“Adults in a Room” is a series in collaboration with The Stimson Center’s Reimagining US Grand Strategy program. The series stems from the group’s monthly networking events that call on analysts to gather virtually and hash out a salient topic. It aims to give you a peek into their Zoom room and a deep understanding of the issue at hand in less than the time it takes to sip your morning coffee without the jargon, acronyms, and stuffiness that often come with expertise.
In an age of relative US decline on the world stage, hyperpolarization across the political spectrum, and ever-expanding executive encroachment over congressional authorities, one is left wondering what Americans think of US foreign policy and the country’s role in the world. Specifically, how do foreign policy experts, the general public, and the Trump administration view the priorities and international conditions shaping US foreign policy efforts?
October’s Reimagining US Grand Strategy roundtable brought together members of the foreign policy community to preview and discuss “Reckless Peacemaker? How Americans See Trump’s Foreign Policy,” the latest annual survey conducted by the Institute for Global Affairs (IGA) at Eurasia Group, which examines the foreign policy views of Americans. Jonathan Guyer, Program Director at IGA, and Andrew Payne, Research Director for Europe, Russia, and the Americas Program at Chatham House, previewed the survey findings and discussed the policy implications. The group then considered what the results imply about the Americans’ policy priorities and views on the Trump administration’s foreign policy moves.
Jonathan Guyer, Program Director, Institute for Global Affairs at Eurasia Group
I am fascinated by the gaps between how President Trump describes his own actions, how foreign policy experts in Washington perceive him, and — most importantly — what the American people think.
Consider the president’s military adventurism in Latin America, with strikes that have already killed 70 people. The administration, using War on Terrorism-era rationales, says that it is targeting drug smugglers who are akin to al-Qaeda in the Western Hemisphere. Some in the Washington establishment agree and go so far as calling for the ouster of Venezuela’s president, while other policy elites argue that regime change is flagrant overreach. And how do Americans see it?
About three-quarters of Americans oppose the president taking military action abroad without congressional approval, according to a new public attitudes survey that my organization recently fielded. It’s a rare issue where a hyperpolarized electorate broadly agrees. And the administration is clearly tapping into American fears. When asked directly about US strikes on drug cartels in Latin America, Americans overall are pretty divided, with 44% supporting such military action, and 42% opposing it. These findings have major relevance as a bipartisan group of senators asserts its war powers authority to stop unauthorized strikes in Latin America.
Asia policy is another arena where the contrasts between the administration, elites, and the public are striking. Among the foreign and domestic security issues that most worry Americans, competition with China is, according to our survey, near the bottom of the list. Nevertheless, when asked directly, most Americans think China is either a moderate or severe threat. Nearly a quarter of Republicans say Trump is making America’s relations with China worse. Despite conservative alarmism toward Beijing, most Americans think the United States should allow students from China to study at American universities.
On the Middle East, our survey reinforces findings from other pollsters on shifting views toward Israel policy, with serious partisanship and generational divides. About a third of Americans believe that Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute “genocide.” Half of Democrats polled see it as such, while half of Republicans describe it as the “destruction of a terrorist organization.” A strong plurality of Gen Z respondents is in opposition to US support for Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. Nearly half of these younger Americans say that the United States should not militarily defend Israel if it were attacked.
Yet, Trump’s approach to the Middle East has been tough to define. He has both staunchly supported arms transfers to Israel and put pressure on the Netanyahu government to acquiesce to a ceasefire; Trump’s team has negotiated with Iran and bombed Iran.
There are inherent contradictions in the way in which the president alternates between militarism and diplomacy, and there are contradictions within how Americans view his foreign policy. We chose to title our new report “Reckless Peacemaker?” because it underscores these tensions. When offered a dozen adjectives, half positive and half negative, Republicans more frequently chose the words “tough,” “intelligent,” and “peacemaker.” Pluralities of Democrats and independents selected “destructive,” “erratic,” and “reckless” to describe Trump’s leadership.
Perhaps it’s because of the president’s contradictions in policy and the public’s, at times, paradoxical views that Trump’s been able to sustain his efforts in his first nine months in office. The US has yet to fully feel the negative consequences of his militaristic policies abroad or gutting development assistance. Not having to answer for these apparent shortcomings, Trump’s disruptions continue unabated.
Andrew Payne, Research Director, Europe, Russia and the Americas Programs, Chatham House
The Trump administration’s foreign policy record is profoundly unpopular. According to IGA’s latest data, a large share of the electorate — including a non-trivial number of Republicans — think the president is doing a bad job. With the sole exception of international drug trafficking, more Americans think the president is making things worse than better.
