President Barack Obama may be swimming against the tide of public sentiment in ordering more troops to Afghanistan. A new poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press and the Council on Foreign Relations – results of which are set to be released Thursday — found that isolationist sentiment in the U.S. is at the highest level since the polling outfit and its predecessors began to measure such sentiment in 1964.
Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Center, said the number of Americans who said the U.S. should go its own way and not worry about other countries was higher than during either the Vietnam or Iraq wars. He declined to divulge specific figures, but said a record number of people also said the U.S. should mind its own business and let other countries get on the best they can.
“We have these long-term measures showing the public looking more inward than they have for a very, very long period of time,” said Kohut. He cited two protracted wars and deep economic woes as factors behind the sentiment.
The Pew Center and the Gallup polling group have posed similar questions aimed at gauging isolationist sentiment every four years, in the first year of each presidential term, since Lyndon Johnson took the White House.