The idea for this blog came to me one day about a year ago. I was reading through an issue of Foreign Affairs (am I the only one who nerds out when I get the most recent issue in the mail?), and I was thinking back to one of my favorite classes in college. In the fall of my senior year, I spent a semester in Washington, D.C., interning at the Organization of American States and taking classes through a consortium of colleges to which my college was (and still is) a member.

One of those classes, Allies and Adversaries, was taught by a former CIA officer. I had never taken a course like this one in my time as an international relations major that boiled down to two of the most fundamental questions: who are the United States’ allies and who are its adversaries?

To discover the answers to these questions, the professor bound together dozens of articles from Foreign Affairs into a booklet, divided up by the regions of the world. Our assigned reading for the course that semester was reading those articles – I was in heaven!

Ever since that class, one of my professional interests (and let’s be honest, personal too) has been the relationship between the United States and the world – other countries, international organizations, and non-state actors. And that is exactly what I plan to explore and analyze in this blog.