Following their August “tour of the Washington foreign policy establishment” (see below), the inaugural cohort of International Relations Fellows (IRFs) had a great first semester of their four-year experience!  Some highlights:

Foreign Affairs

In September the IRFs began what will remain one of our intellectual staples: reading the journal Foreign Affairs together.  The Fellows read the July-August issue as part of their summer reading, so we were primed and ready to go with discussions as soon as the school year began.  Each IRF reads the entirety of each issue, and then we discuss most of the articles together during regular (once or twice a week) lunch-and-Tutor Bell meetings.  The Fellows pick two articles from each issue that they find particularly interesting.  They then look a bit more deeply into that subject, get some background information on its author, and then lead our group discussion of the article.  The process can be daunting at first, but the IRFs have already come a long way in terms of adjusting to the jargon and keeping pace with the content.  By the time they graduate, after keeping pace with Foreign Affairs for four years, the Fellows will be up to speed on the most important contemporary foreign policy debates.

The articles the IRFs have led group discussions about thus far:

• Graham Allison, “The Cuban Missile Crisis at 50”  (Pablo)
• Timothy Garton Ash, “The Crisis of Europe”  (Sophie)
• Amatzia Baram, “Deterrence Lessons From Iraq”  (Sophie)
• Alexander Benard, “How to Succeed in Business”  (Pablo)
• C. Fred Bergsten, “Why the Euro Will Survive”  (Hannah)
• Andrea Louise Campbell, “America the Undertaxed”  (Pablo)
• Mikhail Dmitriev and Daniel Treisman, “The Other Russia”  (Thomas)
• Bernard K. Gordon, “Trading Up in Asia”  (Jessica)
• Stephen Hadley and John Podesta, “The Right Way Out of Afghanistan”  (Jessica)
• Charles King, “The Scottish Play”  (Thomas)
• Bjørn Lomborg, “Environmental Alarmism, Then and Now”  (Sophie)
• Sebastian Mallaby, “Europe’s Optional Catastrophe”  (Hannah)
• Pratap Bhanu Mehta, “How India Stumbled”  (Thomas)
• Richard K. Morse, “Cleaning Up Coal”  (Thomas)
• Kenneth N. Waltz, “Why Iran Should Get the Bomb”  (Hannah)

Community Service with the World Affairs Council

The Fellows also fulfilled their ninth grade community service in the fall by visiting once a week the offices of the World Affairs Council of Greater Hampton Roads (WACGHR).  They helped out WACGHR’s Executive Director, Gabrielle Blake, with some routine office work, and in the process they gained a better understanding of all that goes into running a small, foreign policy-related non-profit non-governmental organization (NGO).  The Fellows spent most of their time, however, preparing to assist the WACGHR with a presentation in their Great Decisions Speaker Series.  On Saturday, January 26th, from 10:00 am to noon, Dr. Philip Roessler will be speaking about China’s growing political and economic ties with Africa.  The IRFs will be assisting Dr. Roessler and the WACGHR by providing an informational trifold on the subject to be displayed in the lobby that morning.  The Fellows will also be speaking briefly to the audience about what they concluded from their study of the subject.  (For more information on this event, and other WACGHR events, visit their web site at http://www.hrwac.org.)

Other Events

The Fellows have also had the chance to attend a variety of other international relations and leadership-related events.  In September, for example, several IRFs attended a WACGHR talk held at Norfolk Academy, where the Vice President for Defense and Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, Dr. Christopher Preble, spoke to an audience of over a hundred about the future of the U.S. nuclear triad.  Dr. Preble was an old friend of the IRFs, having hosted them in his office last August when the Fellows visited the Cato Institute (see below).

In November the IR Fellows joined the Chesapeake Bay Fellows and the Global Health Fellows in attending the Center for Civic and Global Leadership’s quarterly leadership talk.  Lawyer, activist, and friend of Norfolk Academy, Jay Leutze, spoke to the Fellows about the environmental stewardship work in North Carolina described in his book Stand Up the Mountain.  As Ms. Massey put it in her Global Health Fellows blog, “[Leutze’s] story of standing up and fighting against an injustice left everyone present feeling empowered that they themselves can become agents of real change.”

In December the Fellows received a personal tour of George Powell’s (’57) Japanese woodblock print collection on display in the Perrel Art Gallery.  The curator of the display, Dr. Leslie Hennessey, gave the IRFs the “white-glove treatment” as they were able to personally handle up close several of these art treasures.  In the process the students gained a greater appreciation of Japanese art and of the cultural ramifications of the massive political and economic changes that Japan underwent in the late 19th century.

Planning continues regarding future IRF trips.  In December David Rezelman (Director, International Relations Fellows) and Price Massey (Director, Global Health Fellows) made a reconnaissance trip to the Muscatatuck Urban Training Complex in Muscatatuck, Indiana.  Though it is still early in the planning phase, we hope one day soon to enable the IR Fellows to do some foreign policy-related training of their own at this facility!