The Art and Science of Statecraft (DHP D210)

Professor Daniel Drezner

Spring 2007

There is theory, and then there is practice. It is relatively easy to develop theories, strategies, explanations, constructs, or simple rules-of-thumb for conducting foreign policy. It is quite another thing to know which of these abstract options is the optimal choice. What is the best way for the United States to advance its interests in the world? How does the U.S. deal with Iran? North Korea? Sub-Saharan Africa? Which strategy is the right one? Are the best short-term options consistent with long-term goals? Should material interests alone guide policymakers, or should ethical and humanitarian impulses be factored in?

There's another problem. Even if a policymaker could divine the optimal foreign policy response, there's the small matter of executing it. What if the policy is imperfectly implemented? How do domestic, bureaucratic, and cognitive constraints affect policymaking decisions?

The goal of this course is to offer an introduction into the world of policymaking, diplomacy, and statecraft. A good policymaker must have the analytic tools necessary to respond to external events or forward the national interest. That alone is insufficient, however. There are two other components to the crafting of foreign policy. First, the policymaker must have a grasp of the domestic and bureaucratic environment in which policy is being crafted, and recognize how that environment affects both private and public actions. Second, the policymaker must also learn the various arts associated with the policymaking process. The most brilliant foreign policy architect in the world will have no influence unless s/he can make a coherent presentation at a National Security Council briefing, a congressional hearing, or write a concise but accurate briefing paper.

To that end, this course is designed to test the analytic portion of policymaking as well as the interpersonal skills needed to further one's views. There will be a series of exercises designed to test your mettle in different policy settings — and you will be graded on your performance.

COURSE REQUIREMENTS

I expect the following if you take this class:

• You will keep abreast of current events in American foreign policy. This includes reading a daily newspaper or three (the New York Times, Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, etc.) plus the Economist.
• In class, you will turn off or mute your cell phone — and any other electronic device that makes noise. If your phone rings in class, I will make you sing a song of my choosing — and bear in mind I have a soft spot for maudlin ballads.
• I expect your full participation. This means you should have read the assigned material before the class date. I place a high degree of importance on class participation. This does not mean talking for talking's sake, it means making incisive observations that display original thinking. Oh, and I will call on you on occasion, just to be mean.

Your grade will be based on the following:

• A midterm paper. You will be asked to prepare a (short) policy options memorandum outlining possible policy options to deal with a problem of my choosing. The memo should delineate all of the feasible options, assess their likelihood of success, and offer a clear set of actionable recommendations. Your analysis will be based on information you have gleaned from the first part of the class. This will count for 25% of your grade.
• In-class simulation and class participation. There will be multiple exercises to simulate real policymaking activities: congressional testimony, mock NSC briefings, Sunday morning talk shows, etc. These will include a mixture of both written and performance elements. These exercises — plus your overall participation — will count for 30% of your grade.
• An op-ed on an issue of your choosing. This exercise will count for 15% of your grade.
• A final paper. This will be a reworking of your original options paper — but now you will need to weigh and assess the problems of policy implementation and political support. This will count for 30% of your grade.

REQUIRED TEXTBOOKS

• William Easterly, The White Man's Burden (New York: Penguin Press, 2006).
• Francis Fukuyama, America At The Crossroads (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).
• Alexander George, Bridging the Gap: Theory & Practice in Foreign Policy (Washington: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1993).
• Anatol Lieven and John Hulsman, Ethical Realism (New York: Pantheon, 2006).
• Benjamin I. Page and Marshall Bouton, The Foreign Policy Disconnect: What Americans Want from Our Leaders but Don't Get (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
• Jeffrey Sachs, The End of Poverty (New York: Penguin Press, 2005).
• Amy B. Zegart, Flawed By Design: The Evolution of the CIA, JCS, and NSC (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).

RECOMMENDED BOOKS

• Richard Neustadt and Earnest May, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decisionmakers (New York: Free Press, 1986).

PART I: Introduction

Political science and foreign policy (1/18)

• George, Bridging the Gap, pp. 1-31.
• Philip Zelikow, "Foreign Policy Engineering: From Theory to Practice and Back Again," International Security 18 (Spring 1994): 143-171.
• Ezra F. Vogel, "Some Reflections on Policy and Academics," Asia Policy 1 (January 2006): 31-34.

