A Curriculum for Foreign Policy Expertise

What training is required to become an expert in foreign policy?

“The study of history offers no manual of instructions that can be applied automatically; history teaches by analogy… Each generation must determine for itself which circumstances are in fact comparable.” -Henry Kissinger

Foreign policy is unique among fields of public policy in that there are no educational requirements necessary to become a leader in the field. There is no body of tradecraft, professional skills, or standard training regimens to prepare the next generation of leaders.

The State Department should aspire to be the most skilled policymaking institution on the planet, one obsessed with policy success. To achieve this standard, it must develop a curriculum that can clearly distinguish the expert from the amateur. Anything short of that exposes US foreign policy to ineffectiveness and marginalizes the role of diplomacy in the national security apparatus.

This article explores the idea of a core curriculum for the State Department.

As always, I would love to hear from you about concepts, articles, and books you think should be required reading for all diplomats. I’ll post some of your ideas next week.

The Insufficient Status Quo

The Foreign Service Institute (FSI) bills itself as “the U.S. government’s premier foreign affairs training provider.” It is an impressive institution in many ways, offering over 800 courses across a wide array of competencies.

Yet these offerings amount to less than the sum of their parts. Courses such as “Negotiation Techniques” are only a few days, often taught by outside consultants. The curriculum is not standardized. No process exists to encourage best practices from training are actually used on the job — nor are lessons from the job necessarily included in training. This is not a recipe for success.

A report authored by President Biden’s Deputy National Security Advisor, Jon Finer, criticizes State’s “lack of commitment to training and professional development.” New skills are rarely celebrated by superiors. Time away from one’s desk is discouraged, viewed more as vacation than vital professional development. The prevailing attitude at State is that talented leaders don’t need training. The result is an endless procession of reports by all who evaluate the State Department suggesting that its training regime is insufficient (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and more). 

The absence of standards for foreign policy expertise helps explain why so many of State Department’s leadership positions are filled by non-career political appointees, including virtually all geopolitically significant ambassadorships, something that would be unthinkable at the Pentagon or Langley. The lack of a rigorous core curriculum contributes to the perception that the State Department is chronically incapable of exercising its role as lead author of US foreign policy.

Congress, to its credit, has sought to change this state of affairs. In January 2023, it passed bipartisan legislation that required the State Department to develop a core curriculum and upgrade FSI by creating a provost and a board of advisors to oversee its training program. The resulting core curriculum announced by the State Department later that year was little more than a broad set of voluntary recommendations that validated the existing buffet of training options. A provost and board of advisors at FSI have yet to be announced, and it appears that State’s leadership is resistant to the imposition.

Four Components of Foreign Policy Expertise

A standard definition of ‘a profession’ is a paid occupation, especially one that involves prolonged training and a formal qualification. What should such training entail for the profession of foreign policy?

To answer this question, I have surveyed dozens of reform reports, syllabi, and course descriptions in the field of US foreign policy. I have organized the field into four main categories: 1) foreign policy history and contemporary issues; 2) bureaucracy, management, and culture; 3) academic theory, and; 4) skills of decision-making. Each of these is important, but they receive disproportionate attention. And in some respects, the least emphasized categories are the most impactful aspects of expertise. Let’s briefly review each category:

1) US Foreign Policy History and Contemporary Issues

Deepening one’s knowledge about US foreign policy history and current events is the most common recommendation to improve expertise in US foreign policy, and it is the most common content in foreign policy graduate programs. A typical syllabus might select a handful of historical moments vital for understanding foreign policy: the establishment of the Westphalian system of state sovereignty, early US isolationism, WWI and WWII, Bretton Woods, Korea, Vietnam, or Iraq. It might also select a few contemporary issues to focus on, such as human rights, multilateral institutions, terrorism, nuclear weapons, or foreign assistance.

This training mirrors and informs the approach many policy practitioners take when they arrive in a new job and take on a new portfolio: grab a few books on the history of the region and issues at hand. While a survey shows that “area studies” is valued by national security leaders, there’s no expectation that policymakers must master the history of the countries to which they are assigned. Instead, the job requires participants to be knowledgeable about current US policy. This type of knowledge is easiest to pick up on the job.

