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SCPS Faculty Profile

Foreign Policy Strategist Visualizes an Alternative to Conflict

Michael Oppenheimer
Clinical associate professor, NYU Center for Global Affairs

Michael Oppenheimer

For almost four decades, Michael Oppenheimer has provided research, consulting, and policy advice for the U.S. foreign policy and intelligence communities. As an expert on international conflict, global economics, U.S.-European relations and national security strategy, Oppenheimer has imagined, speculated, and created solutions to conflict, through the use of scenarios and alternative analyses, free of political motivation.

This spring he created Iraq Post-2010, a workshop at NYU’s Center on Global Affairs, in which a group of Middle East and U.S. foreign policy experts brainstormed three different outcomes for what he describes as the Iraqi ‘conundrum.’ Those scenarios ranged from a National Unity Dictatorship, with an independent leader overseeing a stable Iraq; a Contained Mess, with Iraq’s civil war being suppressed by neighboring countries; and Contagion, a self-explanatory disintegration of the whole region into chaos.

Whatever the real outcome, the value of the workshop to U.S. policy makers was to gain an understanding of the problem, its logic and alternate policies, and to speculate on the biggest question of all – maintaining the future of liberal globalization in a widening environment of radical, fundamental ideology.

Oppenheimer now teaches courses relating to U.S. foreign policy and national security, international political economy and internal conflict within the M.S. in Global Affairs program at SCPS.

Prior to joining NYU, Oppenheimer was the president of Global Scenarios, a New York-based consulting company. Before that, he was executive vice president at The Futures Group, a Connecticut-based international research company. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations; the American Council on Germany; and the Foreign Policy Roundtable at the Carnegie Council. Professor Oppenheimer is also a widely published author and lectures frequently to government and corporate clients.

Please download a full copy of Oppenheimer’s CGA Scenarios: Iraq Post-2010 , published in August 2007 by the NYU Center for Global Affairs at the School of Continuing and Professional Studies.