Interstate conflicts are "roaring back," according to James Fearon. One of the preeminent thinkers in the field of international relations, Fearon joins Colin Kahl on the World Class podcast to talk about why it feels like wars are becoming more prevalent, and how more might be prevented in the future. Drawing on both his academic research and his time in government service, Fearon shares his perspective on why and how the conflicts in Ukraine and Iran are unfolding, and outlines his recommendations for preventing active conflict with China in the Indo-Pacific.

James Fearon is the Theodore and Frances Geballe Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences and a professor of political science. He is a senior fellow at FSI, affiliated with CISAC and CDDRL. His research interests include civil and interstate war, ethnic conflict, the international spread of democracy and the evaluation of foreign aid projects promoting improved governance. Fearon was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2012 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2002. Some of his current research projects include work on the costs of collective and interpersonal violence, democratization and conflict in Myanmar, nuclear weapons and U.S. foreign policy, and the long-run persistence of armed conflict.

This episode's reading recommendation is, “The Personalist Global Order: When Individual Whims Drive Great Power Policy” by Seva Gunitsky and Semuhi Sinanoglu, published in the January 2026 issue of Foreign Affairs.

TRANSCRIPT:

Kahl: You're listening to World Class from the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. I'm your host, Colin Kahl, the director of FSI.

Today we're talking to my good friend, Jim Fearon. Jim is the Theodore and Francis Geballe professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences here at Stanford. He's also a professor in the political science department and a senior fellow with us at FSI. He is inarguably one of the most influential international relations theorists and methodologists of his generation.

He's also spent some time serving in the U.S. government, and he's about to begin a term as the co-director of FSI's Center for International Security and Cooperation, or CISAC, which is one of our flagship centers. Jim's research covers an incredibly broad array of international security issues, including pathbreaking work on interstate war, conventional and nuclear deterrence, civil and ethnic conflict, the international spread of democracy, and its impact on political stability, and the evaluation of foreign aid projects.

He's even branched out to study the cost of collective and interpersonal violence, and he has a terrific new book on the topic entitled Worse Than War. As the world grapples with a new period of heightened conflict and global tension, I can't think of a better person to help us think through these challenges and help lead CISAC in examining them than Jim.

So, Jim, welcome to World Class.
  
Fearon: Thanks, Colin. Very happy to be here.

Kahl: I want to start our conversation by rolling the tape way back. Three decades ago, you published a highly influential article entitled, “Rationalist Explanations of War.” The article addresses a core puzzle in international relations. And that is, you know, because war is costly and risky, a peaceful settlement that avoids destruction should theoretically always exist and be preferred by rational actors, and yet war still occurs. These days, unfortunately, it seems to be occurring more and more often.

So I want to ask you how the insights from this foundational article might help us understand some contemporary conflicts, including those in Europe and the Middle East.

But first—a lot of our listeners are pretty nerdy, but many of them will not have read your article. Maybe you can spend a few minutes just kind of explaining to our listeners the core argument you made in this.

Fearon: You're right; it is a frighteningly long time ago now. Scary for me to think about. 1995 it came out, written pretty much in ‘93.

I guess I’d stress two things in terms of summarizing it. One, even the way you framed it as, war is costly and risky, there ought to be deals, in principle, that rationally led states would prefer to the costly lottery, the costly big gamble of going to war. That was itself a framing that was not standard at the time.

And in fact the reason I wrote the article in that form — I was an assistant professor at University of Chicago and I had a different version based on a chapter of my dissertation. And a senior colleague very generously giving me extensive comments on that draft, disagreed vigorously with that point and said, “No, no, no, no, and here's a list of cases where both sides wanted to go to war, and there were just no deals.”

And that interaction made me realize, well, actually, you know, there's maybe there's a point here that that would be worth arguing out there in the field.

And then the other thing was I wanted to ask, “What are the full set of rationalist explanations for why rational leaders wouldn't be able to find a deal better than this costly lottery?” And basically I say there's two things. There's kind of informational stories and commitment stories.

