Assignment/Activity Title— Foreign Policy Congress
Year— Sophomore
Skill— Research
Portfolio Category— Critical Reasoning
For
CAP foreign policy congress, I had to research and give my opinion on multiple
foreign countries. These conflicts included Israel/Palestine, the Afghanistan
War, Iranian nuclear development, the Syrian revolution, the Egyptian
revolution, and the expansion of Russia into Ukrainian territory. We were given
three days to research, and we met on Thursday and Friday to draft U.S. policy
regarding the six given conflicts.
Now, we got this assignment on
Friday. Since these topics were interesting to me, I decided I was going to
look at the issues before we got to school, just to get good background
knowledge. I ended up forming very strong opinions on these issues, however,
and actually some that surprised me. With the Syrian revolution, for example, I
favored U.S. intervention – and while America is split on this specific issue,
my views on it leaned towards the conservative side. This was surprising to me,
because I'm generally a liberal on most other issues involving military
intervention, civil rights and economic policy.
When I got to school on Monday, I
found out that nobody besides myself (and Max Foley-Keene, of course) had
bothered to do any research over the weekend. I was therefore in a better
position to help explain things to others, and also to argue with Teague. I had
also started drafting my MOCO paper over the weekend, so I was halfway done with
that in our first day of in-school research.
So, I finished my paper. The remaining
time allowed me to draft amendments to the bills given to us ahead of time, and
plan out how I was going to present them. When we met for discussion on
Thursday, I presented an amendment for the bill on Afghanistan/Pakistan, and it
was passed. I wasn't as successful on Friday, and my amendment proposing that
the U.S. threaten to cut aid to Israel was decisively killed.
During this project, I realized (not
for the first time), how much I like debating. There's nothing more satisfying
to me than showing someone else (usually Teague or Ajay), how completely wrong
they are. However, it struck me that the best debaters are the ones who do the
most thorough background research. Now, that sounds obvious enough, but you'd
be surprised how many people form opinions on issues they barely know anything
about. With an arsenal of statistics and quotes, you can persuade anyone you
need to – although pathos can be handy. The best arguments are the ones
embedded with just a little emotional appeal.
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