CISAC co-director Amy Zegart wrote the following essay in the Oct. 25 online edition of The Atlantic:

Pity the professionals. In the past month, President Trump has sideswiped certification of the Iran nuclear deal, sandbagged his own secretary of state’s diplomatic efforts with North Korea, and even provoked the ever-careful Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman, Bob Corker, to uncork his deepest fears in a series of bombshell interviews. “The volatility, is you know, to anyone who has been around, is to a degree alarming,” Corker told the Times earlier this month, revealing that many in the administration were working overtime to keep the president from “the path to World War III.” He doubled down on those comments a few weeks later, declaring that Trump, among other things, was “taking us on a path to combat” with North Korea and should “leave it to the professionals for a while.”

The professionals sure have their hands full. So far, the Trump Doctrine in foreign policy appears to consist of three elements: baiting adversaries, rattling allies, and scaring the crap out of Congress. The administration has injected strategic instability into world politics, undermining alliances and institutions, hastening bad trends, and igniting festering crises across the globe. “America first” looks increasingly like “America alone.” The indispensable nation is becoming the unreliable one. Even without a nuclear disaster, the damage inflicted by the Trump presidency won’t be undone for years, if ever.

But it’s also important to understand that today’s foreign-policy challenges— whether it’s Iran’s hegemonic ambitions in the Middle East, North Korea’s breakneck nuclear breakout, China’s rise, Russia’s nihilism, Europe’s populism and fragmentation, Syria’s civil war, or transnational terrorism and cyber threats—did not start with Trump. This is the most challenging foreign-policy environment any White House has confronted in modern history.

Three swirling complexities explain why.

Threat complexity

Take a look at any of the annual threat assessments issued by the Director of National Intelligence over the past few years. They will make your head spin. They are filled with rising states, declining states, weak states, rogue states, terrorists, hackers, and more. Bad actors don’t just threaten physical space these days. Adversaries are working on ways to cripple America in cyberspace and even outer space—by compromising all those satellite systems on which its digital society depends. In this threat landscape, the number, identity, magnitude, and velocity of dangers facing America are all wildly uncertain. Exactly how many principal adversaries does the United States have? Who are they and what do they want? What could they do to us? How are these threats changing and how can we keep up without spending ourselves into oblivion or leaving ourselves vulnerable to other nasty surprises? These are fundamental questions. There are no consensus answers. Uncertainty is what fuels America’s foreign-policy anxieties today.

The Cold War was different. Then, certainty was what fueled American foreign-policy anxieties. It was clear to all that the U.S. faced a single principal adversary. The Soviet Union had territory on a map and soldiers in uniforms. Thanks to U.S. intelligence, Soviet intentions and capabilities were fairly well understood. The threat landscape was deadly but slower-moving: Communists never met a five-year plan they didn’t like. And while superpower nuclear dangers were terrifying, they were also constraining in a helpful but insane sort of way. In 1961, President Kennedy invoked the specter of a “nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads” over the earth. Every American foreign-policy decision had to consider the question: What would Moscow think of that? Today, the nuclear sword of Damocles is still hanging—indeed, China, India, Pakistan, and North Korea have all successfully tested nuclear devices since 1961—but no singular threat guides U.S. foreign policy as the Soviet Union once did.

Organizational complexity

As threats have grown more complex, organizational arrangements to deal with them have, too. Coordinating Soviet policy was one thing. Developing coherent U.S. foreign policy in the face of so much uncertainty across so many issues is quite another. Little wonder special advisers, envoys, commissions, boards, initiatives, czars, and new agencies have been growing like mushrooms. This may not sound so bad. But it is. Every new agency or czar or special arrangement says, “the regular process here ain’t working.” The crux of the problem is that bureaucracies are notoriously hard to kill or change. Ronald Reagan famously quipped that bureaucracy is the closest thing to immortal life on earth. Whenever a crisis hits, the natural response is to add a new organization and stir. But if today’s chief challenge is developing coherent, coordinated policy in the face of complexity, creating more organizations to coordinate doesn’t get you very far. Over time, the whole bureaucratic universe just keeps growing bigger, filled with obsolete organizations alongside new organizations; fragmented jurisdictions, overlapping jurisdictions, and unclear jurisdictions; and silos so specialized that nobody can see across all the key issues easily.

Cognitive complexity

Humans are not superhuman. Research finds that most people can remember at most seven items at a time, fewer as they grow older. Even the biggest brains have limits. In 2001, Peter Pronovost of Johns Hopkins noticed that highly trained medical teams at the university’s medical center were screwing up insertions of central line catheters, causing infections in critically ill patients at alarming rates. Why? Because they often forgot one of just five simple steps (like washing their hands) before starting the procedure. (Pronovost instituted a checklist that has since become widely used and is credited with saving thousands of lives.)

In foreign policy, too, the stakes are high and humans are frequently overloaded by complexity, resulting in catastrophic errors that nobody ever intended. One of the chief findings of the 9/11 Commission, for example, was that many inside the FBI simply didn’t know or couldn’t remember all the legal requirements and rules for sharing intelligence and law-enforcement information. Even the Bureau’s own 1995 guidelines were “almost immediately misunderstood and misapplied,” the commission concluded. As a result, clues to the terror plot emerged weeks before 9/11 but were marooned in different parts of the bureaucracy.

