Take a wider view

If the students in Sophie Meunier’s Wilson School junior task force hope to “win hearts and minds” (“Hating Uncle Sam,” March 4), they are not going to accomplish that by being trained in the bureaucratic arts of writing two-page memos and splitting the difference, and being encouraged to abandon proposals that “would be regarded as unrealistic by American policymakers.”

The students would be far better prepared if they spent their time with Princeton’s outstanding area-studies faculty and actually learned something about the Middle East and other regions of the world they hope to affect as future officials, rather than steeping themselves in the narrow perspectives and groupthink of Washington policy-makers.