Brian Katulis on What Voters Want… and Aren’t Getting

This podcast episode includes references to the Eurasia Group Foundation, now known as the Institute for Global Affairs.

Transcript:

July 29, 2019

BRIAN KATULIS: ...And they’re like, ehhh, Americans don’t really care about this stuff. And actually, au contraire. Americans actually do care. If you don't understand where people are coming from and then craft arguments that try to connect with them, then you are sort of flying blind.

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MARK HANNAH: My name is Mark Hannah, and I’m your host for None of the Above, a podcast from the Eurasia Group Foundation. I'm sitting here with Brian Katulis, who is at the Center for American Progress. These guys just put out a phenomenal new report called “America Adrift: How the US Foreign Policy Debate Misses What Voters Really Want.” This is a topic a lot of us in the think tank industrial complex are struggling to understand. In fact, here’s a shameless plug: this report follows on the heels of one we put out at EGF, entitled “Worlds Apart,” which also seeks to quantify the divide between the foreign policy establishment and the public they seek to represent.

Let me ask you, Brian, what made you want to embark on this project? What makes you want to understand the public opinion of voters as it relates to foreign policy?

KATULIS: Two main reasons. One: some of the most painful meetings I've been in the last ten years or so are the ones with foreign policy wonks who are saying, “This is what we should say to voters about foreign policy.” It's actually smart stuff when it comes to policy, but in terms of language and where people are at it didn't seem right. And then second: many moons ago, for one of my earlier jobs, I worked for a guy named Stan Greenberg, who is a pollster.

HANNAH: A famous pollster in the Democratic Party, right?

KATULIS: Yeah. And my co-author John Halpin —lead author on this—and I met at that firm. We actually put our heads together and with our colleagues said, “We should get out of our little bubbles here and see where the public is at two-and-a-half years into Trump.” He's had an impact, probably— was the hypothesis—on how people think about the world. And the world has changed too.

HANNAH: Yeah, what kind of responsibility did you feel was being lost by your colleagues in the foreign policy world when they were creating these narratives without us being grounded in public opinion?

KATULIS: Well, one of the biggest things that was lost was just this: there was this failure to communicate from our end.

Interlude featuring archival audio

KATULIS: We started out this research with qualitative, which is open-ended focus groups, but then also in-depth interviews that went on for a few days. And one of the things we tested was the very language I use, that other foreign policy wonks use. I remember sitting in the focus groups watching. The moderator was asking the respondents, “What do you think of phrases like liberal international order?” Blank stare. Nobody knew actually what that meant. Some people chuckled. There’s nothing liberal about the world and yadda, yadda, yadda. American exceptionalism. Nobody really knew. One woman ventured a guess saying, “I think America is exceptional. It accepts a lot of things in this country, like foreigners and a lot of nonsense.”

HANNAH: Oh wow.

KATULIS: So, the very language and concepts we use... Part of what we were missing, I think, in this brainstorming—I’m back to your question—was that Trump has a narrative that pierces, and it's as simple as this: “Foreigners are taking advantage of our country, and I'm going to keep bad ones out and make them pay more, and make better trade deals,” and things like that. For the last two to two-and-a-half years, the foreign policy commentariat have had a lot of important criticisms that are accurate. But they don't have a competing narrative. And this is similar to problems we had, I think, under the George W. Bush Administration, when he had a narrative like, “We're going to expand freedom to defeat terrorism.”

And he ran the table for several years politically, and I think he really captured a lot of folks. Trump has a much narrower base for what he supports, but he's got a narrative. And a narrative defeats no narrative all the time.

HANNAH: There's a Mark Twain quote about, “Don't argue with fools because they'll drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.” Do you think, on some level, by trying to come up with a progressive analog for what Donald Trump has effectively done, Donald Trump's opponents and people who put forward an alternative vision of the world are going to become what they despise?

KATULIS: They need not. And there's a way to connect, I think, policy smarts with smart communications. And we're not there yet. This research, this “America Adrift” report, is basically a survey of the landscape as we see it, and we tried to neutrally ask questions and not press particular messages. The next phase is to actually craft what I would call a centrist internationalist argument and test what might be palatable and acceptable but connected to our good ideas. It's not like we're testing ideas to figure out what our policy priorities are. It's just to understand where people are at.

