 chapter 17 global affairs. Okay, so what I'm going to talk about in this lecture is how the United States goes about engaging with the rest of the world, how the US government creates foreign policy, how it makes decisions about how it's going to engage with other countries in the world. Okay, so the first question we should take up is why does the United States engage in global affairs? And the answer to that is pretty simple, to pursue its national interest and to keep the nation secure. And what do I mean by national interest? What the United States wants to accomplish in order to keep itself safe and secure? How it's going to go about building friendships and alliances with other countries in the world? How it's going to deal with other countries that it views as enemies as opponents? And so all those things going to explaining why and how the United States engages in global affairs in the way that it does. Ever since the US became a nation, all the way back to the time when George Washington was the first president, Americans have argued about how we should engage with the world. And there are basically three schools of thought, three different schools of thought, three different ways of looking at engagement in the world. One group of people that we can call internationalists believe that the US should be actively involved in the world not only to defend US interests but also to promote American values such as democracy, individual freedom, etc. So internationalists believe that the US should have a very robust, very active engagement in the world in order not just to defend our own interests and to defend our own safety but also to aggressively promote American values. These are people that would say, well, what makes America great, what makes America such a special country is that we are a democratic country that believes in giving people freedom, that freedom of the press, freedom of religion, things like that. And so what the US should be doing is making, trying to make other countries in the world be like we are, trying to promote these values of freedom all around the world. And so in order to do that, we have to be actively engaged in the world. We have to be good to our friends. We also have to confront our enemies and be a very strong, active country in the world, especially because we are now the most powerful country in the world, militarily in the richest country in the world, economically. So that's what internationalists believe. Isolationists believe pretty much the complete opposite of internationalists. Isolationists believe that the US should not be actively involved in the world and that it should only defend its own safety from external threats. So isolationists would say that the US doesn't really have an interest in most of what goes on the world. The US should not be budding into other people's problems, that we should be spending our money at home, taking care of our own people rather than spending money on foreign aid to other countries because actively being involved in the rest of the world actually can hurt us because that's what gets us into wars. That if we weren't so engaged in the rest of the world, if we weren't so actively involved in the rest of the world, if the rest of the world, people that don't like us didn't see us as bullies, because we were so actively involved in the world, we'd be much safer. We'd have much more money to spend at home and frankly we wouldn't put American soldiers at risk and we'd be safer because the rest of the world wouldn't see us as bullies and we wouldn't be such a target for terrorism and things like that. So that's what isolationists believe that we should be more isolated within our own country, with our own borders, and that we should only use the military to defend ourselves when we are actively threatened or attacked. Realists believe more like internationalists that the US should be actively engaged in the world to defend US interests, but not so much to defend and promote American values and that we should be engaged in the world even if that means supporting nations that do not represent American values. So it's not that realists don't believe that America is good and special because we hold dear to these values of democracy and into freedom, but that it's not the purpose of the US, it should not be the purpose and goal of the US to actively promote these values. The only purpose of American foreign policy of our engagement in global affairs should be to defend our own interests, to defend our own safety, and sometimes that means helping and supporting nations that do not represent our own American values. And so a good example of this would be that during the Cold War, the period after World War II when the US and the Soviet Union were enemies and vying for control of the world, the United States allied itself with many many countries that were not democratic, that did not promote American values, and we didn't care really because these countries opposed the Soviet Union, we opposed the Soviet Union, so therefore it was in our interest to work and support these allies and we did not really complain when these countries brutally treated their own people the way they did when these countries did not give their people the same kind of freedoms that we do here. So that's the more realist perspective that we need to deal with the world in a real way. We need to see the world as it really is and so the world is not ideal. We cannot go around trying to promote American values because that may not be in our best interest. Even though we'd love to see other countries promote our values, we should not be putting ourselves at risk and our money at risk in order to do that, but at the same time realists would also argue that isolationism is not a realistic goal either because just being isolated within our borders is not going to mean that we don't have enemies. People are going to come after us, other countries are going to come after us no matter what, even if we are isolationists. So we have to be active in the world and we need to be as safe as we can be even if that means supporting nations that do not represent our values, that do things that we find morally wrong like brutalizing their own people, torturing their own people. That's just the way it is. Realists would say that we can't solve all the world's problems. Our main goal should be to protect ourselves as best we can. So