 I'm Hila Rasul, I'm the Director of Planetary Politics at New America, where we are working to reimagine a new world order that is more inclusive, just equitable to tackle the challenges of the day. So before I introduce our discussants, I would like to share a little more about how the findings, how we came to the findings from this oversampling exercise. Our meaning of security work has emerged from an acknowledgement that foreign policy, national security bodies hold certain base assumptions about what the American public thinks about these sets of issues. But as the United States grows increasingly diverse, we actually very little about what those diverse communities think about global issues such as climate change, immigration, use of force. So we partnered with the Chicago Council on Global Affairs to dig into their data and leverage their 2022 survey of public opinion on foreign policy to oversample groups of subgroups of non-white Americans. So what we discovered was a surprising news, it was a rewarding. And what the data does tell us is that Washington and the world have a lot more to learn about the difference in how American see planetary problems we all face now and the standing of the United States and the world. So today we will be discussing some of these findings and exploring what more we need to know and why. For this discussion, I am joined by esteemed colleagues who are experts in national security and foreign policy and have individually conducted extensive work looking at how diversity and why diversity matters in national security and foreign policy. First I'll introduce Craig Kefura, who's partnered with us on this endeavor. Craig is the Assistant Director of Public Opinion and Foreign Policy at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. I'm also joined by my colleague Debra Avant, who's a Senior Research Fellow with Planetary Politics at New America and is also a Distinguished University Professor at Seachel King, a chair at the Corbell School of International Science. We're also very pleased to be joined by Christopher Schell, who's a Fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment. So moving to our first discussion topic, we see this every election season. Political parties operating on the belief that Americans don't typically vote on foreign policy issues and the focus every election season understandably is on the economy and now increasingly on identity politics. So as we move into this election season, I want to turn to my colleagues to hear more about their thoughts on why we need to know more about what diverse communities in the U.S. think about foreign policy and national security issues and why it should matter to the foreign policy making blob in Washington. So Craig, I'll turn to you given the work that Chicago Council has done in the phase over the last few decades and if you could share a little more about the findings from the data. Craig, over to you. Thanks, Hila. And thanks everyone for joining us today to talk about how a diverse America is going to think about an increasingly complex world. So as Hila mentioned, the United States today is more diverse than at any time in its history and we see those effects prop up in our politics, but we don't have a good understanding of how these groups think about foreign policy issues. You know, normally when you see surveys done on international issues, you might see the overall result reported or maybe a breakdown by partisanship, but we don't typically see dives into how African Americans or Hispanics or Asian Americans think about international issues, even though they obviously have, you know, are impacted by these issues and may be impacted by them in different ways than other groups in the United States. You know, one of the role that I see for public opinion surveys in a democratic society is to highlight the views of the public on issues that maybe are not the issue that's top of mind in campaigns, right? Even if the economy and issues like health care reign supreme in an election, that doesn't mean that policymakers aren't interested in and don't care about the public's views on other issues, including these major issues of how do we grapple with climate change? What should U.S. immigration policy be? Issues of war and peace abroad, these are things that matter a lot to Americans and that policymakers do want to know about. And this kind of specialized study is another effort sort of in the same vein, right? We're trying to highlight the views of everyday Americans and uplift those views without consideration to all of the other factors that impact citizens' abilities to participate in normal democratic politics, right? Even if you don't have a lot of money to go out and, you know, contribute to your favorite campaign, we still want to represent that voice in an opinion survey like this. And so that's part of the continuing effort of the council to raise the public's voice in these discussions of foreign policy issues. Thanks, Craig. Over to you, Debbie. Yeah, thanks. And thanks for having me on this. This is such an interesting discussion. I want to just echo a lot of what Craig said. I mean, we talk a lot about averages, either average Americans, average Republicans, average Democrats. But the whole idea of an average is a statistical invention. There is there may not represent any particular person. How people feel about issues and what motivates them to act is really tied to their life experiences. And so getting more granular on what people think and why may help us to go beyond these kind of national level averages. And that's always important. But I think it's particularly important at this moment when a lot of the averages are pointing to extraordinary divergences that are almost caricatures sometimes. And we see this, you know, just in our conversations, we see it on the news where you know, you get this kind of point counterpoint sort of argument when in our sort of daily conversations, we might actually recognize that we see things either similarly or we can kind of reason through them in ways that we understand more if we can sort of get more granular. So I look at this as a really important step, but just a first step. It's designed to look more carefully at the sort of general perspectives in different groups, but by sort of getting a larger sample among each of them. But it's really pointed to some sort of obvious need to get even more granular and to talk to people really not only about what their views are about these issues, but why, you know, how they're sort of thinking through these kinds of things. And that can really help us, I hope, move in a more productive way toward, you know, coming to some level of respectful disagreement about how we think about the US in the world. Thanks, Debbie. And now, Chris, I want to turn to you, especially given, you know, your extensive work looking into how Black Americans think about a certain set of foreign policy issues. Well, definitely. And thank you for having me on. It's a pleasure. And thinking about, you know, why does this type of work matter? One thing that comes to mind is that we've