Citizens for Global Solutions

U.S. GLOBAL ENGAGEMENT | An Assessment of '04

THE PUBLIC, THE UN, AND THE '04 ELECTIONS

During the 1990s, the work of researchers like Steven Kull and I.M. Destler blew apart the myth that the U.S. public is unilateralist. Multiple research studies have illustrated that, when it comes to treaties, international institutions and cooperative U.S. global engagement, the vast majority of Americans support stronger and more effective global structures and a U.S. foreign policy that reflects the values of teamwork, cooperative leadership and engagement.

Today, the mantra of pollsters and analysts on public opinion regarding foreign policy and multilateralism is that it is “a mile wide and an inch deep.” In other words, while support is broad (most people are multilateralist) it is relatively shallow (people don’t hold this opinion very strongly). Certainly, the support for multilateralism has generally not been seen as strong enough to influence voters’ behavior when it comes to the ballot box. Consequently, elected officials pay more attention to the small minority of voters whose voting decisions are affected by candidate positions on multilateralism – that tiny portion of the population that opposes cooperative global engagement through international law and institutions. This small minority therefore holds a disproportionate sway on the political process, leading elected officials to be more unilateralist than their constituents.

Or so the story goes.

In the shadow of 9-11, the invasion of Iraq and the 2004 Presidential election, a new story is emerging – one that places questions about America’s role in the world, our relationship with the United Nations, and the importance of international law smack in the center of the national debate.

Indeed, in direct contrast to the prevailing wisdom that foreign policy is irrelevant to electoral politics (and therefore irrelevant to politics in general), questions of foreign policy were important in the 2002 congressional elections and stand to take center stage in the 2004 elections.

Surprisingly, it’s not Democratic pundits who are talking about the role of the UN in the upcoming elections – it’s the head of President Bush’s own reelection committee. In the June 10, 2004 New York Review of Books, the Bush campaign’s media and polling person, Matthew Dowd, says that the issues of Iraq and the economy will be far more important to voters than other issues in the upcoming election. Later in the same article, the head of Bush’s reelection committee, Ken Mehlman, goes on to say that, on Iraq, people will vote on how strongly they believe in, or distrust, the UN. When challenged about Bush’s decision to turn to the UN for help in Iraq, Mehlman replies that while people on the center-right don’t mind having the UN involved, Democrats see the UN as “an end in itself.”

Mehlman is partially reflecting the surface views of the electorate. Recent polling indicates that, contrary to historic precedents, the UN is today polarized in the electorate, with Democrats more supportive than Republicans, and women more supportive than men.

Indeed, the image of the UN in the U.S. suffered after the failure of the Security Council to achieve consensus on Iraq, with some disappointed that the Council didn’t approve military action, and others disappointed that it did not prevent it. Historically, the UN has enjoyed very high public approval ratings in the United States. The Gallup polling company started asking whether Americans agreed with the statement, “The United States should cooperate fully with the United Nations,” in 1964. Over the last 40 years, agreement with the statement remained over 60% in all but one decade, dropping below 50% for a brief period in the 70s. Indeed, a December 2002 survey found that two-thirds of the American public said that the U.S. should cooperate fully with the UN, up from only 58% in early September 2001.

Despite the boost in public opinion after 9-11, the UN took a serious hit after the Iraq Security Council crisis, with favorable ratings falling from 77% to 55% in March 2004. Nonetheless, even as the war in Iraq was winding down, a 61% strong majority thought that the U.S. should not now feel free to use force without U.N. authorization. The Iraq invasion without UN consensus was put down to a one-off decision. Thus disaffection with the United Nations may reflect the public’s previous support for a stronger UN. In 2002, 64% of Americans said that it is personally important to them that the United Nations is reformed to a stronger and more effective organization, and seventy-one percent of the American people agreed that “recent events prove that we need to make the U.N. stronger so it can do more to address recent problems like terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.”

It’s also possible that the United Nations’ numbers are getting better after President Bush went back for a second Iraq resolutions: a May 2004 poll found that 64% of Americans trust that the UN is working in the US' best interest.

More than half the U.S. public still approves of the job the UN is doing, and while the poll numbers on the UN don’t tell the whole story of the U.S. public’s support for multilateralism, it is an issue that could be important this November. If the vote on Iraq is indeed about the UN, as Bush’s re-election team claims, then perhaps the President should be worrying. The American public has a strong history of support for multilateralism, and for the first time in decades, questions of America’s role in the world are at the center of the national debate, and potentially at the center of national elections.

Sources for this article include polls conducted between 2002 and 2004 by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, the Program on International Policy Attitudes, the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, Chicago Council on Foreign Relations/German Marshall Fund, and others. Click here for links to these sites and other resources.

Last Updated October 17, 2005

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