Karl Eikenberry  Photo Credit: Rod Searcey

President Barack Obama has announced he will send several hundred troops to help secure the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad as militants aligned with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria - known as ISIS - take neighborhoods in Baquba, only 44 miles from the Iraqi capital.

Former Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry, the William J. Perry Fellow in International Security, is interviewed by the Australian Broadcast Corporation. He says the advances by Islamic militants in Iraq in the last week "have been absolutely stunning." The retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen., however, thinks the ISIS advancement will end quickly. "The bigger worry that we have though is ISIS crossing over to the Iraqi and the Syrian frontier and the possibility of them establishing a sanctuary for international terrorists," Eikenberry says.

You can watch Eikenberry's interview here. and ready an interview in The Australian here.

Martha Crenshaw  Photo Credit: Rod Searcey

Martha Crenshaw, a senior fellow at CISAC and its parent organization, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, is one of the world's leading experts on terrorism. She joined a panel on the public radio program KQED Forum to discuss the political situation and what the militants envision for an Islamic state.

"The ISIS is a group that is even more radical than al-Qaida itself," Crenshaw says. 
"Syria provided a launching board for them, which allowed them to become sort of a caliphate linking Syria and Iraq."

Crenshaw estimates there are between 5,000 to 6,000 members of the ISIS fighting in Iraq and that new recruits are coming in all the time. "But the source of their strength is not merely in numbers," she says. They have gained strength through discipline and communicating what an Islamic state would look like.

Listen to KQED panel discussion here.

Arash Aramesh, a national security analyst at Stanford Law School, discusses the crisis through the prism of Iran on Al Jazeera English.

U.S. Army Col. Tracy Roou is a senior military fellow at CISAC this year. She is researching security cooperation with challenging governments and preparing for her next assignment in the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Policy. She recently met with former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in Washington, D.C., at the headquarters of the Rumsfeld Foundation. They discussed military cooperation as a tool of foreign and defense policy. Here, she shares her thoughts about that meeting and what it meant to her personally as a military officer, as well as to her research.

CISAC has given me the platform to learn from two former U.S. Secretaries of Defense, William J. Perry and Donald Rumsfeld. They happen to be the first and the last secretaries of defense to visit Uzbekistan, where I recently served as defense attaché. Their deep insight into the complicated world of policymaking and the military’s ability to provide capabilities and build relationships as a tool of foreign policy in the former Soviet Union, has added greatly to my understanding of strategic thinking in that part of the world.

The chance to meet with Rumsfeld to discuss military cooperation with challenging governments was an incredible opportunity for my research, but also a true honor and a highlight of my Army career. I was well aware of his reputation as a tough interview. The meeting started with his questions about me, my career and family, and my year at CISAC as a U.S. Army War College Fellow. After I described the depth of expertise at CISAC and Stanford about strategic thinking and military policy, he jokingly asked why I needed to meet with him.

It was clear that Secretary Rumsfeld still keeps an intense battle rhythm. But he was gracious, generous with his time and open to all of my questions. A large bust of Winston Churchill sits in the corner of his conference room, where we met for an hour.

Our session covered many areas, but mostly focused on the former Soviet Union and U.S. military cooperation in that region. In the context of foreign policy with challenging governments, Rumsfeld said: “Linking U.S. diplomacy and the military – even when powers will try to pull them apart – is very important.”

Rumsfeld has been back in the news, with a new documentary about his work and leadership in public service, especially overseeing the Iraq War. Though some are saying he was evasive and impenetrable in the documentary, “The Unknown Known,” I found him to be open and engaging when discussing U.S. foreign policy in the former Soviet States and Russia, which is the focus of my research.

Few remember that as a young U.S. congressman, Rumsfeld was a co-sponsor of the Freedom of Information Act, a landmark tool granting American citizens and reporters the ability to push for government transparency. With his memoir, “Known and Unknown,” his declassified papers give insight on many tough policy decisions with challenges to the to the government, many of which can be found on his website, The Rumsfeld’s Papers.