we've been through this before. So kind of thinking historically, thinking about the Cold War era and this perceived idea that amongst, you know, US adversaries that, you know, social cleavages, racial cleavages or fissures within US society is essentially like an open it's like an open area in which, you know, US adversaries can kind of so discord amongst various groups who have, you know, different historical realities, different live realities and kind of in our present moment and thinking about how the US foreign policy establishment is retooling its foreign policy, you know, for dealing with issues in Asia and dealing with issues in in Europe, you know, we can avoid that by kind of being two steps ahead and looking at data and then thinking about what the racial minorities think. So in this case, African Americans and thinking and kind of showing where there are actually areas where there's consensus. I mean, I think we'll get into that later on. But, you know, some of the myth about, you know, African Americans or other racial minorities kind of having these really disparate views on topics, it's it presents itself as some cases, but in some cases there's consensus on some other issues, you know, and I won't go into too much detail on that, but I think it's important to kind of do this work to kind of, you know, break away from conventional knowledge, conventional understanding, but then also to kind of reaffirm information that we already know. Thanks, Chris. I fully appreciate that. You know, as we were going through this data, that's something that struck me, like, why are we doing this? And, you know, I feel like there's very little that we know, but there's a lot that maybe some of our foreign adversaries know and they're using to their whatever, you know, advantages are. And so I think it's critical for us to have more knowledge in this space. So, you know, turning to you, Debbie, you know, as we kind of dug through this data, what are your thoughts on how this data and more data can have implications for policymakers? So, you know, and what are the implications of understanding these diverse perspectives for those policymakers and how we can even countering attempts by the foreign adversaries to exploit differences and undermine American security? Thanks, Hila. And, you know, as you mentioned earlier, this research was really motivated by the sense that the sort of national security blob was increasingly divorced from how Americans were sort of thinking about security and the kinds of things that they were worried about. And there's actually a great report on the Planetary Politics website by Alex Start, Candace Rondo and Heather Hurlburt, that sort of, you know, laid out a lot of the questions around what people really think about when they think about security. And I think that garnering a better sense of what people think about and what they mean by security can really help us move forward in three different ways. First, it can disrupt agendas either within the US or among our adversaries that are really focused on narrow interests and using polarizing narratives to stop division where there might be more commonality than we thought, or at least less charged division than we thought. Second, once people start explaining what they really mean by something, I mean, think about it in your arguments with your spouse and your kids, you know, I mean, you may initially butt heads. And then once you start explaining, it loosens a little bit, you can kind of understand where different people are coming from. And I think, you know, a lot of the way we thought about polling has been within particular received narratives and to the extent that those narratives are divorced from how people feel actually getting to that understanding being able to explain what you mean, why this question didn't really resonate with you or whether why you answered this way instead of that way can really help us to potentially see new frames that could sort of move us in a more productive direction in foreign policy. And then finally, understanding whether really are different views can generate a pretty sobering picture of the difficulties the US could face if it doesn't find avenues toward respectful disagreement. And you know, here, I'll just point to a really interesting study that Michael Mazar and some of his Rand colleagues did last year, where he talks about the fact that national competitiveness really depends on societal bonds. And so to the degree that we don't find a way of working through these kinds of issues, we are not only going to sort of diminish the capacity of people to, you know, feel heard on security issues, but we're also going to diminish the influence of the US globally. And so I think this kind of sobering reminder can hopefully instill a little more curiosity among policymakers and kind of understanding how we can move toward more respectful disagreement. Thanks, Debbie. And I fully appreciate kind of the sense of the social cohesion element, I think is critical. So I'll turn it over to Chris to respond to the same question. No, definitely. I feel like when it comes to, you know, how can this data help policymakers? One thing that really comes to mind is speaking directly to certain groups. So let's use the African American population, for example. And the data shows that, and I think as my colleague said earlier, how certain minority groups do in fact have a thought and do in fact think critically about foreign policy issues. You know, while, you know, more kitchen table issues may be, you know, on the forefront of their mind, you know, the US and the role of the world, the US and its role in the world is definitely, you know, somewhere in their thought process. So when it comes to having this type of data, it will allow policymakers to speak more directly to groups. So I think about issues such as, you know, the good guns and butter tradeoff, you know, African Americans in particular are thinking about these type of issues. You know, they are thinking about Ukraine and thinking about the necessity, for example, to support Ukraine, you know, and the unjust, you know, Russia's unjust invasion of Ukraine. But at a certain point, it might come to a matter of, you know, how will that then translate domestically? So I think having this data will then help policymakers to be able to speak in a more pointed manner to how, okay, this is how these policies can then translate to what you're thinking about on a domestic level. So I think someone going back to what Deborah was talking about, being able to speak in a less broad, general manner, but in a much more pointed manner to certain groups who have different realities and just have different problem sets that face them. Thanks, Chris. And you know, Craig, especially given the decades long work that Chicago Council has done on, you know, mining data on Americans views on foreign policy, what implications do you think that this kind of data can have for policymakers? I think Deb and Chris have kind of hit the nail on the head here. And one of the things that we've seen, and this is fairly evident when you go to DC