Reality stands in the way of a quickly transformed U.S.-Russia relationship, Stanford historian Norman Naimark said. Naimark, an expert in Russian history and faculty affiliate at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), anticipates that "strategic constraints" will set in for the incoming Trump administration as it begins to understand some of the fundamental differences between Moscow and Washington.

The relationship between the two longtime global rivals may not change as fast or dramatically as some suggest, Naimark said. In fact, “deals” may be harder to make with the Putin regime in Russian than Trump anticipates.

CISAC recently interviewed Naimark on the subject of future U.S.-Russia ties:

How might the election of Donald Trump change the U.S.-Russia relationship?

There are many important things we do not yet know about the future Trump administration. How will his foreign policy team reflect (or not) the views of the Republican establishment, including the vice president, on issues towards Russia? How wedded is Trump to his campaign rhetoric and promises about Russia? How influential will the new president be in the making of foreign policy, when his interests and self-proclaimed competence clearly relate to domestic issues? How ready will the Trump administration be to reverse long-standing U.S. treaty and alliance obligations, both formal and informal?

Answers to those questions would help us assess the range of possibilities for any changes in Russian-American relations, which are presently worse than at any time since the beginning of the 1980s, the period of what some call the “second Cold War.” If Hillary Clinton had won the election, one could have been fairly certain that relations would have continued at their present parlous, if steady state, with both sides taking actions to undermine the other, while criticizing the other’s motives. Some commentators have suggested that the Trump victory opens a door for concessions on the part of the Americans – on Crimea, on Ukraine, on Syria, on sanctions, on NATO troops in the eastern member nations – that might encourage Putin to respond accordingly, improving the tone and content of Russian-American relations.

But I would caution against thinking that this will come fast, if it comes at all, or that the impact will be groundbreaking or of significant duration. There are some fundamental differences between Moscow and Washington that reflect deep and abiding issues. For example, both look at Russia’s “sphere of influence” from opposite perspectives: while Putin seeks to expand and consolidate it, the U.S. follows a revived containment policy. “Deals” may be harder to make with Russia under these circumstances than Trump anticipates.

If U.S. foreign policy establishment generally holds skeptical views of the Putin regime, how difficult will it be for Trump to strike off on his own in reshaping the relationship?

The history of American foreign policy since the Second World War has demonstrated that the president and his immediate advisors can have enormous influence on the flow of events. Again, nothing happens at once, independent of a cumbersome process of formulating and executing policy changes. But profound shifts do happen and they can alter the trajectory of American foreign policy. Still it is important to remember that Putin’s determined anti-American stance has Russian domestic political determinants that will impede change, even if President-elect Trump initiates steps to improve the character of the relationship.

What are the biggest flashpoints or challenges between Russia and the U.S.?

Ukraine, Syria, and the lifting of sanctions are probably at the top of the list, though the recent slippage of the arms control regime is a matter of great concern. The problems associated with Ukraine – both the issue of the illegal annexation of Crimea and the Russian destabilization of and military interference in Donbass – have been “handed off” by Washington to the Europeans in general and Germany, with Angela Merkel in the lead, in specific.

The Minsk II sanctions are a European initiative to get the Russians to conform to international norms on a Ukrainian settlement. Trump could hardly make a deal with Putin about Ukraine without serious European input.

Syria is different, though the constraints here also seem extremely difficult to overcome, given the U.S.’ principled opposition to strengthening Assad in power. Secretary of State John Kerry’s dogged attempts to come to an agreement with the Russians about Syria involved, as best we know, a number of important American concessions. Though both the United States and the Russian Federation are deeply hostile to ISIS, and it makes sense for both to join forces to attack the terrorist entity, the maintenance of the Assad regime would be very hard for the U.S. foreign policy and military establishment to accept.

Why does Putin seemingly think Trump is better for Russia than Hillary Clinton would have been?

Some of it is personal: Trump and Putin have said positive things about one another, though these exchanges were based in part on a mistranslation of a supposed compliment to Trump by Putin. Trump has been more conciliatory about dictators and has explicitly promised better relations with Russia. But the issues go deeper. Trump has indicated that he would reduce the United States’ support of NATO and reevaluate U.S. support of Ukrainian interests, both of which would weaken the American position in Europe, one of Moscow’s major foreign policy goals.