I learned that the Rumsfeld Foundation helps young leaders in government, business and academia in Central Asia and the Caucuses better understand the concepts of a market economy, a civilian-led military and a free and open government. The foundation helps microfinance organizations working with the world’s poorest people and it grants fellowships to graduate students interested in public service.

“I had spent a lot of time in Central Asian Republics and felt that they did not have a good connection among themselves, nor did they have much connection or awareness of the Unites States,” Rumsfeld says in a video on his foundation website. “So we’ve established a fellowship program to bring over 10 or 12 Central Asian fellows, mid-career people so that they’ll develop relationships and go away with a better understanding of what the United States of America is all about and the kind of opportunities that free systems offer.”

Following our meeting, I was given a tour of foundation offices, which are filled with photographs and presidential letters of various periods in his life in public service, starting as a U.S. Navy pilot. As I left, I noted the two cabinet chairs from his two terms as secretary of defense sitting at the entryway.

I came away from my meeting with Rumsfeld with the realization that our 13^th and 21^st secretary of defense is as nuanced and complex as many of the policy and security issues he tackled in his extraordinary career. At the end of our meeting, he agreed to a photograph together, next to the Churchill bust, as well as another meeting.

In his book, “Rumsfeld’s Rules,” he refers to a quote by Churchill: “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.” 

Military interventions have traditionally been a source of controversy in the United States. But America’s appetite for the dispatch of armed forces has been diminished greatly by factors that have primarily emerged in the 21st century. These include, most painfully, the protracted campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq that have made US political and military leaders more cautious about waging wars to end tyranny or internal disorder in foreign lands.

Debates on military intervention are complicated by the network of political, security and economic interests that must be balanced when contemplating this option. In this IISS commentary, Karl Eikenberry, the William J. Perry Fellow in International Security at CISAC, talks about how four factors have heavily influence the current calculus.

Military interventions have traditionally been a source of controversy in the United States. But America’s appetite for the dispatch of armed forces has been diminished greatly by factors that have primarily emerged in the 21st century. These include, most painfully, the protracted campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq that have made US political and military leaders more cautious about waging wars to end tyranny or internal disorder in foreign lands.

Debates on military intervention are complicated by the network of political, security and economic interests that must be balanced when contemplating this option. In this IISS commentary, Karl Eikenberry, the William J. Perry Fellow in International Security at CISAC, talks about how four factors have heavily influence the current calculus.

Asked to summarize his biography and career, Donald K. Emmerson notes the legacy of an itinerant childhood: his curiosity about the world and his relish of difference, variety and surprise. A well-respected Southeast Asia scholar at Stanford since 1999, he admits to a contrarian streak and corresponding regard for Socratic discourse. His publications in 2014 include essays on epistemology, one forthcoming in Pacific Affairs, the other in Producing Indonesia: The State of the Field of Indonesian Studies.

Emmerson is a senior fellow emeritus at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), an affiliated faculty member of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, an affiliated scholar in the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, and director of the Southeast Asia Program at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center. Recently he spoke with Shorenstein APARC about his life and career within and beyond academe.

Your father was a U.S. Foreign Service Officer. Did that background affect your professional life?

Indeed it did. Thanks to my dad’s career, I grew up all over the world. We changed countries every two years. I was born in Japan, spent most of my childhood in Peru, the USSR, Pakistan, India and Lebanon, lived for various lengths of time in France, Nigeria, Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and the Netherlands, and traveled extensively in other countries. Constantly changing places fostered an appetite for novelty and surprise. Rotating through different cultures, languages, and schools bred empathy and curiosity. The vulnerability and ignorance of a newly arrived stranger gave rise to the pleasure of asking questions and, later, questioning the answers. Now I encourage my students to enjoy and learn from their own encounters with what is unfamiliar, in homework and fieldwork alike. 

Were you always focused on Southeast Asia? 

