Redeeming America

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For Green and his peers, that doesn't mean forgoing American power; it means reimagining its possibilities. To hear Green tell it, it's as if the country were some upstart teeming with untapped potential: 'I think,' he says, 'that America as a whole has a lot of promise.'

We can't stand idly by until these young people take the mantle, though we might have to ride things out until the Bush administration hightails it out of office. In the meantime, we can follow the lead of a few forward-looking think tanks and begin to re-imagine our global mindset.

The Center for American Progress and the Century Foundation have put together Power and Superpower, a guide to righting the country's crumpling stature by rebinding ourselves to the international order. The recently launched American Security Project, with former senator Gary Hart at the helm, is hatching a bipartisan plan to foster dialogue about the country's real security needs. The Center for Strategic and International Studies--the heaven on earth for foreign-policy wonks--is devising a 'smart power' strategy to balance the hard power of the military and the soft power of persuasion.

One of the mandates of this bipartisan Commission on Smart Power, led by international relations expert Joseph Nye (who coined the term 'soft power' a decade and a half ago) and Bush's former deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage, is to draft a set of foreign-policy recommendations for the next president's transition team. To that end, they've assembled a high-profile lineup of commissioners that includes former Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O'Connor and retired general Anthony Zinni. They are also--and here's where they earn their 'smart' label--tapping the minds of the public by sending their people on listening tours throughout the country and the world.

This popular-intelligence-gathering mission landed in May at a pizza shop just off the University of Minnesota's Minneapolis campus, where a dozen undergrads rounded up by the local chapter of Americans for Informed Democracy had taken a study break from finals to rattle off surprisingly astute recommendations between mouthfuls of pizza and slugs of soda.

Most of the students at the table had studied abroad, and they were keenly aware of the frustration, resentment, and disappointment with which the world currently regards their country. 'My host mom cried when Kerry lost the election,' a 22-year-old senior who had studied in Costa Rica told the group, to nods of recognition.

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