On Feb. 24, President Biden took his first major public action on foreign policy when he ordered airstrikes on Iranian-backed militias in Syria. The United States said that the militias were responsible for a major rocket attack on a U.S. base in nearby Iraq which killed an American contractor.
This action, while a first for the Biden administration, is part of a larger pattern of military confrontation between the United States and Iran since the Trump administration decided to leave the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which most people refer to as the Iran nuclear deal. Some Republicans in Congress, led by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), argue that the United States should terminate diplomatic relations and instead pursue more aggressive military action.
When political leaders consider foreign policy, they keep public opinion in mind. We looked into what factors shape White Americans’ attitudes on foreign policy — and found that racial attitudes have a big influence, even when accounting for partisanship and other important factors.
How we did our research
Much like partisanship, racial attitudes can act like an informational shortcut, or heuristic, strongly influencing a person’s support for policies on issues such as welfare, crime, education, immigration and many other American political issues. Americans also rely on such heuristics when deciding what they believe on foreign policy. Recent scholarship has found that racial attitudes do influence opinion and actions in foreign policy and world affairs.
To look at the relationship between racial attitudes and opinions on foreign policy, we examined data from the American National Election Study from 1986 to 2016. The ANES is a nationally representative probability sample survey of Americans’ political attitudes, conducted every presidential election year.
To measure racial attitudes, we used responses to the racial resentment scale, a set of questions political scientists commonly use to assess anti-Black prejudice. Since the scale was originally designed to discover White Americans’ perceptions of Black Americans, our analysis focuses only on Whites’ racial attitudes.
Even though the scale was designed to measure Whites’ attitudes toward Black Americans, substantial evidence shows that that it’s also accurate at measuring White racial resentment toward other groups — for instance, Latinos, immigrants and Muslim Americans — who have been “racialized” in the United States. By “racialized,” we mean that the group has been defined as a group of racial “others.” Rather than being directed at one specific minority, Whites’ racial resentment tends to be aimed broadly at “non-White” minority groups, and at a host of policy issues that have been framed as helping those groups.
We looked to see whether American Whites’ racial resentment also affects their views on foreign policy toward racialized countries, such as Iran.
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Racially resentful White Americans are more much likely to support military action against countries perceived as non-White
In brief: Yes, it does. White Americans who score high on the racial resentment scale were much more likely to support military action against Iran compared to Whites with lower racial resentment scores. That held true even when we accounted for other important influences on those attitudes, like partisanship, education, attention to political news, ethnocentrism and authoritarianism.
Consider, for instance, the question of whether the U.S. should bomb Iranian sites suspected of being involved in its nuclear weapons program: Racially resentful Whites were 45 percentage points more likely to support bombing than those with less racial resentment. When asked whether the U.S. military should invade Iran, racially resentful Whites were 33 percentage points more likely to say yes than those without such resentment. White Americans with racially resentful views were also 18 percentage points more likely to support economic sanctions on the Iranian government and slightly more likely (by 5 percentage points) to believe that Iran was trying to develop a nuclear weapon.
We found that Whites’ racially resentful views were also associated with support for military action on countries and issues beyond Iran, including the Global War on Terror, China’s rise as a world economic power and other foreign policy positions.
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Here’s how White racial resentment affects their foreign policy views
Our analysis led to three broad findings across countries and issues. Racially resentful Whites are much more likely to 1) prefer military interventions to diplomatic or economic foreign policy options; 2) perceive “non-White” foreign countries like Iran and China as especially threatening; and 3) support increased spending on the U.S. military. Furthermore, we find that racially resentful Whites are generally skeptical of policies and politicians they perceive as more “dovish” or unpatriotic, such as diplomacy and foreign aid.
While most Americans may not pay close attention to the day-to-day happenings in U.S. foreign policy, military interventions nevertheless inevitably affect Americans’ lives. And White Americans’ racial attitudes significantly and substantially inform their views and opinions on what the U.S. should be doing internationally.
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David Ebner is a temporary assistant professor of political science and international relations at the University of Delaware.
Vladimir Enrique Medenica (@vladmedenica) is an assistant professor of political science and international relations at the University of Delaware.
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