Abstract:   With the decline of regional studies, many U.S. leaders find themselves unprepared for the demands of foreign policy in the new century. At the time of the attacks, the entire U.S. government could call on no more than two or three speakers of Pushto (the dominant language in Afghanistan); only a handful of U.S. diplomats know Arabic well enough to appear on al-Jazeera, the Arabic language channel famous for broadcasting videos of Osama bin Laden, without embarrassing themselves. U.S. forces intervened in Iraq without basic cultural literacy, a problem that consistently hampered our ability to collect intelligence on the growing insurgency there. The scandal that the media has thus far failed to cover is the utter failure of the American academy to train adequate numbers of people with deep knowledge about the world outside the United States. This failure is linked to the decline of regional studies in American universities over the past generation and the misguided directions being taken by the social sciences in recent years, particularly political science and economics.

Keywords:   Academia Failed, Regional Studies, wake-up call, Middle East

Publisher:   ILMA UNIVERSITY

Published:   31 May 2005

Issue:   Issue 1 : Volume 1

E-ISSN:   2409-6520

P-ISSN:   2414-8393