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America and the World: Issues in the Teaching of U.S. Foreign Policy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2004

Andrew Hurrell
Andrew Hurrell
Affiliation:
University lecturer in international relations at Oxford University and a fellow of Nuffield College (andrew.hurrell@nuf.ox.ac.uk). He is currently a global research fellow at New York University School of Law. He recently co-edited Order and Justice in International Relations, with Rosemary Foot and John Gaddis. Hurrell thanks Dominic Tierney for his research assistance, Jennifer Hochschild and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this article, and Geoffrey Wiseman for his ideas and suggestions.
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Review Essay
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Perspectives on Politics , Volume 2 , Issue 1 , March 2004 , pp. 101 - 111
Copyright
2004 by the American Political Science Association

At a time when the United States is the dominant power in world affairs and the axis around which so much of global politics revolves, there can be few subjects as politically central or intellectually challenging as U.S. foreign policy. In this review essay, I examine some of the ways that U. S. foreign policy is (and might be) conceptualized in political science courses both in the United States and elsewhere; I consider several approaches to teaching—mostly at the undergraduate level—and explore the theoretical, historical, and normative assumptions that structure courses. My observations are based on an analysis of 29 syllabi in the subfield—most of them supplied by the staff of Perspectives on Politics—that come from private and public research universities as well as liberal arts colleges. Most of the syllabi are recent, but some go back as far as 1994.1

There are 18 from 2000–2003, five from 1996–1998, and six from 1994–1995. Although these years span a decade of great international change and although the topics do reflect this to some extent, the courses vary less according to the year taught than might be expected.

My aim is not to comment on any individual course, but rather to open up a number of broad issues for debate by highlighting some of the main themes and characteristics of the courses under review.

Throughout the article, I develop two principal observations. The first concerns the need for critical distance—“critical” not in the sense of attacking or finding fault, but in terms of exercising detached judgment and carefully estimating the character, origins, and nature of the subject under study. This kind of objectivity is a challenge for all political scientists. But it is particularly acute in a field where contemporary debates are so dominant and important; where much of the literature (including that of the highest quality) is written by participants in political and policy debates; and where much of the intellectual agenda is set by policy makers, would-be policy makers, and those eager to fund research that will influence policy. The challenge is to understand the ways of the household gods whilst escaping from their shadows and, more crucially, teaching students that these are only the household gods.

There are many strategies for achieving critical distance pedagogically and analytically. For instance, we can ask what general patterns a certain behavior illustrates. (This forces us to stand back and consider the range of factors that might be needed to explain an event.) We can consider how a policy fits with broader historical patterns and with claims about change and continuity. We can compare U.S. foreign policy with the foreign policy of other states. We can ask how others view the United States, and what might account for the perceptual gap that so often exists between U.S. foreign policy viewed from the “inside out” and from the “outside in.” Or we can examine the criteria by which we judge U.S. foreign policy and the normative foundations upon which those criteria might rest. Of course, circumstances often dictate modes of inquiry. Theory may well play a less central role in an undergraduate course, where more attention will likely be paid to case studies; to concrete, real-life examples; and to drawing links between students' own experiences and broader patterns or past cases. With graduate students, the challenges are different but equally great: inducting students into the established wisdom of the field whilst preserving a sense of intellectual surprise and fighting against the dreary application of theoretical or interpretative orthodoxy. I will touch briefly on theoretical, historical, comparative, and normative approaches in the course of this essay.

My second observation concerns the place of U.S. foreign policy within political science and the links between this sub-field and the broader study of international relations. We often say that the boundaries between subfields are (or should be) eroding as a result of the changing character of the problems that we study and teach. And yet the courses under review reveal a quite surprising degree of distance between the subfield of American foreign policy and the theoretical debates and issues that have dominated recent research and teaching within international relations. In part, this seems to have much to do with the way IR theory is used within courses on U.S. foreign policy. But it also stems from the common yet problematic distinction between theories of foreign policy, on the one hand, and theories of international relations on the other.

Before proceeding further, it is important to underscore a number of caveats and cautions:

  • The courses considered here represent only a very small sample of the teaching of U.S. foreign policy. The points that I discuss in this essay are not securely based generalizations about the field as a whole.
  • The essay follows an approach suggested by the editor of this journal—namely, to use a reasonably diverse set of syllabi in order to reflect on the field as a whole and to invite discussion.
  • It is impossible to tell from individual syllabi exactly how materials are used. Readings may be chosen to lay out the intellectual landscape and the range of views on a particular issue; to provide factual background; to provoke debate; or to convey a classical view of a particular aspect of a subject (classical in Mathew Arnold's sense of being “the most excellent exposition of a particular issue or enduring problem.”) Examples here might include Samuel Huntington on American values versus American institutions;2

    Reprinted in Ikenberry 1999.

    or Robert Tucker on Marxist interpretations of U.S. foreign policy;3

    Tucker 1971.

    or Robert Jervis on perception and misperception;4

    Jervis 1976.

    or John Ruggie on interests, identity, and U.S. foreign policy.5

    Ruggie 1998.

  • Most important, I write this review as an outsider—as someone who teaches and studies international relations in Britain, and who works on comparative foreign policy and IR theory rather than on U.S. foreign policy per se.

There is an extremely wide variety of ways to teach a subject as diverse, complex, and fascinating as U.S. foreign policy. The scope of the subject is vast; the literature is enormous; and the courses under review reveal many innovative ways of blending disparate teaching approaches and types of materials. Although pluralism will always be a core academic and political value, it remains an ambiguous concept, and its application within academia varies for legitimate reasons.