“Informational story”  means that one or both sides thinks they know something about either their capabilities or maybe their willingness to fight, which they know privately, the other side can't directly observe it. And because if you told me, like, “Don't do that or I absolutely will go to war.” I might not believe you because I know that  you have an incentive to try to get me not to do that.

And then the second thing: commitment problems.That's when even if we largely agree on the probability of winning would be 50-50 or something, and have a good sense of what the costs would be, even if we know there's deals we'd both prefer to fighting, we may believe that one or the other or both of us would not be trustworthy to enforce a deal.

An example would be Iran and cases like that where we might want to make a deal — we give you some sanctions relief, and you agree to intrusive inspections and not to pursue nuclear weapons. But how do we know they're not going cheat? We think they might have reasons to. So that's the kind of concern. Maybe there in principle is a deal, but you're worried the other side has ways of sneakily or not so sneakily reneging.

Kahl: The Iran point is is particularly relevant to my personal experience because I remember during the Biden administration, it was very difficult for us to convince Iran to get back into some version of the Obama-era Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, because I Iran kept wanting us to credibly commit that we would not withdraw from the agreement, like Trump withdrew from Obama's agreement. And it turned out that was very difficult for us to commit to. Of course, we also had trust issues as it related to the Iranians.

But speaking of Iran, we're now past the six-month mark in the U.S. and Israeli war with Iran. We're mostly in the U.S. phase these days.

And we're now in the fifth year of the war in Ukraine. So we've got major conflicts in Europe and the Middle East.

But I was wondering if you could link back to some of those concepts that you just elucidated to help our listeners understand, for example, why Putin made the decision to launch a full-fledged invasion of Ukraine back in 2022, or why President Trump decided to attack Iran alongside Israel back in February.

Fearon: Well, you've given a couple significant challenges here on the “rationalist” part. So, one thing I absolutely was not arguing or claiming in that piece was that all wars are begun by rational choices, and that this was the way to understand why all wars happen.

My hunch is that this decision to go to war was irrational. Say you have a specific psychological bias in mind that may explain it. Psychological biases and irrationality is defined on the basis of, or with respect to, “It's not rational.” Rational is like the normative, like, okay, you ought to do this, or if you're rational, you would do this. And that's how we even can tell what would be irrational.

In order to even figure out what's a psychological bias story, you have to be starting with a clear sense of what would count as a rational story.

So that's a little background on the motivation there. I'm definitely not saying that this current U.S. war with Iran is going to be best explained by rational choices. But to your point, I do think the information and commitment story helps us understand the underlying strategic problems that the leaders are dealing with and states are dealing with and may manage or address in more or less rational ways.

So with that as like a long lead up, let's start . . . well, we’ve been talking about Iran. Let's start there.

We only have a little reporting on this now, but it seems like the president really, like, went with his gut. Even despite getting . . . the CIA allegedly told him that what Netanyahu was telling him that this can bring about regime change . . . he was allegedly told by the U.S. intelligence community, “No, we really don't think that's gonna happen.” The ability of the Iranians to shut down the Strait of Hormuz seems to have been raised.

But he decides and probably is influenced by feeling like the Venezuela operation was a huge success. Ex post, it looks like he exaggerated his prospects for success.

It doesn't seem to me like there was anything to suggest that the U.S. had any particular private information about their capabilities or anything that would give them a rational basis for having mutual optimism with respect to the Iranians. The Israelis had these rather extensive plans for internal subversion, for regime change, but it seems like the U.S. intel didn't think that was likely to succeed.

At a more underlying level though, the whole issue for years now, fifteen plus years, has been this commitment problem issue of the U.S. worrying that if the Iranians got nuclear weapons, this would have various bad effects for a balance of power in the region and possible consequences for us on that.

You were intimately involved in dealing with this commitment issue in the JCPOA talks. And as you know, one of the big criticisms of the JCPOA talks was that it's not credible. That the Iranians would be able to cheat, pursue, get out of the deal, and that the only real solution here is regime change.

