Five visiting scholars with expertise on Southeast Asia will spend varying portions of the academic year 2008-09 in residence at Stanford. Shorenstein APARC and the Southeast Asia Forum will host four of them: three were selected under the Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Initiative on Southeast Asia. and one is a recipient of a 2008-09 Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellowship. A fifth scholar will be on campus as a National Fellow of the Hoover Institution.

The five are John Ciorciari, Joel S. Kahn, Mark Thompson, Angie Ngoc Tran, and Christian von Luebke.

John Ciorciari spent the 2007-08 academic year at Stanford as a Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow at Shorenstein APARC. He finished a book that examines how Southeast Asian states have "hedged" their relations with the United States and China.

Dr. Ciorciari will spend upcoming academic year at Stanford as a Hoover Institution National Fellow. In that capacity he plans to expand his research to include the international relations of India.

Joel S. Kahn is a professor of anthropology (emeritus) in the School of Social Sciences at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia. He will be at Stanford for the first half of October 2008 as the 2008 Lee Kong Chian National University of Singapore-Stanford University Distinguished Lecturer.

While at Stanford Professor Kahn will give three public lectures. Their tentative titles are: "A Southeast Asian Modernity?"; "Empires, States, and Political Identities in (Pen)insular Southeast Asia"; and "Religion, Reform, Science, and Secularity." Details including dates, times, and venues will be posted as they become known.

Mark Thompson is a professor of political science at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany. He will be in residence at Stanford in Winter and Spring 2009 as the 2009 Lee Kong Chian National University of Singapore-Stanford University Distinguished Fellow.

While at Stanford, Prof. Thompson will pursue a book project on "Late Democratization in Pacific Asia." The book will question the claim that democratization in Pacific Asia (including Southeast Asia) has been driven by economic growth and offer an alternative perspective. He will present the results of his project in a public lecture in the spring of 2009. Date, time, venue, and other details will be posted when known.

Angie Ngoc Trần is a professor in the Division of Social and Behavioral Sciences and Global Studies at California State University, Monterey Bay (CSUMB). She will be in residence at Stanford for the second half of November 2008 as the 2008 Lee Kong Chian National University of Singapore-Stanford University Distinguished Fellow.

In a public lecture on November 17, 2008 (Mobilized Workers vs. Morphing Capital: Challenging Global Supply Chains in Vietnam), Professor Tran will present the results of her study of labor-capital relations in Vietnam and how the different national origins of investors and owners affect workers' conditions, consciousness, and activism. Details including time and venue will be posted as they become known.

Christian von Luebke was a research fellow in Tokyo at Waseda University's Institute for Global Political Economy in 2007-08 following receipt of his 2007 PhD in public policy and governance at the Australian National University. He will be at Stanford for the 2008-09 academic year as a Walter H. Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow.

During his residence Dr. von Luebke will pursue a research and writing project on "Good Governance in Transition: Explaining Local Policy Variations in Indonesia, China, and the Philippines." He will give a public lecture on the results of his project in winter or spring 2009. The date, time, venue, and other details will be posted when known.

For the past ten years, Japan has undergone aggressive, government-driven reforms aimed at changing its financial systems, labor markets, and corporate governance institutions. Faced with the challenges of globalization and an ageing population, Japan undertook these reforms to regain its former competitiveness. What remains uncertain, however, is whether these reforms will also be effective in creating an environment
that is more favorable to entrepreneurship and innovation. If the reforms are effective, at what pace, and in what shape will new firms emerge? Will Japan’s system mirror the institutions that have evolved in regions such as Silicon Valley, or will it develop into a new framework of innovation?

The persistent decline in Japanese asset values during the 1990s engendered many policy and legal responses. Among these was a series of business policy and associated legal reforms intended to foster the creation of new companies, new industries, and new financial institutions. Starting in 1997, these reforms included changes in how firms are formed. For example, the capital required to start a stock-issuing firm was reduced from ten million yen to a mere one yen. The yugen kaisha—a secondary form of Japanese company—was also abolished and the limited liability partnership created instead. Holding companies were allowed, mergers were deregulated, treasury shares were authorized, and the liability of company directors was limited.

Additional reforms were promulgated to encourage new forms of financial intermediation. Tax benefits created for “angel” investors, foreign venture capitalists, foreign private equity, and foreign lawyers became common. Purchase of shares with shares, triangular mergers, and repurchase of shares were all allowed. Moreover, several new stock exchanges were created expressly for relatively new companies.

Corporate governance laws were also revised. For one, Japanese firms may now use U.S.-style board of director committees, with an upper limit placed on directors’ liabilities. Japanese auditors are now required to be outsiders, and consolidated accounting is likewise compulsory, as well as “mark-to-market” rules for financial reporting. These are just a few of the changes, all of which combine to increase transparency in Japan’s markets.

The results were noticeable. By 2006, new companies were garnering price-to-earnings ratios of greater than 100 to 1 in the new markets; the number of IPOs per year was comparable to the rate during the U.S. Internet bubble; and the mergers and acquisition market was transformed from one of the most moribund in the world to one of the most dynamic. Venture capital firms proliferated, as did new law firms, private equity firms, and foreign banks. Existing Japanese banks merged, new banks formed, and money-lending began again. Some new companies even gained sufficient liquidity and stature to turn their founders into celebrities and some of the wealthiest people in Japan. Rakuten, Mixi, ValueCommerce, and Cybird are just a few of these success stories. Japan is currently in its seventy-first month of economic expansion—the longest of the postwar period.

The future, however, is unclear. As Professor Yoko Ishikura, of Hitotsubashi University, recently observed at a SPRIE seminar at Stanford, “Japan is at a turning point and it is uncertain which direction it will choose.” For 2008, IPO valuations have returned to levels more comparable to those in the United States, and the climate for startups has moderated somewhat. New company startup rates are flat and IPO rates have recently dipped significantly. Some prominent studies of the entrepreneurial climate in various countries rank Japan among the least favorable. Many observers are impatient for more evidence of results from the reforms. It remains an open question whether Japan is being affected by the U.S. slowdown and commodity price increases, or if the country is simply retreating from it entrepreneurial gains.

In light of these developments, scholars remain curious: Are the reforms permanently changing the Japanese economy? Are the reforms sufficient to meet the challenges that Japan faces? Will the reforms be effective? Alternatively, are these reforms even desirable? SPRIE and the U.S.-Asia Technology Management Center, in cooperation with selected experts and research organizations in Japan, are undertaking
a major project to study the seemingly contradictory corporate and social climate in Japan, which is at present stretched between entrepreneurial and more conservative forces.

