The theory goes that private US diplomatic cables from the Tunis embassy released via Wikileaks on December 7 revealed to Tunisians that Ben Ali was an authoritarian despot, that his family was supremely corrupt, and that life was crushingly hard for the Tunisian poor and unemployed, spurring them to take to the streets.

It goes without saying that Tunisian’s were well aware of this and more, and that the spark for weeks of street protests and riots that rolled across Tunisia (and, indeed, are still rolling) was the suicide of a desperate young man in mid-December.

Interestingly, in doing so, he finds fault with an article on the Foreign Policy Website, and he is careful to reserve judgement on whether or not the recent dramatic changes in Tunisia are truly revolutionary.

The spark for the Tunisian uprising (I’m reluctant to call it a "revolution" since it certainly isn’t clear, as Tunisians are kept inside tonight by a harshly enforced military curfew, that the established order will be replaced) was the spectacular self-immolation of Mohammed Bouazizi in Sidi Bouzid on December 18. Mr. Bouazizi, a 26-year-old computer science university graduate who couldn’t find a job in his field and had been reduced to selling fruits and vegetables on the street, set himself on fire Dec. 18 after police confiscated his little stand. The official reason was that he didn’t have a permit, but I’d bet the real reason was the he failed to pay a bribe.

Unlike in Egypt, Jordan, Algeria, and most other secular Arab autocracies, the main challenge to the Tunisian regime has not come from Islamist opposition but from secular intellectuals, lawyers, and trade unionists. The absence of a strong Islamist presence is the result of an aggressive attempt by successive Tunisian regimes, dating back over a half-century, to eliminate Islamists from public life. Ben Ali enthusiastically took up this policy in the early 1990s, putting hundreds of members of the al-Nahda party, Tunisia’s main Islamist movement, on trial amid widespread allegations of torture and sentencing party leaders to life imprisonment or exile. Most influential Tunisian Islamists now live abroad, while those who remain in Tunisia have been forced to form a coalition with unlikely secular and communist bedfellows.

…

The weakness of Tunisia’s Islamist opposition also makes it difficult to forecast how other Middle Eastern regimes would react to similar protests. It is unthinkable, for example, that Mubarak would not choose to crack down more viciously on protesters given the very real possibility that, if overthrown, Egypt would become an Islamist state. Given the unique nature of Tunisian society, observers hoping that Ben Ali’s fall will portend a similar fate for other Arab autocrats may be left waiting a lot longer than they might now think.

[Thanks to Anthony Cox.]

But a funny thing happened when we looked at real polling data. This conventional wisdom turned out to be dead wrong. The traditional dovehawk, liberal-conservative dichotomies describe little about today’s young people. Instead, it turned out that young voters, ages 18 to 30, hold a new political orientation that does not fit into 1960s stereotypes. They are simultaneously human rights crusaders and supporters of a strong military. They are more concerned about both traditional and non-traditional security threats, more comfortable with the use of force, and more in favor of trade and reducing protectionism than their elders. Indeed, this generation holds complex and nuanced views that straddle traditional lines of party affiliation, income, class, and ethnicity.

They are the September 11 Generation, a generation that may help revive the progressive internationalist foreign policy tradition of Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy by supporting policies that re-couple strong international alliances and a strong U.S. military, aid and trade, human rights and democracy around the world. They are already, quietly but powerfully, helping to reshape America’s national security debate.

It is important to note that the Sept. 11 Generation is hardly a homogeneous group. It instead differs by political orientation, by race and ethnicity, and by an attitudinal split between Gen X (those over 25, who, as a group, typically harbor a strong distrust of government and a yen toward entrepreneurship), and Millennials (those born after 1980, who tend to be community-oriented and more trusting of authority).

Overall, voters under age 30 still fit conventional stereotypes by identifying themselves more as Democrats (42 percent) than do most voters (29 percent). And far more young voters identify themselves as liberal (34 percent) than do all voters (19 percent), according to surveys conducted by Democracy Corps. But these numbers break down starkly by race. Young minorities remain on the left, especially African-Americans under age 30, of whom 86 percent identify themselves as Democrats. Young whites, however, are moving away from the Democratic Party. In 2002, for example, Democracy Corps found that 47 percent of white voters 18 to 24 years old identified themselves as Republican — nearly 10 percentage points higher than their parents’ generation.

