Greeted as Liberators?

JANINA DILL is Dame Louise Richardson Chair in Global Security at the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University. How Americans Think About U.S. Military Interventions “Help is on its way,” U.S. President Donald Trump promised in January, as Iranians took to the streets and were killed by the thousands by government forces. Six weeks later, the U.S. military offensive against Iran began. Trump offered several rationales, including the claim that the American attack would provide Iranians an opportunity to bring down their regime and replace it with something better. “The hour of your freedom is at hand,” he said to Iranians in a video address the night the war began. “When we are finished, take over your government.” Trump’s implicit assertion was that the Iranian people wanted U.S. military intervention. Although some prominent Iranians in exile—such as Reza Pahlavi, the son of the deposed shah—supported this claim, the opinions of the wider Iranian public remained unknown. Even though many Iranians clearly opposed the regime, it does not follow that they welcomed U.S. and Israeli bombs. Trump is not the only American president to have claimed that the U.S. military had invaded a country to help the people there and to infer that the invasion therefore had local consent. Military campaigns over the past several decades have always been given a strategic rationale—the defense of the United States, the defense of an ally, or, in the case of Iran, the destruction of Tehran’s nuclear program. But U.S. leaders have also frequently cast intervention as something the local population wants, as Vice President Dick Cheney famously did in 2003, when he predicted that U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators in Iraq. Trump has similarly mused that the people of Canada and Greenland would welcome being incorporated into the United States, and his administration invoked the suffering of Venezuelans under President Nicolás Maduro to suggest that the public approved of Maduro’s forcible removal in January. It should not be surprising that American leaders make these claims. Consent implies a powerful moral justification for intervention, and research I conducted with the scholars Emily Myers and Livia Schubiger found that Americans are more inclined to support military intervention when the local population consents. Yet U.S. leaders are often guilty of claiming local consent when they have no evidence of it. Making the case that the local population will benefit from U.S. intervention—which can evoke the paternalistic rhetoric used to rationalize Western imperialism and colonial subjugation—is not the same as demonstrating that the local population actually approves of the mission. If Americans are more likely to support a military operation that has local consent, then it stands to reason that an operation justified on these grounds will lose support if it becomes apparent that the local population does not, in fact, welcome U.S. meddling. Doubts about the Iranian public’s support for U.S. intervention—doubts that grew after Iranians did not heed Trump’s call to rise up against the government amid an air campaign that caused thousands of casualties in Iran, wrecked its economy, and likely tightened the regime’s grip on power—may now be contributing to the war’s unpopularity among Americans. And as Washington contemplates another military intervention, this time in Cuba, it ought to try to find out what Cubans really think first—not just as a matter of principle but because misrepresenting the preferences of a population abroad can have political consequences at home. In March 2023, we conducted a large-scale survey experiment with 3,360 adult U.S. citizens that was designed to test how local consent affects public support for U.S. military intervention. Respondents evaluated hypothetical scenarios involving a U.S. air campaign to stop the persecution and killing of an ethnic minority group in a fictional country. The scenarios included four variables: the level of support for the intervention among the ethnic minority group, how many members of the minority group would be injured or killed by U.S. strikes, how many bystanders from the ethnic majority would be injured or killed by U.S. strikes, and how likely the intervention was to succeed. Local consent substantially increased respondents’ support for military intervention. When almost all members of the ethnic minority group supported the operation, respondents were 19 percentage points more likely to favor it than they were in scenarios in which the military action had almost no local backing. That increase was roughly the same as the difference in respondents’ favorability toward the mission when the odds of success were 95 percent compared with 50 percent. Expectations of civilian casualties had an effect on a similar scale. Respondents’ support for military action was 24 percentage points higher in scenarios that were projected to have zero civ

Greeted as Liberators?

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