and you talk to policymakers, there is sort of a limited circle of folks that people talk to in their day to day lives. And when people are deeply involved in policy making and really stuck in on their specific issue, it can be a bit hard to remind yourself that not everyone is as deep on this issue and knows as much about this issue as you do, because you spent day and night working on, you know, this one particular thing for months and months. And so one of the benefits of surveys and public opinion work is just to bring this more general sense back to policymakers to remind them that, yes, we know that you've been focused on this very specific issue, but how does that resonate with the broader public? And getting to Chris's point, not all narratives, not all language, not all phrases are going to mean the same things to different groups, right? Different messages are not going to resonate among the same among all aspects of society. And you see that sometimes when politicians and policymakers, you know, have a misstep, they say something that doesn't translate well. And it tends to blow up into major political disagreements. At the same time, we've seen a little bit more recently narratives about concerns about misinformation among certain groups, especially in Spanish language media. That's only going to, that's not going to go away. That's going to continue to be a problem. And so policymakers, when they're thinking about how the U.S. is going to engage abroad, they need to think about what kind of information is the American public and not just the American public that they think of when they were growing up, the American public of today that is a much more diverse American public. What kind of media are they consuming? What kind of information are they getting? Are they getting more international news than maybe we were 30, 40, 50 years ago? How much of that news is coming online, especially through younger generations, where we know that their sources of news tend to be not traditional broadcast networks, but more modern social networks, things like that, more from the Internet. And how is that affecting their views and their voting behavior, ultimately? So I think there's a lot more to do on this. And I think we can talk about this a bit later, but I think Chris's work really points the way on engaging with not just, you know, the what and how people respond to a question, but what's the thought process behind that? And how are they really thinking through this? I think that's a critical piece, especially looking at the current media landscape and, you know, how and where people are getting their information. So moving into the data itself a bit, you know, we dug into it a little bit in our brief, the difference difference makes into how perceived threats and challenges translate for different communities because of their lived experiences. For me, one of the starkest examples is the COVID-19 pandemic, where we saw many communities of color, particularly black Americans, Native Americans, Latinx communities experiencing higher rates of COVID-19 and deaths compared to white Americans. So understandably, their opinions on responses would differ from the broader sample. We're also seeing it in a large way with climate change. African Americans and low income communities are disproportionately affected by air pollution in the US, although, you know, on the Eastern seaboard and elsewhere, where we're all kind of covered by smoke this week. So hopefully it's that wake up call for all. But, you know, I want to ask the question to all of you, you know, why and where we see divergence of thought coming through in this data and why and where do we see the opinions showing up here confirming long held notions about these communities. So first, I'll turn to you, Chris. Yeah, I think to kind of build off of your point about climate, and you kind of touched on this already, but when we think about climate, and that actually struck me as well in thinking about how there was a level of consensus about amongst African Americans, Asian Americans and Hispanic Americans in the critical threat of climate. Alive, it does lead to, you know, where are these communities clustered? You know, African Americans are clustered on the coast in the American South. I think by and large, we can say the same for Asian Americans and Hispanic Americans. I think a lot of this speaks to, okay, where are these communities clustered? And, you know, and in what way are they on like the front lines of climate change? Now, this is not to say that, you know, white Americans aren't on in those same areas. But, you know, those populate that population has spread out more throughout the country, whereas minority groups tend to settle in particular areas that may be more vulnerable to climate change. So I think thinking about geography, you know, in my work, thinking about historical historical precedent. So when it comes to kind of unpacking this data, in many ways, you know, the research has to be intersectional and pull on various different types of methodologies to really understand like, how do we explain the numbers, the ones and zeros here? And one other thing really quickly, thinking about the use of force. I kind of talk about this in my piece, but why African American support for use of force is relatively lower than other minority groups or even white Americans. And what I've done is, you know, kind of lean on historical precedent, lean on, you know, the history of African Americans in the US military to kind of explain like modern day phenomenon. And I may be somewhat biased, you know, like as a historian by trade. But I feel like when we look at this data, we can't have a presentist mindset. Definitely have to think about, you know, other aspects that can explain what we're seeing right now. That won't go on much longer. Thank you. Thanks, Chris. I'll turn it over to you, Craig. Yeah, so I guess there's, I mean, there's a lot to talk about. When you break a survey as large as the Chicago Council's annual survey down by multiple racial and ethnic groups, you get a lot of data to dig through, as I think everyone on this goal knows well. But I'll make a couple points about some interesting areas of convergence and divergence. So on the use of force and generally the role of the US military, we found a surprising amount of coherence around views that American military power and American alliances around the world are effective ways to achieve US foreign policy goals. And it's sort of true, regardless of there are other views on the use of the US military or support for specific US military bases overseas. So there's a sense that the military is a good institution, maybe helpful in US foreign policy, even if there is often reluctance to commit US troops to combat. That's particularly true among African Americans, Hispanic Americans also tend to be a bit more reticent to send US troops abroad with Asian Americans actually being the most likely to support the use of force abroad. And where that comes through really strongly in a way that to be honest, I did not fully expect is on questions around