition to U.S. dominance in the world is
undoubtedly based on distaste for the overseas U.S. military
intervention of the past decade. In recent years, polls have found
substantial public opposition to the U.S. wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan. In 2010, a poll by the Chicago Council on Global
Affairs found that 79 percent of Americans agreed with the
statement that “the U.S. is playing the role of world
policeman more than it should.”
Of course, during the frenzy of an election campaign, it is
tempting to whip up nationalist sentiment through high-flying
rhetoric about an “American Century” and
America’s allegedly unique virtue. How many times have we
heard, in these circumstances, that America is the greatest nation
in the history of the world? But, in the end, Americans might prove
more committed to an internationalist policy than this year’s
flag-waving politicians think.
Lawrence S. Wittner is Emeritus Professor of History at the State
University of New York/Albany. His latest book is Confronting the
Bomb: A Short History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement
(Stanford University Press).
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