those are the three basic goals, basic schools of thought when it comes to how the US should be engaged in foreign policy that differ from each other. So when it comes to pursuing its interests, when it comes to trying to achieve its foreign policy goals, and the main one remember is to keep us safe from those that would do harm to us, the United States has three tools it can use to pursue its foreign and defense policy goals. One of those goals is diplomatic, one of those goals is economic, and the other goal is military. So diplomatic goals, use of diplomacy. Diplomacy means to talk and negotiate with other countries with the goal of solving our problems with the goal of coming to agreements with other countries through peaceful negotiation, through discussion, through talking. And so, for example, if the United States and Egypt, for example, have a difference of opinion, have an argument, both countries sit down, the leadership of both countries sit down, they discuss their differences, they come to a negotiation, they sign an agreement that peacefully resolves their arguments and their problems so that they can both now get along. And so diplomacy is using discussion, talking, negotiation, and the making of agreements to solve problems peacefully. Now, that's not always possible. And so diplomacy is usually the first step that the United States tries to use to solve problems that it has with other countries to negotiate disagreements, to make compromises. But that's not always possible. Diplomacy doesn't always solve the problem. So the next step that the United States has is to use its economic tools, economic leverage, meaning economic pressure, and what that there are two ways that the United States can do that. One is to offer economic support to another country to do something that we want them to do or to not do something that we don't want them to do. So for example, if so right now Iran is believed to be trying to build nuclear weapons, and this is something that the United States government does not want Iran to do. And at the same time, a lot of countries that are allied with the United States, European countries, Canada, other countries around the world in Asia, are doing business with Iran or buying things from Iran and selling things to Iran. So one of the things the United States wants to do is to convince these other countries, these allies of ours, to stop doing business with Iran until Iran stops trying to build a nuclear weapon. So one of the things the United States can do is to try to get them to do that. It's to use economic leverage in the form of economic aid, economic support, say look, we will give you more money, we will provide more foreign aid to you, we will buy more of your goods from you, which is good for you economically. If you stop doing business with Iran, and so if you sell corn to Iran, please stop selling corn to Iran, and we'll buy all the corn that you used to sell to Iran so that you're not out economically, you still sell the same amount of corn, we'll just buy it from you instead. And so that's one way that the United States can use economic leverage, economic pressure, economic tools to pursue its foreign policy goals. Another way that the U.S. can use economic leverage is to try to use economic punishment, what are called sanctions, S-A-N-T-I-O-N-S, economic sanctions. And so when the United States determined that Iran was trying to build a nuclear weapon, the United States began to employ sanctions on Iran so that Iran could no longer do business with a lot of American companies, could no longer do business with American banks, could no longer do business with the American military, and so the idea is that you use economic sanctions, economic punishment to get a country to stop doing what it's doing in the same way that a parent will punish a child who's doing something wrong so that they stop doing whatever it is. And so economic tools can either be positive in the sense of we'll give you this money to either do something we want you to do or not do something we don't want you to do that we feel is in our interest, or on the other side of the same coin, economic punishment, economic sanctions is we will stop doing business with you, we will stop having economic relations with you until you stop doing what we don't like you doing. And so that sometimes works, sometimes it doesn't work, but if both diplomacy and economic leverage fails, then third option is military, the use of military force to stop a country from doing something that we don't want it to do. So a good example of how these three tools can be used in progression at the same time is the example of the First Iraq War in 1991, when the U.S. invaded Iraq to get Iraq to pull out of Kuwait after its invasion of Kuwait. So this whole thing started in August of 1990 when Iraq for several reasons invaded Kuwait, a small country just to the south of Iraq. As soon as that happened the United States and the United Nations said this is unacceptable and it called on Iraq to remove its troops from Kuwait and to relinquish its control of Kuwait. The leader of Kuwait at the time Saddam Hussein said no, we have a right, we have legitimate grievances against Kuwait and so we are not going to remove our troops. And so that's when the United States and the rest of the world through the United Nations tried to use diplomacy. They began to sit down with Kuwait's leadership to try to negotiate a deal that would remove Iraq from Kuwait. Halfway through these negotiations it became clear that they were not going to succeed and so the United States implemented economic sanctions on Kuwait. I mean on Iraq in order to use economic pressure, economic tools, economic punishment to get Saddam Hussein to remove Iraqi troops from Kuwait. That didn't work and so in January of 1991 the United States in tandem with the United Nations invaded Kuwait, invaded Iraq, well first Kuwait but then Iraq in order to remove Iraqi troops from Kuwait and that was successful. The U.S. was able to succeed in using military force in conjunction with many other countries around the world, Canada, Europe, European countries, Japan and they succeeded in removing Iraqi troops from Kuwait but it took a progression of all three of these tools first diplomatic then economic then military to get Iraq to leave Kuwait and very often the United States succeeds in using these kinds of pressures