In 1935, an advanced bomber nicknamed “the Flying Fortress” crashed during a test flight. The Army Air Corps investigation found that the machine worked fine. The problem was the human. The airplane was so sophisticated, flying required the pilot to remember too many things, and he forgot one of them: unlocking the rudder and elevator controls during takeoff. It was “too much airplane for one man to fly,” one reporter later wrote. That crash sparked the invention of pilot checklists which have been used for nearly a century, transforming global aviation.

U.S. foreign policy is becoming too much airplane for one person to fly. “The professionals” surrounding Trump—Secretaries James Mattis and Rex Tillerson, Chief of Staff John Kelly, National-Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, and others—are trying to keep the whole thing from crashing with a pilot who has never flown before. Let’s hope they can.

America’s approach to the world is a complicated mess, for reasons that predate the current president.

Amy Zegart is co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation and professor of political science, by courtesy. She is also the Davies Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and directs the Cyber Policy Program. She wrote this essay as a contributing editor to The Atlantic.

Siegfried Hecker and Scott Sagan published new essays on the North Korean nuclear crisis. In his article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Hecker said, "we need the political equivalent of control rods, which get inserted into a nuclear reactor core to prevent a runaway catastrophic reaction." Sagan, in a Foreign Affairs magazine essay, urges a deterrence strategy for the U.S., because, "when it comes to the current conflict with North Korea, that means admitting that there are no military options that do not risk starting the most destructive war since 1945."

Deep policy discussions between journalists and top Stanford scholars highlighted a recent media roundtable at the Hoover Institution.

The event drew about 30 members of the national media from a variety of print and broadcast outlets, including CNN, CBS, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, MSNBC, The Washington Post, and Politico.  The two-day media roundtable on Oct. 15-16 was titled, “Outside the Beltway.”

Over the course of the two-day conference, participants engaged in robust discussions with Hoover Institution fellows and Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies scholars, including former U.S. Secretary of State and Hoover and FSI senior fellow Condoleeza Rice, who kicked off the event with a foreign policy conversation.

Drones and cybersecurity, for example, were topics of conversation for Amy Zegart and Herb Lin from the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC).

Drones and new warfare

Zegart said, “New technology is being used in ways never imagined ... The question is, could drones be next?”

Drones are possible “coercion tools,” more effective than people would believe, Zegart said. “We need to figure out how the logic works with coercion, in regard to states.”

How do you get others to back down without a fight? You need to issue a costly threat, she said. For example, “trip-wire” forces of more than 20,000 in South Korea represent such a credible threat to North Korea. “Low-cost is low credibility,” or “cheap talk,” on the other hand.

Drones lower the cost of coercion, Zegart said. One point is that such strikes have huge public support, as the risk of U.S. casualties are very low, according to polls – 62 percent favor such drone strikes.

Zegart said drones could shift the “relative costs” of war and are better able to sustain military action over a lengthy time frame. They also affect the “psychology of punishment.” Hovering over a target for long periods of time, decapitation strikes against regime leaders, and the constant state of “near-ambush” changes the character of war and for a military campaign to stay the course.

“Certainty of punishment is a very powerful way to change the behavior of the adversary,” moreso than “severity of punishment, said Zegart, who has affirmed these conclusions through surveys with foreign military officers. That research also showed that domestic political support for military reaction is the most popular reason for making threats credible. But a deeper dive into such issues is urged, she added.

“We’re really behind the curve in figuring out how to make military threats credible in the world,” said Zegart. “Lots of questions remain.”

Hacking, information attacks

Lin spoke about the recent Equifax data hacking, among other topics.

He said, “The harm we all feel is both tangible and intangible” in regard to such hacks. In other words, there is both material threat and a peace of mind threat, he explained.

The “Internet-of-Things” is another looming problem, Lin said. In the future, liability issues will factor into how all these devices are connected and who is responsible in case of misdeeds, he said.

In the case of health care, confidentiality is a critical societal goal, but hacking creates numerous scenarios: “Would you prefer your blood type posted online or changed in your medical records,” Lin said, explaining the different ways information misuse may affect people.

On the global security front, “cyber war” takes advantage of the flaws of information technology (IT), and “information warfare” takes advantage of the virtues of IT, he noted. Such efforts begin to level the playing field between international actors and agencies.

“You give large megaphones to small players,” Lin said.

In Russia, information warfare is actually studied as a theory of warfare. And the results show that it works – it’s easier to destroy democratic  values online than create or reinforce them, Lin said. For example, Russia’s meddling in the 2016 elect stoked political polarization in America.

One media member asked Lin how the U.S. could prevent Russia from using cyber and information warfare in upcoming U.S. elections.

Lin said, “It’s not clear to me that the U.S. government is really going to be willing to do anything,” but some public pressure may move entities like media companies to respond more effectively.

And Zegart noted, “The Russians are still here.” They are present right now in any number of settings, from social media to traditional media and in public spheres, for example, she said.

“Attacking brains” was how Zegart described Russia’s goal. For American social media companies, she suggested, “Think about battleground states” and focus on “triaging” these areas.

