On foreign policy, millennials lean toward less war and action abroad.
That could mean bad news for Republicans, as leading GOP candidates show strong support for foreign wars, though the Democratic field differs little from them. As the Pew Research Center notes, however, Americans favor Republicans by a 12-point margin over Democrats when asked which party could do a better job handling terrorism.
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In 2012, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found that “52 percent of millennials would prefer that the United States take a less active role in foreign affairs and focus instead on domestic issues,” according to The Daily Signal.
Disillusioned by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as American involvement in Pakistan, Somalia, and Libya, millennials have become more skeptical of the benefits of an interventionist foreign policy. With the rise of ISIS since the 2012 Chicago Council survey, however, millennial support has probably crept up, following national trends.
Of all age groups, millennials are the least supportive of foreign intervention. A July survey from Pew that asked about U.S. military action in Iraq and Syria found that 62 percent of respondents ages 18-29 were concerned that America “will go too far.” The older someone was, the less concerned they were about U.S. overreach.
For Aaron Strickland at the Signal, he found that concerning.
“This is a problem for our national security. Disillusioned or not, there are rising threats to our national security. These threats come as our nation’s defense establishment is underfunded and mismanaged, while most of our adversaries are pursing advanced military technologies, along with a rapid military buildup,” Strickland writes.
Treating military intervention as synonymous with national security, however, is misleading. Millennials have turned against a foreign policy cavalierism because its benefits, and importance, have been overblown and its costs ignored.
“Our military spending is for many purposes: other nations’ defense, the purported extension of freedom, the maintenance of hegemony, and the ability to threaten any other nation with conquest. But the relationship between these objectives and the end they purport to serve, the protection of Americans and their welfare, is unclear … Our global military posture and activism drag us into others’ conflicts, provoke animosity, cause states to balance our power, and waste resources,” the Cato Institute notes.
Millennial skepticism isn’t alone when the public is asked about the effectiveness of American counter-terrorism efforts. Younger Americans are the most positive as to how well the government reduces the threat of terrorism, but only 46 percent of Americans overall think the government has done very or fairly well at reducing the threat of terrorism. That’s the lowest support Pew has ever registered.
Millennials have a concern for terrorism, but they’ve seen the negative consequences of an interventionist foreign policy, and they’re more concerned with how effective government action is rather than the budget appropriations made to the Pentagon. Presidential candidates would do well to keep that in mind.
