Following Up: A Learning Curve on Ukraine Polling

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CBS News, No-Fly Zone, nuclear war, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Pew Research Center, polls, public opinion, Quinnipiac University poll, Reuters/Ipsos, Russia, The Wall Street Journal, Ukraine, Ukraine invasion, Ukraine-Russia war, YouGovAmerica

We’re getting some clarity from the – always imperfect – polls on whether Americans support direct U.S. military involvement in the Ukraine war, and the news is mostly good. Specifically, strong majorities currently reject “boots on the ground” and even the more limited no-fly-zone proposal for fear of risking nuclear war with Russia.

In other words, we know more than we did a little more than a week ago, when the Reuters news organization and the Ipsos polling concern asked respondents their views on the no fly zone, but didn’t mention the nuclear war thing in their question. That’s about as smart as asking someone whether they’d take medicine A to cure disease B without mentioning that medicine A could cause an even worse disease C.

Even weirder, the Reuters article describing the survey’s results actually pointed out this crucial omission. Just for the record, though, Reuters and Ipsos weren’t the only examples of polls completely ignoring vital context, as this YouGoveAmerica post makes clear.

But it seems that pollsters are displaying a learning curve – even in the foreign policy field in which, as the above linked RealityChek post shows, they’ve been especially clueless.

For instance, the YouGovAmerica outfit followed up its first ditzy survey on the No Fly Zone with another that – unlike its initial soundings – defined the idea (without naming it) rather than asking if people support it “without a definition.” What a concept! And once respondents were presented with the fact that American pilots shooting at Russian military planes, support fell support fell substantially.

A similar YouGov exercise for CBS News yielded much more opposition to the No Fly Zone. When it was simply mentioned by name, it enjoyed 59 percent to 41 percent backing. When respondents were told this would mean “U.S. forces might have to engage Russian aircraft, and be considered an act of war by Russia,” the results more than flipped. Sixty two percent opposed the idea and only 38 percent favored it.

Earlier this week, the Pew Research Center found that Americans opposed the United States “taking military action” in Ukraine “if it risks a nuclear conflict with Russia” by 62 percent to 35 percent – a margin much wider than that in the YouGovAmerica poll.

Also this week, the polling center at Quinnipiac (Conn.) University mentioned that a No Fly Zone “would lead NATO countries into a war with Russia.” Opponents prevailed over supporters by 54 percent to 32 percent.

Interestingly, much more public caution was displayed concerning the question of whether the United States “should do whatever it can to help Ukraine, even if it means risking a direct war between the U.S. and Russia” or “do whatever it can to help Ukraine, without risking “such a direct war. The don’t-risk-war option won out by 75 percent to 17 percent.

I’ve found less information on an early March Wall Street Journal poll (including on the phrasing of the questions), but it, too, revealed meager support for direct U.S. military involvement in Ukraine. Only 29 percent of respondents backed the N0 Fly Zone, and only ten percent would “send U.S. troops” to the country.

So why did I say at the outset that the polling news was only “mostly good”? Because in my view, the shares of Americans reportedly willing to risk nuclear war over Ukraine are still alarmingly high – in the 30s and 40s percents, except for the Wall Street Journal poll. It makes me wonder whether the mere mention of nuclear war is enough to show the full potential magnitude of these positions. Maybe respondents should have to watch, for example, this movie, too.

Im-Politic: The January 6th Card Isn’t Working for the Democrats

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Biden, Capitol assault, Capitol riots, CNN, Democrats, Donald Trump, election 2022, election 2024, Im-Politic, January 6, January 6 committee, midterm elections, midterms 2022, Pew Research Center, RealClearPolitics.com, Republicans

Some compelling evidence emerged this past week that if the Democratic Party thinks it’s going to prevent major losses in this year’s Congressional elections mainly by beating the Capitol riot and the Donald Trump-as-deadly-danger-to-American-democracy drums, it needs a major reality check. For new polls are showing that the public is increasingly moving on from January 6^th, and is less and less critical of the former President’s role.

The most eye-opening survey results came out on Tuesday from the Pew Research Center. They showed that, since the immediate aftermath of the attack, 52 percent of the country’s adults assigned Trump “a lot of responsibility” for the riot, 23 percent said he deserved “some” responsibility, and 24 percent saw him as blameless. But of those responding to the same question in the middle of last month, only 43 percent agreed with “a lot,” 24 percent agreed with “some,” and 32 percent agreed with “none at all.”

Predictably, a big partisan split emerged. But changes in Trump’s favor were evident even among adults calling themselves Democrats and those avowedly leaning Democratic. Last year, 81 percent told Pew that Trump bore “a lot” of blame for the riot, 14 percent answered “some” blame, and just five percent let him off the hook. This year, the results were 70 percent, 17 percent, and 12 percent, respectively.

A CNN-co-sponsored poll also taken last month and released Thursday found somewhat similar results in response to a somewhat different question. Last January, 75 percent of the adult respondents surveyed called the Capitol attack a “crisis” or “major problem” for American democracy, with 36 percent choosing “crisis.” Last month, the comparable overall figure was 65 percent, with 28 percent calling the riot a “crisis.”

These two surveys also warn Democrats not to expect the House of Representative’s January 6^th committee to be a political game changer. The Pew poll reports that, since last September, the share of U.S. adults who have heard a lot about the committee has more than doubled. But it’s still just 26 percent. And only 29 percent of Democrats say they’ve been tuned in to this extent.

