When it comes to American foreign policy, U.S. policymakers and citizens from the rest of the world would not be expected to see eye to eye. They do, however, agree on one thing-they both mistrust how ordinary Americans think about international relations.[1]
Elite wariness of American attitudes towards foreign policy has been around since the days of Walter Lippmann. In The Public Philosophy, he warned, "The unhappy truth is that the prevailing public opinion has been destructively wrong at the critical junctures. The people have imposed a veto upon the judgments of informed and responsible officials. . . .Mass opinion has acquired mounting power in this country. It has shown itself to be a dangerous master of decisions when the stakes are life and death." When American troops were deployed to Somalia, George Kennan lamented in The New York Times that American foreign policy was "controlled by popular emotional impulses, and particularly ones provoked by the commercial television industry."
The rest of the world is equally wary of American public opinion. Resentment of American power has been longstanding, but in this decade it has metastasized into something worse. Foreigners have seen President Bush articulate a doctrine of unilateral, preventive war in the name of democratic regime change, invade Iraq in support of that doctrine and get re-elected for his troubles. Since 2002, Pew polls in 16 countries spanning the globe show support for the United States declining in every country except Pakistan, Lebanon and India. To understand the depth of the problem, consider that in 2005 every country in Western Europe had a more favorable opinion of the People's Republic of China than of the United States. This could be written off as hostility to the Bush Administration's foreign policy, except for one problem-the same polls also show increased hostility to the American people.