And their argument one way or another, ends up succeeding, in terms of getting the U.S. president to act on it. It has not succeeded, so far, on regime change, and we'll see what happens there.

Kahl: One thing that seems to be similar about the Ukraine and Iran cases, and wonder what your impression is, but before the war, in both instances, there were diplomatic engagements.

The United States was engaged with Russia to try to convince them that the war wouldn't work out well for them, that the costs would be high, but also in conversations to see whether a broader U.S.-Russia understanding about security in Europe could be discussed to address some of the security concerns that Putin had about Ukraine and about the eastern flank of NATO.

The zone of possible agreement was pretty narrow and there were huge commitment issues. They didn't trust us; we didn't trust them. So, that resonates.

Same with Iran. We were in the midst of negotiations with them. They didn't trust us. We didn't trust them. We had pretty maximalist demands. They had pretty maximalist demands on issues like enrichment. And so the zone of possible agreement was narrow, and trust just made it difficult to to find a diplomatic solution, which means you were kind of in the zone where war could be imagined in both Ukraine and in Iran.

But what's interesting is that both Putin and Trump believed certain types of information rather than others, and basically they believed the wars would be easy. Putin thought the war in Ukraine would be over in a couple of weeks. Trump thought the war in Iran would be over in a couple of days, maybe a couple of weeks. They were getting information from different advisors, but either they were believing certain advisors or they just had very firm beliefs in their own heads about how easy this was going to be that couldn't be shaken. They just thought the wars would be easy.

So if you kind of combine the zone of possible agreement and commitment issues being pretty problematic, and then both leaders thought the wars would be easy, maybe there's some commonality between the conflicts. I don't know if that resonates with some of your views.

Fearon: It does, and I think you're right; there are some similarities there. In both cases, I think the underlying issues have to do with revisionism plus anarchy making for credible commitment problems.

One thing that the Iran case and the Ukraine case have in common [is] they’re wars of regime change, or at least, to a large extent. Putin wants to go to Kyiv, throw out the regime, establish something different or incorporate almost the entire current Ukrainian state into Russia.

When you see regime change as the primary objective, you should think “commitment problem.” This was true in the 2003 U.S.-Iraq war, where the Bush administration really wasn't that interested in cutting a deal with Saddam Hussein. They thought we had an opportunity to change the regime, make things a lot less costly, a lot better. Either he’s working on nuclear weapons now or he's going be able to soon. 9/11 gives us this great opportunity with the U.S. public to to do this.

World War II for the Allies: Churchill and Roosevelt meet in Casablanca early on, well before they have any good reason to think that they're going to be able to defeat, do a landing, and drive all the way to Berlin. But they declare at that point our goal is unconditional surrender. We just have to get rid of this regime. Why is that? Well, they don't think that any deal with Hitler would be stable. Because he's revealed enough about his preferences that he wouldn't comply.

That combines in both the Iranian and the Ukraine case with what, after the fact, look like quite overly optimistic views. In the Ukraine case, ex post we can see like, “Oh gosh, you really miscalculated.” This was not a one-week special military operation. It's five years of staggering, staggering World War I-like losses and lack of progress. So, surely he was irrational in getting that wrong.

But as I recall in the first week or so, people I heard in the Pentagon were like, “Yeah, this is going to be over. It's gonna take them like a week or two, but they're going to win.” And that was also a view that wasn’t just in the U.S. It's not just Putin who was surprised; a lot of people were surprised. There's some interesting reporting in a series of Washington Post pieces in late 2022 where they're talking to Ukrainian military and political leaders, and they were surprised to some extent. They were not a hundred percent sure, ex ante that you would see the degree of coordination, nationalist enthusiasm, support, pulling together, that they actually saw. So even they were a little bit surprised.

I do think that there's a plausible argument for mutual optimism, as we say, that some private information contributed to the sum of their beliefs about their chances of winning being greater than one. The Russians seem to really dismiss the Ukrainian’s capability and they thought that people would defect from the regime, that there wouldn't be a lot of public support, which was totally wrong.