Strikingly, this pattern includes issues that were highly salient in the 2024 campaign and on which Trump held a strong advantage over his opponent. In IGA’s survey of voters in key battleground states last year, for example, Trump held a double-digit lead over Kamala Harris on the question of which candidate would be most likely to end the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Today, however, Trump’s inability to deliver on his pledge to end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours has him down 19 percentage points, while his success in brokering a ceasefire in the Middle East has yielded a net approval rating close to zero. Even on immigration — where Trump took 89% of the one in five voters who ranked the issue as the most important one facing the country a year ago — the president is now five percentage points underwater.
This scorecard represents a flashing amber for Trump and his “America First” agenda. The president does not have to directly face voters again, so we should expect no major course corrections. But some of his policies — particularly his handling of trade (where Trump has a net approval of -28%) — are beginning to hurt co-partisans, many of whom are up for reelection in next year’s midterms. Big wins by Democrats in Virginia and New Jersey could serve as a harbinger for what lies ahead in races that will be similarly cast as referenda on the administration’s record. And while international affairs rarely ranks near the top of voters’ minds, it was a winning issue for Trump last year, with the president carrying the slice of the electorate who ranked foreign policy top among their concerns by twenty percentage points.
In the near term, this could increase pressure on Trump to moderate on the margins. Alternatively, he may choose to double down in an effort to deliver concrete results on some of those issues where progress has been difficult on an electorally friendly timetable. Either way, Trump would not be the only second-term president to adjust their approach to global issues based on the exigencies of the political calendar at home.
Yet it is important not to read too much into questions that ask voters for their views on specific issues. Not all issues are equally salient. Most people will express an opinion about an issue when asked directly, but this can give a misleading impression of the relative importance of that issue. The public’s views about foreign policy are also malleable. There is a growing literature examining the ways in which elites shape public attitudes by providing cues and framing information in a certain way. And, as the stark division in responses given by Democrats and Republicans in this latest survey shows, partisanship plays a significant role in determining voters’ assessments of how well a president is handling any given issue.
But perhaps the most interesting findings in this data have very little to do with specific issues at all. As work by Jeff Friedman has shown, foreign policy is principally a valence issue, whereby voters want to elect leaders who possess the personal characteristics required to be an effective commander-in-chief. As he and I have argued elsewhere, Trump won on foreign policy last November in large part because he was able to convince voters that he would be the stronger leader who could stand up for America’s interests in the world. That he did this while also presenting himself as a peacemaker made his candidacy historically rare.
The results of a question in IGA’s survey asking voters to characterize Trump’s leadership style offer a fascinating opportunity to assess how well the president’s image is holding up, one year in. And while a significant proportion of respondents say Trump is “reckless” (30%), a similar number describe him as “tough” (25%). Even more striking is the low proportion of Trump’s critics who describe him as a “warmonger” (5%) — despite his willingness to use force in ways that many predecessors have not, including direct military strikes on Iran and a series of attacks on civilian boats in Latin America.
Trump’s approach appeals to an inherent cakeism in public opinion about foreign policy. Voters repeatedly tell pollsters that they are opposed to “endless war,” and express skepticism about expansive troop deployments and increases to defense spending. Yet they also exhibit a surprising degree of comfort with the use of force to eliminate a vast range of threats overseas. So far, Trump’s record, blending the spasmodic use of violence with an aversion to long and costly interventions, has captured this apparent contradiction in public attitudes very well. Time will tell whether the president’s paradoxical image as a peace-loving militarist will prove sustainable over the remainder of his term in office.
Evan Cooper, Research Analyst, Reimagining US Grand Strategy Program, Stimson Center
Recent polling from IGA presents various contradictions in how Americans see the role of the United States in the world. This is exemplified by most respondents opposing military action abroad without Congressional approval, but a large portion also support strikes against drug cartels that have received no legislative sign-off. Perhaps even more contradictory, Americans rank China low on their list of threats, but when asked directly about the level of threat posed by China, most think that China is either a moderate or severe threat.
One of the takeaways from this polling (and those conducted by others) is that Americans are intensely divided on issues of foreign policy, and that is true. But the presence of such contradictions also indicates a desire for a coherent vision of what role the United States should play in the world. Trump may have campaigned on a somewhat discernible vision of the role of the United States in “America First,” which was seen as reducing US commitments abroad, focusing on the homeland, and avoiding military intervention and nation-building. But he has not executed that vision, choosing instead to intervene in Iran, carrying out strikes in the Caribbean, and approving major expenditures to back Ukraine and Israel in their wars. A coherent foreign policy vision from Democrats has been missing altogether. Neither party’s foreign policy appears to inspire much confidence.
