Carnegie study: foreign policy in election

U.S. foreign policy has not come up often in the 2020 presidential campaign, Carnegie’s U.S. article on foreign policy’s case study, determined. Any debate that there is “takes place within relatively small circles within Washington, DC, without the benefit of input from state and local officials, small business owners, community leaders, local labor representatives, and others on the front lines of addressing the challenges facing middle-class households.” Looking a three states over the last few years, the study found that “similar to Colorado and Ohio, doubts abound in Nebraska that foreign policy professionals in Washington, DC, truly understand the economic realities confronting middle-income households or that they prioritize these realities in the development of U.S. foreign policies.”

These foreign policy issued addressed range from foreign trade, to climate change. Carnegie concluded that

it becomes clear that foreign policy professionals need to reexamine how they are defining the national economic interests intended to be advanced through U.S. foreign policy. These case studies reveal that rates of economic growth and unemployment are important but incomplete measures of the economic well-being of the country’s middle class. One must also examine the effects of foreign policy on middle-class jobs, standards of living, and the economic viability of local communities. There must be greater acknowledgment of how these effects diverge in different places.