Japan’s economic relationship with the countries of the Pacific Rim—and indeed with the rest of the world—is vital to all of the economies involved. If Japan is transforming into a new economic culture, an understanding of that transformation is relevant both to global economic development and to the study of entrepreneurial growth.

The inaugural (March 2008) issue of PRISM, an undergraduate journal published by the University Scholars Programme (USP) of the National University of Singapore (NUS), carries a dozen essays. Six were written by Stanford undergraduates for a Stanford Overseas Seminar taught in Singapore in September 2006, and six by NUS undergrads in the USP for an NUS course taught at Stanford in May 2007.

The Stanford students, their paper topics, and brief summaries of their conclusions follow:

Jenni Romanek examined Singapore’s national identity. She found that Singaporeans “embody certain shared attributes of national identity, but they do so on a superficial level … If the government truly wishes to impart upon citizens a Singaporean identity, it must allow them to cultivate and define it, at least in part, by themselves. This necessitates a level of self-expression that is not currently acceptable by government standards.” She ended her essay by asking, “Without free speech, whose identity are Singaporeans representing?”

François Jean-Baptiste examined Singapore’s efforts to inculcate national identity through the school curriculum. He found the education ministry’s top-down methods “generally unsuccessful” and recommended a more student-and-teacher-driven approach. “The real and representative Singapore narrative,” he wrote, involved the ambitions of a wide range of Asian immigrants including “Filipina maids,” “Malay Muslims,” and “opposition leaders like J.B. Jeyaretnam and Slyvia Lim.” Education in the city-state’s secondary schools, he concluded, “should and can incorporate that story.”

Lauren Peate studied the “Four Million Smiles” campaign launched in the run-up to the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank held in Singapore in September 2006 while the Stanford seminar was in progress. She found general public support for the campaign except among “young, [more] educated, and electronically connected” Singaporeans, one of whom told her, “We trust the government but it doesn’t trust us [to smile without being told to].” She ended by wondering how the authorities would choose to deal with a young generation of bloggers with critical minds.

Jon Casto explored Singapore’s efforts to instill an entrepreneurial culture despite a general aversion to risk (and a preference for state employment) “perpetuated through cultural norms, the labor market and [government-linked corporations].” He also, however, found entrepreneurship in Singapore “slowly on the rise” and argued that “today’s experiences” in promoting it “may bear tremendous fruit” if and when the economic climate because problematic enough to demand “that Singaporean individuals, not just the [People’s Action Party] government, provide solutions.”

Alexander Slaski researched the implications of illiberal politics for environmental policy in Singapore. He credited the government with having provided its citizens with a high quality of life, including “excellent environmental governance” from the top down. But he was struck by an artifact of the government’s relatively authoritarian approach to being green: the virtual absence in the city-state of a bottom-up or civil-society movement for conservation. To that extent, he concluded, “the authoritarian elements of the government have kept environmental protection from being as strong as it could be.”

Sam Shrank investigated the status and future of renewable energy. Singapore had previously managed to secure for itself “a constant and assured flow of oil and natural gas from abroad at reasonable.” But “peak oil—the year in which the supply of oil peaks—is in sight, and the end of natural gas is not far behind.” Oil and gas prices, he warned, will rise as demand outpaces supply. Amply sunlit as it is, Singapore could and should be doing much more to exploit sources of renewable energy sources, and solar (photovoltaic) energy in particular.

Compared with these essays, the Singaporean students’ essays in PRISM were no less diverse. If the Americans concentrated single-mindedly on Singapore, in keeping with the focus of the Stanford seminar, the Singaporean contributors were more inclined to compare American conditions and experiences with those in their own country.

Dan Goh, the NUS professor who taught the Singaporeans at Stanford, introduced the student essays. His thoughts are excerpted here:

"Reflections on Western civilization have often found themselves seduced by the idea of the American exception. … It seems ironic therefore that a group of American students would travel to this island to study what they have termed as the Singapore exception. Seen in the immediate context of Southeast Asia, Singapore is indeed an exception [whose] culturally diverse [im]migrants [have transformed the city-state] into a forward-looking nation. With little historical gravitas except for founding moments and fathers, it is a young nation filled with anxieties and self-doubt. Yet, it is resolute in forming its citizenry through clever ideological campaigns and in engineering visionary technological and economic projects based on successful foreign examples. For all its democratic institutions, it is beset by political elitism and illiberal tendencies. Despite its Edenic ideals and scientific prowess, it is reluctant to pursue environmental sustainability. These are the themes and contradictions tackled in the articles by the six young American scholars featured in this inaugural volume."

"But if we look closer, these themes and contradictions describe America as well. I have always suspected that the study of the exceptional other is always the study of our self as normal when the two are actually much more similar than they are different. Irony has a way of turning in on itself. However, the American students’ essays show that there is a major difference at the heart of comparing the American and Singapore exceptions."

"Given the American political culture of suspicion of state authority, it is not surprising that [in the Stanford students’ essays] the state sticks out visibly in the landscape of Singapore society. For the Singaporean students traveling to the Bay Area however, the feeling is best described by the excitement and trepidation of a Western naturalist traveling from sedate urban London to the rich jungles of Borneo. The state monolith fades and vibrant cultural diversities, intriguing identity evolutions and self-organizing chaos beckon. But always with Singapore in their minds, the young scholars reflected their study of Silicon Valley and San Francisco back unto Singapore. What they found was that the same diversities, evolutions and chaos were also evident in Singapore, but with the roots of the state apparatus sunk deeper into the rich soil here."

"Singapore is not anything like America and yet is everything American, except for the leviathan that stands over our shoulders. Nonetheless, the diversities and hybridities of vernacular everyday life continue to grow as ideas, images and identities speed around the global circuits of capitalism, … connecting young people across the deep Pacific …"

In his own preface to the PRISM issue, SEAF Director Donald Emmerson, who taught the Stanford seminar in Singapore, had this to say:

“In Praise of Bad Teaching.” Years ago at the University of Wisconsin-Madison I pinned a page of text under that title to a bulletin board next to my office door. The author argued that bad teachers were really good teachers because their boring lectures drove their students out of the classroom and into the real world where real learning could occur.

