Commentary: Americans are losing interest in our nation's crucial role in the world

Americans are losing touch with the world, and the presidential campaign isn’t solving the problem.

Economic issues, immigration, taxes, and even dogs and cats dominated the recent presidential debate between Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump, but less noticed in the fray and its coverage was the effort by the candidates to promote their global goals.

That matters greatly since they laid out starkly different visions of U.S. foreign policy for voters to consider.

The question is whether Americans are listening. Surveys show many are avoiding foreign news or losing interest in this nation’s pivotal role in the world — a trend that may well undermine America’s impact and leadership abroad, damage U.S. democracy at home, or worse, fuel a disturbing trend toward isolationism.

Like the decline of the Roman Empire, some fear America’s three-decade run as the world’s sole superpower is on the wane. Yet another close and contentious upcoming election worries allies and erodes U.S. standing in the world. Far too many voters support former President Trump’s “America First” approach, even as a growing alliance of malign global rivals such as China, Russia, North Korea and Iran seeks to challenge U.S. democracy, economic dominance and military power worldwide.

Certainly, President Joe Biden deserves immense credit for rebuilding trust and faith among U.S. allies that America remains a reliable partner. Biden revived and expanded alliances and multilateral diplomacy, picking up the wreckage after Trump’s abrogation of international agreements such as the 2015 Iran nuclear deal and the 2016 Paris climate agreement, repeated harassment of our NATO partners and threats to withdraw from the alliance altogether.

Biden rejoined the Paris accord in 2021 and worked to restore respect for U.S. diplomacy abroad. He leveraged his vast foreign policy experience and pulled NATO together to support Ukraine after Russia’s unprovoked invasion and helped NATO add two new members, Finland and Sweden. He is right to warn that Russian expansionism won’t stop with Ukraine. However, if Trump returns to office, all these efforts could be for naught.

On debate night, Vice President Harris took the traditional path: touting the importance of U.S. partners and alliances in preserving national security at home with democratic norms abroad, while defending the inviolability of borders, the sovereignty of nations and international respect for the rule of law. With authoritarianism on the rise worldwide, these commitments are more important than ever.

Yet Trump, by contrast, modeled a 21 st century caricature of French King Louis XIV’s “L’etat c’est moi” (“The state: It is I”), claiming he alone could wield presidential power to get Russia to stop its war on Ukraine or bring intractable fighting in Gaza to a close. Simultaneously, he exalted authoritarian regimes such as Viktor Orban’s Hungary, stoked racial animus against immigrants by falsely accusing Haitian migrants of eating household pets and declined to say whether he wants Ukraine to win its war.

Despite these fundamental differences in worldview, Americans at the crossroads do not seem as committed to the U.S. taking an active role in the world today as they were, for example, during the Cold War or after 9/11. Perhaps the stakes don’t seem as high now, but it would be folly to step back and disengage.

In research for our book “The World We Don’t Know,” which covers the decline in U.S. foreign correspondents and global news content, as well as Americans’ engagement in the world and news about it, the early results raise concern.

In an AmeriSpeak Omnibus study for the book conducted by the nonpartisan research group NORC at the University of Chicago, 66% of the 1,124 respondents in a national survey agreed or strongly agreed it is important for the U.S. public to be informed about foreign news, yet little more than half (53%) said they followed it closely or very closely.

Moreover, only about half saw the decline in consumption and interest in foreign news as a danger. While 53% acknowledged a decline in public interest in foreign news leaves citizens less informed and harms democracy in America, only 47% agreed that the trend undercuts U.S. leadership abroad and isolates the country more from the world.

In a breakdown of the kinds of international stories that did draw the most significant interest, unsurprisingly, foreign crises and upheaval were at the top. Some 39% of respondents said they were very or extremely interested in international news stories if they involved U.S. involvement in crises abroad or foreign policy decisions; 35% showed interest in crisis, disaster, war or upheaval in another country; 25% in human interest stories about life, health, science and people outside the U.S.; and 16% in foreign culture, such as movies, TV shows, books, music or the arts.

What’s especially striking is how younger Americans, ages 19 to 29, view foreign news.

They are more likely than middle-aged Americans to say that foreign news is not relevant to their lives, and they are least interested in news about the U.S. involvement in foreign crises or U.S. foreign policy decisions. If they follow foreign news at all, they rely the least on newspapers, TV or cable outlets — the media that put the greatest emphasis on providing it.

The Chicago Council on Global Affairs, similarly, has been conducting public opinion surveys on American foreign policy since 1974, and today, its polling shows American support for the U.S. taking an active role in world affairs is down to 56%. That was the lowest number in roughly 40 years.

Global turmoil abounds. In the past two years, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Israel-Hamas war now threatening to spread to a regional conflict, political upheaval in sub-Saharan Africa, climate disasters and critical elections worldwide are only some of the developments to have rocked the international community.

But our research questions whether the issue lies not with what events are happening in the world, but what we know about them. Global news and stories are certainly out there, but are enough Americans reading, viewing and listening to them?

Almost universally, Americans report significantly lower levels of interest in international news than in news about their own communities, or the United States as a whole. Amid persistent high inflation and one of the most polarizing presidential elections in modern times, it may be draining to follow just America’s issues, let alone those of the rest of the world.

However, history shows that isolationism is fraught and dangerous. Americans would do well to remember that we live in an era of rising threats, instability and autocracy, and if we aren’t more mindful, it just may eat us for lunch.

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Storer H. Rowley and Stephen Franklin are writers and former foreign correspondents for the Chicago Tribune. John Sisco is a student at Northwestern University. Research for “The World We Don’t Know” is supported by a grant from the Alumnae of Northwestern University.

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