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Chapter 4: Foreign Policy

This activity contains 5 questions.

India and Pakistan are neighbors and enemies. Given the problems of misperception and bias in foreign policy decision making, what steps could you propose that each government adopt to keep these problems from interfering in the rational pursuit of national interests?

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Sometimes aggressive international actions are attributed to a "madman" such as Iraq's Saddam Hussein or Nazi Germany's Adolf Hitler. Do you agree that such leaders (each of whose actions severely damaged his state's well-being) must be "mad"? What other factors could account for their actions? How do you think such people achieve and maintain national leadership?

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Imagine a sudden, unexpected crisis caused by an event such as the explosion of a nuclear weapon (of unknown origin) in Moscow. Given the dangers inherent in crisis decision making, what steps could the leaders of affected states take to prevent the situation from spinning out of control? Which of these steps might be taken before any crisis occurred, to prepare for a future crisis?

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Inasmuch as democracies almost never fight wars with each other, do existing democracies have a national security interest in seeing democratization spread to China and other authoritarian states? If so, how can that interest be reconciled with the long-standing norm of noninterference in the internal affairs of other sovereign states?

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Traditionally, foreign policy elites have faced only sporadic pressure from mass public opinion. Is the role of television changing this relationship? If you were a top foreign policy maker, what steps could you take to keep TV news from shaping the foreign policy agenda before you could define your own goals and directions?

To create paragraphs in your essay response, type at the beginning of the paragraph, and at the end.

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