David Brooks: Voters, Your Foreign Policy Views Stink

New York Times:

“The C.A.P. researchers asked 2,000 registered voters what America’s foreign policy priorities should be. The top priorities were protecting against terrorist threats, protecting jobs for American workers and reducing illegal immigration. These are all negative aspirations: preventing bad things from hostile outsiders.

The lowest priorities were promoting democracy, taking on Chinese aggression, promoting trade, fighting global poverty and defending human rights. The things Americans care least about are the core activities of building a civilized global community.

The C.A.P. study estimates that less than a fifth of voters are traditional internationalists. The Eurasia Group study estimates that only 9.5 percent are. …”

It is a frustrating time to be a neocon.

John Bolton and Mike Pompeo are in the saddle in the Trump administration, but have been unable to start a new war in Venezuela and Iran because public opinion is trending so strongly toward against liberal internationalism. The political class is afraid of crossing the public on that issue which is sick and tired of the endless wars for democracy in the Middle East.

The United States would have been better off avoiding every single war of the 20th century – the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, the Gulf War. The result of all of those wars was any number of unforeseen consequences and getting sucked into a quagmire from which we will never escape until liberal internationalism is repudiated. The sequence of events has been that every war seems to lay the groundwork for the next war.