Course Overview: 

Adversaries get a say in international politics. Strategy demands that you select actions that optimize your outcomes conditional on what your adversary is likely to do. What your adversary is likely to do depends on preferences, beliefs, information, and the options available. This course explores strategic interactions across many domains of international relations. First, we will consider when countries can cooperate to achieve efficient outcomes -- be it in the realm of arming, trade, or mitigating climate disruptions. Second, we will investigate zero-sum interactions when one side’s gain is another’s loss. Nowhere is this more apparent than in international bargaining occurring in the shadow of military force. Third, the course considers the effect of military technologies on the likelihood of conflict onset and escalation. Fourth, we will conclude with a consideration of how politics in the domestic sphere rearranges strategic choices in the international sphere. Students should emerge from the course with a set of analytical tools essential to understanding international relations and social phenomena more generally. Among these tools are an appreciation for empathizing with one’s adversaries, planning ahead, and employing deductive reasoning. To show the applicability of these concepts, we will rely on historical and contemporary cases that include the US-China trade war, prosecutions of human rights violators, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the onset of World War I, and efforts to prevent nuclear proliferation.