Greeted as Liberators?

At the site of a school struck by U. S. missiles in Minab, Iran, May 2026 Majid Asgaripour / West Asia News Agency / Reuters JANINA DILL is Dame Louise Richardson Chair in Global Security at the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University. Share & Download Print unlock this feature or Sign in. Save Sign in and save to read later Copy This is a subscriber-only feature. or Sign in. Chicago MLA APSA APA Chicago Cite not available at the moment MLA Cite not available at the moment APSA Cite not available at the moment APA Cite not available at the moment Request reprint permissions here. Local consent substantially increased respondents’ support for military intervention. When almost all members of the ethnic minority group supported the operation, respondents were 19 percentage points more likely to favor it than they were in scenarios in which the military action had almost no local backing. That increase was roughly the same as the difference in respondents’ favorability toward the mission when the odds of success were 95 percent compared with 50 percent. Expectations of civilian casualties had an effect on a similar scale. Respondents’ support for military action was 24 percentage points higher in scenarios that were projected to have zero civilian casualties among the ethnic minority group than in scenarios with 2,000 expected casualties, and there was a 22-point difference in support between scenarios with zero and 2,000 bystander casualties. Local views matter to Americans. The findings indicate not just that consent matters but also why it matters. One potential explanation would be that local support is a signal: if the people being rescued want the intervention, it is probably more likely to succeed. S. troops might encounter more effective resistance, and Washington’s political aims might be harder to achieve. Yet our experimental design allowed us to rule out the possibility that this signaling function is the only way in which consent matters. We told respondents the projected costs and likelihood of success upfront, and these variables were not dependent on the estimates of local support in the different intervention scenarios. Respondents still cared about consent. That suggests a more likely explanation: principle. Even in scenarios projected to be essentially costless in terms of civilian casualties, respondents were more likely to support intervention when it had the blessing of the local public. They apparently viewed consent not merely as a practical concern but as a matter of moral principle. It is more difficult to pinpoint how local consent shapes the American public’s support for real-world military campaigns, because many factors affect public support for war, and most polls do not ask Americans if they believe that the local population welcomes U.