U.S. Public Support for the U.S.-NATO Alliance

Abstract

While previous research has thoroughly investigated the structure of Americans’ foreign policy beliefs, existing literature tells us far less about the determinants of public support for U.S. military alliances. In the following paper, we examine whether former President Donald Trump’s framing altered public support for the U.S.-North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) military alliance. First, using survey data from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, we show that support for NATO became polarized after 2016. Second, employing a survey experiment, we test two causal mechanisms that might explain these shifts: (1) a framing model positing that reframing the alliance to emphasize financial costs decreased public support and (2) a cue-taking model positing that opinion on NATO realigned to conform to (or reject) former President Trump’s stated positions. Our experimental results reveal that reframing the alliance decreased support for NATO while the presence of a partisan cue had little or no effect.