Whether historical or current, I call this the “memorization” approach to foreign policy training. Having access to many facts is important, but Wikipedia is an incomplete basis for developing expertise.

2) Bureaucracy, Management, and Culture

Many soft skills are necessary to exercise leadership within a government bureaucracy. As State’s “core competencies” suggest, success in foreign policy requires a keen understanding of how to navigate internal politics. If one wants to be influential, one must understand how the bureaucracy functions, inspire the confidence of others, and exercise effective management of people and projects.

Colin Powell is credited with prioritizing such leadership training at the Department during his tenure as Secretary of State, though the Government Accountability Office criticized State for failing to evaluate the efficacy of such training.

The limitation of this approach is that these skills offer little for the content of foreign policy. One can be a brilliant manager, but steer policy in a completely ineffective direction.

3) Academic Theory and Method

Some classes in foreign policy expose students to theories of international relations - categorized by academics as a subfield of political science. 

Most discussions of international relations theory begin with realism. Realism remains the hegemonic perspective in government, and is a powerful lens through which to understand the international system. Yet many students come away with a skewed perspective, believing that realism is the correct theory of international relations, and are never exposed to alternative theories like liberalism and constructivism. This is a shame because decades of research since realism’s introduction in the 1940s have eroded many of its foundational assumptions.

These grand theories of international relations are useful lenses through which to view macro processes of international relations, but the view from 50,000 feet is unhelp for the vast majority of day-to-day policymaking. These theories have gone out of fashion in academia in favor of what many refer to as mid-level theory, which focuses on specific behaviors of states rather than the function of the system at large. For instance, such scholarship can teach policymakers when peaceful nuclear assistance affects nuclear proliferation or the conditions under which peacekeeping or mediation work.

Unfortunately, mid-level research seldom makes an appearance in foreign policy curricula. Nor does this scholarship frequently penetrate the walls of the Foggy Bottom. One of the challenges is that without methodological training, this scholarship is hard to understand or evaluate, especially if it is quantitative.

Just like we demand that Treasury Department officials understand complex economics, and public health officials to understand epidemiology, we should expect Department of State officials to understand (and perhaps even contribute to) complex international relations research.

4) Policymaking Skills

This last category is perhaps the most neglected in foreign policy. Whereas the intelligence community develops and trains analytic tradecraft standards, and the military does the same with doctrine, nothing similar exists for foreign policy decision-makers.

All policymakers should develop a firm grasp of intelligence analysis and a variety of qualitative and quantitative analytical techniques. Policymakers must have a solid foundation in causation, counterfactual thinking, selection bias, and confounding variables. Such concepts are prerequisites for understanding new technologies such as artificial intelligence.

Further, effective policies are more than mere wishes; they require actionable and realistic plans to achieve discrete goals. Policymakers should study strategy development methods and engage with case studies of success and failure. They must also command the basics of project management and budgeting. Great policy ideas often fail because of poor implementation.

Finally, all policymakers must be experts in monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) techniques. All policies should include metrics for success. Monitoring plans should be closely linked with strategies for implementation and discipline of a team to ensure each stage of a policy implementation is successful. Real expertise requires a culture that invests in feedback and learning. 

What Next?

Foreign policy expertise must draw from all four of these categories. Different career tracks or specializations might emphasize different distributions of these skills, but the above categories form a shared basis within our institutions of foreign policy.

A shared conception of expertise should direct every stage of training, execution, and evaluation of foreign policy. Expertise should steer pre-professional educational training (e.g. master’s programs in foreign policy), hiring standards, professional training, the day-to-day practice and standard operating procedures of foreign policy, and performance evaluations used for merit and promotion.

As always, this is intended as a starting point for discussion. I’d love to hear from you what you think I’ve missed. Please leave a comment or shoot me an email. I’m especially interested in articles or books that you think are vital knowledge for foreign policy practitioners.

Next week I plan to offer a first draft of a reading list for Foreign Policy Expertise which touches on each of these topics, and will share your recommendations.