First, students need to be taught that most high-quality academic work involves pressing the virtues of a particular line of argument, category of explanation, or theoretical approach, and seeking to show why it is better, more defensible, more intellectually coherent, or more soundly empirical than the alternatives. Overview courses need to cover the waterfront, but there is often a real tension between the presentation of “menus for choice” and the promotion of rigorous and critical thinking.

Second, most departments, and surely most individuals, develop a particular academic identity and an expertise in a limited range of areas or approaches. What is troubling, of course, is where potentially important frameworks have been neglected or where an orthodoxy marginalizes other ways of thinking. In what follows, I highlight some of the questions, issues, and approaches that have been omitted or underrepresented.

Third, and most obviously, selection is inevitable if teaching is to be coherent. In writing this review, I am acutely aware of just how easy it is to suggest all kinds of promising topics and approaches that might be included, if only courses were not limited to a particular number of weeks. The substantive points that I develop cannot do more than prompt reflection on the criteria for selection and on how existing questions are framed and existing material is presented. A great deal depends on the related courses that students take. The heavy domestic focus in U.S. foreign policy courses may, for example, be offset by IR courses that typically lay far greater emphasis on systemic theory. And historical perspectives may best be provided by courses on U.S. diplomatic history. Not everything can be taught in a single course, and courses usually fit into a broader sequence. Acknowledging this, I nonetheless suggest that the “internalist” and “presentist” character of much current analysis and teaching of U.S. foreign policy does raise issues that merit debate.

Approaches to Teaching

The syllabi under review suggest that the subfield of U.S. foreign policy is well established. Courses are constructed and organized in three major ways: around contemporary issues, around levels of analysis, or within historical frameworks. A few syllabi lean heavily in one direction, but most include elements from each. General courses very often divide material into three categories: the history of U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War, the institutions and processes that guide foreign policy formation and implementation, and the most salient contemporary foreign policy challenges. Others divide the course between recent history and foreign policy decision making, but often with a balance that is heavily weighted toward the latter; or between U.S. foreign policy implementation and key foreign policy challenges. In at least one case, the treatment of contemporary issues includes no material on the historical evolution of policy, even during the Cold War.

Even though several courses are constructed around levels of analysis or history, the stress on contemporary issues remains one of the most striking characteristics of the courses under review. Indeed, the “presentism” that characterizes much U.S. political science is very evident here.6

Courses sometimes rely heavily on contemporary and policy-oriented readings. In one case, out of 59 weekly readings, 40 were taken from Foreign Affairs or Foreign Policy.

The problems and challenges discussed have much to do with the here and now—and the future. The topics are mostly as one would expect. For example, one such course covers the post–Cold War era, Europe, democracy promotion, China, humanitarian intervention, globalization, terrorism, Iraq, and the Middle East. Another includes unilateralism versus multilateralism, relations with Russia, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Balkan wars, U.S. policy toward the Middle East, Asia, the use of force, and nuclear proliferation. Democracy and human rights, foreign economic policy, and environmental policy are included, but less frequently and in descending order of emphasis. Several courses place very heavy weight on U.S. Middle East policy; only occasionally do they address other topics (e.g., Cuba). The developing world figures strongly in one of the U.S.-based courses as part of a section on the “new” foreign policy agenda; unsurprisingly, it is also central to the one Mexican course under review. Only one of the syllabi explicitly lists drugs, transnational crime, and AIDS as topics to be addressed.

The language of course descriptions and introductions is that of choices and challenges; it is less often that of tensions and even more rarely that of contradictions. It is the language of a self-confident state with enormous amounts of power to back up its policies—describing the world as it looks from the perspective of the United States and, overwhelmingly, from the perspective of a U.S. policy maker inside the Beltway. Several courses explicitly focus on “how participants in the foreign policy process handle current policy challenges.” Analytically, there is an almost dominant emphasis on decision making—although notably less attention is given to issues of implementation. Some courses zero in on the international, institutional, and domestic settings in which decision makers operate; in this approach, case studies often guide the debate. Many courses concentrate on the “the components and actors within the foreign policy-making process” or on “American institutions and processes as they pertain to foreign policy.” Others stress “the intensive discussion of specific foreign policy decisions.”

Some of the most impressive courses blend the use of case studies and individual decisions with broader explanations of U.S. foreign policy and their historical patterns. But for all their pedagogical and analytical appeal, case studies raise two perennial problems: the tension between telling good stories about individual cases and analyzing the broader historical development of foreign policy, and the extent to which case studies inevitably involve a particular picture of foreign policy. They take the analyst and student back to Washington, to the state, to government sources, and to explanations of policy as they appear to those working within the state. This close look at cases makes it difficult to be analytical as well as to maintain critical distance.

There is, then, an “internalist” approach to the study and teaching of U.S. foreign policy, with many courses concentrating on the making of foreign policy and its domestic sources. The array of topics covered includes the president and foreign policy, Congress and the courts, the State Department, the Defense Department, the intelligence community, economic bureaucracy, public opinion, interest groups, the media, and the state and society in foreign policy. In terms of levels of analysis, statist and societal approaches enjoy pride of place, with a good deal of attention paid to cognitive and psychological aspects of decision making. It is here that the range and sophistication of the literature is most evident and the subfield is most clearly demarcated. The politics of foreign policy—and of foreign policy making—lies at the heart of the subject as taught in many U.S. universities. But in such courses, strikingly little space is given to the external, or international, context.

