Rebranding America: College Students Propose Strategy for New President

As U.S. financial stability wobbles and world economies spin, we are reminded once again of the energetic force the U. S. exerts in the community of nations. It is this power’economic and political’that Occidental College professor Derek Shearer invited his students to examine in a course last spring titled ‘American Grand Strategy.’ The idea was to look at the future and offer a concrete set of foreign policy actions for the new administration that will come to power in January. The students, juniors and seniors, researched national and global public opinion and concluded that, after 9/11, President Bush and his administration had ‘squandered an enormous amount of international goodwill, lost considerable moral authority of the country, and approached the world with an Us vs. Them mentality.’ The students decided that it is vital for the next administration’whether Republican or Democrat’to regain the moral high ground and to lead rather than to dominate. ‘They looked at the world after Bush and what ideas are out there,’ says Shearer, a Palisadian who served in the Clinton administration as an economics official in the Commerce Department, and then as Ambassador to Finland. With the overwhelming number of books published in the last two years’from ‘Second Change’ by Zbigniew Brzezinski and ‘The State of the American Empires’ by Stephen Burman, to ‘World War IV’ by Norman Podhoretz and ‘Stagecraft’ by Dennis Ross”the students read from the experts, left, right and center, and began to deepen their understanding of issues and to identify the complications and consequences of U.S. global power. ‘Experts tend to be theoretical and standoffish,’ Shearer says. ‘I said, ‘Let’s be very clear and practical in our ideas.” The seminar format offered the students a forum to debate, argue and sometimes bang their heads together to come up with 10 problem areas they wanted to address. The list included: Iraq, Transnational Terrorism, al-Qaeda and Torture, Relations with Europe, NATO, Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States, Iran and Nuclear Proliferation, Oil and Energy Issues, U.S.-U.N. Relations, Humanitarian Intervention and Global Health, China, Pakistan and Afghanistan, Israel and Palestine and Illegal Immigration and NAFTA. Shearer gave the students a practical framework to fit their strategy.   ”What should the new administration do the first month in office, the first six months, and the first year and beyond?’ I also had them write a new mission statement for the U.S., which reminds government officials of the values enumerated in the founding documents. We had it printed on a card that would go in the wallet of every American in the State Department, the Pentagon, the CIA and other branches of government.’ Student pairs selected one of the problems, debated the strategy and wrote the report. Shearer says that nobody wanted to take Iraq, no doubt because they were as divided and perplexed as current experts as to the best course of action ‘Matt Hunter and Ian Henry took up the challenge, and despite their wide differences of opinion, they were able to knock their heads a bit, in a nice way, and come up with a practical solutions.’ The overall report, ‘Rebranding America,’ is refreshingly free from cynical punditry and engrained foreign policy beliefs. ‘The students are not hung up on their egos or reputations,’ Shearer says. ‘They were not auditioning for a job, they didn’t pose. So what we got is frank, straightforward, and optimistic.’ In solving climate change, for example, the report suggested that all U.S. political envoys worldwide be driven by hybrid vehicles. ‘Experts would say that was trivial.’ Shearer says. In the area of terrorism, Ian Henry suggested that during the first month in office, the President should ‘immediately renounce use of the term ‘War on Terror.’   ’A war on a tactic cannot be won, as it is renewed any time that tactic is used,’ he wrote. ‘Terror is not a discrete enemy or even an ideology.’ ‘These kids don’t come out of the Cold War and are not terrorized by ‘War on Terror,” Shearer notes. ‘These are good, practical solutions.’ Occidental College prides itself on its multicultural student body and Shearer’s seminar included a diversity of cultural and social experience. There was an African-American woman from Louisiana involved in theater and dance, a young Lebanese woman, an older Hungarian student, a Japanese-American, and a Russian from St. Petersburg. Since returning to Occidental in 1997 after serving President Clinton, Shearer was named the Chevalier Professor of Diplomacy and World Affairs and he directs global affairs in the college’s international relations, including the expansion of its international affairs programs. He, his wife, financial consultant Sue Togo, and their three dogs and cat live in Rustic Canyon. ‘As a former diplomat and government official, I am impressed with the quality of the students’ work and breadth of their creativity in proposing policy action for the next president,’ Shearer says. Copies of ‘Rebranding America’ have been sent to the foreign policy advisors for Senators McCain, Obama, and the chiefs of staff of the Senate and House Foreign Relations committees. It is also posted at www.OxyWorldwide.com for all interested U. S. and global citizens to read.