Foreign Affairs Issues Won't Sway Voters

Robert Jervis, the Adlai E. Stevenson Professor of International Politics. “It’s the president who is seen as the main guardian of national security and foreign policy, the House and Senate are seen as one step removed.”

Recent events in Iraq, Syria and Ukraine are feeding into an overall narrative that the president, and by extension the Democratic Party, have been ineffective when it comes to foreign policy.

That’s not entirely fair, said Jervis. The president—indeed, any president—tends to get credit when things go well and blame when they don’t. Moreover, he added, “presidents usually have very limited maneuvering room when it comes to foreign policy, and even if they had more, the extent of American influence is less than we think,” he said.

Take, for example, the issue of Syria and chemical weapons. In August 2012, President Obama said that if Bashar Assad used chemical weapons on the Syrian people he would be crossing “a red line for us.”

That quote was immediately pounced upon, and “people said Obama was incompetent for drawing the red line,” Jervis said. “But when you look more closely, Assad ultimately was disarmed of most, if not all of the chemical weapons. That’s not portrayed as an American victory even though we got what we wanted.”

Another example is in the administration’s response to Vladimir Putin’s actions in Ukraine. “I can imagine rerunning the history differently, but of the three or four factors that influenced Putin, American policy probably is the smallest,” he said. “But it affects how the president is seen, especially when things are not going particularly well domestically or internationally.”

And in the fight against ISIS, the U.S. is encouraging Turkey to take an active role in the coalition against the terrorist group as it captures territory ever closer to the Turkish border. But there is little the U.S. can do, Jervis said, to make the Turks move any faster. “The Turks have very strong interests, preferences, and fears and unless the U.S. is willing to provide a no-fly zone or move more strongly to overthrow Assad, they are going to go their own way.”

“I don’t think even ISIS has penetrated deeply into general public opinion,” said Jervis. But it has among political activists, which may trickle down to a unwillingness to play the major get-out-the-vote role they have in the 2008 and 2012 elections. “They may just say ‘I’ll vote for the candidate, but will I spend another weekend on the phone bank?’”

Despite all the ads, the robocalls, the candidates’ personal appearances and speeches, “what really influences people is what their friends and neighbors and personal contacts do,” he said. “Anything that affects the party organization does affect the outcome. And it’s very hard to pin that down.”