Political Science Essay Prompt:
Early in his presidency, President Trump described his foreign policy as “America First.” Using examples from his stated policy principles and/or his administration’s decisions, explain which perspectives dominate the United States foreign policy. Additionally, describe some of the critiques of President Trump’s policy/decisions from other perspectives.
*Answer the questions as thoroughly as you can.
*The questions need to be answered in three-pages, double-spaced and using Times New Roman font.
*Use at least two perspectives.
*Be sure to use complete sentences, proofread your work, and ensure coherent sentences, paragraphs.
*This is not a history course essay. Do not focus on writing historical matters.
*Thesis must be stated, and your writing needs to be argumentative.
Rubric:
*Thorough and comprehensive – 19 points
*Use of different perspectives – 7 points
*Uses more than one secondary source (not from the course textbook) – 7 points
*Logical, coherent, properly structured, and easy to follow – 7 points
*Adequately proofread, and grammatically correct – 7 points.
Kinds of Perspectives ( Copied from the textbook – Perspectives on International Relations, power-institutions-ideas, Fifth edition, by Henry R. Nau )
*Realist perspective – Emphasizing the struggle for relative power, which in turn limits the universality of what is right. It sees the world largely in terms of strong actors seeking to dominate weak ones and weak actors resisting strong ones to preserve their interests and independence. Realist scholars writing about the past do not tell the whole story.
*Liberal perspective – Emphasizing relationships and interdependence among actors in international affairs, how a group interacts communicate, negotiate, and trade with one another.
*Identity perspective – Emphasizing the importance of ideas that define the identities of actors and motivate (cause) their use of power and negotiations in international affairs.
*Critical theory perspective – Such as Marxism, emphasizing the deeper material forces propelling history toward its predetermined end. In the case of Marxism, the predetermined end is communism. In other instances of critical theory, it might be the emancipation of marginalized voices of simply deconstruction of all power relationships. Critical approaches remind us that attempts to understand history through perspectives are always selective and, therefore, biased. Social forces are holistic. They drive social science researchers no less than do the political, economic, and military events that researchers try selectively to understand. These approaches make people skeptical of all effects to select and emphasize specific factors to understand international relations, whether power or identity factors. Critical theories, on the other hand, face a comparable limitation. Even though they insist on studying history as a whole, not by selecting and focusing on specific hypotheses, they have to concede that they can ever tell us the whole story of history. Critical theory can tell us the story of history only from the social vantage point of a particular critical theory scholar.