In this week's Politico, David Remnick has written a lengthy piece about former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul's rocky tenure in Moscow, as Vladir Putin came back into power as president and U.S.-Russia relations began to deteriorate.

Michael A. McFaul, a FSI senior fellow and CISAC affiliated faculty member, writes in this Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law that while the U.S. and Europe maintain pressure on Putin through sanctions, the West also needs to get serious about strengthening Ukraine.

"So far, Ukrainians have done more to thwart Mr. Putin than any action by outside powers," says McFaul. "The West can likewise do more to help the Kiev government win hearts and minds in eastern Ukraine."

And in a Politico magazine piece by McFaul earlier this week, he argues that Putin today sees a path to glory that does not involve democratic governance and ignores international norms.

"Putin dreams of comparisons with Peter the Great or the Catherine the Great," writes McFaul, who was ambassador in Moscow from January 2012 until this February, when he returned to Stanford as a political science professor at FSI's New Yorker.

"But if we judge him by his ability to achieve even his own stated goals, his record is not so great. He has achieved some objectives aimed at restoring Russia to the position of global greatness he believes it deserves, but failed at achieving those most important to him. And the future looks even darker."

Recap:  The Europe Center Lectureship on Europe and the World

Tooze is the author of The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy(2006) and Statistics and the German State 1900-1945: The Making of Modern Economic Knowledge (2001), among numerous other scholarly articles on modern European history. His latest book, The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of Global Order 1916-1931, will be released in Summer 2014 in the United Kingdom and in Fall 2014 in the United States.

Recap:  European Commission President José Barroso Visits Stanford

Barroso was named President of the Social Democratic Party (PSD) of Portugal in 1999, following which he was re-elected three times. He was appointed Prime Minister of Portugal in 2002. He remained in office until July 2004 when he was elected by the European Parliament to the post of President of the European Commission. He was re-elected to a second term as President of the European Commission by an absolute majority in the European Parliament in September 2009.

Workshop:  Comparative Approaches to the Study of Immigration, Ethnicity, and Religion

Spring 2014 Graduate Student Grant Competition Winners Announced

Meet our Visiting Scholars:  Vibeke Kieding Banik

Vibeke Kieding Banik is currently affiliated as a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History, at the University of Oslo. Her main focus of research is on the history of minorities in Scandinavia, particularly Jews, with an emphasis on migration and integration. Her research interests also include gender history, and her current project investigates whether there was a gendered integration strategy among Scandinavian Jews in the period 1900-1940. Dr. Banik has authored several articles on Jewish life in Norway, Jewish historiography, and on the Norwegian women’s suffragette movement. She has taught extensively on Jewish history and is currently writing a book on the history of the Norwegian Jews, scheduled to be published in 2015.

Workshop Schedules  

Europe and the Global Economy

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We welcome you to visit our website for additional details.

The United States and Russia should keep working together to stop the spread of nuclear weapons even while disagreeing on issues like Ukraine, Stanford scholars say.

In a recent article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Professor Siegfried Hecker and researcher Peter Davis advocate continued U.S.-Russia collaboration on nuclear weapon safety and security.

"The Ukraine crisis has exacerbated what had already become a strained nuclear relationship," Hecker said in an interview. "As one of our Russian colleagues told us, nuclear issues are global and accidents or mishaps in one region can affect the entire world."

Hecker is a professor in the Department of Management Science and Engineering and a senior fellow at CISAC and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Over the past 20-plus years, he has worked with Russian scientists to help stop nuclear proliferation. He and Davis returned from a trip this spring to Russia, where they met with nuclear scientists.

"We agreed that we have made a lot of progress working together over the past 20-plus years, but that we are not done," they wrote in the journal essay.

Hecker and Davis described Moscow as a reluctant partner in talks on nuclear proliferation. As for the United States, it actually backed away from cooperation first. A House of Representatives committee recently approved legislation that would put nuclear security cooperation with Russia on hold. And though the White House has opposed this, the Energy Department has issued its own restrictions on scientific interchanges as part of the U.S. sanctions regime against Russia.

But, Hecker said, "Cooperation is needed to deal with some of the lingering nuclear safety and security issues in Russia and the rest of the world, with the threats of nuclear smuggling and nuclear terrorism, and to limit the spread of nuclear weapons."

Washington does not have to choose between the two. It still can pressure Moscow on Ukraine while cooperating on nuclear issues, Hecker and Davis wrote.

They called for further nuclear arms reductions between the two countries, rather than a resumption of the nuclear arms race that took place in the mid-20th century.