Meanwhile, according to Pew, only 44 percent of American adults overall are “very” or “somewhat” confident that the committee’s investigation of the riot is “fair and reasonable.” Fifty-four percent are “not too” or “not at all” confident.

CNN’s results were more favorable to the committee: Forty-four percent of its respondents viewed it as “a fair attempt to determine what happened” and just 36 percent dismissed it as a “one-sided effort to blame Donald Trump.” (Twenty percent “hadn’t heard enough to say.”) But no earlier figures were presented to enable judging any trend over time.

But maybe the most revealing poll results pointing to a big fading of January 6th’s political effects (totally contrary to what yours truly predicted) come from RealClearPolitics.com. Since August, the site has tracked polls that have asked the public whether they would back Trump or President Biden if they ran against each other in the 2024 presidential election. Of the 12 surveys monitored, Trump has won in ten and one produced a tie.

At least as revealing: In five of these polls (including two of the last three), the “Trump vote” topped his official 46.86 percent share of the 2020 vote.

As I’ve written previously, this could all change if the House committee or the press produce some genuinely blockbuster findings, or if Trump is perceived to be going unprecedentedly far off the rails or if most of the myriad challenges and opportunities sure to face America over the next few months break the Democrats’ way. And I certainly don’t rule out Republicans screwing up in some disastrous way between now and November.   

But so far, it looks very much like their “All January 6th” approach has been a bad bet for Democrats. At the same time, given Mr. Biden’s record and deep unpopularity, maybe it’s still the best bet they’ve got.

Im-Politic: Latinos Flocking to a (Still Trump-ian) Republican Party

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Axios-Ipsos Poll, Biden, Democrats, Donald Trump, election 2016, election 2020, election 2022, election 2024, exit polls, Glenn Youngkin, Hispanics, Im-Politic, Immigration, Latinos, NPR-Marist Poll, Pew Research Center, polls, public opinion, Republicans, The Wall Street Journal, Virginia governor's race

Remember all those those charges that former President Donald Trump made clear from the very beginning of his 2016 presidential campaign that he was an anti-Latino bigot, and the predictions that any political success he enjoyed would doom Republican chances of winning support from this increasingly important group of voters?

Apparently, many Latino voters themselves don’t. Or they’ve concluded that Trump and now dominant Republican views on sensible controls on immigration matter less to them than views on other issues. Or that they actually like Trump and the Republicans on some combination of these subjects – including immigration. Or that maybe the Republican positions aren’t terrific, but that what the Democrats have stood for lately is a non-starter.

That’s the message being sent lately by several recent polls on Latino political views that could decisively shape American politics for the foreseeable future.

First, though, some context. There’s little doubt now that four years of Trump-ism wound up boosting the former President’s support among Latinos, now further shrinking it. In 2016, Trump won 28 percent of their presidential vote. In 2020, this figure had grown to 32 percent according to the eixt polls. (This subsequent study pegs his 2020 total at 38 percent.)  And of course, in some key states, the exit polls showed, his 2020 performance was far better – notably Florida (46 percent) and Texas (41 percent). So the racism and xenophobia charges were showing signs of flopping while throughout Trump’s term in office.

Even so, the results of a Wall Street Journal survey conducted in the second half of November came as a major shock. They showed that if Trump was running for the White House against President Biden today, he’d lose by only 44 percent to 43 percent among Latino voters. And they said they’d be even split at 37 percent in their votes for Democratic and Republican Congressional candidates.

As noted in this analysis, the poll’s sample size was very small, so serious doubts in its accuracy are justified. But similar results have been reported elsewhere. Yesterday, notably, National Public Radio and Marist College released a survey showing that just 33 percent of Latino adults approved of President Biden’s performance in office, versus 65 percent who disapproved. These Biden Latino numbers were worse than his ratings from American adults as a whole (41 percent approving and 55 percent disapproving).

Moreover, only 11 percent of Latino adults “strongly approved” of Mr. Biden’s presidency so far, versus 17 percent of U.S. adults overall, and when it came to strong disapproval, 52 percent of Latinos marked that column compared with 44 percent of the total national adult population.

Nor does the evidence stop there that the longer Mr. Biden has been in office, the less Latinos like his perfomance. As this Washington Post column reminds, “In late May, Biden’s job approval among Hispanics averaged 60 percent, with a net approval margin of 32, a bit larger than his vote margin the prior year.”

Biden backers and Democrats can point to a new Axios-Ipsos survey reporting that “The Democratic Party enjoyed huge advantages over the Republican Party when Latino respondents were asked which party represents or cares about …..” But after that ellipsis comes the finding that “those advantages evaporated when it came to the economy and crime.”

Democrats own a clear edge among Latinos on one major issue, though: the CCP Virus pandemic. According to the Axios-Ipsos results “respondents were much more likely to say Democrats were doing a good job of handling COVID-19 as a health challenge — 37% to 11% for Republicans, with another 17% saying both are doing a good job.” 

But Axios-Ipsos has been a major outlier lately, as made clear in this analysis that looks not only at this year’s polls but the Virginia gubernatorial election, which saw victorious Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin actually win the state’s Latino vote.  The conventional wisdom seems to hold that Youngkin prevailed in large measure because he held Trump at arm’s length. But in light of all the other survey results, maybe that’s wishful Mainstream Media thinking?      