Taiwan. Asian Americans are notably and consistently more likely to support the US taking a variety of actions in support of Taiwan should China invade the island. And in fact, only Asian Americans in our survey support the use of US troops in that scenario. They're clearly we need to do a little bit more research to understand why this is Asian Americans as a group are very internally diverse. And I'm guessing that each of those communities has a will have a different response to the sort of a scenario. So it's definitely an area for future research. And then lastly, race and ethnicity clearly matter for a lot of these issues, especially things like climate and immigration. But so does partisanship. And on those issues that have really strong partisan valences, like immigration, climate change, I would guess other domestic issues as well. The differences between partisans tends to outweigh the differences between racial and ethnic groups of the same partisan affiliation. And so when we look at racial and ethnic differences on some of these questions, we have to be sure, was this because they're coming from a different perspective? Or, you know, how much of this is because African Americans are 90% identifying with Democrats. And even then within the parties, where are there areas of tension on issues like immigration? Although Americans generally feel that growing diversity makes the country better, that doesn't necessarily translate directly into views about, oh, we should increase legal immigration, right? There are definitely differences within the Democratic Party, along racial and ethnic lines about the future of legal immigration and what to do with undocumented Americans. Thanks, Greg. And yeah, I and I know Debbie was as well as we're going through the data that you had sent us over were really struck by how much alignment there was based on partisanship. And so I'll turn it over to Debbie, because I know she had some really awesome questions as we're going through this. Yeah, thanks. I first want to just echo Chris's point about the importance of like history, but also historical narratives, things that people can really point to to make sense of things I think are really, really important, especially when somebody gets a question and they're not sure how to think about it, you know, often that that historical narrative is incredibly important. And then I also want to emphasize something that Craig said about the degree to which on the use of force, this was one of the most interesting things to me is there was this kind of commonality among sort of seeing American alliances, you know, having the capacity to use military forces being incredibly important. And yet such divergence in terms of what that meant in particular scenarios. And so that was really an example, I thought of a situation where you know, the the survey gives us like, you know, kind of an illusion of consensus in some ways. And yet when you sort of drill down, people are actually when they, you know, embrace this notion of military alliances, they're thinking about very different things. And when you when it comes down to brass tacks, they're really unsure about whether it makes sense to use force or use different kinds of coercive tools. And so I think those are, you know, those are like big question marks, I would say, for us moving forward. I had a couple of other things that I thought were really interesting on climate. Native Americans report less urgent concern over climate issues and other groups. And this was, you know, in some of the other works that I've done looking at indigenous communities. It made me like, what are they thinking when they get this question? And they may not be thinking about it the way we think they are. And so this is another area where I thought that, you know, understanding more what people are thinking about would be really important. Similarly on immigration, Native Americans also stand out there as being these positive in the views of the benefits of immigration and most likely to see immigration as a critical threat. And again, I would I really feel like there's there's a story behind there that I'm not sure that we've we've come up with. So I feel like I feel like it, you know, all this data as is often the case, I mean, people often want to say, well, the data tells a story, the data actually often disrupts your stories. And in this case, I think that's what it's done. And it's really encouraged us to look further. And, you know, the final thing that that I will say is just to really assess the point about partisanship, there, there are really different narratives about, you know, what these things mean in the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. And this is one of those sobering moments where I feel like it's it's important to grapple with that and to, you know, for years when I was in graduate school, we talked about, you know, sort of, you know, foreign policy sort of stopping at the water's edge, having a certain level of orientation that kind of made sense to people. And to the degree that that's eroding, that's a really urgent concern and not something where one side needs to win, but something where there needs to be a lot more discussion and understanding and sort of coming to terms, or, or there will be significant consequences for US influence. Thanks, Debbie. And that kind of brings me to my next question, because as we are going through this data, we were starting, it was, you know, very interesting, compelling information that we're coming across. But I think at every step of the way, we felt like there was more that we wanted to know. And so, you know, I want to ask this of you, Craig, first, like what more is it that you think we need to know? And if you think oversampling of existing service surveys is the appropriate tool to get us that understanding. Yeah, so as someone who's been doing this work for a while, I can say every survey we do always brings up more and more questions, which is why we then have to do the next survey. I think oversampling is one of many useful tools in a research toolbox, trying to understand the implications for diversity and American foreign policy. Public opinion surveys as a scientific approach to understanding mass opinion are incredibly valuable, and they can give you some insights they can give you a lot of what and how Americans respond to specific questions. But often to get at the motivations you need to do work that's a bit more like what Chris has been doing with focus groups, trying to dive into the motivations and the logical processes behind those responses, which then you can feed into another round of surveys to test. Okay, well, we've talked to this group of 10 people. We talked through their processes. Is that more broadly true? Is that more widely applicable? And so you can get into a good rhythm of getting through narratives, testing whether that applies to a broader public, and just to sort of continue that cycle. I'll say in particular, I think it's important to dive a bit more deeply into the views of the API community. As I mentioned before, that's a very internally diverse