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| Photo Credit; AP. |
WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. international outlook has undergone a major shift in recent years, a new poll shows, with a majority now expecting that U.S. relations with allies will stay the same or improve but that U.S. dealings with traditional adversaries like Russia and North Korea will only grow more hostile.
Two years
into the Biden administration, the assessments look much different from four
years ago, at roughly the same point in the Trump administration. Now, 60% of
U.S. adults say relations with adversaries will get worse, up from 26% four
years ago, according to the poll from the Pearson Institute and The Associated
Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Just 21% say relationships with
allies will deteriorate, down from 46% then.
In general,
39% expect the country’s global standing to worsen, compared with 48% who said
that in 2018. Crucially, the United States’ own sharply divided domestic
politics influences views of the country’s standing abroad.
“Those results really, clearly show that it’s
hyperpartisanship” affecting how confidently or bleakly, respectively,
Democrats and Republicans see the U.S. standing abroad, said Sheila Kohanteb, a
political scientist and executive director of the Global Forum at the
Chicago-based Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global
Conflicts.
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In terms of
the opinions that people in the U.S. are expressing on U.S. dealings abroad,
the key factor is “political bloc sticking with political bloc,” Kohanteb said.
Four years
ago, three-quarters of Democrats expected U.S. global standing to suffer. Now,
roughly that same percentage see stability or improvement in the near future.
By comparison, about 6 in 10 Republicans predicted improvements in 2018; now
that same percentage expect the current administration to stumble.
Other
countries are “probably laughing at us, waiting for us to fall apart,” said
Kristy Woodard, a 30-year-old Republican in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. She
said she saw the economy and U.S. leadership as suffering under President Joe
Biden.
“I don’t think
we really have allies anymore because the United States is just a joke at this
point,” Woodard said.
But David
Dvorin, a 49-year-old Democrat in Pittsburgh who works as a price specialist,
said Biden was winning respect abroad by rallying international allies to
respond to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
“The war in Ukraine has shown the leadership
of the Biden administration, to be able to hold most of Europe together,”
Dvorin said.
Still, as
Russia amps up its assault on Ukraine, tensions with China grow over Taiwan and
other issues and the U.S. confronts North Korea and Iran over those countries’
nuclear programs, similar percentages of Republicans and Democrats say that
relationships with adversaries will get worse in the next year.
The Pearson
Institute/AP-NORC poll also shows strong support for a U.S. foreign policy that
protects women and minorities around the world — even though few people think
the U.S. is doing a world-beating job of protecting those same interests at
home.
Majorities
of U.S. adults said they see preventing discrimination against women and
minorities around the world as an important U.S. foreign policy goal and that
the U.S. government has significant responsibility for protecting the rights of
those groups. And 78% of people in the United States believe the U.S. should
withhold financial support from other countries that are failing to protect the
rights of women and minority groups.
However,
only about 1 in 5 U.S. adults thinks the country is leading the world in
safeguarding the rights of women and racial, ethnic and religious minorities,
or LGBTQ people. Many think the U.S. is among several countries that are doing
it well, but about a third say there are other countries doing better.
Rick
Reinesch, 61, of Austin, Texas, who works as a project manager for a consulting
firm and describes himself as a Democratic-leaning political independent, calls
safeguarding the freedoms of women and minorities abroad “essential” for the
U.S.
But the
increasing Republican and Democratic divide at home means Americans’
performance on that point is a “mixed bag,” with rights deteriorating in states
most influenced by former President Donald Trump’s dismissive outlook, he said.
Chris
Ormsby, 53, of Edmond, Oklahoma, an administrator in higher education who
describes himself as a political independent, pointed to women’s rights in
Iran, where women are spearheading weeks of protests triggered by government
demands that women cover their hair, as among the rights issues playing out
overseas.
“Maybe we
can take more proactive steps” abroad on that, Ormsby said. But “I think
there’s other things to worry about, nuclear proliferation and things like
that.” He called slowing climate change by moving the world away from fossil
fuels a priority for U.S. policy abroad.
That all
makes for a strange split for those charged with shaping America’s policy on
protections of human rights, Kohanteb, the Pearson Institute official, said.
“American policy is not as adamant about
protecting our own rights as Americans believe we should be doing abroad,” she
said.
Dolby
reported from New York.The poll of 1,003 adults was conducted Sep. 9-12 using a
sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed
to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for
all respondents is plus or minus 4.0 percentage points.