BC-NXT-ALUMINUM:MCT — lifestyle (1140 words)

New Kids on the Block: Millennials and Foreign Policy By Antonio Franquiz McClatchy-Tribune (MCT)

As he simultaneously lip-synced to Lady Gaga while pulling off the largest leak of military secrets in U.S. history, Pfc. Bradley Manning, 25, served as the perfect metaphor for a generation of Americans who are souring on their country’s approach to foreign policy. Manning saw himself as a sort of information warrior. He combined his tech skills and access as a low-level Army intelligence analyst to transfer U.S. military secrets – most notably video footage of a helicopter strike that killed two unarmed Reuters journalists – to the site WikiLeaks, which publishes classified information in the interest of total transparency. “God knows what happens now,” Manning said privately to Adrian Lamo, the hacker who ultimately outed him to the authorities, via instant messenger after the leak. “Hopefully worldwide discussion, debates and reforms. I want people to see the truth regardless of who they are, because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.” More recently, as he pled guilty to charges of misusing classified information, Manning doubled down on this stance. “I believe that if the general public ... had access to the information (that I had),” he said at a pretrial hearing, “this could spark a domestic debate as to the role of the military and foreign policy in general." Whether you see Manning as a traitor or a freedom fighter, it’s clear that many share his views on how the United States exercises its considerable military might. Increasingly, the millennial generation – defined as people between ages 18 and 29 – oppose what it perceives as an overexertion of U.S. power around the globe. These young people, like Manning, favor a revisionist approach to foreign policy that deemphasizes U.S. unilateralism and stresses cooperation with foreign allies. “We advocate for a constitutional foreign policy of nonintervention,” said a young activist at the weekend-long International Students for Liberty Conference in February, an annual gathering of some 1,000 libertarian students in Washington, D.C. “I think that clearly we’re not doing things properly as it is now.” Young Americans for Liberty, a libertarian-oriented student organization, maintained a presence at the conference with its “Generation of War” activism project, stating that “we’ve grown up with war; now let’s end it.” Nick Ong, a student from the University of California Irvine, agreed wholeheartedly. “It’s almost like we’re forgetting that we need a process for creating laws,” he said after a conference session put on by the Cato Institute called A Foreign Policy for Advancing Liberty Abroad (without Undermining it at Home), “and now our government is becoming something that we don’t even know it’s becoming.” And libertarians aren’t the only ones recoiling at the United States’ approach to foreign policy. Young people across party lines are uniting on this front. According to the 2012 Chicago Council Survey of American Public Opinion and U.S. Foreign Policy, millennials are easily the age group least supportive of the U.S. taking an “active

part in world affairs.” Just 48 percent answered in favor of doing so, down 9 percentage points from 2002. The decade during which this significant drop took place offers significant insight into the forces driving down peoples’ desire for U.S. global engagement. In 2003, when the United States was in the earliest stages of the Iraq War, an overwhelming 70 percent of respondents said that it was “worth fighting,” according to an ABC News/Washington Post Poll. As late as 2007, the same poll indicated that 56 percent of respondents still saw the Afghan War as “worth fighting” as well. But since then, the situations have rapidly deteriorated in both countries, and so have young peoples’ opinions towards the United States’ involvement there. Today, overwhelming majorities of millennials agree that “the experience of the Iraq War should make nations more cautious about using military force” and that “the war has worsened American’s relations with the Muslim world,” according to the Chicago Council’s study. Perhaps even more significantly, the study found that the vast majority of respondents don’t think the Iraq war “will lead to the spread of democracy in the Middle East” or that “the threat of terrorism has been reduced.” The bottom line: after a decade of continuous war, today’s young people do not think that the United States ever accomplished its stated objectives. They’ve been jaded by the experience – which they largely see as a failure – and will bear that in mind when tackling the future of American foreign policy. But if millennials don’t want to stay the course on America’s dealings with the world, what do they want? The answer to that is much less clear. “There is a vague sense that the United States is overextended and doing more than it should,” said Dr. Steven Kull, director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) and a senior fellow at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy, “but (the millennials) don’t know exactly what should be done about that.” Indeed, a 2012 Pew poll indicated that a majority of respondents disapproved of cutting the defense budget, with just 40 percent in favor. The millennials seem to be stuck between a rock and a hard place, torn between the tradeoff of reduced military intervention and an actual reduction in military spending. Out of this confusion, however, one overwhelming trend has surfaced as the driving force of public opinion on foreign policy: multilateralism. “(People) don’t like the U.S. being out front so much,” said Dr. Kull, “but to the extent that other countries get together, then there is support for U.S. participation (abroad) … they’re more opposed to the American hegemonic posture of dominance.” The stats would certainly seem to back that up. A full 71 percent of all respondents support the U.S. solving “international problems with other countries” and 78 percent agree that “the U.S. is playing the role of world policeman more than it should be,” according to the Chicago Council. With a Department of Defense budget greater than the next 13 countries combined, as foreign policy expert and bestselling author Fareed Zakaria puts it, “we remain in a singlesuperpower world.” At the same time, threats like instability in the Middle East and rogue states like Iran and North Korea will persist, presenting new and evolving challenges on the world stage. How the United States deals with these and other foreign policy matters remains to be seen, but this much is clear: Bradley Manning is not alone in his critical approach to how things

have been done in the past. The millennial generation in particular shares his revisionist approach to foreign policy. Manning adequately summed up this growing public sentiment in a military courtroom in February, saying that the motivation for his WikiLeaks scandal had not been to harm the United States, but rather “to make the world a better place” by exposing a U.S. foreign policy “obsessed with killing and capturing people.” ——— (Antonio Franquiz is a student at the University of Maryland and an intern at the McClatchy-Tribune News Service this semester.) ——— ©2013 McClatchy-Tribune Information Services