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Aaron Rapport

Research Fellow, International Security Program

Contact:
Telephone: 617-496-7494
Fax: 617-496-0606
Email: rapp0030@umn.edu

Experience

Aaron Rapport holds a B.A. (cum laude) from Northwestern University and is currently a doctoral candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities. His dissertation seeks to explain why elite policymakers in the U.S. government have historically underestimated the long-term costs of large-scale military interventions that target foreign regimes. Drawing from research in psychology, he argues that senior decision-makers who highly value the future—or more colloquially, are "farsighted"—are biased towards assessing the desirability, rather than feasibility, of their policy aims. He contends that this bias is especially pronounced when the U.S. attempts to transform the political structure of a targeted state rather than just maintain the status quo by defending an existing regime.

Rapport has published an article on the theoretical underpinnings of neoconservativism and their implications for U.S. foreign policy, “Unexpected Affinities? Neoconservatism’s Place in IR Theory,” Security Studies, Vol. 17, No. 2, April 2008. In addition to his dissertation research, he is currently working on how neoconservative understandings of leadership affect attitudes towards international institutions. He and a University of Minnesota colleague are also researching how leaders of autocratic regimes are able to leverage state weakness to secure their own political survival.