Changing relationship

Hecker and Davis acknowledged that the U.S.-Russian relationship overall is changing.

"We realize … that the nature of nuclear cooperation must change to reflect Russia's economic recovery and its political evolution over the past two decades," they wrote.

For example, due to the strained relationship, nuclear proliferation programs must change from U.S.-directed activities to more jointly sponsored collaborations that serve both countries' interests.

As they noted, one huge problem is that Russia still has no inventory or record of all the nuclear materials the Soviet Union produced – or where those materials might be today.

"Moreover, it has shown no interest in trying to discover just how much material is unaccounted for. Our Russian colleagues voice concern that progress on nuclear security in their country will not be sustained once American cooperation is terminated," Hecker and Davis said.

Iran is a flashpoint

America needs Russia to help in its effort to stop Iran from building a nuclear weapon, Hecker and Davis wrote. Russia is a close ally of Iran: "Much progress has been made toward a negotiated settlement of Iran's nuclear program since President Hassan Rouhani was elected in June, 2013. However, little would have been possible without U.S.-Russia cooperation."

In a June 2 interview in the Tehran Times, Hecker said that the only way forward for Iran's nuclear program is transparency and international cooperation. He suggested that the country follow the South Korean model of peaceful nuclear power.

"In my opinion, South Korea will not move in a direction of developing a nuclear weapon option because it simply has too much to lose commercially. That is the place I would like to see Tehran. In other words, it decides that a nuclear program that benefits its people does not include a nuclear weapons option," he told the interviewer.

Hecker said that it is not in Russia's interest to have nuclear weapons in Iran so close to its border.

"Washington, in turn, needs Moscow, especially if it is to develop more effective measures to prevent proliferation as Russia and other nuclear vendors support nuclear power expansion around the globe," Hecker said.

In February, the Iranian government republished an article by Hecker and Abbas Milani, the director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University. The story ran in Farsi on at least one official website, possibly indicating a genuine internal debate in Tehran on the nuclear subject. Hecker and Milani described such a "peaceful path" in another essay on Iranian nuclear power.

Hecker is working with Russian colleagues to write a book about how Russian and American nuclear scientists joined forces at the end of the Cold War to stymie nuclear risks in Russia.

Media Contact

Siegfried Hecker, Freeman Spogli Institute: (650) 725-6468, shecker@stanford.edu

Clifton B. Parker, Stanford News Service: (650) 725-0224, cbparker@stanford.edu

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.” 

In this commentary in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, CISAC's Siegfried Hecker and Peter Davis argue that the United States should continue cooperating with the Russians on nuclear security despite worsening ties over Moscow's actions in Ukraine. The two countries hold the key to preventing the proliferation of nulcear weapons and global nuclear terrorism.

"And, if nuclear power is to provide clean electricity in more places around the world, Russia and the United States must share a common goal of making sure this spread happens safely and without exacerbating proliferation concerns," they write.

Early this month, Hecker answered questions about a recent trip to Russia for a nuclear security conference, in a CISAC story.

In this commentary in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, CISAC's Siegfried Hecker and Peter Davis argue that the United States should continue cooperating with the Russians on nuclear security despite worsening ties over Moscow's actions in Ukraine. They argue it is in the best interest of both countires to prevent the proliferation of nulcear weapons and global nuclear terrorism.

On April 30, May 1, and May 2, 2014, Adam Tooze, Barton M. Briggs Professor of History at Yale University, delivered in three parts "The Europe Center Lectureship on Europe and the World", the first of an annual series.

With the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War as his backdrop, Tooze spoke about the history of the transformation of the global power structure that followed from Germany’s decision to provoke America’s declaration of war in 1917. He advanced a powerful explanation for why the First World War rearranged political and economic structures across Eurasia and the British Empire, sowed the seeds of revolution in Russia and China, and laid the foundations of a new global order that began to revolve around the United States.

The three lectures focused successively on diplomatic, economic, and social aspects of the troubled interwar history of Europe and its relationship with the wider world. Over the course of the lectures, he presented an argument for why the fate of effectively the whole of civilization changed in 1917, and why the First World War’s legacy continues to shape our world even today.

Tooze also participated in a lunchtime question-and-answer roundtable with graduate students from the History department.

The First Lecture

Tooze motivated his first lecture, entitled, “Making Peace in Europe 1917-1919: Brest-Litovsk and Versailles,” by the recent political developments in Ukraine, Crimea, and in Eastern Europe. In light of these political frictions, Tooze posed the question: Is a comprehensive peace for Europe, both East and West, possible? To properly answer this question, Tooze argued that we must look back to the first moment in which that question was posed, during and after World War I.

