Freshman and Sophomore Programs

American Foreign Policy and the Challenges of the Twenty-First Century Instructor(s): Stephen Stedman Prerequisites: None
Upon taking office in January 2009, President Obama confronted a world in crisis: wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, an Iran bent on mastering the technology necessary to produce nuclear weapons, an arc of crisis from Sudan to Pakistan, all amidst the worst global economic downturn since the Great Depression. Transnational threats such as climate change, terrorism, nuclear proliferation, pandemic disease, and failed states require unprecedented levels of effective international cooperation. International institutions that are supposed to help supply that cooperation reflect a world of 60 years ago, and need to be transformed. At the same time, power in the international system is diffuse and uncertain. America's unipolar moment may have passed, but no one is sure what will replace it. In this course we will study the foreign policy challenges and choices facing the Obama administration, as well as various domestic constraints on the making of foreign policy, including public opinion, Congress, and an increasingly unwieldy bureaucracy. Topics will include climate change and energy, nuclear policy, biological security, failing states and regional conflict, terrorism, and the global economic crisis. We will study the ongoing crises in the broader Middle East. Finally, we will examine how the changing distribution of power in the international system may provide opportunities or pose barriers to effective international cooperation. In addition to the readings, students will research and write a short policy memorandum on a topic the instructor designates, and will participate in a 48-hour simulation at the end of the course.

Stephen John Stedman is director of the Ford Dorsey Program in International Policy Studies at Stanford University, where he is also a senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and professor of political science, by courtesy. In 2003-2004 Professor Stedman was Research Director of the United Nations High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change and was a principal drafter of the Panel's report, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility. In 2005 he served as Assistant Secretary General and Special Advisor to the Secretary General of the United Nations, with responsibility for working with governments to adopt the Panel's recommendations on strengthening collective security and for implementing key changes within the United Nations Secretariat, including the creation of a Peacebuilding Support Office, a Counter Terrorism Task Force, and a Policy Committee that acts as a cabinet to the Secretary General. His most recent book, coauthored with Carlos Pascual of the Brookings Institution, and Bruce Jones of New York University, is Power and Responsibility: Creating International Order in an Era of Transnational Threats (Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 2009), of which Brent Scowcroft wrote, "the vision, ideas, and proposals in this book have the potential to redeem American foreign policy."