fp21 believes the State Department should be the most skilled and well-trained policymaking institution on the planet, one obsessed with policy success. To achieve this standard, it must develop a curriculum that can clearly distinguish the expert from the amateur. Such a body of knowledge must inform every stage of the foreign policy: the process by which decisions are made and diplomacy conducted, hiring and promotion processes, training, and more.
Yet foreign policy is unique among fields of public policy in that there are no educational requirements necessary to become a leader in the field. There is no body of tradecraft, professional skills, or standard training regimens to prepare the next generation of leaders. This absence of professionalization makes US diplomacy less effective, invites inexperienced outsiders into positions of power and influence, and contributes to diplomacy’s marginalization in the national security apparatus.
This page develops the idea of a core curriculum for the State Department. Scroll to read more, or select one of the four buttons to jump to a section.
THE STATUS QUO
The Foreign Service Institute (FSI) bills itself as “the U.S. government’s premier foreign affairs training provider.” It is an impressive institution in many ways, offering over 800 courses across a wide array of competencies.
Yet its offerings amount to less than the sum of their parts. Required training for new employees is limited, focused more on administrative functions and soft skills than substantive knowledge. Courses offered later in one’s career such as “Negotiation Techniques” are only a few days, often taught by outside consultants. Longer-term training is available only to a select few, but the curriculum is not standardized. No process exists to encourage best practices from training are actually used on the job — nor are lessons from the job systematically included in training.
A report authored by President Biden’s Deputy National Security Advisor, Jon Finer, criticizes State’s “lack of commitment to training and professional development.” New skills are rarely celebrated by superiors. Time away from one’s desk is discouraged, viewed more as vacation than vital professional development. The prevailing attitude at State is that talented leaders don’t need training. The result is an endless procession of reports by all who evaluate the State Department suggesting that its training regime is insufficient (examples include: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and more).
The absence of standards for foreign policy expertise helps explain why so many of State Department’s leadership positions are filled by non-career political appointees (see image below), including virtually all geopolitically significant ambassadorships, something that would be unthinkable at the Pentagon or Langley. The lack of a rigorous core curriculum contributes to the perception that the State Department is chronically incapable of exercising its role as lead author of US foreign policy.
Congress, to its credit, has sought to change this state of affairs. In January 2023, it passed bipartisan legislation that required the State Department to upgrade FSI by creating a provost and a board of advisors to oversee its training program. The Department responded by announcing a core curriculum, though it was little more than a broad set of voluntary recommendations that largely validated the existing buffet of training options. A provost and board of advisors at FSI have yet to be announced. Some progress has been made, and more promised, but it appears halting.
A THEORY OF CURRICULUM
A standard definition of a ‘profession’ is a paid occupation, especially one that involves prolonged training and a formal qualification. What should such training entail for the profession of foreign policy?
To answer this question, we have surveyed dozens of reform reports, syllabi, and course descriptions in the field of US foreign policy. We have organized the field into four main categories: 1) foreign policy history and contemporary issues; 2) bureaucracy, management, and culture; 3) academic theory, and; 4) skills of decision-making. Each of these is important, but they receive disproportionate attention in the hallways of Foggy Bottom. And in some respects, we judge that the least emphasized categories are the most impactful aspects of expertise.
1) US Foreign Policy History and Contemporary Issues
Deepening one’s knowledge about US foreign policy history and current events is the most common recommendation to improve expertise in US foreign policy, and it is the most common content in foreign policy graduate programs. A typical syllabus might select a handful of historical moments vital for understanding foreign policy: the establishment of the Westphalian system of state sovereignty, early US isolationism, US involvement in WWI and WWII, Bretton Woods, Korea, Vietnam, or Iraq. Syllabi also typically select a handful of contemporary issues to investigate, such as human rights, multilateral institutions, terrorism, nuclear weapons, or climate diplomacy.
This training mirrors and informs the approach many policy practitioners take when they arrive in a new job and take on a new portfolio: grab a few books on the history of the region and issues at hand, and discuss the issues with other intelligent people. While a survey from 2014 shows that “area studies” is valued by national security leaders, there’s no expectation that policymakers must master the history of the countries to which they are assigned, nor any test of their knowledge. Instead, the system encourages participants to be knowledgeable about current US policy. This type of knowledge is easiest to pick up on the job.
