CISAC's Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall selected as Carnegie Scholar
Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, a senior research scholar with the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at the Stanford Institute for International Studies and a senior adviser to CISAC's Preventive Defense Project, has been selected as a 2004 Carnegie Scholar.
The 15 scholars chosen this year by the Carnegie Corporation of New York will each receive up to $100,000 for a period of two years to pursue research. They join 52 others awarded the fellowships since 2000.
"The Carnegie Corporation has a long history of supporting path-breaking work in international security, and I am truly honored to be included in such a distinguished group of scholars," said Sherwood-Randall. "Given the state of the world -- and the fact that there are few foreign and defense policy goals that we can successfully pursue unilaterally -- I intend to use this support to generate new ideas about the leadership of America's key alliances and partnerships."
Sherwood-Randall's research topic is "Transforming Transatlantic Relations: A New Agenda for a New Era." Her study will seek to understand the elements of continuity and change in the global security environment in order to determine whether and how America's most important alliance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, can remain relevant and effective. She intends to publish the results of her work in a journal-length article as well as produce policy memoranda and briefings for appropriate officials in the U.S. government and relevant international organizations.
Sherwood-Randall served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia during the first Clinton Administration (1994-1996). She played a key role in creating a cooperative context for denuclearization efforts in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan and in establishing security ties with the new states of Central Asia. Prior to her government service, Sherwood-Randall served as co-founder and associate director of the Harvard Strengthening Democratic Institutions Project, as chief foreign affairs and defense policy advisor to Sen. Joseph R. Biden, Jr., and as a guest scholar in foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution.
Sherwood-Randall received her B.A. from Harvard-Radcliffe Colleges, magna cum laude. She received her doctorate in International Relations from Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar.
Chosen in a highly competitive process -- from an initial group of 144 nominees, 54 were invited to provide complete proposals -- the 15 selected Carnegie Scholars will explore issues critical to economic growth and human development. These include the American electoral process; political theory of international law; school reform from an international perspective; a reconsideration of the Iran hostage crisis; the logic of suicide terrorism; local control and federal reform of education; how U.S. transatlantic relations can remain relevant and effective; Hispanic students' achievements in elementary education; justice in education; political obligations in World War I America; the rise of far-right extremist groups and the role masculinity plays in their resurgence; the role of the United States in the 21st century; and the rebirth of democracy in Iraq.
"The annual announcement of the Carnegie Scholars is an opportunity to celebrate original and creative thinking on a wide array of social issues important to the Corporation's strategies," said Vartan Gregorian, president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, who inaugurated the Scholars Program in 1999 to support innovative and path-breaking scholarship.
"Criteria for selection were based on stringent academic standards and the relevance of the project to Corporation program priorities," said Neil Grabois, Carnegie Corporation's vice president and director for strategic planning and program coordination, who facilitated the various levels of deliberations. "The program's definition of excellence incorporates demonstrating intellectual risk-taking, framing unusual questions, possessing the capacity to communicate clearly and effectively on complex themes, and advancing scholarship in the Corporation's programs."
The Carnegie Corporation of New York was created by Andrew Carnegie in 1911 to promote the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding. As a grant-making foundation, the Corporation seeks to carry out Carnegie's vision of philanthropy, which he said should aim to do real and permanent good in the world. The Corporation's capital fund, originally donated at a value of about $135 million, had a market value of $1.8 billion on Sept. 30, 2003. The Corporation awards grants totaling approximately $80 million a year in the areas of education, international peace and security, international development and strengthening U.S. democracy.
Beijing tries to read mixed U.S. signals in Korea diplomacy
Beijing tries to read mixed U.S. signals in Korea diplomacy By John W. Lewis
For the past year China has led the quest for a negotiated solution to the Korean nuclear crisis. It facilitated and hosted three-way talks with the United States and North Korea a year ago this week and two sessions of the six-party talks (adding South Korea, Japan and Russia) in August and February. Its officials crisscrossed the globe to explore potential areas of common interest and compromise and this week hosted North Korean leader Kim Jong Il to explore options for the beleaguered Korean Peninsula. Yet, in each of the formal talks, the Chinese have been discouraged by the minimal results. They are now questioning U.S. intentions toward Korea and, in the longer term, toward China.