The key thing I'd say—and we highlighted it in here—is that the whole landscape has changed. The terms “neocon” or “liberal interventionist” mean nothing anymore politically.

HANNAH: One thing I was struck by your categorization scheme, is that the smallest group you identified could be conceived of as traditional internationalists, because most people in Washington, most people who do foreign policy for a living, might be considered traditional internationalists, right?

KATULIS: Yeah.

HANNAH: But their worldview is shared by the least amount of people you surveyed. Are you concerned about that? Is that accurate?

KATULIS: I'm one of those centrist internationalists, full disclosure. About a decade or so ago, I wrote a book called The Prosperity Agenda, which you could classify as a very centrist internationalist democratic agenda. So I'm in that category. I'm not as concerned, because there's a second category which we define as the global activists. They're about a quarter of the American public. They actually put climate change, global income inequality, and poverty as high priorities. Here's the key: a lot of them are millennial. And a lot of millennials have substantially different views on foreign policy than I do. I'm in my late forties, and that, in some ways, makes a lot of sense to me.

HANNAH: Why?

KATULIS: They grew up in a world where there's been endless wars, like Iraq and Afghanistan, and they don't see the results of it. Some of their family members paid high costs, and they want to know why we are doing all of this stuff. But it's not like they're isolationist.

HANNAH: But you also found a lot of young people to be foreign policy disengaged. Does that concern you?

KATULIS: I think it does, in part because there's a significant percentage of them in the final category, the one-fifth of Americans that are disengaged. And again, it makes sense to me. Younger generations here in America have a lot of problems of their own.

The one thing I think cuts across all of these categories is that people understand we're in a global competition. I don't really see a lot of isolationism. I think people understand that. Their iPhones are made overseas. A lot of people travel overseas much more these days.

But there's a strong impulse for this issue of, “How do we invest here at home in order to compete in the world again?” That's one of the cross-cutting themes I don't see being made, certainly not by Trump. He has what I call a “gated community approach” to security. Treat America like it's Mar-a-Lago. Build higher walls; whatever happens on the other side of the wall, we don't care. I think there's a potential receptivity to saying, “Look, we actually need to not be so closed off, but we need to invest in who we are, in infrastructure, in education, and in healthcare.” These sorts of things actually help us compete in the world. And it doesn't mean we have to go invade and occupy countries endlessly to protect our interests. But it does mean we actually need to negotiate better trade deals, and do it from a position of strength, rather than this angry reactive positioning Trump has.

HANNAH: That seems to be your main conclusion for this report, is it not? You summed it up this way: that American voters believe America needs to be strong at home in order to be strong in the world.

KATULIS: Right.

HANNAH: Can you dig into that a little bit more? What does that look like when you're talking to people? What are some of the things they would share with you that illustrated that belief?

KATULIS: I think the number one thing for most of the folks we talked to in this research is China. They understood that China is in this competition with us, and it was a perception that China has a long game, but that we don't. We're sort of making things up as we go along, and I think that's reflective of how Trump operates. But I think that comment pertains to a bunch of administrations. It goes back maybe fifteen, twenty years. So there's this sense that even though many Americans aren't foreign policy experts, they sort of understand we have to do more on new technology, and we need to defend against new threats, like cyber security.

Interlude featuring archival audio

HANNAH: Do you think there's a condescension among people in the foreign policy community in their regard for the American public?

KATULIS: Yeah, I mean, among some. But what's interesting is you see, especially after Trump's election, a wake-up call. And this project is one of many that people are doing to step out of our bubbles and try to listen, and I think that's a healthy thing. But if we treat it in this sort of artificial sense that, every once in a while, we need to go out and listen to folks, it's not organic enough. What I think needs to happen is especially elected leaders, and especially those in Congress, need to connect the so-called domestic issues with foreign policy issues and this issue of competition and America's competition in the world.

HANNAH: You mentioned in the study that the public is generally grappling with questions of why are we in the Middle East in the first place and not dealing with Russia and China? What did we gain from years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan?

KATULIS: Yeah.

HANNAH: I think these are questions a lot of people in the foreign policy establishment would have a hard time answering as well, right?