WWII, Russia

The media also heard presentations from Hoover's Kori Schake on defense policy; Hoover's Victor Davis Hanson on “The Second World Wars,” his new book; Hoover's Michael Auslin on the Asian century; Hoover and FSI's Michael McFaul discussed the U.S-Russia relationship; and Hoover and FSI's Larry Diamond on democracy in the world order.

McFaul spoke about the hot spots in the relationship between the U.S. and Russian governments, his time as the U.S. ambassador to Russia during the Obama administration, and his suggested approaches to today’s engagement with Russia. He noted how Russia's President Vladimir Putin has prevailed on many recent occasions against the best interests of the U.S. One instance is Syria and how complicated that issue was for foreign policy makers during his tenure.

"The objective we sought to achieve -- the end of the civil war -- our policies did not achieve," said McFaul, who urges stronger U.S. action against Russian cyber attacks on the U.S. electoral process, now and into the future.

Hanson said that people today often fail to appreciate the deadly scope of the WWII conflict. For example, he pointed out that more people died in that conflict than any in human history, with 27,000 people dying every day in WWII. It was also the first time that more civilians were killed than soldiers. Of all the six major powers involved in the conflict, Japan killed about 10 people for every person they lost.

Lessons from WWII? “Things change very quickly in a war,” Hanson said. In 1942, it looked like the Axis powers had the upper hand; the next year, the Allies were surging. Also, a country should rely on a formidable deterrence strategy to discourage would-be attackers.

Once you lose it, “deterrence is very, very hard to recapture,” Hanson said.

MEDIA CONTACTS:

Clifton B. Parker, Center for International Security and Cooperation: (650) 725-6488, cbparker@stanford.edu

If the U.S. abandoned the Iran nuclear deal, it would harm America’s credibility on nonproliferation issues and make it more difficult to solve the North Korean crisis, Stanford scholars say.

The Trump administration is soon expected to “decertify” or send the Iran nuclear agreement to Congress for reconsideration. Signed in 2015, the nuclear deal framework is between Iran and what is known as the “P5+1” group of world powers: the United States, United Kingdom, France, China, Russia and Germany.

Advocates of the deal say it helped avert a possible war with Iran and a Middle Eastern nuclear arms race. Critics say it will only delay Iran’s march toward a nuclear bomb. The agreement aims to limit Iran’s ability to create nuclear weapons; in return, Iran received relief from economic penalties and sanctions.

The Stanford News Service spoke with two experts about the deal.

• Siegfried Hecker is a top nuclear security expert, former Los Alamos National Laboratory director and senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation.
• Abbas Milani is the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studiesand affiliate at FSI’s Center on Democracy Development and the Rule of Law.

If the U.S. cancels the Iran nuclear deal, could Iran follow a similar path that North Korea has taken? 

Hecker: An important lesson the Trump administration should learn is from what happened in October 2002 when the Bush administration couldn’t wait to walk away from the Clinton administration’s “Agreed Framework” deal with Pyongyang. That led to North Korea withdrawing from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, expelling the international inspectors and building a nuclear bomb. Walking away from the Iran deal now could similarly open the doors for Tehran to build a nuclear bomb.

How might this change our relationships with other countries and nuclear powers?

Hecker: The other parties that signed the Iran deal are all strongly in favor of keeping the deal, so it will leave the U.S. even more isolated than it has already become. It is not clear what the effect would be in Israel where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opposes the deal, but where many voices favor it.

Are the inspection standards in this deal rigorous? 

Hecker: The deal has more stringent inspection regimes and rights than previous nuclear agreements. Some in the U.S. call for even more intrusive inspections, such as to defense sites, that essentially no country is willing to have inspected. I think the agreement was able to get more than I ever thought possible.

How is the deal perceived in Iran?

Milani: I think the critical point to know is that there is not one voice or view that reflects the hopes and aspirations of Iran. The radical conservatives among the clergy and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps were critical of the deal. They condemned it as the most “shameful” agreement in modern Iranian history. They lambasted Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and President Hassan Rouhani for having made far too many concessions. Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader, tried to keep a safe distance from the deal – lest he antagonize his badly needed and shrinking radical conservative base – and yet, at every major turn, endorsed it.

For the regime, faced with calamitous economic challenges, having the deal and ending the sanctions was an existential must. For the same reason, the vast majority of Iranians, facing the drudgeries of a dying economy, favored the deal. They also hoped that the deal would usher in new relations with the world and the U.S. – a possible harbinger for a more free Iran.

How would Iran likely react to a strict enforcement approach often urged by the Trump administration?

Milani: It is not clear what the Trump administration means by a more “strict enforcement.” The agreement has placed fairly rigorous limits on Iran’s nuclear activity given the unique abilities of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to monitor the program. Might Iran cheat? It might, but no “strict” enforcement can eliminate such a possibility.

There are, moreover, areas that have by all accounts been consciously left ambiguous in the deal. Is, for example, Iran required to curtail its missile program or contain its regional activities? Iran is adamant that these provisions were never part of the deal. Finally, the Trump administration’s notion that Iran is not abiding by the “spirit” of the deal is hard to enforce. One side’s perceived spirit might be deemed by the other side as nothing but wishful thinking.

Are there ways the deal could be strengthened and Iran’s regional ambitions checked?