especially economic military because the United States is today the world's richest nation and it's the nation with the strongest military. So who makes foreign policy decisions for the U.S. who decides whether the United States is going to invade another country or whether it's the right time to use economic sanctions or how to engage in diplomacy or what countries to be friendly with or not friendly with who makes these kinds of foreign policy decisions for the U.S. while several different groups of people individuals and groups of people involved beginning with the president and ultimately the president is the chief decider he makes the final decisions the final foreign policy decisions for the United States the president but also the president is assisted in these making these decisions by the vice president by the Secretary of State who's the chief diplomatic officer of the United States the Secretary of State is in charge of the State Department which is mainly in charge of maintaining our relationships with foreign countries the Secretary the State Department has ambassadors around the world in every country in the world that we have relationships with that operate as the main representative of the United States in that country also the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chief of Staff the Secretary of Defense is the main civilian leader of our military the Secretary of Defense is in charge of the Defense Department and the Joint Chief of Staff are the main military leaders the top military leaders of the U.S. military there is a chief of staff for every branch of the military so we've got a chief of staff for the Army the chief of staff of the Navy the chief of staff of the Marines and the chief of staff of the Air Force and so all those chiefs of staff together form what's called a Joint Chief Staff the main military leadership that offers advice to the Secretary of Defense the Vice President and the President and the head of that Joint Chief of Staff is called the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and that person the Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff is basically the main military advisor to the President and the Vice President and then there's also the National Security Advisor and the National Security Council the National Security Council is a group of people that work in the White House that represent all the foreign policy agencies of the U.S. government we're talking now about the military the State Department the Central Intelligence Agency the National Security Agency which is a spy agency that I'll talk about in a little bit all these groups together all these agencies together have these representatives at the National Security Council who talk over certain issues and try to form a set of opinions and advice that are presented to the President and Vice President so that the President can make a decision about how best to deal with the situation and the head of the National Security Council is the National Security Advisor who is a very close advisor the President when it comes to decisions about foreign policy and military policy so all of these people and groups are involved in making foreign policy decisions for the United States now Congress also plays an important role in making foreign policy decisions because only Congress for example can declare war the Constitution clearly states that only Congress can declare war against another country also as I've mentioned before this only the Senate must ratify a treaty so the President can sign and negotiate a formal agreement with a foreign country a treaty but that treaty does not have any any force it's not official until the Senate ratifies it so that's a very important role that the Senate the part of Congress that is the Senate has when it comes to making foreign policy decisions when it comes to deciding how the United States is going to engage with other countries in the world and very importantly only Congress can provide funding for foreign policy actions so the President can say that I want to increase the amount of military aid we give to another country that's a friend of ours or the United or the President can say I want to put more troops into Afghanistan or Iraq but he can't do that without Congress's ultimately he can't do that without Congress's approval because only Congress can provide funding for foreign policy actions everything the President wants to do in the realm of foreign affairs costs money and according to the Constitution only Congress can authorize the spending of money only Congress can declare that we're going to fund one thing or another now even though Congress plays an important role the fact that the President and Congress both have important roles when it comes to making foreign policy decisions can be unclear can create confusion because the Constitution does not clearly draw a line between executive and congressional authority does not clearly say how the President and Congress have to work together or what happens if they disagree for example owning Congress can declare war right okay that's true but the Constitution also says that the President in the United States is the Commander in Chief for the US military forces which means that the military only takes orders from the President and so the President can order military troops to go into another country to invade another country and he can do that whether or not Congress declares war on the same token Congress can declare war but if the President doesn't want to send military force against the country that Congress declares war against he doesn't really have to because Congress cannot order the military to do anything only the President can and so even though Congress can can only even though only Congress can declare war in the past 75 years since World War II the United States is involved in many undeclared wars where the President has sent military troops into a combat situation without Congress have declared war their first Gulf War that I just mentioned was not declared war Congress never declared war against Iraq now what they did do was authorize the President to use the military force but even if Congress did not authorize the President to use the military force it wouldn't stop the President in this initially from using military troops the way he wanted to the last time Congress actually did declare war against any country was in