Gyngell and Wesley (2003) talked about the two worlds of foreign policy. Practitioners have a different view of foreign policy in comparison to academics. I agree with their distinction and will expand on some of the points they made in their book. Some academics think that foreign policy is a structured detailed plan outlining the interaction between two states. Mitna (2018) challenged this perception with the statement that foreign policy does not need to be a predetermined course of action or strategy. It can be an impromptu statement or expression of a particular view, reflecting the reactive nature of foreign policy. Decision-makers decide what foreign policy is by choosing what they do. This is evident in the case of Marape and his choice to focus on Southeast Asia. After his election as the Prime Minister, he made this impromptu statement about working with Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore. He said he wanted to focus more on trade and economics. Furthermore, Mitna ...
Liberal internationalism is defined by Griffiths, O'Callaghan and Roach (2008, p.190) as a project to transform international relations so that they conform to models of peace, freedom, and prosperity allegedly enjoyed within constitutional liberal democracies. The same scholars go further by dividing liberalism into three distinct groups. They say these are the three ways to implement the project. The way they present liberal internationalism as a project makes their work interesting. Three distinct groups Firstly, commercial liberalism is about free trade between states. States bilaterally or multilaterally via a platform like APEC pursue the goal of trade liberalization. Griffiths, O'Callagahan and Roach (ibid.) argued that economic interdependence would decrease the likelihood of going to war. Republican liberalism is about democratic peace. The scholars argued that the spread of democracy among states so that governments will be accountable to their citizens makes it di...
This model centers on the fact that different bureaucracies have different standard operating procedures. These procedures are made in order to allow day to day operations to be carried out. Thus, a foreign policy decision is made based on these standard operating procedures. It is hard for a bureaucracy to make a decision or let alone function out of character or contrary to their standard operating procedure. The reading Chapter 4: Foreign policy shares a straight forward explanation of the OPM: "An alternative to the rational model of decision making is the organizational process model. In this model, foreign policy decision makers generally skip the labor-intensive process of identifying goals and alternative actions, relying instead for most decisions on standardized responses or standard operating procedures. For example, the U.S. State Department everyday receives more than a thousand reports or inquiries from its embassies around the world and sends out more than a ...
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