Milani: There surely are ways to strengthen any deal.  The first step is, by clear indication, that all sides will abide by it. The U.S. is now the only country in the agreement that has indicated its desire to abrogate the deal. You can’t strengthen a deal you no longer are a part of.

It will be a bonanza for the radical conservatives if the U.S. unilaterally walks away from the deal. Khamenei’s mantra that the U.S. can never be trusted will be confirmed, Iran will harvest the economic benefits of the end of sanctions and radical conservatives will be able to blame their own failed management on U.S. sanctions.

MEDIA CONTACTS

Siegfried Hecker, Center for International Security and Cooperation: (650) 725-6468, shecker@stanford.edu

Abbas Milani, Iranian Studies: (650) 721-4052, amilani@stanford.edu

Clifton B. Parker, Center for International Security and Cooperation: (650) 725-6488, cbparker@stanford.edu

Read this story on the Stanford News Service web site.

Harold Trinkunas, CISAC's deputy director, and Richard Feinberg, a UC San Diego professor, co-authored the following op-ed in The Hill:

In an escalation of hostilities toward Cuba that is rapidly dismantling the Obama era détente, the Trump administration on Tuesday expelled 15 Cuban diplomats. The administration has also sharply drawn down the staff of the U.S. Embassy in Havana. The administration argues that the Cuban government has failed to provide safety to U.S. diplomats, 22 of whom fell victim in a mysterious rash of illnesses, even as the precise causes and perpetrators have yet to be identified. The U.S. government does not accuse the Cuban government for the unexplained illnesses.

A State Department travel advisory preceded the diplomatic expulsions, warning Americans against going to Cuba, although not one visitor has been affected by these illnesses. This extraordinary measure will undermine the island’s fastest growing source of foreign exchange earnings. Many of our professional diplomats, both those stationed in Havana and those at the State Department, oppose the dramatic downsizing of the U.S. and Cuban missions. While all are concerned for the safety of U.S. personnel, the health incidents seem to be in sharp decline. The U.S. diplomats in Havana are proud of the gains in advancing U.S. interests in Cuba, and they wish to continue to protect and promote them.

These punitive measures are about much more than protecting U.S. citizens. Rather, this White House and its pro-embargo allies in Congress have opportunistically seized on these mysterious illnesses affecting U.S. diplomats to overturn the pro-normalization policies of a previous administration, using bureaucratic obstruction and reckless language when they cannot make the case for policy change on the merits alone.

By taking these precipitous actions, this White House is doing exactly what our adversaries in the region seek to provoke. Overt U.S. hostility empowers anti-American hardliners in the Cuban regime opposed to stronger bilateral relations between the two countries. In addition, American travel to Cuba benefits the privately-operated segments of the Cuban tourism sector, and strengthens the emerging Cuban middle class. The travel advisory will harm these progressive segments of Cuban society.

Furthermore, a breakdown in U.S.-Cuban relations allows Russia, China, Iran and Venezuela to deepen their influence in Cuba and the broader Caribbean Basin. By pushing Cuba away, the U.S. is pushing it towards other actors whose interests are not aligned with our own. The Trump administration’s ill-considered actions towards Cuba are part of a broader pattern of disrespect for U.S. diplomacy from this White House, apparently without careful consideration of the geopolitical consequences. From attacking the deal to restrain Iran’s nuclear ambitions to provoking a nuclear North Korea to attacking the NAFTA trade accord with America’s two largest trade partners, Mexico and Canada, the Trump White House has steadily diminished U.S. influence and credibility abroad.

Our partners in Latin America welcomed the change in U.S. policy towards Cuba in 2014 as a sign that the Cold War had finally ended in the Western Hemisphere. The administration’s retreat from the opening towards Cuba alarms our friends in the Americas and calls into question the enduring value of U.S. commitments, much as belligerent statements toward Iran and North Korea harm our credibility with our allies in Europe and Asia. This pattern of reckless animus towards diplomacy comes at a cost to the international reputation of the U.S. with no apparent gain for our interests abroad.

There might have been an opportunity for creative diplomacy in this latest crisis. The Cuban government has been unusually collaborative with the U.S. in investigating these incidents involving U.S. diplomats. Cuba has allowed the FBI to operate independently in Cuba for the first time in more than 50 years, a signal of the importance that President Raul Castro assigns to improved relations with the U.S. But this White House seems bound and determined to continue down the path of obstruction, despite the costs. U.S. hostility risks damaging the coming transition to a new Cuban government after President Raul Castro steps down in early 2018 by strengthening the hand of anti-American hardliners who oppose further economic opening on the island.

It damages Cuban-Americans and their families by impeding travel and the flow of funding associated with their visits, and those of other American visitors, which have allowed the Cuban private sector to gain traction. It also damages U.S. relations with our partners in the region, who have long criticized what they see as senseless hostility between the U.S. and Cuba. And finally, the Trump administration’s approach serves to widen the door to U.S. geopolitical adversaries, such as Russia and Venezuela, to advance their interests in Cuba and in the region.

Harold Trinkunas is deputy director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Richard Feinberg is a professor at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California San Diego and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He is author of “Open for Business: Building the New Cuban Economy.”

At 90, William J. Perry has seen a lot in this world.

