The New Era Foreign Policy Project is part of the Center for America's Global Strategic Challenges, a Berkeley-Duke collaboration based at the Institute of International Studies (IIS) at Berkeley and the Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy at Duke. The project is funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the Travers Foreign Policy Endowment. What kind of a world does the U.S. want to inhabit in 2012, and what policies should the U.S. pursue now to promote that outcome? This is the core question around which the New Era Foreign Policy Project is organized. Our rationale is that responsible U.S. global engagement should be systematically proactive, seeking to understand significant medium and long-term global changes, and to influence strategically the impact of such trends on U.S. interests and those of the rest of the world. We intend to provide a rich and dynamic alternative to the short-term mindset that currently dominates debates in many think-tanks, government circles, and the media. Our work will be broadly framed at developing intellectual frameworks and focused on actionable policy proposals and related strategies. We start from a simple proposition: national leaders need new approaches to better anticipate and shape the future. It is commonplace to observe that we live in a time of unprecedented dynamism. A practical foreign policy problem follows directly from this intellectual challenge: Policy during periods of rapid change becomes overly reactive to events, a form of rolling crisis management that is more like the practice of emergency room medicine than it is like the military's notion of "shaping the battlefield." Our contention is that to be successful, the foreign policies of a great power instead should aim squarely at being proactive. Foreign policy writ large, in this view, is about comprehending major contextual and environmental changes taking place in the world and steering, directing, and influencing the impact of those trends over a reasonable time frame. That is our analytic and practical goal: to understand what it means to think and act strategically for starting to shape foreign policy out to 2012, and to derive from those understandings tactical foreign policy actions that contribute to longer term goals. 23 August 2005 |
