The next generation of foreign policy makers understand the need for new strategies in a global community that's more interconnected than ever.

Millennials' foreign policy will be characterized by a distinct departure from the hegemonic dominance to which we have grown accustomed. It will be a foreign policy that emphasizes the building of democratic global institutions rather than nation building -- a foreign policy dedicated to cooperation toward inherently shared interests.

We believe in a foreign policy grounded in ambitious aspirations that resolutely bolsters our national security on the pillars of diplomacy and development for long-term security. We reject the notion that a strong national security strategy is based in wielding unilateral military strength. We believe that global human security is necessarily tied to our own national security.

The formative experiences of this "fourth turning" not only demonstrate the failures of past generations, but also serve as a reminder that democratic inspirations must be internally driven. In contrast to the Bush administration's democracy promotion in Afghanistan and Iraq, this generation saw the Arab revolutions live on Al Jazeera.

For the disconnected public and political honchos alike, perspectives are framed by their news sources. In the past, we were limited to a single narrative of international events. The continuously expanding sources of news and analysis in the form of blogs, alternative news channels, and social media sites contribute to a more holistic view of events. They give the new generation the option to reject privileged and static perspectives in favor of innovative and critically examined solutions to our problems.

The next generation of foreign policy makers will be much more inclined to understand the human hopes and fears of others -- a conscious shift from the otherization and vilification that characterizes past foreign policy. Due to the massive growth of immigrant communities, especially those of South Asian, East Asian, and Middle Eastern heritage, second generation Americans (or those who grew up as the friends and classmates of second generation Americans) will, for the first time, be our defense and diplomacy leaders. We see examples of this shift with the appointment of Rajiv Shah, the Indian-American Administrator of USAID, and Waco, Texas-raised Rashad Hussain, U.S. Special Envoy to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation.

Significant swings in the ideological direction of America are taking place. In 2008, Millennials, still too young to hold national political office, first realized and flexed their political muscle with a strength that propelled Barack Obama to the White House. And Baby Boomers are beginning to retire. Ideological yet pragmatic Millennials are sure to be the major source of influence in the coming era. There are more Millennials than Baby Boomers, their ranks are and over three times that of Generation X.

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The next generation of Americans will not continue on the track of foreign policy grounded in brute protection of national interests because we will internally challenge it. Winograd and Hais argue in their book 2011 book Millennial Momentum that Millennials will shift away from the top-down approach to foreign policy in favor of a grassroots, community-based, and inclusive movement. As reflected in this year's 10 Ideas for Defense & Diplomacy, the future of American diplomacy will be characterized by equal and constructive diplomatic relations with our allies and adversaries -- relations based on understanding shared interests and respect for sovereign agency.

Tashin Chowdury, a student of the City College of New York, offers a novel approach in the exercise of American soft power. With the diplomacy of past generations wholly defined by top-down, personality-dependent hierarchies, Tahsin offers a refreshing alternative. His proposal exemplifies a bottom-up Millennial approach to global diplomacy.

Lily Roberts, a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, explores a systemic yet overlooked crisis in our defense budget debates. In her engaging paper, Lily offers insight and realizable solutions to this problem, proudly advocating for the rights of neglected veterans.

Daniel Pitcairn, a student at Yale University, has been working on one of our most exciting projects. With his colleagues at Yale, Daniel has been working directly with NATO representatives to conduct a research study surveying the attitudes of Millennials towards NATO. Daniel writes about his findings and analysis in his thought-provoking article.

The ambitious, yet implementable, policy proposals of these three students represent progressive Millennial thought that will soon dominate the sphere of defense and diplomacy policy. In defense policy, this is manifested as a prioritization of urgently needed care for our veterans. For the future of U.S. diplomacy, this means building common understandings and shared experiences between communities and negotiations grounded in inherently shared interests. At its core, it is a movement driven by a collective understanding of the need for grassroots- and community-based change -- a movement defined by empathy for our own citizens as well as our fellow human beings.

Ahmad Soliman is the Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network's Senior Fellow for Defense and Diplomacy and a senior at the University of Michigan, where he studies business administration and political science.

