The Global and Area Studies department of the University of Wyoming has invested large amounts of time and money to bring in expert practitioners of international relations for students to take advantage of.
The senior visiting scholar for the Global and Area Studies this year is former U.S. Ambassador and Advisor to the Southwest Pacific Command, Marc Wall. He has a 37 years in professional government service and brings all of this knowledge with him to the university.
Many special lecture events featuring distinguished guests have been sponsored by Global and Area Studies this past school year.
Most recently, Derek Leebaert, a scholar and author of the book Magic and Mayhem: The Delusions of American Foreign Policy from Korea to Afghanistan, was invited to the campus to speak to students in various classes about his findings and thoughts on the state of U.S. foreign policy.
One such class met at Wall’s home for an intimate question-and-answer session with Leebaert.
The discussion focused on the primary component of Leebaert’s book, which is that the U.S. has had more foreign policy failures in the past six decades than it has had major successes.
“A statement I make that generally makes my friends in the military uncomfortable is that we have lost four wars in a row,” Leebaert said during the discussion. “Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.”
The problem Leebaert cites as having caused these embarrassing debacles is that top policy makers in the U.S. combine a misleading knowledge of history with a basic lack of understanding of how hard it will be to achieve our desired goals in overseas conflicts.
“There’s this problem that we seem to have as a country where we line up behind a White House-appointed policy maker who claims to have all the answers to whatever crisis they happen to be managing,” Leebaert said. “Even when the outcome is clearly going to be disastrous.”
Bringing in an expert opinion who offers insight into the reason why events in the real world unfold the way they do is an intelligent investment of any university department’s money, but in one with such a far-reaching scope as Global and Area Studies, it is imperative to offer students who may one day end up in professional careers shaping political policies.
The upcoming event, Wyoming Goes Global, taking place on the 30-31 of this month, offers students both a chance to hear the perspectives of distinguished guest speakers, and also learn about career opportunities in the field of International Relations.
The keynote speaker will be former Department of State policy planning director Richard H. Solomon. Solomon will be presenting his lecture on Sunday, March 30 at 4 pm in the UW Conference Center.
Monday’s agenda will feature events ranging from graduate student and faculty research lectures to career opportunity presentations in both the private and NGO sectors.
A full schedule of the event can be found at: www.uwyo.edu
