Max Boot tries to make sense of the new WSJ/NBC News poll result on the public’s foreign policy preferences and predictably fails. He notes that Obama’s foreign policy is more unpopular than it has ever been:

How can this be, given that Obama’s foreign policy is all about having America take a less-active role in the world [bold mine-DL]? Isn’t Obama giving the public what it wants? The answer, I believe, is that most Americans are ambivalent. On the one hand, they like the idea of doing less, and that impulse has been reinforced by five years of presidential rhetoric about “nation building begins at home” and “the tide of war is receding.” On the other hand, most Americans also want a vigorous defense of American interests abroad and they are uneasy about the image of weakness we currently project.

The more obvious and defensible explanation is that many Americans want the U.S. to be less active in the world, and they then notice that the U.S. seems to be just as active as ever and disapprove of that. Americans know what Obama promised in his last election campaign, and they can also see that Obama has often not been doing what he said he would do. Since his re-election, Obama has repeatedly given or tried to give the public a foreign policy that it very much does not want. It is common to argue that Obama has tailored his foreign policy to suit public opinion, but that is at most only half-true. On some of the most significant decisions of his presidency, he has opted for the policy that most Americans did not support, and it was only on Syria that the resistance was so strong that he was forced to back off. Americans do want “a vigorous defense of American interests abroad,” but most also don’t believe that this has anything to do with bombing Syria or wading into the Ukraine crisis. I suppose Americans generally wouldn’t like the U.S. to be perceived as “weak,” but most wouldn’t agree with hawkish definitions of what constitutes “weakness.” There is no contradiction to be found in these numbers so long as one doesn’t start from faulty hawkish assumptions about what Obama’s foreign policy has actually been.