community. When we say Asian American, that's widely, widely diverse, right? Korean American, Chinese American, Taiwanese American, Vietnamese American, I mean, there are many, many groups that fall under that API umbrella. And each of them, you know, will combat this with a different historical narrative, and often, you know, directly linked to, you know, how recently they came to the country, what new sources they consume, how their family has experienced US foreign policy in the past, and other countries foreign policies for that matter. There has been some really interesting work done on the views of Indian Americans out of Carnegie, that I think is a good model for one way to approach this. I do understand there are funding challenges, but I'm hopeful that funders out there will realize the importance of understanding Asian American views in a more fine grand way, especially as we started to see, you know, speaking about these, you know, foreign powers seeking to make inroads and use, you know, cracks in the US civil space as leverage for their own agendas. We have seen attempts in Canada and in Australia to use the Chinese American and Asian American communities for, you know, Beijing's own domestic purposes. That's something we definitely want to avoid here in the United States, but we do need a better understanding of how these communities think about those issues so that policy makers can have the appropriate tools to respond without making the problem worse, which is something that I think everyone's very concerned about right now. Yeah, I completely agree with you on the not making the problem worse because, you know, as we do see foreign actors trying to sow discord, we also need to remain cognizant of, you know, increasing, you know, racism within our own country and how those narratives are shaped. So I'll turn the question over to you, Chris, especially given the focus group work that you've been doing. No, definitely. I mean, Craig pretty much summed it up about echo his sentiments. You know, we talked about earlier the idea of the US becoming a more diverse nation. I think what that means with the US becoming more diverse is that we kind of have to move away from some of these more archaic, archaic ideas of like racialization that we have. And I think that kind of leads into doing more segmented work, you know, the using the term Asian or even just using the term African American might not be fully encompassing because in the case of African Americans, you have more recent immigrants from the Caribbean, more recent immigrants from Africa. And to some degree, there is a difference in culture, a difference in understanding of the relationship to the United States that we have to take into consideration. I'll just say really quickly, I found in my research on the question of use of force. When it came to African Americans who reported that they were a third generation or longer in the US, their support for use of force was about 10 percentage points lower than individuals who were recent immigrants or first generation. So like that right there already speaks to something that we have to kind of look at what does it mean to be foreign born or born in the US, even if you are a part of the same quote unquote racial group. So that's really important as well. And going kind of just finishing up on the idea of focus groups. I conducted a focus group in New York, which is also really interesting when it comes to the idea of blackness. You have large immigrant in a native born population. And even there in my focus group, I was able to kind of get at some really nitty gritty ideas about the role of the US, the US's role and what is done in various parts of the world. Back to African Americans and kind of just kind of talking about, you know, this idea of and we're like the day this leads to more questions. I think focus groups also add to the pool of questions, but it kind of answers some questions as well. So I will I will say the caveat is trying to get these focus groups going is not easy, but it's necessary. And they're fruitful and fulfilling. Thanks, Chris. And before I turn it over to Debbie, I just want to remind our audience to please add in any questions that you might have in the I think the chat box that's there and will be sure to answer them shortly. But Debbie and I discuss this in terms of like we're going through this and like there's so many more questions that we have. For me, I was most in coming growing up as a second first generation, second generation immigrant. Was that the question that Chris shares is like what is the like first generation immigration experience and how does it shift over time with subsequent generations and how they think about these particular issues. But then even within these subgroups, the diversity that is in their beyond generations, but down to their personal immigration experiences and the like. So Debbie, what struck you and what questions are kind of still burning inside of you as we went through this exercise? So many. Yeah, I feel like, you know, I had about 10 years ago actually had the opportunity to do some focus groups and it was in response to a survey experiment where we got some really puzzling results. And it was so eye opening. I completely agree with Chris. It's hard to do, but I feel like it often can sort of give you a different level of insight. And I think that this kind of town hall focus group individual interview follow up to some of these surveys is really critical to to really moving, you know, not not simply sort of remarking on these differences, but actually moving toward, you know, doing something about them because a lot of times, you know, what we learn from the focus groups can actually lead to better questions for the next round of surveys and and a better sense of the things that are really driving people's experience. I do feel like, you know, looking at both the general findings from each group, but also the range of variation in each group makes me really interested to learn more about like geography, as Chris talked about earlier, about different life experiences, about people's orientations, be they LGBTQ or other, you know, there are so many different life experiences that are likely to play into these kinds of issues that I think, you know, if I'm thinking about where to go from here, I would like to sort of dive into some of those some of those kinds of concerns. I would like to also just kind of end on a little bit of a hopeful note in that a lot of times we look at divergence as being really problematic and I think it can suggest ways in which, you know, there are problems that we need to sort of think about. And yet when we get diverse views that can be sort of exchanged in a quasi-respectful way, we often generate the possibilities for innovation and, you know, as half of the country is like sitting under this cloud of smoke today, I mean, we are reminded all the time that we actually are facing some pretty serious issues that require not just, you know, democratic thought or republican thought but side of new ways of thinking and so, you know, what makes me hopeful