Stanford, December 1, 2003 -- Arthur Bienenstock, Vice Provost and Dean of Research and Graduate Policy, and Coit D. Blacker, Director, Stanford Institute for International Studies (SIIS), announced today that professor Stephen D. Krasner has been appointed deputy director of the Institute, effective January 1, 2004.

Krasner, the Graham H. Stuart professor of international relations, is also a senior fellow at the Institute and director of its Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL).

"I am enormously grateful to Steve for his willingness to do double-duty at the Institute, as he already directs our Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law," said SIIS director Blacker. Stanford is in the midst of an important transition -- evolving from a predominately national university to an institution with true global reach -- and I expect SIIS to be deeply involved in that process. Having Steve on board in a directing capacity will enhance our ability to think and act effectively at this important juncture in the development of the Institute."

Stephen D. Krasner came to Stanford University in 1981. He was the chair of the political science department from 1984 to 1991. Between 1986 and 1992, he was editor of International Organization. In 2002, he served as director of governance and development at the National Security Council. He was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences (1987-88) and at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2000-01). He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

His writings have dealt primarily with the political determinants of international economic relations, American foreign policy and sovereignty. His major publications include "Defending the National Interest: Raw Materials Investment and American Foreign Policy" (1978); "International Regimes," ed. 1983); "Structural Conflict: The Third World Against Global Liberalism" (1985); "Exploration and Contestation in the Study of World Politics," co-editor (1999); "Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy" (1999), and "Problematic Sovereignty: Contested Rules and Political Possibilities," editor (2001).

Krasner received his B.A. from Cornell, M.A. from Columbia and Ph.D. from Harvard. Before coming to Stanford, he taught at Harvard and UCLA.

STANFORD, California Perhaps no other country has more to lose from North Korea's acquisition of a sizeable nuclear arsenal than China. The existence of such weapons would not only endanger the city of Beijing but also provoke a regional arms race in which Japan, South Korea, and possibly even Taiwan would eventually develop their own strategic deterrents. Given these facts, it is surprising that China has not acted more forcefully to persuade Pyongyang to terminate its nuclear program.

The explanation for this reluctance is the importance Beijing attaches to regional stability. If the North Korean regime were to collapse, a refugee crisis would ensue as starving people flooded across the border into northeastern China, and the way would be opened for South Korean and American troops to advance up the peninsula towards Beijing.

If the Bush administration wants to enlist Chinese help against Pyongyang, therefore, it must first assuage these very reasonable concerns.

China's importance to the United States stems from the absence of other sources of leverage over Pyongyang. Military action against North Korea is an unattractive option because Kim Jong Il and his generals could retaliate massively. Promises of long-term economic aid in exchange for Pyongyang's renouncing its nuclear aspirations also offers little hope. Kim has a long record of consenting to such deals and then surreptitiously reviving his armament efforts.

What is needed is an intermediate form of suasion. China is the only power that possesses this sort of leverage. According to South Korean analysts, in 2002 China supplied 31 percent of North Korea's imports and accounted for 37 percent of its exports. In addition, each year Beijing gives several hundred thousand tons of food aid to its troublesome neighbor, and, now that the United States and Japan have suspended their oil shipments, provides the preponderance of its fuel.

Beijing has occasionally used its influence to express discontent with North Korean behavior, and, by all accounts, the diplomatic dialogue between the two states has also become more acrimonious of late.

However, Beijing will presumably not press Pyongyang much further unless it is assured of the Bush administration's goodwill. In practice, this means that Washington must identify and alleviate China's specific geopolitical concerns. If Beijing fears a refugee crisis, then the United States and its allies must promise to help finance the care of the displaced and perhaps to absorb some significant number of North Korean emigrants. If Beijing fears the approach of American military forces, Washington should consider promising to limit U.S. activities north of the demilitarized zone.

While demonstrating that the United States is willing to accommodate China's needs, the Bush administration must also prove that Pyongyang's policies represent an immediate threat to East Asian stability. To do this, Washington needs to engage more frequently and more conciliatorily in diplomatic talks with Kim and his representatives. For with each abortive discussion, each rejection of reasonable American gestures, the North Koreans push Beijing closer to the conclusion that they pose an unacceptable danger to China's national security interests.

The effect of this policy of dual engagement with China and North Korea would almost certainly be positive. As Beijing's attitude towards Pyongyang hardened, the world might see a sharp reduction in its oil shipments, the deployment of more troops to the North Korean border, or overt discussions with the United States about the future of the peninsula. This would be the strongest possible signal to Pyongyang, short of war, that the world will not tolerate its emergence as a major nuclear power. If, on the other hand, he remained intransigent until the intensified pressure caused North Korea to collapse, Washington and Beijing would still be relatively well situated to deal with the ensuing challenges.

