Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/ZVHEqY1_3w8

Abstract: Before the CCP came to power, China lay broken. Today it is a force on the global stage, but its leaders remain haunted by the past. Sulmaan Khan will tell the story of the grand strategies pursued by China’s paramount leaders: the shrewd, dangerous Mao Zedong, who made the country whole and kept it so; the caustic, impatient Deng Xiaoping who dragged the country into the modern world; Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao who served as cautious custodians of Deng’s legacy; and Xi Jinping who combines assertiveness with insecurity. For all their considerable costs, China’s grand strategies have been largely successful. But whether or not they can meet the challenges of the twenty-first century remains to be seen.   

Speaker's Biography:

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Abstract: Sound strategy requires alignment of ends, ways, and means. A significant gap in ends (the objectives to be achieved) and means (the resources to be applied towards that objective) result in risk and likely policy failure. Few policies over the last decade have had a wider gap between ends and means than Syria. Declared U.S. objectives – “Assad must go” – were not matched by the resources for achieving that objective nor considered thought as to how it might realistically be achieved. This situation has worsened in the Trump administration as the declared objectives have increased but the available resources and political commitment have decreased. McGurk will discuss Syria policy across both administrations based on his own experience leading the U.S. response to ISIS. He has traveled to Syria extensively and calls for an urgent realignment of ends and means to drawn down risk to the United States. The lessons to be drawn are then applied to other foreign policy challenges and offer a ready formula for assessing the declared objectives of U.S. policy.  The talk will be based on McGurk’s recent article in the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs magazine.

Speaker's Biography: Brett McGurk is the Frank E. and Arthur W. Payne Distinguished Lecturer at the Freeman Spogli Institute and Center for Security and Cooperation at Stanford University.

McGurk’s research interests center on national security strategy, diplomacy, and decision-making in wartime.  He is particularly interested in the lessons learned over the presidencies of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump regarding the importance of process in informing presidential decisions and the alignment of ends and means in national security doctrine and strategy.  At Stanford, he will be working on a book project incorporating these themes and teaching a graduate level seminar on presidential decision-making beginning in the fall of 2019.  He is also a frequent commentator on national security events in leading publications and as an NBC News Senior Foreign Affairs Analyst. 

Before coming to Stanford, McGurk served as Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS at the U.S. Department of State, helping to build and then lead the coalition of seventy-five countries and four international organizations in the global campaign against the ISIS terrorist network.  McGurk was also responsible for coordinating all aspects of U.S. policy in the campaign against ISIS in Iraq, Syria, and globally.

McGurk previously served in senior positions in the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, including as Special Assistant to President Bush and Senior Director for Iraq and Afghanistan, and then as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Iraq and Iran and Special Presidential Envoy for the U.S. campaign against the Islamic State under Obama.

McGurk has led some of the most sensitive diplomatic missions in the Middle East over the last decade. His most recent assignment established one of the largest coalitions in history to prosecute the counter-ISIS campaign. He was a frequent visitor to the battlefields in both Iraq and Syria to help integrate military and civilian components of the war plan. He also led talks with Russia over the Syria conflict under both the Trump and Obama administrations, initiated back-channel diplomacy to reopen ties between Iraq and Saudi Arabia, and facilitated the formation of the last two Iraqi governments following contested elections in 2014 and 2018.

In 2015 and 2016, McGurk led fourteen months of secret negotiations with Iran to secure the release of Washington Post reporter Jason Rezain, U.S. Marine Amir Hekmati, and Pastor Saad Abadini, as well as three other American citizens.

During his time at the State Department, McGurk received multiple awards, including the Distinguished Honor Award and the Distinguished Service Award, the highest department awards for exceptional service in Washington and overseas assignments.

McGurk is also a nonresident senior fellow in the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

McGurk received his JD from Columbia University and his BA from the University of Connecticut Honors Program.  He served as a law clerk to Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist on the U.S. Supreme Court, Judge Denis Jacobs on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2d Circuit, and Judge Gerard E. Lynch on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Bureaucrats become powerful when they stage emotionally calibrated performances as “servants” before state principals, earn their trust, and carve out space for action through “whispering,” “propagating,” cultivating patrons, and building coalitions behind the scenes and on the sidelines of official interaction. These servant performances involve what sociologist Arlie Hochschild calls “emotional labor,” that is, the management of feelings when fulfilling the requirements of a job. Prof. Nair will develop a theory of emotional labor in international bureaucracies that explains why bureaucrats perform such work and how, if skilfully done, it can empower them. He will test the theory with an ethnography of the Secretariat of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Jakarta—a “hard” case that does not fit prevailing theorizations of bureaucratic power. Prof. Nair will also show how his theory can be applied to other, Euro-American bureaucracies.