about this experiment is sort of generating the kinds of conversations that will lead to those innovations with which we can sort of better try to manage these global problems. Thanks, Debbie. So I might just change it up a little before we get into some of the audience questions, you know, given that we are still in a virtual space and with virtual panelists and not everybody has had the opportunity to meet one another and have these discussions in a real way. I wanted to give you all the opportunity to ask one another, you know, based on your, you know, history's work that you have done, you know, what questions would you have for one another? I'll go. Thanks, Debbie. So I'm actually interested in Craig's perspective because you've been doing this polling for so long. You know, what do you see as some of the, you know, sort of are there lessons that you can already draw for how you're thinking about the next round of surveys or what kinds of things might you want to see in focus groups or other kinds of survey instruments or other kinds of research instruments that would sort of give you better tools as you move toward surveys in the future? Yeah, so I can think of a few different things that would be helpful. I mean, one of the challenges with looking at racial and ethnic groups over time is that because the United States has become more diverse in recent the last couple of decades, we don't always have good trend data on how these groups may have thought about foreign policy five years ago, 10 years ago because we haven't been running these over samples every year. There are some groups, though, where we should have enough data to be able to say something about how their views have changed and evolved, right? So African-Americans making up 11 to 12 percent of the population, that is enough to give a general sense in most of our historical surveys about how their views have changed. So I think that's one interesting avenue to explore, right? And most surveys, you know, if you pull data from another source, we'll have a similar, you know, 100, 120 African-Americans in them, if there are, you know, a standard thousand sample, thousand-person sample representative survey. So that's one avenue to look at, right? To get away, again, from this presentism, right? We're looking at just opinion now. Well, how is that opinion and shaped over the last 20 years of U.S. foreign policy? That's one of the, you know, general strengths that we think of here at the Chicago Council because our trends do go back to the 1970s. We can compare, for example, American views of Russia during the height of the Cold War II, American views of China today at what some people are saying is the beginning of another Cold War. And I will say it has been useful to have those questions withdrawn for designing new questions for today's political environment. I guess the other thing that I'd be really interested in doing is doing more specific surveys of the Asian-American community that is going to be challenging and difficult and expensive, but I think also very worthwhile. That's a community that, again, is incredibly internally diverse and that internal diversity, I think, could manifest in interesting ways. Perhaps as a first step, focus groups would be one way to get at some of those questions and also to move toward more specialized survey instruments. This is, you know, an oversample onto a survey that's designed to cover the entire broad spectrum of U.S. foreign policy issues to do more specialized surveys that do really take into account the feedback from focus groups that do really try specifically to get at how are these different groups thinking about foreign policy? I think that would be another great step. And then I'm going to say a third step. Hopefully, Chris, you're continuing your work doing focus groups and survey work on African-American views of foreign policy. And I'd be curious, you mentioned, you know, some of the differences that you've seen in your New York focus groups. You know, how of those, where else have those differences manifested? And maybe if you've got some future plans already, you could teach those for us. Oh, yeah, no. So so far, I've only done the focus group in New York. Yeah, currently in the process of arranging focus groups in other parts of the country, but you bring up a really good point. I think Deborah mentioned this about geography, that yes, what thoughts of the African-American community might have in New York may be different than Miami or, you know, Los Angeles or even Georgia or Texas, which kind of goes back to like the importance of taking geography and understanding that, you know, region plays an important role on how people, you know, relate to the world. So the answer to your question in short, I have not done more than just New York, but I will say really quickly that I have another survey that that's coming out that's actually looking at how African-Americans perceive domestic race relations and looking to see if there's a correlation with how they view various U.S. foreign policy initiatives. So I mean, look forward to sharing that with you all and, you know, the wider community, but that's something that's interesting, kind of going back to like, what more do we need to know? I am curious about trying to see if we can maybe craft questions that kind of teases out this idea of, does a domestic influence, you know, international worldview? I'm curious, Craig, if you've kind of like, it's kind of thought through questions like that, because that's something that I'm kind of teasing through. Yeah, this is a direction that we've started to move into in recent years. As we've seen in when we ask Americans, you know, do you see the greatest challenges to the U.S. as being domestic or international? They tend to say domestic, overwhelmingly so, in fact. And so we've been trying to add more domestic issues or sometimes they call them inter-mestic issues, these things that cross national borders into our survey that generally focuses on major foreign policy topics to try to find where there are overlaps and influences between things that in policy worlds we might think about as being very separate. I think that is still fairly much in the early stages, but I'm really excited to see the data that you just mentioned. I think that should be a really interesting set of results and hopefully is something that we can build on in the future to try to figure out more about the relations between domestic views and international views because one of the things that we do see in our trends is that, you know, there are definite effects of, for example, American economic performance and how Americans are feeling at home affecting their views of engagement internationally, right? When Americans and economies humming along and everyone is doing well, we have more resources, like we're more inclined to help others abroad or more inclined to be active internationally. And when the Great Recession hit, you know, you can see in our trends on a variety of international issues, we did see a dip. There was a concern about cost. There was concern about what are we doing