Pondering Foreign Policy
Back to the Future: United States National Security Policy in Northeast Asia under the Trump Administration
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Benedict Edward DeDominicis
Evaluating international political strategy includes critiquing the desired future implied in the strategy. The critique focuses on the value, attitudinal, and elite cohort trends regarding the critical target of the strategy. Evaluation of the strategy focuses on trend alteration for achieving the desired future. Security challenges in Northeast Asia are legacy issues from the Cold War. The Cold War containment instruments towards the USSR that the US created and oversaw continue to dominate politically the discourse regarding security challenges in the region. An understanding of the political forces that these bureaucratic, military, and economic vested interests institutionalized is useful for understanding discourse political contours. These vested interests embody the political forces that set the global political framework for what is today called globalization. The US Trump administration is politically constrained to maintain the general thrust of US foreign policy in the region. It is manifested in his continuation of the incremental nature of US policy making. Trump’s rhetoric of significant change serves primarily a legitimation function to reinforce the primacy of these vested interests in the US foreign policy making process.
The World Bank's Influence on Higher Education Reform in Indonesia Post-Financial Crisis
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Nariswari Khairanisa Nurjaman
The globalization of education has opened an increasingly intensive interaction space between the governments of a country with international institutions such as the World Bank. In Indonesia, the World Bank plays a role in guiding the policy direction of higher education through a series of policy prescriptions. This paper questions the Indonesian tovernment's decision to receive a prescription for higher education reform. To consider this question, this study uses discursive institutionalism and policy borrowing theory. Therefore, it examines the various World Bank prescriptions that are derived into Indonesian tovernment discourses on the process of identifying interests, policy constructs, and policy legitimacy. This paper shows that the idea of new paradigm and knowledge economy oriented towards the enhancement of competitiveness play an important role in encouraging the Indonesian government to undertake higher education reforms after the 1997 financial crisis. The implications show a change in how education was seen from as public good into education as private.This review is useful for assessing how structures affect agents in which the World Bank influences government.
American Exceptionalism in the Age of Trump’s America First Foreign Policy: Is Donald Trump the First Anti-exceptionalist POTUS?
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Manuel Iglesias Cavicchioli
This paper examines American exceptionalism from both a theoretical perspective and from its resonance in contemporary US foreign policy. Thus, it reviews the key conceptual aspects of American exceptionalism, analyzing its different interpretations within a framework of the main US foreign policy currents. Using this theoretical basis, it explores the practical influence of exceptionalism in the foreign policy of Donald Trump, who has been considered by some critics as the first anti-exceptionalist POTUS.