KATULIS: Yeah. I think essentially, right after the end of the Cold War, you had a sense that the wind was at our sails. The Clinton administration actually articulated arguments of forward engagement or democratic enlargement. They had themes, and it connected with the moment where the economy by and large was doing pretty well. They expanded NATO. They let China into the WTO, and things like this. Then 9/11 happened, and we had a new theme. George W. Bush had preemptive war. We needed to go and invade places like Iraq to expand freedom and defeat terrorism. That fell flat, and I think the bill is still coming due for that. I think we have Donald Trump—

HANNAH: Well, literally and figuratively—

KATULIS: Yeah.

HANNAH: The debt the country is saddled with is—

KATULIS: Yeah, the debt, and then most importantly, the lives, and the fact that we've had more vets kill themselves than be lost in combat. Just the impact on our mindset as a nation. But I think a bunch of other things happened that really didn't turn the country inward but shifted the terms of our foreign policy debate long before Donald Trump thought of running for president. The global financial crisis. The fact that I think Barack Obama did a good job in trying to correct for the overreaches of George W. Bush but then in his second term, didn't really articulate a clear enough argument for what it is we're doing in the world.

When your tagline for your foreign policy after two terms in office is, “Don't do stupid shit,” that is very good, but also doesn't tell you exactly what it is we're doing in trying to negotiate a trade agreement with Asia, or why all of these things matter.

People started to use that politically, especially from the right. And there was a reintroduction of the politics of fear in national security that Trump basically ran on. You know, he drove a truck through that and exploited that quite a lot.

HANNAH: The questions you're asking about priorities within American foreign policy—did you not expect that one of the highest priorities would be protecting the U.S. homeland and its people from external threats? I mean, that is kind of…

KATULIS: Yeah, mirabile dictu, people want to be safe. We haven't had big attacks here at home, but it's in the consciousness of a lot of people. We've heard some candidates from the left say this—that we should treat these like law enforcement issues. I understand we've overreached and had a silent surge of U.S. military forces around multiple countries around the world, but it's not enough to simply say to your local police, “Okay, you can handle this.” Politically in the minds of many Americans, a genuine threat still exists out there. And I think objectively there still is.

HANNAH: And I think to some, there's a sense of trauma and shock that was filled, that what was once unimaginable is now easily imagined—all too easily imaginable. I wonder whether you think some of those fears are informed and rational fears that the American people have, or if you think they just deprioritize other threats relative to the fear of an attack on the American homeland, that they don’t feel are affecting their lives on a daily basis.

KATULIS: Again, I think one of the biggest findings—and again, it's not terribly shocking—most Americans feel like we've overreached, militarily. And Trump has played into that. This is why he makes these decisions on Syria but then backtracks and—

HANNAH: Well, I want to push you on that. He said that before he got elected president, right? He's channeling that no doubt, but do you think he is the ultimate expression of that public frustration with thirty years of American overreach in foreign policy?

KATULIS: He is, but then you see he's still boxed in, in a sense, by the reality and the facts. If you saw his top general testifying yesterday on Capitol Hill, he said, “We're going to be staying in Afghanistan until the insurgency is done.” Again, that’s not a thing you would hear from President Trump, but the system itself in some ways. Part of it—

HANNAH: The deep state.

KATULIS: Yeah, the deep state, but the system itself still has an ability to hang onto these things despite President Trump saying he wants to move in a different direction. Now, Trump is probably the most interesting and innovative communicator, for better and for worse, we've had in the Oval Office on things like, for instance, Middle Eastern allies.

Interlude featuring archival audio

KATULIS: He sort of toggles between talking to his base and his audiences here, and expressing this like, “We're mad as hell, and others are going to pull their weight and do more.” And then he's completely complicit and gives just short of a blank check to allies or partners like Saudi Arabia.

HANNAH: When you got out into the country and started talking to people, what are some of the things you were particularly struck by?

KATULIS: Number one was the sense that I was expecting more of an attitude of retrenchment and isolationism, I call it. It's not there. That was surprising to me. Again, that exposes my own biases as an internationalist. That's something you could work with and make a case for a balanced engagement—I think that is the phrase we use.

HANNAH: I think it was restrained engagement.