He focused on the influence of Russian power and powerlessness in shaping both the abortive effort to make peace in the East between Imperial Germany and Soviet Russia at Brest Litovsk—the first treaty to recognize the existence of an independent Ukraine—and the efforts to make peace in the West at Versailles and after.

In the Brest treaty, Russia lost territories inhabited by 55 million people, one third of its agricultural land, more than half of its industrial undertakings, and 90 percent of its coal mines. Whereas conventional narratives view these developments either as an expression of German ultra imperialism or as the ultimate demonstration of Lenin’s revolutionary realism, Tooze drew attention to Brest as the first international venue to recognize the independence of Ukraine in the modern era.

“The map that was created at Brest, the existence side by side within separate dispensations of a fragile and independent Ukraine alongside a battered, reduced and resentful Russia, is strikingly reminiscent of that which we have taken for granted since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.”

Tooze argued that Brest is the only historical precedent for the structure that the international community is seeking to defend today in Ukraine. In turn, “the first good peace gone bad was not Versailles, but Brest. Furthermore, it is not just that Versailles echoes Brest, but Brest actually directly conditioned the more familiar story of Versailles. And after acts one and two, after Brest and Versailles, there was a third act in which between 1919 and 1923 the search for a truly comprehensive peace in Europe, a peace that would embrace eastern as well as western Europe, unleashed a violent see-sawing movement that did not finally come to rest until Europe relapsed into exhausted division in 1924.”

Tooze drew insights from the period between 1917 and 1923 to draw conclusions about the stability of the world order that has largely been taken for granted since 1991.

“What the current crisis makes clear is that if we want to disarm Russian nationalism, we need to find some way of addressing the trauma of 1991, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dismembering of its component parts. If we do not want to entrench a new cold war, we need to make a serious effort to reconcile Moscow to the new order that must otherwise seem like a Brest Litovsk set in stone.”

The Second Lecture

In his second lecture, “Hegemony: Europe, America and the problem of financial reconstruction 1916-1933,” Tooze reflected on the rearrangements in the transatlantic power structure in the aftermath of World War I. Having established itself in the 19^th century as the financial center of the world, Europe’s sudden impoverishment by World War I came as a dramatic shock. The ensuing transatlantic crises of the 1920s and early 1930s were not only the most severe, but also the most consequential in the history of Europe and the wider world.

Tooze began by discussing the vast efforts that were made to restore European economies to prewar normality—and in particular, to restore gold and gold-backed currency as the basis of the international financial system—in the immediate aftermath of 1919.

Yet, these efforts culminated not in prosperity but in unprecedented deflation, unemployment and trading disruptions: “The result, by 1933 was a truly catastrophic disintegration, which marks a caesura in the history of capitalism and in world politics. The demons of imperialism, racism and nationalism were unleashed.”

To this day, Tooze pointed out, there is substantial disagreement amongst both social scientists and historians as to the causes of these economic developments. Conventional interpretations view the interwar period either as an era of trans-historic hegemonic succession or as time when global economic cooperation disintegrated, yet Tooze argued that neither account gives adequate importance to the actual impact of World War I. According to Tooze, the war abruptly changed the nature of the international cooperation by laying the foundations of a new world system that centered on the public debt of the major entente allies: Britain, France, Russia, and the United States.

“Within that new system, from 1918 a new game of politicized global finance was played out, a power game in which the United States emerged from November 1916 as the central actor…Once we acknowledge this shift in the functioning of the international financial system, then the politics of that crucial moment in 1931 appear rather different.”

Tooze argued that the political issue of the settlement of war debts played a central role in shaping the groundwork for each nation’s return to the gold standard between 1924 and 1930. Two complementary power plays emerged and began to define what became a “self-equilibrating” system: the strategy of persistent surplus and the strategy of persistent deficit.

According to Tooze, the absence of American influence was crucial in determining Europe’s economic fate during this period. “What was catastrophic was America’s failure to commit to any of its former partners in the war, in leading a joint effort to create a new order.”

These developments hold major lessons for our understanding of world politics today, because many of the current imbalances in the global economy stem from national strategies that resonate strongly with the politics of the interwar era.

The Third Lecture

In his third and final lecture, “Unsettled lands: the interwar crisis of agrarian Europe,” Tooze laid out an ambitious agenda for a new agrarian history of the interwar crisis by drawing on “the strange entangled” micro history of an agrarian cooperative in Wuerttemberg.

