THREAD: The @EGFound's @ProfessorHannah and @gray2_gray have written an important report that notes: "Americans don't want to recoil or retire from global engagement. Voters appear to see engagement in a different light than many in Washington."

https://egfound.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Indispensable-no-more.pdf

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Reflecting on their report, @dandrezner concludes: "If they [younger Americans] cannot remember a headline foreign policy that worked, they will not and should not have faith in foreign policy elites to do the right thing."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/11/26/kids-are-not-all-right-with-american-foreign-policy/

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If one were to ask Americans who came of age after 9/11 to assess the track record of U.S. foreign policy, I suspect most would cite the aftermaths of multiple interventions in the Middle East and a seeming inability to engage in sustained economic competition with China.

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In Washington one often hears impassioned arguments that deal in abstractions: the United States must "lead", must prevent the emergence of regional "vacuums", must maintain its "credibility", and so forth.

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But Americans, especially those who've come of age in the past two decades, increasingly question why they should heed these pleas, not only because of the aforementioned track record, but also because of strategic and technological shifts that constrain U.S. agency.

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U.S. foreign policy will need to come to terms with those shifts and acknowledge the limits to U.S. influence if it is to prove politically feasible and strategically solvent over the long run.

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