KATULIS: Yeah, restrained. Again, that's probably the worst kind of... We were joking about it after that was published. It's like, well, that doesn’t exactly mean anything to anyone. The second thing was—and we write about it—the Fox News effect.

HANNAH: Let's talk about that. One of the things you write in the context of the Fox News effect is about social trust. Can you teach us what social trust is?

KATULIS: Well, my colleague John Halpin, co-author on this, puts this into a lot of the polling we do. It’s a question of how connected people feel in their own community, in their own lives, and can you trust other people? And the basic finding makes sense to me. Those who don't feel like they are connected and have strong community ties are much more skeptical about America's building alliances in the world and support, if you will, an “America first” approach. They're like, “Why do we need international institutions and things like this?”

But if people are disinclined anyway to support cooperating with others in the world because of factors that aren't rational, but because of how they feel about their own position in their own community, then you have to figure out other points of entry to make your argument. We haven't figured out what that is yet, but that's one aspect of it.

Secondly, we asked a series of questions about where people get most of thier news on foreign affairs. Number one is television.

HANNAH: Local TV too, right?

KATULIS: Local TV is the number one out of all of that. And think about it; foreign policy news does not feature probably more than a minute or two, very broad strokes that people are catching about what's going on in the world, and not in the detailed way we like to argue about. The second thing is cable news. And on the Fox News effect, I think that network has very much a perspective we all know. Their ability to shape hard line immigration views—that's part of the Trump narrative and the communication mechanisms—is something that we don't have. And by “we,” I mean the internationalists, which we find in our poll to be nearly half. There's really not as tight of a communication mechanism that the nationalists have with Fox News and where Trump is, and it's so powerful because, as I said, it has an actual storyline. Agree or disagree with it—it's the thing that “foreigners are taking advantage of us.” And it has deep roots that go back years. We have NPR. We have your podcasts. We have New York Times. We have things like this, and it's all—

HANNAH: Our podcast is doing quite well!

KATULIS: And then another thing we do is a lot of the stuff we talk about in this town on foreign policy—Yemen war—it flies over the heads of most Americans. It's not like the Iraq War ten or twelve years ago.

HANNAH: Why do you think that is? Do you think people are just sick and tired and fatigued? Or war weary?

KATULIS: Yeah, they don’t care. The first thing is it doesn't connect. They don't see it connecting with their own wellbeing. Is it going to get me a job? Is it going to make my life better? Is it going to make me safer from terrorist groups?

HANNAH: And presumably it’s not going to do any of those things, right?

KATULIS: Nobody's making that argument. Nobody has made those arguments. President Obama started to make those arguments. He had to in building the coalition and the political fight to go after ISIS and Iraq in Syria. But nobody's really made a clear argument for those things. And part of it is that. And then second, it's a rightful sense that there's a bunch of people over there, and they're fighting each other. We don't want to get in the middle of it in the way we did in the Iraq War. And it's not where most Americans are focused. They're focused on China, and a bit on Russia.

They're focused on the competitive fight, and they're not yet hearing that argument coming from Democrats or others.

HANNAH: Do you think on some level conservatives just have an easier time making emotionally driven arguments whereas democrats are so focused on rational arguments we have a hard time giving a “from the gut” argument?

KATULIS: Yeah—

HANNAH: “They're taking advantage of us” is a great victim narrative. What's the Democrats’ response to that?

KATULIS: I think the bigger challenge that Democrats have faced for decades is what I call self-imposed national security deficit disorder. They have a political consulting class—and I know some of them very well—who would say for decades after the Vietnam War, “If a security question comes up, you should pivot to health care.” I'll tell you from my own personal experience, in my own personal time, back in 2006 in the midterm elections, I'd be involved in certain briefings for candidates, for the Senate and other things. And this is when Iraq was the number one issue, and people were pissed off at Bush. And a lot of Democrats, at least their political consultants, didn't want them to touch it, because they read the polls as, “Well, Democrats aren't as strong on security questions.” It was this wounded dog—like they weren't willing to fight.

And that was what was interesting about not only Obama, but other Democrats who basically said, “Look, this has gone wrong—the Iraq war.” And then they made a much more expansive argument about U.S. global engagement. But that national security deficit disorder has come back a bit because of the politics of the moment. We’ve got a lot of problems at home. You’ve got identity fights and Trump running plays on so many different fronts. But one of the key findings, I think, in our poll, is that Trump is vulnerable. That Americans by and large want a different course in the world than what he's set.

