Engaging Today's Global Citizens

What the Public Wants: A New Direction for US Foreign Policy

This article was written by Seth Green, president and founder of Americans for Informed Democracy (AID), a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) organization working to raise global awareness on more than 1,000 US university campuses and in more than ten countries.

Across America, people are speaking and what they are saying is that they want a new direction for US foreign policy. Over the past three months, our organization has coordinated more than 300 town hall meetings on the US role in the world in cities from El Paso, Texas, to Madison, Wisconsin. Overwhelmingly, the people who spoke at these meetings said the United States needs to work more with other countries and the United Nations to fight global disease and poverty, invest in alternative energy, and stop genocide and violent conflict.

The town halls were part of "The People Speak" (TPS), a United Nations Foundation-led initiative started in 2003 that organizes thousands of events around the country and the world to explore emerging global challenges and opportunities. In just the first year, more than 3,500 events were organized in all 50 states. There have been more than 20,000 events since.

The most recent series of TPS events took place from September through November of 2006 and, from our organization's perspective, a few trends made last year unique. For starters, the hunger for discussion among the public was larger than we've ever seen it. In Stillwater, Oklahoma, more than 600 people turned out for a town hall meeting despite the lack of a high-profile speaker. The local newspaper reported that the meeting had to start about 10 minutes late because the event's planners "had to hurry to set up more seating for double the number of people expected to attend."

And this year, such overcapacity events were the norm. In New York, a TPS conference on global health, held in a large auditorium, needed an overflow room when more than 750 participants showed up. And in cities from Richmond, Virginia, to Fort Collins, Colorado, people had to stand when venues fitting 300 people were filled. In past years, drawing crowds in the hundreds was difficult; this year, finding enough seats for the hundreds who attend is the new challenge.

The second trend that made this year unique was the use of the Internet to continue the dialogue from the town halls. TPS revved up its Web site (www.thepeoplespeak.org) this year with online chats and interactive videos with everyone from Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus to billionaire philanthropist Ted Turner. One online chat we coordinated on the TPS site on US-Muslim world relations was particularly memorable. The discussion featured more than a dozen Muslim-American students, and it allowed them to answer public questions about the status of Muslims in America after 9/11 and current relations between the United States and the Muslim world. The discussion was frank and eye opening.

Student Javaid Zeerak wrote, "It is often said that this is a battle of ideas, and yet everyone insists [on] fighting the battle of ideas with the use of firearms. This is not to say that the Western world should plain stay out of it. No. We live in a more interdependent world than that and, either way, such a thing would not be possible. Rather, engaging with the Muslim world through a different medium is what is needed." Of course, TPS was creating that different medium—dialogue—and that's precisely what made the online chat so valuable.

Perhaps what made 2006 most unique of all was the subject matter. People were not only hungry for the discussion, they were passionate in their vision for the future of the US role in the world. The people at our events generally said they were tired of a foreign policy that five years after 9/11 had made us less safe and more isolated from our allies than ever before. They wanted to get beyond a simplistic black-and-white discussion about terror to a more contextualized discussion about America's leadership in our interconnected world. In the words of one young participant, Kareem Elbayar, "It is time our leaders stop treating us like children; it is time to stop calling different fights in different countries against different enemies by the same name.... Our fight—and it is one that we can and must win—is a battle against poverty, against lack of education, and against depravation of civil and political rights.... It is time again for America to embrace the moral high ground."