Among “internalists,” there is a consensus regarding the definition of foreign policy: it is about the actions and activities of the U.S. government and of U.S. governmental representatives.7

For a recent definition of foreign policy, see Carlsnaes 2002.

This is the commonsense view of the subfield, and it makes for coherence and manageability. But it is not the only possible one. It gives little space, for example, to arguments that foreign policy is changing because of the impact and greater pluralism of transnational civil society and the disaggregation of the state (more on this later). At least on the evidence of the syllabi under review, there is also relatively little on the international impact of U.S. companies or nonstate actors—from missionaries in the nineteenth century to corporations, churches, and human-rights groups today. Only one course devotes a class session specifically to nongovernmental foreign policy. And no explicit attention is paid to the foreign policy of substate actors.8

The “foreign policy” of California vis-à-vis Mexico is perhaps the clearest example. (See Lowenthal and Burgess 1993; Goldsborough, 1993.) This case also illustrates how increasingly dense integration may be changing the character of foreign policy, even in a systemically dominant state such as the United States.

Theory, Comparison, and History

Almost all of the courses make some reference to international relations theory, most often by discussing levels of analysis or making reference to debates between realism and liberalism. Many rely on the relevant chapters in a textbook, and several use Stephen Walt's 1998 article “International Relations: One World, Many Theories” to provide theoretical background.9

Walt 1998.

However, the treatment of theory is surprisingly sparse in light of the emphasis on theory, method, and empirical explanation in the broader field of international relations as taught and studied by political scientists, especially in the United States.10

For a recent argument along such lines, see Moravcsik 2003. The subfields of IR theory and foreign policy analysis (FPA) have moved apart for both intellectual and professional reasons, including the failure of FPA to fulfill its early expectations and ambitions, and the extent to which the profession has come to place particular value on theory development, which in turn rests either on a range of carefully chosen cases or on large-n studies, rather than rewarding sustained attention to a single country or part of the world.

Liberalism and realism are presented as the primary, if rather caricatured, ways of thinking about international relations. More troubling than the caricature is the extent to which (especially in some textbooks) a particular IR theory comes to be associated with a particular set of national foreign policy goals. Hence, liberalism is linked to the American promotion of democracy or the construction of multilateral institutions—even though neorealism, constructivism, or neo-Marxism may well provide the most convincing explanation of why liberal attributes have come to dominate the practice of U.S. foreign policy at a given time.

Relatively few courses run through the full range of what one might, from a comparative foreign policy or IR theory perspective, consider to be the potential answers to the basic question, Why does America act as it does in the world? Only four of the courses under review appear to take IR theory as a central organizing theme or idea, although several have excellent introductory readings on the problem of explanation, and several others intersperse theoretical readings in course sections dealing with particular topics—for example, democratic peace theory in relation to U.S. policy in the 1990s, or Joseph Nye's writing on the transformation of power.11

Nye 2002.

Collections of readings on the theoretical aspects of U.S. foreign policy are also somewhat rare.12

For one important example, see Ikenberry 1999.

There also appears to be little discussion of the difficulties of taking a general IR route into the study of U.S. foreign policy. After all, many theoretical approaches to international relations claim not to be directly interested in explaining foreign policy at all—and certainly not the foreign policies of particular states at particular times. This is true of Kenneth Waltz's neorealism, Alexander Wendt's constructivism, and Robert Keohane's liberal institutionalism. Waltz has long been clear that “international politics is not foreign policy.”13

Waltz 1996, 54.

And Wendt agrees: “Like Waltz, I am interested in international politics, not foreign policy.”14

Wendt 1999, 11; see also Keohane 1989, as well as Rose 1998 and Zakaria 1992.

Although these arguments are contested, the translation of IR theory to foreign policy is more complex than even some of the graduate courses suggest. The key to helping students make sense of the role of the United States in the world might not lie so much in theory as in careful conceptual analysis and the unpacking of core concepts such as power, hegemony, empire, multilateralism, and leadership. These concepts dominate the discussion of U.S. foreign policy, and yet it is surprising how little space many courses (and textbooks) devote to their definition and analysis.

What other theories have been omitted or underrepresented? Several might be noted. There are few references to poststructuralist approaches, as in the work of David Campbell,15

Campbell 1998.

or to feminist perspectives, such as Cynthia Enloe's.16

Enloe 2001.

Additionally, although imperialism is back into analytical and political fashion, and many have once more come to view the United States as an imperial power, the courses under review give only scant attention to this historically important way of analyzing U.S. foreign policy. Only one course lists a range of neo-Marxist and critical writings on U.S. foreign policy, and the only sustained references to neo-Marxist theory appear in just one of the graduate courses. One course devotes two sessions to the historical expansion of the United States and to the issue of imperialism, with readings drawn from Walter LaFeber. (Interestingly, although LaFeber is one of the most popular authors for providing historical background, his own focus on the United States as an imperial power gets neglected as courses move into the contemporary period.) Many course readings make reference to arguments about the “military-industrial complex”; but in general, societal explanations and discussions of interest groups and pressure groups reflect a rather cozy liberal pluralism. This trend points once more to a narrowing of the range of theory but also to a significant disjuncture between how U.S. foreign policy is understood within and outside the country—although such readings surely press students to challenge conventional understandings and to engage in critical reflection.

