The Bench

An end-of-semester note

My classes end this week. The classrooms are emptying. Before the noise of the next news cycle drowns out what happened in those rooms, I want to write it down.

The students in my classes this term came from everywhere—different countries, different faiths, different starting points, different politics. In one class, the women outnumbered the men. In both classes, a meaningful share of the contributions came from outside the United States. None of this was a diversity statement. It was a working condition — the thing that made learning possible. When a student from the Gulf and a student from the Midwest argue about what American retreat looks like from where they sit, they are not engaging in perspective-taking. They are doing the slow, unglamorous work of seeing a problem from more than one side at once — the kind of work no lecture can substitute for. I had the easier job. I just had to stay out of the way.

What we studied this semester was not abstract. We studied an America in selective retreat — from the alliances it built, the institutions it led, and the commitments it made. We studied wars of choice, those a country launches because it can rather than because it must, and the long tail of consequences those choices drag behind them. We studied humanitarian emergencies on a scale difficult to hold in mind: displacement in the millions, food insecurity across regions, and economic shocks that travel through supply chains faster than policy can respond. The backdrop was not a seminar construct. It was the morning news, read before class.

The students knew this. They are not naive about the world they are preparing to enter. Many of them are frustrated — with the choices being made in their name, with the institutions that are supposed to check those choices but are not, and with the gap between what they were told about American leadership and what they are now witnessing. Their frustration is earned. I did not try to talk them out of it. You cannot do serious work on foreign policy without first being honest about its state.

And yet. What I saw in those rooms was not despair. It was more like a clear-eyed resolve. It was a group of young people who had looked clearly at the wreckage and, anyway, decided to prepare themselves for service. They asked better questions than I did at their age. They challenged each other and me with a rigor that would not tolerate sloppy thinking. They wrote papers on Iran, the Kurdish question, alliance management, the humanitarian architecture, and the politics of sanctions, and the work was good. Not just for students. Good.

I have been in this field long enough to know that talent is not a scarce resource. What is scarce is the willingness to do the work when it is hard and the rewards are thin. These students have that willingness. They are choosing public service at a time when it is undervalued, underfunded, and often publicly disparaged, yet they are choosing it anyway. That is a fact worth stating plainly.

I do not want to overclaim. One classroom, one semester, cannot reverse a trendline. The generation coming up will inherit problems decades in the making that good intentions or sharp analytical skills cannot undo. Some of what has been broken will remain so. Some of what has been lost will not be recovered. Realism must come first, or the optimism is just sentiment.

But here is what I keep coming back to. The bench is deeper than the headlines suggest. The people who will be called on to rebuild what this moment has damaged are already in the room. They are in graduate programs, in junior roles at agencies and NGOs, and in the early years of careers they chose with their eyes open. They are more diverse than any cohort that has come before them and more clear-eyed about American power — its uses, its limits, and its costs — than the generation that deployed it in the wars we are now studying as cautionary tales.

They will make mistakes. They will inherit constraints they did not create. They will have to rebuild trust, at home and abroad, that others have eroded. None of this will be quick, and none of it will be clean. But they are coming. And watching them this semester, across every line that is supposed to divide them, do the hard work of learning from one another — that is what keeps me in this. On the days when the easier thing would be silence — when the temptation is to close the laptop and let the arguments go on without me — it is the memory of those classrooms that brings me back to the desk.

The bench is there. The question is whether our country will have the sense to call on it.