But we're not going to get it unless people start making political arguments and narratives that are compelling, not policy arguments. Criticisms aren't enough. Smart policy in and of itself is not enough. You need to actually have a compelling message that connects with smart policy and the criticisms all together. And I think if I were advising somebody who's running for president or sitting in Congress, about what to do with that result, it would be to not do the standard foreign policy speech. Don't even call it a foreign policy speech—the thing that has alliances and nonproliferation and fighting against authoritarian governments. Do something that actually connects all of those issues to the wellbeing of ordinary Americans.

Revive America's position in the world by focusing on how we're going to make our workers and our people stronger. How we're actually going to work with other countries to deal with the new security threats of cyber and climate change. In this world, you can't step back and just build walls, you need to actually lean in a bit and say we're going to invest here, in our own people, so that we can be in a stronger position in the next ten years or so.

HANNAH: We're going to enter a lightning round with the last five minutes we have left. So, thirty second answer... less than ten, fifteen second answers.

Here we go into the lightning round. You're a dad.

KATULIS: Yep.

HANNAH: What's your favorite dad joke?

KATULIS: Oh, my favorite dad joke. I can't tell you.

HANNAH: You just do bad puns at the dinner table?

KATULIS: Yeah.

HANNAH: What do you think your kids will think about American foreign policy, or what do they think about it?

KATULIS: We have an eight-year-old son, Ben. He's very much engaged in the world. We've had him to Egypt last month, Italy a couple of times, and Greece. And I think he's curious—

HANNAH: He's already part of the cosmopolitan elite, the global elite.

KATULIS: I think he's curious about what's out there and wants to connect with other people. It's also my sense that for those who are millennial and below, there’s less the fear of the other. There’s more excitement of connecting with something new, and I think that's a product of how interconnected we are on social media and things like this. The ability to make and then sustain connections with folks from across the planet is amazing.

HANNAH: Why do older folks watch Fox News?

KATULIS: I think it reinforces a lot of their perceptions about what America was and still could be. Plain and simple.

HANNAH: Climate change swamps D.C. Where will you go? Where would you go?

KATULIS: Western Massachusetts.

HANNAH: What's up with hating on millennials? What's going on there from the older generation? Actually entitled slackers or just frozen in a paralysis of anxiety brought on by impending climate catastrophe?

KATULIS: I think it's just a difference of views born out of how we grew up. On the foreign policy stuff, I basically got interested in this when we were winning. When we actually won the Cold War, our economy was doing strong, and I was encouraged to go out into it. I completely understand a lot of the millennials who say, “Look, we've overreached. What are we doing? And all of this. And what are my job prospects? What am I going to do about my student loan?”

HANNAH: You think your experience living through the heady success of the Cold War has informed a bias, an analytic commitment you maybe subconsciously made when you're approaching foreign policy analysis?

KATULIS: It's definitely there. For anybody who's honest with themselves, their experiences have shaped all of that. But that's why it's important to do research projects like this. I think it's trying to step out of our bubble and really try to listen and understand. What's interesting to me—whether it's an issue related to the Middle East, which I deal with day to day, or these broader issues—is that there's a strong confirmatory bias among a lot of people. They're not willing to challenge their own assumptions. And I catch myself in that. But that's the purpose of a project like this: to try to expand our own thinking and then try to expand the language and the ideas people have to create a new way of talking about America's role in the world, so that we’re not just talking about indispensable power, or American exceptionalism, and all of this stuff. And part of it is this new generation, some of whom I work with here, are going to have to invent this new language and these new concepts, I think, and I’m excited to see what they’ll do.

HANNAH: Brian Katulis, Center for American Progress. Thanks for your time. Thanks for joining us.

KATULIS: Thank you!

HANNAH: That was Brian Katulis from the Center for American Progress. And I’m Mark Hannah, with None of the Above, from the Eurasia Group Foundation. If you like what you heard, please visit our website, noneoftheabovepodcast.org, or subscribe and review wherever you get podcasts, iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, et cetera. See you next time!

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