The most striking omission in the syllabi concerns social constructivism. In one form or another, the language of ideas and identity, and debates between rationalist and constructivist approaches, have been central to IR theory over the past decade. Yet these issues and many of the writings that they have generated appear to have made little impact on courses on U.S. foreign policy or on the major textbooks. Constructivist questions map directly onto many of the core and abiding puzzles of U.S. foreign policy, not least its striking mélange of hard power-political and economic self-interest with high-minded moralism, whether of an exemplarist or a crusading kind. For some, of course, it is simply a matter of power and interest. As John Mearsheimer notes:

Because Americans dislike realpolitik, public discourse about foreign policy in the United States is usually couched in the language of liberalism. Hence pronouncements of the policy elites are heavily flavored with optimism and moralism. American academics are especially good at promoting liberal thinking in the marketplace of ideas. Behind closed doors, however, the elites who make national security policy speak mostly in the language of power, not that of principle, and the United States acts in the international system according to the dictates of realist logic…. American foreign policy has usually been guided by realist logic, although the public pronouncements of its leaders might lead one to think otherwise.17

Mearsheimer 2001, 25–6.

On the other side, those influenced by constructivism insist that, whilst states and other political actors undoubtedly seek material power to defend their security, the core analytical question is always, What kinds of power do states seek and for what sorts of purposes? Constructivists argue that the meanings that states and other political actors attach to power and security are central to helping us explain their behavior.18

See, for example, Katzenstein 1996.

And they assert that the interaction between ideational factors and material interests is highly complex: “ideas not only shaped how interests were pursued, but in some cases helped define the interests the United States subsequently did pursue.”19

Ruggie 1998, 225.

From this perspective, then, the foreign policy of all states, including the United States, can be seen, in Ulrich Beck's nice phrase, as “autobiographical solutions to systemic contradictions.”20

Quoted in Coker 2003.

The case of the United States also helps us to probe the ambiguity within constructivism over whether the identities behind state preferences are the result of social interaction, as in the Wendtian account, or whether they are solely the product of largely autonomous national histories—specifically, national processes of state formation.21

Wendt 1999.

In addition, posing explicitly constructivist questions provides a way of uncovering the unspoken assumptions that underpin foreign policy but have become a taken-for-granted and underanalyzed part of the political landscape. One thinks here, for example, of the peculiar—and peculiarly resilient—character of American nationalism. (Again, the outsider is struck both by the absence of any explicit discussion in most courses of American nationalism and by the easy, unproblematic reference to “we” and “us” in course introductions and descriptions.) The syllabi under review certainly give extensive coverage to historical traditions of U.S. foreign policy.22

For an important recent addition, see Mead 2001.

They include texts by those who insist on the importance of such traditions and by those who see U.S. foreign policy as essentially pragmatic—either because of the ultimately determining role of either material domestic interests or external power-political pressures, or because the multiple traditions of U.S. foreign policy continually compete with one another, with none able to establish lasting predominance. Less often in the literature do we find theoretically satisfying accounts of exactly how these ideas actually influence policy.

Of course, it might be argued that theory is not necessarily the most appropriate way into a field—especially, as noted above, in the case of undergraduates. Moreover, those working at the public policy end of the spectrum may well agree with Jorge Luis Borges that “[t]heories can be admirable stimulants … but in themselves they can engender monsters or merely museum pieces.”23

Borges 1999, 463.

If theory provides one way of setting the foreign policy o…articular country withi…roader context, comparison is another. Comparison is inevitable and necessary. All our thinking—whether as historians, political scientists, or policy analysts—is marked by implicit comparisons, usually with other historical cases but sometimes with counterfactual possibilities and with the many paths not taken. It is very difficult to locate interesting puzzles or to isolate potentially important explanatory factors without relying on comparisons or on the theories to which comparative work has contributed. What sense can one make of claims to exceptionalism without comparing the United States with other great powers? And yet the syllabi contain not much in the way of explicit comparative work or comparative questioning. Overtly comparative questions—such as, What is uniquely American about American foreign policy? How different is the United States from other great powers?—appear more often in non-U.S. courses. And it is interesting, although perhaps not surprising, that the Canadian and Mexican courses under review begin by considering the specificities of U.S. culture and ideology.

There are, of course, important exceptions in terms of major writings—by, for example, Paul Kennedy or Joseph Nye. But these are rarely included, at least in the syllabi gathered here. So just as, strangely to the outsider, American politics is taught separately from comparative politics, the study of U.S. foreign policy appears cut off from the comparative study of foreign policy. If the foreign policy of other countries were studied or taught in this way, I suspect that we would quickly hear the sorts of criticisms that political scientists are wont to raise against “area studies” specialists: that they are too interested in the particular or the distinctive; too preoccupied with old, worn-out theories and are lacking interest in developing new ones; and too likely to ask the wrong questions because comparable cases have not been considered.

Like theory and comparison, history is also a way of attaining critical distance. However, as noted above, the syllabi under review reveal a rather variable grounding in history, both in scope and in the periods studied. The courses tend to rely on one major historical text—often Rise to Globalism, Strategies of Containment, or one of LaFeber's works (e.g., The American Age).24

Ambrose 1997; Gaddis 1982; LaFeber 1994.