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Second Conference on "The Political Economy of Japan under the Abe Government"

March 1 - 2, 2019

Philippines Conference Room

Sponsored by: Japan Society for Promotion of Science, Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership, and Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (Stanford University)

Organizers: Takeo Hoshi and Phillip Lipscy

Program

3/1/2019

8:45am   Breakfast

9:05am    Welcome Remark     Toru Tamiya (JSPS San Francisco Office)
                                                   Osamu Honda (Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership)

9:15am  "Abenomics and Japan's Entrepreneurship and Innovation: Is the Third Arrow Pointed in the Right Direction for Global Competition in the Silicon Valley Era?", Kenji Kushida (Stanford University)

Discussant:
Yong Suk Lee (Stanford University)

10:15am  Break

10:30am  "Abe’s Womanomics Policy: Did it have Effect on the closing of Gender Gap in Managers?", Nobuko Nagase (Ochanomizu University)

Discussant:
Curtis Milhaupt (Stanford University)

11:30am  Move to SIEPR Building for Lunch and Keynote Speech

11:45am  Lunch to conference participants

12:15pm  Lunch and Panel Discussion on Abenomics at SIEPR Building

Moderator: Takeo Hoshi
Panelists: Joshua Hausman
                   Takatoshi Ito
                  Nobuko Nagase
                  Steve Vogel

1:45pm   Panel ends and walk back to Encina Hall

2:00pm    "Abenomics, the Exchange Rate, and Markup Dynamics in Japanese Industries", Kyoji Fukao (Hitotsubashi University) and Shuichiro Nishioka (West Virginia University)

Discussant:
Yuhei Miyauchi (Stanford University and Boston University)

3:00pm  Break

3:30pm   "Abe's Reverse Course: How a Labor Shortage Transformed Labor Politics and Policy", Steven Vogel (University of California, Berkeley)

Discussant:
Kenji Kushida (Stanford University)

4:30pm   "The Crisis that Wasn’t: How Japan Has Avoided a Bond Market Panic", Mark T. Bamba and David E. Weinstein (Columbia University)

Discussant:
Johannes Wieland (University of California, San Diego)

5:30pm     Adjourn

3/2/2019

8:30am   Breakfast

9:00am   Welcome Remark
                 Moto Ono (Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership)

9:10am   "The Enduring Challenges of History Issues", Mary McCarthy (Drake Univesity)

Discussant:
Phillip Lipscy (Stanford University)

10:10am  Break

10:25am "Expansion of the Prime Minister's Power in the Japanese Parliamentary System", Harukata Takenaka (National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies)

Discussants:
Patricia Maclachlan (University of Texas)

11:25pm  "Abenomics: Est. in 2013, or 2007?", Takatoshi Ito (Columbia University)

                   Discussants:
                  Takeo Hoshi (Stanford University)

12:25pm  Lunch

1:30pm  "Abenomics, Monetary Policy, and Consumption", Joshua Hausman (University of Michigan), Takashi Unayama (Hitotsubashi University), and Johannes Wieland (University of California, San Diego)

Discussant:
Thuy Lan Nguyen (Santa Clara University)

2:30pm   "The Great Disconnect: The Decoupling of Wage and Price Inflation in Japan", Takeo Hoshi (Stanford University) and Anil Kashyap (University of Chicago)

Discussant:
Takashi Unayama (Hitotsubashi University)

3:30pm  Break

4:00pm   "Introduction", Takeo Hoshi (Stanford University) and Phillip Lipscy (Stanford University)

5:30pm  Adjourn

Abstract:

Inequality has long been widely and rightly seen as one of the greatest threats to democracy. For political scientists, the most lethal kind of inequality for democracy is some form of economic inequality. In this project, I adopt a more historical and ideological approach to the question of how inequality threatens democracy. Specifically, focusing on twentieth-century post-colonial contexts, I argue that inequalities of citizenship that are historically grounded in founding narratives of nationalism are also detrimental to a country’s democratic prospects across time.

Speaker Bio:

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Seminar recording: https://youtu.be/NUJqthUIGiU

Abstract: Did the Cold War of the 1980s nearly turn hot? Much has been made of NATO’s November 1983 Able Archer 83 command post exercise, which the literature typically casts as having nearly precipitated a nuclear war. Warsaw Pact policy-makers, according to the conventional wisdom, suspected that the exercise was more than just a rehearsal of nuclear escalation and concluded that a surprise nuclear attack was imminent, nearly launching a preemptive strike of their own. This article overturns this narrative using new, international evidence from the political, military, and intelligence archives of the Eastern bloc. First, it shows that the much-touted Warsaw Pact intelligence effort to assess Western intentions and capabilities, Project RIaN, which supposedly triggered Eastern fears of a surprise attack was nowhere near operational at the time of Able Archer 83. Second, it presents an account of the East’s sanguine observations of Able Archer 83 disproving accounts which allege that the exercise nearly escalated to nuclear war. In doing so, it advances debates not only in the historiography of the late Cold War, but also pertaining to the stability of the nuclear peace and the role of perception and misperception in policy-making.

Speaker's Biography:

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