Maybe, in fact, too much. When it comes to nuclear warfare and annihilation, few people alive have contemplated such tragic outcomes quite like Perry, a senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), a former U.S. secretary of defense, and one of the world’s top nuclear weapons experts.

Perry, who becomes a nonagenarian on Oct. 11, has been called America’s “nuclear conscience.” He has sometimes referred to himself as a “prophet of doom,” and certainly not in a congratulatory sense, but more as a scientist on a mission. A brilliant mathematician who's worked with nearly every administration since Eisenhower, Perry's been up-close to nuclear weapons and near-miss crises for the last several decades.

Today, Perry is devoted to education on the subject of nuclear weapons – he understands exactly how much horror they would wreak on humanity and beyond.

And while no one would call Perry a crusader type (he is pragmatic, modest and private), there’s no doubt he’s on an energetic crusade for a nuclear-free world. Reaching young minds – those who will inherit the leadership of this world – is his calculus in the formula of world peace.

So, Perry reaches out in ways that resonant with youth. Last year created a series of virtual lectures, "Living at the Nuclear Brink," known as a MOOC, or massive open online course. His new online course, "The Threat of Nuclear Terrorism," launches Oct. 17.  

“Nuclear weapons may seem like 20th century history, but the choices we make about these weapons in the 21st century will decide your future in truly fundamental ways,” Perry wrote in the earlier course's introduction.

Conversations with conscience

An engineer and policy maker, Perry has academic affiliations that range widely across the Stanford campus. He is the Michael and Barbara Berberian Professor (emeritus), a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He's always in demand for a panel discussion or speaker event.

On Nov. 1, he's the featured subject of a CISAC event, "A Conversation with William J. Perry: Assessing Nuclear Risk in a New Era." That talk will include a Perry discussion with CISAC co-director Amy Zegart and another panel discussion, led by CISAC co-director Rod Ewing, with scholars Siegfried Hecker, David Holloway and Scott Sagan.

Perry's been known to participate in “Ask Me Anything” chats on Reddit, a place popular with youth. He connects with all types of audiences, conveying in direct encounters the exact nature of the nuclear dangers now facing civilization, and what can be done to reduce those dangers. This mission to educate led him to write a memoir, My Journey at the Nuclear Brink, all the while giving countless media interviews and delivering major speeches before major think tanks, nongovernmental organizations and policymakers.

One core Perry message is that U.S. foreign policies do not reflect the existing danger of nuclear threats -- the reason is that this risk isn’t widely recognized across society. And young people need to understand this dynamic that creates a distorted, too complacent view of a very real nuclear weapons problem throughout the world.

Perry, with the help of both his daughter, Robin Perry, his son, David Perry, granddaughter, Lisa Perry, and grandson Patrick Allen, established the William J. Perry Project, which informs the public about the role of nuclear weapons in today's world, while urging the elimination of these weapons.

It’s a family on a mission, and the Perrys believe the only way to avoid nuclear war is by directly contemplating the scenario in a personal, direct sense through learning and education.

"We're really just out there trying to reach a generation that isn't engaged on this issue right now," said Lisa Perry in an article on the Perry Project web site. She is the digital media manager for the project. "It's something we learned in history class. There was no conversation about what's happening now."

As her grandfather explained, "The dangers will never go away as long as we have nuclear weapons. But we should take every action to lower the dangers, and I think it can be done."

Early entrepreneurship days

Perry was born in Vandergrift, Pennsylvania, in 1927, the year that Charles Lindbergh completed the first solo flight across the Atlantic.

As a child, Perry fell in love with math. Math for him represented analytical discipline and the beauty of overcoming challenge. By solving math problems, one can master not only numerical problems, but other seemingly all-too difficult challenges. The key, as Perry discovered, was breaking down the larger problem into smaller parts. This evolved complexity into simplicity, which is more easily understood. Perry went on to cultivate this problem-solving mindset the rest of his life.

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After his military service, Perry received his B.S. (1949) and M.A. (1950) degrees from Stanford, and a Ph.D. in mathematics from Pennsylvania State University in 1957. He chose a career in defense electronics, and became one of the Silicon Valley’s early entrepreneurs, founding a company that pioneered digital technologies to analyze the Soviet nuclear missile arsenal. And so, he was often asked to counsel the federal government on national security.

In October 1962 during the Cuban missile crisis, Perry received an urgent request from the U.S. government to help analyze U-2 photos of the Soviet installation of nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba. Perry later recollected that he thought the world could end during that crisis, and that those days might well be his last.

From 1977 to 1981 during the Carter administration, Perry served as the Pentagon’s undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, where he oversaw weapon systems and research. After leaving the Pentagon in 1981 to work in the private sector, Perry became a Stanford engineering professor and a co-director of the Preventive Defense Project at Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC).

He was the co-director of CISAC from 1988 to 1993. Today, he is the Michael and Barbara Berberian Professor emeritus at Stanford, with a joint appointment at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the School of Engineering. He is also a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

In 1994, President Bill Clinton tapped Perry to become the 19th U.S. Secretary of Defense. However, it was not so easy for the White House to recruit him.

Perry treasured his privacy so much that he originally turned down the job of defense secretary. Only when Clinton and Al Gore assured him that his family’s privacy could be maintained, he finally accepted the offer. With the Cold War having ended a fear years earlier, he found it would become a historic time to serve as America’s defense secretary.