Beijing considers the unchecked expansion of North Korea's nuclear weapons to be a real possibility, and its reasoning starts with the record of U.S. policies toward nuclear proliferation. That record, the Chinese argue, is mixed and often contradictory. As a result, China worries that Washington might continue to tolerate the program so long as Pyongyang did not cross key red lines, such as the transfer of nuclear materials to terrorists.
Whatever Beijing's past position on nuclear matters, many senior Chinese now regard nuclear weapons on their border to be a direct threat to their national security and suspect Washington of downplaying that danger. For them, it is no great leap to the conclusion that the unfettered growth of the Korean program might embolden others in Asia, including Taiwan, to acquire nuclear weapons despite verbal opposition from Washington. Beijing's leaders can easily imagine how that nightmarish turn of events would undermine the nation's drive toward modernization and end strategic cooperation with the United States.
Despite the fact that all parties at the six-party meeting in February endorsed the dismantling of the North's nuclear weapons program, the Chinese fear that the talks may be dead in the water. Following that meeting, they began to debate other ways to resolve the crisis. They had already reorganized the leadership team responsible for North Korean affairs, and that team had begun acting to prevent the worst case, including offering further inducements to Kim Jong Il this week. Whereas last fall the talk of deepening U.S.-China cooperation on Korea pervaded the news, now, especially after Vice President Dick Cheney's uncompromising stand on Korea and Taiwan last week, the reverse is occurring.
What China can do in these circumstances is quite limited. Its influence on North Korea is largely determined by what the United States does or doesn't do. By refusing to negotiate on a staged process leading to the eventual dismantlement of Pyongyang's nuclear weapons, Washington has tacitly allowed the North's program to proceed. It has rejected proposals for a temporary freeze, technical talks and any interim steps short of the unconditional and complete ending of the program. The result is virtual paralysis.
Beijing has been able to work with North Korea only when it could find areas of potential compromise between Washington and Pyongyang. It cannot or will not act
alone to exert pressure because this would jeopardize its influence on the North. Contrary to a widely circulated story, Beijing did not cut off energy shipments to North Korea for three days in 2003. Beijing would not take such a counterproductive action when its main influence with the North lies in the kind of quiet diplomacy being practiced this week with Kim Jong Il.
Many in Beijing are beginning to question whether there might be a more promising approach with Pyongyang. Should the Chinese, South Koreans and Russians conclude that making progress toward the common goal of the North's complete nuclear disarmament is out of reach, for example, they reluctantly might translate their joint offer of aid in February into a quid pro quo for a partial agreement, such as a limited freeze, that would allow the situation to stabilize. China could worry that such an independent action could endanger the common front with Washington. At the same time, it could calculate that the United States would be sufficiently pleased with any solution that halted the North Korean nuclear program.
None of these developments may come to pass, of course, but who could have imagined a year ago that Washington would have permitted the situation to deteriorate to the present point?
United States and Russia in isolation
Faced with the deadly menace posed by transnational terror organizations, the nations of the world must redouble their cooperative efforts. The tasks ahead -- to disrupt terror groups and preempt their attacks -- require intense coordination among a multitude of national intelligence, national law enforcement, and military organizations. Unprecedented cooperation among all of the nuclear powers is needed to prevent nuclear weapons from falling into the hands of terror groups.
Yet, paradoxically, the two nations that have suffered the worst terror attacks -- the United States and Russia -- are regressing more and more to national strategies. They have been unwilling to make the extra effort to reap the benefits of real international cooperation.
I believe that the United States' strategic vision of the war on terrorism is flawed. I fear it is following the isolationist path of the United States after World War I rather than pursuing the broad international programs it successfully undertook to protect its security interests after World War II.
The terrorists posing the greatest threat to the United States and to Russia are transnational, with cells in many different countries. To support their training and operations, they raise funds in many countries and maintain these in international bank accounts. They use satellite-based television as their principal means of propaganda, the World Wide Web as their principal means of communication and international airlines as their principal means of transportation. Their efforts to get weapons of mass destruction are based on penetrating the weakest security links among the nations possessing these weapons, and their successful guerrilla operations depend on their ability to get support from sympathizers among the more than 1 billion Islamic people around the world.
An international operation is clearly needed to successfully deal with this threat. But the United States is not making full use of other nations and international institutions to dry up the terrorists' funds in international bank accounts, to gain intelligence on their planning for future attacks, to penetrate their cells so that it has a chance of preempting these attacks, to organize all nuclear powers with effective security of their nuclear weapons and fissile material, and to conduct counterinsurgency operations wherever they are needed. Dealing effectively with transnational terror groups that operate with impunity across borders requires an international operation with the full cooperation of allies and partners in Europe and Asia.
