The Center for International Security and Cooperation now has more than 46 podcasts, dating all the way back to Oct. 19, 2016. Listen to them on the CISAC page on the iTunes website. Simply mouse over the title and click play. Open iTunes to download and subscribe to CISAC podcasts. Seminars and events at CISAC are routinely audiotaped for use as podcasts. Also, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Relations offers the World Class podcast series, featuring scholars and experts from FSI, CISAC and beyond.

CISAC's Siegfried Hecker this week won the Dwight D. Eisenhower award from the American Nuclear Society. He received the honor, along with former Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN) and former Senator Sam Nunn (D-GA), for his "historic achievements in the advancement of nuclear nonproliferation, arms control, and peaceful uses of nuclear energy." The annoucement from the American Nuclear Society noted:

"Dr. Siegfried Hecker, an international expert in plutonium metallurgy, is being recognized for his nuclear non–proliferation efforts during and following his tenure as the Director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Dr. Hecker was part of a historic visit by a U.S. delegation to Sarov, Russia, known as Arazamas-16 during the Cold War.  This was the first visit to the closed city by the U.S., and it laid the foundation for a series of programs aimed at securing nuclear materials in Russia and all of its former republics. Dr. Hecker’s current research at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation is focused on reducing the risks of nuclear terrorism worldwide, the nuclear challenges in India, North Korea, Pakistan, and the nuclear aspirations of Iran."

Maya Rossin-Slater uses her PhD in economics to analyze large-scale data on population health and socioeconomic outcomes to help inform policies targeting families with children, especially those who are disadvantaged or poor.

Rossin-Slater, an assistant professor at the Department of Health Research and Policy at Stanford Medicine, is the newest core faculty member at Stanford Health Policy. Prior to coming to Stanford this summer, she was an assistant professor of economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara for four years after receiving her PhD at Columbia University. Her research centers on public policies and their impacts on the health and well-being of families.She asks complex questions, often finding the answers in large administrative databases. Specializing in using “natural experiment” methods, Rossin-Slater tries to separate causation from correlation.

How do child-support mandates impact the relationship between parents and children? Does high-quality preschool compensate for early life health disadvantages? What are the long-term impacts of early childhood exposure to air pollution once they become adults?

“To me, it’s important to do this kind of research that can inform real-world policies, particularly for less advantaged families,” said Rossin-Slater, who is also a faculty fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic and Policy Research (SIEPR) and a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

“We live in a world with limited resources and we need to understand how to best allocate them,” she said. “So I think there is value in providing rigorous causal evidence on the effectiveness of various tools and policies that impact the less advantaged so that we can get the highest return on public spending as well as the highest potential for improving the outcomes of those at the very bottom.”

In a paper published in the Journal of Public Economics, Rossin-Slater talks about the growing body of evidence that suggests in-utero conditions and health at birth make a difference in later-life well-being. She found that the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) is one of the most cost-effective and successful programs to improve health at birth for children of disadvantaged mothers.

“The estimated effects are the strongest for mothers with a high school education or less, who are most likely eligible for WIC services,” she wrote in the paper, which was cited by the White House blog under President Barack Obama.

Paid Family Leave

When Mark Zuckerberg announced he would take a two-month paternity leave when his daughter was born in 2015, the Facebook co-founder was taking advantage of his own company’s policy, which grants employees up to four months leave for all new parents.

“Studies show that when working parents take time to be with their newborns, outcomes are better for the children and families,” Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook page.

This prompted many media outlets to turn to a co-authored study with Rossin-Slater, which found that 46 percent more men have taken time off to help take care of their newborns since California made paid family leave (PFL) law in 2004.

“The increase in paternal leave-taking may also have important implications for addressing the gender wage gap,” the authors wrote. “Our results suggest that a gender-neutral PFL policy can increase the amount of time fathers of newborns spend at home—including the time they spend at home while the mothers work—and may therefore be seen as one way to promote gender equality.”

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Here at Stanford, Rossin-Slater is using databases in the United States, Denmark and Sweden to continue her research on public policies (including paid family leave), as well as looking at how prenatal and early childhood factors impact lifelong outcomes. Does inequality and the stress of poverty in pregnancy, for example, get transmitted across generations?

In a forthcoming paper in the American Economic Review Rossin-Slater and her co-author, Stanford economist Petra Persson, found that prenatal exposure to maternal stress due to deaths in the family could have lasting consequences for the mental health of the children.