Years later he recalled standing with his Russian and Ukrainian counterparts as their teams destroyed missile silos in the former Soviet Union. By the end of the 1980s, Perry thought the world had survived the horrific prospect of nuclear annihilation – and that it was behind everyone, left in the ashes of the Cold War.

Not so fast. Welcome to 2017.

Beyond doomsday

Today, Perry believes, the world is arguably more dangerous than ever before. His view is supported by The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which announced in January 2017 that the Doomsday clock now stands at two-and-a-half minutes to midnight, suggesting that existential threats now pose a greater danger to humanity than they have at any time since the height of the Cold War.

In fact, in 2016, Perry warned that the Doomsday clock should stand at five minutes to midnight for nuclear war – but only one minute to midnight for the threat of nuclear terrorism. He said during that press conference that the clock now issued a “more dangerous, more ominous forecast than two thirds of the years during the Cold War.”

As a result, Perry’s profile has risen higher than ever as the world confronts increasingly unsettling nuclear threats like a war between the U.S. and North Korea, reckless nuclear rhetoric by state leaders, and the possibility that terrorists may use nukes.

On North Korea in particular, Perry has urged a return to deterrence on the part of the United States:

“The threat to use nuclear weapons has always been tied to deterrence or extended deterrence; historical U.S. policy is that the use of nuclear weapons would only be in response to the first use of nuclear weapons against the United States or an ally covered by our extended deterrence,” he said in a statement.

With North Korea, Perry notes that the U.S. should not make empty threats, because empty threats weaken America’s credibility and reduce the ability to actually take strong action. “As Theodore Roosevelt said, ‘Speak softly but carry a big stick,’” he said.

During the early Cold War, he said, when the Soviets used “shrill” language, U.S. presidents like Eisenhower merely responded in tempered, moderate tones. “Just as in those tense times, today’s crisis also calls for measured language,” Perry said.

On top of this, Perry said the U.S. and Russians seem to be “sleepwalking into this new nuclear arms race,” and that while a new Cold War and arms race may look different than the prior one in U.S.-Soviet history, they are both dangerous and “totally unnecessary.”

Whether on the North Korean peninsula or elsewhere, a miscalculation could be catastrophic, Perry warns. That’s one reason he joined other former "Cold Warriors" like George Schulz, Henry Kissinger and Sam Nunn to write an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in 2007. They argued that the goal of U.S. nuclear policy should be not merely the reduction and control of atomic arms, but the ultimate elimination of all nuclear weapons everywhere.

What type of world does Perry dream about in his brightest visions? One without nuclear weapons. He believes collective humanity must “delegitimize” nuclear war as an acceptable risk of modern civilization. A safer world, one that requires great purpose, persistence, and patience to make a reality, is possible, if people understand the threats and take action to reduce them, Perry has said.

“This global threat requires unified global action,” Perry wrote in July 2017 in support of a new United Nations treaty banning the use of nuclear weapons.

Education and knowledge – that’s how Perry believes humanity can safely evolve past its nuclear phase.

MEDIA CONTACT:

Clifton B. Parker, Center for International Security and Cooperation: (650) 725-6488, cbparker@stanford.edu

Sunday’s referendum vote in Catalonia, a northeast region of Spain seeking independence, was marred with violence as police forces from the Spanish government, which deemed the referendum illegal, clashed with Catalonians attempting to vote.

From 2011 to 2016, Francois Diaz-Maurin, a visiting scholar at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, lived and studied in Barcelona, Catalonia’s largest city. He offers his perspective on the events that unfolded over the weekend, why the Spanish government reacted so severely and what effects Catalonia’s quest for independence may have on Europe.

What are Catalonia’s motivations for independence?

The Catalonian pro-independence movement has historic, cultural and economic roots. Historically, pro-independence Catalans want to recover their sovereignty that was lost during the War of the Spanish Succession, a major European conflict of the early 18th century.

Culturally, there is a popular slogan: “Catalonia is not Spain.” Catalonia really has a very different culture from Spain. It has its own language, celebrations, traditions and historic references – which were all prohibited under Francisco Franco’s dictatorship (1939-1975). After the Catalan self-determination referendum was shockingly repressed by the Spanish police, it seems that Catalonia and Spain do not even share the same definition of democracy.

The independence of Catalonia also has some pragmatic motivations. Catalonia, one of the wealthiest regions in Spain, wants to be able to take full control of its economy. Indeed, after almost a decade of political gridlock – Spain’s Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy still does not have a majority at the Parliament after two elections. With a wave of austerity measures and multiple cases of corruption affecting Spain’s ruling party, the right-wing Partido Popular, Catalonia is looking for a way out of the economic and political crises.

Why was the reaction from the Spanish government so severe?

Although the Catalan independence referendum was considered anticonstitutional under Spanish law, what happened was an absolute shock. It gives a very sad image of a so-called advanced democracy. We should have been counting the ballots, not the numbers of people having received urgent care at hospitals – about 1,000 people, according to the Catalan government.

Yet, what is behind the Spanish brutality is much more trivial than it appears. In a situation of stalled political process, Rajoy, who has long lost legitimacy in Catalonia where the Partido Popular is not well-represented, could risk his seat if Catalonia becomes an independent state. So, in my view, the harsh reaction of the Spanish government is at the crossroad between a long tradition of brutality and the fear of one to lose power.