Articulating a role for the United States in the current world is no small feat because of the geopolitical reshaping taking place, of which the United States largely does not have control over and the outcome of which is not yet clear. As Emma Ashford wrote in her latest book, First Among Equals, the only solid conclusion we can all acknowledge is that a new world is forming and “the old world is dead.” And yet, the foreign policy visions being articulated by both parties seem reliant on staid concepts suited for a past era. US-led regime change in Venezuela seems an idea that could get public support in the 1990s, not in 2025. Limitless backing of proxies in the Middle East and elsewhere could get support when the United States did not have a peer rival, but not when Americans feel the need to deter a rising China.
Contradictions from the American electorate frustrate policymakers in Washington, who throw their arms up and bemoan that the public knows nothing and asks for too much. But it is the lack of coherent foreign policy from either party — that meet the realities of a world in which the United States cannot dictate affairs as global hegemon — that drives these inconsistencies. There is an obvious demand for leadership that articulates how the United States can thrive amid multipolarity, avoid overcommitting limited resources and getting involved in quagmires, and provide a stable and more equitable economy. That is no small task, but it is one that no US leader is coming close to exemplifying at this moment in time.
Jeffrey A. Friedman, Associate Professor of Government, Dartmouth College
The Institute for Global Affairs’ (IGA’s) new survey indicates that Americans disapprove of a wide range of President Trump’s foreign policies. On their face, these findings suggest that foreign policy should be a political liability for the White House. But, as I demonstrated in a recent book, voters’ foreign policy preferences have relatively little impact at the ballot box. By comparison, Americans place a higher priority on assessing whether presidents have the right personal attributes to be commander-in-chief — particularly whether presidents seem strong enough and tough enough to stand up to America’s adversaries. In many cases, nominally unpopular policies can even be political assets if they help presidents to showcase those leadership qualities.
Andrew Payne and I demonstrated that this logic played a key role in explaining why most voters thought that Donald Trump would do a better job handling foreign policy than either Joe Biden or Kamala Harris during the 2024 election. And polling continues to show that Americans generally trust Republicans more than Democrats when it comes to handling foreign conflicts. The IGA data confirm that toughness remains an attribute that voters are most likely to associate with Trump. Other research shows that the proportion of voters who view Trump as a strong leader consistently exceeds his overall approval rating, which means that Trump’s ratings on the leadership strength question are not the product of voters saying nice things about a president they support for other reasons.
The IGA data reveal that many voters also characterize Trump as being “reckless” and “destructive.” But, intriguingly, very few consider Trump to be a “warmonger” — a charge that has historically damaged Republican leaders such as Barry Goldwater or Ronald Reagan. Americans appear to view Donald Trump as a tough guy who often makes questionable decisions, but who is not inclined to take the United States to war. This image likely reflects the way that Trump has repeatedly demonstrated willingness to use lethal force — for example, through bombing Iranian nuclear facilities or attacking alleged drug smugglers in the Caribbean — in ways that have not yet caused major escalations or directly imposed major costs on the United States. Indeed, Trump routinely boasts about having been “the first president in decades who has started no new wars.”
My overall interpretation of the data is that foreign policy will continue to be a political asset for Trump so long as his uses of force do not escalate into major conflicts. If that were to be the case, then the downsides of Trump’s apparent recklessness would become vivid, and the fact that he previously avoided starting major wars could easily be attributed to luck rather than competence.
Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, Senior Advisor, Quincy Institute; Editorial Director, Responsible Statecraft
The realism and restraint movement emerged amid the failing wars of Iraq and Afghanistan as a proper counterpoint to neoconservatives and the Washington foreign policy establishment in the mid-2010s. As a largely transpartisan endeavor, it has achieved success both politically and intellectually in a war-weary society where Americans no longer believe that their elites can make the right decisions about peace and war and sending young people into harm’s way for military interventions abroad.
Most critically, Donald Trump’s 2015 campaign for president opened the door for alternative ways of thinking on the Right — a return to conservative skepticism of imperialist foreign policy, which places US interests, mainly liberty and prosperity at home, at risk. In other words, America First.
All that “winning” by the realism and restraint movement is at risk now, however, as the Trump administration turns toward the Western hemisphere in an ostensible militarized drug war and potential regime change in Venezuela.