Millennials don't see health policy as a side issue. They want to extend quality care to all Americans, and they have bold ideas for how to do it.

Health policy is an issue that provokes strong sentiments -- and often, great controversy -- by bringing questions of body, mortality, disease, and wellness into the public arena. For a recent example we need only look to the 2010 midterm elections, when House Democrats lost their majority to a wave of Tea Party Republicans in what many attributed to blowback from the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA).

The dispute over health care reform, like many issues in health policy, concerns the nature of paternalistic public health. Policymakers and their constituents review the (often conflicting) evidence and ask themselves to what extent they are comfortable with the level of government involvement in their personal health. Where the benefits of public intervention outweigh the intrusion of government into our individual choices, we accept policy.

At the Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network, we contend that health care is not only a choice, but a fundamental right of every American. It may surprise some to see the Millennial generation so engaged in issues of health care. After all, this is an arena that many seasoned policymakers find too byzantine to approach. In my role as the Senior Fellow for Health Policy at the Campus Network, I've learned that our approach to health policy is reflective not just of the timeliness of the issue but of the core values and principles of my generation.

Last year, we worked on a project that built a "health care toolkit" for college students. This year, we're pleased to see a rapid expansion of health coverage for young people. According to a recent revision of official estimates, 2.5 million young Americans aged 19-25 have gained health care coverage since September 2010. A little over a year ago, 64.4 percent of young Americans had health insurance; since then, that proportion has risen to 72.7 percent. Known collectively as the "invincibles," Americans aged 19-25 are accustomed to being left in the blind spot of health coverage. Those days are now largely over.

Among the many projections made by the president's Council of Economic Advisers, the ACA is estimated to "increase net economic well-being by roughly $100 billion a year" and increase real GDP by 8 percent through 2030 relative to the no-reform baseline. The Congressional Budget Office also links a "net reduction in federal deficits of $143 billion over the 2010-2019 period" to the ACA.

This year, you can find our values and belief in the power of health care policy front and center in the pages of our 10 Ideas for Health Care series. The 10 Ideas series is a flagship publication of the Campus Network. In the fall, each of the six policy centers submits a call for submissions to thousands of students. Of the hundreds of submissions we receive, only the 10 best are included in each journal. These journals provide not only valuable academic experience for students, but a springboard for our advocacy. It is not uncommon for the ideas in our journal to jump from the page to a floor debate in a state legislature, or a grant-winning project. As such, 10 Ideas for Health Care represents the very best of the Millennial paradigm and the future of health policy. This week, New Deal 2.0 will offer a sneak peek at the best of the best.

Check out “The 99 Percent Plan,” a new Roosevelt Institute/Salon essay series on the progressive vision for the economy.

Kate Lawrenz, a student from the University of Richmond, is writing about payment reform for Accountable Care Organizations. Highlighted in the ACA, Accountable Care Organizations seek to coordinate health care among Medicare recipients, calibrating services and payments with metrics to reduce redundancy and error. Kate is looking at ways to make their payment schemes even more effective.

Rahul Rekhi, a student of Rice University, is applying the lessons of emergent technologies to biomedicine. While medicine benefits tremendously from the application of new technologies and advances from research, we're slower to apply the paradigm of the Internet Generation to health care. Rahul seeks to extend the benefits of open-access computing to open-access health care.

Paul Wilson Parker, a student of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is engaging an issue of surprising interest to the Millennial generation: Medicare reform. His interest in expanding the choices available for comprehensive care and creating public competition for private insurers reflects Millennials' belief in the importance of longstanding health care programs in addition to the new and emerging trends.

But we are not stopping at writing policy. The Health Policy Center of the Campus Network is also engaged in a policy project this year. With the Farm Bill slated for reauthorization in the coming months, we believe there's a special opportunity for the Millennial generation to engage in a debate that will shape America's eating habits and access to healthy food.

Containing 10 titles ranging from funding and regulation for conservation programs to commodity futures markets, the Farm Bill was last reauthorized in 2008 at the cost of $283.9 billion. Of the $283.9 billion appropriated in 2008, $188.3 billion went to just one of the 10 titles -- nutrition. This title, which accounted then for two-thirds of the bill and is now estimated to occupy a 70 percent share, consists largely of funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (what is formerly known as food stamps), food and nutrition guidelines under the purview of the FDA and USDA, and school meal programs.

