Candace Rondeaux
Americans don’t agree on much these days. But polls reveal that a majority of them agree on one thing: There are lessons for humanity to be drawn from the COVID-19 pandemic. For the United States, the biggest lesson may not be a spiritual or religious one, but rather that it urgently needs to rethink its approach to foreign policy and reinvent national security for the next generation.By the time many American children born in 2020 are old enough to run for Congress, the world will be marking the 100th anniversary of the end of World War II. But it is highly unlikely that, come 2045, there will be simultaneous celebrations of a U.S.-led international liberal order. Instead, the America that established the United Nations, the World Bank and the World Health Organization will be long gone, and so, too, will today’s assumptions about what constitutes America’s vital national interests.
Over the next 25 years—just one generation—today’s leading military superpower and preeminent economy will be more urban, more diverse and its population a whole lot older. Over the next 40 years, the number of Americans who are 65 or older will double, and the number over 85 will likely quadruple, according to the Urban Institute. Despite serious COVID-induced setbacks, America’s growing urban and suburban core is also likely to continue to increase in size, income and educational levels. Moreover, all these domestic shifts will converge around the same time that America becomes a “majority-minority” nation.
President Joe Biden’s moves this week to catalyze racial equity at the federal level and classify climate change as a U.S. national security priority are a good start. Yet, even after Biden’s term expires, the U.S. is still likely to face a serious reckoning in the eventual aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic, a series of bruising elections and the Jan. 6 insurrection that, together, have made a once vibrant and powerful democracy extremely brittle. While Biden and his team do what they can to “build back better,” the rest of America needs to be thinking about building forward from 2024 onward—right now.
A lot of unfinished business—from America’s forever wars, the economic fissures from the Great Recession, growing domestic extremism, institutional decay and creeping isolationism—has simultaneously shredded America’s credibility on the world stage. Not to mention the threat to U.S. international standing posed by abject leadership and organizational failures in response to the pandemic. Global information disorder, disruptive technologies, supply chain interruptions and the ongoing war over the future of the internet, energy and trade routes will only exacerbate all of these problems.
That is a lot of challenge and change for one country to confront during the span of a single generation. And, if the pandemic, climate change and escalating interstate rivalries between the U.S., China, Iran, North Korea and Russia over the past few years are signs, Washington may have even less time to get to grips with it all. But the convergence of all these crises also suggests that today’s troubles could present genuine opportunities to transform the America of tomorrow. In fact, the best bet for the U.S. may be to go all in on healthy disruption.
The debate about how the U.S. will face up to its very uncertain future will need to be shaped by leaders who look like and come from all of America.
The national conversation about what constitutes America’s vital interests will have to change, and major repairs will need to be made to the American public square. That means that the debate about foreign policy and national security will need to move outside the D.C. Beltway to fast-growing cities like Atlanta, Houston and Phoenix, where more and more of America will be living in the coming decades. It will also have to shift to agricultural, Rust Belt and coastal cities made fragile by the climate crisis and digital revolution, like St. Louis, Detroit and New Orleans, where more Americans will be on the frontlines of the world’s biggest problems.
The debate about how the U.S. will face up to its very uncertain future will need to be shaped by leaders who look like and come from all of America. Biden is already making a good showing on this score with one of the most diverse transition teams in history and a Cabinet that features far more experience than that of his predecessor. Still, after the Trump administration, that’s a pretty low bar. Plus, the lack of diversity of thought and life experience among Washington’s decision-making elites well predates Donald Trump.
For generations, American graduates of Ivy League universities and military service academies have dominated Washington’s circle of national security elites. While some rebalancing has begun to take root, the fact that many of Biden’s White House picks hail from Obamaworld or Clintonworld, or both, suggests too little effort is being made to think differently. This is hardly just a Democratic Party problem, either. Even if the Republican Party manages to course correct its much more abysmal track record on diversity in its leadership ranks, that is no guarantee that we will see more Mandarin-speaking African-Americans leading U.S. policy on China anytime soon. Nor should we expect modest moves made today will automatically pave the way for first-generation LGBTQ college graduates to lead major D.C. think tanks tomorrow, or Latinos fluent in Arabic to run the World Bank a few years from now.
The lists of experts in national security from LGTBQ, Black, Native, Latinx and Asian backgrounds with experience in defense, diplomacy, development and tech are long and plentiful. Less evident is what impact they can ever have on the future of American national security at home and abroad until they are invited to the table alongside the upper echelons of business management, corporate board rooms, universities, nonprofit organizations or think tanks.
But this is not about affirmative action or quotas. It’s about a different kind of numbers game. To elevate the impact of the next generation of leaders on U.S. national security, this conversation must expand beyond percentages, pay and promotions. What is needed now more than ever is substantial philanthropic, private and public sector investment in building out the leadership and educational pipeline for Americans from underrepresented communities who not only have a strong command of tech, security, and climate issues, but mastery of critical languages such as Mandarin, Russian, Arabic, Turkish and Persian.
This is also not just a matter of race or gender; it is a question of class. With college becoming more of a financial reach for Americans across the board, the inequality gap is widening, especially in rural areas that are underserviced and urban areas that are under-resourced. How we think about diversity needs to take all this into account, as well.
In this new, emergent America, those who want to see change need to be that change by elevating and building up the next generation of leaders. After all, if one thing is abundantly clear after the past year, it is that what makes Americans safe and secure is already dramatically changing.
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