Whether historical or current, one might call this the “memorization” approach to foreign policy training. Having access to many facts is important, but Wikipedia is an incomplete basis for developing expertise.
2) Bureaucracy, Management, and Culture
Many soft skills are necessary to exercise leadership within a government bureaucracy. If one wants to be influential, one must understand how the bureaucracy functions, inspire the confidence of others, and exercise effective management of people and projects. These skills are emphasized in State’s “core competencies” that guide promotion evaluations..
Colin Powell is credited with prioritizing leadership training at the Department during his tenure as Secretary of State and was lauded for investing in the culture and institution of the Department. Yet it is difficult to judge the extent to which this training has made a difference, and the Government Accountability Office has criticized State for failing to evaluate the efficacy of such training.
The limitation of this approach is that these skills are necessary but insufficient for foreign policy leadership. One can be a brilliant manager, but steer policy in a destructive direction.
3) Academic Theory and Method
Some classes in foreign policy expose students to theories of international relations (IR) - which is categorized by academics as a subfield of political science. Theories of IR are important not because they are “true,” but because they help direct our attention to the factors we believe to be most important in making sense of an infinitely complex reality.
Most discussions of IR theory begin with realism. Realism remains the hegemonic perspective in government, and is a powerful lens through which to understand the international system. Yet many students come away with a skewed perspective, believing that realism is the correct theory of international relations, and are never exposed to alternative theories like liberalism or constructivism. This is a shame because decades of research since realism’s introduction in the 1940s have eroded many of its foundational assumptions.
These grand theories of IR are useful lenses through which to view macro processes of world politics, but the view from 50,000 feet is unhelp for the vast majority of day-to-day policymaking because the variables these theories draw attention to are not easily manipulated. These theories have gone out of fashion in academia in favor of what many refer to as mid-level theory, which focuses on specific behaviors of states rather than the function of the system at large. For instance, mid-level theory can help policymakers when peaceful nuclear assistance affects nuclear proliferation or the conditions under which peacekeeping or mediation work.
Mid-level research seldom makes an appearance in foreign policy curricula. Nor does this scholarship frequently penetrate the walls of the Foggy Bottom. One of the challenges is that without methodological training, this scholarship is hard to understand or evaluate, especially if it is quantitative in nature.
Just like professionals at the Treasury Department are expected to understand complex economics, or public health officials are assumed to understand epidemiology, we should expect Department of State officials to understand (and perhaps even contribute to) complex IR research.
4) Policymaking Skills
This last category is perhaps the most neglected in foreign policy. Whereas the intelligence community develops and trains analytic tradecraft standards, and the military does the same with doctrine, nothing similar exists for foreign policy decision-makers.
Skills associated with conducting analysis and designing high-quality strategies should be a central emphasis for all policymakers. Policymakers should develop a firm grasp of intelligence analysis and a variety of qualitative and quantitative analytical techniques. They should develop a solid foundation in causation, counterfactual thinking, selection bias, and confounding variables. Such concepts are prerequisites for understanding emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence.
Effective policies are more than mere wishes; they require actionable and realistic plans to achieve discrete goals. Policymakers should study strategy development methods and engage with case studies of success and failure. They must also build mastery in project management and budgeting techniques. Great policy ideas often fail because of poor implementation.
Finally, policymakers must be experts in monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) techniques. All policies should include metrics for success. Monitoring plans should be closely linked with strategies for implementation and discipline of a team to ensure each stage of a policy implementation is successful. Real expertise requires a culture that invests in feedback and learning.
Bringing It All Together
A shared conception of expertise should direct every stage of training, execution, and evaluation of foreign policy. Expertise should steer pre-professional educational training (e.g. master’s programs in foreign policy), hiring standards, professional training, the day-to-day practice and standard operating procedures of foreign policy, and performance evaluations used for merit and promotion.
