Thinking about U.S. Foreign Policy: Three Harris Voices Weigh In

A war in Afghanistan. A humanitarian crisis in Yemen. Skirmishes across the globe.

New technologies allow for us to communicate and trade with people on the other side of the world in real time. Wall Street traders will tell you that policies in China – only fifty years ago a country that the United States had no relationship with – can affect US markets in the blink of an eye. 

Since World War II reordered geopolitical realities in the mid and late 1940s, the world has maintained an unprecedented period of relative peace. Yet as the world struggles to keep strong the postwar bonds that define and shape this period, so too does the world struggle with conflicts and crises that jeopardize lives, treasure, and human dignity.

Jonathan Caverley MPP’03/PhD’08, Eric Ham MPP’04, and Sahar Khan MPP’08 have dedicated their careers to the examination, creation, and implementation of foreign policy – a multifaceted field that includes responding to humanitarian crises, hostile actors, and simple failed states.

Eric Ham MPP’04

Eric Ham served as a senior national security advisor in the United States Senate. He also served as the Director of Congressional Relations for the Center of Strategic & International Studies and was Executive Director of the Joint Experts' Committee on Iran. From there, he wrote The GOP Civil War: Inside the Battle for the Soul of the Republican Party with Rick Blalock, and became a U.S. Policy Analyst for BBC. He is now the host of SiriusXM Radio/The POTUS Channel 124.

Ham believes that far too often, policymakers forget how interconnected daily life, societies, and situations are when they make decisions on how to handle issues across the world.

“If we're looking at development in Nigeria, it makes sense to look at, what does this mean for the health sector? What does this mean for the financial sector? What does this mean for infrastructure?” Ham said. 

“Unfortunately,” Ham continued, “what we see now is, be it policymakers or journalists, they will tend to focus narrowly or myopically on that one issue with no understanding of how this might affect this industry or this sector over here or this industry or this sector – or even these people here. And so you don't get a holistic view or approach to how policies are not just shaping this in this space right here but the spaces surrounding it.”

"I think there are so many people who are in this space now who simply don't know what questions to ask and that can be from policymakers to journalists," said Ham. 

Ham freely admits that his education at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy drives him to think broadly about strategy in the foreign sphere. According to Ham, at Harris “everything is quantitative, and it's frustrating, and it's tedious, but it's that attention to detail that is so important in our development of policy and, not only that, but it lends itself to a strategic planning approach to policy.”

That broad, interconnected view of the world has led Ham to identify a foreign policy challenge that does not get frequent attention in the mainstream press.

“I think the greatest foreign policy challenge confronting us right now is our inability to effectively address state failure,” Ham said. “And unfortunately, the United States simply has not had an answer to this problem since the Marshall Plan immediately following World War II. And it's something that we haven't been really good at and until the United States can make the investment in a holistic approach to nation building, state building, I think we're always going to be behind the curve and being able to identify the undercurrents that hurt and foment weak and failing states.”

It takes a “whole host of issues” to develop a plan to address this important issue, Ham says, comparing it to a cake that needs just the right combination of ingredients to turn out. “Until we actually find the right mix of our U.S. foreign policy toolkit, we're always going to be on the outside looking in in terms of how do we address and actually fix these problems.”

Jonathan Caverley MPP’03/PhD’08

One tool that may be used to address challenges is, not surprisingly, the military. The decision on when to utilize military power, as well as what the military looks like, is a complicated story in itself.

Jonathan Caverley is Associate Professor of Strategy at the Center for Naval Warfare Studies and the author of Democratic Militarism: Voting, Wealth, and War. When he first came to the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, Caverley had graduated from Harvard College with a degree in history and literature and had served as a submarine officer in the US Navy. 

While serving on a submarine, Caverley learned an important lesson: “Human beings are actually incredibly adaptable people. It's a strange thing to put 110 people in a tin can for a few months and expect them to get along, and it seems to work.”