The material is mainly post-1990, with good coverage of post-1945, little of 1900 through 1945, and very little of pre-1900. Only two of the courses devote significant time to the pre-1945 period (in one case, six sessions, and in another, five). Of course, given the constraints of time and space, there are real difficulties in deciding which aspects of history to include. Several courses manage the problem by beginning with a general discussion of American exceptionalism and the “intellectual heritage of early American foreign policy,” and then moving swiftly on to the origins of the Cold War. One the most interesting courses combines secondary readings with a strong emphasis on primary texts and statements (for example, the Monroe Doctrine, John Hay's Open Door Note, Woodrow Wilson's War Message, or Lyndon Johnson's “Peace without Conquest” speech).

As we move away from the Cold War and its very specific circumstances, and as the continuities between contemporary and pre–Cold War U.S. foreign policy become more evident, the case for reducing the focus on the Cold War and for including material on other periods becomes stronger. Some would make a case for the interwar years (think of the contemporary resonance of Herbert Hoover's call for “independent internationalism”). Others might wish to highlight the importance of the U.S. rise to power from the 1890s to 1919—in order to explain the determinants of U.S. policy and to demonstrate the continued relevance of the ideas and justifications for policy produced in this period, perhaps above all by Presidents Roosevelt and Wilson.

Why might one want to include history? First, because it is the only way to make sense of claims about change and continuity and to test arguments about the impact of ideas and identity on U.S. foreign policy over time. Second, because the U.S. policy debate is so resistant to thinking and arguing historically, at least in a sustained way. And third, because the broader pedagogical purpose of a liberal education, as Martin Wight argues, is “to escape from the Zeitgeist, from the mean, narrow, provincial spirit which is constantly assuring us that we are at the peak of human achievement, that we stand on the edge of unprecedented prosperity or an unparalleled catastrophe, that the next summit conference is going to be the most fateful in history, or that the leader of the day is either the greatest, or the most disastrous, of all time.”25

Wight 1991, 6.

Or as Paul Klee more simply puts it: “The world has looked different, and in time it will come to look different again.”26

Klee 1969, 47.

Relationships and the International System

As noted above, it has become common within political science to distinguish between a theory of international politics and one of foreign policy. But depending on what aspects of foreign policy we are examining, this distinction can be highly problematic. If we are trying to explain why a state attempted to do x or y at a given point in time, then a pre-dominantly domestic story, including a domestic understanding of the nature of the international system, will no doubt take us a long way.27

The extent to which domestic understandings of the external world belong to an internalist account of foreign policy—as opposed to a systemic or analytic view of the opportunities and constraints of the international system as they are constructed—is one of the central questions in foreign policy analysis.

But many of the most important questions of foreign policy analysis are unavoidably about interactions and relationships. A theory of foreign policy might explain policy choice, but the evolution of a policy over time and an evaluation of its success will depend on the nature of its external environment and the responses of others. Strategy is inevitably about interactions. Foreign policy outcomes, then, cannot be understood by studying the attributes, preferences, or domestic policy-making characteristics of a single country, but only by examining the interaction of states within a changing international context.

Many of the courses reviewed here begin by stressing that they are concerned with the process by which U.S. foreign policy is made; yet many of the same courses' syllabi also encourage students to understand “the consequences of American foreign policy,” or the “effectiveness of policy,” or the “success of policy in achieving its purposes.” Even when studying a very powerful state, it is far from clear how courses that place so much emphasis on the domestic process by which foreign policy is made can provide students with the evidence and arguments that they need to engage with these issues or with the larger question of why the United States behaves as it does in the world. Debates about effectiveness occur in many courses. If effective is defined narrowly (for example, in terms of intrabureaucratic coherence or consistency), then there is no problem. But if effective is understood to involve an assessment of the outcomes of interactions, then the limits of focusing on foreign policy making are surely clear. And many of the courses under review are concerned precisely with outcomes in this broader sense.28

See Robert Litwak's masterly study of rogue states, which considers “whether the U.S. strategy towards rogue states has been effective in terms of achieving U.S. objectives.” Litwak 2000, xiv.

This emphasis on policy making brings the relative neglect of the international context into sharper relief. External or systemic factors are not necessarily determinants of particular policy choices, but usually are central to the explanation of the evolution of policy over time—and almost always play a major part in any evaluation of overall success or failure. We can classify the treatment of the external context under four headings.

Bilateral and regional relationships

A great deal of any country's foreign policy will entail bilateral or regional relations. The global scope of U.S. foreign policy means that the range of such relationships is especially wide. And yet very little assigned reading forces students to consider what the relationships look like from the other side. Some courses hint at the issue by raising such questions as follows: What are the limits of American “hegemony”? Why do these limits look different in Washington than in Europe? What specific issues or cases illustrate these differences? Why have U.S. relations with countries in Latin America and Africa proved to be inconsistent and thus unsatisfactory to many countries in these regions? But only rarely do the syllabi explicitly invite students to consider what the United States or U.S. foreign policy looks like from the outside. Non-American authors are cited infrequently, and then mostly in collections or readers rather than on their own. (However, this lack of representation may partly reflect non-Americans' often puzzling lack of serious academic engagement with U.S. foreign policy even in countries that are directly and critical ly affected by the United States.)29

On this theme, see Heisbourg 1999.

Here, critical distance is once again missing. As Thomas Franck and Edward Weisband put it some time ago: “Unfortunately, the United States has never learned to listen to itself as if it were the enemy speaking.”30

Quoted in Williams 1980, title page.

But it is also a matter of poor analysis. It is hard to tell convincing stories about U.S. relations with other states and to come up with plausible theoretical explanations without well-grounded analyses of how U.S. power and policy have been received and understood by others and of how the relationship works from both ends. The relative absence of such material reflects a substantive problem—namely, the much greater openness of U.S. sources and archives compared with those in other countries and the relative weakness (particularly in developing nations) of both diplomatic history and international relations as well-established fields of study.