The Russian president also welcomes Trump’s readiness to recalibrate American involvement in Syria. Meanwhile, Clinton was seen as having tried to undermine Putin’s election to the Russian presidency in 2012 and as supporting an aggressive democratization program in Russia. She is the personification for him of the liberal, internationalist, and interventionist wing of the Washington foreign policy establishment that advocates, in his view, the Americanization of the international order.

With this said, Putin is surely nervous about Trump’s inconsistencies and volatility, which could exacerbate rather than calm Russian-American tensions.

What does history tell us about the U.S.-Russia relationship and what may happen in the future?

Since the beginning of the Cold War (some might argue since the Russian Revolution, almost a century ago), the relationship between the U.S. and Russia has been fraught with deep tensions and mutual hostility. The Cold War was a very dangerous period of relations, when proxy wars, dramatic international crises, and the potential use of nuclear weapons dominated the relationship. One of the major disappointments of the post-Cold War period is the unsuccessful integration of the Russian Federation in the international system as a force for peace and stability. Putin is an important part of the story. But there are also deep historical and structural reasons for this problem and they will not be solved by the waving of an American president’s magic wand. Though both countries are changing, we may have to wait a good long while for the Putin-era enmity to disappear.

Naimark is also the Donald Andrews Whittier Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, the Robert and Florence McDonnell Professor of East European Studies in the history department, a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution and an affiliated faculty fellow at the Europe Center at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He recently published a new book, Genocide: A World History.

Follow CISAC on Twitter at @StanfordCISAC and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/StanfordCISAC.

MEDIA CONTACTS

Norman Naimark, Center for International Security and Cooperation: (650) 723-2674, naimark@stanford.edu

Clifton B. Parker, Center for International Security and Cooperation: (650) 725-6488, cbparker@stanford.edu

Amy Zegart, co-director of CISAC, wrote the following op-ed for the San Francisco Chronicle:

Donald Trump’s stunning win has made many wonder: Just how dangerous could a Trump foreign policy be? There are plenty of reasons to be afraid, very afraid.

Marjorie Kiewit, a former CISAC researcher and longtime supporter, passed away at her home in Boston on Nov. 12, 2016.  She was 95.

Kiewit was a researcher for the Center for International Security and Cooperation under John W. Lewis, CISAC co-founder and the William Haas Professor of Chinese Politics. She was also a generous and enthusiastic supporter of CISAC’s mission to make the world safer through knowledge and education.

Lewis said, “Marjorie worked throughout CISAC in its formative years and supported with wonderful gifts the entire center. In the last 10 years or so, she primarily supported my project (the Project on Peace and Cooperation in the Asian-Pacific Region), but she embraced the overall center's commitment to peace.”

For example, Lewis and his co-author acknowledge the support of Kiewit that made this 2016 research paper on China’s interests in the South China Sea possible. Always maintaining such connections after her two-plus decades at Stanford, Kiewit worked on campus at the Northeast Asia-United States Forum and then CISAC. She also served as a member of Stanford’s Board of Visitors for the Institute of International Studies. 

One Stanford colleague said Kiewit possessed an “intuitively correct understanding of the world events and world leaders.”  Another described her as “engaged, intelligent and relevant to how we faced extraordinary challenges and opportunities with the Chinese, North Koreans and Russians. She brought light and joy into all of our work."

Roots and results

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Kiewit maintained her association with Stanford for over three decades until her death, during which time she traveled with high-level delegations to China, Russia, and North and South Korea and cultivated close relationships with Chinese educators and senior policy makers to share ideas and proposals in the field of educational and foreign policy. She was also the founder and served as longtime chairperson of the Helios Foundation, which supports charitable institutions throughout the world and promotes philanthropy for future generations. She spent the last 20 years living in Boston to be near family, which was always a priority in her life, her family stated.

Kiewit was preceded in death by her two husbands; parents; two brothers, John and William Harkins; and her daughter, Linda Jacob.  She is survived by her sister, Barbara Belle of Belleville, Wis.; her daughters Barbara (Jack) Aalfs of Sioux City, Iowa and Nancy (Tom) McLoughlin of Mystic, Conn.; her son John (Lynne) Buchanan of Appleton, Wis.; her son-in-law Jonah Jacob of Boston; and seven grandchildren, 12 great-grandchildren, and three step-grandchildren. 