The argument is not wholly facetious. Conventional undergraduate education is notoriously indirect. Independent field work is the preserve of professors and graduate students. Undergraduates sit, listen, read, take notes, and take exams. Technology—the ability to google—has reduced the teacher’s ability to control information. But in standard classrooms, it is still the teacher who selects, interprets, and conveys knowledge, and who then tests and grades its retention. In humdrum pedagogy at its worst, the professor and the student are, respectively, faucet and sponge. A charismatic lecturer—a supposedly “good” teacher—may fill lecture hall seats only to reinforce the enthralled passivity of the sitters.

Fortunately, the National University of Singapore and Stanford University are not conventional institutions. Both campuses encourage their students to go abroad. Professors are not dispensed with. But by affording students direct contact with foreign cultures, NUS and Stanford necessarily challenge the teacher’s span of control. In that loss of unquestioned professorial authority lies a chance for serious learning by students and teacher alike. …

For lack of space, alas, we could not [publish in PRISM] all thirty essays written for our seminars. But those that are printed herein should give readers a feel for what happened when two sets of undergraduate students were “turned loose” on each other’s turf. I am grateful to [Dan Goh and the other individuals who made this issue and the seminars possible] and above all to both complements of students, including those not represented in these pages, for giving me one of the most enjoyable and memorable “teaching”—that is to say, learning—experiences of my life.

PRISM is not available on line, but it can be ordered (stock permitting) from

The Editor, PRISM
University Scholars Programme
National University of Singapore
BLK ADM, Level 6,
10 Kent Ridge Crtescent
Singapore 119260

The Stanford Program on International and Cross-cultural Education (SPICE) has just announced a major new interdisciplinary, interactive initiative for middle school and high school students on the road to the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. “The Road to Beijing” initiative includes a new documentary featuring world-renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble, a new documentary developed by NBC that features Olympians who will participate in the Beijing Olympics, curriculum materials addressing Beijing and issues raised by the Olympics, an interactive website, and teacher professional development. SPICE serves as a bridge between the interdisciplinary work of Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and K–14 schools in the United States and independent schools abroad by developing multidisciplinary curriculum materials on important international themes.

“Learning about other cultures and about the migration of ideas among communities is vital in today’s world. In presenting a full range of perspectives, SPICE curricula broaden students’ views of the world and deepen their understanding of their own lives.” Yo-Yo Ma

The Road to Beijing initiative has four major educational components. First is a four-lesson curriculum unit, geared to middle and high school students, that (1) introduces students to the modern city of Beijing through its history, geography, and major attractions and sights; (2) explores some economic, environmental, political, and social issues of modern China and the challenges of hosting the Olympics; (3) introduces some of the Olympians participating in the 2008 Beijing Olympics through a documentary by NBC; and (4) examines musicians’ reflections on Beijing and China through a documentary produced by Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble. Stanford scholars, such as Andrew G. Walder, the Denise O’Leary and Kent Thiry Professor of Sociology, served as advisors of the curriculum unit.

A second component focuses on two documentaries that are available through the SPICE website. The documentary, The Road to Beijing, produced by the Silk Road Project and narrated by Yo-Yo Ma and featuring music of the Silk Road Ensemble, is available with the Road to Beijing curriculum unit as well as through the SPICE and Silk Road Project websites. An accompanying teacher’s guide is available as well. Olympics broadcaster NBC joined the collaboration with SPICE and has produced a short documentary that features U.S. and Chinese Olympians. The first interview features Stanford alumnus and U.S. gymnast David Durante. The NBC documentary and an accompanying teacher’s guide is also available on the SPICE website.

Third, a new Road to Beijing website showcases many of SPICE’s curriculum units on China, along with new interactive features on the modern city of Beijing and the historic Silk Road. In 2007, SPICE completed a curriculum unit called Along the Silk Road in collaboration with Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Project. A new Silk Road game, designed by David Cohn, Cammy Huang, Gary Mukai, and Johanna Wee, will now allow students to walk and explore the historic Silk Road. Yo-Yo Ma commented, “The wonderful work SPICE is doing to educate young people about the historic Silk Road trading route is significant on many levels. Learning about other cultures and about the migration of ideas among communities is vital in today’s world. In presenting a full range of perspectives, SPICE curricula broaden students’ views of the world and deepen their understanding of their own lives.” Other China-focused curriculum units that have been produced by SPICE include Chinese Dynasties Part One: The Shang Dynasty through the Tang Dynasty, 1600 BCE to 907 CE; Chinese Dynasties Part Two: The Song Dynasty through the Qing Dynasty, 960 to 1911 CE; China's Cultural Revolution; Ethnic Minority Groups in China; Hong Kong in Transition: A Look at Economic Interdependence; Religions and Philosophies in China: Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism; and 10,000 Shovels: China's Urbanization and Economic Development.

As a fourth component, the Road to Beijing initiative offers teacher professional development seminars, another hallmark of SPICE’s work over the past three decades. Many seminars have already been held at Stanford and for the East Asia Regional Council of Overseas Schools, the European Council of Independent Schools, and the Chicago Public Schools. Most recently, the SPICE staff and Albert Dien, professor emeritus of Asian Languages, gave four seminars for the Chicago Public Schools in May 2008. Each seminar featured a lecture by Albert Dien and interactive demonstrations of SPICE curricula by the SPICE staff. In October 2008, SPICE and the Silk Road Project will work with the New York City Public Schools.

In collaboration with organizations such as NBC and the Silk Road Project, SPICE will continue to channel its interdisciplinary work on key international issues (and their historical and cultural underpinnings) — political economy, security, the environment, and health — to schools in our nation and the world. SPICE invites interested teachers to visit its new website, show their students the new documentaries, and engage their students in a study of historic topics concerning China, such as the Silk Road, as well as contemporary topics concerning China, such as the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

“We are delighted that SPICE is once again sending the university’s path-breaking, interdisciplinary scholarship and research out into the world, educating a new generation of students and scholars about contemporary issues occasioned by the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing and China’s historic rise,” said FSI Director Coit D. Blacker.

Gary Mukai personally introduced the new Road to Beijing initiative to Stanford alumni in Chicago on June 16, 2008, at a Leadership Circle Event.

As oil prices surge through $140/barrel at the time of writing, surely one can at least count on the invisible hand of the market to drive further exploration and production and ultimately bring more supplies on line, right? Or perhaps, more ominously, high oil prices presage a darker future of shortage and conflict as global oil fields pass their geological “peak”? In fact, both positions miss a crucial point about the dynamics of the world oil market — that it is increasingly animated by the counterintuitive behavior of the state-owned oil and gas giants that now control the vast majority of the world’s hydrocarbon resources.