Perceptions and misperceptions occupy an important place in the study of foreign policy, and psychological and social-psychological theories of decision making as applied to the United States are impressive and highly developed. But with so many of Washington's bilateral or regional relations, the analytical focus needs to be on mutual (and often divergent) perceptions, and on the extent to which understandings of individual issues and of the international system more generally clash because of the very different cultural, ideological, and historical “filters” through which policy makers in each country interpret their world. Only part of the picture can be gained by looking at how the United States forms its perceptions of its own policies and of the world. To say this, however, is not to pretend that the challenge of incorporating outside perspectives is easy—either in deciding what can be coherently covered in a single course or in finding suitable materials. (Indeed, one can argue that bilateral relations—falling uneasily between a theoretical concern with systemic patterns and interactions and a narrower emphasis on the foreign policies of single countries—have been neglected within the study of international relations more generally.) But the challenge remains an important one, for policy as well as for teaching and research.

Perhaps the tendency to look at relations from just one side is a natural result of both the power of the United States and the paradox of globalization (that the greater the emphasis on global and systemic forces, the less the attention paid to specificities of cultural and linguistic difference). As Fred Halliday notes: “We live in an age that proclaims its multiculturalism … yet never has university culture in the Anglo-Saxon world been less multicultural, less open to the other in this cultural and linguistic sense, and, I would argue, as a result less critical of the household gods.”31

Halliday 1999, 108.

The international political system

Most of the courses under review follow mainstream neorealism in understanding the external context principally in terms of the international political system. Thus, in classes on the international/external context, students examine the distribution of power, the role of nuclear weapons, the move from the Cold War to unipolarity, and so on. Of course, those who wish to see themselves as working within a realist tradition tend to start with the view that distribution of power in the international political system sets the basic parameters of foreign policy. “A good theory of foreign policy should ask first what effect the international system has on national behavior,” writes Fareed Zakaria, “because the most powerful generalizable characteristic of a state in international relations is its relative position in the international system.”32

Zakaria 1992, 197. For a powerful liberal rejection of this view, see Moravcsik 2002.

This perspective often leads to the assumption that the absence of major power confrontation, the waning of direct security challenges, and the sheer extent of U.S. power will make the international political system less important. Hence, we find the common view that the end of the Cold War naturally led to a greater role of domestic forces and factors in the analysis of U.S. foreign policy.

Yet even when thinking just about the international political system, perhaps we place too much emphasis on how systems “constrain” by pushing states to act in particular ways, as in the orthodox neorealist account, and neglect the fact that systems may also constrain by pulling and entrapping. Clearly hegemonic or imperial states can be driven to make policy choices and, in particular, can be tempted to overexpand, by domestic interest groups and by domestically engendered and propagated “myths of empire” of the kind analyzed so power-fully by Jack Snyder.33

Snyder 1991.

Yet both empires and hegemonic states face many genuine strategic dilemmas that are rooted in the nature of the system, not in domestic politics. After all, stable hegemony rests on a delicate balance between coercion and consensus, between the exercise of direct and indirect power of the hegemonic state and the provision of a degree of autonomy and respect for the weaker states. Unlike direct subordination, it is necessarily based on a constant, and usually unstable, process of negotiation between the strong and the weak. And as with strategy, negotiation is always about interaction.

Globalization

Another striking feature of the courses under review is the relative neglect of ways in which the international political system34

It is far from clear that the “international system” should be equated easily or automatically with the international political system, as the syllabi here tend to do. Even if the world “out there” is about power and conflict, the nature of the conflicts and the character of power politics may have rather little to do with an anarchical system of states and the machinations of great powers.

might be changing and, in particular, of the arguments associated with globalization. Even recent syllabi contain little on globalization and draw infrequently from the wealth of writings from the 1990s about how globalization was supposed to be transforming world politics—perhaps because political and academic discussion of globalization came some-what late to the United States and, arguably, only as the problems of globalization became more salient to U.S. policy makers. The debates around globalization breathed new life into many of the older claims about the changing character of world politics: the multiple and ever-increasing links that exist between societies, many of which are either beyond direct control of government or can only be controlled with tremendous difficulty; the consolidation (if not novelty) of the role of many more actors, both corporations and non-governmental organizations (NGOs); the difficulty of translating hard military power into sustainable answers to many of the issues on the international agenda, such as promoting global financial stability, tackling climate change, or dealing with transnational terrorism; the multiple character of world politics, with interstate relations being only one of many different arenas within which political games are played.35

From this enormous literature, see Held et al. 1999 and Scholte 2000.

In this regard, we might note in the courses under review the lack of attention given to U.S. foreign economic policy. One course has sessions on international economic policy, the crusade for free trade, financial hegemony, and shadow economics. But it is the outlier; in most cases, high politics and the security agenda tend to predominate. Equally, discussion of trade blocs (and of regionalism more broadly) appears infrequently in the syllabi, even though the United States is closely engaged in this aspect of the changing system—both directly, through the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and indirectly, through the emergence of bloc politics as a response to U.S. hegemony.36

Contrast the absence of attention to NAFTA in foreign policy courses with the “surprising” inclusion of Mexico in comparative politics courses. But note also that a number of the omissions here seem to be replicated in comparative politics courses: “Topics such as regional integration, the impact of the international system on domestic institutions, globalization and convergence, macroeconomic management, and the “withering” of state boundaries receive only modest attention.” Kurzer 2003, 130.

