One of the unfortunate consequences of the so-called realist turn in American politics is its confusion of populism for realism. To be blunt, anybody hoping for realism and restraint in American foreign policy is setting themselves up for failure if they put their trust in the inherent wisdom of the mass public to provide a sound guide for foreign policy. It is true that after serious disasters in American foreign policy or prolonged wars, the public does tend to tack a seemingly “realist” course in foreign policy matters. However, a “realist’ inclination that only evinces itself in a politically meaningful way after enough time has passed for thousands of lives have been lost or billions of dollars spent is not a very useful constraint on the interventionist tendencies of the US government. ~Daniel Trombly

Via Scoblete

Trombly is right about this. He has effectively made an excellent case that there is nothing inherent in popular or democratic government that encourages restraint or discourages the use of force. As both of us have suggested before, public ignorance is another important factor in making it relatively easy to launch military interventions with public support:

At the same time, popular parochialism and ignorance of foreign politics and cultures enables the inflation of threats abroad just as easily – if not more so – as it provokes skepticism.

This is certainly true. Threat inflation and invention happen in every powerful country, but inflating threats and inventing enemies are much easier when the public knows next to nothing about the part of the world where the threat is supposed to be located. While government officials may know more, this is also not nearly enough in most cases. This was one of Figes’ observations in his history of the Crimean War: Russophobia had an extremely powerful effect on British public opinion, but actual knowledge of Russia was negligible. Public opinion was instead shaped by the wildest of alarmist claims fueled by the forged “Testament of Peter the Great,” and these claims also shaped the making of policy among the supposedly well-informed:

The documentary basis of this ‘Russian menace’ was the so-called ‘Testament of Peter the Great’, which was widely cited by Russophobic writers, politicians, diplomats, and military men as prima facie evidence of Russia’s ambitions to dominate the world. Peter’s aims for Russia in this document were megalomaniac.

—————-

The ‘Testament’ was a forgery. It was created sometime in the early eighteenth century by various Polish, Hungarian and Ukrainian figures connected to France and the Ottomans, and it went through several drafts before the finished version ended up in the French Foreign Ministry archives during the 1760s.

—————-

Nowhere was its influence more evident than in Britain, where fantastic fears of the Russian threat–and not just to India–were a journalistic staple….These travel books not only dominated public perceptions of Russia but also provided a good deal of working knowledge on which Whitehall shaped its policies towards that country. (p. 70-72)

Americans also have a history of overreacting once they have been pulled into conflicts overseas, and this tends to push arguments for restraint to the side or out of the debate all together. This is an overreaction that feeds of public ignorance about the rest of the world and America’s geographic distance from the regions where these conflicts are being fought. Before U.S. entry into WWI, there was no overwhelming popular agitation for entering the war, but once America was in the war there was a strange transformation. George Kennan describes the wartime mood very well in the prologue to The Decision to Intervene*:

American society had no tradition that could help it accept a foreign war with calmness and maturity. Its political philosophy–optimistic, idealistic, impregnated with the belief that an invincible progress had set in with the founding of the American state–had no comfortable place for mass killing and destruction as an end of American policy. There was no explanation for America’s involvement in the war which fitted with the basic assumptions of the American outlook and at the same time permitted the adoption of a realistic image of the enemy and recognition of the war as an integral part of the process of history. It could not, in the American view, be anything generic to human nature that had produced this confusion. Only a purely external force–demonic, inexplicable, evil to the point of inhumanity–could have put America in this position, could have brought her to an undertaking so unnatural, so out of character, so little the product of her own deliberate choice.

—————-

There was a sort of mass running for cover; and “cover” was an impressive show of noble indignation against the external enemy, coupled with the most unmeasured idealization of the American society whose philosophic foundation had been thus challenged.

—————–

The result was an hysteria, a bombat, an orgy of self-admiration and breast-beating indignation, that defies description. In one degree or another it took possession of press, pulpit, school, advertising, lecture platform, and political arena….Never, surely, has America been exposed to so much oratory–or to oratory more strained, more empty, more defensive, more remote from reality. All was righteousness and hatred. (p. 6-7)

So there’s no question that changes in public mood are unreliable and won’t form the basis for establishing a foreign policy of restraint and prudence. Still, I think Trombly does overlook something. In between the orgies of self-admiration and breast-beating there are openings for realist arguments to be heard and gain traction. Public war-weariness does not by itself indicate anything about how the public will respond to future agitation for war, but it opens up political space to challenge assumptions about the wisdom and necessity of military interventions and of confrontational foreign policy more generally.

* The intervention discussed in Kennan’s book was Wilson’s decision in 1918 to send American soldiers to Siberia as part of the absurd Allied intervention after the Bolshevik Revolution.