Caverley added, “I've seen, throughout my career, that actually people adapt pretty well. People tend to move in the same direction if given enough leadership and guidance.”

Caverley noted that while the world order has changed, so too has the military. “Arming and war have become an exercise in fiscal rather than social mobilization,” Caverley said. “And once that sort of activity becomes a check-writing problem, then it just works differently. People will expect different types of militaries if they can pay for it with cash rather than blood.”

Caverley suggested that the type of myopic view Ham identified – or, worse, a total misunderstanding of the forces at play – may be shaping the U.S. approach to China and the political maneuvering in the South China Sea and the Pacific. And peoples’ ability to adapt and follow guidance could prove disastrous, if enough work is not done to understand the dispute, and enough money is involved.

“We have this potential conflict, and we're not sure what it's about,” Caverley said. “It's about more vague things like a rules-based order or freedom of navigation or the ability to trade with other nations. So, the theory of why we would go to war with China is not very well developed.”

Lack of knowledge, misunderstandings: Caverley says they all hinder a foreign policy that keeps the peace. “If you don't understand the incentives, you can't design policy because people are going to act in their interests most of the time.”

Caverley emphasizes “the importance of empirics…actually collecting data, doing the best you can to analyze it, and helping that feed back into the policy process.”

Among the data that needs to be synthesized is the political climate, as politics can often hamper effective policy if policymakers are not aware of a policy’s pitfalls. Caverley put it plainly when he noted, "You may have the best data in the world, and you might have the best solution to the problem, but that does not mean it's going to happen."

That can be a difficult pill to swallow, particularly among Harris graduates who have a keen understanding of how important data is in helping to make good policy. But one must understand the political climate to effect good policy: as Mel Brooks might say, “You gotta read the room.”

Sahar Khan MPP’08

Yet reading the room without having a solid basis in data can cause a serious foreign policy blunder, as Sahar Khan, a visiting research fellow at the Cato Institute’s Defense and Foreign Policy Department, knows. Khan believes that a failure to utilize the best data to effect policy has hampered the War in Afghanistan, which the United States has participated in for almost 17 years.

"I think especially in D.C., the loudest voices get heard and the message you want to sell depends on the threat escalation,” Khan said. “I think for the U.S., they need to really think about what exactly is a threat now because when we have empirical information on the ground, we realize that Afghanistan is no longer a threat and it's very unlikely that a nonstate actor can launch an attack on the U.S. homeland.”

At Cato, Khan's research interests include militancy, counterterrorism policies, anti-terrorism legal regimes, South Asia, Middle East, and U.S. national security. Her dissertation at the University of California, Irvine, explored state motivations for sponsoring militant groups and the role civil institutions play in state-sponsorship within Pakistan, a country very much involved in the War in Afghanistan.

According to Khan, when the war started in 2001, “Pakistan declared that it was the United States ally, but at the same time it was supporting the Afghan Taliban and Haqqani network, and various other groups that have sort of systematically targeted U.S. troops.” Understanding that has helped the U.S. understand why Pakistan has become a “complacent” partner.

But internal changes in Pakistan may affect the War in Afghanistan. “Pakistan … went from a military dictatorship that had agreed to be the U.S. ally to a somewhat democratic country,” Khan explains. “Generally, the United States has sort of looked towards Pakistan and thought that the War on Afghanistan is going to be determined by their relationship with Pakistan. The Trump administration has taken a very hardline approach towards Pakistan. I think that's going to continue. The Pakistani administration would need to decide how it wants to be perceived in the international community” before it can improve its standing and ease tensions in Afghanistan.

Ham, Caverley, and Khan agree that, whatever the issue, foreign challenges are complex and require deep study to understand the underlying – and often moving – parts at play. What are the incentives for peace? Who absorbs the pain of conflict or war?

Whether it’s a war between matched (or even unmatched) militaries, a humanitarian crisis that cries out for aid, or simply a nation failing to provide for its people, insight and innovation are the first step to finding effective public policy – and maintaining the long peace.