AMERICA'S PURPOSE AND ROLE IN A CHANGED WORLD

More about: North America , US , Lebanon
MAY/JUNE 2014
America’s Purpose and Role in a
Changed World
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Sarah Grebowski
’ll never forget my brief and ill-received
show of American patriotism as a young
expatriate in Beirut. It was the summer of
2010, and the city was teeming with convoys
of Lebanese youth honking and waving flags
to celebrate their favorite teams’ victories in
the World Cup. After an exciting win by the
US, I joined a group of Americans in a street
celebration. But cruising down the main
thoroughfare of West Beirut, our procession of
stars and stripes was met with disapproving
looks. The image that remains with me to this
day is that of an older man standing silently
with his shoe in his hand. The tattered sole
was pointed directly at us, an expression of
disrespect in Muslim culture. We recognized
the gesture’s meaning only because a similar
shoe had been thrown at the American
president’s head a year earlier.
Today’s generation of young Americans,
known as the millennials, has come of age at
a time when America has been humbled on
the world stage. Many of them have traveled
extensively at a young age and experienced
this diminished reputation firsthand. Their
parents and grandparents believe that
America has been a remarkable force for
good in the world and that the country should
not lose sight of its responsibility to shape
events globally because of mistakes made in
the last decade. But millennials seem more
fixed on the limits of American power and
disenchanted with ideas of American
exceptionalism.
Because of these reservations, the millennial
generation is often described as declinist or
isolationist. I disagree. Young Americans care
more than any other age group about what
happens beyond our borders. Millennials tend
toward multilateralism and the cautious use of
force, and perhaps would be more selective in
committing US resources overseas. But far
from an abdication of global leadership, this
prudence may prove to be the silver lining to
millennials’ crisis of confidence in America’s
role as, in President Obama’s words, “not just
a place on a map, but the light to the world.”
ther generations have been disillusioned
by the tarnishing of America’s image
abroad. This was particularly true during the
war in Vietnam. A Foreign Affairs article
published in 1970 titled “The New Generation
of Isolationists” contains remarkable parallels
between the attitudes of young baby boomers
at the time and millennials now. The 1970s
youth generation saw deep flaws in American
democracy, felt outrage over America’s wars
and covert action, and vowed that they would
not repeat the foreign policy mistakes being
made by their elders.
Much as the 1972 Democratic Party
convention and its presidential candidate
harnessed the political voice of this frustrated
generation, the 2008 presidential election,
which saw the second-highest youth turnout
in history, focused national attention on the
attitudes and opinions of the eighteen-to-
thirty-two-year-old slice of the American
population known as the millennials. Amid
the clamor over what it means to be a
millennial, this much is clear: the current
generation embraces a distinctly different
worldview than that of older generations. In a
2011 Pew Research poll, “The Generation Gap
and the 2012 Election,” millennials were the
least likely age group to say that the US is the
greatest country in the world; in fact, only
thirty-two percent of them held the view.
The reasons for young people’s skepticism
toward claims of American greatness that
resonate so strongly with their elders are
complex.
For starters, millennials’ unprecedented level
of interaction with foreign cultures makes
them reluctant to think of their country as
fundamentally superior to others. More than
simply gaining familiarity with other
countries and feeling an affinity for the global
community, millennials have developed bonds
with foreign countries through their
experiences living, working, and studying
abroad. Especially throughout America’s
economic recession, when many college
graduates faced a discouraging lack of job
opportunity at home, many have called Beirut,
Beijing, Kyiv, and other places home. Recent
polling data from Zogby Analytics confirms
that millennials are much less likely to agree
that foreign cultures are inferior to American
culture than other generations have been.
Historical context is also part of the equation.
Millennials have come of age during a decade
when America’s image has plummeted as a
result of unpopular wars, shaping their
perception of the country. More importantly,
they have never seen the world order come
under a threat from a malign force such as
fascism or communism. Millennials have read
about the exceptional things America has
done to benefit the rest of the world, but were
never shaped by the visceral experiences of
stocking a fallout shelter during the Cold War
or being conscripted to fight for America’s
way of life. The attacks of 9/11 might have
been a seminal event for the millennials, but
the resulting war against al-Qaeda has not
affected as many younger people as
profoundly as these previous conflicts did.
Finally, millennials perceive an awkward
mismatch between ideas of American
exceptionalism and the pronounced crisis of
institutions the country faces. Millennials
today witness partisan gridlock, economic
stagnation, and growing socioeconomic
inequality at home and wonder whether the
US has the capability or the moral right to
provide global leadership when it has such
interminable difficulty putting its own house
in order.
f millennials aren’t thinking like leaders of
the free world once did, what then do they
see as the way forward for the US?
Isolationism is not the mainstream view
among them, despite the Brookings
Institution’s 2011 finding that fifty-eight
percent of the “emerging foreign policy
leaders” identified among the younger
generation think America is “too involved in
global affairs and should do more at home.”
Millennials on the extreme end of foreign
policy opinion—who, for example, favor
slashing the foreign aid budget, which hovers
at one percent of federal spending, for the
sake of “nation building at home”—often
overestimate the degree to which scaling back
our presence globally will fix domestic
problems.
But the Brookings profile of millennials may
be an outlier. A greater number of studies
indicate that millennials are ready to embrace
a robust foreign policy with more, not less,
engagement beyond our borders. A 2005 poll
conducted by GQR Research, for example,
showed that more young Americans believed
that the September 11th attacks underscored a
need for America to be more connected with
the world (fifty-five percent) than a need
simply to assert greater control over its
borders (thirty-nine percent). Millennial
foreign policy views are also not necessarily
defeatist or declinist. Most young Americans
believe that the nation’s best days are ahead
of us and show more optimism about the
future than older generations. 1
The central question, then, is not whether but
how the millennial generation of
policymakers will preserve America’s position
in the world and promote global stability and
prosperity. If trends continue, the rising
generation will likely be cautious in the use of
force to achieve foreign policy goals and
prefer diplomacy instead. (In the 2011 Pew
poll, sixty-six percent of millennials thought
that relying too much on military force to
defeat terrorism actually leads to more hatred
and terrorism.) Multilateralism is also central
to the millennial vision. Younger Americans
are the most likely to believe that America’s
security depends on building strong ties with
other nations, and think that the US should
take the interests of its allies into account
even if it means making compromises. 2
This is no abdication of global leadership, but
rather a realistic reaction to the lessons of
recent history. What would be the wisdom
after the Iraq War in using military force
over diplomacy to advance democratic
change? Where are the financial and political
resources for the US to secure its interests
unilaterally?
Millennials see leadership as more than a
binary choice between isolationism and
interventionism, and weigh the many forms
of agency when it comes to how the US can
shape events around the world. Though
shirking a global leadership role is not an
option, scaling back our commitments abroad,
especially militarily, does seem to be an
important priority among this young
generation. Aware of America’s fallibility and
the constraints upon its global behavior,
millennials believe they can craft a more
sustainable level of American engagement
beyond its borders by recalibrating its use of
hard and soft power to shape events