Teach ’Em Young

By Ifrah Maskan

I used to think people learned hawkishness once they joined the government. Now, I think that conditioning begins much earlier in educational spaces. 

In my first semester at Columbia, I took a course called “Inside the Situation Room” with the former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. At the end of a lecture in which she accused China of building its nuclear arsenal in defiance of international standards, I asked her why the U.S. government could not take similar steps against China as her administration’s predecessors did against Iraq. Was it because China was strong enough to push back, while Iraq could not? 

She ignored half my question and shrugged before saying: “All Iraq had to do to avoid the intervention was tell us it didn’t have weapons of mass destruction.” 

I was stunned by the finality of Clinton’s statement—the entitled belief that Iraq owed a response to a country it saw as a threat. In her eyes, Iraq only had two options: reveal its strategic posture to the world, or prepare to be bombed back to the Stone Age. 

What was more unsettling was the environment in which she said that. In a room of more than three hundred students, there was no space to question her. Perhaps this was out of decorum, or steadfast belief in Clinton’s credibility. Either way, policy spaces can normalize silence and let diplomatic language replace moral clarity.

The war on Iran has made the effect of policy-school training even clearer to me. I see many of my peers raise their voices on social media about liberating Iranian women and the need for regime change. More than a thousand people have been killed in Iran, yet there is little urgency concerning civilian protection. Instead, discussions often circle back to the same refrain: “The regime was killing its own people, too.”

While the Iranian government has carried out severe crackdowns on protests, a foreign power bombing the country in the name of liberation is still not justified. Such interventions have a well-documented record of causing destruction rather than freedom, as seen in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. Yet, nuance disappears from the discourse as soon as the issue becomes a choice between democracy and dictatorship.

Institutions like SIPA reward confidence, clarity, and decisiveness. The ecosystem provides “exposure” through guest lectures by “reputable” government officials, presenting them as authorities on international affairs while overlooking their human rights violations. People succeed when they can quickly diagnose authoritarianism in China, democratic backsliding in parts of Africa, and instability in the Middle East. 

And, this diagnosis is rarely neutral. It is rooted in the assumption that the Global South is a problem to be solved, that its regimes are inherently brutal, and that democracy is the true panacea for its people. It reveals that the anachronistic white man’s burden never left the conversation. Students are taught to believe they are being rational when they make strategic trade‑offs: justify violating Venezuela’s sovereignty because Nicolás Maduro has been removed; accept indiscriminately bombing Iran because Ayatollah Khamenei has been eliminated. The resulting logic frames instability as the road to liberation, presenting Western arsenals as a stabilizing force to disarm the Global South.

Decisive diagnoses require ignoring complexity. In SIPA classrooms, the Global South becomes data, regions turn into case studies, and conflict is reduced to a simulation. These conversations center on the necessity of intervention while sidelining its consequences, like asking whether the Taliban teach children to hate the U.S. while ignoring how decades of war shape such perceptions. A few policy memos and a summer at a think tank can foster a false sense of certainty about diagnosing problems and redesigning systems in places most people have never visited.

I don’t know how this architecture can be renovated. Perhaps international affairs degrees should include a course on policy ethics in the first year, critically examining past interventions. Perhaps term papers should require students to defend strategic decisions not to government officials, but to families bearing the consequences. Or perhaps we should reconsider inviting officials involved in initiating wars as professors altogether. At the very least, we must examine the ecosystem that trains policymakers. We must ensure that these institutions remain pedagogical spaces rather than pipelines to power, and promote intellectual rigor alongside morality, not strategic detachment. Ultimately, the true measure of a policymaker lies not in delivering decisive answers, but in wrestling with complexity, engaging with perspectives beyond the Western lens, and remaining attentive to uncertainties that arise from human realities.