“On average national oil companies (NOCs) extract resources at a far lower rate than international oil companies (IOCs), leaving about 700 billion barrels of oil effectively ‘dead’ to the world market.”So-called “national oil companies,” or NOCs, own about 80 percent of the world’s proven reserves of oil, a percentage that has been on the rise as the persistent high price environment encourages countries to assert even tighter control over the rent streams flowing from their resources. NOCs are curious and variegated beasts, and, contrary to the popular imagination, some are highly capable both technically and organizationally. Brazil’s Petrobras is an acknowledged world leader in deepwater drilling, while Norway’s StatoilHydro is highly regarded for its competence and transparent business practices. Saudi Arabia’s national champion, SaudiAramco, is secretive to the outside world but generally considered to be a well-run, technically capable organization. At the other end of the continuum, government infighting and micromanagement hobble Mexico’s Pemex and Kuwait’s KPC. Once-independent PDVSA in Venezuela has been remade by President Hugo Chávez into a government puppet that spends liberally on social programs but consistently undershoots its production targets. And indeed some national oil companies are hardly oil companies at all — Nigeria’s NNPC, for example, is mostly a rent-seeking bureaucracy.

What NOCs do share in common as distinct from the familiar international oil companies (IOCs) is being answerable to a host government, which inevitably brings with it some focus on objectives other than simple profit maximization. Typically, an NOC arises originally from the desire of resource-rich governments (“principals”) to gain more effective control over resource extractors (“agents”) by creating an oil champion owned by the state. Prior to NOC formation, governments are frequently (and often justifiably) wary of exploitation by the foreign oil operators providing hydrocarbon extraction services. Lacking a deep understanding of the costs of production, states are simply unable to be sure they are taxing their agents appropriately. In addition to enhancing control over the hydrocarbon sector and the revenue it brings, states may hope for other benefits from the NOC: cheap energy to fuel a growing economy, employment and development of local industry to support the hydrocarbon sector, or even foreign policy leverage derived from control of key resources.

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A detailed study of NOC performance and strategy at the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development at FSI suggests a useful way of thinking about the effects of NOC resource domination on world oil and gas markets. Price versus quantity supply curves from classical economics assume that increased price will spur efforts to expand supply. Unfortunately, the counterintuitive reality for NOCs is that, when it comes to expanding supply in the current high-price environment, most either 1) can but don’t want to or 2) want to but can’t. The end result is what one could call a “backward-bending” supply curve — additional price increases do little or nothing to boost supply.

“The world has plentiful hydrocarbons in the ground, but that’s where many of them are going to stay due to the unique organizational and political dynamics of the NOCs.”In the “can but don’t want to” category are resourcerich governments that have decided they cannot assimilate any more money. Already, their investments are running into political resistance around the globe — witness Dubai’s failed attempt to purchase U.S. port management contracts, CNOOC’s failed bid for Unocal, or the increasing calls for curbs on the activities of sovereign wealth funds. Nations may decide they have enough cash and are better off leaving resources in the ground where they safely await monetization at a later date.

In the “want to but can’t” camp are countries and their NOCs that are simply unable to provide the stable political and regulatory climate to support additional build-out of expensive production and transport infrastructure. This situation is particularly common for natural gas, where long investor time horizons are needed to bankroll the multibilliondollar capital costs of pipelines or liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals.

Meanwhile, international oil companies are left on the sidelines salivating helplessly over the vast reserves in NOC hands. Venezuela’s Orinoco region could yield hundreds of billions of barrels of heavy crude, but the government and a nowpliant PDVSA invite favored countries and their NOCs to explore rather than selecting the operators most capable of extracting the challenging but plentiful resource. Technical expertise and massive investment are required to fully develop vast Russian gas fields including Kovykta, Shtokman, and Yamal, but IOCs already burned by nationalizations and shifting rules in these and other Russian ventures are unlikely to be in a position to supply enough of either. In the face of dwindling resources they can tap, IOCs will need to diversify their business models, perhaps tackling technologically challenging options like oil sands or liquids from coal in conjunction with the carbon storage techniques that could make these palatable from a climate change perspective. Ironically, the only “easy” oil for IOCs has become oil that is geologically and technologically difficult.

While oil price is dependent on many factors (including global economic health) and is impossible to forecast with certainty, one can confidently predict continued tight supply of oil and gas, especially given global demand that will be propped up indefinitely by rising consumption in China and India. The world has plentiful hydrocarbons in the ground, but that’s where many of them are going to stay due to the unique organizational and political dynamics of the NOCs. Leverage over the market is weak; measures to reduce demand for oil and gas (though politically unpopular) or to spur development of alternative fuels and associated infrastructure (though slow to develop at scale) may be all that we have.

One of the more remarkable underreported stories of 2008 was a speech in which the State department’s legal adviser John Bellinger admitted that there “are also realities about the International Criminal Court that the United States must accept.” He also stated that the Bush administration would work with the Court to maximize its chances of success in Darfur. Bellinger did not say that the United States might actually join the Court, but acknowledged that it enjoyed widespread international support and legitimacy, and that the United States could fruitfully cooperate with it on areas of mutual benefit.

Neither mea culpa nor volte-face, the speech nonetheless indicates the distance the administration has traveled in seven years. While Bellinger’s oratory went largely unnoticed by foreign policy wonks and the attentive public alike, it did not escape the scrutiny of John Bolton, who dismissed it as Clinton-era “pabulum” and reflective of “the yearning the Rice State Department has for acceptance” by academics and foreign intellectuals. He added ominously, “the fight resumes after Jan. 20.”

Bolton has been a powerful influence on Republican foreign policy for the last twenty years. Before his appointment as ambassador to the United Nations in 2005—which was achieved without Senate confirmation—Bolton dominated arms-control policy in the first Bush term. He killed the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, negotiations with North Korea, and the Biological Weapons Convention verification protocol. During the Clinton years, he campaigned tirelessly from his Heritage Foundation perch for missile defense and against global governance, which he seems to equate with global government. In 1998, when then-Secretary-General of the United Nations Kofi Annan released a report critical of both the United Nations secretariat and member states for the failure to prevent genocide in Srebrenica, Bolton chastized Annan for having the temerity to criticize governments for what they did or did not do in the former Yugoslavia. He added menacingly: “I think if he continues down this road, ultimately it means war, at least with the Republican Party.”