The Campus Network Health Policy Center will be spending the coming months building a coalition of think tanks, food organizations, and youth groups to take a stand on our nation's largest food-based legislation. Modeled after the Network's Blueprint for a Millennial America, we aim to present a Millennial Farm Bill.

Through each of these efforts, from our projects last year to our policy journal and Farm Bill Blueprint this year, it's clear that my generation is engaging the strong sentiments of health policy with strong proposals. We're informed by our values, the privileges and responsibilities that come with higher education, and the drive to detail the change we see necessary. We're here to speak health to power.

Rajiv Narayan is the Senior Fellow for Health Care Policy at the Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network and a graduating senior at the University of California, Davis.

The president showed he understands that Millennials are concerned about paying for college, getting a job, and not getting left out of health care if they can't.

Last night, listening to the State of the Union, I felt really proud of my president. I felt inspired. He spoke to me as a member of the Millennial generation.

There seems to be a lot of chatter in politics about how to help out my cohort -- talk of how to save my generation from a dystopian future of mountains of federal debt, an oppressive federal health care system, and illegal immigrants stealing our jobs. Lord knows, if you've caught any of the recent political debates on TV or in Washington, you've heard it too. (See the phrase: "It's for our children and grandchildren!")

Last night, President Obama showed that he understood that this kind of rhetoric is not what my generation needs. Fairness is at the heart of the solution. Millennials know it, and the president gets it. He also understands that fairness is not merely a virtue to aspire to, but a core value that we can tangibly work on -- and one that is at the center of what makes our country as strong and resilient as it is.

But the president was also right when he said that the defining issue of our time is how to keep the American dream alive. I know this to be true. Like the rest of my generation, I've watched friends and family struggle with what can feel at times like a Sisyphean challenge, but is, in fact, a challenge that can be met.

A close friend of mine, I'll call her Sara, found herself in trouble a few years ago. With the help of her extended family, she was able to afford attendance to a fantastic liberal arts school and major in what she loves. As a college student, she was eligible for health care under her parents' plan. Unfortunately, with the onset of the recession, her family was no longer able to support her education and she was forced to drop out of school. Sara moved back home and began searching for a job. No longer a student, she was now ineligible for coverage under her parents' health care plan. She was out of school, out of a job, without health care. At the time, she described to me her health care strategy: "Don't get hit by a bus."

Sara was not alone in her experience, nor in her health care strategy. And this unfortunate experience has become one that is too familiar.

This is the kind of experience that the president had in mind when he said we need to "return to the American values of fair play and shared responsibility." We must ensure that my generation gets a fair shake: a fair chance to get a good education, a good-paying job, and an opportunity like everyone else to support ourselves and our future families without having to adopt a "don't get hit by a bus" strategy.

The 2012 election is already in full swing and the ideological camps are staked out. The pundits and candidates have painted a campaign pitting individual liberty against the shared responsibility and fair deal the president laid out. This is, in fact, a false choice.

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As the president said, "No one built this country on their own. This nation is great because we built it together." We were able to do so because individuals made the choice to do great things as a community, as a state, as a nation. The role of government is and should be to, as Lincoln said and the president reminded us, "do for people only what they cannot do better by themselves." Yet there is much that we simply cannot do alone -- much that we must work together to achieve.

Many of the challenges that the president has faced thus far required not individuals, communities, or states to address, but a country as a whole. Because the president understands this reality, 2.5 million young people now have health insurance, thousands of college students are now eligible for more funding through Pell Grants and can more easily pay back their federal loans, tens of thousands of young people are coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan, and millions of Americans are finding work and climbing out of the terrible hole they are in.

The president encouraged us to act as a nation so that we can take on these larger questions. Furthermore, the notion that these accomplishments run counter to or limit individual liberty misses the mark. Beyond the fact that health care, college aid, and employment maximize individual liberty, they allow us to begin at the same starting line. It is disappointing, and perhaps surprising, when such an agenda is labeled "extreme" and "pro-poverty," as it was in the formal response to the State of the Union, or dismissed as "a hodgepodge of little ideas" in the Tea Party response.

