Why Breaking Into Foreign Policy Just Got Harder

Renanah Miles Joyce told three Bangkok teenagers not to specialize too early, because the entry-level jobs they're picturing may not exist in the form they expect by the time they get there. It's advice she's in an unusually good position to give: Joyce is an assistant professor of security studies at Georgetown University's Walsh School of Foreign Service and Center for Security Studies, and the field she studies just lived through the roughest hiring year in its recent history.

Joyce joined student co-hosts Lucy and Saris on Students Incorporated, the podcast produced by students at the International Community School of Bangkok, to talk about her own winding path into international security and what she now tells students trying to find theirs. Her own route started in Baghdad. Six months after graduating college, she was working as a civilian contractor supporting the U.S. Army during the Iraq War, watching an effort to stand up a new Iraqi military and tamp down an insurgency that, as she put it, "didn't go very well." That contract work was her first real exposure to the security world, and it led her back to Washington, D.C., into a master's program at Georgetown's Security Studies Program, and eventually to a PhD in political science at Columbia University in 2020. She's since held fellowships at MIT, Harvard's Kennedy School, George Washington University, and the RAND Corporation, taught at Brandeis University, and returned to Georgetown in 2024 as faculty in the same program where she'd once been a student.

A Pipeline That Just Buckled

Joyce's advice to "be as broad and expansive as possible" wasn't offered in the abstract. She told the students directly that the nature of entry-level work is shifting, "including in the foreign policy field." That understates what actually happened. In January 2025, a federal hiring freeze halted Foreign Service recruitment across the board, and by March, the State Department was rescinding accepted offers to its own Foreign Service Internship Program, a program students had already cleared through applications, interviews, and background checks to get into, according to reporting by The Washington Post. The department also suspended the Foreign Service Officer Test, the standard entry exam for career diplomats, while it reassessed its workforce needs. The freeze, extended through the summer, ran into the start of fiscal year 2026.

Hiring has since resumed, but not enough to erase the disruption. The American Foreign Service Association has reported that the State Department brought in roughly 100 new Foreign Service officers last September and about 160 more in January 2026, even as the department separated close to 250 Foreign Service employees and about 30 civil service staff under reduction-in-force notices issued the previous summer, according to Federal News Network. For a graduating student, that's a different hiring environment than the one their professors trained in: fewer guaranteed slots, a workforce still absorbing layoffs, and an entry test that spent months not running.

The disruption reached beyond the State Department's own payroll. On January 28, 2025, a stop-work order shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development almost overnight, and within the year the United States had canceled more than 80 percent of its development and humanitarian assistance programs, according to reporting compiled by the aid-industry outlet Devex. USAID had long doubled as one of the biggest employers and training grounds for graduates of international-affairs programs, the same pipeline Joyce's own students are aiming for. The Hoya, Georgetown's student newspaper, reported that students bound for careers in public service were rethinking those plans as the openings disappeared, with new graduates now competing for a shrunken pool of jobs against staff recently laid off from that same agency. That's the specific texture behind Joyce's warning that the entry-level job market "is going to look different, I think, across the board," a shift that had already landed on the students she was advising.

Why the Tool She Studies Keeps Underdelivering

Joyce's own research sits inside a related problem: even when a government commits resources to a security relationship, it doesn't reliably get the influence it's paying for. Her current book project, Exporting Might and Right: Security Assistance and Liberal International Order, examines how great powers use weapons, training, and advice to foreign militaries as a tool to shape those militaries' behavior, and why that tool so often falls short. The project grew out of her dissertation, which won the American Political Science Association's Kenneth N. Waltz Award for the best dissertation in security studies in 2021. On the show, she put the core finding plainly: security assistance "often does not get" the U.S. "what it wants," because influencing a partner military turns out to be very hard.

That finding lines up with what government auditors have found in the largest live security-assistance program running right now. The U.S. Government Accountability Office, tasked by Congress with monitoring the roughly $42 billion in defense and security assistance sent to Ukraine, reported this year that the State Department and Department of Defense don't consistently share information on approved weapons transfers, and that neither agency verifies the equipment it authorized was actually delivered. GAO also found that evaluators still hadn't completed outcome assessments across several Ukraine assistance projects as of November 2025, more than three years into the war, because the data needed to measure results wasn't available on a workable timeline. It's a real-world illustration of the exact question Joyce says academic research is built to ask: not "how do we get this specific partner to do this specific thing," but "under what conditions does this tool work at all."

She drew that same line, policy analysis versus academic research, early in the interview, using the Strait of Hormuz as her example. A policy analyst under a compressed deadline asks what the U.S. can do today to reopen a strait closed by conflict with Iran. A political scientist asks a more general question: under what conditions does coercion actually work against a regional power. "It's sort of a different focus," she said, but one she thinks every student in an international field will eventually have to translate between. It echoed an aside she'd made earlier in the class: many of them, given how often they already move between languages, classrooms, and home communities, are doing a version of that translation work without naming it.

"Cake and Ice Cream"

Asked what she'd tell her own younger self, Joyce didn't lead with a specific skill. She led with scope: understand how big the field is before you commit to a lane. Policy analyst, think-tank researcher, professor, teacher: "all of them meaningful," she said, and people move between them more than students expect. She traced that advice back to a mentor she met with as a student, a woman already working in the field Joyce wanted to enter.

"You always want to be choosing between cake and ice cream."

Joyce said she thought the line was silly when she first heard it. It stuck anyway: the point was never about dessert, but about keeping two good options on the table instead of settling for the only one, which means applying and learning broadly enough that options actually show up. Her practical version of that advice for students today is more concrete than "stay open," though. She tells them to have two or three specific issues, regions, or tools ready to talk about (not expertise, just a real answer) because a vague "I'm interested in foreign policy" doesn't hold up once someone asks what, exactly. "Having ideas ready," she said, "can sort of help you immediately launch into a more substantive conversation."

It's advice built for the moment the field is having: broad enough to survive a hiring freeze nobody saw coming, specific enough to say something when the freeze lifts and the interviews start again.

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