Holsti - Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy

The first edition of Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy was generally well received, but that is not sufficient reason to bring out a revised and updated version of the book. The rationale for a new edition can be found in a number of developments since 1995, when the first edition went to press. In addition to important evidence about public attitudes provided by the Gallup Organization and other major polling firms, the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, the Program on International Policy Attitudes, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, the Foreign Policy Leadership Project, and the Triangle Institute for Security Studies have undertaken major surveys that focus on various important aspects of America's foreign relations. These have been especially helpful because each of them has included samples of opinion leaders, a sector of American society that has not frequently been the subject of special attention from Gallup and other commercial polling firms. Almost all of the tables appearing in the first edition have been redone to reflect new evidence from these surveys.

A second important development has been the recent publication of major studies that have probed the most difficult and complex issue regarding public opinionits impact on the political process. Steven Kull, I. M. Destler, Lawrence Jacobs, Robert Shapiro, Richard Sobel, Douglas Foyle, and others have been at the forefront of efforts to combine archival research with interviews of public officials and in some cases of pollsters, thereby providing a better understanding of how public opinion enters the policy-making process, the uses to which it is put, and its impact on policy outcomes. These works and other works have provided important new evidence for the discussions in and elsewhere.

The end of the Cold War and increasing democratization areamong the developments that have opened up opportunities for public opinion studies in countries where such research, especially by Westerners, would have been quite unthinkable even a few years ago. This book focuses on the United States, but the growth of comparative cross-national research provides a much richer understanding of the relationship between public opinion and foreign policy-for example, which findings about that relationship are limited to the American political context, and which may have more universal validity?

A major theme of the first edition of this book is that research and theory on public opinion and foreign policy have often been shaped by such key events as the two world wars of the twentieth century and the war in Vietnam. Several studies have shown that many post-Vietnam aspects of public attitudes have persisted beyond the end of the Cold War. However, the enormity of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington raises anew questions about continuity and change. As many analysts have asserted, has everything changed since 9/1 I, including public attitudes toward foreign affairs, much in the way that the attack on Pearl Harbor six decades earlier drove a stake through the heart of the isolationist argument that national interests, geographical realities, and commonsense prudence dictated a policy of limiting contacts with belligerents or potential belligerents abroad? It is clearly far too early to assess the long-term impact of 9/11 on the American public and its attitudes toward global engagement. , which is wholly new in this edition, nevertheless undertakes at least an interim assessment of the role, if any, that public opinion has played in promoting or sustaining the Bush administration's pronounced preferences, during both the nine months before September 11 and the first two years following the terrorist attacks, for a unilateralist approach to world affairs. The 9/11 period includes debates and frequent polling on the issue of Iraq, culminating in the March 2003 invasion of that country and the destruction of Saddam Hussein's regime in Baghdad.

In this undertaking I have been extraordinarily fortunate in receiving the counsel, insights, assistance, and encouragement of many persons. I reiterate the many debts acknowledged in the preface to the first edition. Many of those cited there have continued to provide help far beyond the call of collegiality and friendship, and my gratitude for their assistance persists unabated. I have also benefitted immensely from those who pointed and provided incisive and useful suggestions for improving it. I am also indebted to two anonymous reviewers who read the entire manuscript and offered their suggestions for revisions. Steve Kull was generous in offering advice and sharing data from his Program on International Policy Attitudes; Chris Whitney was most helpful in providing data from the 2002 Chicago Council on Foreign Relations survey; and Steve Casey provided some useful information about Franklin Roosevelt's views on polling.