If Biden Wanted to Ease U.S.-China Tensions, Would Americans Let Him?
Of course, the two cases aren’t identical. Most Americans favor reducing trade ties with China, but the two countries are more economically intertwined than the U.S. and the Soviets ever were. In the 1940s, most Americans backed sending troops to defend European countries from Soviet takeover; most don’t yet support sending troops to Taiwan. Americans still worry more about terrorism and other foreign policy issues than about China. And for now, far more say the U.S. and China are “in competition” — the Biden administration’s preferred framing — than say they’re in a cold war.
Still, the message Americans are getting from their leaders about China is profoundly negative. “That’s percolated into the general public,” said Richard Herrmann, an Ohio State University professor who studies international relations and public opinion.
A feedback loop
Souring public opinion, in turn, may worsen U.S.-China relations.
That might seem surprising; most Americans don’t pay that much attention to foreign policy, which is typically far removed from their daily lives. But the international issues that do register tend to be ones that politicians, experts and the news media talk about a lot. And once public opinion on a foreign policy issue calcifies, as it increasingly has on China, political leaders often pay attention to it. “It generally sets guardrails for what policymakers can do,” said Dina Smeltz of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, which conducts polls on Americans’ views of China.
Public animosity can incentivize leaders to speak and act aggressively, hawkishness that journalists then communicate back to the public. The result is a feedback loop in which events, leaders’ words and actions, media coverage and public opinion reinforce one another.
That feedback loop can become especially potent if public sentiment crosses party lines, as it did for much of the Cold War and increasingly does on China (even though self-identified Republicans remain more hostile toward China than Democrats and independents). “Taking a hard line on China is one of the few issues that Republicans and Democrats in Washington seem to agree on,” Joshua Kertzer, a Harvard political scientist, said in an email.
Source: The New York Times