They examined nearly 300,000 births in Sweden between 1973 and 2011, in which a relative of the mother died either before her due date or in her child’s first year of life. They found that children who were in the womb when a relative died were 25 percent more likely to take medication for ADHD than those who were infants when the relative died. And those children were 13 percent more likely to take prescription drugs for anxiety once they became adults.

Take those results and one can imagine that the stress of living in poverty during pregnancy might be compounded over generations in that same disadvantaged family.

“This would imply that policies aiming to alleviate stress associated with economic disadvantage may help break the cycle of poverty,” Rossin-Slater and Persson told The Washington Post for a story on their research.

In new projects, Rossin-Slater is now studying the effects of reforms in the WIC program in California on maternal and child health, as well as the impacts of paternity leave on maternal mental health and child outcomes in Sweden. She continues using research designs that pay careful attention to establishing causality and working with large administrative databases.

“I believe in and enjoy working with data because it provides an opportunity to learn about how real-world policies actually work,” she said. “I have the privilege of being able to set my own research questions and to use my economic training and newly available data to try to find at least some answers. My hope is that these answers can be useful for creating better and more effective policies.”

CISAC co-director Amy Zegart wrote the following essay in the Oct. 25 online edition of The Atlantic:

Pity the professionals. In the past month, President Trump has sideswiped certification of the Iran nuclear deal, sandbagged his own secretary of state’s diplomatic efforts with North Korea, and even provoked the ever-careful Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman, Bob Corker, to uncork his deepest fears in a series of bombshell interviews. “The volatility, is you know, to anyone who has been around, is to a degree alarming,” Corker told the Times earlier this month, revealing that many in the administration were working overtime to keep the president from “the path to World War III.” He doubled down on those comments a few weeks later, declaring that Trump, among other things, was “taking us on a path to combat” with North Korea and should “leave it to the professionals for a while.”

The professionals sure have their hands full. So far, the Trump Doctrine in foreign policy appears to consist of three elements: baiting adversaries, rattling allies, and scaring the crap out of Congress. The administration has injected strategic instability into world politics, undermining alliances and institutions, hastening bad trends, and igniting festering crises across the globe. “America first” looks increasingly like “America alone.” The indispensable nation is becoming the unreliable one. Even without a nuclear disaster, the damage inflicted by the Trump presidency won’t be undone for years, if ever.

But it’s also important to understand that today’s foreign-policy challenges— whether it’s Iran’s hegemonic ambitions in the Middle East, North Korea’s breakneck nuclear breakout, China’s rise, Russia’s nihilism, Europe’s populism and fragmentation, Syria’s civil war, or transnational terrorism and cyber threats—did not start with Trump. This is the most challenging foreign-policy environment any White House has confronted in modern history.

Three swirling complexities explain why.

Threat complexity

Take a look at any of the annual threat assessments issued by the Director of National Intelligence over the past few years. They will make your head spin. They are filled with rising states, declining states, weak states, rogue states, terrorists, hackers, and more. Bad actors don’t just threaten physical space these days. Adversaries are working on ways to cripple America in cyberspace and even outer space—by compromising all those satellite systems on which its digital society depends. In this threat landscape, the number, identity, magnitude, and velocity of dangers facing America are all wildly uncertain. Exactly how many principal adversaries does the United States have? Who are they and what do they want? What could they do to us? How are these threats changing and how can we keep up without spending ourselves into oblivion or leaving ourselves vulnerable to other nasty surprises? These are fundamental questions. There are no consensus answers. Uncertainty is what fuels America’s foreign-policy anxieties today.

The Cold War was different. Then, certainty was what fueled American foreign-policy anxieties. It was clear to all that the U.S. faced a single principal adversary. The Soviet Union had territory on a map and soldiers in uniforms. Thanks to U.S. intelligence, Soviet intentions and capabilities were fairly well understood. The threat landscape was deadly but slower-moving: Communists never met a five-year plan they didn’t like. And while superpower nuclear dangers were terrifying, they were also constraining in a helpful but insane sort of way. In 1961, President Kennedy invoked the specter of a “nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads” over the earth. Every American foreign-policy decision had to consider the question: What would Moscow think of that? Today, the nuclear sword of Damocles is still hanging—indeed, China, India, Pakistan, and North Korea have all successfully tested nuclear devices since 1961—but no singular threat guides U.S. foreign policy as the Soviet Union once did.