It is through the joint resolution of serious challenges that potential rivals like the United States and China learn to trust each other. If there is a silver lining to the North Korean cloud, it is this opportunity to improve bilateral communications in anticipation of future exigencies.

The writer is a fellow at the Asia-Pacific Research Center, Stanford Institute for International Studies. Enlisting Beijing

APARC Professor Donald K. Emmerson, together with IIS Director Coit D. Blacker and Hoover Institution Fellow Larry Diamond (both of CDDRL), discussed "Democracy vs. Liberty" on the television program "Uncommon Knowledge."

Is democracy - that is, free elections - to be desired at all times for all nations? Or are nations more successful when they establish the rule of law, property rights, and other constitutional liberties first? For the United States, this is no longer an academic question. America is deeply involved in nation-building in Afghanistan and Iraq. Should the establishment of democracy in these countries be the first priority for the United States, or is securing public order and the rule of law more important?

Developments in European science and science policy suggest that a new landscape is forming, one over which scientists can move as freely as they already do between Massachusetts and California.

The great scientific traditions of Europe have always had strong national identities. One thinks of Pasteur as French, Newton as British, Planck as German. But in moving towards an economically unified Europe, some national sovereignty had to be given up to serve a more communitarian vision. That same evolution is now taking place in science, as a powerful movement towards unified European research takes shape.

In a recent editorial in Le Monde, several Nobel Prize winners - including Francois Jacob, the French biologist, Bengt Samuelsson, the Swedish biochemist, Aaron Klug, the British biochemist, and Rita Levi Montalcini, the Italian developmental biologist - called for a restructuring of science policy that would double support for science, renew the focus on basic research and fund centres of excellence that would be regional and not national. Soon afterwards, the European Commission pointed out that European countries together produced proportionally more scientists then the US - but that scientists constituted a much smaller proportion of the working population. To help retain scientists, the Commission has advocated increased European Union investment in research and urged European co-operation to stop the "brain drain".

This growth of scientific collaboration in Europe is encouraged by the EU's sixth research framework programme, which provides grants to support work throughout the Union. The trend towards breaking down national borders should also be evident at a new pan-European event - EuroScience 2004 - taking place in Stockholm a year from now.

All this is good news but more work is needed in three areas. The priorities of a future European research entity should be restructured; governments both sides of the Atlantic should co-operate to plug any "brain drain" of talent away from Europe; and science policy needs to follow science along its cross-border course.

Some European scientists are reported to be dissatisfied with the balance of basic and applied research in the EU's framework programmes. They want more of the former and less of the latter. This dissatisfaction is fuelling discussion on the formation of a European research council, which might play a pan-European funding role like that of the National Science Foundation in the US. But if such a council is to develop, there needs to be a careful examination of the weight of different scientific fields in its research portfolio.

The US government should welcome these developments but it must also change its own position to assist the European science union. That means helping to tackle the problem of "brain drain", which received much attention in the 1960s but slipped out of view as European research expenditure increased and laboratories grew stronger. Many European commentators claim it has reappeared.

To slow it, US institutions need to ignore, at least for a time, the temptation to conduct overseas raids on scientists to fill permanent positions. An increased international scientific exchange will support, rather than inhibit, the equitable distribution of talent; and US science and immigration policies should be drawn in ways that ease movement of graduate and post-doctoral scientists in both directions. At the moment, the increasingly delicate visa situation - exacerbated by new interview requirements imposed by the US authorities - and the well publicised political differences between the US and Europe are impairing scientific exchange.

Last, the knowledge needed to construct a European science policy based on regions rather than nations must come from scientists themselves. Regional centres of excellence might provide a structure for policy discussion. But scientists still face the dilemma that while science is increasingly carried out across borders, science policy is still made by nations. The people best placed to construct a European science policy that brings together broad issues (such as the desirable balance between basic and applied projects) and narrower ones (such as stem cell research) are its leading scientists. It is a task worthy of their best efforts. The writer is editor-in-chief of Science, the international journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

There are "no good options" for the United States to confront or contain North Korea's nuclear weapons proliferation, according to political science Professor Scott Sagan.

Sagan, who is also a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for International Studies, was one of five foreign policy experts who joined a panel discussion Friday titled "It's a Mad, Mad World: Prospects for Security, Diplomacy and Peace on the Korean Peninsula." Presented by the Law School, the event took place in Dinkelspiel Auditorium as part of Reunion Homecoming Weekend.

