The Washington Post’s Ishaan Tharoor on Monday spotlighted a recent poll from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs that found that, despite what you might think, Americans are actually more in favor of intervention if China invades Taiwan than in the nearly four decades the institution had polled this question.

That caught my attention. Perhaps this might be a symptom of our increasing and unusually bipartisan focus on combating China, I thought. But then I looked a little more closely.

In fact, this increasing desire to use the U.S. military to defend allies from incursion by adversaries spans multiple key regions — every one the Chicago Council surveyed. And it increased even as the country as a whole turned more and more against our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.