A celebration of Kiewit's life will be held next summer in Appleton, Wis.  Donations in her memory may be made to the Marjorie Buchanan Kiewit Scholarship Fund at Lawrence University. The address is:

Development Office, Lawrence University

711 E. Boldt Way

Appleton, WI 54911

Stanford students are applying lean start-up techniques to some of the world’s most difficult foreign policy issues.

The fall 2016 quarter class, Hacking for Diplomacy: Tackling Foreign Policy Challenges with the Lean Launchpad, is a first-of-its-kind course for studying statecraft, created as a reflection of the best that Stanford and Silicon Valley offers in the way of pioneering paradigms. Hacking for Diplomacy is co-taught by Joe Felter, a senior researcher at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). It is based on the Lean LaunchPad methodology, created by course designer Steve Blank, a Stanford lecturer and entrepreneur.

The teaching team also includes Jeremy Weinstein, a political science professor at the Freeman Spogli Institute; Zvika Krieger, the U.S. Department of State's Representative to Silicon Valley; and Steve Weinstein, the CEO of MovieLabs.

'Breaking free'

The class is based on cultivating ideas and imagination, breaking free of the traditional “business plan” approach to rolling out new products and solutions. In the case of diplomacy, the lean start-up method is fast and flexible above all. It has three key principles based on concepts such as "mission model canvas," "beneficiary development," and "agile engineering,” according to Felter, also a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.

“The first principle is accepting that any proposed solution to a problem whether in the commercial world or public sector is initially just a set of untested hypotheses – at best informed guesses – as to what may solve the needs of a customer or beneficiary,” said Felter.

Regarding beneficiary development, he said, experiential learning is central.

“There are no answers to complex challenges ‘inside the building,’ if you will, and students must ‘get out of the building’ to find out –in as intimate detail as possible – the various pains and gains experienced by the various beneficiaries, stakeholders and end users that must be addressed to find viable and deployable solutions to their problems,” Felter said.

The last principle, “agile development,” is based on the view that proposed solutions are generated and constantly updated through a collecting of data and feedback. This in turn, Felter explained, is rapidly tested and new solutions are designed based this iterative process.

Overall, he noted, the core idea is that entrepreneurs are everywhere, and that lean startup principles favor experimentation over elaborate planning, offering a faster way to get a desired product or solution to market.

Real-world instruction

In the class, student teams analyze real-world foreign policy challenges. They then use lean startup principles to find new approaches to seemingly intractable or very complex problems that have bedeviled the foreign policy world. The teams actually work with mentors and officials in the U.S. State Department and other civilian agencies and private companies.

Each week, the teams present their findings (“product”) to a panel of faculty and mentors, who will critique their solutions. The outcomes will range, as they vary from problem to problem. Examples include human rights, food security, refuges and labor recruitment, and mosquito disease threats, among others.

On Oct. 10, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry visited the class. “Brilliant minds are applying technology to world’s toughest problems. Their perspective will inform,” Kerry tweeted after the class.

Kerry’s State Department gave the students seven challenges to address – human trafficking, avoiding space collisions, tracking nuclear devices, and countering violent extremism. The students will explore and analyze these issues through the rest of the quarter.

One student, Kaya Tilev, later asked Kerry what the students should be striving for to make their “solutions” a reality for national policymakers.

Kerry said, “Well, you’re doing it. You’re in it. You’re in the program. And I have absolute confidence if you come up with a viable solution it is going to be implemented, adopted, and institutionalized.”

Zvika Krieger, the state department official, told the students that Kerry was impressed with them and the class.

“He (Kerry) brought up our class in all of his meetings that day, including at a lunch with the CEOs/founders of Google, Airbnb, and Lyft; in a podcast interview with Wired magazine, and in remarks at the Internet Association's conference,” Krieger wrote in an email to them.

Global flashpoints are proliferating around the globe – the Syrian War, conflict and civil wars across the Middle East and in parts of Africa; the pursuit of weapons of mass destruction by states and non-state groups; the most significant flow of refugees since World War II; North Korea nuclear testing; Russian adventurism on its borders; China’s forays into the South China Sea; and a changing climate.

In other words, there is no shortage of thorny problems for young minds to solve as they embark on their careers.

‘Hungry to apply their energy’

Jeremy Weinstein, the political science professor, described the students as “hungry to apply their energy and talents to real-world problems, and to use hands-on experiences as a way of accelerating their learning.”

The class taps into that motivation by bringing together data scientists, engineers, and social scientist, he noted. In the end, the idea is for students to learn how to “innovate inside government.”