It’s still a long way even to the 2022 Congressional elections, much less the 2024 presidential race. But unless the President and his party can turn their sagging fortunes around, it looks like they’re rapidly running out of time with Latinos – who are increasingly flocking to a Republican Party still strongly influenced by Donald Trump.  

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Why Biden’s Immigration-Enabling Goals Couldn’t be Worse Timed

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asylum seekers, California, CCP Virus, coronavirus, COVID 19, Department of Labor, Eduardo Porter, illegal aliens, illegal immigration, Immigration, Jobs, Joe Biden, NAFTA, North American Free Frade Agreement, Open Borders, path to citizenship, Pew Research Center, recession, refugees, services, The New York Times, The Race to the Bottom, wages, Wuhan virus, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Apparent President-elect Joe Biden emphatically and repeatedly told the nation that he’s determined to increase the flow of immigrants to America – whether we’re talking about his promises that will greatly strengthen the immigration magnet (like creating a “roadmap to citizenship” for America’s illegal alien population, tightly curbing immigation law enforcement activities, and offering free government-funded healthcare to anyone who can manage to cross the border lawfully or not), or his promises to boost admissions of refugees, speed systems for processing applications for asylum and (legal) green card applications, and generally “to ensure that the U.S. remains open and welcoming to people from every part of the world….”

During normal recent times such pledges – and the fallout of pre-Trump efforts to keep them – had proven troublesome enough for the U.S. economy and for working class Americans in particular. Inevitably, they pumped up the supply of labor available to U.S.-based businesses, and created surpluses that enabled companies to cut wages with the greatest of ease – exactly as the laws of supply and demand predict.

During the CCP Virus pandemic and its likely economic aftermath, however, this quasi-Open Borders strategy looks positively demented, as emerging trends most recently described by New York Times economics writer Eduardo Porter should make painfully obvious.

According to Porter in a December 1 piece, “The [U.S.] labor market has recovered 12 million of the 22 million jobs lost from February to April. But many positions may not return any time soon, even when a vaccine is deployed.

“This is likely to prove especially problematic for millions of low-paid workers in service industries like retailing, hospitality, building maintenance and transportation, which may be permanently impaired or fundamentally transformed. What will janitors do if fewer people work in offices? What will waiters do if the urban restaurant ecosystem never recovers its density?”

What’s the connection with immigration policy? As it happens, the service industries the author rightly identifies as sectors apparently vulnerable to major employment downsizing are industries that historically have employed outsized shares of immigrant workers (including illegals). And along with other personal service industries, they’re kinds of sectors whose modest skill requirements would continue to offer newcomers overall their best bets for employment.

The charts below, from the Pew Research Center, show just how thoroughly dominated by both kinds of immigrants these sectors, and present similar data broken down by occupation. (The U.S. Department of Labor tracks employment according to both kinds of categories.)

Twenty years ago, in my book The Race to the Bottom, I wrote about news reports making clear that

“immigrants were flooding into California in hopes of landing jobs in labor-intensive industries such a apparel and electronics assembly that NAFTA [the North American Free Trade Agreement] had steadily been sending to Mexico — where most of the immigrants come from! In other words, the state was importing people while exporting their likeliest jobs.” 

And not surprisingly, wages throughout the southern California in particular stagnated.  

If a Biden administration proceeds with its stated immigration plans as quickly as it’s promised (with many actions scheduled for the former Vice President’s first hundred days in office), this epic blunder will wind up being repeated — but this time on a national scale.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Im-Politic: About That Systemic Police Racism Charge

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African Americans, Gallup, Im-Politic, Pew Research Center, police, polls, race relations, racism, systemic racism

For the longest time, it’s been widely noted that polls tend to send two unusually strange and related messages: First, Americans’ views of their own personal situations, and of the national situation, often differ tremendously; and second, the first is much brighter than the second.

So for instance, poll respondents can dismiss Congress as a bunch of incompetent crooks, yet voters keep reelecting their own representatives – in the most important poll of all. They can condemn America’s healthcare system as a mess, but make clear how much they like their own coverage.

But familiar as I am with this pattern, I was stunned to see it appear in a Thursday Gallup poll about African Americans and their encounters with the police.

Taken on their own, the findings seemed narrative-busting enough. The Gallup headline was pretty par for the recent course: “For Black Americans, 41% of Police Encounters Not Positive.” That’s hardly confirmation of the apparently emerging conventional wisdom that American law enforcement is plagued by systemic racism.

After all, even the downbeat wording of the header suggests that 59 percent of these encounters have been positive for African Americans. The actual results are even more surprising, given how systemic the systemic charge has become. Specifically, 73 percent of African Americans polled reported that during their “interactions with police,” they were “treated with respect.” And 74 percent said they were “treated fairly.”

To be sure, these percentages are lower than for whites (by 20 percentage points for the overall positive/non-positive assessment, by 17 percentage points when it comes to respect, and by 19 percentage points when it comes to fairness). But although these gaps are hardly trivial, all the readings are well into majority positivity, respect, and fairness territories. And even the finding that provides the most support for the systemic racism charge is kind of suspect when you think about it. After all, let’s say that any driver is stopped by a police car and (justly) ticketed for speeding. Whatever his or her race, what driver is likely to feel great about the experience?