So what do the numbers say about the attitudes of this generation? Voters under age 30 — particularly those under 25 — are far more conservative than the Vietnam Generation. Protected by attentive parents, they are close to their families and are the first generation to grow up with more conservative sexual, religious, and social mores than the generation immediately preceding them. Sixty-seven percent of voters between the ages of 18 and 25 feel that religion is important in their family lives, according to Greenberg, Quinlan, Rosner Research, and over one-half attend church at least once a month. They are also more prone to accept authority and trust the government than voters in their late 20s and early 30s.

These beliefs help explain why the young Caucasians of this generation lean more toward the Republican Party than past generations of young people — a fact the Democratic Party would do well to notice.

From 2000 to 2005, polls conducted by Harvard Student Surveys found that between 87 percent and 92 percent of college students claimed to be deeply patriotic. They also have deep respect for the military: More than 70 percent of college students (the most liberal contingent of this group) trusted the military to do the right thing all or most of the time, when polled in 2001. In 2005, 65 percent still held that opinion. Among the young, the military is the most respected of the major public institutions.

But members of the Sept. 11 Generation are not old-fashioned conservatives. They distrust large corporations. They have even less confidence in spin from the media and politicians. They believe that the government can — and should — be an active force solving problems in America. They embrace multiculturalism and a multilateral worldview. After all, they have grown up in a truly pluralistic society, where many schools enroll students who speak dozens of languages; where Caucasians are often minorities themselves among other minorities; and where that reality is not threatening.

Cataclysmic events

Each generation is defined by its own set of catalyzing events, and by different generational moods and beliefs. Earlier generations wrestled with the ideological challenge of Soviet communism, the fear of nuclear weapons, and the divisive debate over the Vietnam War. These events shaped their general worldview, which carried over into their beliefs and policies on how to face an age of terror. Similarly, to understand how Americans under the age of 30 think about foreign policy now, it is important to understand their general beliefs about the world and the cataclysmic events that have shaped their way of looking at the questions and policy challenges America faces.

For voters under 30, the main catalyzing foreign policy event has been the fall of the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers. Hence, on issues of national security, they are collectively the "Sept. 11 Generation." But the tragedy of Sept. 11 begins with the climax of the story. To really understand the generation’s outlook, it is important to start at the beginning.

The Sept. 11 Generation was raised during a time of enormous optimism. The Cold War was distant: A 21-year old in 2005 was only 5 when the Berlin Wall fell. His or her first political memory would have been the triumph of freedom: the collapse of Soviet communism. American values were strong and spreading: America turned to NATO not just as a Cold War alliance of realpolitik, but increasingly as a vehicle to promote democracy and human rights. In school, members of the Sept. 11 Generation learned that they lived in the "end of history", a time when U.S. values, aided by an enormous economic boom and the promise of globalization, would spread peacefully across an improving world.

American power was real, vast, and a force for good. Members of the Sept. 11 Generation never knew the pain of military stalemate and the self-doubt of the Vietnam Generation. Instead, they watched their first war on television, culminating in the first Gulf War’s stunningly rapid victory. That war showed them both the power of military force and the broad potential of multilateralism — with NATO, the United Nations, Arab countries, and even America’s former Soviet enemy united to defeat aggression against an innocent country.

They also saw that inaction and isolation could betray American ideals. They watched the foot-dragging in Bosnia and America’s failure to address genocide in Rwanda. Yet they viscerally understood that military solutions were not the only answer. Underneath the "end of history", new problems were boiling that seemed unlike the old ones. America did not face Soviet armies in the center of Europe, but instead the threat of AIDS, ethnic conflict, and Samuel Huntington’s famous "clash of civilizations", weak states, environmental destruction, and myriad new issues that required new, non-military solutions.

Then, Sept. 11 struck. Suddenly, on the cusp of adulthood, young people faced the stark reality of a threat. It was not overseas, abstract, and far away — but concrete, and in America’s cities. The attitudes and history that had begun shaping this generation crystallized into a new security worldview, one that simply does not fit old categories.

Americans under 30 do not doubt that the country faces a deadly enemy — the burning towers are etched on the generation’s collective consciousness, and young people are not burdened with the blame-America-first mentality that tars some on the left. Yet they are neither "realist" hawks nor conservatives. They do not believe Americans need to surrender civil liberties at home or human rights abroad to be safe. And they believe America should be willing to stand for its ideals in the world, spreading hope and preventing genocide.

