Exploring Foreign Policy through Different Perspectives and Site Visits around DC

Spring break has passed and the semester is more than half over. It has been incredibly rewarding to teach this wonderful group of students. So far, this semester our Gap Year Seminar on International Affairs has met with U.S. Ambassador Barbara Stephenson, Senior U.S. Foreign Service Officer and President of the American Foreign Service Association, for an outstanding lecture on new threat-set facing the United States and the world in the Twenty-First Century. Subsequently, we have been exploring the alternative responses that U.S. foreign policy may provide to these new challenges. We have also studied the constitutional debate over the roles of Congress and the Executive Branch in the formulation and implementation of foreign policy, as well as the main schools of thought that seek to guide our foreign policy.

While considering the various philosophies competing to influence U.S. foreign policy, we have visited the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum where we had a seminar session with an expert on the international law of genocide, with a Holocaust survivor from The Netherlands, and toured the Permanent Exhibition. We have also met with representatives from The Heritage Foundation, the World Service Authority, the Center for the National Interest (formerly known as the Nixon Center), the Cato Institute, Citizens for Global Solutions, and the Center for Teaching Peace, all of whom offered sharply different perspectives on how to respond to the current international challenges facing the United States and the world. We are capping this section with a class discussion about the schools of thought in U.S. foreign policy, for which every student has chosen his or her preferred school of thought and written an essay making the strongest possible case for it based on the lectures, guest speaker presentations, and required course readings. We are all enjoying this major class debate that is now going in to its third phase this week. It has been both enlightening and enjoyable

-Dr. Christian Maisch, AU Gap Professor, Spring 2017