Foreign Policy Analysis

Catalog description

Foreign policy decisions, like any other decisions state leaders make, are products of the pulls and pushes of domestic and international actors whose capabilities, tastes, and stakes compete to determine policy outcomes. These decisions are, thus, strategic. To teach the implications of various strategic settings for decision-making processes, the first seven weeks of the course offer an introduction to the toolbox of analytic techniques that are essential for understanding, analyzing, predicting, and eventually engineering policy choices in international politics. The second seven-week part of the course will cast the students as advisors on the most challenging decisions any political leader has to make. Using the analytical tools students mastered in the first part of the course, they will advise leaders in deciding how they should act in the face of foreign policy crises such as the Iran nuclear deal or disputes over natural gas drilling in the Mediterranean Sea. Throughout this part of the course, students will engage in red-teaming, write short strategic options memos and detailed case studies to inform policymaking with a model-based approach.