Kahl: I think that's right. Maybe this was a byproduct of the fact that all the senior advisors to the Secretary of Defense were Army guys, and the Secretary of Defense himself was an Army guy back when the invasion happened. But when they all were all looking at the giant green map, and I say that because it was literally this huge green map that Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, would roll out on the table in the Secretary's Conference room and start pointing to what the Russians were intending to do based on all the insights and intel that we had.

I think our military, again, these Army guys, basically saw a repeat of 2003 Iraq, which was that the major combat phase of the war and the regime change part of the war might be over in a couple of weeks, right? You'd have the equivalent of a thunder run to Kyiv, like we had the thunder run to Baghdad. But also like Iraq, in the aftermath of that, Ukrainian nationalism was real, resistance was real, and that you'd have a combination of basically insurgency, civil uprisings and disobedience, serious occupation problems.

Milley is talking to Gerasimov, his counterpart in Russia before the war, he's saying, “Look, you think this war is going to be over in fourteen days, but it's going to last fourteen years.”

But when Milley was saying that, he was talking about the post-war, post-regime change difficulties that we faced in Iraq. I think it was a shock about how poorly the Russians performed. It certainly was a shock on our side. And also how well the Ukrainians performed, and not the least of which because the Ukrainians didn't appear to have a plan. But I think in retrospect, they did have a plan. They just didn't share the plan with us because they didn't trust us all that much. So there were some information asymmetries.

I think the biggest one that Putin had was not just what we now see as his overconfidence in how easy it would be to change the regime, but he didn't believe us when we said we would impose a lot of costs on him: support the Ukrainians, imposing costs, sanctions, a degree of international isolation. He just didn't believe any of that stuff.

Okay. You've already mentioned that you worked at the Pentagon. We worked together in 2021, 2022. You took some leave from Stanford to serve in the Strategy Office within the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

For our listeners, the Office of the Secretary of Defense is not literally the secretary's office; it's a huge, sprawling civilian bureaucracy that supports the Secretary. And Jim worked in the strategy shop. And specifically, you had an opportunity to work on the 2022 National Defense Strategy, which is an important intellectual and framing document for the Pentagon.

It's kind of a meta document that tries to translate the national security strategy into a defense strategy that can be operationalized by the Pentagon. I believe this was your first time working in government, and I'd love you to reflect on that experience a little bit. Because obviously you've spent all this time in the ivory tower. You're hugely influential in the field of international relations.

What impact did this experience of being in the bowels of the Pentagon for a year or so . . . what impact did it have in shaping your understanding about the policy process or maybe your thinking about international security more broadly?

Fearon: Well, the opportunity for that year was largely due to you. So I have you to thank for that. And it was an amazing experience and it was a great thing to do in mid- late-career to kind of shake things up. And I learned just a massive amount. I’d say I’m still . . . in terms of lessons, too many to count. I'm still really processing it all. I'm trying to clear off a bunch of various longstanding projects so I can start thinking more systematically and trying to write about that.

The experience didn't really end up changing my views about international politics. Although I've got a lot more good anecdotes, it didn't really change the way I teach “Intro IR” that much.

But it radically . . . I just learned a ton about how U.S. foreign policy and defense policy is made inside the machine. And that's just been fascinating. And that has affected . . . when I read the newspaper or read about what's going on in the world, it definitely informs how I understand a lot of stuff that I see happening.

We talk a ton about policy makers and policy making in our academic IR world. And not just political science in general. What did I think? Well, I didn't know. Maybe you go in and like you sit around a table with a bunch of policymakers and you go like, “Hmm, what should our policy be on this question?” You know? And it'll be a little bit like a seminar, maybe?

Occasionally I saw stuff that was a little bit like that. And maybe at levels that you experience more at higher levels, maybe that happens more. But that was like not the way it works at all, right?

