Starting next fall, Stanford's 25-year-old International Policy Studies (IPS) master's program will double in length and expand its interdisciplinary scope to train a new generation of graduates prepared for careers in international policy-making and advocacy.

The two-year program is named in honor of Susan Ford Dorsey, president of the Sand Hill Foundation, who has made a gift of $7.5 million, which has been matched by university funds to create a $15 million endowment. According to program Director Stephen J. Stedman, the funding will be used to better integrate the program into the university's international policy research centers, increase access to courses in the law and business schools, use more full-time faculty to teach classes and introduce a practicum that involves solving real-world problems.

Ford Dorsey's endowment fulfills one of the key priorities of Stanford's International Initiative, according to Stedman, which is to address global problems by leveraging the university's cross-disciplinary and collaborative research and teaching. Ford Dorsey and her husband, Mike, serve on volunteer committees of The Stanford Challenge, which is seeking to raise $4.3 billion in a broad effort to expand the university's role in addressing global challenges and educating the next generation of leaders.

Stedman, a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), was asked to lead the program because he has experience in both academic and policy work. In 2003, Stedman served as research director of the U.N. High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, which former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan established to analyze global security threats and propose reforms to the international system. Upon completion of the panel's report, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility, Annan asked Stedman to stay on as a special adviser to help get support in implementing the panel's recommendations. Following the U.N. world leaders' summit in September 2005, during which more than 175 heads of state agreed upon a global security agenda developed from the panel's work, Stedman returned to the Center for International Security and Cooperation at FSI.

According to Stedman, the revamped curriculum will give students the skills to understand the complex connections between poverty, deadly infectious disease, environmental degradation, resource depletion, food insecurity, interstate conflict, civil war, nuclear proliferation and terrorism.

"In a world where problems cross borders and disciplines, where threats that were previously thought to be independent are found to be interconnected, where distinctions between what is domestic policy and what is foreign policy are becoming more and more tenuous, students need training and perspective to break down disciplinary silos," Stedman says in a statement on the program's website. "They need the tools and dexterity to work across issue areas and in diverse policy arenas. They need to see connections that others miss, and be able to describe and explain those connections so that others will then see them too."

The program, which will be jointly administered by the School of Humanities and Sciences and FSI, will continue to admit about 30 students a year, with up to half coming from outside the United States. Students are required to have taken prerequisite courses in economics and statistics, and to speak a foreign language.

At a Feb. 7 dinner celebrating the newly endowed program, Gareth Evans, president of the International Crisis Group and a member of the U.N. High-Level Panel, talked about the need to "make idealism realistic" and discussed the concept of a state's "responsibility to protect" civilians as a new international norm. "In just five years, which is short in the history of ideas, a brand new historical norm" was introduced and recognized by much of the international community, he said. "This was a historic breakthrough. It should reinvigorate our belief in the art of the possible." Concerning the Ford Dorsey IPS program, Evans said, "When it comes to making idealism realistic  there really could be no better place anywhere in the world that this new master's program at Stanford."

The incoming fall cohort of IPS students will study writing and rhetoric and international economics. They will take core courses in Issues in International Policies, which introduces Stanford's policy research centers and provides analyses of current global issues, and Managing Global Complexity, which teaches concepts and theories of international relations while focusing on issues with competing policy concerns. "The goal is to understand that much of what we study today is marked by trade-offs among various goods that we seek to promote," Stedman says in the statement. "Globalization and interdependence creates opportunities for creative solutions to problems, while sometimes creating negative unintended consequences for policy solutions."

IPS students will take a "gateway" course before selecting a concentration during the second year. These specialized fields include democracy, development and the rule of law; energy, environment and natural resources; global health; global justice; international negotiation and conflict management; international political economy; and international security and cooperation. Finally, students will complete a small group practicum in which they will be required to develop solutions to current global problems.

Developments during the last several weeks seem to suggest that Russia is reconsidering its nuclear cooperation with Iran. Just months ago, Moscow pledged with great fanfare that the Bushehr reactor would be ready for the first shipment of fuel in March and would reach criticality in September 2007. But in February, Russia backtracked, claiming it had to delay the fuel delivery because of missed payments. As for the reactor's launch, the only thing that's certain is that it will not happen in September. The situation became even more puzzling after reports that Russia warned Iran that Moscow might suspend the project if Tehran does not stop its enrichment program and that some Russian technical specialists are returning home.

