What Does American Public Opinion Tell Us About U.S. Support for Ukraine?

Never forget: most Americans do not care about foreign affairs.

By Daniel Drezner, Professor of International Politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy

Some personal news: the good people at Chatham House have asked me to write a column for their magazine The World Today. It will be called Eagle View. My inaugural column is now online and free to read. Beyond the greetings and the salutations and stage-setting, my primary point in the column was to explain one of the most important assumptions I make every day about how the American public thinks about U.S. foreign policy — by and large they do not think about it at all:

The hard truth about Americans is that, by and large, most of them do not care all that much about world politics. In recent polling about presidential elections, voters always rank global issues low relative to economic or social questions. For all the casual talk about globalization making the world a smaller place, a 2021 YouGov poll showed that more Americans have never held a passport than currently hold a valid passport.

The United States is a continent-wide land mass protected by two oceans and two friendly neighbors. Few nations can afford to ignore the rest of the world – but the US is one of them.

This is the primary reason for the foreign policy naivety of most US citizens. When the average American bothers to think about the world, he or she usually excels at holding two diametrically opposed positions: the rest of the world thinks like Americans do, and yet the US remains an exceptional country. It can be frightening to consider that the most powerful country on the planet is populated by voters who rarely, if ever, think about international relations. 

This brings us to the question of whether the United States will continue providing aid to Ukraine as that country defends itself from Russia’s invasion. At the start of the war, there was broad-based bipartisan support for aiding Ukraine, and those who opposed it were mostly on the outside looking in. Nineteen months later, the polling demonstrates that a large number of Americans are increasingly skeptical about additional aid. The presidential primaries are nudging this opinion shift even further; Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, and Vivek Ramaswamy all oppose further aid. In Congress, vapid arguments from the likes of J.D. Vance are being promulgated as though they are legitimate talking points.

The temporary resolution funding the government for about six more weeks that Congress passed this weekend just before a shutdown deadline raises even more questions. During two weeks of trying to pass appropriations bills as a means of establishing bargaining leverage with the Democrats, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy failed multiple times. After caving on Saturday, McCarthy got almost nothing in return — except for stripping additional U.S. appropriations for Ukraine aid. Despite bipartisan support for this move in the Senate — and in the House as well — there will have to be a supplemental bill for it. This came after Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell failed to persuade his caucus to demand its inclusion. 

Biden’s statement after signing the bill made it clear he wants another bite at the Ukraine aid: “We cannot under any circumstances allow American support for Ukraine to be interrupted. I fully expect the Speaker will keep his commitment to the people of Ukraine and secure passage of the support needed to help Ukraine at this critical moment.” According to Politico, “Biden… stressed his expectation that there would be another attempt to pass Ukraine aid in the near term.” The thing is, as the story went on to note, “How much of that was spin, wishcasting, or solid intel was hard to tell.”

So will the moderate shift in U.S. public opinion away from further aiding Ukraine prevent further funding? I don’t think so, although it undeniably complicates matters. As conservative Republicans have become more strident in their opposition to Ukraine aid, the issue has become more polarizing. This means that there is a small bloc of partisan GOP voters who likely care very much about this issue, making it hard to secure bipartisan support. 

That said, most American voters do not seem terribly motivated to oppose Ukraine aid. This matters because most of official Washington — i.e., the Biden White House, Senate Democrats, Senate Republicans, House Democrats, and even a sizeable chunk of House Republicans — support aiding Ukraine for perfectly cromulent national security reasons.1 And as I wrote in my Eagle View column:

Elizabeth Saunders explains in her forthcoming book The Insiders’ Game: How Elites Make War and Peace [that] much of US foreign policy emanates from a bargaining process among elites – Congress, the military, executive branch officials, even outside experts like myself – who are all invested in how, where and when American power should be applied.

Those elites make it such that Ukraine aid will likely get through the House on its own or as part of a larger supplemental. 

No doubt, the uncertainty over aid will unsettle an already unsettled Ukraine. But one thing that country will not have to fear is American public opinion. Because as I said before and will say again: when it comes to foreign policy, voters do not care.

1 I am oddly overjoyed that cromulent is now a real word in the English language. It embiggens the spirit.

(This post is republished from Drezner’s World.)