Young People Not Wanting To Work for the National Security State Is aValuable Price Signal for Policymakers

pa href=https://www.cato.org/people/justin-logan hreflang=undJustin Logan/a
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pLast week the Carnegie Endowment held an a href=https://carnegieendowment.org/2023/03/07/remembering-and-misremembering-iraq-war-event-8043 rel=noopener noreferrer target=_blankevent on the Iraq War/a with several old pals of mine. There was one passing remark from Stanford’s Francis Fukuyama that I’d like to take up here./p
pFukuyama closed by warning of the possibility we may “over‐​learn certain lessons.” He worried about the wind the war put into the sails of “the enduring kind of anti‐​statism and distrust of government that’s part of our political culture.” He expressed fear that this view had gained ground on both right and left./p
pThe consequence of this is that Professor Fukuyama’s students don’t want to go to work for the national security bureaucracy:/p
blockquotepit leads to things like my students, almost none of whom want to go into government, [though I’m] teaching at policy schools where we’re supposed to be training people to want to do public service, [but they] don’t want to do it. If they’re on the left they want to go to an international organization, or to an NGO, or to anbsp;law firm or legal organization that will hold the government accountable. If they’re on the right they want to go to the private sector. Nobody actually has any belief that our government can actually do positive things./p
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pThis analysis strikes me as wrongheaded. First, there are precious few ways for voters to use the means available to them to influence U.S. foreign policy. Because of the profound degree of security the United States enjoys, a href=https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/2021-08/logan-tir-8-26-2021.pdf rel=noopener noreferrer target=_blankforeign policy is almost always low salience to voters/a. In extreme cases like the 2006 midterm elections, it may carry weight, but there are very few democratic tools available to citizens to make their voice heard on foreign policy./p
pWhen students at Stanford—or prospective enlistees in America’s all‐​volunteer force—decide that the people in charge of U.S. foreign policy look dangerous and foolish to them and as anbsp;consequence decide on different careers, that should be anbsp;valuable price signal to policymakers. Reckless foreign policies like the Iraq War have costs. That is anbsp;good thing. Policymakers should accept those costs as feedback on their policies, and pursue sensible foreign policies that instill confidence in the U.S. citizenry./p