Why? Because the neoconservatives, wandering in the wilderness and on the outside of the Trump base, arguably the strongest and most transformative populist-Republican movement since the Reagan era, have found a way back inside.
Neoconservatives had pretty much dominated the foreign policy establishment since the Cold War. However, an aversion to Trump (particularly his boisterous critique of the war in Iraq and its architects) drove them out of the conservative base and with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, more into the Democratic camp. MAGA, which felt burned by Russiagate and had already torn off the veil regarding “just wars,” was the first to question Washington’s effort to fuel Ukraine’s war “for as long as it takes.” Then-Senator JD Vance and other fellow travelers in the realism and restraint strain on the right, like Representative Warren Davidson, and in the media, like Tucker Carlson, made it clear that the neoconservative arguments for endless wars — in this case, Democracies vs. Autocracies — weren’t cutting it with the base anymore.
On Gaza, a similar phenomenon occurred. As most Republicans still support Israel and US military funding of Israel to the tune of $4 billion a year annually (since the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel, the US has sent some $22.7 billion total, according to the Brown University Cost of War Project), MAGA has gotten restive over what it sees as a blank check. Charges that the neoconservatives were appropriating America First to keep the US cleaved to Israel despite not only the drain on our resources, but a human catastrophe on the ground (including the killing of Christians and attacks on their places of worship), began emerging this year on social media and major podcasts like Tucker Carlson. “Neocon” once again became a dirty word in political parlance and the antithesis of America First. Polling on the Right is starting to respond accordingly.
But now we come to Trump’s pivot to Latin America. Realists/restrainers across the spectrum think trying to rid Main Street of the fentanyl crisis by designating cartels terrorists and blowing their alleged smuggler boats out of the water is strategic folly. To them, the drug war, first launched in the 1970s, is the biggest failed “forever war” there is. Trying to revitalize it by using the US military so kinetically will only prove the point. Moreover, airstrikes against Venezuela (which is not the chief distributor of fentanyl to America) would not only be illegal but also unleash unnecessary blowback and crisis in the region. As would a “decapitation” operation, bloodless or otherwise, against President Nicolas Maduro.
But this is where the neoconservatives’ fortunes turn. One of Trump’s most popular foreign policy pledges was to pivot back to the Western Hemisphere, to refocus national security awareness on our own backyard, and to revitalize the Monroe Doctrine. His actions against the cartels — however constitutionally questionable, no matter how ineffective they might be ultimately — are proving popular with the base.
This is in part thanks to Secretary of State Marco Rubio. A former neoconservative lawmaker who found his way into Trump world by leaning instead into the “Jacksonian” national conservatism of the New Right, he has aggressively sought regime change in Latin America — particularly Nicaragua, Cuba, and Venezuela — for ideological reasons since the beginning of his career, coming from the vocal and politically powerful Cuban exile community in South Florida.
Calling the shots now as Secretary of State and head of the National Security Council, Rubio has helped to remake the goal of regime change, particularly in Venezuela, as a counter-terrorism operation, with Maduro as the head of the leading cartel in the country and an illegitimate leader as well. “Decapitation,” as it were, is not so much an ideological crusade (though Rubio continues to use the language of such, calling Maduro an “enemy of humanity”) but a law enforcement operation, one that may very well be shepherded by the US military.
Knowing how unpopular the nation-building and democracy promotion has become on the MAGA Right, neoconservatives can press their own long-term goals in Latin America by hitchhiking on what is becoming a popular mantra on the Right: kill the cartels that are killing our children. Protect our hemisphere from Great Power encroachment like China and from terrorists who want to use our borders to “invade” the United States (thus the resumption of warnings about ISIS in the US). This can be accomplished with short, sharp attacks and shows of force.
With Rubio joining forces with other like-minded top officials in the administration like Stephen Miller and Sebastian Gorka, the fusing of these America First nationalist-neocon agendas makes for a powerful force in Trump’s foreign policy sphere. As Trump himself has vacillated quite a bit between regime change (he wanted to see Maduro deposed during his first administration), intervention, and restraint, it is not easy to gauge how open he is to these arguments at any given moment.
It will also be a serious challenge for the realism and restraint movement to convince a populist Right that while a focus on stopping the flow of drugs into the US and protecting the American sphere of influence is not only an important but “realist” endeavor, a militarized approach to it, including regime change in Venezuela, is not. It will take strategic messaging and mettle to prevent another neocon takeover of US foreign policy.
