foreign policy notes
American Approach to Foreign Policy
The Politics of U.S. Foreign Policy / The International Policy Environment
• Foreign policy embraces the goals that the nation’s officials seek to attain abroad, values that motivate these goals, and the means of instruments used to pursue the goals.
• Today we try to understand how and why the interaction of goals, values, and means shapes American foreign policy, sometimes stimulating change and other times constraining America’s ability to respond innovatively to new challenges.
• Why are the values and goals underlying American foreign policy resistant to change?
• Slide 2 Political scientist James N. Rosenau first came up with a framework that creates five sources explaining why states behave as they do in international politics. Together these groups help us think systematically about the politics shaping American foreign policy. o External (global) environment o The societal environment of the nation o The governmental setting in which policy making occurs o The roles occupied by policymakers o The individual characteristics of foreign policy-making elites
• These five sources collectively shape what the U.S. does abroad. Thus, these sources can be seen as the inputs to the foreign policy-making process, while the actions the U.S. pursues abroad can be thought of as the outputs of the foreign policy-making process.
• Rosenau’s framework also shows us how policymakers operate with constraint, because each source is constrained by the sources above it. No source category by itself fully determines policy behavior—the categories are interrelated and collectively determine foreign policy decisions
• We can think of the foreign policy making process as the intervening variable that links foreign policy inputs (the five sources, the independent variables) into outputs (U.S. foreign policy action, the dependent variable)
• Although it is sometimes difficult to separate the process from the
The Politics of U.S. Foreign Policy / The International Policy Environment
• Foreign policy embraces the goals that the nation’s officials seek to attain abroad, values that motivate these goals, and the means of instruments used to pursue the goals.
• Today we try to understand how and why the interaction of goals, values, and means shapes American foreign policy, sometimes stimulating change and other times constraining America’s ability to respond innovatively to new challenges.
• Why are the values and goals underlying American foreign policy resistant to change?
• Slide 2 Political scientist James N. Rosenau first came up with a framework that creates five sources explaining why states behave as they do in international politics. Together these groups help us think systematically about the politics shaping American foreign policy. o External (global) environment o The societal environment of the nation o The governmental setting in which policy making occurs o The roles occupied by policymakers o The individual characteristics of foreign policy-making elites
• These five sources collectively shape what the U.S. does abroad. Thus, these sources can be seen as the inputs to the foreign policy-making process, while the actions the U.S. pursues abroad can be thought of as the outputs of the foreign policy-making process.
• Rosenau’s framework also shows us how policymakers operate with constraint, because each source is constrained by the sources above it. No source category by itself fully determines policy behavior—the categories are interrelated and collectively determine foreign policy decisions
• We can think of the foreign policy making process as the intervening variable that links foreign policy inputs (the five sources, the independent variables) into outputs (U.S. foreign policy action, the dependent variable)
• Although it is sometimes difficult to separate the process from the