In these courses, there is relatively little discussion of how globalization has changed the nature of the security agenda (from drugs to informal violence and terrorism)—although newer courses will no doubt address this phenomenon. Treatment of U.S. policy on other so-called global topics, such as the environment or AIDS, is also very sparse, as noted above.

The point is not to suggest that the United States or U.S. foreign policy has necessarily been transformed by globalization. It is rather to teach students to understand the ways that the United States has responded to the challenges of globalization (both recently and in earlier phases) and the reasons why U.S. responses have often differed so strongly from those of other states. Is the difference simply a matter of relative power? Or does it reflect a range of more specifically American factors, such as the United States' exceptionalist belief in the universality of its own values, its long-standing ambivalence toward international law and institutions, and the constraints placed by its understandings of popular sovereignty and by its legal and constitutional structure? Moreover, even when studying such a powerful state, one might wish to investigate the international sources of its identity and the international influences on its political development.37

See, for example, Katznelson and Shefter 2002.

This is yet another of the ways in which a theory of foreign policy is necessarily linked to a theory of international relations or at least to an understanding of the dynamics of the international system.

Transnational civil society

The issue of NGOs and transnational civil society is another one that merits further attention in the syllabi. After all, the roles of such groups within international society have increased significantly: first, in the formal process of norm creation and development; second, in the broader social process by which new norms emerge and find their way on the international agenda; third, in the detailed functioning of many international institutions and in the processes of implementation and compliance; and fourth, through direct participation in many governance activities (for instance, disbursing an increasing proportion of official aid, engaging in large-scale humanitarian relief, or leading efforts at promoting democracy or post-conflict social and political reconstruction). In all of these areas, the analytical focus has been on transnational networks—for example, knowledge-based networks of economists, lawyers, or scientists—or transnational advocacy networks that act as channels for money and material resources and, more critically, for information, ideas, and values.

Understanding the nature of foreign policy on many issues often involves understanding the links between states and actors within transnational civil society. State action may be shaped by NGO lobbying, but it is often crucial in fostering the emergence of civil society to begin with and in providing the political framework that enables civil society to flourish. More important, state power is increasingly determined by the ability of governments to work successfully within civil society and to exploit transnational and transgovernmental coalitions for their own purposes. This is surely one important aspect of U.S. power in the world and of the changing character of diplomacy. And yet in the syllabi that I have examined, NGOs—particularly the links between the U.S. state and transnational NGOs—are underrepresented, and conceptualizations of the state and diplomacy remain very statist and “traditional” in character. There is lots of pluralism domestically (in interest groups, lobbies, the media, and so on), but much less internationally and globally. Again, the point is not to claim that U.S. foreign policy has been fundamentally changed by these developments; it is rather to press students to consider how the realm of policy choice and the content of many specific policies may have changed—in relation, for example, to human rights and the environment, but also to democracy promotion, nation building, peacemaking, and many aspects of foreign economic interactions.

Conclusion

Let me conclude with a few brief remarks about evaluation and normative judgment, which are central only to a small number of the courses under review. One, for example, “places very heavy emphasis on the role of values in the making of American foreign policy,” and its readings begin with the Melian Dialogue, Immanuel Kant, and Thomas Jefferson. Interestingly, this is one of the most historically oriented courses, both in coverage (five sessions on pre-1945) and in the use of many primary readings. Two courses give significant consideration to the links between U.S. foreign policy and democratic theory, including texts by Noam Chomsky and Ronald Dworkin, and raising questions about the relationship between foreign policy and the role and rights of citizens. Some of the more interpretative courses ask even more strongly normative questions. (Should the promotion of democracy and human rights be retained as foreign policy goals? Should the United States strive for preeminence in trade?)

But the language of evaluation, even normative evaluation, is also prevalent in courses that focus on policy decisions and on choices between competing grand strategic visions. Although the primary concern is with explaining how and why particular decisions are made, students are asked, for example, to consider “whether and how our policies should change towards various regions of the world” or what the “appropriate” U.S. foreign policy on a particular issue ought to be. One of the most comprehensive syllabi clearly states that its course's objectives cover both explaining and evaluating America's past and present foreign policy: “Were the results of American policies good or bad? Would other policies have better served America and/or the wider world?”

The amount of evaluation in a course depends on how much knowledge the students acquire of how choices are made, of the substantive or technical content of policy problems, and of the various analytical approaches for understanding the formation and implementation of foreign policy. But, especially in the subfield of international affairs, it might also depend on the students' grasping the problems of political morality and being aware of the various possible roles of norms and values in foreign policy. If foreign policy really is all about choices and options, as so many of the syllabi suggest, then it is surely difficult to avoid discussion of the criteria by which those choices are made and evaluated.

However, in most of these courses, students are not being assigned even a minimal range of readings to help them make sense of normative or evaluative questions. (One such reading could be chapter one of Stanley Hoffmann's book Duties Beyond Borders.)38

Hoffman 1981.

This is perhaps an example of where the subfield has been ill served by the broader trends within the discipline. After all, the ethics of prudence, responsible state-craft, and pragmatic judgment formed a core element of the earlier generation of classical realist scholarship—as in the writings of George Kennan, Arnold Wolfers, or Hans Morgenthau. It is true that these scholars gave only a partial (and, for many, a deeply problematic) answer to normative questions. But they were deeply concerned with the problem of moral choice in a difficult world and were engaged in an explicitly normative project: challenging what they saw as the misplaced and dangerous ethical absolutism of the so-called idealists. And of course, a great deal of their analysis focused directly on U.S. foreign policy and on the choices confronting U.S. leaders.

