Silvio Berlusconi has been a force in Italian politics during the past two decades. As the country’s prime minister and richest man, the media mogul managed to slip through sex scandals and criminal charges only to be forced out of office by Europe’s debt crisis.

As a new government led by economist Mario Monti takes place, Ronald Spogli talks about Berlusconi’s fall, what’s next for Italy and whether the United States should get involved in the eurozone’s tailspin. Spogli, who served as the U.S. ambassador to Italy from 2005 to 2009, is a Stanford trustee and major benefactor to the university’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

What will Italy’s government look like under Mario Monti, and how will it trim the country’s $2.5 trillion debt?

Monti is an economist by training and has been president of Bocconi University, Italy’s most prestigious business school. He was the European Commissioner and that position earned him international influence and experience. So here’s somebody who has economic savvy, institutional gravitas, and the ability to be perceived as above politics.

The new government is expected to carry out the stability program enacted immediately before Berlusconi’s resignation on Saturday.  This law contemplates asset sales to reduce debt, among other measures.  The idea of a wealth tax has been floated in Italy – which by most measures is the richest country on the continent – as a way to immediately and significantly pay down the nation’s debt. 

The Monti government is likely to consider this and other options to reduce the country’s indebtedness.  However, it will have to gain parliamentary approval for any new laws. And depending on the nature of the bill proposed, passage of legislation could prove problematic.

How did Berlusconi manage to survive sex scandals and corruption charges, only to be brought down by Italy’s financial crisis?

I think he survived because for most Italians, his personal life was less relevant than his actions and promises as a politician who could do good things for Italy.

He came into power in 1994, and his ability to dominate Italian politics for nearly two decades has been the main story. He came in with an expectation that as Italy’s richest man and as a successful businessman, he would help jumpstart a country that had begun to stall economically. The notion was that after stagnation had begun to creep in, Silvio Berlusconi was the person to break the logjam and move Italy forward.

But for the last 20 years, Italy has had half the economic growth rate of Europe. That’s the biggest issue against Berlusconi. But nobody is 100 percent convinced that he’s really gone for good. He has an amazing ability to resurrect himself. He’s proven that throughout his political career.

How does Italy’s debt burden fit in to the rest of Europe’s economic woes?

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In terms of the sheer magnitude of the problem, the Italian circumstance dwarfs Greece’s situation and the ability of the initiatives meant to deal with other countries’ crises. The issue is whether the new Italian government will be able to calm the bond markets.

Restoring credibility is absolutely vital. The fundamental concern is that there’s no offered solution to an Italian debt problem. There is no bailout being contemplated that’s big enough to be able to deal with the issue, unlike Greece.

The euro crisis has claimed the political lives of prime ministers in Greece, Spain and Italy. Can we expect more high-profile political casualties?

It’s interesting how the markets – in such a short period of time – have forced a political change that the internal Italian political system has been unable to achieve for quite some time. It’s difficult to speculate as to whether those forces will move to more counties. But it certainly wasn’t contemplated that they’d have this impact on Italy, so its fair to say that nothing is completely off the table.

In the United States, candidates vying for the Republican nomination in next year’s election say America shouldn’t get involved in Europe’s financial mess. Is that the right attitude?

Europe is extremely important to the United States. Not just for economic reasons, but for political reasons. This is a European problem to solve. On the other hand, if it gets to the point where it continues to have a very damaging impact on the world’s capital markets, I think the resolve to keep it as an isolated problem may fade.

Beyond the narrowly defined economic impact of the crisis, we have many issues of global security that we cannot effectively deal with without the help of Europeans. If they’re going to go into a pronounced period of economic contraction, that’s going to heavily impact their ability to be a great partner for us.  Italy is a perfect example of this concern. We counted on its help in the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon. Those are expensive missions, and if the country doesn’t grow its economy, it’s harder for them to be a great American ally.  Italy’s economic situation extends to our basic international security interests.

Italy's economic crisis is the subject of a Nov. 18 presentation given by Roland Benedikter, a scholar at FSI's Europe Center. 

As if the alleged Iranian plan to kill Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the U.S. wasn’t strange and sinister enough, it offered an outlandish twist: American officials say the Iranian plotters wanted to hire a Mexican drug cartel to carry out the murder.

The charges laid out earlier this week are raising questions about how the United States should respond to Iran, skepticism about the Mexican underworld’s possible involvement and concerns about the growing, borderless network of global terrorism.

Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, a law professor and co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and Beatriz Magaloni, an associate professor of political science and affiliated faculty of FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, discuss the developing events.

President Obama is vowing to impose tougher sanctions on Iran. What good will they do?

Cuéllar: Countries use sanctions to achieve multiple goals. Sanctions often put pressure on the regime and disrupt the regime’s capacity to move money, pay for resources, and offer goods and services on the international market. Even if they are imperfectly enforced, sanctions can affect particular individuals or organizations within states. Separately, sanctions signal the resolve of the nation imposing them, and thus the United States can force discussion among governments and diplomats regarding how the international community will respond to a state violating international norms.

Do Mexican drug cartels have the ability and willingness to be the hired guns in global terrorist operations?

Magaloni: Drug cartels are increasingly diversifying their portfolios of crime. They’re not exclusively engaging in the trading of drugs. They’re also engaged in many other criminal activities, including kidnapping, and extortion. And some have engaged in human trafficking.

Can this extend to acts of terror beyond Mexico? At this moment – with the evidence I see – I find it difficult to believe.