No. I had visited Southeast Asia earlier, but a fortuitous failure in grad school play a key role in my decision to concentrate on Southeast Asia. At Yale I planned a dissertation on African nationalism. I applied for fieldwork support to every funding source I could think of, but all of the envelopes I received in reply were thin. Fortunately, I had already developed an interest in Indonesia, and was offered last-minute funding from Yale to begin learning Indonesian. Two years of fieldwork in Jakarta yielded a dissertation that became my first book, Indonesia’s Elite: Political Culture and Cultural Politics. I sometimes think I should reimburse the African Studies Council for covering my tuition at Yale – doubtless among the worst investments they ever made. 

Indonesia stimulated my curiosity in several directions. Living in an archipelago led me to maritime studies and to writing on the rivalries in the South China Sea. Fieldwork among Madurese fishermen inspired Rethinking Artisanal Fisheries Development: Western Concepts, Asian Experiences. Experiences with Islam in Indonesia and Malaysia channeled my earlier impressions of Muslim societies into scholarship and motivated a debate with an anthropologist in the book Islamism: Contested Perspectives on Political Islam. 

What led you to Stanford?

In the early 1980s, I took two years of leave from the University of Wisconsin-Madison to become a visiting scholar at Stanford, and later I returned to The Farm for shorter periods. At Stanford I enjoyed gaining fresh perspectives from colleagues in the wider contexts of East Asia and the Asia-Pacific region. In 1999, I accepted an appointment as a senior fellow in FSI to start and run a program on Southeast Asia at Stanford with initial support from the Luce Foundation.

As a fellow, most of your time is focused on research, but you also proctor a fellowship program and have led student trips overseas. How have you found the experience advising younger scholars?

In 2006, I took a talented and motivated group of Stanford undergrads to Singapore for a Bing Overseas Seminar. I turned them loose to conduct original field research in the city-state, including focusing on sensitive topics such as Singapore’s use of laws and courts to punish political opposition. Despite the critical nature of some of their findings, a selection was published in a student journal at the National University of Singapore (NUS). NUS then sent a contingent of its own students to Stanford for a research seminar that I was pleased to host. I encouraged the NUS students to break out of the Stanford “bubble” and include in their projects not only the accomplishments of Silicon Valley but its problems as well, including those evident in East Palo Alto.

That exchange also helped lay the groundwork for an endowment whereby NUS and Stanford annually and jointly select a deserving applicant to receive the Lee Kong China NUS-Stanford Distinguished Fellowship on Contemporary Southeast Asia. The 2014 recipient is Lee Jones, a scholar from the University of London who will write on regional efforts to combat non-traditional security threats such as air pollution, money laundering and pandemic disease.

Where does the American “pivot to Asia” now stand, and how does it inform your work? 

Events in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and now in Crimea as well, have pulled American attention away from Southeast Asia. Yet the reasons for priority interest in the region have not gone away. East Asia remains the planet’s most consequential zone of economic growth. No other region is more directly exposed to the potentially clashing interests and actions of the world’s major states – China, Japan, India and the United States. The eleven countries of Southeast Asia – 630 million people – could become a concourse for peaceful trans-Pacific cooperation, or the locus of a new Sino-American cold war. It is in that hopeful yet risky context that I am presently researching China’s relations with Southeast Asia, especially regarding the South China Sea, and taking part in exchanges between Stanford scholars and our counterparts in Southeast Asia and China. 

Tell us something we don’t know about you.

Okay. Here are three instructive failures I experienced in 1999, the year I joined the Stanford faculty. I was evacuated from East Timor, along with other international observers, to escape massive violence by pro-Indonesian vigilantes bent on punishing the population for voting for independence. The press pass around my neck failed to protect me from the tear gas used to disperse demonstrators at that year’s meeting of the World Trade Organization – the “Battle of Seattle.” And in North Carolina in semifinal competition at the 1999 National Poetry Slam, performing as Mel Koronelos, I went down to well-deserved defeat at the hands of a terrific black rapper named DC Renegade, whose skit included the imaginary machine-gunning of Mel himself, who enjoyed toppling backward to complete the scene. 

The Faculty Spotlight Q&A series highlights a different faculty member at Shorenstein APARC each month giving a personal look at his or her teaching approaches and outlook on related topics and upcoming activities.