Debating grand strategies, take one (1/23)

• Jeffrey Legro, Rethinking the World: Great Power Strategies and International Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), chapter two.
• George W. Bush, second inaugural address, January 20, 2005. Accessible at: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/01/
  20050120-1.html.
• Executive Office of the President, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, March 2006. Accessible at http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss/2006/nss2006.pdf.
• Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads, pp. 1-12, 66-113.

PART II: The Tools of Statecraft

Military statecraft (1/25-1/30)

• Richard Betts, "The Delusion of Impartial Intervention," Foreign Affairs 73 (September/October 1994)
• Barbara Walter, "The Critical Barrier to Civil War Settlement," International Organization 51 (Summer 1997): 335-364.
• Robert Pape, "Coercion and Military Strategy: Why Denial Works and Punishment Doesn't," Journal of Strategic Studies 15 (December 1992).
• George, Bridging the Gap, chapters 71-88.
• Dani Reiter, "Exploring the Bargaining Model of War," Perspectives on Politics 1 (March 2003): 27-43.
• Andrew Stigler, "A Clear Victory for Air Power: NATO's Empty Threat to Invade Kosovo." International Security 27 (Winter 2002/03): 124-157.

Economic sanctions (2/1)

• Richard Haass, "Sanctioning Madness?" Foreign Affairs 76 (November/December 1997): 74-85.
• Arne Tostenson and Beate Bull, "Are Smart Sanctions Feasible?" World Politics 54 (April 2002): 373-403.
• Daniel W. Drezner, "The Hidden Hand of Economic Coercion." International Organization 57 (Summer 2003): 643-659.

Inducements (2/6)

• Daniel W. Drezner, "The Trouble with Carrots: Transaction Costs, Conflict Expectations, and Economic Inducements." Security Studies 9 (Autumn 1999/Winter 2000): 188-218.
• Erik Gartzke and Quan Li, "War, Peace, and the Invisible Hand: Positive Political Externalities of Economic Globalization," International Studies Quarterly 47 (December 2003): 561-586.
• Miroslav Nincic, "The Logic of Positive Engagement: Dealing with Renegade Regimes," International Studies Perspectives 4 (November 2006): 321-341.
• George, Bridging the Gap, 61-70.

Private diplomacy (2/8)

• Bruce Jentleson and Christopher Whytock, "Who 'Won' Libya?" International Security 30 (Winter 2005/06): 47-86.
• Peter Neumann, "Negotiating With Terrorists," Foreign Affairs 86 (January/February 2007): 128-138.

Public diplomacy (2/13)

• Christopher Ross, "Public Diplomacy Comes of Age," The Washington Quarterly 25 (Spring 2002): 75-83.
• Government Accountability Office, "U.S. Public Diplomacy," GAO-06-707T, http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d06707t.pdf, May 2006.
• Joseph Nye, "Public Diplomacy in the 21st Century" The Globalist, http://www.theglobalist.com/DBWeb/
  printStoryId.aspx?StoryId=3885, May 10, 2004.

Multilateral diplomacy (2/20)

• Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth, "International Relations Theory and the Case Against Unilateralism," Perspectives on Politics 3 (September 2005): 509-524.
• Ivo Daalder and James Lindsey, "Democracies of the World, Unite!" The American Interest 2 (January/February 2007)
• Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads, 155-195.

2/22: POLICY OPTIONS PAPER DUE

PART III: How is Actual Policymaking Different From What You've Just Learned?

American values, public opinion, and the media (2/22)

• George Kennan, "Diplomacy in the Modern Age," in American Diplomacy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
• Richard Eichenberg, "Victory Has Many Friends: U.S. Public Opinion and the Use of Force, 1981-2005," International Security 30 (Summer 2005): 140-177.
• Page and Bouton, The Foreign Policy Disconnect, pp. 1-78, 100-138, 174-246.

Congress (2/27)

• Aaron Friedberg, "Is the U.S. Capable of Acting Strategically? Congress and the President." The Washington Quarterly 14 (Winter 1991): 5-23.
• Robert Putnam, "Diplomacy and Domestic Politics: the Logic of Two-level Games," International Organization 42 (Summer 1988): 427-460.
• James Lindsey, "Congress and Foreign Policy: Why the Hill Matters," Political Science Quarterly 107 (Winter 1992/93): 607-628.
• Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann, "When Congress Checks Out," Foreign Affairs 85 (November/December 2006): 67-82.