internationally when like we're having these really serious struggles at home. And we saw that across a number of items that you wouldn't necessarily think would be directly related to cost like that. So something that we're going to continue doing here at the Council in this year's survey. And then, you know, in 2024, we'll be celebrating our 50th anniversary of the Chicago Council Survey. So hopefully we continue that sort of cross international and domestic work in that survey as well. And, you know, we can I just interjectually quick, I want to follow up on one thing that you said, Craig, about, you know, sort of the queuing, the sort of connections or asking about the connections between domestic and foreign policy issues in a whole different project. I'm sort of looking at this sort of engagement between researchers and policymakers and practitioners and sort of the public more generally. And one of the things that we do with surveys is not simply ask people. We also queue them. We tell them what we think of as important categories. And in the situation where we're in right now, I mean, you know, most American cities have foreign policies. I mean, foreign, you know, sort of the global interactions are absolutely a part of many of our local concerns and national concerns. And I think that the more that we queue these kinds of things in our questions, the greater space we give for people to actually consider not just domestic issues and foreign policy issues, but realize the degree to which these are connected. I just spent a week in Hungary a couple of weeks ago and, you know, there, people feel very strongly the ways in which the war in Ukraine is impacting them. And the thing is, the war in Ukraine is impacting all of us in many, many ways that we don't always sort of think about. And so I think that not only will we get better information if you ask those kinds of questions, we actually might get more reasonable thinking about the ways that these issues are interrelated. I think another important thing here is, you know, as we're doing this work and we're looking to kind of expand the work that we have already done in this space is how do we get the ears of policymakers? And, you know, part of that is who are the policymakers and how much does that impact what, you know, how foreign policy is shaped? So, you know, we've in planetary politics in New America have done some work with some other networks in terms of, you know, encouraging, you know, greater diversity within the foreign policy blob, so to speak. So, I mean, how much does that factor into the policymaking itself? Like, what in terms of like, what is the face of foreign policy? I mean, it's a good question. The Chicago Council does do surveys of what we call foreign policy opinion leaders, which are people who are either directly involved in policymaking processes through Congress or the executive branch agencies, people who have an outsized knowledge of foreign policy issues, you know, fellows at think tanks, academics, and folks that we think would have an outsized influence, perhaps on foreign policy issues. These are people like labor leaders, business leaders and religious leaders. I don't believe that we have looked at demographic differences among those leaders. However, I will say from memory, they do tend to be the stereotype of the blob that we all think of, right? They do tend to be older, they tend to be wider, they tend to be more male. They also tend to be very highly educated in a sort of way that I think is also evident if you look at sort of folks from different major cities around the US, sometimes those groups will seem more similar to each other than to, for example, more differences say between Chicago and downstate Illinois than necessarily between Chicago and New York or Chicago and LA. And those differences come out in a lot of different ways. I do think it would be interesting to be able to look more at racial and ethnic differences among those sorts of opinion leaders because right, when you talk to folks who work in those spaces, you definitely hear that, right? It matters a lot where we come from, it matters to have representation in foreign policy. But to be able to dig more into that, I think we would need to do something more along the lines maybe of Chris's work or Debbie's work in doing focus groups and in speaking with them about how those have manifested in specific issues and in specific cases, I think that would be a really interesting contribution to the debate. So actually, Hila, whenever you were talking, I was thinking, we do a lot of work at the C Center and at Corbell on the role of various practitioners. There's so many people and groups that impact kind of the policy process now from agenda setting to formulating potentially rules that get picked up by governments to doing kind of monitoring to sort of filing suits in generating adjudication. So I think that it is smart to sort of think about the policy community in a broader way, but in particular, it does make sense. I think in the world we live in now where cities do have foreign policies, where there is so much of a global focus even at local levels to think about sort of different levels of government as well. Instead of, we often think about foreign policy in the U.S. has really centered in Washington at least on the Eastern Seaboard. But if we thought about it more in terms of the generative capacities of these different local leaders, I think that that gives us a little bit of a different orientation. And it also gives us a different way of beginning to demarcate between them, some of them being more geographical. There's different kinds of concerns that people have in the mountain states where I lived and the coastal states, particularly on climate. I mean, when I go to San Diego, where I'm from, there's a lot of concern about the shoreline and things like that. In the Rockies, it's much more of a concern about fires and heat and things like that. So I think that the different kinds of geographies might matter in different ways. But anyway, but going back to the policymaker point, I think the idea that there are actually a lot of people who are making policy that's relevant and sort of thinking about ways in which we can understand how they're thinking and how they're getting information about the people they're serving would be really useful. Thanks, Debbie. I don't know, Chris, if you had any thoughts on this question before I move into our next audience question. No, I'm okay, thank you. So, you know, we're asked for differences among ethnic groups. Do people still tend to follow party lines or are there examples of party affiliation in foreign policy views diverging? So I will say that I don't recall individually cases where race and ethnicity overrode partisan affiliation. Party affiliation is pretty strong when it comes to shaping these views. Though I will also note that on a lot of foreign policy issues, there's a fair bit of bipartisan consensus among the public. Partisanship really crops up in a couple of areas. Ukraine has gotten more polarized over the last year. Issues like climate and