Alliances in U.S. Foreign Policy: Issues in the Quest for Collective Defense by Alan Ned Sabrosky

Author:Alan Ned Sabrosky [Sabrosky, Alan Ned]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367155667
Google: R4ztygEACAAJ
Goodreads: 48633621
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 1988-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Public Opinion

Elsewhere in this volume, Gregory Foster has discussed public opinion and the alliance at some length. Nonetheless, it needs to be considered here as one of the domestic factors to which Congress must be responsive. The easiest way to understand the influence of public opinion on Congressional action is to reflect on the thesis of Congress: The Electoral Connection, by David R. Mayhew.19 The essential argument of this book is that the primary function of a Congressman is to be reelected—that it is from the electoral imperative that the richest understanding of the factors that motivate Congressional actions can be drawn. The problem with this perspective lies in the fact that public opinion as it affects the way people vote is diverse, difficult to assess, and more than occasionally an ill-informed guide to the best interests of the republic. Still, Congressmen and Senators pay a great deal of attention to public opinion as they can discern it, through the media and through attention to expressions of interest from their constituencies.

Public opinion as it relates to defense issues is a complicated phenomenon. Americans hold a generally ambivalent attitude toward their military institutions. They are heir to a powerful antimilitary tradition, yet they are willing to support participation in conflict if they feel threatened. They tend to ignore the military until they need it, at which time they expect it to rise to the occasion and keep them secure. Most rational Americans understand the need to support forces in peacetime if they are to be ready for war, but the strategy of deterrence imposes a greater obligation on an informed population. Deterrence requires that the people be willing to support forces in peacetime, not in anticipation of their eventual use in wartime, but so that they will never be used. The illogic of deterrence, coupled with what appears to be an element of fundamental irrationality in nuclear policy, confuses public opinion. As Lawrence Freedman put it, "The attempt to deter conventional aggression in Europe with a nuclear arsenal controlled by a non-European power that is itself subject to nuclear retaliation has never appeared to be an example of political or military rationality."20

At the same time that the difficulty in understanding strategy was growing, it was becoming increasingly less likely that civilians would be able to avoid being directly impacted by warfare. A common scenario for nuclear war involves at least the possibility of strikes against civilian population centers (the countervalue option); casualties among noncombatants behind the front line would be higher than those among troops on the line. This realization has led large numbers of citizens to try to understand the intricacies of nuclear policy; greater popular attention to issues of nuclear policy have revealed its bizarre nature and further undermined trust in the defense establishment.

In addition, the shocks of the 1970s—Iran, Afghanistan, OPEC and the related oil crisis, the Soviet buildup—led Americans to feel that they had lost control of their domestic and international environments. Among other things, it became

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