This is the Kidderly Podcast for Tuesday, June 16, 2015. I'm Kila Brown.

American millennials, those born from roughly 1980 to 1997, number some 87 million.

They are more liberal, less politically engaged, but also more

skeptical of military intervention. Trevor Thrall is co-author of the New Cato Report,

millennials and U.S. foreign policy,

the next generation's attitudes towards foreign policy and war,

and why they matter.

When we look at where people get their worlds from, it turns out that they get most of it

from the what we call the critical period or their impressionable years when they're between 14

and 24 years old. So when older people argue that younger people don't know anything that may be true

but they're feeling a lot of things and the things that they are learning as young people

are having lifetime impact.

All right, so what, how does what those young people have experienced, how does that inform

their views on foreign policy.

There are two big categories of things shaping

millennials, foreign policy attitudes.

One are things that aren't happening in a certain way,

and the other is a set of events that have happened in their young

lives. The first and most important underlying thing is the end of the Cold War

and the rebalancing or shifting of the global balance of power without a unifying threat in the Soviet Union,

millennials are just a lot less worried about national security

than older folks are.

...