U.S or Them?

More Americans think the US should “mind its own business” in regard to the rest of the world, according to a new poll released yesterday by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. It revealed that 49 per cent of Americans believe the US should stay out of international affairs. “Pew headlined its report about the poll in the language long favored by those advocating an interventionist U.S. foreign policy: ‘Isolationist Sentiment Surges to Four-Decade High.’ The poll was conducted by Pew for the internationalist Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a New York-based policy group whose members have dominated U.S. foreign policy since World War II. An interesting facet of the report polled CFR members separately and compared those results with members of the general U.S. public. It noted that while both the general public and CFR are ‘apprehensive and uncertain about America’s place in the world,’ he general public, ‘which is in a decidedly inward-looking frame of mind when it comes to global affairs, is less supportive of increasing the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan than are CFR members.’”