Why millennials should be excited for Rex Tillerson to be Secretary of State

The bipartisan concern has not been confined to the blogosphere and Twitter.  Senators Marco Rubio, John McCain, and Lindsey Graham — all of whom sit on the deciding Senate Foreign Affairs Committee — have released statements on the Tillerson nomination that can at best be described as skeptically lukewarm.

But, we would be foolish to discount Tillerson right off the bat. Here’s why:

Starting with the 2008 Georgia War and acceleration of President Obama’s failed reset, relations between Russia and the United States have been deteriorating.  For a while, the American public and politicians mostly laughed off the idea of a resurgent Russia (if you don’t believe me, recall that President Obama’s reaction to Mitt Romney naming Russia as America’s #1 geopolitical foe was to mock him).

No one is laughing now.  Russia is beating the United States in the game of international chess.  For the first time since the 1970s, Russia has moved back into the Middle East via Syria’s civil war, and have strengthened relations with Egypt.  They annexed Crimea and successfully fomented a civil war in the Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk.  On top of this, the US Army recently commissioned a study of possible conflicts in Eastern Europe between Russia and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).  The results were, to put it mildly, awful for the West.

Additionally, the fact that the chances of actual conflict occurring were, up until November 8th, increasingly high.  Hillary Clinton had promised to install a no-fly zone over Syria in an area where Russian jets are currently flying.  Putin, who has an entire image built around masculinity and strength, would never have backed down.  Ditto for Clinton, who a) would have looked weak backing down so soon after taking office, and b) has never seen something in the Middle East that she didn’t want to blow up.

Would Russia have had to respond with military action perhaps with a full invasion of Eastern Ukraine? The United States would have responded likewise, likely by arming Ukraine and sending “military advisors.”  While this would probably not have spiraled into a full-blown war with Russia, as neither the United States nor Russia is suicidal, it is conspicuously similar to the paths both sides took to the proxy conflicts of the Cold War.

These bloody, brutal wars weren’t fought by older politicians, by the way.  It wasn’t think tank strategists, cozy in their Washington offices, who were fighting in jungles.  The soldiers were young kids.  They were the Silent Generation in Korea, the Baby Boomers in Vietnam and — had this election gone differently — it could have been the Millennials in Ukraine or Syria.

I am not arguing Tillerson is perfect.  Not much is known about his views on other regions of the world, and conflict of interest questions still need to be addressed.  But America’s instinctive “Russia is not our friend, and anything it does is bad” policy has given us poor results.  The sanctions have failed to have any effect on Russia’s foreign policy; there is a zero percent chance that Putin is anywhere close to giving back Crimea.  There is, however, a 100% chance that the sanctions have harmed innocent Russians, who are just trying to buy cheese at the supermarket.  Our “I’m not touching you” policy of attempting to induce Russian border states like Ukraine and Georgia into NATO (both of which are neither northern nor near the Atlantic) has only served to enrage Russia understandably.

Tillerson represents a substantial change in American foreign policy toward Russia for the first time in decades.  More importantly, he represents a policy that might not end with millennials dead in a ditch in Donetsk or a sand dune in Syria.

And that is worth getting excited about.