Instead, it's like a gazillion meetings.with people from different offices, and offices within offices, and offices within offices within offices at a gazillion levels and across different agencies talking about, “How do we align?”

It turns out policymaking is basically all about aligning things, aligning things with other things. It's about coordination. You have a notion when we're talking about policy in the newspaper journalist sense, it's very simple, right? Is the policy going to be this or that? But in actuality: what's a policy? It's not one simple thing. It's like a million things. It's a million little decisions.

And you can’t, even when you say, if you’re the Undersecretary, “I think we should do this.” Well that goes down the chain, and then what comes back are like a million, “Well we can't do that because of this, or that causes this friction, or we can't do that because of this other thing.” So that was one thing that was really striking.

It's a world of silos. Silos and silos within silos. And we talk about silos as if they're bad, but the truth is that you have to have silos. The whole system's a silo. You've got State Department and you've got Homeland Security and you've got the Defense Department and Treasury. And you need specialists in these different areas, and expertise. And someone's going to be lead on this or that policy. But at the same time, once you create all these silos, they have to coordinate. And that’s what so much of policy was about. It was about all these meetings of aligning across and within silos.

Kahl: Totally. Whether it's policy percolating from the bottom up or you're trying to implement it from the top down, the vast majority of what people in the U.S. government do is try to align and coordinate their actions. Either align it to their preferences — like their organizational preferences or their individual preferences — or align it to a policy that they think is already set, while deconflicting with everybody else.

It's basically a hot mess. It's surprising, actually, that anything gets done.

I was thinking as you were talking: probably the most famous scholar-practitioner of all time is Henry Kissinger. And Kissinger once remarked about when he was back at Harvard as an academic, he learned things. He built up all this intellectual capital. And then he went into government and he spent it all down. Implying that he didn't really build up more intellectual capital inside government, that that happened outside of government.

My sense is that Kissinger was a brilliant guy, but that he's absolutely wrong about that. Every time I've served in government, my intellectual capital went up, including in domains that I had not been exposed to before. So, I do want to ask about whether your intellectual capital changed at all on some issues you thought deeply about.

In particular, during your time at the Pentagon, was there anything that you learned about the world or how DOD conducts its planning and operations that changed your understanding of contemporary deterrence challenges? Because after all, the national defense strategy that you work so hard on in the strategy office framed as its central challenge, sustaining and strengthening deterrence vis-a-vis potential adversaries with China and Russia kind of at the top of the pile. Given that you’ve thought a lot about deterrence as an academic, you then saw how people were debating it in these endless meetings on the inside: did it shape your thinking at all?

Fearon: Well, the overarching frame of the 2022 national defense strategy was integrated deterrence. And initially I was like, what does that mean? Do we need another deterrence concept?

But the more time I spent there, the more I thought actually, you know, that's right. The U.S. and its allies and partners have an amazing set of strengths, but you need to make the whole greater than the sum of the parts. So now we're talking about silos not only within the U.S. government, but with allies and partners. There's a whole other set of very difficult coordination challenges.

It's incredibly challenging. I worked on implementation, as you know, until I left in September 2022, and I saw some stuff that happened after that, but my impression is that the agenda of integration had more successes inside the defense establishment than across agencies. And it seems like that coordinating across agencies was just really hard for all kinds of reasons.

But let me come back. You want to know about the intellectual capital. I didn't feel like I was spending down intellectual capital. I did think that, for example, in doing the national defense strategy, I was able to bring some stuff to the table conceptually from having studied and written about deterrence for quite a while.

But in terms of what I got, it goes to what we were just talking about being really struck by the scale and the organizational challenges. When you're coming from academics, or for that matter journalists, or for that matter really historians, there are all kinds of incentives to see and understand and also blinders to put things in very psychological terms.

So although I think psychology is hugely important, the experience made me think that we're over-emphasizing in a lot of ways, or we’re attributing things to psychological biases or this or that that are actually have more to do with organizational and career incentive things that are very difficult to to see from the outside.