And these findings also fit the broader polling pattern of individuals assessing their own personal situations as being better than relevant broader situations. For example, in early 2019 (i.e., not so long ago), Gallup  reported that 77 percent of African Americans reported believing that “blacks in their community” are “treated less fairly than whites” in “dealing with the police, such as traffic incidents.” FYI, the questions were asked in 2018.

Moreover, not only does that finding clash pretty loudly with the results from this past Thursday about African Americans’ own personal experiences. It also clashes pretty loudly with the results from that same 2019 poll’s findings on African Americans’ own personal experiences. When asked “Can you think of any occasion in the last 30 days when you felt you were treated unfairly in the following places because you were black?”, only 21 percent of blacks answered “Yes.” Maybe the limited timeframe held down the “yes” responses for individuals. But if police racism really is systemic, you’d think that for the African American respondents as a whole, the time interval problem would fade away.

And here’s an interesting kicker: The 21 percent figure isn’t the all-time high recorded by Gallup. That came in 2004 – during George W. Bush’s Presidency.

Nor is Gallup the only polling organization to report a large gap between African Americans’ views on police racism generally, and on their own experiences with police. An April, 2019 Pew Research Center survey found that 84 percent of African Americans believe that “in general in our country these days, blacks are treated less fairly than whites in dealing with police.” But only 44 percent said they had been unfairly stopped by police.

None of this is to say that there are no racial issues in American law enforcement. After all, that 44 percent Pew figure doesn’t translate into “most,” but it’s still disturbingly high. My own personal conversations with black friends have helped convince me (despite my deep mistrust of the evidentiary value of anecdotes) that there is a tendency on the part of a non-negligible number of police officers across the country to view African American men in particular with special suspicion, and to act on these suspicions. South Carolina Republican Senator Tim Scott’s alleged experiences in this respect carry weight with me, too.

But recognizing the importance of these instances is a far cry from proving that  American law enforcement as a whole is afflicted with systemic racism, however you define the term. And the Gallup and Pew results represent two more reasons for caution about this conclusion.

Im-Politic: Evidence that Trump Would Be Foolish Not to “Run on China”

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2020 election, CCP Virus, China, climate change, coronavirus, COVID 19, cybersecurity, Democrats, environment, Gallup, human rights, Im-Politic, Jobs, Joe Biden, Pew Research Center, polls, public opinion, Republicans, tariffs, Trade, trade deficit, trade war, Trump, Wuhan virus

Monday I laid out the case that presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has cheer-led every major Washington policy decision in recent decades that has enabled the rise of a wealthy, powerful, and worst of all, hostile and dangerous China. So it’s at least awfully interesting that the day after, a new poll was released making clear that the Trump campaign’s decision to brand the former Vice President as “soft on China” is not only on the mark substantively, but a smart political move.

The poll, conducted by the Pew Research Center, shows that Americans of all political stripes have turned into strong China critics. And especially important – there’s much more going on here than blaming Beijing for the CCP Virus outbreak. Respondents across-the-board now strongly agree that China poses a major threat to a wide range of U.S. interests – including on the trade front, where President Trump’s tariffs were widely reported to be devastating pretty much every major group of actors in the American economy, from businesses to consumers, and from farmers to manufacturers.

P.S. It’s not like Pew has ever itself shown any signs of being critical of China. Indeed, its introduction to the results includes this moral equivalence-friendly assessment: “…with the onset of an unprecedented pandemic, the stage has been set for both sides to cast aspersions on the other.”

The finding Pew emphasizes is a dramatic rise in unfavorable American views of China since Mr. Trump’s inauguration. When he entered office at the beginning of 2017 , the respondents Pew interviewed disapproved of China, but only by a narrow 47 percent to 44 percent margin. The most recent results show unfavorable ratings thumping favorable by 66 percent to 26 percent. The latest negative reviews garnered by Beijing, moreover, represent its worst such showing since Pew began asking the question in 2005.

And as Pew points out, looking at this divergence over time makes clear that China’s ratings began deteriorating long before the virus appeared. In fact, the sharpest increases in Beijing’s unfavorables and sharpest decreases in its favorables started in 2018 – when the administration began announcing and imposing steep levies on huge amounts of prospective imports from China.

Indeed, China’s image among Americans is now so bad that it’s shared among Democrats and Republicans alike. Frustratingly, the survey doesn’t measure the attitudes of declared political independents, but the latest figures show that 72 percent of Republicans and those “leaning” Republican hold unfavorable views of China, and that 62 percent of Democrats and their “leaners” agree. And both negatives are up sharply since the trade war began – or more accurately, since the United States started fighting back.

Not that trade is the only China-related concern expressed in the Pew survey, or even the strongest. Pew gauged U.S. opinion on several China-related issues, and the biggest worries were voiced over “China’s impact on the global environment.” Fully 91 percent of respondents labeled it as a “very serious” or “somewhat serious” problem for the United States, the former responses hitting 61 percent. Next came “cyberattacks from China,” rated as problems by 8 percent of those surveyed, and as “very serious” problems by 57 percent.

Coming in third and fourth were the economic issues. Eighty five percent saw the U.S. trade deficit with China as a problem, including 49 percent calling it serious. And for “the loss of U.S. jobs to China,” the numbers came in at 85 percent and 52 percent, respectively. Interestingly, those latter results nearly matched those for the issue of “China’s growing military power” (84 percent and 49 percent, respectively).

