Spring 2008

GOV 312L • issues and Policies in American Government

Course Description

How do presidents choose their foreign policies? What role do domestic political considerations play in their decisions and how do they reconcile them with geopolitical imperatives? This class probes these and related questions by examining the foreign policy behavior of presidents from Harry Truman to George W. Bush. The course is designed to increase your knowledge of presidential decision-making and to help you think systematically and critically about the forces that shape the nation's foreign policy.

Texts

Required Reading John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment (Oxford 2005) Zbigniew Brzezinski, Second Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower (Basic 2007) Lewis Gould, The Modern American Presidency (Kansas 2003)

back