A Politico survey conducted this week found support among President Donald Trump’s supporters for continuing the war with Iran, even at rising domestic costs, falling from 50% in May to 37% in July. Nearly 1 in 5 MAGA voters is ready to end the fighting, whatever the cost, and 57% say the war has pushed gas prices upward. The broader public is harsher. Reuters/Ipsos polling last month found just 24% of Americans judged the war as worth its price.
But whatever the polls say, national security decisions should not be made over considerations of popularity. The operative question is whether the threat is real and if the benefits of military action outweigh the prospective costs. Public opinion often follows results far more than it predicts them, and a leader who succumbs to domestic sentiment hands the adversary leverage. The American public may not like foreign wars, but what it dislikes more is losing them.
History, as usual, offers guidance. Through 1940 and 1941, Gallup found that large majorities of Americans were determined to stay out of the European war. Within months of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, support for the war became close to universal and held firm through conscription and hundreds of thousands of combat deaths. The United Kingdom faced the same in 1982. Before Argentina attacked its Falkland Islands territory in the South Atlantic Ocean, appetite for fighting over the islands was close to zero. Argentina’s sudden use of force transformed perception overnight, converting a distant territory into a national question of defending British citizens and upholding sovereignty against aggression. Support for the operation ran above 70% even as British warships were sunk and soldiers killed. Indeed, victory transformed Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s political standing.
The Korean War is another example. By 1951, roughly half of Americans, though initially supportive, were calling the war a mistake, and President Harry Truman’s approval sank toward 22%. Yet he pressed on, the armistice was agreed, and seven decades later South Korea stands as a prosperous democracy and treaty ally. Even the war with Iraq, the most reviled American intervention of this century, isn’t a total debacle. Despite all its errors and terrible costs, it left behind a state that, however dysfunctional, has held competitive elections for two decades in the heart of the Arab world.
Set against those precedents, the demands this war places on Americans look comparatively modest. This is a campaign fought overwhelmingly with airpower. The American toll, while every loss is grievous, stands at 18 killed after months of fighting. Had Washington entered the Second World War in 1939 or 1940, when Germany was weaker, the eventual cost in lives and treasure would almost certainly have been far lower, but instead, isolationists held policy hostage, and the two years of delay purchased at their insistence raised the price of victory enormously.
Of course, leaders should listen to their people. They should also always be willing to consider new evidence and arguments in favor of changing course. But when it comes to national security, history is the ultimate judge, not the current mood of the population. Every war carries costs, and to win a war, it’s important to have the capacity to accept those costs. That applies to political leadership and among the public alike. In this case, those costs are showing up through higher oil and gasoline prices, which appear to be weakening support among voters who would back the campaign if its economic impact remains limited. But that gives adversaries an obvious leverage. They may not need to defeat the United States militarily if they can raise the domestic price of staying in the fight. A low tolerance for pain, therefore, not only weakens national resolve but is also a strategic vulnerability.
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For American power projection and for the security architecture that will shape American lives over decades, this conflict has to end in a strategic defeat for the Iranian regime. That means real denuclearization, a permanently open Strait of Hormuz, and pressure that persists on the regime until concession becomes necessary for Tehran.
The polls and history will follow the outcome.