Bolton came of age politically during Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign. The future policy heavyweight was a high schooler in Baltimore at the time. He honed his conservatism at Yale College and Yale Law School, ducked Vietnam through a National Guard posting (“looking back, I am not terribly proud of this calculation”), and got his first taste of Washington as an intern to Spiro Agnew. During the Bush Sr. presidency, Bolton was Assistant Secretary for International Organization Affairs in James Baker’s State Department, and was one of the first people who Baker called when he needed a posse of chad-disputing lawyers in Florida in November 2000. Bolton’s name keeps showing up in various articles about the fight inside the Republican Party for the soul of John McCain’s foreign policy.

All of this makes it imperative to read his memoirs, which clarify the stakes in the forthcoming election. Although it is hard to imagine Bolton in a McCain administration—his memoirs offend so many within his party, across the aisle, and overseas, that Bolton could not win Senate confirmation for capitol dog-catcher—Bolton will be plotting, pressing, and pushing to force McCain’s foreign policy back to the unilateralism of George Bush’s first term, when the war on terror meant never having to say you’re sorry. And there are important national security posts that do not require Senate approval.

The memoir reads like an international relations primer done in the style of a modern morality tale—imagine Kenneth Waltz's classic Man, the State, and War as written by Ayn Rand.

To Bolton, the United Nations is a “target rich environment,” and I had a front row seat to watch his gunslinging. In 2005 I served as Special Adviser to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. I was responsible for developing member-state support for his efforts to overhaul the United Nations. In that capacity, I was in Brussels in March 2005 when President Bush nominated Bolton as Ambassador to the United Nations. One high-ranking EU official recoiled in horror, and, to share his agita, repeated two of Bolton’s more famous lines: that “UN headquarters could lose ten floors and no one would know the difference,” and that “there was no United Nations.” How in the world, the official asked, could such a man be Ambassador to the United Nations?

Amidst nodding heads and shared pained looks, I offered that if I could pick the ten floors, I would agree with Bolton. Moreover, I said, any sentient being who spends time in Turtle Bay—the Manhattan site of the United Nations—will at some point in frustration say to themselves that there is no United Nations. Bolton’s sin was to say it publicly. Finally, I suggested that John Bolton was irrelevant: “If the President of the United States and the Secretary of State want a strong, effective United Nations, then Bolton will have to deliver. If they don’t, you could have John Kerry as the U.S. ambassador, and nothing will happen.”

Oh well; win some, lose some. Which is what Condoleeza Rice is rumored to have told a friend who asked how John Bolton could have possibly been nominated for the position under her watch.

Or more accurately, I was half right, half wrong. Reading this book, one can almost feel sorry for how unsuited Bolton was for his new job. For four years he had been the point man for breaking American commitments abroad, insulting allies and enemies alike, ditching the ABM Treaty, and unsigning the Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court (“my happiest moment at State”). In the heady days of the first Bush administration, when it believed the United States was so powerful it could get anything that it wanted without friends, partners, or institutions, Bolton was the “say no” guy, a job he performed with great brio. How could he know that in 2005 his big boss, the President, and his nominal boss, the Secretary of State, would actually decide that international cooperation was necessary, and that maybe we should start worrying about America’s free fall in world opinion? A pit bull in the first term, Bolton would be a yap dog in the second, grating on the Secretary of State, the President, and most American allies.

Almost sorry, for whatever else you say about John Bolton, he is not of the “we can disagree without being disagreeable” school of American politics. This is one of the nastiest, pettiest memoirs in the annals of American diplomatic history. Among the many targets of insults and catty remarks are former and present U.K. ambassadors to the United Nations Emyr Jones Parry, Adam Thomson (“I could never look at or listen to Thomson without immediately thinking of Harry [Potter] and all his little friends”), and John Sawers; recent U.K. foreign ministers; just about every UN civil servant mentioned; indeed, just about every U.S. civil servant mentioned, along with countless journalists and politicians.

The memoir reads like an international relations primer done in the style of a modern morality tale—imagine Kenneth Waltz’s classic Man, the State, and War as written by Ayn Rand. Bolton, usually singlehandedly, takes on what he calls the High Minded, the Normers (those who create international norms of behavior or try to “[whip] the United States into line with leftist views of the way the world should look”), the EAPeasers (career State Department officials who advocate negotiations with North Korea), the Risen Bureaucracy, the Crusaders of Compromise, the Arms Control True Believers, and the EUroids.

The book has the formulaic allegories typical of the genre—the young, innocent female (Kristen Silverberg, Assistant Secretary for International Organization Affairs) driven to tears after being berated by the cold-hearted career bureaucrat (Nicholas Burns); the noble knight (Bolton himself) fighting against the political higher ups who care only about “positioning themselves” (Rice) or their legacy (Colin Powell). And of course Bolton’s plaintive cries that the 2005-06 changes in administration policy occurred against the will of the President. One sees the peasants now: ‘If only the King knew what was happening, this would never go on.’

Now add a heaping dose of xenophobia. Foreigners, appeasing foreigners, foreigners claiming to know us better than we know ourselves: all loom large in Bolton’s memoirs. He insults the former Swedish foreign minister and President of the General Assembly Jan Eliasson as not only having “an ethereal Hammarskjöldian vision problem, but also a Gunnar Myrdal problem, yet another foreigner who ‘understood’ us better than we did ourselves.” (This is the Myrdal who shared the 1974 Nobel Prize in Economics with Friedrich Hayek, and whose classic book on race, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, was cited in Brown v. Board of Education.) At one point in his belittlement of a Bush political appointee, a special assistant to Condoleeza Rice, no less, Bolton adds that she was “a naturalized citizen originally from Pakistan,” in case we wondered why she could not possibly understand America’s real foreign policy interests. In Bolton’s worldview Zbigniew Brzezinski is probably a naturalized American citizen originally from Poland; Henry Kissinger, a naturalized American citizen originally from Germany.

In the Bolton universe, you want Iran and North Korea to be referred to the Security Council, so that when it fails to unite behind a resolute strategy, the United States is then free to take the tough action it needs to take. And in the case of North Korea, Bolton is clear about what that would be: “unilateralist, interventionist, and preemptive.” Is it any wonder that when it came to Iran and North Korea, our allies and adversaries were loathe to refer them anywhere near Bolton?

Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 article “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” was prompted by the supporters of the Goldwater campaign. Bolton strides right off the pages of Hofstadter’s essay:

He is always manning the barricades of civilization . . . he does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated—if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.

According to Bolton, we do not need diplomats who negotiate, seek common ground, and strive for cooperative solutions. We need litigators who will go to the wall defending American interests, who will understand that when others say no, they mean no, and that therefore compromise is illusion. But in a world where the United States needs international cooperation for its own peace and prosperity, what comes next? Bolton’s answers are laughable—we stick with our “closest friends in the United Nations”—Israel, Palau and the Marshall Islands. Or we forge a new alliance with Japan, South Korea, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand to overcome the parasitic and paralytic EU. The road to global primacy runs through . . . Wellington?

There are, of course, some glaring contradictions in the memoirs. Bolton is known as a sovereignty hawk and he spells out the content of that doctrine as “greater independence and fewer unnecessary restraints.” The job of civil servants, politically appointed or career, is “to implement the president’s policies.” So it comes as a double shock when we find Bolton handing a draft Security Council resolution to the Israeli ambassador, in case the ambassador wants to ask his Prime Minister to appeal directly to Bush or Rice to change President Bush’s policy on Lebanon.

Another example concerns Bolton’s recurring beratement of UN officials for forgetting that they work for the member states. He then describes how one Under-Secretary-General, American appointee Christopher Burnham, surreptitiously showed him budget documents that put the United States at an advantage in budget negotiations. It is hard to see how you can have it both ways. Either UN officials serve all member states equally or the organization is up for grabs to the most powerful state.

But it is the big betrayal that is at the heart of the book. Facing a quagmire in Iraq, a faltering coalition in Afghanistan, a nuclear armed North Korea, the possibility of a nuclear Iran, and a war against terror that was creating more, not fewer, terrorists, Condoleeza Rice convinced President Bush that maybe they should stop digging a bigger hole for American foreign policy. And that meant actually trying diplomacy in North Korea, Iran, and the Middle East.

The losers were John Bolton and his acolytes; the winners were the professionals like Nicholas Burns and Christopher Hill. Faced with defeat and repudiation of the failed policies he advocated, Bolton’s response is familiar and tiresome: the professionals had secretly hijacked the president’s policy; the Secretary of State cares more about appeasing foreigners than protecting American interests.

The moment of reckoning for Bolton and for the President that nominated him is not described in the book, but it took place two months after Bolton left the administration. When the United States and North Korea reached a deal in February 2007 that holds the promise of denuclearizing the country, Bolton tried to scuttle it. Asked by reporters whether he was loyal to the President, Bolton answered, “I’m loyal to the original policy.”

What did Bolton achieve at the United Nations? Very little, which was fine by him and fine by the cast of nonaligned Ambassadors who oppose a more effective international organization. I asked one of them in December 2006 if he was happy that Bolton was leaving. He said, “No, we’ve learned how to deal with Mr. Bolton.” When I sought clarification, he said, “Look, Bolton comes in and asks for the sun, the moon, and the stars, and we say ‘no.’ He then says, ‘I told you so’ and leaves. Everybody is happy.”

Which returns us to the question of why anyone would want to wade through these 500 self-serving pages. The best answer: to remind yourself of the stakes of this upcoming election and why the United States needs more old-fashioned diplomacy and less paranoia and arrogance. A McCain presidency might not eschew diplomacy, but in the political free-for-all that is the Republican party, Bolton and his minions are always there, ready to denigrate any agreement or compromise, to sabotage and subvert real diplomacy.

Asked by reporters whether he was loyal to the President, Bolton answered, "I'm loyal to the original policy."

To understand the stakes, consider the little known and even less appreciated record of American negotiations with North Korea since 1994. Between what was called the “Agreed Framework” that brought North Korea back into the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1994 and the end of 2000, the United States and North Korea reached twenty agreements on a wide array of issues. Certain of these agreements foundered in implementation, but an objective assessment shows that some of the noncompliance stemmed from constraints placed by American domestic politics.

The Bolton strategy killed the Agreed Framework, hoping through threats, sanctions, and use of force to end the North Korean regime. Unfortunately for Bolton—fortunately for the rest of us—our ally South Korea and our necessary partner China did not want to deal with the consequences: either a war or a collapsed, deadly state on their borders. In the end, they did not have to because North Korea left the NPT, developed a nuclear bomb, and tested it, bankrupting the Bolton policy and producing the sharp change of strategy that has born fruit in recent North Korean steps to end its nuclear program.

Writing about the successes of American negotiators in bringing North Korea and the United States back together in February 2007, former State Department negotiator Robert Carlin and Stanford Professor Emeritus John Lewis have described why Bolton and his crowd loathe diplomacy is loathed by Bolton and his crowd, and why it is so necessary:

Diplomats strive to put down words all of them can swallow and hopefully their superiors in [the] capital can stomach. Written agreements are difficult to reach. The pain often comes not so much in dealing with the other side but in dealing with your own. Unless you are dictating terms to a defeated enemy, you are going to have to compromise on something, probably several somethings, that will make many people unhappy. That was done for the February 13th agreement, and there is no shame to it.

John Bolton did much damage to American interests in the first Bush administration, but he was implementing the president’s policy. President Bush deserves the blame for putting Bolton in a position to continue hardming American interests even when the overall direction of policy changed.

Given that many countries treated the United States as radioactive in 2005; given that trust and confidence in the United States were at all time lows; given that our record was one of a violator of international law and human rights; President Bush, had he truly wanted to start to move the United States out of the hole he had been so assiduously digging, would have had to send to the United Nations an ambassador with extraordinary listening skills, who could work across various international chasms, rebuild respect for American diplomacy, and, yes, advocate agreements that would make a lot of people unhappy. Someone, in fact, a lot like our present Ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, a naturalized citizen originally from Afghanistan. Instead he sent . . . Yosemite Sam.

So back to January 20. A new American president will take office with grinding wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a nuclear-armed North Korea, an Iran headed that way, and crises in Sudan, Israel and Palestine, Lebanon, and Pakistan. Our foreign policy is anathema; our reputation in tatters. Throw in big issues like global warming, non-proliferation, catastrophic terrorism, and a potential pandemic of a deadly new influenza. It is hard to see how any of these crises or issues can be solved without sustained international cooperation and strong international institutions. Take global warming: protecting Americans from its ravages will depend on exercising sovereignty to strike deals with other countries whose domestic behavior threatens us and whose security our domestic behavior threatens. A narrow view of sovereignty as the ability to do as we damned well please will be—quite literally—the death of us all.