December of 1941 right after Pearl Harbor when the United States declared war against Japan right after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor so the U.S. Constitution is not clear about where the line is between executive congressional authority when it comes to military affairs and foreign policy decisions and as we as I've discussed before since World War II the powers of the presidency have increased and the power of Congress has decreased so today when it comes to the role of foreign policy military policy the President is much more powerful than Congress even though both have an important role in making foreign policy decisions now making good foreign policy decisions also requires good intelligence and what I mean by intelligence is information you want to know what other countries around the world are doing especially countries that you're not on good on a good relationship with you don't want to be caught by surprise especially of other countries mean to do you harm or attack you so the U.S. has several foreign intelligence gathering services that work to collect information on foreign nations and these are just some of them and the most important and not all the all the ones that we have but these are the most important ones that we should talk about the State Department the Central Intelligence Agency the National Security Agency the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI so the State Department we talked about before so the State Department is in charge of maintaining our relationship with other countries in the world the U.S. has embassies around the world that work to represent U.S. interests and communicate with other countries as the first point of communication around the world these embassies are led by an ambassador who's our chief representative to other countries around the world but those embassies also have people whose job is to collect intelligence in a very public way so when I'm talking about spying secret kinds of intelligence gathering but public information gathering that's maintained by speaking with representatives from the other government openly negotiating with other governments reading newspapers and listening to the radio to find out what the public opinion of the other country is and so this is the way that the State Department very openly and very publicly and in a very transparent way collects information about foreign countries and at the same time this is happening other countries have their embassies here in in Washington DC and they're doing the same thing collecting information about us to try to figure out what's going on with the election who's likely to win the next election and things like that by reading newspapers looking at public opinion polls and things like that the US also has this as the central intelligence agency the CIA whose job it is to work secretly to collect information foreign information and this is done by spying so the US has spies around the world who secretly try to gain information from other countries that other countries don't want us to have and so CIA spies work every day to secretly basically steal information that would help us have a better idea what are the countries on the world are doing not just our enemies but also our friends we spy on our friends and our friends spy on us so other countries in the world have spies here in the United States right now and we may not even know who they are who are trying to collect secretly collect information on us so the central intelligence agency does this mostly through human spying through human spies who secretly work in other countries with secret identities the national security agency the NSA is another spying agency one that not that doesn't work through human intelligence through having human spies try to steal information instead the national security agency works with digital and electronic spying sources so wiretapping hacking internet hacking computers that's the kind of work that the NSA does to steal information from other countries so that we have a better idea what they're doing the defense intelligence agency the da is another intelligent agency that that is part of the military and what they do is they try to analyze defense related secrets that could be stolen either by the CIA or the NSA so like maps and information related to weapons systems anything related to military intelligence is what the DIA deals with and the FBI the federal bureau of investigation also engages in foreign intelligence gathering even though the FBI's main job is to serve as the nation's top federal law enforcement agency the FBI is the federal government's police force they serve the federal government the FBI also from time to time will send agents around the world to collect intelligence on foreign-based crimes and so that's very different from what these other agencies do which is more foreign policy related the API is more criminal related their job is to investigate and prosecute crimes but sometimes foreign intelligence foreign policy and foreign crime investigation are the one and the same so for example when there are when there's a terrorist act around the world that's targeted against American uh interest the american government or the american military the FBI will send investigators to investigate to try to collect evidence so that they can find and prosecute the person responsible so after 9-11 for example the FBI sent many agents to the Middle East and other parts of the world to investigate people suspected of being involved in 9-11 in the 9-11 attacks and because of the evidence that the FBI was able to gather up many of these people were arrested and prosecuted in the United States and they are now serving prison sentences inside the United States because of the work that the FBI did the United States government also works with international organizations to make foreign policy and to solve foreign problems around the world that are in the US interest three examples of four of international organizations are the United Nations World Health Organization and the International Criminal Court so the United Nations is a world body that is represented by all basically all countries in the world and it's a place where all the world's countries can get together and use diplomacy and negotiation to solve world problems peacefully before they escalate into war so for example