Foreign policy expertise must draw from all four of these categories. Different career tracks or specializations might emphasize different distributions of these skills, but the above categories form a common basis of understanding within our institutions of foreign policy. These categories are only a starting point – a framework – for developing an actual curriculum for foreign policy expertise. We go deeper in the reading list below.
THE CURRICULUM READING LIST
What knowledge should serve as a necessary foundation for policymakers?
This suggested reading list departs from the norm in that we are focused on a broad view of the skills and knowledge a policymaker will require. It thus includes a lot of social science, method, and political theory (including ethics), in addition to more traditionally valued subjects like history. fp21 advocates for the field of foreign policy to be “less art, more science,” but both science and the humanities are important for today’s policymakers to excel.
We do not intend this list to be the definitive curriculum for foreign policy expertise. Instead, we hope this list a starting point for a deeper conversation about the skills and knowledge necessary to prepare the next generation of foreign policy practitioners for success.
To navigate the reading list, expand the accordion items for a list of resources, or explore the embedded Airtable database below.
The (in)Definitive Reading List for Foreign Policy Expertise
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History and historical data is the starting point for any discussion of foreign policy. Learning about the method by which historiography is conducted helps us understand the strengths and limits of historical research and how it can be used to make better foreign policy.
Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers, Richard Neustadt and Earnest May
Thinking About History, Sarah Maza
Analogies at War, Yuen Foong Khong
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There are more books on the history of US foreign policy (and the countries with which we interact) than one could read in 100 lifetimes. Here are a handful to get one started. We should note that among the dozens of books recommended to me in this category, not a single one was written by a woman. This should serve as a potent reminder that our views of history are inextricably tied to power and identity.
Twentieth Century: The History of the World, 1901 to 2000, J.M. Roberts
America in the World: A History of U.S. Diplomacy and Foreign Policy, Robert Zoellick
A Concise History of U.S. Foreign Policy, Joyce Kaufman
From Colony to Superpower, George Herring
Diplomacy, Sir Harold Nicolson
American Diplomacy 1900-1950, by George Kennan
Diplomacy, Henry Kissinger
A Short History, Department of State Historian’s Office
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The scientific method is a powerful approach to improve the quality of the evidence we produce. This category emphasizes the value of causal logic and the four hurdles necessary to assume causation, and it also teaches us how to leverage comparison and counterfactual explanations. All policy decisions can be seen as implicit hypotheses about causation — causation and hypothesis testing help us distinguish between truth and fiction. This list features both quant and qual.
The Fundamentals of Social Science Research, Kellstead, Whitten, Tuch
Case Study and Theory Development in the Social Sciences, George and Bennett
Foreign Policy Should be Evidence Based, Spokojny and Scherer
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Great decision-makers understand the conditions under which intuitive expertise forms, and appreciate the way that misleading biases accrue in human judgment.
Conditions for Intuitive Expertise: A Failure to Disagree, Kahneman and Klein
Perception and Misperception in International Politics, Robert Jervis
Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman
The Behaviorist Revolution in International Relations, Hafner-Burton, et. al.
Hawkish Biases and Group Decision Making, Kurtzer, et. al.
Political Psychology in International Relations, Kertzer and Tingley
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The intelligence community invests a great deal in propagating strong analytical standards, but the foreign policy community lacks similar training or standards. This is a dangerous state of affairs. This provides fertile soil for policymakers to disregard strong analytical insights if they don’t comply with their preexisting beliefs or political goals.
A Practical Guide For Policy Analysis: The Eightfold Path To More Effective Problem Solving, Eugene Bardach
Intelligence Community Analytical Standards, Intelligence Community Directive 203
Intelligence: From Secrets to Policy, Mark Lowenthal
Bridging the Gap: Theory and Practice in Foreign Policy, Alexander George
Strategic Choice and International Relations, Lake and Powell
Designing Social Inquiry, King, Keohane, and Verba
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Effective policymaking requires seeing into the future. In the corporate world, businesses with strategic forecasting operations or long-term strategies tend to greatly outperform their competition. Unfortunately, the incentives of organizations are often short term, and experts tend to be terrible forecasters. Forecasting and scenario planning tools can help policymakers better prepare for the future and select policy options most likely to succeed in an uncertain world.
Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction, Phillip Tetlock
“Imagine a World in Which”: Using Scenarios in Political Science, Barma, Durbin, Lorber, Whitlark.
Assessing the Accuracy of Geopolitical Forecasts from the US Intelligence Community’s Prediction Market, Goldstein, et. al.
Finally, Evidence that Managing for the Long Term Pays Off, Barton, Manika, and Williamson
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Policymakers are great at coming up with good ideas, but are often ill equipped to design and execute strategies and budgets to achieve success. The quality of US foreign policy rests on effective strategy.
Bringing a Method to the Strategy Madness, Jeffrey Meiser
US Joint Doctrine Note 1-18: Strategy, U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff
To Regain Policy Competence: The Software of American Public Problem-Solving, Philip Zelikow
Harvard Business Review Project Management Handbook: How to Launch, Lead, and Sponsor Successful Projects, Antonio Nieto Rodriguez
Strategy: A History, Lawrence Freedman
Doing Agile Right: Transformation Without Chaos, Rigby, Elk, Berez
Buying National Security: How America Plans and Pays, Adams, Williams
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Strong organizations learn from today’s successes and failures in order to improve the likelihood of success tomorrow. There are well-developed and tested tools to build a culture of learning. Monitoring and evaluation (M&E) systems generate evidence to allow policymakers to understand the effectiveness of a policy or program from start to finish. This knowledge must also be properly managed and distributed through an organization.
Monitoring and Evaluation Training, Chaplowe and Cousins
How to Measure Anything, Douglass Hubbard
Lean Knowledge Management, Roger Forsgren
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Individuals don’t create foreign policy – organizations do. The challenge for policymakers is not simply to learn how to get ahead within the bureaucracy, but to participate in a process that’s greater than the sum of its parts. Understanding the tradeoffs between careerist vs political appointees is particularly important in a system like the State Department.
Bureaucratic Politics in Foreign Policy, Halperin and Clapp
Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, Graham Allison
A Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice, Cohen, March, and Olsen
Bureaucracy, James Q. Wilson
Learning while governing: Expertise and accountability in the executive branch, Gailmard and Patty
Presidents, Bureaucrats, and Foreign Policy: The Politics of Organizational Reform, I.M. Destler
Flawed by Design: The Evolution of the CIA, JCS, and NSC, Amy Zegart
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We all use mental models to simplify an infinitely complex world. Studying international relations theory helps policymakers understand the structure of the international system and how the parts fit together. There is no “correct” theory of international relations; each approach has strengths and weaknesses.
Man, the State, and War, Kenneth Waltz
The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, John Mearsheimer
After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy, Robert Keohane
Social Theory of International Politics, Alexander Wendt
International Norm Dynamics and Political Change, Finnemore and Sikkink
Rationalist Explanations for War, James Fearon
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Mid Level theory excels in providing generalized patterns of behavior in international politics. The number of topics here are endless. Scholars have studied the effectiveness of virtually any tool of foreign policy one can think of. Just like a policymaker must study the history of the countries in their portfolio, they should also study the effectiveness of the most relevant tools and issues. Below, we sample some leading literature in just a single area we know well: causes and solutions for civil war.
Why We Fight: The Roots of War and Paths to Peace, Chris Blattman
Committing to Peace: The Successful Settlement of Civil Wars, Barbara Walter
Fostering Peace After Civil War: Commitment Problems and Agreement Design, Mattes and Savun
War on Sacred Grounds, Ron Hassner
Containing Fear: The Origin and Management of Ethnic Conflict, Lake and Rothchild
The Frontlines of Peace: An Insider's Guide to Changing the World, Severine Autesserre
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Ethics and values must steer choices at every stage of the decision-making process. Our principles help us answer: How do we identify what our society deems a problem? How do we frame the problem? Which problems do we prioritize? How do we handle distributional questions? Scientific approaches can help evaluate the implications of our ethics, but science can’t tell us which values are correct.