Organizational complexity

As threats have grown more complex, organizational arrangements to deal with them have, too. Coordinating Soviet policy was one thing. Developing coherent U.S. foreign policy in the face of so much uncertainty across so many issues is quite another. Little wonder special advisers, envoys, commissions, boards, initiatives, czars, and new agencies have been growing like mushrooms. This may not sound so bad. But it is. Every new agency or czar or special arrangement says, “the regular process here ain’t working.” The crux of the problem is that bureaucracies are notoriously hard to kill or change. Ronald Reagan famously quipped that bureaucracy is the closest thing to immortal life on earth. Whenever a crisis hits, the natural response is to add a new organization and stir. But if today’s chief challenge is developing coherent, coordinated policy in the face of complexity, creating more organizations to coordinate doesn’t get you very far. Over time, the whole bureaucratic universe just keeps growing bigger, filled with obsolete organizations alongside new organizations; fragmented jurisdictions, overlapping jurisdictions, and unclear jurisdictions; and silos so specialized that nobody can see across all the key issues easily.

Cognitive complexity

Humans are not superhuman. Research finds that most people can remember at most seven items at a time, fewer as they grow older. Even the biggest brains have limits. In 2001, Peter Pronovost of Johns Hopkins noticed that highly trained medical teams at the university’s medical center were screwing up insertions of central line catheters, causing infections in critically ill patients at alarming rates. Why? Because they often forgot one of just five simple steps (like washing their hands) before starting the procedure. (Pronovost instituted a checklist that has since become widely used and is credited with saving thousands of lives.)

In foreign policy, too, the stakes are high and humans are frequently overloaded by complexity, resulting in catastrophic errors that nobody ever intended. One of the chief findings of the 9/11 Commission, for example, was that many inside the FBI simply didn’t know or couldn’t remember all the legal requirements and rules for sharing intelligence and law-enforcement information. Even the Bureau’s own 1995 guidelines were “almost immediately misunderstood and misapplied,” the commission concluded. As a result, clues to the terror plot emerged weeks before 9/11 but were marooned in different parts of the bureaucracy.

In 1935, an advanced bomber nicknamed “the Flying Fortress” crashed during a test flight. The Army Air Corps investigation found that the machine worked fine. The problem was the human. The airplane was so sophisticated, flying required the pilot to remember too many things, and he forgot one of them: unlocking the rudder and elevator controls during takeoff. It was “too much airplane for one man to fly,” one reporter later wrote. That crash sparked the invention of pilot checklists which have been used for nearly a century, transforming global aviation.

U.S. foreign policy is becoming too much airplane for one person to fly. “The professionals” surrounding Trump—Secretaries James Mattis and Rex Tillerson, Chief of Staff John Kelly, National-Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, and others—are trying to keep the whole thing from crashing with a pilot who has never flown before. Let’s hope they can.

America’s approach to the world is a complicated mess, for reasons that predate the current president.

Amy Zegart is co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation and professor of political science, by courtesy. She is also the Davies Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and directs the Cyber Policy Program. She wrote this essay as a contributing editor to The Atlantic.

Siegfried Hecker and Scott Sagan published new essays on the North Korean nuclear crisis. In his article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Hecker said, "we need the political equivalent of control rods, which get inserted into a nuclear reactor core to prevent a runaway catastrophic reaction." Sagan, in a Foreign Affairs magazine essay, urges a deterrence strategy for the U.S., because, "when it comes to the current conflict with North Korea, that means admitting that there are no military options that do not risk starting the most destructive war since 1945."

Deep policy discussions between journalists and top Stanford scholars highlighted a recent media roundtable at the Hoover Institution.

The event drew about 30 members of the national media from a variety of print and broadcast outlets, including CNN, CBS, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, MSNBC, The Washington Post, and Politico.  The two-day media roundtable on Oct. 15-16 was titled, “Outside the Beltway.”

Over the course of the two-day conference, participants engaged in robust discussions with Hoover Institution fellows and Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies scholars, including former U.S. Secretary of State and Hoover and FSI senior fellow Condoleeza Rice, who kicked off the event with a foreign policy conversation.

Drones and cybersecurity, for example, were topics of conversation for Amy Zegart and Herb Lin from the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC).

Drones and new warfare

Zegart said, “New technology is being used in ways never imagined ... The question is, could drones be next?”

