Below is a one page summary of the results, which can also be found on our website at www.nsnetwork.org:

Detecting Intentions, Managing Fear:
HOW Americans Think About National Security

Polls and focus groups provide valuable snapshots of what the American people think about national security. The National Security Network and US in the World have been working with the Topos Partnership to study how Americans understand national security - what it is, which strategies contribute to it, and how our political leaders do or don't further it. In Spring 2008, the National Security Network commissioned Topos to conduct fifty one-on-one in-depth interviews with a diverse cross-section of Americans, called elicitations. At the same time, Topos produced a companion meta-analysis of dozens of polls and focus groups on the topic

Four key findings from the elicitations are of interest to practitioners, authors, analysts and advocates - anyone who interprets global events to the American people. Drawing on the elicitations and on other research conducted for the National Security Network and US in the World, the authors also identify some opportunities and challenges for communicators who seek to engage Americans in a debate about national security policies that prioritize breadth, cooperation, balance, foresight and accountability.

1. Americans understand security and international relations as a world of individuals relating to each other like people, and are relatively blind to structural and institutional factors.

2. Americans fit news of world events into one of a number of scenarios familiar from everyday life and, rather than hungering for a different understanding of how the world works, they tend to filter out information that challenges those scenarios.

* The world is a schoolyard, where today Americans worry that America is the bully, but also believe that we must stand up to bullies and avoid appeasement.
* The world is the Wild West, and America is the lone sheriff (since images of other nations' or organizations' global leadership are largely absent from US media).
* The world is an urban jungle, where the laws and institutions we rely on at home are absent and self-reliance is the central requirement.

3. Americans have ideas about what makes us safe that relate more to personal experience or psychology than to the reality of security policy:

* Strength: the tougher we are the less likely other are to mess with us.
* Control: the more control over a situation we appear to have, the safer we are.
* Authority: Lining up behind a strong leader, and a strong sense of patriotism, enhance feelings of security.
* Good fences make good neighbors: Americans see the analogy of neighbors as an appropriate guide to international behavior; but the 21st-century American model of the good neighbor is someone who maintains a high degree of autonomy and does not intervene in others' affairs.
* Working well with others: being well-liked makes us safer.

4. National Security is centrally connected to feelings more than analyses, and the central dichotomy is peace of mind vs. fear. Even the threat of fear has outsized influence, because peace of mind is such an important value for many Americans. Thus, anxieties about illegal immigration, crime economic insecurity and other cultural disruptions influence how Americans perceive national security.

NEW OPPORTUNITIES

Americans are more easily engaged by positive visions of how concerns overseas can be addressed than by a purely critical or negative approach to talking about our role in the world.

As issues such as crime, the economy and immigration serve as proxies for insecurity, they can also serve as positive proxies for security. Leaders who offer responsible, effective options for dealing with those other challenges may also allay some public fears about national security as traditionally defined.

Americans evince a growing skepticism about unilateralism, and an increased ability to distinguish between thoughtful, principled, farsighted diplomacy and spineless appeasement, though it is unclear whether this change will outlive public dismay about the current Administration.

Similarly, Americans are increasingly aware of the manipulative nature of appeals to fear and force, though again it is unclear what the depth of this change is.

AND CONTINUING CHALLENGES

Many Americans approach national security issues as if much of the international institutions and arrangements set up to promote security didn't exist; fear produces an even sharper focus on who is bullying us and makes this structural blindness worse.

The basic analogies and scenarios Americans tend to use to make sense of the security debate favor a black-and-white, zero-sum view of the world, where strength is all-important and complex, longer-term strategies and investments make little sense.

While Americans show some understanding of the idea that our security is threatened by political, economic and social instability in other countries and that we should work with those countries to reduce that instability, it does not seem to make a lasting impression; and it is pushed aside by zero-sum reasoning drawn from personal life experience when such threats appear directed at the U.S., e.g., terrorist safe havens, and require countering.

History and its lessons are largely invisible: partly because awareness of past events is weak, and partly because of an American tendency to dismiss the past simply because it is past.

Specific strong fears, and a more generalized sense of anxiety connected to crime, the economy and cultural disruption, lead the public to over-emphasize particular security concerns and to favor more authoritarian responses.