There is still plenty of progress to be made, and like many Americans and many Millennials, there are policies and goals I have wanted to see politically that haven't been realized. I know we're not there yet.

But I was thrilled to hear the president make proposals that are directed at my generation: doubling the number of federal work-study jobs in the next five years, calling on Congress to send him a law to give young immigrants the chance to earn their citizenship, and reducing the red tape that stifles the creativity of young entrepreneurs.

In 1910, Teddy Roosevelt went to Osawatomie, Kansas, and declared, "I mean not merely that I stand for fair play under the present rules of the games, but that I stand for having those rules changed so as to work for a more substantial equality of opportunity and of reward for equally good service."

Fairness isn't important simply because it speaks to the best of us as people. For after the famously profound "we hold these truth to be self-evident, that all men are created equal," just after the piece about "inalienable rights," a little bit past explaining that among those are "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," there is an oft forgotten piece: "That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men."

Last night, the president clearly and compellingly reminded us of the potential we hold and the great work we stand to accomplish together.

Adin Lenchner is the president of the Wheaton College (MA) Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network chapter and is majoring in political science.

Despite facing legal challenges, health care reform is already extending coverage to millions of young Americans.

According to a revision of official estimates released last week, 2.5 million young Americans aged 19-25 have gained health care coverage since September 2010. A little over a year ago, 64.4 percent of young Americans had health insurance; since then, that proportion has risen to 72.7 percent. This is great news, as an increasing number of us 20-somethings with health insurance no longer have to live uncertain of our health care coverage. Known collectively (and pejoratively) as the "invincibles," Americans aged 19-25 are accustomed to being left in the blind spot of health coverage. Let's hope those days are over.

So far, as the mounting evidence can tell us, the boom in coverage seems to be an effect of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA). Indeed, not only were more insured between the ages of 19-25 in the second quarter of 2011 compared to the third quarter of 2010, but coverage by like programs (such as Medicaid) has fallen in that period. With lower disposable incomes in this recession, fewer Americans have the resources to purchase health insurance for their children outright. If programs like Medicaid and private consumption are not insuring young people, the inescapable conclusion is that the Affordable Care Act is responsible for the latest increase in coverage.

This early success for health care reform is especially significant given that the law is under fire in several states and in the courts. In addition to the challenge brought against the ACA's individual mandate, 26 states attorneys general are seeking to repeal the law in its entirety. Moreover, the National Conference of State Legislatures has recorded actions from 45 state legislatures that "have proposed legislation to limit, alter or oppose selected state or federal actions" in compliance with the law. Consider for a moment that much of the legislation's core features, including the controversial individual mandate, will not even activate until 2014.

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With this context in mind, the real news here is that health care reform is not imploding on take off, raining fire and destruction on a population in need. If any group has underestimated the impact of the Affordable Care Act, that group is its proponents. According to official estimates released at the beginning of fall, health care reform was expected to cover an additional 1 million young adults. The newest numbers, which peg the actual increase closer to 2.5 million, show the Affordable Care Act doing even better than we thought it would despite the many doomsday scenarios concocted by its staunch opponents.

It may be too early to expand other projections about the impact of reform, so let us instead recall what benefits we have to look forward to by recounting past estimates. Among the many projections made by the President's Council of Economic Advisers, the ACA is estimated to "increase net economic well-being by roughly $100 billion a year" and increase real GDP by 8 percent through 2030 relative to the no-reform baseline. The Congressional Budget Office also links a "net reduction in federal deficits of $143 billion over the 2010-2019 period" to the Affordable Care Act.

With the Supreme Court set to take up health care reform in the coming months and state governments continuing to create political hurdles for it to overcome, it is worth stressing that the benefits of reform have been meeting and exceeding expectations. As it becomes clearer that this law is helping to build a future where more have access to care, we must consider what the opponents of reform are really against.

Rajiv Narayan is the Senior Fellow for Health Care Policy at the Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network and a graduating senior at the University of California, Davis.