The Policy Crucible: How Top MA Programs Cast a Long Shadow on US Foreign Policy

• In Event: US Foreign Policy

Abstract

This study is built from qualitative interviews with instructors at elite foreign policy MA programs, exploring how future national security professionals are taught in light of recent psychological scholarship on decision-making, uncertainty management, and active learning.

National security scholarship has long recognized the role played by individuals within the foreign policy process. We have delved deeply into individual psychology and personality differences, and just as deeply into the power of professional socialization, institutional culture, and group dynamics. However, this narrative omits a critically fundamental period of intellectual development: Professional education. A large majority of current NSC staff, for instance, holds MA degrees or higher – most from the same set of elite institutions. Yet there has been almost no systematic study of this educational process (even though, ironically, many scholars would see this period as the most critical in their own development).

This study seeks to explore how national security policymakers are taught, in light of recent psychological research on learning, decision-making, and uncertainty. The core of the project is a series of interviews with faculty/students in elite MA programs (both military and civilian), structured as an exploration of various core tensions in education and intellectual development: Cognitive complexity vs. the need for parsimony, effective argument vs. engaging with uncertainty, use vs. misuse of historical analogy, etc. How are we training future policymakers – as thinkers and substantive experts? And can this window offer a chance to perhaps better address some of the traps in collective reasoning that have proven so intractable at the professional level?

Author

• Christopher Ray, George Washington University