And yet, as classical realism gave way to neorealism, as liberals sought to build their theories on neorealist assumptions, and as political scientists came to insist ever more often that theirs was an explanatory and theoretical endeavor that should eschew normative analysis, the range of readings that could help students deal with the normative questions posed by the syllabi shrank almost to a vanishing point. The questions are still there, in classes and in the world of policy. But the tools and arguments needed to answer them (or at least to debate them rationally and rigorously) are not.

Syllabi

Ayres, Bill. Ohio State: Autumn 1995. U.S. Foreign Policy: History, Actors, and Issues. Available at colorado.edu/isa/sections/fp/syllabi/ayres.htm. Accessed 20 August 2002.

Baldwin, David. Columbia University: Fall 2002. American Foreign Policy.

Crawford, Beverly. University of California at Berkeley: Spring 2003. American Foreign Policy. Available at ocf.berkeley.edu/~gobev/fp/syllabus.html. Accessed 14 November 2003.

Danilovic, Vesna. Texas A and M: Spring 1997. American Foreign Policy. Available at www-polisci.tamu.edu/dept/classes/danilovic/POLS413_spr97.htm. Accessed 14 November 2003.

Eisenstadt, Todd. El Colegio de Mexico: Spring 1997. U.S. Foreign Policy Since World War II.

Ellis, Joseph, and Vincent Ferraro. Mt. Holyoke: Spring 2000. American Foreign Policy. Available at www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/afps00.htm. Accessed 20 August 2002.

Foyle, Douglas. Wesleyan: Spring 2002. United States Foreign Policy. Available at www.wesleyan.edu/gov/g311df.htm. Accessed 20 August 2002.

Gerner, Deborah J. University of Kansas: Fall 1998. U.S. Foreign Policy. Available at csf.colorado.edu/isa/sections/fp/syllabi/gernusfp.html. Accessed 20 August 2002.

Hobbs, Heidi. North Carolina State: Spring 1995. American Foreign Policy. Available at csf.Colorado.edu/isafp/syllabi/hobbs.htm. Accessed 14 November 2003.

Holsti, Ole. Duke University: Fall 1994. American Foreign Policy. Available at csf.colorado.edu/isa/sections/fp/syllabi/holsti~2.htm. Accessed 20 August 2002.

Howard, Pamela. University of South Carolina: Fall 1994. Conduct and Formulation of U.S. Foreign Policy. Available at csf.colorado.edu/isafp/syllabi/howard.htm. Accessed 14 November 2003.

Khong, Yuen Foong. Oxford University: Fall 2002. The United States in International Relations.

Lentner, Howard. City University of New York: Fall 1996. United States Foreign Policy. Available at csf.colorado.edu/isafp/syllabi/lent3.htm. Accessed 14 November 2003.

Licklider, Roy. Rutgers University: Spring 1995. Formulation of American Foreign Policy. Available at csf.colorado.edu/isafp/syllabi/lickli~4.htm. Accessed 14 November 2003.

Lipson, Michael. University of Colorado: Spring 2000. American Foreign Policy. Available at www.sas.upenn.edu/~mlipson/3163.html. Accessed 14 November 2003.

Machala, Pavel. Amherst College: Fall 2002. American Politics/Foreign Policy. Available at www.amherst.edu/~polisci/ps30syllabus. Accessed 14 November 2003.

Markey, Daniel. Princeton University: Spring 2003. American Foreign Policy.

Miller, Linda. Wellesley: Fall 2002. The United States in World Politics.

Owen, John. University of Virginia: Fall 2002. The United States in World Affairs.

Pevehouse, John. University of Wisconsin: Fall 2002. Problems of American Foreign Policy.

Rodman, Ken. Colby: Fall 2002. United States Foreign Policy II: After the Cold War. Available at www.colby.edu/govt/faculty/kar/go232/go232f02.html. Accessed 14 November 2003.

Rose, Gideon. Columbia University: Fall 2002. American Foreign Policy.

Rose, William. Connecticut College: Spring 2003. U.S. Foreign Policy.

Saideman, Stephen. McGill University: 2002–2003. American Foreign Policy. Available at www.arts.mcgill.ca/programs/polisci/courses/poli346.html. Accessed 14 November 2003.

Sathasivam, Kanishkan. Carleton College: Spring 2002. American Foreign Policy. Available acad.carleton.edu/curricular/POSC/classes/Posc231/S02/index.html. Accessed 14 November 2003.

Schultz, Kenneth. UCLA: Spring 2002. Studies in the Formulation of American Foreign Policy. Available at www.sscnet.ucla.edu/02S/polisci121-1/s02.ps121.kschultz.htm. Accessed 14 November 2003.

Stanger, Allison. Harvard University: Spring 2002. American Foreign Policy. Available at www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~gov90js/syllabus/Gov_90js_Syllabus.htm. Accessed 20 August 2002.

University of Arizona: Spring 2002. American Foreign Policy. Accessed 14 November 2003. (Name of professor unavailable.)

Van Evera, Stephen. MIT: Fall 1994. American Foreign Policy. Available at csf.colorado.edu/isa/sections/fp/syllabi/vaneve~2.htm. Accessed 20 August 2002.

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