EVERYTHING I NEED TO KNOW ABOUT FOREIGN POLICY I DIDN'T LEARN IN COLLEGE

I'll be upfront - my categorization of foreign policy - dividing its primarily between Wilsonian idealists and anti-Wilsonians (most important among them being the Realists) differs greatly from what I learned from soon-to-be Assistant National Security Advisor Jospeh Nye in his popular introductory course on international relations. For Nye, the essential debate among foreign policy theorists was the relevance of the nation-state. On the one hand, those who believed that the prime actors in international relations were nation-states, and that their prime motivation was to promote their national interest were termed "Realists". On the other side were those who argued that mulitnational, transnational and subnational actors had emerged as more relevant than nation-states, and thus foreign policy thinkers should instead rely on transnational mechanisms of promoting global stability. These were termed the Global Interdepence school. The take home message from Nye in each lecture was "the answer probably lies somewhere in the middle." In other words, the "Realists" downplayed the impact of globalization and the decline of the nation-state, while the Global Interpendence camp overplayed these factors.

The debate over American foreign policy was for the past decade framed in these terms. The Globalists advocated American involvement in multilateral ventures - pursuing global stability through an expansion of international political and economic institutions. The "Realists" on the other hand, fought a rear-guard action against these initiatives, arguing instead for a more unilateralist American approach. In U.S. politics, Clinton and the Dems leaned more towards the Globalists, and the Republican Congress leaned towards the "Realists". In fact, both sides were Realists in the sense that they agreed that American foreign policy goals should be limited, nonideological, and privilege global stability. Their disagreement boiled down to a debate over means - with the Globalist Realists having more confidence in multilateral strategies and international institutions, and the Nation-State Realists having more confidence in unilateral strategies.

What the foreign policy establishment's debate failed to offer was a positive vision of international affairs. Were the levels of tryranny and misery in the world a given fact or responsive to a more ambitious agenda? What were the trade-offs in centering American foreign policy on short-term stability and diplomatic consensus as opposed to long-term political freedom and economic development? These questions hovered at the periphery of American foreign policy - and the foreign policy establishment would prefer it that they remained there. However, one of the critical lessons of 9/11 is that we cannot leave foreign policy to the Realist establishment. We desperately need an international analysis that takes into account the ideological conflicts that exist off the Realist road-map. There is a role for the foreign policy establishment, especially when it comes to analyzing the efficacy of various means (Nye is quite accurate in his descriptive view of the world - we are in a transitory phase where effective foreign policy must rely both on unilateral and multilateral initiatives). However, we can no longer continue to privilege the means of diplomacy over their ends.