Twentieth Century Realism, Jack Donnelly
A Foreign Policy for the Left, Michael Waltzer
Conservative Internationalism, Henry Nau
Ethics and International Relations: a Primer, Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs
These Truths, Jill Lepore
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Resources on communication and relationship building can provide helpful frameworks and common language for a field that depends on communication in order to be effective both internally and externally. (See the reader recommendations below for many more books in this category)
Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement without Giving In, Fisher and Ury
How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie
On Communication, Cialdini, Morgan, Tannen
Several Short Sentences About Writing, Verlyn Klinkenborg
The Ugly American, Burdick and Lederer
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Understanding the institutions within which foreign policy is crafted is vital to advancing policy. Much of this knowledge can be learned on the job, but familiarization with the complicated workings of the various cabinet agencies is a useful starting point.
National Security Enterprise: Navigating the Labyrinth, George, Rishikof, and Scowcroft
The Liberal International Order, Hans Kundnani
The Use and Misuse of Economic Tradecraft, Lew and Nephew
In the Shadow of the Oval Office, Destler and Daalder
Combined Reading List with Reader Recommendations
IMPLEMENTATION
To help foreign affairs agencies improve their core functions this section focuses on the question of how to implement a new curriculum (rather than what that curriculum should be).
How to Implement a Curriculum
Official endorsement and adoption of a robust curriculum for foreign policy expertise would signal a paradigm shift in the practice of foreign policy. Such a move offers a recipe by which policymakers can upgrade their approach to decision-making and build a more effective institution.
One of our beliefs is that careerists at the State Department, especially the Foreign Service folks, must take the lead in demanding high standards for training. Career diplomats have failed for generations to convince presidents that they possess specialized expertise that differentiates them from others in the national security process (as evidenced by the growing rates of political appointees and the marginalization of diplomats in the policy process).
Challenging this narrative won’t happen by simply asserting their self-superiority. The institution must raise the bar for itself and invest in cutting-edge new skills.
The most obvious location for implementing a curriculum is at the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute (FSI), which bills itself as “the U.S. government’s premier foreign affairs training provider.”
Indeed, it is Congress’s stated desire that the State Department improve its curriculum. In January 2023, it passed bipartisan legislation that required the State Department to appoint a non-partisan board of advisors at the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) to provide recommendations on curriculum, and a provost position at FSI to oversee curriculum and evaluation. State has taken some positive steps in this direction, but a lot of work remains to be done.
There are a handful of pathways down which the State Department might proceed:
Impose the curriculum as a requirement. Simply require that all Foreign Service officers enroll in a class at FSI that covers the full curriculum. Maybe it’s required for everyone, only new officers, or for any officer being promoted to a FS-2 / GS-14 level. The requirement could be phased in over time. We estimate that our suggested curriculum would take about two months of full-time coursework. It would be costly to roll 7,000 diplomats through training, but we think it would be powerful if a new Secretary of State announced a “transformational year of training” and everyone had to go through it together.
Design a test to evaluate competency. A more cost-effective approach would be to develop a standardized test that evaluates officials’ mastery of the curriculum. Test prep could be offered via voluntary classes, study groups, or self-guided study.
Develop doctrine that harmonizes with the curriculum. Research suggests that training new skills that aren’t used on the job is a waste of time. The decision-making process must utilize the skills taught in training. Certain skills taught in the curriculum – analysis, strategy formation, program evaluation, etc. – might be formally spelled out in official doctrine. Such procedures could be spelled out in Executive Secretariat (S/ES) guidelines and included in the FAM.
Incentivized but not required. Maybe a pay bump, or a commendation in one’s promotion file for those who undergo the curriculum and/or pass a competency exam.
Voluntary adoption. The most likely starting point (unfortunately) is that the new curriculum is designated as entirely voluntary. Indeed, this is where FSI’s current core curriculum stands today. We are not confident that this model will have any meaningful impact on policymaking. High-level leadership could help, but has so far been lacking. It speaks volumes that our leaders don’t feel the need to undergo the core curriculum themselves. The Department might sponsor an official core curriculum reading group, perhaps led by a different 7th-floor official at each meeting. The Secretary of State’s team might host a monthly blog in which they reflect on how material drawn from the core curriculum helped advance diplomacy. The Foreign Service Institute could develop a speaker series drawn from the authors of its chosen curriculum.