Important to note, however, is evidence that, high as they are, the economic concerns have been leveling off in recent years, while the environmental concerns have been rising (along with those centered on human rights). That’s not necessarily great news for Mr. Trump, whose focus has been on the jobs and overall economy impact (along with the technological threat from China – which is a major source of public China-related concern).

Much better news for the President – Americans aged 50 and older (whose voter turnout rates have long been high) – hold the most negative views of China. Yet this year, Beijing’s image has turned negative for Americans in the 18-29 age class for the first time ever. And for both groups, disapproval of China surged starting in 2018.

Of course, China’s not the only issue on which Americans will be voting this fall. But the latest Gallup results, for example, show that virus-related issues have surged to the top of their rankings for the “most important problem facing the U.S.” If the President can link the virus with the overall China challenge in voters’ minds, his odds of reelection would seem to be pretty good. His biggest obstacle? Possibly the companion Gallup finding that right behind the virus on the list of national problems is “The government/poor leadership.”

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: A Big Hint that America Finally Needs to Leave NATO

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alliances, allies, Article V, Cato Institute, defense spending, Europe, free-riding, globalism, NATO, North Atlantic treaty Organization, nuclear war, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Pew Research Center, tripwire, Trump

Whenever I’ve written about America’s security alliances lately, I’ve emphasized the unacceptable dangers they pose to the nation’s safety because they commit the United States to risk nuclear attack to defend countries that clearly now don’t belong on the list of U.S. vital interests – that is, countries so important to America that their independence literally is worth the complete destruction of major individual cities and even genuine armageddon.

Earlier this week, however, a reminder has appeared about another crucial reason to ditch the granddaddy of these alliances – the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Revealingly, it also strongly bears out President Trump’s charges that U.S. allies in the region where they’re concentrated (Europe) have been shamelessly free-riding on the United States. Indeed, the new information also underscores how the allied defense deadbeats are not only ripping America off economically (which seems to be Mr. Trump’s main concern), but how their cheapskate defense budgets are fueling the nuclear risk faced by the United States.

The evidence comes in the form of a new survey of the populations of NATO member countries (including the United States) released by the Pew Research Center, and if you stopped with the headline (“NATO Seen Favorably Across Member States”) you’d understandably think that everything is just dandy in alliance-land. But check out the chart below, which for some reason doesn’t appear until the middle of the Pew report. Its central message should outrage the entire nation.

 

For it shows that although NATO populations are confident that the United States “would defend them from Russian attack,” they’re decidedly unenthusiastic about their own countries participating in the defense of another NATO member. Specifically, a median of 60 percent of residents of NATO Europe (along with Canada) countries express such confidence in America’s military (including nuclear) guarantee (versus 29 percent who are not so convinced). But by a 50-38 percent margin, they oppose their own country joining in.

Of the fourteen NATO members surveyed, populations in only four (the United Kingdom, Canada, Lithuania, and the Netherlands) favored using military force to defend a fellow NATO ally. Yet in only four (Turkey, Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic) did majorities not expect the United States would use force to defend them.

The gap was widest in Italy (where only 25 percent favored helping defend another ally versus 75 percent believing that the United States would ride to its own rescue) and narrowest in the Netherlands (where the numbers were 64 percent and 68 percent respectively). The Italians also were the most confident in the United States in absolute terms, and tied with the Greeks for the least willing to help out. The only NATO members in which majorities supported both propositions were the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Lithuania.

Americans should be infuriated by these results for several intertwined reasons. First, the obligation to come to the defense of a fellow NATO member is at the heart of the alliance (and indeed of any alliance) and is spelled out in Article V of the NATO treaty. Although it’s true that members can always ignore legal obligations when push comes to shove, that’s long been much more difficult for the United States – because of its policy of stationing its own forces in many NATO countries (as well as in South Korea) to serve as “tripwires.” The idea has been that once they’re bloodied by attackers, and indeed about to be overwhelmed (because of their relatively small size) American Presidents will have no real choice but to respond with the U.S.’ equalizer – nuclear weapons.

This prospect was supposed to deter attack in the first place, and the (very) good news is that this strategy worked to keep the peace in Europe throughout the Cold War, and is still working. The bad news is that during the Cold War, the main European beneficiaries were countries whose independence was arguably vital to America – like the United Kingdom, (West) Germany, and France. Nowadays, the main beneficiaries are countries whose independence was never even during the Cold War viewed as vital to the United States – principally, the former Soviet bloc countries.

Yet although the stakes have shrunken dramatically, Washington continues to brandish the nuclear sword. And this risky American strategy remains in place – as it always has – because the European allies’ military forces have remained far too small and weak to repel a Soviet/Russian attack on their own, or with the help of modest U.S. non-nuclear forces. Worse, the Pew results also strongly suggest that if war did break out, American leaders could not for long even count on the help of allied forces even if it was provided initially. That’s an unparalleled recipe for disaster on the actual battlefield.

The Pew findings make the reason for this alarming situation glaringly obvious – the allies have skimped on their military spending out of confidence that the Americans would always answer their call. So why shouldn’t they save the big bucks that would be needed for genuine self-defense and use them for other purposes – like generous welfare states? Even better, the Americans would be left holding the nuclear risk bag, since once any conflict on the conflict escalated to that level, the nuclear conflict would be fought over their heads.

In addition, the Pew survey reinforces the results of a poll released last fall and alertly reported by my good friend Ted Galen Carpenter of the Cato Institute (who’s also just come out with an important new book on the subject).

