[From the syllabus] This course is not designed as a primer for future foreign policy-makers or Department of State personnel. Nor is this course primarily designed to teach you the "basic facts" of U.S. foreign policy, whether historical or contemporary. Instead, this course is designed to you help you develop the intellectual and analytical "tools" and/or modes of thinking necessary for understanding the nature and implications of the American foreign policy process. To do so requires that you learn something about theory, method, and history. It also requires you to think with an open, but critical mind. I cannot understate this latter point, for if you insist on interpreting U.S. foreign policy through a fixed and (almost certainly) narrow lens, you will learn very little in this course. This is not to imply that my objective is to get all students to "think like me" or to agree with single point of view. It is not. Rather, it is to say that there are no clear-cut, easy answers about something as complex as the foreign policy-making process. A primary objective of this course, then, is to develop your capacity to be critical, thoughtful, and informed observers of American foreign policy and of world politics more generally. To read the rest of the class syllabus, click here [PDF version].