Clearly, I’ve been in a critical mood this week
This week in non-Foreign Policy publications I take a shiv to both American academics and American policymakers. On the academic side, my latest essay in The National Interest online explains why the traits that make one a good international relations scholar are not-so-good traits for a good international relations practitioner: To borrow from Isaiah Berlin, ...
This week in non-Foreign Policy publications I take a shiv to both American academics and American policymakers.
This week in non-Foreign Policy publications I take a shiv to both American academics and American policymakers.
On the academic side, my latest essay in The National Interest online explains why the traits that make one a good international relations scholar are not-so-good traits for a good international relations practitioner:
To borrow from Isaiah Berlin, academic scholars of international relations are rewarded for being hedgehogs—i.e., knowing one big thing. Scholarship is thought to be “interesting” when an academic generates a really big and provocative idea that challenges conventional understandings of big questions about international relations. The incentive structure of the academy also rewards the academic for repeating and rewriting their big idea as often as possible. Are these big ideas right? That’s almost beside the point. As long as their progenitors are alive, ideas never die in international-relations theory (when they do die, someone will eventually dust it off and repackage the idea under their name).
On the other hand, today’s policymakers ain’t what they used to be — a point I make in a commentary for Marketplace:
The dirty little secret inside the Beltway is that international economics either scares or bores America’s foreign policy community. Although foreign affairs analysts understand on some level that economics is important, they see it as distinct from geopolitics. As a result, very few of them have the necessary experience or training to talk about international economic matters.
It was not always this way. During the Cold War, some of America’s greatest foreign policy minds — Dean Acheson, Walt Rostow, George Schultz or James Baker — had substantive backgrounds in economics, finance or business. This allowed them to navigate the waters between high politics and high finance with a minimum of fuss.
[So, to sum up your mood this week: America’s foreign policy community stinks!!–ed. I don’t think that highly of you, either. Actually, it’s worse than that — after reading this Jacob T. Levy post, I’m not entirely convinced that the academic side of IR should necessarily strive for policy relevance.]
Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast. Twitter: @dandrezner
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