Lost in scholars’ preoccupation with the study of the industrial revolution, Tooze reminded us, is the stark fact that until the middle of the twentieth century Europe, like the rest of the world, was majority agrarian. Europe’s agrarian population peaked as late as in the 1930s at roughly 250 million people. Roughly 110 million lived in the Soviet Union while the remainder inhabited the rest of Europe, pursuing occupations as rural laborers, sharecroppers, long-term tenants and peasant proprietors.

The interwar era heralded major shifts and dislocations in the organization of agrarian life in Europe. During this period, “more than in any other sector millions of small scale producers were caught up in the turmoil of early globalization.” Opportunities for migration and movement to industrial work were limited during the interwar period, producing overcrowding and severe distress. Additionally, rural struggles over the distribution of land—in Russia, Italy, Spain, and much of Central and Eastern Europe in the immediate aftermath of World War I—routinely spilled over into violent confrontation.

And yet, Tooze observed, the most influential accounts of the interwar crisis, framed by the industrial and urban world of the later twentieth-century Europe, have tended to ignore these agrarian developments, focusing instead on workers, businessmen, politicians and soldiers.

An alternate approach that studies the ebbs and flows of agrarian life in Europe during the interwar period promises to shed new light on the historical political economy of the period. Tooze’s proposal was to eschew considerations of the “macrostructures of modern history” but to instead delve into a micro history of “the more intimate networks through which the interwar crisis was understood and lived.” His goal was “to reconstruct the experience of structural change, to reconstruct how Europeans came to terms with this trajectory, how they sought to resist, to deflect to shape or to accommodate themselves to it.”

Tooze’s micro history pertained to Haeusern, a tiny Wuerttemberg hamlet containing nine homesteads that was situated 2 kilometers away from the village of Ummendorf, on the rail-line connecting the medieval market town of Biberach to Stuttgart.

“There were thousands of cooperatives across Europe, for all sorts of things, but amongst specialists this unlikely place came to stand in agronomical debates at the mid-century for a special kind of agrarian modernity…It was in fact to become an improbable model for global development policy.”

By delving into the micro history of Haeusern—which is to become the foundation for his latest research agenda— Tooze attempted to illustrate how brining the peasantry “back in” has the potential not only to throw new light on Europe's great epoch of crisis, but to open that history, beyond the “Bloodlands” to the wider world.

Video recordings of these lectures can be found on The Europe Center Lectureship on Europe and the World webpage.

Tooze is the author of The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (2006) and Statistics and the German State 1900-1945: The Making of Modern Economic Knowledge (2001), among numerous other scholarly articles on modern European history. Tooze’s latest book, The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of Global Order 1916-1931, will be released in Summer 2014 in the United Kingdom and in Fall 2014 in the United States.

Former President George W. Bush met with Stanford students for an hourlong conversation that touched on many of the defining moments and policies of his presidency.

In a relaxed and sometimes self-deprecating exchange on May 5, Bush talked about the limits of congressional power and his relationships and personal diplomacy with other world leaders. His tone was more serious when discussing what he described as universal desires for freedom, his military strategies following 9/11, and his commitment to addressing Africa’s HIV/AIDS pandemic.

Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, director of the university’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, moderated the session. Stanford President John Hennessy and Condoleezza Rice – Bush’s secretary of state and national security adviser who has returned to teaching political science and business at Stanford – joined the conversation.

"FSI has a terrific track record of convening leaders at Stanford, from the head of the International Monetary Fund to prime ministers and presidents,” Cuéllar said. “On this occasion, we wanted our students to have an opportunity for a candid conversation with one of the key policymakers of the early 21^st century, and we think such experiences will further prepare them for leadership in a complex world."

About 30 students were invited to the session at Encina Hall, but they didn’t know they were meeting Bush until the 43^rd president walked into the room.

“I suspect he misses this sort of engagement,” said Gregory Schweizer, a second-year law school student who was part of the discussion that also covered immigration reform, national education policies and the Edward Snowden affair.

“The media always portrays him as being disengaged from current affairs,” Schweizer said. “But I’m impressed with how interested and engaged he still is.”

Along with representatives from Stanford Law School, other students were invited from the Ford Dorsey Program in International Policy Studies. Honors students from FSI’s Center for International Security and Cooperation and Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law also joined the conversation.

Bush’s visit was arranged with the help of  Brad Freeman, a former university trustee and Ronald Spogli, who is currently on Stanford's board of trustees. Freeman and Spogli are longtime friends of the former president and philanthropists who donated a naming gift to FSI in 2005. Bush appointed Spogli as ambassador to Italy in 2005 and as ambassador to San Marino a year later. 

Stanford has a tradition of hosting current and former heads of state, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel and former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev – both of whom visited in 2010.