"Proxies" and the Public: Public Support for Military Aid to States and Militias

• In Event: The Conduct of Warfare: Perceptions and Beyond

Abstract

Under what conditions do states terminate military aid abroad? This project examines the audience costs of doing so through experimentally assessing American public attitudes about terminating ongoing military aid. Contemporaneous decisions by the Trump administration to withdraw military aid to Ukraine and the Syrian Kurds in 2019 surprisingly galvanized the public, despite long-established empirical findings that foreign policy rarely captures the public's imagination. These episodes of public backlash to ending military support are particularly puzzling in the face of growing opposition to military intervention among Americans (2019 Chicago Council Survey, 19), indicating that this phenomenon may function differently from traditional public opinion on foreign policy or support for war—and that it may merit being analyzed on its own. This project explains variation in public support for military aid to an armed actor abroad through an original survey experiment. It tests whether the American public makes a distinction between loyalty to non-state or state recipients of the aid, or if fears of backlash on the US inform their attitudes. This project contributes to theoretical understandings of the constraints democracies face in publicly changing their foreign-policy behavior.

Author

• Sara Plana, University of Pennsylvania