when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990 the United States and the rest of the world first tried to solve this crisis peacefully through the United Nations and only when that failed did the US then go to economic leverage and ultimately military policy in 1950 when North Korea invaded South Korea triggering the Korean War a war that the United States only got involved with before the US got involved the US tried to solve the and end the Korean War through the United Nations so the United Nations doesn't always succeed in stopping crises it often does but not always but that's its purpose to try to solve crises around the world before they escalate into violent conflict the World Health Organization is designed to monitor health crisis around the world like COVID-19 so the World Health Organization is very involved in trying to trying to stop the COVID-19 pandemic which is not just a pandemic here in the United States but around the world the World Health Organization also is involved in trying to deal with the spread of AIDS around the world and other viruses like Ebola and things like that so the World Health Organization is a very important organization that the US was part of but now President Trump is trying to pull the US out of the World Health Organization another international organization very important one is the International Criminal Court which is centered in Switzerland which is now Austria sorry Vienna which is also where the World Health Organization is the United Nations is centered here in New York City the International Criminal Court its responsibility is to prosecute people who are accused of international crimes particularly war crimes so and the International Criminal Court is something that was created by the world after World War II because of the experience of the Holocaust and the and then the types of war crimes that Germans that the Nazis engage in with the Holocaust so in the 1990s for example the US got involved in a war in Bosnia and Sarri and Bosnia and Kosovo part of what used to be the country of Yugoslavia in an effort to protect the minority Muslim population from really brutal violence by the Bosnian Serbian majority population and after the war ended the International Criminal Court arrested and charged many of the Bosnian Serb leaders with war crimes the indiscriminate killing of civilians and the torturing of civilians of innocent civilians and so that is something the US was heavily involved in through its participation in the international criminal court so these are three organizations through which the United States works together with other countries in the world to help deal with international crisis and international problems so what is America's current place in the world since 1945 the US has been a superpower after World War II the US went from being just one of many very strong important powers in the world to being one of two superpowers along with the Soviet Union what does it mean to be super out it means to have enormous power so much that you are a leader of the world and the US's power comes both from economic power and from military power and in fact in 1945 the US was the only country in the world that had nuclear weapons and that's one of the things that made the US a superpower after World War II now before World War II the US was isolation's power go back to how I started this lecture talking about what isolationism is the feeling that you should not be very involved in the world that you should only use your military in defense of an attack that you shouldn't use your military to try to solve other problems in the world that you're not involved in you shouldn't try to use your military to defend other countries in the world that have been attacked but you don't have any any part of that conflict so before World War II the US was a very isolationist power didn't have a very big standing military but World War II changed all that the two presidents who led America through the Second World War first Franklin Roosevelt and then Harry Truman convinced the American people that the US needed to become an internationalist power after War II not just a country that would go back after the war and not be engaged in the rest of the world but that now the US as a superpower had to be actively engaged in the world so the United States started doing things after the war that had never been done that never done before building military bases around the world stationing troops around the world giving lots of foreign aid to other countries in the world these are things that weren't done before World War II but now are a common practice of the United States since World War II all the way up to the present day and the reason for this was the Cold War the war that the US entered into against the Soviet Union after World War II wasn't a war like the World War II where the US and the Soviet Union were actively fighting each other but instead they were fighting each other through economic battle through ideological battle because the United States was a capitalist country the Soviet Union was a communist country and they were both aiding other countries that were on their side so the US had its allies the Soviet Union had its allies and sometimes allies of the two fighting wars like in Vietnam or in Korea but it was not a war a violent war directly between the United States and the Soviet Union so during the Cold War the US saw itself as the defender of the Western liberal capitalist system meaning that the US saw itself as the defender of America's values of capitalism of liberal democracy meaning a democracy that gives its people freedoms and it saw itself as a defender against the communist system in the Soviet Union and so throughout the Cold War this was the battle between capitalism and communism the core lasted from 1945 to 1991 and ended in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed and so the United States won the Cold War and came out of the Cold War as the world's only superpower at least for a time US foreign policy entered into a new era after the September 11th 2001 attacks after those attacks President George W. Bush started the war on terror a war on terrorism to fight the threat of terrorism not just against the United States but against other countries around the world the war on terror dramatically changed the nation's foreign and domestic policy for example congress passed the patriot act