Let’s be totally clear: This European approach has always made perfect sense from a European standpoint. But it not only makes no sense for the United States – it’s a strategy that creates the danger of national suicide because of decisions that still yoke the country’s fate to manifestly unreliable foreign publics.

Weirder yet: Avowedly America First champion President Trump has been steadily increasing the U.S. military presence in NATO’s most vulnerable – eastern European – members without having secured military spending increases from the other NATO countries that are remotely game changing.

It’s tough, therefore, to avoid the conclusion that America’s NATO allies are now giving Washington the broadest possible hint that it’s time for the United States to leave – because they’ve become utterly unreliable on top of their defense free-riding.  Why is the President acting as reluctant as any globalist to take it?

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Why a Real America First European Security Policy is More Urgent than Ever

Tags

alliances, America First, Article Five, Cato Institute, China, Cold War, coupling, EU, Europe, European Council on Foreign Relations, European Union, extended deterrence, globalism, NATO. North Atlantic Treaty Organization, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Pew Research Center, Russia, Ted Galen Carpenter, tripwires, Trump

Even if the Cato Institute’s Ted Galen Carpenter wasn’t one of my closest friends, I’d still be writing this post highlighting his op-ed piece earlier this week for the Washington Post. Because it absolutely decimates the claim that all that ails the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), America’s oldest national security alliance, is recklessly mindless norms-buster Donald Trump.

Instead, Carpenter reports on overwhelming evidence that the arrangement, which since 1949 has committed the United States to the defense of first Western Europe and now most of Europe (and at considerable risk of nuclear attack on the U.S. homeland), is critically ill mainly because, in the decades since the end of the Cold War, U.S. and European interests have been steadily – and inevitably – diverging. And these findings add powerfully to the case that America’s globalist military commitment to Europe has become dangerously outdated.

The evidence consists of polling data showing unmistakably that European publics no longer believe that their governments should side with the United States in its disputes and conflicts with Russia (whose perceived threat Western Europe’s independence during its post-World War II decades as the Soviet Union sparked NATO’s creation in the first place), or that they should even rally to each other’s defense.

The Russia-focused results come from a September survey conducted by the European Council on Foreign Relations, and are based on the views of no less than 60,000 individuals from fourteen countries belonging to the European Union (EU) – an economic organization not officially related to NATO but many of whose member countries are U.S. NATO allies as well.

The bottom line – which Carpenter rightly describes as “startling”? “When asked ‘Whose side should your country take in a conflict between the United States and Russia?’ the majority of respondents in all 14 E.U. countries said ‘neither’.”

Some of the country-specific results?

“In France, only 18 percent would back the United States, while 63 percent opt for neutrality; in Italy, it’s 17 percent vs. 65 percent, and in Germany, 12 percent to 70 percent.

“The results were similar even in NATO’s newer East European members, despite their greater exposure to Russian pressure and potential aggression. Hungarian respondents selected neutrality over supporting the United States 71 percent to 13 percent, while Romanians did so 65 percent to 17 percent. Even in Poland, a country whose history with Moscow during both the Czarist and Soviet periods was especially frosty, neutralist sentiment had the edge, 45 percent to 33 percent.”

What’s especially disturbing, and indeed outrageous, from an American standpoint is that since NATO’s founding, European governments have insisted that U.S. troops be stationed on the continent to serve (as in South Korea) in a trip-wire role – which RealityChek regulars knows means units deployed close enough to invasion routes and vulnerable enough to the superior conventional militaries of aggressors practically to force American Presidents to use nuclear weapons to save them if conflict breaks out.

This policy of “extended deterrence,” or “coupling,” has been intended to prevent such conflicts from breaking out in the first place. What’s dangerous for the United States of course – and needlessly so – is that if deterrence fails, nuclear weapons use could expose American territory to a retaliatory nuclear strike, even though the United States itself may not be at risk.

Even worse: Throughout the Cold War, NATO non-nuclear forces were inferior to their Soviet and Soviet satellite counterparts because the European allies preferred to free-ride on the U.S. military guarantee instead of spending funds they all could have afforded for armed forces capable of self-defense.

For good measure, moreover, this European Council on Foreign Relations poll showed that Europeans are just about as ambivalent in joining with the United States if a conflict with China broke out.

Of course, even though the lopsided nature of the results indicates that these European views have been long in the making, it’s not entirely crazy to believe that Mr. Trump’s election has been so alarming to these populations that the shift did actually begin with his 2016 victory. But as Carpenter points out, a survey from the Pew Research Center conducted in 2015 demonstrates that NATO’s core principles were in deep trouble in Europe well before the President even declared his candidacy for the Oval Office.

Pew sampled opinion in eight NATO members and found that 49 percent of respondents opposed their country coming to the defense of other allies. And majorities in key alliance members France, Italy, and Germany alike rejected “fulfilling their country’s obligation to fulfill the Article 5 treaty pledge to consider an attack on any NATO member as an attack on all.” Crucially, Article 5 of the NATO treaty embodies the notion of collective security. In other words, it literally makes NATO NATO.

Carpenter rightly concludes that “the concept of transatlantic solidarity, even on collective defense, is now largely confined to out-of-touch political elites on both sides of the Atlantic.” Just as important, he notes that “it will be hard to sustain policies that increasingly run counter to the wishes of popular majorities.”

