According to a YouGov poll conducted this week, only 14 percent of Americans said the U.S. has “any responsibility” to get involved in Ukraine, and only 18 percent think the U.S. “has any responsibility to protect Ukraine if Russia were to invade” “Americans are more likely than not to say that the United States has no responsibility to get involved in Ukraine even under extreme circumstances, the new survey shows,” the Huffington Post reports. “Pluralities of Democrats, Republicans and independents agreed that the U.S. does not have a responsibility to protect Ukraine.”
This reminds one of the Pew poll from back in December that found a majority of Americans more than ever before in Pew’s 50-year history of polling this question, think the U.S. “should mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along as best they can on their own.”
Over a decade of war will do that do a population. Part of the low support for intervening in Ukraine stems, I would suspect, from the lack of knowledge of Ukraine and the amount of people who probably could not point it out on a map (which I assume is very significant).
But more power to them. The way Washington is wringing its hands over the situation in Ukraine is indicative of, in John Mearsheimer’s words, the fact that “America’s national-security elites act on the assumption that every nook and cranny of the globe is of great strategic significance and that there are threats to U.S. interests everywhere.”