A Curriculum for the Foreign Service
This article originally appeared in the Foreign Service Journal.
By: Dan Spokojny | September 2025
The State Department should house the most skilled and well-trained policymaking team on the planet, one obsessed with policy success. To achieve this standard, State must develop an in-service training curriculum, the mastery of which would help distinguish the expert diplomat from the amateur.
This expert curriculum should inform every aspect of the design and conduct of foreign policy. Harmonized with the day-to-day practice of foreign policy, the curriculum should provide a common language and structure for action—not a paint-by-numbers dogma or constrictive standard operating procedure. The curriculum should also guide hiring standards and performance evaluations used for promotion.
Foreign policy is unique among fields of public policy in that nothing like a curriculum for the profession of diplomacy exists. There are no educational requirements for becoming a leader in the field, no formal tradecraft, and no professional skills, training regimens, or certifications from which authority derives. Only a tenuous relationship exists between university researchers who study international relations and those who practice it, a bizarre state of affairs unmatched in any other area of public policy.
A common dictionary definition of a profession is “a paid occupation, especially one that involves prolonged training and a formal qualification.” Diplomacy measures up poorly against this standard. Weak professionalization makes U.S. diplomacy less effective, invites inexperienced outsiders into positions of power and influence, and contributes to diplomacy’s marginalization in national security policymaking.
Congress, to its credit, has sought to change this state of affairs. In January 2023, bipartisan legislation demanded upgrades to the Foreign Service Institute, located at the George P. Shultz National Foreign Affairs Training Center in Arlington, Virginia, by creating a provost and a board of advisers to oversee its training program.
The 2023 announcement of a core curriculum for diplomacy was a step in the right direction, though its initial manifestation was little more than a set of voluntary recommendations that largely validate the status quo. One might have expected the Foreign Service and its professional association to champion the opportunity to set a high bar for itself, but there has been little attention to the issue.
Discussion about curriculum can put experienced diplomats in a bind. When they assert their readiness to take on roles of high responsibility, they implicitly validate their existing experience and expertise. If, however, they admit their expertise is insufficient, they risk invalidating their qualifications and affirming the flood of outsiders into the leadership positions. It will thus take courage to advance a new vision of foreign policy expertise.
With the Foreign Service increasingly marginalized and the utility of career service being called into question, it is time to find the courage to evolve.
What Is Foreign Policy Expertise?
The luminary diplomats Ambassadors William Burns and Linda Thomas-Greenfield co-authored an article in 2020 that described diplomacy’s fundamentals as “smart policy judgment” and a “feel for foreign countries.” Policymakers, they explain, must possess a “nuanced grasp of history and culture, a hard-nosed facility in negotiations, and the capacity to translate U.S. interests.” Certainly, this is all true, but the descriptions offered by Burns and Thomas-Greenfield—like the Department of State’s promotion process itself—are highly subjective. If foreign policy is an art, as Burns claims, then does its beauty lie only in the eye of the beholder? This is infertile soil for the growth of expertise.
Expertise requires clear standards. A good definition of expertise is “consistently superior performance on a specified set of representative tasks for a domain.” The scholar Gary Klein seeks the secrets to superior performance by studying chess masters, neonatal nurses, elite athletes, and others. His study of firefighters, for instance, found that “when faced with a complex situation, the commanders could see it as familiar and know how to react. The commanders’ secret was that their experience let them see a situation, even a nonroutine one, as an example of a prototype, so they knew the typical course of action right away.”
Klein finds, however, that not all experience is equal—a lifelong tennis hobby, for instance, does not make one Serena Williams. Two features are necessary for experience to flourish into expertise: (1) One must receive clear feedback about the success of their actions, and (2) one must practice and improve based on this feedback. Research from Anders Ericsson finds that it takes 10,000 hours of practice—“deliberate practice”—to become an expert. This sort of effortful training requires focused attention to converting one’s weaknesses into strengths.
In the absence of feedback loops and deliberate practice, expertise does not readily form. The brain tricks us into thinking we are much better at a task than we really are. We develop great confidence but not expertise.
This research offers a warning for foreign policy practitioners: Policymaking is highly susceptible to overconfidence. State Department officials are neither trained nor encouraged to provide clear feedback about the success or failure of efforts. Policymakers, as a result, cannot be trained on their strengths and weaknesses, nor can they easily pass expertise on to future generations.
What Would an Expert Curriculum Look Like?
I surveyed dozens of reform reports, syllabi, and course descriptions in the field of U.S. foreign policy to better understand what a curriculum for foreign policy might look like. I have organized the field into four broad categories of knowledge:
1. U.S. Foreign Policy History and Contemporary Issues. This includes traditionally valued topics such as area studies, language skills, history, and policy histories.
