The Transition Generation?
The entries on this blog are telling of a global transformation. From the violence in the Middle East to global health pandemics to North Korea, the world is in transition and it’s not clear yet where we’re headed. In his new book, The Meaning of the 21st Century, Dr. James Martin therefore calls today’s young people the “transition generation” because it is these young leaders that will play the critical transition role to the next world order. “We are traveling at breakneck speed into an era of extremes—extremes of wealth and poverty, extremes in technology, extremes of globalism,” he writes. “If we are to survive, we must learn how to manage them all.”I could not agree more with Dr. Martin’s assessment and what’s most troubling is that young people around the world are growing up with a disturbingly negative image of the U.S. In the most recent Pew data, Britain was the only surveyed country in Europe with favorable views of the U.S., as compared to 2002 when all surveyed countries had favorable views. And the U.S. image is even lower in the Muslim world.
If we are the transition generation, then it is dangerous for American foreign policy to be so drastically out of touch with our generation. It means that we could transition the world toward an order opposed to the U.S. and its interests. I warned of this danger as a student at Oxford in an op-ed to the Christian Science Monitor back in 2002:
“As the US has moved from the war on terrorism to a potential war on Iraq, the tide here has turned. Whereas moderate voices once dominated public debate, radical dissent has become increasingly prevalent. Over the past two months, I’ve heard outlandish statements proliferate: “Americans want to kill innocent Iraqis.” “Americans only care about oil and Israel.” “America is more dangerous than Iraq.”
It would be easy to dismiss these remarks as the insensitivity of juvenile students going through an antiestablishment phase in which they hate anything American. But having seen the extremist sentiment develop here, I can testify that the driving force behind its rapid growth is American unilateralism.”
I went to argue that if America continued its unilateralism “it will be sowing the seeds of its future insecurity. My generation was not around when we won World War II, rebuilt Western Europe, and protected South Korea from communism. Even the fall of the Berlin Wall is a preteen memory. As my generation, now in college, has begun to form opinions of America, it sees a generally unilateralist foreign policy that prioritizes force over diplomacy… If Oxford students are some of the world’s future leaders, and if they are turned against the US during their impressionable college years, who will join us the next time we need to wage a war on terrorism?”
I continue to fear that we are headed in that wrong direction. Our organization will be convening a conference on the Transition Generation to examine these issues. Hopefully, that conference will be the start in a turn around from the disaster course that we are currently headed down.
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