Chapter 9 Review questions

  1. What is foreign policy analysis fundamentally concerned with?
  2. Which is the best approach to foreign policy analysis, and why?
  3. Which level of foreign policy analysis makes most sense, and why?
  4. Should foreign policy be confined to foreign ministries or state departments (as Realists and International Society scholars argue) or should it extend to groups in society as well (as Liberals argue)?
  5. How useful is the RAM approach for explaining the US decision to go to war in the Persian Gulf in 1991?
  6. Can theories of foreign policymaking be applied in making foreign policy decisions or can they only be used to explain those decisions after they have been made?
  7. How skeptical should we be about the capacities of foreign policy-makers?
  8. Is foreign policymaking basically a matter of pursuing and defending the national interest of states, as realists argue, or is it more than that?
  9. How far should governments rely on think tanks in foreign policymaking?
  10. Does the notion of foreign policy assume that governments are rational?
  11. How do Stephen Walt (defensive realist) and John Mearsheimer (offensive realist), respectively, predict that the US is likely to respond to the ‘Rise of China’? Who do you agree most with and why?
  12. To what extent did Donald Trump change US foreign policy? What constraints did he face and were they effective?
  13. Recent scholarship claims that the characteristics and life experiences of individual leaders matter for the foreign policies they pursue. Discuss.
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