Mexican drug gangs do not seem to have that much capacity to operate in the U.S. There is an implicit agreement between government officials in some states and the cartels, and that’s what allows them to operate, often with impunity. But right now, I don’t think they can orchestrate the same type of terror once they cross the border because they do not have the same networks in the US.

How do you expect the criminal case to play out?

Cuéllar:  The criminal complaint alleges that accused individuals sought the assistance of a Mexican drug cartel. Instead of negotiating with that organization, however, the accused ended up interacting with a confidential informant working for American law enforcement agencies. Prosecutors will nonetheless focus on the motivation of the accused and the possibility that individuals with such goals might succeed in forging alliances with transnational criminal organizations in the future.  

How is the criminal activity in Mexico affecting security in the region?

Cuéllar: Although Mexico is a country that faces considerable challenges involving security and state capacity, it is certainly not Somalia or Afghanistan. And the Attorney General indicated that the Mexican government worked closely with U.S. authorities investigating the alleged criminal conspiracy. Nonetheless, Mexico has become a focal point for the activity of certain large criminal organizations with the ability to operate across large territories and to harness different forms of expertise. 

While these criminal networks certainly affect the security environment in both Mexico and the United States, there is often something of a paradox in the nature of the threat they pose. The organizations with the greatest capacity to engage in complicated operations across borders tend to be the ones with the tightest hold on lucrative pieces of the drug trade. And they are probably the most skeptical of getting involved in something that will draw a massive response from the United States.

What may complicate the situation is that some of the criminal organizations are beginning to fragment in response to changing dynamics in illicit markets and conflict with Mexican authorities. Fragmentation tends to weaken hierarchies, disrupting the ability of leaders to discipline the subordinates capable of engaging in violent activity. Continuing fragmentation may further affect the security context, as individuals and smaller organizations compete for resources and seek new markets for illicit activity.

A new study by Joseph Felter, Jacob N. Shapiro, and Eli Berman, finds that the U.S. counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan, which  focuses on working with local populations on small, community-based projects like digging wells or paving rural roads, has reduced violence. Researchers found no evidence, however, that larger projects had the same effect. Read the study below. 

Karl Eikenberry has a unique perspective on the U.S. war in Afghanistan. The former ambassador to Kabul, his 35-year career in the army includes an 18-month tour as commander of the U.S.-led coalition forces in the country. As the conflict hit the 10-year mark, Eikenberry discussed President Obama’s Afghanistan strategy, the challenge of working with Pakistan, and the problem of overpromising.

We are coming up on 10 years in Afghanistan. What’s your snapshot of where we are now and where Afghanistan is going?

We're on the right path. The president has adopted a strategy that by the end of 2014 – if it’s well implemented – will have us in a position, and have the Afghans in a position, where the Afghans will be fully responsible for providing their own security.

It's going to require that the Afghan army and the Afghan police continue to develop sufficient capabilities so that by 2014 they have the right numbers and the right quality to allow our military forces to step back into a supporting role. It's going to require that the Afghan government continues to make improvements in terms of its accountability and its responsiveness to its people. And third, it's going to require that Pakistan make more efforts to attack the sanctuaries that Afghan Taliban currently enjoys there.

That doesn't mean we’ll be at a point where the U.S. commitment in Afghanistan ends. We'll continue to provide security assistance to the Afghan national security forces beyond 2014. We will continue to have a robust diplomatic mission at the end of 2014. I would expect that we'll still have a substantial foreign assistance program to Afghanistan – not at the level it is right now, but still substantial by global standards, and we’ll still, I expect, remain very diplomatically engaged in that part of the world.

So you've laid out three things: capacity building, governance, and Pakistan. Can we accomplish all three?

I think we have a reasonable possibility for success. I would not put probability against that. We know how to do capacity building especially with security forces, and I'd say over the last decade, we’ve made some important gains in knowing how to do that. It takes time, it takes resources, and it takes patience. The second thing – "good governance" – that's harder.

Ultimately, you can only have success in the first category of capacity building if you have success in the second category because all those institutions have to rest upon a foundation of what the people might say is reasonable, good governance, something that they’re willing to voluntarily support. That's more problematic.

The third category, Pakistan, is even more problematic. Their support of the Afghan Taliban is still seen by some elements within the state of Pakistan as being in their national security interest.

Are there things you think the U.S. policy makers have learned in Afghanistan that can be applied elsewhere?

I do. If you look in any of the domains we’re working in in Afghanistan – security assistance, rule of law, education and health – there are good lessons we've learned over time. Americans are extraordinarily adaptive. We’re creative. One of our good characteristics is that we frequently pull back from an enterprise, sum up lessons learned, be self critical, and continue to improve.

Another lesson learned coming out of Afghanistan may be the need to get a better understanding of what’s realistic in terms of setting goals and objectives. When we went into Afghanistan it’s fair to say that all of us – the international community, the Americans, the Afghans – did not fully understand the level of effort that would be needed to achieve some of the goals and objectives that we initially set for ourselves. 

I think if we could roll the clock back and go back in time, one of the lessons is that we might have tried to under promise more and then over deliver. When we went in in 2001 and 2002 we had talked about infrastructure that would be developed, how fast institutions would be built, how fast representative democracy might be able to take hold.

I think historians will look back and say they didn't really understand the complexities and the problems, they didn’t fully understand just how difficult this might all be.