immigration that have domestic components tend to be very heavily polarized. But on issues like U.S. alliances and support for U.S. bases overseas and U.S. relations with allies, with NATO, with Japan, South Korea, those issues tend to demonstrate a lot of bipartisan consensus among the public. So you don't really have the room for big divergences. But I think as we said earlier, there are differences within parties among racial and ethnic groups, but they're not greater than the differences between the parties themselves. Thanks, Craig. Yeah, can I just jump in there really quickly? I mean, one of the things that was really interesting to me is that we often think of the Democratic Party has become more diverse and therefore these diverse views are going to be just like typical Democratic views and they're not. And so I do think that there are tensions between the way that people's life experiences are influencing how they think about things and what we've constructed as these typical views in the party. And I think for me, the ones that stood out the most were in the Native American community on climate change. Native Americans are more likely by a long shot to be Democrats and yet responded in a way that was quite outside the way we think about the typical Democratic response. So I think that there are some things to plumb there. I think that Craig's absolutely right, the sort of the Fuller-Heiss narrative is really sort of taking up a lot of the air in the room. And yet I think that it's important to sort of, to look further into these divergences. Thanks, Debbie. Over to you, Chris, on this question. Yeah, I would definitely say something that I've noticed when it comes to partisan affiliation, kind of pulling from my other research, a paper that I produced a couple of months ago and thinking about the question about sending troops to Ukraine. There's been a lot that's been published and thought about in terms of the quote unquote rise like the liberal hawks, the Democratic Party taking more of an forward stance on sending humanitarian aid towards Ukraine and even somewhat support for sending troops if necessary. And one thing that I found in my research was that my Republican respondents were a bit more in favor of the idea of possibly sending troops to Ukraine and the sending of aid to Ukraine versus my Democratic respondents, which was pretty interesting kind of seeing, when we zoom out, seeing how on a national scale the Republican Party is a bit more reticent about its support of Ukraine in terms of humanitarian aid, but kind of when we translate over to the African-American community, kind of going back to, I think, I will argue the guns and butter trade-off where the African-American community is overwhelmingly democratic, but on those type of concerns, a bit more reticent about sending aid long-term, that is. So I think looking there, we kind of see somewhat of a divergence. I don't think it's anything major or anything glaring, but kind of seeing how, you know, on certain issues the Democratic Party kind of answers a lot of African-Americans' concerns, but on some other issues, there's some divergence. A kind of an attendant question to that is as we're moving to like the run-up to 2024, you know, what are some of the things that both political parties have to be mindful of, looking at the data that we have and like some of our kind of general perceptions about what these diverse American communities think about certain issues? So I think like, for instance, like, you know, the Democratic Party has long relied on the Hispanic and Latinx communities being long-standing Democratic part of the Democratic Party, but could we through this data maybe see some shifts in those views and the partisanship? Yeah, well, I know Pew actually conducted some important research that kind of showed that in many ways the Latinx community is somewhat shifting more to the Republican Party. And even when it comes to the African-American community, not in the same numbers, we don't see as much of a drift, but when it comes to African-American males, Trump won a significant amount of the black male vote. So I think that's also something to consider in thinking about 2024 that, you know, populations are not as stagnant in their voting patterns as we might have seen, you know, for several decades. And that's always been the case in US history, you know, parties change, you know, affiliations change, but there definitely, I will argue that we can see, I don't think the trend of, in the case of African-Americans, some African-Americans primarily men somewhat shifting to the Republican Party, I don't see it stopping, not if, you know, certain politicians are speaking to where they proceed to be concerns that various demographics may, you know, want to hear. So I think that there's definitely something to be cognizant of going to 2024. Yeah, I think picking up on that and on some of the points that Chris and Debbie made earlier about splits within the Democratic Party, because the Democratic Party is much more racially diverse, it is going to have more internal tensions to manage that are along racial and ethnic lines. And immigration is a really good example of that in a way that's actually playing out right now in Chicago. We've received 10,000 migrants that have been bused up from the Southern border and the city is trying to figure out where to put them. One of the options is to put them in schools that were closed in African-American neighborhoods and that is generating quite a bit of pushback with communities saying, if you have those resources, why are you not spending them on us? Like we are here, we already need this support. And you do see those differences on immigration issues in our survey. And I'm guessing that Chris, it might also come up in your focus groups. I guess the other thing I'll note is that in the same way that parties aren't static things, racial and ethnic labels are also not static things. And that groups, and this is, I think happened a little bit for Hispanics. As certain Hispanic groups have been in the US longer, some second and third generation are identifying primarily as white and not as Hispanic or Latino, which is going to, is that connected to other political views? Is that connected to other views of race and ethnicity in the United States? I think it's a very interesting thing to think about that we think of these racial categories as being permanent fixed, but they're very much not. They are in fact quite fluid and open to individuals' interpretation. Thank you all. And I know that we're running up against time, so I just wanna take this opportunity to thank our panelists for this very insightful conversation. Yeah, as we went into this work, I noted earlier that we came up with a lot more questions than answers, but I think this is the beginning of what is going to be a very rich and fruitful discussion going forward. So I would just encourage everybody to stay tuned and I look forward to further collaborations and discussions, I think, on this very important issue. So thank you all and thanks to Craig, Debbie, and Chris for joining us today.