世代变迁如何重塑美国外交政策态度.pdfVIP

Even before Donald Trump’s election in 2016 many foreign policy observers had begun to worry about public support for international engagement and American leadership of the “liberal international order.” As Ian Bremmer wrote in 2012, “In an age of austerity, Americans have less interest in helping manage turmoil in the Middle East, 1 rivalries in East Asia, or humanitarian crises in Africa.” In 2013 the Pew Research Center reported that for the first time since the question was initially asked in 1964, a majority of the public – 52 percent – agreed that the United States should “mind its own business internationally,” up from just 30 percent in 2002 in the wake of 9/11. That same year a survey of the members of the Council on Foreign Relations (comprised primarily of professionals working in the foreign policy establishment) found that 92 percent believed that, in recent years, “the American public has become less supportive of the 2 U.S. taking an active role in world affairs.” As Figure 1 shows, in 2014 the Chicago Council on Global Affairs also recorded a near-record low, with just 58 percent saying the U.S. should take an “active part” in world affairs, a figure not seen since the years after the Vietnam War.3 On the eve of the presidential election, a 2016 Pew study found that 57 percent of Americans thought the United States should “deal with its own problems” and let other countries deal with their own problems “as best they can,” while 70 percent of the public wanted the next president to focus more on domestic 1 Ian Bremmer, Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World (Portfolio, 2012). p. 13. 2 Pew Research Center, December 2013, “America’s Place in the World,” p. 5. 3 Dina Smeltz, Ivo Daalder, and Craig Kafura, October 2014, “Foreign Policy in the Age of Retrenchment,” Chicago