Weinstein is optimistic that this class – and a stronger connection between the State Department and Stanford’s technical and policy expertise – can drive more innovation inside government.

“Technology can play a critical role in addressing many of today’s foreign policy challenges, and this class is one new way for senior U.S. officials to tap into the passion, creativity and talent of Silicon Valley,” he said.

Hacking for defense

Last year, Felter and Blank also led a Hacking for Defense class based on the same lean start-up principles. Hacking for Diplomacy is co-listed as both an International Policy Studies and a Management Science and Engineering course – it counts for international relations and political science majors as well.

Blank, a consulting associate professor in engineering, told the Stanford News Service in a recent story that he seeks to cultivate in students a passion for giving back to society and their world.

“We’re going to create a network of entrepreneurial students who understand the diplomatic, policy and national security problems facing the country and get them engaged in partnership with islands of innovation in the Department of State,” said Blank, who also wrote about the new hacking for Diplomacy course in the Huffington Post.

“Teams must take these products out to the real world and ask potential users for feedback,” he noted.

CISAC nuclear scientist Siegfried S. Hecker earlier this year released a book, Doomed to Cooperate, about how American and Russian scientists joined forces to avert some of the greatest post-Cold War nuclear dangers. Physics Today and Arms Control Today recently ran reviews on the work. Below is a Nov. 1 article that Hecker wrote on this subject for Russia Matters:

By Siegfried S. Hecker

You can now listen to podcast seminars held at the Center for International Security and Cooperation on Stanford's iTunes U site.

With more talks to be added after they occur, the CISAC iTunes page launched this week with the following podcasts from the fall 2016 quarter:

• Margaret Levi's Oct. 13 talk where she discusses the conditions under which individuals act beyond their narrow economic interests in situations where logic suggests that self-interest should triumph. A political science professor, Levi is the director of Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

• Derek Chollet's Oct. 10 seminar on President Obama's foreign policy legacy. Chollet served in senior positions at the White House, State Department, and Pentagon.

• Mark Zoback's Oct. 10 discussion about the opportunities and challenges of the world's natural gas abundance. Zoback is a Stanford geophysics professor and director of the Stanford Natural Gas Initiative.

To access the podcasts, go to itunes.stanford.edu. Then click on the red button, "Launch Stanford on iTunes U," and look for CISAC under the "What's New Button. Check the CISAC homepage for future speaker events that will be eventually added to the center's iTunes site.

Stanford on iTunes U is an archive of audio and video content from schools, departments, and programs across the university on Apple's popular iTunes platform. The site includes Stanford course lectures, faculty presentations, event highlights, music and more. The collection is maintained by Stanford's Office of University Communications.

All of the content from Stanford on iTunes U is free. To access the site, make sure you have the most current version of iTunes installed on your Mac or PC computer. To download the application, visit to www.apple.com/itunes. Next, launch the iTunes application and click on iTunes Store in the source list. Select iTunes U in the top navigation area, and click on Stanford on the resulting page. Alternatively, you can go directly to the university's iTunes U page via the “Launch Stanford on iTunes U” link at itunes.stanford.edu. Stanford launched its iTunes U collection in 2005.

Erin Baggott Carter, a CISAC fellow during 2014-16, recently published a Washington Post op-ed on the Chinese media coverage of the current U.S. presidential election. This is a result of CISAC's increased focus on requiring and helping all CISAC fellows publish an op-ed based on their academic research. Carter is now an assistant professor at the School of International Relations at the University of Southern California. Click here to read the entire op-ed, with charts and additional links. Below is the written portion:

Erin Baggott Carter

How do the 2016 U.S. elections appear outside the United States? The state-controlled Russian media clearly leans toward Republican nominee Donald Trump, who appears to admire President Vladimir Putin.

But what about China’s state-controlled media? Given Trump’s frequent references to China as a major cause of U.S. job losses — and his promises to get tough on trade pacts — one might expect harsh reporting on Trump.

To test this theory, I scraped China’s leading state-affiliated print news media from May 1 to Oct. 24, looking for references to the two candidates and automatically coding whether nearby words indicated a positive or a negative tone. This exercise shows that official Chinese-language media leans somewhat toward “Hillary” (as the Democratic candidate is referred to in China) in terms of favorable mentions.

