What Foreign Policy Challenges Face the Next U.S. President?
With election day fast approaching, we asked the faculty at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University their opinions on the biggest foreign policy challenge facing the next President of the United States
While the ongoing crises in the Middle East including the fight against ISIS was one of the more significant topics of discussion related to foreign policy during this presidential campaign, Pardee School faculty provided much detail, important nuance and some surprises regarding what foreign policy challenges the next U.S. President might face.
The Syrian civil war and global refugee crisis were identified by a number of our faculty as the biggest foreign policy challenge facing the next U.S. President, including by Professors Kaija Schilde, William Keylor, Amb. Vesko Garčević and Joseph Wippl.
Professor Robert Hefner said the biggest foreign policy challenge facing the next U.S. President will be “the ongoing campaign to contain and eventually defeat ISIS/Daesh, while also repairing fraught relations with our Muslim friends and allies from Morocco to Indonesia.” On a related theme, Dean Adil Najam said one of the biggest foreign policy challenges for the next U.S. President will be restoring America’s image abroad, and that “it will take a lot of tender love and care from whoever is the next president to restore it. If not restored, it will affect everything. Everything!”
Professor Michael Corgan said the next U.S. president will have to determine “how to breathe life into the ‘pivot to Asia,’ or at least determine what our policies toward China should be. At the moment things are not going too well in that domain.” Professor John D. Woodward Jr. said “the next President faces a North Korea with better and more far-ranging nukes led by a very unstable and worrisome dictator that China seems unable or unwilling to rein in.”
Director of the African Studies Center Professor Timothy Longman said he hopes the next U.S. president “will recognize that focus on Africa could be highly beneficial because of the great economic, political and human potential of the continent, while neglect of Africa will be costly, as allowing authoritarianism, conflict and economic decline to spread can have global reverberations.”
Professor Jeremy Menchik said one of the biggest challenges facing the next U.S. president is the struggle of global governance institutions to tackle world problems such as climate change and economic ineqauility. Menchik argues that “global governance is simply not capable of solving these massive issues and the U.S. cannot solve them alone. The next president needs to think big.”
Professor Henrik Selin, said that the biggest foreign policy hurdle for the next U.S. President is “the design of an effective foreign policy approach centered around multilateral that engages other countries to address a wide range of global issues including terrorism, climate change, trade and human development.”