Stephen Heintz, President, Rockefeller Brothers Fund
Walter Isaacson, President and CEO, The Aspen Institute

This guide grows out of a deepening sense of urgency that the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and The Aspen Institute's Global Interdependence Initiative share with many other organizations and individuals in the United States. That urgency stems in part from the fact that U.S. and international responses to many global challenges -- AIDS, terrorism and the spread of deadly weapons, poverty and inequality, climate change and biodiversity loss, and more -- are still not commensurate with the scale of those problems or our capacity to make progress toward solving them. It arises, too, from the recognition that America now faces critical choices about who it is and wants to be in an increasingly interdependent world -- choices that will have a profound impact on Americans, on other peoples and countries, and on future generations. And it comes from the belief that only a broader, more engaged and more active constituency of Americans can encourage policymakers to support the kind of sustained investment, involvement, and leadership needed from the United States to tackle global challenges effectively.

 

These concerns are not new, and addressing these challenges will require years of sustained effort. In fact, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and The Aspen Institute began the collaboration that led to the Global Interdependence Initiative in the mid-1990s. Our basic principle was and remains simple: America's open and democratic system is a source of strength for its foreign policy. The collective wisdom of the American public, accompanied by its informed consent and support, help to give our nation's global engagements their moral legitimacy and their sustaining power.

 

The sense of urgency we feel today has led us and others working on global issues to acknowledge that whatever we have been doing to reach out to the American public, and however successful we have been in engaging citizens in discrete policy debates, it is simply not enough. At a time when our country faces fundamental questions of national identity and purpose, we still lack a broad, bipartisan public constituency for pragmatic, principled, effective, and cooperative U.S. global engagement. Though polling tells us that many Americans care about global problems and support such an internationalist vision of America's role, non-expert citizens are often not confident enough of their knowledge and opinions -- or of their ability to make a difference -- to speak up actively on foreign policy issues. Highly specialized and jargon-filled debates among foreign policy specialists and advocates do little to invite citizens into the national dialogue on U.S. global engagement or to dissuade citizens from deciding they should leave foreign policy to "the experts."

 

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