Warning against the “dangers of excessive hubris,” former U.S. Ambassador Stephen W. Bosworth emphasized the intricacies and complexity of creating American foreign policy and called for the government to exercise greater restraint and better understand the countries it engages with.

The veteran diplomat and visiting lecturer at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies called for the United States to exercise greater self-restraint and better understand the history and current circumstances of countries it engages with. 

“The making of U.S. policy is inherently a very, very difficult enterprise,” said Bosworth, positioned at Stanford for winter quarter.

“The issues tend to be complex, and they frequently pose moral as well as political choices,” he said. “I found that perfection is usually the enemy of the good in the making of foreign policy and is, for the most part, unattainable.”

Foreign policy can be ambiguous and difficult at times; it is a process that can be compared to gardening because “you have to keep tending to it regularly,” Bosworth said, referencing former Secretary of State George Shultz’s well-known analogy.

Bosworth, who served for five decades in the U.S. government and for 12 years as dean of Tuft’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, delivered these thoughts in the first of three public seminars this quarter. He is the Frank E. and Arthur W. Payne Distinguished Lecturer in residence at FSI’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC).

He cautioned against America’s tendency to revert to military power when crisis occurs. “I believe that when at all possible, we need to choose diplomacy over force,” Bosworth asserted, “although it is sometimes true that diplomacy backed by potential force can be more effective.” 

Citing Afghanistan, Iraq and Southwest Asia, Bosworth noted these among other examples as situations of excessive power projected by the American foreign policy arm. In some cases, pride may have gotten the better of policymakers who sometimes “want to be seen as doers and solvers.”

Bosworth pointed out that the nature of our actions speaks loudly – both at home and abroad – thus sensitivity and sincerity are important in any international exchange.

Since the Vietnam War, American values and the push for democracy are not always well received by other countries. And there’s often good reason for that, he said.

“It is awkward for the U.S. to campaign for more democracy elsewhere when our own model seems to have increasing difficulty in producing reasonable solutions for our own problems,” he said.

Democracy is “not a cure-all” for every nation and this is reflected in the amended model adopted by countries such as Singapore, Indonesia and Burma. However, Bosworth said he remains confident that the American democratic system “will prevail and eventually work better than it seems to be working now.”

Bosworth will explore the challenges of maturing democracies in Japan and South Korea and negotiations and management of relations with North Korea in his two other Payne lectures. The Payne Lectureship brings prominent speakers to campus for their global reputation as visionary leaders, a practical grasp of a given field, and the capacity to articulate important perspectives on today’s global challenges.

Bosworth entered the Foreign Service in 1961, a difficult yet “exciting time to join the government,” he said.

“At the age of 21, I was the youngest person entering my class,” he said, “and of the 38 people, there were only two women…and were zero persons of color and only a handful who were not products of an Ivy League education.” The State Department of then is very different compared to the one that exists today; this signals positive, necessary change in the diplomatic corps.

Bosworth, having served three tours as a U.S. ambassador in South Korea (from 1997 to 2001); the Philippines (from 1984 to 1987); and Tunisia (from 1979 to 1981) and twice received the State Department’s Distinguished Service Award (in 1976 and 1986), has a long established career.

He brings great wisdom on foreign affairs given his extensive engagement as a practitioner and a writer, said former colleague and Shorenstein APARC distinguished fellow Michael H. Armacost.

“To say that Steve has had an extraordinarily distinguished career in the Foreign Service doesn't quite capture the range of his accomplishments, I can’t think of very many Foreign Service officers in this or any other generation that have left a footprint on big issues in three consecutive decades,” Armacost acknowledged. 

During his time at Stanford, Bosworth will hold seminars and mentor students who may be interested in pursuing a career in the Foreign Service, in addition to the two upcoming public talks.

A student seeking this very advice posed a question in the discussion portion following Bosworth’s talk.

Speaking to anyone considering a Foreign Service career, Bosworth said one must “think about it hard, and think again.” He said public service is a privilege, not so much a sacrifice as the typical notion holds. “It can be a great career as long as you have the right perspective on it,” he ended.