Fall 2015 - 59980 - PA388K - Advanced Topics in Public Policy

U.S. foreign policy appears to be in tatters. After two difficult wars, the rise of the Islamic State, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and decades of China’s rise, U.S. policymakers are still scrambling to respond. These complaints are a fair criticism of the day-to-day management of U.S. foreign policy, but they obscure a deeper and longer consistency to U.S. grand strategic goals. In fact, the United States has pursued a broadly consistent set of grand strategic goals for the last century. They consists of five objectives: defending the U.S. homeland from attack, maintaining a favorable balance of power among the great powers, punishing rogue actors, investing in good governance and allied capabilities abroad, and championing classical liberalism. It is in the manner of pursuing these goals that U.S. foreign policy differs from one age to the next and, of course, in response to different threats. Today, the United States faces three great families of threats. First, the preeminent threat to the global liberal order and to the United States are effort by powerful, autocratic states armed with nuclear weapons to expand their influence through illegitimate means. Second, the United States faces threats from failed states and the rogue actors that operate from them, such as pirates, organized criminals, drug cartels, and terrorists. Third, there is what counterinsurgency theorist David Kilcullen has called the global Islamist insurgency. Constructing a response to all three of these threats in balance is the art of grand strategy. In this course we discuss the nature of strategy, the threats of the contemporary security environment, the goals of foreign policy, and the five pillars of U.S. grand strategy. We discuss how this argument relates to the debate about U.S. foreign policy that has gone on since the end of the Cold War. We will review the history of U.S. efforts in each pillar, describe unique aspects of the contemporary security environment, and examine how America’s grand strategy should be implemented today. We conclude with discussions of U.S. military deployments, its aid and alliance network, and ongoing global efforts against terrorist groups.