Publications
fp21 is building a new culture of foreign policy that uses evidence and robust analysis in decision-making processes, learns from its successes and failures, and continually feeds lessons back into the way it recruits, trains, and promotes a merit-based staff. Explore our publications below.
Evaluating Policy Success and Failure in Foreign Policy: A Better Approach
Thomas Scherer: When is a foreign policy a success, and when is it a failure? Most commentators fail to specify criteria or offer good evidence to support their claims. As with any scientific endeavor, clear standards of success are essential to policy learning, innovation, and improvement. This article offers three rules to follow to improve our understanding of policy success.
The U.S. Should Practice What It Preaches on ‘Good Governance’
Rachel George: Washington’s emphasis on good governance in fragile states requires more attention to institutional modernization at home. The coronavirus pandemic and myriad new global challenges have highlighted the importance of addressing the fractures and failures within the U.S. agencies tasked with implementing US foreign policy. The disconnect between applying good-governance principles at home as cohesively as they are being promoted abroad is glaring given U.S. expertise on adaptive management in the effort to enhance global stability and resiliency.
It’s Official: All Foreign Service Officers Must Learn Data
Dan Spokojny: The State Department will now be evaluating foreign service officers on their proficiency in data collection, analysis, and decision-making following an update to the decision criteria for tenure and promotion. This change to the core precepts reflects the Department’s recognition that data skills are an indispensable part of every leader’s toolkit in today’s information economy.
We Are Not Capable of Learning the Lessons of Afghanistan
Dan Spokojny: Lessons are empty wishes without national security institutions capable of actually learning and evolving. Learning, like war, requires an effective strategy and organization to accomplish success. If twenty years of war in Afghanistan have proven anything, it is that our national security institutions have a hard time learning from failure. Yet there is still hope for efforts to draw lessons from Afghanistan. Reformers have an opportunity refocus their attention to improving the processes and institutions of US foreign policy.