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“Emerging democracies must demonstrate that they can solve governance problems and meet citizens’ expectations for freedom, justice, a better life, and a fairer society.”

If the big global story of the 1980s and 1990s was the remarkable expansion of democracy, the bad news of this decade is that democracy is slipping into recession. In the two decades following the Portuguese revolution in 1974, the number of democracies tripled (from 40 to 120) and the percentage of the world’s states that are at least electoral democracies more than doubled (to about 60 percent). Since the late 1990s however, there has been little if any net progress in democracy. To be sure, significant new transitions to democracy took place in countries like Mexico, Indonesia, Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine. But globally, the democratic wave has been neutralized and is now at risk of being overtaken by an authoritarian undertow, which has extinguished democracy in such states as Pakistan, Russia, Nigeria, Venezuela, Bangladesh and Kenya. In fact, two-thirds (15) of all the reversals of democracy (23) since 1974 have taken place just in the last eight years, since the October 1999 military coup in Pakistan.

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Two other negative trends are important to note. One is the implosion of democratic openings in the Arab world. Under pressure from the George W. Bush administration beginning in 2003, several authoritarian Arab regimes liberalized political life and held competitive, multiparty elections. Then, Islamist political forces made dramatic gains in Egypt and Lebanon and won a majority of seats in Palestine and Iraq — and suddenly the Bush Administration got cold feet. Arab democrats who had surfaced and mobilized felt abandoned and betrayed. The liberal secular politician Ayman Nour, who had the temerity to challenge President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt’s first contested presidential election, languishes in prison three years later. The country’s political opening is now frozen, while more than a billion dollars in American aid continues to flow to the regime.

The second negative trend is that authoritarian states have, unfortunately, learned some of the lessons of democratic breakthroughs of the past decade, particularly the color revolutions that brought down neocommunist autocracies in Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan. As a result, they have closed political space, swallowed up or arrested independent media, crushed independent political opposition, sabotaged or shut down innovative uses of the Internet, and sought to block or sever external flows of democratic assistance. Vladimir Putin’s Russia (with its sinister cabal of savvy Kremlin “political technologists”) has blazed the trail in this authoritarian pushback, but China, Belarus, Iran, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, and other “post” communist and Middle Eastern dictatorships have followed suit. To make matters worse, China and Russia have drawn together with the Central Asian dictatorships in a new club, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, to formalize and advance their authoritarian pushback.

To renew democratic progress in the world, we must understand the reasons for the democratic recession. Authoritarian learning is one. Another has been the inconsistent and often unilateralist policies of the United States. Although President Bush has done much to put democracy promotion at the center of American foreign policy and has substantially increased funding for U.S. democracy assistance programs, he has also alienated potential allies in the effort to advance democracy globally by associating democracy promotion with the use of (largely unilateral) force, as in Iraq; by promoting democracy with a tone that was often self-righteous and a style that was too often poorly coordinated with our democratic allies; and then by failing to sustain pressure for democratic change when the going got rough in the Middle East.

Structural factors have also driven the recession of democracy. One has had to do with the global political economy. As the price of oil has gone up, the prospects for democracy have receded. Russia, Nigeria, and Venezuela have all seen their democracies slip back into authoritarianism as oil prices have skyrocketed, sending huge new infusions of discretionary revenue into the hands of autocratic leaders, which they have used to buy off opponents and strengthen their security apparatuses. In Iran and Azerbaijan, surging oil revenues have shored up authoritarian states that once seemed vulnerable.

A second and more pervasive factor has had to do with the performance of the new democracies. Some new democracies are holding their own (like Mali) and even making progress (like Brazil and Indonesia) in the face of enormous accumulated problems and challenges. But the general reality, even in these countries, is that democracy often does not work for average citizens. Rather, it is blighted by multiple forms of bad governance: abusive police and security forces, domineering local oligarchies, inept and indifferent state bureaucracies, corrupt and pliant judiciaries, and ruling elites who routinely shred the rule of law in the quest to get rich in office. As a result, citizens grow alienated from democracy and become susceptible to the patronage crumbs of corrupt political bosses and the demagogic appeals of authoritarian populists like Putin in Russia and Hugo Chávez in Venezuela.

“If democracies do not work better to contain crime and corruption, generate economic growth, relieve economic inequality, and secure freedom and a rule of law, people will eventually lose faith and turn to authoritarian alternatives.”Before democracy can spread further, it must take deeper root where it has already sprouted. Emerging democracies must demonstrate that they can solve governance problems and meet citizens’ expectations for freedom, justice, a better life, and a fairer society. If democracies do not work better to contain crime and corruption, generate economic growth, relieve economic inequality, and secure freedom and a rule of law, people will eventually lose faith and turn to authoritarian alternatives. Struggling democracies must be consolidated, so that all levels of society become enduringly committed to democracy as the best form of government and to the country’s constitutional norms and restraints. Western governments and international aid donors can assist in this process by making most foreign aid contingent on key principles of good governance: a free press, an independent judiciary, and vigorous, independently led institutions to control corruption. International donors also need to expand their efforts to assist these institutions of horizontal accountability as well as initiatives in civil society that monitor the conduct of government and press for institutional reform.

The only way to stem the democratic recession is to show that democracy really is the best form of government — that it can not only provide political freedom but also improve social justice and human welfare.

With more than a million dollars in committed new funding, CDDRL’s Stanford Summer Fellows on Democracy and Development marches into its fifth year with a sustainable future and also a new name: the Draper Hills Summer Fellows on Democracy and Development. The program’s new name recognizes the generous commitments of William Draper III and Ingrid von Mangoldt Hills to fund the program and enable it to continue its bold vision.

William Draper made his gift to honor his father, Maj. Gen. William H. Draper, Jr.; Ingrid von Mangoldt Hills made her gift in honor of her late husband, Reuben W. Hills.

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Reuben W. Hills was a San Francisco philanthropist and president and chairman of the board of Hills Bros. Coffee. He was also vice president and director of the San Francisco Opera and trustee of the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco. In 1992 he and his wife Ingrid started a nonprofit organization, The Hills Project, to connect inner-city youth with visual and performing arts. The project reaches out to 3,300 children in San Francisco and Berkeley schools, offering field trips to the San Francisco Ballet, museums, artists’ studios, and other cultural institutions as well as visits by artists.