Are we seeing a radical turn in Russian policy? Probably not, but the situation is more complicated.

Those who think that dealing with North Korea is impossible are wrong. Unfortunately, those who think that it is, in fact, possible to deal with North Korea often are not much closer to the truth. The basic problem is that people of both views simply haven't figured out what it is that the North really wants.

We tend to confuse North Korea's short-term tactical goals with its broader strategic focus. We draw up list after list of things we think might appeal to Pyongyang on the assumption that these will constitute a "leveraged buyout," finally achieving what we want: the total, irreversible denuclearization of North Korea.

But this list of "carrots" (energy, food, the lifting of sanctions) does not include what the North thinks it must have. It can, of course, help keep the process on track and moving ahead, and it could help cement a final deal and hold it together through the inevitable political storms. But these things are not the ends that North Korea seeks.

North Korea feeds our misperceptions by bargaining so hard over details and raising its initial demands so high. For our part, we tend to be taken in by Western journalists' repetition of stock phrases about it being "one of the poorest nations," "one of the most isolated," "living on handouts." Accurate or not, these factors are irrelevant to Pyongyang's strategic calculations.

Those who realize that North Korea does not have visions of grand rewards sometimes move the focus to political steps that many see as "key" to a solution. These include replacing the armistice with a peace treaty, giving the North security guarantees, discussing plans for an exchange of diplomats. But these, like the economic carrots, are only shimmering, imperfect reflections of what Pyongyang is after.

What is it, then, that North Korea wants? Above all, it wants, and has pursued steadily since 1991, a long-term, strategic relationship with the United States. This has nothing to do with ideology or political philosophy. It is a cold, hard calculation based on history and the realities of geopolitics as perceived in Pyongyang. The North Koreans believe in their gut that they must buffer the heavy influence their neighbors already have, or could soon gain, over their small, weak country.

This is hard for Americans to understand, having read or heard nothing from North Korea except its propaganda, which for years seems to have called for weakening, not maintaining, the U.S. presence on the Korean Peninsula. But in fact an American departure is the last thing the North wants. Because of their pride and fear of appearing weak, however, explicitly requesting that the United States stay is one of the most difficult things for the North Koreans to do.

If the United States has leverage, it is not in its ability to supply fuel oil or grain or paper promises of nonhostility. The leverage rests in Washington's ability to convince Pyongyang of its commitment to coexist with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, accept its system and leadership, and make room for the DPRK in an American vision of the future of Northeast Asia. Quite simply, the North Koreans believe they could be useful to the United States in a longer, larger balance-of-power game against China and Japan. The Chinese know this and say so in private.

The fundamental problem for North Korea is that the six-party talks in which it has been engaged -- and which may reconvene soon -- are a microcosm of the strategic world it most fears. Three strategic foes -- China, Japan and Russia -- sit in judgment, apply pressure and (to Pyongyang's mind) insist on the North's permanent weakness.

Denuclearization, if still achievable, can come only when North Korea sees its strategic problem solved, and that, in its view, can happen only when relations with the United States improve. For Pyongyang, that is the essence of the joint statement out of the six-party talks on Sept. 19, 2005, which included this sentence: "The DPRK and the United States undertook to respect each other's sovereignty, exist peacefully together, and take steps to normalize their relations subject to their respective bilateral policies."

And that is why the North so doggedly seeks bilateral talks with Washington. It desires not "drive-by" encounters, not a meeting here and there, but serious, sustained talks in which ideas can be explored and solutions, at last, patiently developed.

Robert Carlin, a former State Department analyst, participated in most of the U.S.-North Korea negotiations between 1993 and 2000. John Lewis, professor emeritus at Stanford University, directs projects on Asia at the university's Center for International Security and Cooperation. Both have visited North Korea many times, most recently in November.

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Lots of ruthless dictators have remained in power during [George W. Bush]'s tenure, but they were in power before Bush came to the White House. Russia is the only major country in the world that has, during Bush's time in office, moved from "partly free" to "not free" (as determined by Freedom House, the leading institution in the democracy assessment business). Vladimir V. Putin is also one of the few leaders in the world with whom Bush has developed a close relationship. If Russian democracy completely breaks down while Bush is still in office, Bush's decision to invest so much time and energy in Putin will look like a strategic mistake.