This is not "mission impossible." In 1993, the United States was able to get all of the former members of the Warsaw Pact to join up with NATO in forming the Partnership for Peace to cooperate in peacekeeping operations. In 1994, the United States with the full cooperation of Russia was able to negotiate an agreement by which all nuclear weapons were removed from Uzbekistan, Belarus and Kazakhstan and by which substantial improvements were made in the security of nuclear weapons in Russia. In 1995, the United States was able to get an agreement under which NATO took responsibility for the peacekeeping operations in Bosnia, an operation that was believed at the time to be as dangerous and filled with religious and sectarian strife as Iraq today, and it was able to get dozens of non-NATO nations -- notably including Russia -- to join it in that operation.
Securing Russian cooperation required listening to Russian views and making accommodations wherever possible. As U.S. defense secretary, I had to meet with my Russian counterpart four different times before I came to understand how to structure the command in Bosnia in a way acceptable to both Russians and NATO. The general lesson from this example, which is still applicable today, was best expressed by Winston Churchill, who observed during World War II, "The problem with allies is they sometimes have ideas of their own." But in reflecting on that problem, he also said, "The only thing worse than fighting a war with allies is trying to fight a war without allies."
What lessons can we learn from Churchill today? Had the Bush administration understood better the dangers of the post-conflict phase, surely it would have worked harder to get the support of those countries before invading Iraq. In any event, after the war it would have reached out to them and tried to achieve an accommodation that would have allowed their support during the reconstruction phase.
Instead, the administration took the position that any nation that was not with the United States during the war would not have a role in the reconstruction. To compound the problem, the United States did not seek meaningful assistance from the United Nations. Today, in the light of the difficulties experienced in restoring security in Iraq, the administration is reaching out to the United Nations and requesting that it play a major role in the political reconstitution of Iraq, but it is still not working effectively with the governments of France, Germany and Russia.
Just as the United States erred in believing that it did not need more international support in Iraq, so did the Russian government err in believing that it did not need more international support as it reconstituted its government after the Soviet era. The Putin administration believed -- correctly -- that it could turn around the Russian economy without significant assistance from other countries, and it believed that it could deal most effectively with its terrorist threat without interference from other countries. It also apparently believed that moving toward a level of democracy conflicted with the controls necessary for economic recovery and for fighting its terror war. So today we see a Russia that has enjoyed a healthy 7 percent growth rate each of these past five years, but has stopped -- indeed reversed -- its move towards becoming a liberal democracy. This reversal over the long term will have profoundly negative consequences for the Russian economy and for the Russian people, and unquestionably it is setting Russia on a course that will alienate it both from the United States and the European Union.
Both the Bush administration and the Putin administration have apparently made the decision that they can achieve their goals without broad international support. Both governments have erred in that judgment. But it is not too late to correct the judgment, and I fervently hope that both of governments will do so. The most important step in that process is reviving cooperation between the United States and Russia.
Geopolitics of Gas Capstone Conference
The conference seeks to take a fresh look at the geopolitical consequences of a major shift to natural gas in the coming decades; indeed by most estimates global consumption of gas will double by 2030. But in the ares of highest projected demand - North America, Europe, China, and South and East Asia - demand is expected to outstrip indigenous supply. This implies the need for a huge amount of investment in the expansion of cross border gas transport infrastructure to bring gas from supply centers - particularly Russia and the Middle East.
What are the geopolitical implications of a more gas-intensive world? What can the history of cross-border gas infrastructure investment tell us about the political, economic, and legal issues we are likely to face as we become more dependent of natural gas? Is there a "resource curse" for gas? What is the likelihood that gas producers form a cartel to control prices - a Gas OPEC?
Hosted by former Secretary of State James Baker, the Geopolitics of Gas: From Today to 2030 conference will bring together experts from industry and academia to discuss these questions and more. PESD and the Baker Institute will present results from historical case studies of major cross-border gas infrastructure investments and results from the first integrated global gas trade model; keynote speakers include the Minister of Energy and Mines for Algeria.