3/1-3/6: TO BE DETERMINED

Interest groups (3/8)

• Stephen M. Walt and John Mearsheimer, "The Israel Lobby." The London Review of Books 28 (March 23, 2006).
• Ka Zeng, "Trade Structure and the Effectiveness of America's 'Aggressively Unilateral' Trade Policy," International Studies Quarterly 46 (March 2002): 93-115.
• Daniel Kono, "Optimal Obfuscation: Democracy and Trade Policy Transparency," American Political Science Review 100 (August 2006): 369-384.

3/13: POLICY SIMULATION I: MOCK CONGRESSIONAL HEARINGS

Bureaucratic politics (3/15-3/29)

• Amy B. Zegart, Flawed by Design, 1-109, 163-239.
• James Q. Wilson, Bureaucracy 1-28, 95-110, 179-195.
• Rajiv Chandrasekaran, "Early U.S. Missteps in the Green Zone," Washington Post, September 17, 2006, p. A1. Accessible at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/
  2006/09/16/AR2006091600193_pf.html.

3/27: POLICY SIMULATION II: MOCK NSC MEETINGS

Ideas, experts and policy entrepreneurs (4/3-4/5)

• Anne-Marie Slaughter, "The Real New World Order," Foreign Affairs 76 (September/October 1997): 183-197.
• Philip E. Tetlock, "Theory-Driven Reasoning About Plausible Pasts and Probable Futures in World Politics: Are We Prisoners of Our Preconceptions?" American Journal of Political Science 43 (April 1999): 335-366.
• Richard Haass, "Think Tanks and US Foreign Policy: A Policymaker's Perspective," U.S. Foreign Policy Agenda 7 (November 2002): 5-8.
• George, Bridging the Gap, pp. 115-146.
• Chaim Kaufmann, "Threat Inflation and the Failure of the Marketplace of Ideas: The Selling of the Iraq War," International Security 29 (Summer 2004): 5-48.
• David Rothkopf, "Inside the Committee that Runs the World," Foreign Policy 147 (March/April 2005): 30-41.

4/10: ENTREPRENEURIAL OP-ED DUE

The psychology of the policymaking process (4/10)

• Isaiah Berlin, "On Political Judgment," The New York Review of Books, October 3, 1996.
• David Patrick Houghton, "The Role of Analogical Reasoning in Novel Foreign-Policy Situations," British Journal of Political Science 26 (October 1996): 523-552.
• Stephen B. Redd, "The Influence of Advisers on Foreign Policy Decision Making," Journal of Conflict Resolution 46 (June 2002): 335-364.
• Daniel Kahneman and Jonathan Renshon, "Why Hawks Win," Foreign Policy 158 (January/February 2007): 34-39.

4/12: POLICY SIMULATION III: MEET THE PRESS

PART IV. Today's policy debates

Global economic development: (4/17)

• Jeffrey Sachs, An End to Poverty, 1-25, 51-89, 188-368.
• William Easterly, The White Man's Burden, pp. 3-209, 240-265, 345-388.
• Fukyama, America at the Crossroads, pp. 114-154.
• Nancy Birdsall, Dani Rodrik, and Arvind Subramanian, "How to Help Poor Countries," Foreign Affairs 84 (July/August 2005): 136-152.

4/19: POLICY EXERCISE III: A DEBATE ABOUT ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

Debating grand strategy, redux (4/24)

• Anatol Lieven and John Hulsman, Ethical Realism, 53-181.
• Fukyama, America at the Crossroads, pp. 114-154.
• G. John Ikenberry and Anne-Marie Slaughter, Forging a World of Liberty Under Law: U.S. National Security in the 21st Century, excerpts.

The ethics of statecraft (4/26)

• Samantha Power, "Bystanders to Genocide," Atlantic Monthly, September 2001. Accessible at http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200109/power-genocide.
• Gerard Prunier, "The Politics of Death in Darfur," Current History, May 2006, pp. 195-202.
• Gilbert Burnham, Riyadh Lafta, Shannon Doocy, and Les Roberts, "Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional cluster sample survey," The Lancet 364 (October 11, 2006): 1857-1864.
• Mark Lilla, "The Lure of Syracuse," New York Review of Books, September 20, 2001.

4/30: POLICY OPTIONS PAPER REDUX DUE