Early this summer, Chinese state media covered Trump far more often than Hillary Clinton. But by this fall, the volume of coverage was nearly equal. There has been very little coverage of trade policies or economic implications for China. Instead, Chinese reporting tends to focus on scandals and missteps. This does not reflect a typical “horse-race” view of elections. Instead, as my ongoing research shows and some journalists point out, Chinese propaganda likes to emphasize the flaws of democracy as a political system.

The graph below shows the volume of coverage for both candidates. In early May, state-run newspapers mentioned Trump five times as often as they mentioned Clinton. This imbalance has steadily declined. Currently, the candidates are mentioned with nearly identical frequency.

The next graph shows the editorial tone of coverage of Trump and Clinton. Since May, Chinese propaganda has consistently covered Clinton more favorably, although both candidates have become slightly less popular over time. Clinton’s favorability rating started at 92 percent in May and declined to 77 percent in late October. Trump’s favorability rating started at 79 percent in May and declined to 71 percent in late October.

China’s state-run newspapers have said relatively little about the candidates’ policies and their implications for U.S.-China relations. Instead, coverage has focused on scandals: Clinton’s deleted emails and Trump’s affinity for Vladimir Putin, his tax returns, and his relationships with women.

Excluding generic campaign words and filler words, the most commonly used words about Clinton include “email,”  “investigation,” “Russia,” “FBI,” “lawsuit,” “Clinton Foundation,” “scandal,” “husband,” and “women.” The most commonly used words about  Trump include “Russia,” “Putin,” “intraparty,” “criticism,”  “immigrants,” “tax payments,” “slander,” “New York,” “magnate,” “women” and “real estate.”

Why is Clinton getting better coverage?

China’s preference for Clinton over Trump is notable for two reasons. First, China has a tepid relationshipwith Clinton. In her first visit to Beijing in 1995, she refused to meet with senior leaders and criticized Chinese human rights practices, neither of which endeared her to her hosts. As secretary of state, she implemented the Obama administration’s strategy of rebalancing toward Asia, which many in China interpreted as a move toward containment. After Clinton left the State Department, the China Daily wrote that she “always spoke with a unipolar voice and never appeared interested in the answers she got.”

Second, it takes a lot for Chinese leaders to take China-bashing from U.S. presidential candidates seriously. They learned from Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush that U.S. presidents rarely enact the anti-China campaign platforms that help carry them to victory. For instance, as Mitt Romney ramped up his criticism of Chinese trade practices in 2012, China’s Global Times speculated, “Is Romney’s toughness toward China just a scam? … His soft stance is only a matter of time.”

These two facts speak to the depths of Chinese concern about a Trump presidency. Despite China’s historical antipathy toward Clinton and willingness to countenance tough campaign rhetoric, Chinese propaganda still favors Clinton over Trump.

This is important because the American media has recently speculated that China, like Russia, may prefer a Trump presidency because it would lead the United States to withdraw from the world. Although there are doubtless some in the 88 million-member Chinese Communist Party who hold this view, China is far more integrated into the American financial system than Russia is and has commensurately larger stakes in U.S. economic stability.

For instance, as the U.S. financial sector was unraveling in September 2008, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson asked China not to sell Treasury bonds. China agreed, Paulson tells us in his memoirs, even though Russia invited China to weaken the American economy by dumping bonds in concert.

Now, as was the case eight years ago, when forced to choose between global stability and relative gains over the United States, Chinese leaders prefer global stability. Although Trump offers China the enticing possibility of American withdrawal from the Asia-Pacific sphere, Chinese leaders have begrudgingly cast their lot with the devil they know. This is evident from the propaganda they control, which favors Clinton over Trump.

The coordinated cyber attack that crippled parts of the internet on Friday highlighted key policy problems, a Stanford cybersecurity scholar said.And while the problems were clear, there are no easy solutions, said Herbert Lin, a senior research scholar for cyberpolicy and security at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. A research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Lin serves on the President’s Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity.

Beginning early Friday morning, several major websites including Twitter and Amazon went down for most of the day, and many other sites were inaccessible. The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are investigating what is described as a DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack. The attacks mainly focused on Dyn, one of the companies that run the internet’s domain name system (DNS).

The following is an interview with Lin:

What happened on Oct. 21?

