The Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University is very pleased to announce that Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, US Army (Ret.), has been appointed the Bernard and Susan Liautaud Visiting Fellow at FSI effective September 1, 2018. 

McMaster will also hold the Fouad and Michelle Ajami Senior Fellowship at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and serve as a lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in management.

“H.R. McMaster is a soldier-scholar who has seen war from every angle -- on the hot battlefield and through the cold judgment of history. Few officers ever serve their country in the highest levels of government. Fewer still have done so while getting a Ph.D. and writing an influential book about civil-military relations,” says Amy Zegart, a senior fellow and co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at FSI. “He will bring a deep well of expertise and experience to the Hoover and Stanford communities. We are thrilled to be welcoming him back to the Farm.”

H.R. McMaster served in the United States Army for 34 years before his recent retirement in June 2018. Until recently, he also was the 26th Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs.

Alongside his military career, he earned a Ph.D. in American history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1996. He has published essays, articles, and book reviews on history, the future of warfare, and leadership in numerous publications including, but not limited to, Foreign Affairs, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times. 

His seminal work is his book Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Lies that Led to Vietnam, published in 1997 and subsequently a New York Times bestseller.

In recent years he has been voted one of TIME magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World” and Fortune’s “50 World’s Greatest Leaders”.

“I am delighted to welcome H.R. McMaster back to the Stanford community,” says FSI director Michael McFaul. “In addition to his insights regarding national security strategy for the academic and policy worlds, we look forward to his contributions to the education and training of future foreign policy leaders from Stanford University.”

Students from Ford Dorsey Master’s Program in International Policy spent a week in Korea to experience firsthand how international policy works in practice.

The full article can be viewed here.

Gi-Wook Shin, director of the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and of the Korea Program, regularly writes on Korean affairs for Korean audience. His recent articles in Munhwa Ilbo, a South Korean daily newspaper, are listed below. Note: these articles are written in Korean.

Three ambiguities should be resolve in Hanoi (Gi-Wook Shin, February 13, 2019)

Come and See Silicon Valley, the Front Line for the U.S.-China Technology War (Gi-Wook Shin, January 23, 2019)

The Danger of the Administrative Politicization of the Moon Government (Gi-Wook Shin, January, 9, 2019)

Populism Politics and Democracy in Korea (Gi-Wook Shin, November 28, 2018)

BTS and Kim Jong Un are well-known to Americans (Gi-Wook Shin, November 7, 2018)

North Korea nuclear issue: A chronic disease (Gi-Wook Shin, October 17, 2018)

This time North Korea must take the opportunity missed 20 years ago (Gi-Wook Shin, September 19, 2018)

The Danger of a Compromised Alliance (Gi-Wook Shin, August 1, 2018)

With Trade War, Will U.S. and China Fall into Thucydides Trap?  (Gi-Wook Shin, July 18, 2018)

Three Track approach is still valid in dealing with North Korea nuclear issues (Gi-Wook Shin, July 4, 2018)

Withdrawal of US troops from South Korea now becomes an option (Gi-Wook Shin, June 20, 2018)

Risky game between North Korea and U.S. (Gi-Wook Shin, May 30, 2018)

Paul N. Edwards of CISAC has been appointed as a lead author for the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC is the scientific organization supporting the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).  Organized by the United Nations and the World Meteorological Organization, the IPCC’s reports provide the scientific underpinnings for the international climate negotiations that led to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change.

The IPCC reviews the state of the science of climate change every 5-7 years. Its Sixth Assessment Report—to which Edwards will contribute--will be completed in 2021. Edwards will serve as lead author for four years to develop, review, and complete the assessment.

Through his appointment, Edwards becomes the first social scientist to serve as a lead author in Working Group 1, which assesses the physical science of climate change. The other two working groups deal with impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability (Working Group 2) and mitigation of climate change (Working Group 3).  Edwards will travel to Guangzhou, China, next week for the first meeting of lead author—a trip for which he has purchased carbon offsets.

Paul N. Edwards is William J. Perry Fellow in International Security and Senior Research Scholar at CISAC, as well as Professor of Information and History at the University of Michigan. At Stanford, his teaching includes courses in the Ford Dorsey Program in International Policy Studies and the Program in Science, Technology & Society. His research focuses on the history, politics, and culture of knowledge and information infrastructures. He focuses especially on environmental security, including climate change, Anthropocene risks, and nuclear winter.

Edwards’s book A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (MIT Press, 2010), a history of the meteorological information infrastructure, received the Computer Museum History Prize from the Society for the History of Technology, the Louis J. Battan Award from the American Meteorological Society, and other prizes. The Economist magazine named A Vast Machine a Book of the Year in 2010. Edwards’s book The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (MIT Press, 1996) — a study of the mutual shaping of computers, military strategy, and the cognitive sciences from 1945-1990 — won honorable mention for the Rachel Carson Prize of the Society for Social Studies of Science. Edwards is also co-editor of Changing the Atmosphere: Expert Knowledge and Environmental Governance (MIT Press, 2001) and Changing Life: Genomes, Ecologies, Bodies, Commodities (University of Minnesota Press, 1997), as well as numerous articles.

“The spectacle of the Singapore Summit, the first-ever meeting between a North Korean leader and a sitting U.S. president, naturally captured the world’s attention. The compelling images of the encounter between Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump should not, however, obscure two essential realities,” writes Daniel Sneider in an analysis written for The National Bureau of Asian Research. Read it here.