Panelists Mi-Hyung Kim, Bernard S. Black, Gi-Wook Shin and Scott D. Sagan took turns weighing in on the difficulties of U.S. diplomatic relations with North Korea during a law school-sponsored discussion. Photo: L.A. Cicero

What makes the situation even more vexing is that the objectives of neither North Korea nor the United States are entirely clear, said law Associate Professor Allen Weiner, a former State Department lawyer and diplomat who moderated the panel.

"Is the United States intent on a regime change? Or putting the nuclear genie back in the bottle?" Weiner asked.

"North Korea feels threatened by the United States and believes nuclear weapons are the only way to protect its national sovereignty," said sociology Associate Professor Gi-Wook Shin, director of the Korean Studies Program in the Asia/Pacific Research Center.

The talk came one day after North Korea announced that it is prepared to "physically unveil" its nuclear program. By Sunday, President George W. Bush announced that he would provide written assurances not to attack North Korea if the country takes steps to halt its proliferation and if other Asian leaders signed, too. Bush, who counted North Korea as part of an "axis of evil," stopped short of offering a formal, Senate-approved nonaggression treaty.

Earlier this month, North Korea claimed to have finished reprocessing 8,000 spent fuel rods to produce enough weapons-grade plutonium to build a half-dozen nuclear bombs. Faced with a collapsed economy and the legacy of 1.5 million deaths from starvation in the late 1990s, the North Korean government, led by Kim Jong Il, has overtly threatened to use its small arsenal as deterrence against U.S. aggression. Although it has been difficult to verify North Korea's capabilities, international experts have asserted that its main nuclear facility in Yongbyon could produce one or two bombs a year.

Tension first heated up last October when North Korea admitted to having abandoned the 1994 Framework Agreement brokered by the Clinton administration to shut down its nuclear reprocessing facilities.

Confirming U.S. intelligence reports that North Korea possesses nuclear weapons capabilities, the former director of the CIA under the Clinton administration, Jim Woolsey, said from the audience that in 1994 the CIA was confident North Korea had enough plutonium to make one or two bombs. Estimating that its current capabilities hover somewhere around six bombs, Woolsey explained North Korea doesn't have good delivery technology. The greater concern, he said, is that it would produce enough plutonium to sell to al-Qaida.

The amount of plutonium it takes to build a bomb is the "size of a grapefruit" -- making it difficult to monitor and stop weapons material shipments, Sagan said.

Believing North Korea is posturing for economic aid and bilateral security guarantees, the United States has sidestepped direct talks and instead joined South Korea, China, Japan and Russia in a round of six-party talks with North Korea last August. Bush's announcement is seen as an effort to jump-start the next round of regional talks that were expected by the end of the year.

The crisis has taken its toll on the longstanding alliance between the United States and South Korea. Panelist Mi-Hyung Kim, a founding member of South Korea's Millennium Democratic Party and general counsel and executive vice president of the Kumho Business Group, the ninth largest Korean conglomerate, said the relationship between the United States and South Korea is the "rockiest" it has ever been because of "Bush's hard-line policy on North Korea" and the fact that wartime control of the South Korean military reverts to U.S. hands. Bilateral talks would further alienate South Korea, which fears that Seoul will become a "sea of fire," she said.

"South Korea thinks Bush is a bigger threat than nuclear weapons 35 miles to the north," Kim explained, pointing out that South Korea will bear the brunt of a military conflict. "South Korea wants to avoid war and economic burdens it can't afford," she said.

Part of the problem has been the failure of the United States to explain its policy to the South Korean people. "The United States is bad at selling its policies to publics abroad," Weiner noted. We're used to dealing bilaterally with government officials; public diplomacy is a skill we've had to learn over the past 15 years."

"A PR campaign by the United States is not going to solve this," Kim countered.

"If North Korea collapses, how will South Korea survive?" asked law Professor Bernard Black, a panelist who served as an economic policy adviser to the South Korean government. "South Korea would have to devote 30 percent of its GDP to bring North Korea up to its standard of living and that's not sustainable.

"South Korea has lived under North Korean guns for the last 50 years. North Korea can destroy Seoul at any time. South Koreans are saying, 'What's changed?' The last thing South Korea wants is to provoke North Korea to attack."

China, North Korea's closest ally, may have the most leverage through trade sanctions and has a vested interest in halting regional proliferation, Kim said. "China does not need another nuclear neighbor. ... It has enough problems with India and Pakistan." North Korea's proliferation could lead to a nuclear Japan, South Korea and "its worst fear, a nuclear Taiwan."

Predicting that nothing would come of the next round of talks until after the next U.S. presidential election, Kim said ironically, "North Korea is expecting a regime change in the United States to an administration that is more reasonable."

"North Korea is not a crazy rogue state but a dangerously desperate state," said Sagan. "When you play poker with someone who's cheated in the past, you can expect them to cheat again."