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The generous support of Bill Draper and Ingrid von Mangoldt Hills enables CDDRL to continue to create a community of democratic activists dedicated to building new linkages among democracy, sustainable development, good governance, and the rule of law in transitioning nations.

Over more than six decades, the partnership between the United States and the Republic of Korea has been subject to many stresses and strains, from the Korean War to coping with the challenge of North Korea’s nuclear ambitions. More recently, the democratization of South Korea has opened the alliance to much greater public scrutiny and pressures from an active and mobilized Korean public. Managing this strategic alliance in an era of democracy has been a focus of the research work on Korea conducted by FSI’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center.

With the election in December of Lee Myung-bak as South Korea’s president, ending two terms of progressive rule, Shorenstein APARC decided to launch a nonpartisan group of former senior U.S. government officials, scholars, and other American experts on Korea to explore how to revitalize the U.S. alliance with the Republic of Korea (ROK) after a decade of tensions. In partnership with the New York-based Korea Society, Shorenstein APARC assembled this policy study group at Stanford in early February for in-depth discussion of the challenges facing the alliance and then took the group to Korea for meetings with key figures, from President-elect Lee and his advisors to leaders of the opposition, Korean businessmen, and American diplomats and security officials.

Based on these intensive meetings, the members of this “New Beginnings” policy study group concluded that the United States now has a major opportunity to bolster and broaden its relationship with the ROK. Lee, Korea’s first businessman to be elected president and a self-proclaimed “pragmatist,” has stressed that he gives top priority to the United States in his foreign policy. His fixed five-year tenure will coincide with the entire first term of the next U.S. president, allowing the two new leaders an extended period of cooperation.

Immediately before Lee’s first visit to the United States as president in mid-April, New Beginnings members led by Shorenstein APARC Director Gi-Wook Shin, APARC Distinguished Fellow Michael H. Armacost, and Korea Society President Evans J.R. Revere visited Washington, D.C., and New York City to release their report, New Beginnings in the U.S.-ROK Alliance: Recommendations to U.S. Policymakers. They also addressed a forum in San Francisco co-hosted by the World Affairs Council and the Asia Society of Northern California on June 3 to discuss their recommendations and subsequent developments in U.S.-South Korean relations. The report received extensive coverage in the South Korean news media and was noted in American media as well.

Surrounded by a rising China, a more assertive Russia, a Japan seeking a greater international role, and a nuclear North Korea, the ROK can play a key role in working with the United States to maintain peace and stability in East Asia. No effort to address the nuclear and other challenges posed by North Korea is likely to succeed without the closest U.S.-South Korean cooperation. The ROK, as the world’s 13th-largest economy and one of Asia’s most democratic countries, is a model of the virtues of a market economy, of the values of freedom and human rights, and of alignment with the United States. The two countries are also bound by personal ties: 2 million people of Korean descent live in the United States, and 100,000 Koreans come to the United States each year for study and exchanges, more than from any other country.

President Lee’s election reflects four key changes in South Korea: (1) a shift from the political left back toward the center; (2) greater skepticism about North Korea; (3) increased wariness of China; and (4) enhanced support for the U.S.-ROK alliance. The protests against the United States seen in South Korea in 2002 were the result in part of transitory circumstances and no longer reflect the reality there.

President Lee seeks a global partnership with the United States while maintaining good relations with Korea’s neighbors, Japan, China, and Russia. He favors improved relations with North Korea and has stated his willingness to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il. In major departures from the earlier “sunshine” policy of the South Korean government toward North Korea, however, Lee will not provide large-scale economic assistance to the North until after it abandons its nuclear weapons program. In another major departure from the previous ROK policy, he has also criticized human rights abuses in North Korea. Lee supports continued food and other humanitarian aid to the people of North Korea.

New Beginnings group members believe that the United States cannot afford to lose the opportunity presented by President Lee to build a global partnership with one of the United States’ most important allies. The group identified a number of steps that the United States, in cooperation with the ROK, could take to move the alliance into a new era (see sidebar).

The New Beginnings group has announced that it plans to continue its efforts in support of strengthened U.S.-South Korean relations. Among other projects, the group intends to present recommendations early next year to the South Korean government on how to develop a close relationship and bolster the alliance with the incoming U.S. administration.

Recommendations to United States Policymakers

• Global Partnership — Building on the cooperation between Presidents Bush and Lee, the new U.S. president next year should issue a vision statement with Lee detailing their partnership and goals for the alliance. To advise them, the two new presidents should establish a bi-national panel of distinguished Koreans and Americans. The United States and the ROK should also give increased emphasis to the foreign ministerial strategic dialogue they initiated in 2006.
• Security Alliance — We support the ongoing realignment of U.S. forces in the ROK. Congress should increase its budget for the relatively small U.S. portion of the total cost of its implementation. The decision to transfer wartime operational control of Korean forces back to the ROK in 2012 was likewise correct, but the United States should respond positively to any South Korean proposal to discuss conditions related to the transfer. We welcome the Lee administration’s apparent desire to review the main North Korea war plan and to prepare jointly for other contingencies, including that of a North Korean collapse. The United States should conduct regular, joint consultations with South Korea and other allies in East Asia to determine whether security conditions warrant changes in our respective force levels and, if so, in what direction.
• North Korea — The ROK election has brought the United States and South Korea into essential agreement, for the first time in seven years, on how to deal with North Korea and its nuclear aspirations. To avoid the danger that their North Korea policies will again diverge, they must establish stronger consultative mechanisms, including with Japan.
• Economy and Trade — Congress should ratify the U.S.-ROK Free Trade Agreement now. U.S. failure to approve the FTA would not only represent foregone business opportunities; it would damage U.S.-ROK relations and be seen by the international community as a weakening of U.S. self-confidence and engagement, in East Asia and around the globe.
• People-to-People Ties — The U.S. government should set an early target date to include the ROK in the Visa Waiver Program and encourage the Korean government to support a major expansion of the Fulbright Program’s English Teaching Assistant Program. The United States should create a new program to allow U.S. federal employees to intern in Korean ministries and increase the budget for the State Department’s International Visitor Program for young South Korean leaders. U.S. military personnel stationed in Korea should be joined by their families. The United States should, at long last, construct a new U.S. embassy in Seoul.