To review, we think the benefits of a new curriculum would arrive in a number of ways:
Improve the quality of foreign policy by upgrading the techniques of analysis, decision-making, risk evaluation, and more.
Professionalize the practice of diplomacy and improve collaboration by creating a shared body of knowledge, skills, and standardized techniques.
Empower learning from success and failure in foreign policy by cultivating a more scientific approach to understanding the impact of our policies.
Enhance meritocracy by rewarding those who demonstrate more consistent success.
De-politicize foreign policy by cementing a clear role for highly trained careerists in the policy process.
Major Obstacles to Implementation
Making such changes to the culture and identity of those who proudly staff the nation’s oldest executive agency will be a challenge. It is hard to imagine seasoned diplomats at the apex of their careers admitting their skills require sharpening. Yet this is the sort of brave leadership that will be required to rescue US diplomacy from its marginalization.
We are therefore dismayed by the messages we receive from policy professionals who report being stymied by the State Department in their efforts to advance better training or doctrine. “The only way I think you can actually learn the job is by watching those who have done it well," asserted a former Dean of Training at FSI in an event focused on learning in diplomacy, suggesting that diplomacy is a “fuzzy art” that cannot be measured. (Watch the full video in that link and you’ll get a sense of just how distrustful some of our most powerful diplomats are to the value of a rigorous core curriculum.).
To make progress in implementing a curriculum for foreign policy expertise, one will need to face some obstacles head on.
Dismissal of the value of this knowledge. While many studies on the practice of diplomacy suggest that diplomats would benefit from more training, there’s little agreement on what content would be most useful. Many (most?) senior leaders believe that the only useful knowledge in foreign policy resides in case studies and diplomatic history. Such advocates believe other forms of knowledge lack applicability to the actual practice of policymaking.
Limited resources. Training is costly. The military holds a 15% staffing surplus to ensure a portion of their workforce can be away from their day jobs for training at any given time. The State Department, in contrast, complains of being chronically underfunded and understaffed.
Short-termist incentives. Leaders, especially political appointees, are more incentivized to respond to crises rather than invest in leadership for tomorrow. Notably, multiple Secretaries of State have won funding from Congress for major hiring sprees with the promise that extra staff would be sent to training, but new staff was consistently redirected to backfill ostensibly more pressing priorities (read Kori Schake’s book for more detail on this).
Revenue from consular work. All new Foreign Service officers must serve at least one tour of duty in a consular section, conducting visa interviews and performing American citizen services. This work is vital and it generates a lot of money for the budget-challenged State Department. But this incentivizes rushing new diplomats out into the field to start generating revenue rather than investing in lengthy training on the front end.
How Do We Choose the Ideal Curriculum?
The State Department needs to develop a serious needs assessment process to continually shape its curriculum and training process. The current process surveys top policymakers on what topics and skills they think are important. This is a useful starting point, but insufficient. Policymakers who have been inside of the State Department for two or three decades will have a hard time assessing their own blind spots, challenging orthodoxy, or identifying cutting-edge skills they don’t already possess. If the implicit starting point is that our senior leaders do not require ongoing training, the training regime will never reach its full potential.
A more robust needs-assessment process must accomplish two tasks: 1) synchronize training with the skills necessary for the most important tasks in diplomacy, and 2) rigorously evaluate whether training actually improves performance on those tasks. Evaluating the effectiveness of training might include, for instance, interviewing trainees and their bosses after the training session to see whether/which skills were actually used on the job, or compare performance over time between those who did and did not receive the training.
The first attempts at imposing a curriculum need not — will not! — be perfect. Any attempt must be subject to ongoing scrutiny and iterated based on feedback and evaluation. In this manner, the curriculum must be dynamic, constantly evolving in response to an ever-changing world. Sub-curricula might be developed for other specialties, such as foreign assistance, public diplomacy, economic, or management cones.
Ultimately, good ideas aren’t enough to change anything in Washington. Progress requires people in positions of authority to speak up and agitate for changes. If you found yourself with the authority to help advance a curriculum for foreign policy expertise, we hope you too will push for change.