Drones are possible “coercion tools,” more effective than people would believe, Zegart said. “We need to figure out how the logic works with coercion, in regard to states.”

How do you get others to back down without a fight? You need to issue a costly threat, she said. For example, “trip-wire” forces of more than 20,000 in South Korea represent such a credible threat to North Korea. “Low-cost is low credibility,” or “cheap talk,” on the other hand.

Drones lower the cost of coercion, Zegart said. One point is that such strikes have huge public support, as the risk of U.S. casualties are very low, according to polls – 62 percent favor such drone strikes.

Zegart said drones could shift the “relative costs” of war and are better able to sustain military action over a lengthy time frame. They also affect the “psychology of punishment.” Hovering over a target for long periods of time, decapitation strikes against regime leaders, and the constant state of “near-ambush” changes the character of war and for a military campaign to stay the course.

“Certainty of punishment is a very powerful way to change the behavior of the adversary,” moreso than “severity of punishment, said Zegart, who has affirmed these conclusions through surveys with foreign military officers. That research also showed that domestic political support for military reaction is the most popular reason for making threats credible. But a deeper dive into such issues is urged, she added.

“We’re really behind the curve in figuring out how to make military threats credible in the world,” said Zegart. “Lots of questions remain.”

Hacking, information attacks

Lin spoke about the recent Equifax data hacking, among other topics.

He said, “The harm we all feel is both tangible and intangible” in regard to such hacks. In other words, there is both material threat and a peace of mind threat, he explained.

The “Internet-of-Things” is another looming problem, Lin said. In the future, liability issues will factor into how all these devices are connected and who is responsible in case of misdeeds, he said.

In the case of health care, confidentiality is a critical societal goal, but hacking creates numerous scenarios: “Would you prefer your blood type posted online or changed in your medical records,” Lin said, explaining the different ways information misuse may affect people.

On the global security front, “cyber war” takes advantage of the flaws of information technology (IT), and “information warfare” takes advantage of the virtues of IT, he noted. Such efforts begin to level the playing field between international actors and agencies.

“You give large megaphones to small players,” Lin said.

In Russia, information warfare is actually studied as a theory of warfare. And the results show that it works – it’s easier to destroy democratic  values online than create or reinforce them, Lin said. For example, Russia’s meddling in the 2016 elect stoked political polarization in America.

One media member asked Lin how the U.S. could prevent Russia from using cyber and information warfare in upcoming U.S. elections.

Lin said, “It’s not clear to me that the U.S. government is really going to be willing to do anything,” but some public pressure may move entities like media companies to respond more effectively.

And Zegart noted, “The Russians are still here.” They are present right now in any number of settings, from social media to traditional media and in public spheres, for example, she said.

“Attacking brains” was how Zegart described Russia’s goal. For American social media companies, she suggested, “Think about battleground states” and focus on “triaging” these areas.

WWII, Russia

The media also heard presentations from Hoover's Kori Schake on defense policy; Hoover's Victor Davis Hanson on “The Second World Wars,” his new book; Hoover's Michael Auslin on the Asian century; Hoover and FSI's Michael McFaul discussed the U.S-Russia relationship; and Hoover and FSI's Larry Diamond on democracy in the world order.

McFaul spoke about the hot spots in the relationship between the U.S. and Russian governments, his time as the U.S. ambassador to Russia during the Obama administration, and his suggested approaches to today’s engagement with Russia. He noted how Russia's President Vladimir Putin has prevailed on many recent occasions against the best interests of the U.S. One instance is Syria and how complicated that issue was for foreign policy makers during his tenure.

"The objective we sought to achieve -- the end of the civil war -- our policies did not achieve," said McFaul, who urges stronger U.S. action against Russian cyber attacks on the U.S. electoral process, now and into the future.

Hanson said that people today often fail to appreciate the deadly scope of the WWII conflict. For example, he pointed out that more people died in that conflict than any in human history, with 27,000 people dying every day in WWII. It was also the first time that more civilians were killed than soldiers. Of all the six major powers involved in the conflict, Japan killed about 10 people for every person they lost.

Lessons from WWII? “Things change very quickly in a war,” Hanson said. In 1942, it looked like the Axis powers had the upper hand; the next year, the Allies were surging. Also, a country should rely on a formidable deterrence strategy to discourage would-be attackers.

Once you lose it, “deterrence is very, very hard to recapture,” Hanson said.

MEDIA CONTACTS:

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