Rajoy said that the rule of law was still reigning in Spain, which remained unified, and called for opening negotiations. But negotiating was never an option for the Spanish government, which refused to discuss the possibility of a referendum. That is no longer an option for the Catalan government after this violation of its sovereignty and fundamental rights of its people.

Despite all the troubles, yesterday’s Catalan referendum resulted in more than 2.2 million citizens – out of 5.3 million voters – voting at 90 percent in favor of the independence, although 770,000 ballots could not be counted due to the Spanish police operations, which seized and destroyed ballot boxes, according to news reports. Catalonia government’s President Carles Puigdemont said in a communiqué that an independent state in the form of a republic will be proclaimed after approval of the referendum’s results by the Catalonian Parliament.

What impacts could these events have on Europe in terms of other regions following Catalonia’s actions?

The situation of Catalonia has always been intertwined with the history of Europe, and there is no surprise that the current situation in Catalonia is getting much attention from outside of Spain. So, one can expect that the referendum in Catalonia will certainly reinforce the pro-independence movements in other regions of Europe, such as Scotland, Basque Country, Flanders, Belgium, and Veneto, Italy. Yet, the repression of the Spanish government also poses some dilemma.

The Catalan referendum has some deeper implications as far as the definition of democracy. The Catalans’ fundamental rights were violated by the same institutions that should be protecting their fellow citizens. Of course, this happens in numerous countries every day with some complacency. But those countries do not pretend to be the flagships of democracy. That makes a big difference.

What happened in Catalonia clearly does not show the best image of Europe as a unified community. Only very few state officials and foreign observers from Europe condemned the repression of the Spanish government, despite the fact that it clearly violated the European charter of fundamental rights. What we are seeing is clearly the end of the European model as we know it. In days like the one we just have witnessed we clearly see that democracy is much more fragile than it seems. What we take for granted such as the right to deliberate over a political project can encounter the brutality of dictatorial regimes.

Milenko Martinovich is the deputy director for social science communications in the Stanford News Service. He wrote this story for the Stanford News Service.

Francois Diaz-Maurin also wrote this story on Catalonia for the Freeman Spogli Institute's Medium site. 

Colin Kahl, a top national security expert and veteran White House advisor, has been named to a new senior fellowship at Stanford.

Starting in January 2018, Kahl will be the inaugural Steven C. Házy Senior Fellow, an endowed faculty chair at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI). He will be affiliated with the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). 

Kahl most recently was an associate professor in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. From 2014 to 2017, he was deputy assistant to the U.S. president and national security advisor to the vice president. In that position, he served as a senior advisor to President Obama and Vice President Biden on all matters related to U.S. foreign policy and national security affairs, and represented the Office of the Vice President as a standing member of the National Security Council Deputies’ Committee. 

Michael McFaul, director of FSI, said, “Professor Colin Kahl is a terrific hire for FSI and Stanford University as a whole. Very few scholars in the United States have both deep scholarly interests and credentials as well as experience and expertise in policymaking. Colin is that rare professor who truly bridges the gap between theory and policy. We are very lucky to have him at Stanford. "

Amy Zegart, co-director at CISAC, said, “Colin Kahl is a tremendous addition to CISAC in every way – a distinguished scholar and educator who has served in senior policy positions at one of the most challenging junctures in U.S. foreign policy. His wide-ranging work spans nuclear risk reduction, U.S. grand strategy, and Middle Eastern politics, and promises to enhance and enrich nearly everything we do at CISAC.”

Kahl said his Stanford plans include conducting research on a range of contemporary international security challenges, including writing a book examining American grand strategy in the Middle East after 9/11. He is also doing research on the implications of emerging technologies for strategic stability and nuclear rivalry. 

For Kahl, joining Stanford is both an intellectual opportunity and a homecoming of sorts.

“Stanford is one of the top universities in world,” Kahl wrote in an email, “with a diverse faculty in the social sciences and natural sciences working at the cutting edge of international affairs and national security. I can think of no better intellectual community to be part of. I also grew up in the Bay Area, so this is a great opportunity to come home.”

National, global security

Many of the issues dominating national security conversations over the past few decades continue to matter today, Kahl said.

“These include nuclear proliferation, threats from international terrorist organizations and other transnational actors, and the competition between the United States and rising global and regional powers,” he said.

Kahl noted that in a “globalized, hyper-connected world,” other critical issues are becoming increasingly important. This includes climate change and environmental sustainability, and the social, economic, and security implications of the digital revolution. It is time to for a scholarly examination of cyber, big data, robotics, A.I., autonomous systems, 3-D printing, and synthetic biology, for example.

“No university in the world is better positioned to help policy makers understand these challenges and craft creative solutions than Stanford,” he added.

From February 2009 to December 2011, Kahl was the deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East at the Pentagon. In this capacity, he served as the senior policy advisor to the U.S. defense secretary for Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, the Palestinian territories, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Yemen, and six other countries in the Levant and Persian Gulf region.

In June 2011, Kahl was awarded the Secretary of Defense Medal for Outstanding Public Service by Defense Secretary Robert Gates. In 2007-2009 and 2012-2014, he was a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a nonpartisan Washington, DC-based think tank.

