What do American people think about U.S.-China policy? | Live with Lizzi Lee

In this episode of Live with Lizzi Lee:

What do Americans think about U.S. foreign policy towards China? Zuri Linetsky, a research fellow at the Eurasia Group Foundation (EGF), discusses findings from a recent survey.

Below is a transcript of the video:

Lizzi: Joining me today is Mr. Zuri Linetsky, a research fellow at the Eurasia Group Foundation. Thank you so much, Zuri, for joining me today.

Zuri: Thanks for having me.

Lizzi: For starters, can you please briefly introduce the EGF survey on America’s view on foreign policy?

Zuri: The survey is motivated by an overarching question, which is: Is there a gap between the U.S. policymakers’ choices in making policy and what the American people want?

Perhaps American voters don’t want the U.S. to be the global policeman or embrace this idea of primacy as the motivating strategy for the United States.

Perhaps an idea like restraint or liberal internationalism, ideas of more diplomatic engagement, or potentially focusing on issues at home are the things that voters want.

And so, we want to understand what voters want and how that should interact with foreign policymakers, decision-makers’ choices.

Lizzi: Right. Thank you so much for the introduction. In a most recent round of surveys, from the results, we see a significant increase in respondents who prefer sending more U.S. troops to bases in U.S. allies like South Korea and Japan. What do you think has led to the change from previous years?

Zuri: Yeah. So, there’s been a progressive increase in this idea of moving more troops to places like Korea and Japan. In the first year that we asked this question, which was 2019, about 57% of the people that we surveyed said the United States should decrease the number of people that were based in Korea and Japan.

This year, obviously, four years later, we’re talking about just under 45% saying decrease and about 55% saying the United States should increase.

And so, this can be attributed to the fact that asked people to rank why they said this. The people that took this survey said that China is aggressive and expansionist. And the United States needs to do something about that. One way to do that is increased troop presence in Asia.

And it’s also worth pointing out that the last five years have revolved around increasingly bellicose relations between China and the United States.

Trump imposed export controls and imposed tariffs on Chinese products in 2018. A lot of that has not changed under the Biden administration.

And as the outgoing president in 2021, Trump changed the rules for how American diplomats can interact with Taiwanese diplomats.

So you’ve seen this kind of ratcheting up of tensions between the two powers. So that can potentially address more interest among our survey takers for basing Americans in the region.

And it’s also worth noting that this survey was given to people about a month after Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan.

And so obviously, people who took the survey had in their minds the images of the large Chinese military exercises that crossed the center line and really imperiled Taiwanese security.

Lizzi: Since you mentioned Taiwan, paradoxically, the percentage of respondents in favor of defending Taiwan declined in this most recent round of survey. Why do you think this is the case?

Zuri: Yeah, so that’s an interesting question. First and foremost, we’ve asked this question over the last two years, and we actually changed the wording in the question in that in previous years we just asked about defending Taiwan, but this year we asked about adding we added some language on costs, thinking about what this would mean for American service people who would be fighting to protect Taiwan.

And so that can account for some of the decrease in interest in defending Taiwan because suddenly this is real: People’s neighbors or children would ultimately be dealing with would be fighting to defend Taiwan.

Again, we must think through Nancy Pelosi’s visit and what that led to as a result. What we can’t forget about is that the plurality of the people that took our survey last year and this year, about just about 40%, said we don’t know if the United States should or shouldn’t defend Taiwan.

Now, that can be looked at as a problem with the survey, or people just not knowing. Or one way to think about this is the success of this idea of strategic ambiguity, which has been American policy over Taiwan since the late seventies.

So maybe we’ve learned that Americans have internalized this idea of maybe we shouldn’t know what to do to maintain the status quo.

Lizzi: And your survey also highlights an interesting aspect, which is this generational gap in preferences for U.S. military presence in Asia. I wonder if you can help me unpack that part of the results a little bit more.

Zuri: Yeah, for sure. I think so. Overall, we see just over 50% of people wanting to increase the American troop presence in Asia.

But when you break down these numbers, it’s kind of a linear progression with age, meaning the youngest group of Americans, people that are 18 to 29, nearly 54% of those don’t want the United States to increase its troop presence in Asia among our survey takers. And as you get older, this percentage increases.

For those above between 30 and 44, you’re looking at about 51 or 52%. For people between 45 to 60, it’s about 57%. And then 60 and above, it’s about 64%.

The question is why. I think we must remember, again, Taiwan. We’ve had this on-again-off-again relationship with how we interact with Taiwan, particularly in the last four years.

And I think that’s ever present in people’s minds. But also what we should be thinking about is people that are 18 to 29, they came of age during the Obama presidency when the American government tried to shift or pivot to Asia relatively unsuccessfully, unfortunately, given its commitments to the war on terror.

And I think that you see you’re seeing Americans, younger Americans, particularly people that took our survey saying, well, perhaps this doesn’t work. Perhaps this idea of putting American troops abroad is not the best use of American money. Perhaps American troops are increasing the threat that America poses to China.

And in fact, when we asked our survey respondents why they think the United States should decrease its presence in the Indo-Pacific region, the most often selected reason was that the presence of American soldiers can lead to a spiral of escalation, if you will. It’s a threat to China.

Lizzi: What should U.S. policymakers take away from your survey results, especially the part on China?

Zuri: Yeah, absolutely. I think perhaps there’s an age gap overall. We’re talking about American Congress, the 117th Congress, where the average age was approximately 64. There’s a giant age gap between the average American voter and people who took our survey who tend to be in their thirties and forties, and the people that are making policy.

So potentially American policymakers need to do a better job of getting in touch with what their constituents want. But at the same time, we need to be thinking beyond this idea of just sticks when engaging with China or just military force. We need to be thinking about the risks and the benefits and risks of interacting with China.

So are there things we can do to engage China that will be positive inducements for more cooperative relationships, instead of just focusing on troop deployments and the threat that those create for China and for the United States?