Spoiled by Peace, Again

By Abe Greenwald

Wednesday, March 04, 2026

 

When the U.S. went to war with Iran, more Americans disapproved than approved of the decision. But two new polls, one by Fox News and the other by Politico, show the country is now split almost evenly on the question. The change isn’t surprising. American and Israeli forces have done an incredible job of targeting the regime and its weapons, and success is a sure path to popularity. But when support for a war hangs on day-to-day military fortunes, that war is only as popular as the latest developments. 

 

If Americans were down on the war from the start, and if that’s their baseline attitude, I suspect it has a lot less to do with the logical reasons for skepticism that pundits cite and more to do with feelings toward Donald Trump and ideas about America’s general safety.

 

There are, of course, many Americans who are unable to support anything that Trump does. Given that the president’s popularity has taken a big hit over the past year, I doubt he’d have made much headway with the public regarding Iran even if he and his administration hadn’t offered a confusing account of its war aims and painted a very blurry portrait of victory.

 

But beyond the public’s feelings about Trump, there’s the matter of how Americans think about threats to the country. The fact is, it’s very hard for many of us to believe that foreign actors or countries pose a threat to the United States so great as to require military action.

 

There are multiple reasons for this. One is that a massive majority of living Americans have enjoyed some or all of what’s called the Long Peace—the period from the end of World War II to the present. When your life coincides with a stretch of history during which there has been no great-power conflict, you can begin to believe that’s the norm. And if your own country—the United States—is the chief cause and guarantor of that peace, you’re even more likely to believe in it.

 

Another longstanding reason has to do with the U.S.’s unique geographical advantage. We’re protected by two massive oceans and bordered by two allies to the north and south.

 

Finally, when Americans compare their own quality of life to daily life in countries where conflict reigns, it can seem almost absurd that far-off, exotic violence might make its way to our doorstep. This is true even for those Americans who claim that we live in a terrible country. They can say what they want, but their privileged experience has shaped their attitude more than they admit.

 

But all these notions are, in the end, comforting illusions. America is extraordinarily well-protected, but not impenetrable. We found that out on September 11, 2001. And the mass shock of realization was like nothing I’ve witnessed before or since. In the days following that attack, one could feel the country transform from one type of land to another. We joined the world and first understood what vulnerability meant.

 

And the majority of Americans then believed that foreign threats were worth fighting—up until the Iraq War went off course. Soon after that, we retreated to our old illusions and took to fighting one another over politics.

 

Few today hang on to the memory of 9/11 as a reminder that the real world can pierce fortress America. Millions of American adults weren’t even alive when the attacks happened. Which is why we just went through two and a half years of Americans chanting jihadist slogans and why New York City elected a mayor who sympathizes with Islamists.

 

It takes a lot of forgetting and a lot of ignorance to get from post-9/11 New York to Mamdanitown. And it takes the same to look at the Iranian regime and determine that it might not be worth the fight, that war is merely optional.