Crucially, perhaps because of the encompassing multiculturalism of their peer groups, young people firmly believe in a world community, despite otherwise conservative security stances. Thus, they care about the United States being respected by other countries, and think the United States should lead cooperatively, not unilaterally — because it’s right, and because it works. In June 2005, Democracy Corps found that more than twice as many voters under 30 chose the statement "America’s security depends on building strong ties with other nations" (64 percent) over "Bottom line, America’s security depends on its own military strength" (29 percent). That was more than twice the margin opting for multilateralism in any other age group, and double the margin of American voters overall (who sided with multilateralism by 53 percent to 38 percent).

Young people do not deny the power of terror and hatred. Neither do they blindly accept the Republican strategy for a unilateral, military-led solution. They are engaged in a more difficult pursuit: trying to determine for themselves how best to meet these threats."

While Sept. 11 provides the starting point for the national security vision of this generation, the long-term foreign policy values and policies of those under 30 are still being formed. They are watching, learning from, and — most importantly — fighting in the current war in Iraq. That war will easily have an impact that rivals Sept. 11 itself in terms of shaping this generation’s vision of national security.

For example, overwhelming confidence in America’s military superiority — and even invincibility — catalyzed much of the Sept. 11 Generation’s pro-war sentiment. (More than 60 percent of young Democrats supported the war in 2002, according to The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, a number that has steadily dropped since.) Yet polling shows that the struggles of the war in Iraq are giving young people a more nuanced view of what military force alone can and cannot accomplish. American troops — most of whom are members of the Sept. 11 Generation — were eager to go to war, but have been chastened by the realities of occupation and insurgency. They have learned firsthand, and the rest of the generation has learned at one remove, the limits of military force.

Looking for inspiration

But the generation as a whole has reached a very different conclusion from the ambiguous and painful relationship the Vietnam generation formed with the military. Today’s young people care about, support, and trust the military to do good in the world. They are, instead, simply becoming aware of its limits, and learning that the military is not a one-size-fits-all tool. Support for the war has gradually dimmed since 2005, along with support for the necessity of pre-emptive war. Young people are paying attention to what is happening in the world and changing their beliefs accordingly. They are becoming not more timid, but wiser.

The attitudes and beliefs of the Sept. 11 Generation are important because these young people are not just the future of the Democratic Party; they are already coming into political power. Many of the children of the baby boomers are just reaching voting age. By the next decade, they will comprise 25 percent of the voting public. But their political identity is not captured in categories created for their parents during the Vietnam era. This generation is looking for inspiration from a different vision of national security that neither political party now espouses — one that marries national strength with progressive, internationalist values.

Rachel Kleinfeld is the founder and co-director of the Truman National Security Project. Matthew Spence is the co-director of the Truman National Security Project. This article is adapted from the book, With All Our Might: Progressive Strategy for Defeating Jihadism and Defending Liberty, edited by Will Marshall (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006). It first appeared in Blueprint,
the magazine of the Democratic Leadership Council. Thanks to our friends at Blueprint and the DLC for permissions.

Do you want to respond to this article? Send your comment to Alan Johnson, Social Democratic Futures editor, at alanjohnsonsdf.

Commentators and politicians expend countless hours debating how we handle he rise of Islam and raise the spectre of a "clash of civilisations". In fact, how the West handles the emerging Chinese superpower will define foreign relations in the 21st century. Worryingly, neither the Blair government nor the Bush administration seems to have a clear view of how to approach the PRC. At the heart of this complacency is the underlying western assumption that free markets and free politics inevitably go hand in hand. After all, that has been the hallmark of western development since the industrial revolution. As rapid economic expansion along China’s east coast continues apace then the emerging middle class will surely demand political choice in the same way as they have come to expect consumer choice, or so the theory goes. The problem with this theory is that there is no evidence for it at all in China. Indeed, the opposite seems to be the case. China may not yet be the world’s leading economy but it is a world leader in another field: it is the world’s number one abuser of human rights.