Publications, research

Kahl wrote the 2006 book, States, Scarcity, and Civil Strife in the Developing World, and has published articles in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, International Security, the Los Angeles Times, Middle East Policy, the New Republic, the New York Times, Politico, and the Washington Post, for example.

He has analyzed the causes and consequences of violent civil and ethnic conflict in developing countries, as well as U.S. intervention practices in those conflicts, with a particular focus on the Middle East.

From 2000 to 2007, Kahl was an assistant professor of political science at the University of Minnesota. In 2005-2006, he served as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, where he worked on issues related to counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, and responses to failed states.

Kahl received his bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Michigan in 1993, and his doctorate in political science from Columbia University in 2000.

Donor background

The gift for the position was made by Christine and Steven F. Hazy in honor of their son, Steven C. Hazy, who was a CISAC honors student and is now a vice president at Aviation Capital Group, one of the largest commercial aircraft leasing firms in the world. A leader in the aviation industry, Steven F. is the founder of two Los Angeles-based air leasing companies.  In addition to many civic leadership roles in Los Angeles and Washington DC, Christine is a current Stanford trustee and former co-chair of The Stanford Challenge. 

It was CISAC core faculty member Scott D. Sagan's engaging and productive mentorship of their son that inspired the family to establish the new senior fellowship. Steven received his bachelor’s degree from Stanford in International Relations in 2004 and his MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business in 2011. Steven serves on the FSI Council.

MEDIA CONTACTS:

Clifton B. Parker, Center for International Security and Cooperation: (650) 725-6488, cbparker@stanford.edu

CISAC senior research scholar Herb Lin writes in this Washington Post op-ed about the Equifax hacking and how to prevent such future incidents. He urges Congress "to go beyond proposed legislation on free freezing of credit reports to require that individual reports be frozen by default, 'thaw-able' only with the individual’s consent."

As the new deputy director for the Center for International Security and Cooperation, Harold Trinkunas will assume more day-to-day management duties of the center in addition to his research scholarship.

Trinkunas, who starts his new role Oct. 1, will provide additional oversight over CISAC’s core operations, from research and fellowships to administration and finance. He was previously CISAC’s associate director for research; he will continue to be a senior research scholar affiliated with the center.

In his new capacity, Trinkunas will work to ensure that CISAC remains on a sustainable footing as its faculty, scholars and fellows generate knowledge to build a safer world and educate the next generation of security experts. This will contribute to maintaining CISAC’s position as a global thought leader on meeting the most pressing challenges for international security and international cooperation.

CISAC’s associate director position for administration and finance will report to Trinkunas, who joined CISAC in September 2016. Previously, that position (under recruitment now) reported to CISAC’s co-directors.  

The new organizational structure brings CISAC into alignment with other centers at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. It will also allow co-directors Amy Zegart and Rod Ewing  to focus more time on CISAC’s external relationships – with CISAC supporters, policy makers and media. These are key audiences for the Center’s scholarly findings and education programs.

Zegart, CISAC co-director for the social sciences, said, "I couldn't be more delighted that Harold has agreed to become CISAC's deputy director. Creating this deputy director position will enable us to bring together longer-range strategic planning and day-to-day operations -- and Harold is ideally suited to the task, with deep experience in university administration at the Naval Postgraduate School, Brookings, and Stanford as well as an active and exciting scholarly research agenda."

Ewing, CISAC co-director for the sciences, said, “Harold’s expanded role in CISAC will allow for a better coordination of administrative and budgetary decisions on a day-to-day basis.  I certainly look forward to working with Harold as we continue to expand the impact of CISAC scholarship on policy issues.”

Management, research

Trinkunas joined CISAC last year from the Brookings Institution, where he was the Charles W. Robinson Chair and senior fellow as well as director of the Latin America Initiative in the Foreign Policy program.

“This is a great opportunity to work in collaborative ways with exceptional scholars around some very important international security challenges facing today’s world,” Trinkunas said then.

Born and raised in Venezuela, Trinkunas earned his doctorate in political science from Stanford in 1999; he was also a predoctoral fellow and later a visiting professor at CISAC.  His first exposure to CISAC took place when he served as a teaching assistant to Scott Sagan in 1992.

Through the years, CISAC has evolved and adjusted its focus to reflect the global security realities, Trinkunas said. Research at CISAC spans biosecurity and global health, terrorism, cybersecurity, governance, and nuclear risk and cooperation, among others.

Trinkunas said he enjoys the mentoring aspect of working with emerging scholars in the CISAC fellowship program, which he oversees.

Security, governance

Trinkunas’ most recent book, Aspirational Power: Brazil's Long Road to Global Influence, co-authored with David Mares of UC San Digo, was published last year by the Brookings Institution Press.  Aspirational Power was chosen as one of Foreign Affair’s “best books of 2016.”

Trinkunas studies the intersection of security and governance. In his research, he has examined civil-military relations, ungoverned spaces, terrorist financing, emerging power dynamics, and global governance.

MEDIA CONTACTS:

Harold Trinkunas, Center for International Security and Cooperation: (650) 725-8035, antanas@stanford.edu

Clifton B. Parker, Center for International Security and Cooperation: (650) 725-6488, cbparker@stanford.edu