James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy, Rice University
9/11 and American Foreign Policy
Leffler is the Edward R. Stettinius Professor of History at U.Va. He joined the faculty in 1986, after teaching at Vanderbilt, and chaired U.Va.'s Corcoran Department of History from 1990 to 1995. One of the country's leading authorities on modern U.S. foreign relations, he won the Bancroft Prize for his book A Preponderance of Power in 1993.
Leffler was a senior fellow at the Nobel Peace Institute in Oslo during 1993 and 1998, where he lectured on the Cold War. He served as president of the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations in 1994.
In 1990, he was a member of the U.S. delegation to a joint Soviet-American symposium on the Cold War in Moscow and Washington. He served in the office of the Secretary of Defense during the Carter years, where he worked on arms control, confidence-building measures, and contingency planning as a fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Bechtel Conference Center
Why Do Some Civil Wars Last So Much Longer Than Others?
Five factors are shown to be strongly related to civil war duration. Civil wars emerging from coups or revolutions tend to be short. Civil wars in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union have also tended to be relatively brief, as have anti-colonial wars. By contrast, 'sons of the soil' wars that typically involve land conflict between a peripheral ethnic minority and state-supported migrants of a dominant ethnic group are on average quite long-lived. So are conflicts in which a rebel group derives major funding from contraband such as opium, diamonds, or coca. The article seeks to explain these regularities, developing a game model focused on the puzzle of what prevents negotiated settlements to long-running, destructive civil wars for which conflicting military expectations are an implausible explanation. In the model, regional autonomy deals may be unreachable when fluctuations in state strength undermine the government's ability to commit. The commitment problem binds harder when the center has an enduring political or economic interest in expansion into the periphery, as in "sons of the soil" wars, and when either government or rebels are able to earn some income during a conflict despite the costs of fighting, as in the case of contraband funding.
Beijing tries to read mixed U.S. signals in Korea diplomacy
For the past year China has led the quest for a negotiated solution to the Korean nuclear crisis. It facilitated and hosted three-way talks with the United States and North Korea a year ago this week and two sessions of the six-party talks (adding South Korea, Japan and Russia) in August and February. Its officials crisscrossed the globe to explore potential areas of common interest and compromise and this week hosted North Korean leader Kim Jong Il to explore options for the beleaguered Korean Peninsula. Yet, in each of the formal talks, the Chinese have been discouraged by the minimal results. They are now questioning U.S. intentions toward Korea and, in the longer term, toward China.
Beijing considers the unchecked expansion of North Korea's nuclear weapons to be a real possibility, and its reasoning starts with the record of U.S. policies toward nuclear proliferation. That record, the Chinese argue, is mixed and often contradictory. As a result, China worries that Washington might continue to tolerate the program so long as Pyongyang did not cross key red lines, such as the transfer of nuclear materials to terrorists.
Whatever Beijing's past position on nuclear matters, many senior Chinese now regard nuclear weapons on their border to be a direct threat to their national security and suspect Washington of downplaying that danger. For them, it is no great leap to the conclusion that the unfettered growth of the Korean program might embolden others in Asia, including Taiwan, to acquire nuclear weapons despite verbal opposition from Washington. Beijing's leaders can easily imagine how that nightmarish turn of events would undermine the nation's drive toward modernization and end strategic cooperation with the United States.
Despite the fact that all parties at the six-party meeting in February endorsed the dismantling of the North's nuclear weapons program, the Chinese fear that the talks may be dead in the water. Following that meeting, they began to debate other ways to resolve the crisis. They had already reorganized the leadership team responsible for North Korean affairs, and that team had begun acting to prevent the worst case, including offering further inducements to Kim Jong Il this week. Whereas last fall the talk of deepening U.S.-China cooperation on Korea pervaded the news, now, especially after Vice President Dick Cheney's uncompromising stand on Korea and Taiwan last week, the reverse is occurring.
What China can do in these circumstances is quite limited. Its influence on North Korea is largely determined by what the United States does or doesn't do. By refusing to negotiate on a staged process leading to the eventual dismantlement of Pyongyang's nuclear weapons, Washington has tacitly allowed the North's program to proceed. It has rejected proposals for a temporary freeze, technical talks and any interim steps short of the unconditional and complete ending of the program. The result is virtual paralysis.