Even our Foreign & Commonwealth Office, not China’s sternest critic, noted in its last Human Rights Report in 2005 that there was "extensive use of the death penalty; torture; shortcomings in judicial practices and widespread administrative detention, particularly re-education through labour; harassment of human rights activists, lawyers and religious practitioners … and severe restrictions on basic freedoms of speech and association." The campaigning group Human Rights Watch went further and has suggested that since President Hu Jintao came to power the human rights situation has deteriorated, especially in the last year. To put all this into some perspective, Amnesty International’s lowest estimate for the number of Chinese people who suffered the death penalty in 2004 was 3,400, or over 90 percent of the world’s total. Chen Zonglin, a Deputy in China’s National People’s Congress put the figure at 10,000 per year. Both the UK and European Union have human rights dialogues with China but have very little to show for them other than the release of the odd political prisoner. Whilst even these small gains are welcome, there is a fear that the existence of the dialogues allows the PRC to compartmentalise human rights concerns. It seems that the PRC can show the West that it is serious about tackling human rights abuses by pointing to the existence of the dialogues whilst the abuses themselves continue apace.

Central to the problem has been the West’s inability to decide whether China’s emergence as an economic and military superpower presents a challenge or an opportunity. The US in particular has too often appeared as an appalled bystander at the rise of China’s economy, unable to see beyond the unpalatable truth that it has an annual trade deficit with the PRC of over $200 billion. The US has been similarly unsure at how to cope with China’s spectacular military build-up: the People’s Liberation Army has 2.3 million ground forces, 8,000 battle tanks and an air force of over 3,500 aircraft; but it is China’s navy that is the real concern as it develops both the capacity to have a "blue water" global force combined with the sophisticated submarine presence to provide a real threat in the Taiwan Strait. Earlier this month China threatened Taiwan with a military invasion if it contemplated independence, and as I discovered on my recent visit to Beijing, the Chinese Communist Party is none too keen on the concept of self-determination for the people of Taiwan. America’s response to this provocation last week was to invite the Chinese military to observe their military manoeuvres in Guam as a sign of friendship. You don’t have to be a supporter of Taiwanese independence to see that this may be sending the wrong signal to Beijing.

Most of China’s aspirations are entirely reasonable: it sees the per capita wealth of the West (an area where China still lags far behind) and wants to emulate it; it wants to emerge from being merely a dominant regional player to being a global player, eclipsing its former (and largely unforgiven) occupier Japan in the process; it wants to be a responsible stakeholder on the United Nations Security Council. Some of its aspirations are less appealing: China’s desire for re-unification with Taiwan has too often veered into bullying behaviour; its respect for the integrity of the internal affairs of other nations has led it to believe that selling arms to the Zimbabwean dictatorship is a reasonable thing to do; and its desire for rapid economic expansion is having dire consequences for the environment, for example with its plan to build 500 coal-fired power stations over the next ten years.

We need to change tack in our relations with the People’s Republic of China. It wants to emerge as a global player economically, militarily and politically and it is in our strategic interest to assist China in that aim, and our role should be that of an honest friend. It is too simplistic to see the PRC with its seemingly endless supply of cheap labour as an economic threat to West, and in fact China is already suffering as some jobs are being outsourced in industries such as textiles to countries such as Vietnam. The irony of this, as someone who represents a former textile manufacturing constituency, is not lost on me. We should instead be looking at the PRC as a prime location for UK investment and not just in the well-established and highly profitable financial and banking sectors; why not engage more aggressively in other areas of British expertise such as green technologies? China is showing real signs of finally taking its place on the Security Council of the UN seriously after decades of merely seeing it through the prism of self-interest; adroit but robust diplomacy over facing down the nuclear ambitions of both Iran and North Korea is essential for China to demonstrate this new-found seriousness. As US Democratic Congressman Tom Lantos has noted, if China steps up to the plate on the issue of nuclear proliferation then it will be a welcome sign that the PRC is finally recognising that with global power and prestige comes global responsibility. On Taiwan, China needs to discover that bullying doesn’t pay dividends; as with other territorial disputes (Spain and Gibraltar come to mind) a prolonged period of wooing would be much likelier to achieve China’s desired outcome, not least as most Taiwanese want to see the issue resolved peacefully. Opening up transport links such as direct passenger and cargo flights between the PRC and Taiwan would be a welcome step in the right direction.

Finally, we ought to accept that the human rights dialogues with China are not working and break them off, for they provide a cloak behind which China routinely abuses the human rights of its citizens. Far better to be an honest friend that can look the Chinese Government in the face and tell it that the repression of free speech, religion and the right to freely associate have no place in the modern world of which China so desperately wants to be a part.

Greg Pope MP represents the constituency of Hyndburn and is a member of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee.

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