in October 2001 less than a month after the the attacks on September 11th what this law did was increase the use of domestic intelligence gathering so that the United States government can more aggressively investigate suspected terrorism so what the law did was make it much easier for the United States government to investigate suspected terrorists inside the United States even if those suspected terrorists were American citizens so in many ways it loosened up the freedoms it restricted the freedoms it lessened the freedoms that you and I have under the fourth amendment fifth amendment sixth amendment the freedoms that I talked about throughout the the semester so it made it easier for the government to get a search warrant if the government suspected you of being a terrorist of engaging in terrorism or helping terrorism or trying to launch your own terrorist attack it made it easier for the government to wiretap people's phones it made it easier for the government to search someone's computer or phone or internet history or even somebody's library card history so under the patriot act the government could look at what books you're reading what books you've borrowed from the library the US also increased the use of foreign intelligence gathering the US increased the size of the CIA and sent more spies out into the world to try to spy on suspected terrorists the US also increased the number of FBI agents who worked on terrorism investigations and then in 2002 President Bush proclaimed the Bush doctor a doctrine is a statement of how the US is going to engage in foreign policy how a president is going to engage foreign policy so the Bush doctrine was a statement about how George W. Bush would engage and fight the war on terror and so the Bush doctrine contained two parts to it the first part state stated that uh when it came to the threat of terrorism against America other countries were either with us or against us meaning that countries could either help us fight terrorism or they would be seen as our enemy there was no neutrality a country could not be neutral in the war on terror the US had to be either on our side or against us with us or against us the other part of the Bush doctrine proclaimed the right to engage in what's called preemptive war meaning to go to war against a country that hasn't first gone to war against us so for the most part not always but from the most part during the course of American history the United States did not go to war against a country unless that country attacked us first so in war one the US did not engage in the war until Germany began to attack American naval ships in World War II the US didn't declare war against Japan until after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor but now with the Bush doctrine the president was saying from now on we will not wait for a country to attack us if we suspect that a country is trying to do us harm if a country we think means us harm we will attack them first and that's kind of what happened in Iraq in 2003 where the US believed that Iraq was was going to try to engage in terrorist attacks against the United States and rather than wait around for that to happen the US would first attack Iraq to remove Iraq as a threat so the war in terror resulted in the US fighting two Middle East wars the war against Iraq in 2003 but first before that the war in Afghanistan 2004 when the US invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 in an effort to go after Al Qaeda's leaders particularly of Salman Lan who was believed to be in Afghanistan in 2001 in October 2001 and we now pretty much think that he was but that he was able to escape into Pakistan is after the US invaded and it was in Pakistan ultimately or he was found and killed when the Obama administration and CIA hunted him down and killed him during the Obama administration so the US has been involved in Afghanistan and Iraq since the US first went in in 2001 in the case of Afghanistan in 2003 in Iraq and in fact today the US presence in Afghanistan is America's longest war much longer than World War I or World War II much longer than the Vietnam War longer than any other war and President Trump right now is trying to end America's military involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq that's something he was he he ran on promising to do that and it was one reason he was elected president I think is because the American people were tired of being involved in two foreign wars so far away from the United States for so long and we'll see now that we're coming to the end of of President Trump's first term whether he's able to end the war before he either loses to Joe Biden or if he wins whether he can do that during a second term in office because President Barack Obama also promised while he was present to end those wars and he was not successful for many reasons and so we'll see if President Trump is is successful so today these are the biggest global challenges facing the United States right now obviously COVID-19 the virus so global challenges do not have to be military threats they can be economic threats or in the case of COVID-19 health threats a global health threats a virus Iran which I said before is believed by the United States and other countries in the world to be trying to develop a nuclear weapon in an effort to possibly use against its enemies in the United States is considered an enemy by Iran North Korea which also has nuclear weapons already has nuclear weapons and President Trump has tried to engage North Korea in diplomacy unfortunately and successfully so far Russia is a threat big potentially military but also politically Russia we know has tried to interfere and did interfere in the 2016 elect presidential election at some degree and we think they're trying to interfere in the 2020 election China is also a threat because China is trying to expand its military around the world and China is also a very big economic threat to the United States to the US economy so all these all these challenges are threats to America's foreign policy interests and so the US government is very heavily involved in trying to deal and solve all these threats today and then time will only tell how successful they are so that's the end this is our last lecture of the semester I hope you enjoyed being in class this semester and good luck on the fourth exam your final exam that's coming up next week