It was a distributed denial-of-service attack on a major internet services provider. The company operates much of the internet’s infrastructure. It’s not a consumer-facing company, but is in between the user and a company like, say, Amazon. These attacks centered on the domain name system (DNS), which is the service that translates something like stanford.edu into a numerical IP address. People remember Amazon.com, but they don’t remember the numerical IP address (which is actually where a company like Dyn sends web users going to a site like Amazon). What a DOS attack involves is the flooding of this (Dyn) company’s servers with millions of fake requests from sources for service to go to those web sites. Being forced to process all these requests, the company can’t service real people trying to use web sites. On Friday, the millions of sources making these requests appear to have been part of the Internet of Things.

What is the Internet of Things, and how did it factor into the cyberattack?

In this case, they weren’t, by and large, products like your computer or mine, but were mostly smaller things like surveillance cameras, baby monitors and home routers [everyday objects that have network connectivity to the internet]. What makes these things particularly vulnerable is that they are small, they don’t have much computational power in them, and they don’t include many, if any, security features. In fact, a Chinese company just admitted that it didn’t pay enough attention to security, and they recommend users do some things to improve security. But they shipped their products without paying much attention to security, and that’s why this was a vulnerability.

What new public policies could lessen the likelihood of this happening again?

The primary policy recommendation is that we need policy that encourages – or mandates, depending on how strong you want to be about it – at least minimal security measures for devices that connect to the internet, even Internet of Things devices. How you actually promote, encourage or incentivize that without a legal mandate is problematic, however, because nobody quite knows what the market will accept. Also, if you’re going to force manufacturers to pay attention to security, you’re going to reduce the rate of innovation for these products. Then there’s the question of who’s going to buy them, because the unsecure ones will probably be cheaper. The fundamental problem here is that guys who use the Internet of Things, like surveillance cameras, will find those cameras work perfectly fine, even if they were compromised. So they don’t care about security. They have no incentive to do so. Why should they pay more to protect me?

Does this show that our November election is even more vulnerable to hacking?

At this point, it looks unrelated … But I don’t know, it is all just speculation.

Herb Lin's research interests focus on policy-related dimensions of cybersecurity and cyberspace, especially regarding the use of offensive operations in cyberspace as instruments of national policy. In addition to his Stanford positions, he is chief scientist, emeritus, for the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, National Research Council (NRC) of the National Academies. Prior to this, he was a professional staff member and staff scientist for the House Armed Services Committee (1986-1990), where his portfolio included defense policy and arms control issues. To learn more, read Lin's "An Evolving Research Agenda in Cyber Policy and Security."

MEDIA CONTACTS

Herbert Lin, Center for International Security and Cooperation: (650) 497-8600, herbert.s.lin@stanford.edu

Clifton B. Parker, Center for International Security and Cooperation: (650) 725-6488, cbparker@stanford.edu

Malfrid Braut-Hegghammer, a former CISAC Stanton nuclear junior faculty fellow and Stanford MacArthur Visiting Scholar, wrote a Washington Post op-ed about why some dictators are more likely to get nuclear weapons. Below are the opening paragraphs:

Many dictators have sought nuclear weapons; some succeeded, some came close, others failed spectacularly. A careful examination of two such regimes illuminates why. Today, many dictatorships are becoming personalist, in which leaders dominate decision-making at the expense of formal state institutions. According to recent research, personalist dictators are more likely to pursue nuclear weapons and are less likely to get them, but they can become increasingly dangerous and unrestrained if they succeed.

In my recent book, Unclear Physics: Why Iraq and Libya failed to build nuclear weapons, I revisit the unsuccessful attempts in those two countries. Libya failed badly at its nuclear-weapons program, whereas Iraq came dangerously close to a major breakthrough when its program was interrupted by the 1991 Gulf War cease-fire.

Using documents and interviews with scientists, doctors, journalists, academics, military officers and ex-officials, I reconstruct the history of both countries’ nuclear programs. The stories that emerge challenge key assumptions in the conventional wisdom about these projects and regimes. At the same time, this account brings important differences between the two cases to light.

Personalist leaders weaken their states to concentrate power in their own hands, but they do so in different ways. Saddam Hussein fragmented Iraq’s state apparatus, whereas Moammar Gaddafi dismantled Libya’s state institutions. Such strategies weaken states in distinct ways, which affect their capacity to build nuclear weapons. Gaddafi’s efforts to create a “stateless state” were particularly damaging. Personalist dictators use different strategies to manage their nuclear programs. But they share some common challenges, as weak state institutions make micromanagement very costly and oversight difficult. Read more.

Braut-Hegghammer is now an associate professor of political science at the University of Oslo.