2. Bureaucracy, Management, and Culture. This category includes many of the soft skills necessary to excel, including leadership skills, communications, organizational culture, management, and national security procedures and law, such as familiarity with the Foreign Affairs Manual.
3. Academic Theory and Methods. “Systemic” and grand theories of international relations are useful frameworks, and “mid-level” research on topics like peacekeeping, nonproliferation, and mediation help policymakers systematically understand how different types of interventions work in the real world. Methods training promotes rigor and discernment.
4. Policymaking Skills. This category includes the “how-to” of policymaking, such as strategic planning, budgeting, policy analysis, intel analysis, monitoring and evaluation, and audience analysis.
Foreign Service officers are called “generalists” for a good reason. Successful diplomats possess encyclopedic knowledge of world affairs, culture, and history. These fields, broadly categorized as humanities, emphasize unique context and subjective meaning. These traditional sources of wisdom are necessary but insufficient for the development of expertise. They are also the easiest to pick up on the job.
Effective diplomats must also be scientists. Social science, in contrast to the humanities, guides adherents to produce high-quality feedback necessary for the development of expertise. It seeks patterns of human behavior while seeking to minimize subjectivity and bias. Thus, the skillful command of the scientific method—the process used to build shared knowledge—is an essential foundation for the development of foreign policy expertise.
This is not rocket science: The same methods are used in the medical field. Notably, the medical world was highly distrustful of science too. Well into the 20th century, physicians resisted medical trials on the grounds that it was dangerous to insert a scientist between the doctor and the patient. Doctors also argued that every human body is unique, rendering any large-N study dangerously naive. But our views have evolved. Today, we consider medical trials essential, and medical training is routinized and rigorous.
Emphasizing Science in International Affairs
Many senior diplomats with whom I have spoken reject the utility of science in international affairs, claiming that there are no patterns to be discovered amid the many varying contexts. Make no mistake: This is a denial of the possibility of expertise. Certainly, all countries are unique, as are human bodies, but science sharpens our ability to detect patterns amid the noise and collect knowledge over time. Sure, diplomacy is hard—but if you confuse hard with impossible, you’re in the wrong line of work.
Of course, not every aspect of foreign policy can be evaluated under the rubric of expertise. There are irreducibly subjective aspects of diplomacy. The extent to which the United States should be willing to expend blood and treasure to defend another country’s citizens, for example, is better answered by politics than claims of superior expertise.
Both humanities and social science are important, but they receive disproportionate attention in the hallways of Foggy Bottom. As I have written in these pages before, foreign policy must be more scientific and evidence-based. The curriculum should reflect that.
Certainly, different career tracks or specializations should emphasize different distributions of these skills, but the above categories form a common basis of understanding within our institutions of foreign policy. These categories are only a starting point, a framework, for developing an official curriculum for foreign policy expertise.
Next Steps
The Foreign Service must take the lead in demanding high standards for itself. Official endorsement of a robust curriculum for foreign policy expertise would signal a paradigm shift in the practice of foreign policy. Such a curriculum offers a recipe by which policymakers can upgrade their approach to decision-making and build an institution more demonstrably capable of achieving discrete national security goals.
Three tasks are necessary to advance the implementation of a new curriculum at the State Department. First, the content of the curriculum needs to be developed, ideally by a well-respected, diverse, and interdisciplinary commission. The ideas contained in this article are intended as a contribution to a long-standing discussion, not the final word.
Second, great care needs to be taken to design an implementation plan. There are many options. An official curriculum could be offered simply as voluntary guidance. A required training program might be developed for all officers. Or the substance of the curriculum could be integrated into the hiring and promotion standards of the State Department.
Third, the department’s processes must be updated to ensure the skills taught in training are actually used. Research suggests that training new skills that aren’t used on the job is a waste of time and resources. The precepts of the curriculum—the process by which country strategies are designed, for instance—might be formally spelled out in official State Department doctrine.
The first iteration of the curriculum will not be perfect. Any attempt must be subject to ongoing scrutiny and based on feedback and evaluation. In this manner, the curriculum must be dynamic, constantly evolving in response to an ever-changing world.
Ultimately, good ideas aren’t enough to change anything in Washington. Progress requires people in positions of authority to speak up and agitate for change. To rebuild trust with Congress and the American people, the Foreign Service needs to up its game. Adoption of a cutting-edge curriculum would demonstrate that the Foreign Service remains committed to leadership.