Neocons Rising

It’s often said that Americans like policies offered by Democrats and principles offered by Republicans. While that’s certainly a gross generalization, it is, more often than not, true.

Talk about Obamacare, for instance, and most Americans come down hard against the program. But talk about specific provisions—such as “subsidy assistance to individuals” or “Medicaid expansion”—and most are all for it.

Mention increased gun control and Americans are ambivalent. But ask about “increased background checks” and they’re ardent supporters. Ask if the government should cut spending across the board, and three-quarters say “yes.” But talk about cutting back specific programs like social security and…well, you get the idea.

“When Americans look at the woods, they’re Republicans,” writes Dominic Tierney, a political science professor at Swarthmore. “When they look at the trees, they’re Democrats.”

As of late, this dynamic has put President Obama into a public relations bind when it comes to foreign policy—an impossible Catch-22 in which Americans strongly disapprove of the manner in which he deals with events abroad, while at the same time approving of almost every specific action and inaction he takes.

In terms of the “woods,” as Tierney phrases it, 55 percent of Americans now disapprove of the president’s performance on foreign policy, and 54 percent say he hasn’t been “tough” enough. Country by country, Americans disapprove of the way he’s handled Iran, Syria, Iraq, Palestine, and Ukraine.

In terms of the trees, however, they wholeheartedly approve of the almost all of the specific policies he’s actually applied to those hotspots.

Take the example of Syria, for starters: When President Bashar al-Assad crossed the so-called “red line” by using chemical weapons on his own people this time last year, war-weary Americans remained firmly against airstrikes or military engagement of any kind. Obama kept out, and—while using a strategy that neoconservatives like to condemn as hopelessly quixotic—managed to diplomatically divest Assad of chemical weapons. Now, in the unlikely case that Sunni extremists take control of any of the dictator’s weapons arsenals, Americans, as well as Shiites, Jews, and Christians across the Middle East, have decidedly less to fear.

In terms of the Islamic State, or IS, Americans support airstrikes against the group in Iraq and strongly condemn the idea of committing ground troops to the situation. Again, Obama’s actions have followed the preferences of the public, allowing the Kurds and the government in Baghdad regain a foothold after the initial Islamist onslaught without a single American life lost.

In Afghanistan, the vast majority of Americans support Obama’s withdrawal timeline. In Ukraine, 17 percent think the US government has, in fact, done too much to counter Russian aggression.

And in Iran—where Americans apparently think Obama is milquetoast, yet have always opposed a military strike themselves—sanctions coordinated by the administration played a large role in sweeping the relatively moderate Hassan Rouhani into the presidency, where he has surrounded himself with Western-educated advisors, many toting American Ph.D.’s.

“The recent presidential election in Iran proved that the Islamic Republic’s instinct for self-preservation trumps its ideology,” wrote Medhi Khalaji, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, in the Washington Post last year.

So, why does this dissonance between the approval of Obama’s specific policies and the disapproval of his grander “foreign policy” matter?

Because, simply put, the manner in which America’s military engages with the world is at a crossroads. After two unsuccessful wars in the Middle East that cost Americans $4 to 6 trillion and at least 6,690 military lives not including post-combat suicides, we lost our appetite for foreign conflict and realized the futility of attempting to culturally transform an entire region with brute force.

As recently as mid-2013, the majority of Americans still thought the country did “too much” in “solving the world’s problems.” As late as this June, The American Prospect, a liberal magazine, and the American Conservative, an old-school right-of-center publication, went so far as to jointly proclaim a “new consensus” of “prudence, the rule of law, and diplomacy.”

When it gets down to the nitty-gritty—the actual nuts and bolts of foreign policy—the American public still wholeheartedly embraces this “new consensus.” But in terms of the greater woods, a new hawkishness has begun to creep in, and it’s creeping in at Obama’s expense.

The danger is that if this public hawkishness continues to grow, neocons—“tough” guys, so to speak, in the mold of John McCain or Lindsay Graham—could very well rule the White House and Foggy Bottom.

When that happens, our foreign policy will be transformed. But to the chagrin of the public, so too will those limited, precise, on-the-ground policies that we have come to prefer and, apparently, take for granted.

J. Gram Slattery ’15, a Crimson editorial writer, is a social studies concentrator in Kirkland House.