Poll: Most Americans want US leadership on global affairs, increased defense spending

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PENTAGON  — A major­i­ty of Amer­i­cans want the Unit­ed States to lead on the glob­al stage with a strong mil­i­tary, and a super­ma­jor­i­ty want to increase nation­al defense spend­ing, accord­ing to the lat­est Rea­gan Nation­al Defense Survey.

Despite Amer­i­cans elect­ing a pres­i­dent who ran on an “Amer­i­ca First” agen­da that focused on domes­tic issues rang­ing from the U.S. econ­o­my to secur­ing the south­ern U.S. bor­der, 57% of those sur­veyed said they want­ed to see the U.S. more engaged and tak­ing the lead on inter­na­tion­al events this year, com­pared with 42% a year ago.

Near­ly 80% of Amer­i­cans sur­veyed sup­port­ed increased gov­ern­ment spend­ing on the U.S. mil­i­tary, a slight increase from last year. Increas­ing mil­i­tary spend­ing ranked high above some of the oth­er U.S. for­eign pol­i­cy pri­or­i­ties, such as pro­mot­ing free­dom abroad (61%) and pro­vid­ing for­eign aid (43%).

“The Rea­gan Nation­al Defense Sur­vey demon­strates yet again that Amer­i­cans are not paci­fists, and we are not iso­la­tion­ists. We want a fed­er­al gov­ern­ment that serves Amer­i­can inter­ests and pro­tects our coun­try,” Bradley Bow­man, a mem­ber of the sur­vey’s advi­so­ry board and the senior direc­tor of the Cen­ter on Mil­i­tary and Polit­i­cal Pow­er for the Foun­da­tion for Defense of Democ­ra­cies, told VOA Friday.

The Ronald Rea­gan Insti­tute has sur­veyed U.S. pub­lic opin­ion on nation­al secu­ri­ty for the past six years, and the lat­est poll, released Thurs­day, includ­ed a bipar­ti­san sam­ple of about 2,500 Amer­i­cans who were sur­veyed two days after the Novem­ber pres­i­den­tial election.

Most respon­dents said they sup­port­ed con­tin­ued U.S. secu­ri­ty sup­port for Ukraine and allow­ing Ukraine to fire U.S. weapons inside Rus­sia, with near­ly 60% believ­ing the Rus­sia-Ukraine con­flict will end with Ukraine nego­ti­at­ing for peace, even if that means giv­ing up some of its sov­er­eign territory.

Ukraine sup­port dif­fered wide­ly among vot­ers for the Demo­c­ra­t­ic pres­i­den­tial can­di­date, Vice Pres­i­dent Kamala Har­ris, and Repub­li­can can­di­date, Pres­i­dent-elect Don­ald Trump, with 74% of Har­ris vot­ers in sup­port of send­ing aid com­pared with 42% of Trump voters.

A super­ma­jor­i­ty (80%) sees Rus­sia as an adversary.

On Israel, 54% of those sur­veyed sup­port­ed con­tin­u­ing U.S. aid, but Amer­i­cans were split 45% to 45% on whether Israel has a right to con­tin­ue mil­i­tary action or Israel’s mil­i­tary action in Gaza has gone on long enough and needs to tran­si­tion to a ceasefire.

About half of those sur­veyed think the Unit­ed States would pre­vail in a con­flict with Chi­na, with near­ly the same num­ber find­ing Chi­na to be the great­est threat to the Unit­ed States.

If Chi­na invad­ed Tai­wan, near­ly three-quar­ters of those sur­veyed said the U.S. should offi­cial­ly rec­og­nize Tai­wan as an inde­pen­dent nation, with two-thirds agree­ing that the U.S. should respond with eco­nom­ic sanc­tions against Chi­na and more than half sup­port­ing send­ing more mil­i­tary equip­ment to Tai­wan (56%) and mov­ing more mil­i­tary assets such as air­craft car­ri­ers into the region (58%).

Most Amer­i­cans sur­veyed believe the U.S. mil­i­tary should be large enough to win two simul­ta­ne­ous wars.