Beijing has been able to work with North Korea only when it could find areas of potential compromise between Washington and Pyongyang. It cannot or will not act alone to exert pressure because this would jeopardize its influence on the North. Contrary to a widely circulated story, Beijing did not cut off energy shipments to North Korea for three days in 2003. Beijing would not take such a counterproductive action when its main influence with the North lies in the kind of quiet diplomacy being practiced this week with Kim Jong Il.
Many in Beijing are beginning to question whether there might be a more promising approach with Pyongyang. Should the Chinese, South Koreans and Russians conclude that making progress toward the common goal of the North's complete nuclear disarmament is out of reach, for example, they reluctantly might translate their joint offer of aid in February into a quid pro quo for a partial agreement, such as a limited freeze, that would allow the situation to stabilize. China could worry that such an independent action could endanger the common front with Washington. At the same time, it could calculate that the United States would be sufficiently pleased with any solution that halted the North Korean nuclear program.
None of these developments may come to pass, of course, but who could have imagined a year ago that Washington would have permitted the situation to deteriorate to the present point?
Moral Clarity or Political Calculation? The U.S. Approach to Human Rights in North Korea
A buffet lunch will be available to those who RSVP by 12:00pm, Wednesday, April 21 to Rakhi Patel. In the last three years, partly as the result of the efforts of a burgeoning conservative movement, the issue of human rights in North Korea has attained greater prominence in the statements and policy positions of the U.S. government. The administration connects this shift in emphasis in U.S. policy to its calls for greater moral clarity in foreign policy. At the same time, the administration has clearly enunciated its desire for regime change in North Korea, and the human rights issue has served as a method of cultivating public support for this policy, both domestically and internationally. Toward this end, the administration has revived a Cold War foreign policy approach from the 1970s and 1980s that connected human rights to economic and security issues--exemplified in the Jackson-Vanik amendment linking trade to emigration levels for Soviet Jews and the inclusion of human rights issues in the 1975 Helsinki Accords. The application of this model to North Korea demonstrates a failure to understand the differences between Eastern Europe and East Asia in general and the nature of civil society under Soviet communism and North Korean juche. It also fails to draw any useful lessons from the experience of the European Union and South Korea in dealing with Pyongyang on human rights. The unquestionably dire human rights situation in North Korea--and the character of its government and society--requires a set of policy approaches that need updating from the Cold War period and adaptation to the North Korean and East Asian context. John Feffer's most recent book is North Korea, South Korea: U.S. Policy at a Time of Crisis (Seven Stories, 2003). He is also the editor of the Foreign Policy in Focus book Power Trip: U.S. Unilateralism and Global Policy after September 11 (Seven Stories, 2003). His other books include Beyond Detente: Soviet Foreign Policy and U.S. Options (Hill & Wang, 1990) and Shock Waves: Eastern Europe After the Revolutions (South End, 1992). His other edited collections include Living in Hope: People Challenging Globalization (Zed Books, 2002) and (with Richard Caplan) Europe's New Nationalism: States and Minorities in Conflict (Oxford University Press, 1996). His articles have appeared in The American Prospect, The Progressive, Newsday, Asiaweek, Asia Times, TomPaine.com, Salon.com, and elsewhere. He is a former associate editor of World Policy Journal and has worked for the American Friends Service Committee, most recently as an international affairs representative in East Asia. He serves on the advisory committees of FPIF and the Alliance of Scholars Concerned about Korea.
Philippines Conference Room, Encina Hall
Neotrusteeship and the Problem of Weak States
George W. Bush and his administration came into office with a self-consciously realist orientation in foreign policy. The president and his advisers derided the Clinton administration's multilateralism as mere form without national security substance. They viewed Russia and China as the main potential threats or sources of danger, and regarded Bill Clinton as a naïve idealist for neglecting these great powers in favor of "foreign policy as social work"--humanitarian ventures in areas peripheral to U.S. national security concerns. Consistent with a realist suspicion of multilateralism and confidence in self-help, the administration's principal foreign policy project in its first months was the unilateral pursuit of ballistic missile defense.
The Bush team was particularly critical of U.S. participation in quixotic efforts at nation building for failed states. The message was clear: The Bush administration would not engage in state-building efforts. Ironically, the Bush administration has since undertaken state-building projects that are vastly larger and more difficult than anything the Clinton administration ever attempted. It can be argued that despite the apparent about-face, the Bush administration has actually kept true to its realist principles. We argue to the contrary that the Bush administration's brand of realism has collided with post-Cold War realities that shaped the Clinton administration's foreign policy as well.