What I Wish I Had Taught
By Dr. Allan E. Goodman, President and CEO
INSTITUTE OF INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION

I chose the topic I did for two reasons. The first is that I have no regrets about any of the faculty I hired. My first was a person who was just then leaving government service, an expert on Poland, whose father was a Czech diplomat/professor that fled communism and went on to mentor Dr. Condoleeza Rice. She was also a protégé of Dr. Zbigneiw Brzezinski with whom she worked at the National Security Council. And we actually team taught a course for many years together. She became our Secretary of State. Other faculty included two UN ambassadors (Donald McHenry and John Negroponte), one National Security Advisor (Anthony Lake) and several assistant secretaries of state. Of course, we also hired "regular" academics who wrote all the books that the practitioners should have read. The aim was to give students at the School of Foreign Service a blend of theory and practice, as they, like you, prepared for international affairs careers in the public and private sectors.

The second reason for my topic is that I am not mad at my own mentors for not having prepared me for the dangerous world in which we now find ourselves living. I studied under Henry Kissinger (who today serves on the Institute's Board of Trustees) and did my Ph.D. dissertation under the supervision of Samuel P. Huntington. Their names and writing are still much in the news, of course, but what I gained most from their courses and tutelage was an appreciation for the dynamics of international relations, especially those driven by ideas (correct as well as faulty) and the workings of civil society. With two degrees from Harvard and all on scholarships, I was about as well prepared for these past 30 years as one could have wished.

The truth is that probably very little could have prepared any of us for what happened. I tended to specialize and tilt my courses toward the future; beside my joint course with Madeleine Albright, I developed a large lecture course on the "Future of the International System" and a seminar on "Forecasting and Analysis." Central to such courses was starting with a vision of the future and then examining the dynamics likely to come into play as reality unfolded. I got some things right like globalization, the terrorism that produced 9/11, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. I just never judged the time correctly. For example, in October 1989, I predicted in a lecture to visiting West German scholars that their country would be united "by the end of the decade," a prospect they all thought was unimaginable in their lifetime. What I actually had in mind was the end of the 1990s, not the events which unfolded a month after my lecture.

Not everyone was so lucky.

The other course that Dr. Albright taught was on the "Foreign Policy of the Soviet Union." I found her one day in the fall of 1990 at the entrance to the campus throwing away what appeared to be old files and many lecture notes. She was in despair because she was scheduled to teach the course I just mentioned in the spring term of 1991, when the USSR would no longer exist.

Prior to 1997, one of the most hotly-debated topics in academic as well as governmental circles in America as well as Asia was the issue of the "clash of civilizations," a thesis advanced by my dissertation mentor. He was looking for a way to make sense out of the post-Cold War era and to predict its disorders. He ran into a maelstrom of criticism over his characterization of societal norms and cultural value systems. His critics in Asia especially saw Huntington's analysis of Confucianism as anti-individualistic and tolerant of authoritarianism as evidence of a plot to deny Asia nothing less than the future. The perceived U.S. government policies that flowed from Huntington's approach, moreover, were seen as the equivalent of a form of economic containment aimed at thwarting the so-called Asian miracle and a last-ditch effort by a jealous West to deny Asia its rightful place as owner of the 21st century.

You don't hear much talk about the "Asian Century" these days. Instead we are seeing a new map of the post-modern world emerge as the international system "right-sizes." In just ten years, the international system has increased the number of countries in it by 20; population is growing at the rate of 90 million a year, more than twice what the growth rate was just a decade ago, suggesting that even more new countries may lie ahead. In the process, what constitutes a country and how it is held together is changing. And information and ideas -- the great reserve currencies of the educator's world -- flow so readily across borders, languages, regions, and cultures that regions of many countries conduct foreign political and commercial relationships with regions of other countries in ways that the central government can barely monitor and no longer effectively control.

The conjunction of the end of the Cold War, the advent of globalization, and all that the terrorism of 9/11 brought in its wake have changed the nature of international relations faster than our ability to understand it in theoretical terms. In fact, and in virtually every issue of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy magazines these days, we are engaged in a vigorous but unresolved debate about what the present era is all about. So far, all we can agree on is what it is not -- e.g., not the Cold War, not bipolar, not a system of world politics driven only by nations, and not one where ideology appears to matter very much. Consequently, we have no reliable guide to gauging the impact of ideas and the various forms of power or even of nations when they possess large supplies of both. So far, the spirit of the era is best-captured by Vaclav Havel: "this is an age in which everything is possible and nothing is certain."

The best any of us can say is that there are forces at work which we only imperfectly understand but which are changing the world of the educator at the same time that they are changing the space inhabited by diplomats and businesspeople.

So what would I teach?

In no particular order, my syllabus for a person preparing to be a diplomat today (or attempting to make sense out of what is going on in any capacity) would include:

--the fall of communism (or who really won the Cold War and how),
--the rise of NGOs and the nature and dynamics of modern civil society,
--why wars happen and how best how to prevent them,
--the implications of globalization for governance,
--what the UN does well and not so well, and
--the three issues that their professors thought might appear on the proverbial radar screen in the next 10 years (but not sooner than the next 5).

I would also ask students to examine three decisions taken by a leader or a government with which they are familiar but with which they disagreed. The assignment would require assessing all of the alternatives and charting a course that would have led to the decision they preferred.

What might be contained in and the value of these topics - as well as what I am leaving out -- are matters which I hope we will have an opportunity to discuss.

Now all of this amounts to more courses than a single professor can teach and more than a single course could possibly contain. But if viewed another way, we are entering an age where none of us have all the answers. So perhaps our job is to encourage students to raise the questions and engage as many resources as possible in their search for answer.