Ironically, however, despite his harsh criticisms of NATO allies’ free-riding and periodic swipes at the alliance as possibly obsolete, President Trump is increasingly acting like one of those out-of-touch globalist mainstays who urgently needs to see these poll results. For despite the warnings sounded by these polls that the United States won’t be able to rely on the European governments and their militaries even if shooting breaks out in Europe, he’s actually strengthened American forces on the continent – including in Poland, right on the Russian border.

In other words, an avowedly America First President is binding his country’s fate to that of Europe at the very moment when disengagement is more important than ever.

Im-Politic: Why the Crucial Abortion Debates are (Long) Over

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abortion, abortion rights, Constitution, Gallup, heartbeat bills, Im-Politic, Kaiser Family Foundation, National Opinion Research Center, Pew Research Center, Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, Quinnipiac College poll, Robert G. McCloskey, Roe vs. Wade, Supreme Court

If only most of the major challenges facing Americans were as easy to meet as arriving at a satisfactory compromise over abortion. In fact, in the key respects, the challenge has already been met, as a general consensus is staring the nation in its collective face, has been in place literally for decades, and looks guaranteed to remain solidly in place for the foreseeable future.

Sounds crazy, doesn’t it, given the political and policy brawl that has erupted in recent weeks over a handful of states’ approval of laws dramatically reducing the circumstances in which abortion will remain legal?  But this contention is backed up strongly by the national legal regime regulating abortion right now, by all the polling, and by everything known about how the Supreme Court – which it’s thought on both sides of the issue could well transform the status quo it’s created since its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision – historically has handled such explosive questions. Moreover, abortion is one of those matters in which the politics, the law, and the history powerfully reinforce each other.

Let’s start with the law. The major Supreme Court decisions are of course the Roe case – which established a Constitutional right to abortion but also authorized states to infringe on it in various ways during a pregnancy’s second and third trimesters – but also a ruling in the 1992 Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey case. In it, a 5-4 majority of the Court created a standard to govern such state restrictions on abortion, holding that such measures could not impose an “undue burden” on women seeking abortions that “created a substantial obstacle” to undergoing the procedure “before the fetus attains viability.”

Revealingly, that guideline nicely describes the current U.S. consensus on abortion rights: Women deserve a fundamental right to abortion, but (like most other rights), it’s not absolute. More specifically, the most widely agreed on exceptions involve what are clearly exceptional (and exceptionally tragic) – mainly rape, incest, serious threats to the pregnant woman’s health, and a high likelihood that the new baby would suffer from serious defects. (See this recent Gallup summary for some representative data.)

Still more revealingly: These public attitudes have been remarkably stable over time. At least three separate polls – shown in the aforementioned Gallup summary, by Pew, and by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) – make this point emphatically.

And at least as important – NORC’s findings show that a sizable gap has existed between public support for the “tragic” exceptions to the right to abortion on the one hand (which have demonstrated at least 70 percent backing for the four decades examined), and other proposed exceptions (whose support generally has remained between 30 percent and 50 percent).

In turn, these legal and political considerations both create towering obstacles even to a Court now featuring a conservative majority overturning either the Roe or the Casey regimes. And least plausible of all is the wish-dream of abortion rights opponents and the nightmare of abortion rights supporters – that the Court bases such a reversal on cases brought deliberately in order to uphold the highly restrictive new state laws. For outlawing abortion even in the aftermath of rape and incest, for example, would seem the epitome of creating a Casey-violating undue burden on the fundamental right to abortion. The various “heartbeat” bills for their part can’t be squared with the Court’s determination in Roe and other decisions since that a fetus isn’t viable until long after the six weeks at which this function can first be detected.

Indeed, such laws repeatedly have been struck down in various courts, and the Supreme Court has refused to consider the two that reached it on appeal. And don’t think it’s a coincidence that the high court’s recent record tracks well with public opinion (including on the heartbeat bills, according to Kaiser Family Foundation and Quinnipiac University survey results presented in this sweeping summary of decades of abortion poll findings).

But couldn’t the Supreme Court’s new conservative majority decide the time is ripe to get rid of Roe and follow-on decisions? Not if it bears any resemblance to its predecessors since the New Deal era. For one of the seminal findings about the Court came back in 1960, in Harvard political scientist Robert G. McCloskey’s classic study, The American Supreme Court. As McCloskey argued compellingly, the Court is most successful when it pays attention to public opinion, and runs into its greatest troubles when it gets too far ahead of or too far behind these attitudes. If you’re skeptical, just think of the tumult that followed the pre-Civil War Dred Scott case and its invalidation of crucial pieces of New Deal legislation during the Great Depression.

None of this is to say that lots of thorny abortion-related decisions will continue to face Americans – like federal funding for Planned Parenthood and other organizations that provide a wide range of women’s health care services, including abortion services; and about what kinds of reproductive health services like birth control religious organizations should be required to provide for female employees in their health insurance plans. And few of them have generated enough polling evidence to identify consensus with any justifiable confidence.

But the broadest, most important abortion-related questions have been decided – especially in the court of public opinion. The procedure will remain a strongly protected Constitutional right early in pregnancy, and a more weakly protected right in later phases. Throughout pregnancies, this right will receive virtually absolute protection in genuinely traumatic circumstances, and be subjected by states to curbs on its availability that don’t “substantially” nullify it in practical terms — and that therefore should not be reflexively condemned as stepping stones to wide-ranging bans.

