When Americans are asked today about the biggest threats they face, they do not feel they need to look any further than their own backyard. Even before the killing of the conservative leader Charlie Kirk in Utah this month, a sense of alarm about domestic threats was rising, crowding out concern about threats from the rest of the world.
That is because in recent years, Americans have come to see threats as not just the possibility of attack by a foreign adversary. The potential for political violence at home is part of it, along with polarization, corruption and a sense of cultural dysfunction. Americans increasingly view the survival of the country as being at stake, with consequences that are existential for our nation.
Just this weekend, not long after the killing of Mr. Kirk, my own polling found 84 percent of Americans saying they believe violence and threats against people for expressing opinions is more of a problem than it was a decade ago.
Pressed to choose, only one-third of voters said “most political debates are about differences in policy ideas, and the country will ultimately be OK no matter who wins,” while a majority — including two-thirds of Democrats — say our debates are existential and the country will be “irreparably harmed” if the wrong side wins.
Meanwhile, Republicans are divided over whether the assassination of Mr. Kirk shows that we need to come together, or whether it simply shows how “divisive and dangerous the other side has become.”
As alarm grows more intense about violence and division inside our own house, voters feel less like we have the luxury of worrying about what is happening elsewhere. Indeed, polls show that in recent years, foreign policy and national security persistently rank low among concerns on voters’ minds.
Polling conducted by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs has repeatedly found — in 2021, 2022 and 2023 — that only around one in five Americans say they are more concerned about threats outside our own country than threats within it. This trend cuts across party lines. In my polling, I find nearly half of Americans — and a higher figure among Republicans and independents — believe we are better off paying less attention to global challenges and focusing more on problems at home.
That hasn’t always been the case. Foreign policy and national security have often been the top issue on voters’ minds over the last century, ebbing and flowing with the tides of global conflict and domestic strife. Gallup has helpfully tracked Americans’ open-ended responses to the question “What do you think is the most important problem facing this country today?” since the mid-1930s. In November 1941, in the days leading up to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, fears of war and worries about our national defense dwarfed all other concerns. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Americans looked outward to see problems lurking overseas, principally that of a rising Soviet Union and the Vietnam War.
But during the malaise of the 1970s, concern turned inward to problems like inflation and the energy crisis. Only briefly in the 1980s did the specter of war push national security concerns into a prominent position, and by the 1990s, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the turn of the new millennium, domestic issues again reigned supreme. It was not until the devastating attack on the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, and the subsequent war on terrorism and invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan that voters again turned their eyes beyond our borders.
Since then, it is again domestic concerns that have blotted out the worries about threats from afar. In my own recent polling, done in the week after the assassination of Mr. Kirk, only 22 percent of Americans said that “the biggest threats to the United States come from outside our country in the form of adversaries such as Russia, China, and Iran.” By contrast, 74 percent said that “the biggest threats to the United States come from within our country in the form of polarization, corruption in government or dysfunctional cultural trends.”
Advocates for investments in foreign aid and engagement overseas point to the threats, both short and long term, of neglecting America’s leadership role in the world, and the downstream consequences of allowing our global health, development and security efforts to atrophy.
At the same time, foreign aid is typically considered low-hanging fruit for budget cutters and was obviously a top target for the efforts of the Department of Government Efficiency earlier this year.
Republican voters in particular have gravitated toward the idea that prioritizing problems at home must come first — a sentiment that I expect only to intensify as domestic discontent rises and the sense of threat from our own literal neighbors feels terribly acute.
That is barring the old Harold MacMillain quote about what was hard about being prime minister: “Events, dear boy, events.” The rest of the world doesn’t stop and wait for us to get our house in order, or allow us to call a timeout, to resolve our entrenched problems and to mend our homegrown wounds.
Kristen Soltis Anderson is a contributing Opinion writer for The New York Times. She is a Republican pollster and a speaker, a commentator and the author of “The Selfie Vote: Where Millennials Are Leading America (and How Republicans Can Keep Up).”
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