So abortion rights supporters need to give up on extending strong protections deep into pregnancy. And abortion rights opponents should forget about overturning Roe and Casey. It’s true that medical advances that keep pushing fetal survivability (if not viability without pervasive support) back closer to conception will one day resume adding fuel to the abortion debate fire. And public opinion is by no means set in stone. But for more than forty years since Roe, Americans collectively have been saying that the general abortion debate is over, and the courts have plainly agreed. It’s high time that politicians and activists across the spectrum got the message.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: The U.S. Public Opinion Gap isn’t Only Partisan

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alliances, America First, climate change, Democrats, globalism, Immigration, Jobs, national security, nuclear deterrence, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Pew Research Center, Republicans, terrorism, Trump, weapons of mass destruction

A recent (November 29) Pew Research Center poll on public attitudes toward foreign policy issues was a classic good news/bad news story – at least if you believe that the top priority of American foreign policy should be to promote the security and well-being of the American people.

On the one hand, that’s pretty much what the results show – that’s the good news. On the other hand, these commonsense positions prevail overwhelmingly because adults viewing themselves as either Republicans or Republican leaners hold them. That’s the bad news.  In other words, the views of Democrats and those leaning Democratic reveal a marked disregard for their nation’s self-preservation and prosperity.

According to Pew, 72 percent of all Americans say that “taking measures to protect the U.S. from terrorism” should “be a top foreign policy priority,” 71 percent would assign the same priority to “protecting jobs of American workers,” and 66 percent regard “preventing the spread” of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) with similar urgency.

But now check out the partisan splits: On the terrorism issue, fully 84 percent of Republicans and their leaners regard it as a top foreign policy priority. Only 61 percent of Democrats and their leaners agree. So much, i.e., for the idea that Americans will never forget September 11. And remember – the question only described protection from terrorism as a top priority, not the top foreign policy priority.

On protecting American workers’ jobs, 81 percent of Republicans and their leaners would treat it as a priority, versus only 65 percent of Democrats and their leaners. I’m old enough to remember when the Democrat called themselves the party of working Americans.

The exception here is preventing the spread of WMD: Fewer (64 percent of Republicans and their leaners see it as a major priority than do Democrats and their leaners (68 percent), but these results are very close.

Many of the other Pew poll findings are not the slightest bit surprising. Principally, the biggest partisan divides on foreign policy issues come on “dealing with global climate change,” “reducing illegal immigration into the U.S.,” and “maintaining U.S. military advantage over all other countries.”

But here’s what’s more surprising. The Democrats, and especially their leaders, have enthusiastically assumed the mantle of globalism champions versus President Trump’s proclaimed America First approach. And a hallmark of globalism, whether on the right or the left ends of the national political spectrum, has been international activism. Liberals and conservatives generally disagree on where to place the emphasis (e.g., emerging transnational issues like climate change and migration versus more traditional security-oriented issues), but energetic engagement is favored by all.

Nonetheless, if you look carefully at the Pew results, Democrats and their leaners would place the “top priority” label on relatively few foreign policy issues. Indeed, only one such candidate for this status reaches the 70 percent mark with these groups – “improving relationships with allies.” And only four issues are seen as top priorities by 60 or more percent of Democrats and their leaners – as stated above, WMD (68 percent), protecting American jobs (65 percent), climate change (64 percent) and terrorism (61 percent). 

Overall, then, it’s easy to conclude from these and other findings in the Pew poll that Democrats and their leaners may be globalists, but they’re globalists who don’t seem to regard overseas-related challenges with overwhelming concern. Alternatively, they’re reluctant to support zeroing in on a limited (and arguably more manageable) set of goals. P.S., the relatively low score for climate change seems especially noteworthy given the importance progressive Democrats and others relatively far to the Left have attached to the idea of a “Green New Deal.”

It’s even easier to conclude that Republicans and their leaners are more committed to an America First-type approach. And it looks like this commitment is somewhat stronger. Their highest priority foreign policy issues are the aforementioned terrorism and job protection – where their priority scores are in the 80s percent. And their next three priorities are maintaining a national military edge (70 percent), reducing illegal immigration (68 percent), and preventing WMD spread (64 percent). For good measure, “getting other countries to assume more of the costs of maintaining world order” comes in at 56 percent.

However revealing these Pew results, they still left out two of the biggest questions for politicians and others trying to surmise which approaches to U.S. foreign policy, and what specific initiatives, would garner the most and least public support. The first is how genuine political independents view these issues. The second is how high a priority is assigned to preventing a nuclear attack on the U.S. homeland.

The importance attached to halting the spread of weapons of mass destruction points to great concern about this challenge. But the strong support expressed by Democrats and their leaners for shoring up America’s alliance relations indicates an especially serious lack of awareness on their part that indiscriminately extending nuclear umbrellas over U.S. allies has greatly increased the odds of such attack (principally from the newish NATO commitments to the highly vulnerable Baltic states, and the longstanding commitment to protect South Korea from North Korea and its new nuclear capabilities).

Of course, these Americans can’t entirely be blamed for this knowledge gap, as both U.S. leaders and the mainstream media continue to work overtime to mask the – growing – nuclear war risks inherent in the nation’s alliance system. (President Trump has been only a partial exception.) Hopefully 2019 will see some explicit, intellectually honest discussion of these dangers – and well before they reach critical mass.