Kahl: Yeah. I think in part that’s because it's like a nature-nurture question. Do our beliefs emerge from our experiences, in which case they are to some degree byproducts of our experience and to include it inside government.

I think your integrated deterrence point is interesting because a lot of critics of that defense said that integrated deterrence is just deterrence. Like deterrence is deterrence. In fact, you’re saying “integrated” because you want to actually slough off deterrence on other actors: the State Department or the Treasury Department, or our allies.

And I think the way that we saw it was that it was a recognition of the reality that if deterrence is either about denying the adversary the ability to achieve their objectives, or credibly being able to threaten to impose costs in excess of what they might achieve through aggression, that you had to have the entire kit available to you to do that, which meant you had to deter across the domains of warfare: land, air, sea, undersea, space, cyberspace, information, all of those.

The military kind of, I think, understood that, although implementation-wise it wasn't great at it. You had to deter across our alliances for the point that you made, that the whole had to add up to more than the sum of its parts. And that's a really hard coordination problem.

But you also had to integrate across the instruments of national power so that you're not just threatening to do things militarily, but as we've we've seen in places like Ukraine and Iran, the military instrument hits certain limits on your ability to achieve national objectives if it's not in tight coordination with diplomacy and economic carrots and sticks and other things.

The Trump administration didn't use the term “integrated deterrence” in their most recent national defense strategy. My suspicion is that people are largely thinking about deterrence in similar ways.

Fearon: An example would be in the lead up and through the whole Ukraine experience, Treasury is brought in. It does all kinds of stuff and does all kinds of analysis on the whole sanction side in terms of actions. But getting coordination to use that experience or do advanced planning on some kind of parallel contingency in the Western Pacific; that's hard to do.

Kahl: Very hard to do. But, you know, interestingly . . . we threatened Putin with all the things we ended up doing: supporting the Ukrainians, imposing sanctions, trying to isolate Russia on the world stage, which worked for about a year and a half or two. It's since kind of fallen apart.

My own view is that if Putin had known the cost that would have been imposed on him, he probably wouldn't have launched the war. We told him what many of those costs were, he just didn't believe us. My assessment of Beijing is yes, if they ever make a move on Taiwan or Japan or the Philippines, in one of these disputed areas: South China Sea, East China Sea, or the Taiwan Strait.

They will not just be calculating whether their military operations would be successful or whether they could dissuade the United States from intervening, but they'll be calculating what the impact would be on China's economy, on their regime stability, on a whole host of issues that are not entirely military and have significant economic and diplomatic elements to them. So, I think it's just only sensible to try to bundle up the various deterrence messaging so that Beijing thinks not only would they face a long hard slog if they went after Taiwan, but they'd also face sanctions or disruptions to critical supply chains or economic isolation from key economies around the world and et cetera, et cetera.

I do want to talk a little bit more about China and deterrence and get your views. You wrote a very interesting article in Foreign Affairs last year about how to think through conventional deterrence with China. So, much more in the military domain. And I wonder if the prospect of China taking action against Taiwan or another U.S. ally or partner is one of the pathways in which you could get a massive global conflagration? How should we think about deterring that?

Fearon: So, this was an article in Foreign Affairs in May or June last year with Andrew Lim, who's a very smart, experienced civil servant in OSD policy.

The basic idea is like, how do you sustain and strengthen deterrence as the 2022 NDS said, in the Western Pacific? We argue that the U.S. needs to work towards what we call the conventional triad. So, more investment in precision-guided missiles and deeper munition stocks in that area. Basically missiles, bombers, and subs. So, bombers that can be used to launch long-range cruise missiles. That's a technology called palletized munitions, as you know.

One thing we were trying to draw attention to is that there are pretty big first strike incentives. So, if you get in a tense or a crisis situation, the PLA has a real premium on preventing the U.S. forces from getting in the fight. And they built a missile complex that, if they used it successfully, very quickly could make it impossible, or very, very difficult, or could be devastating for U.S. naval assets and fixed bases in the region, which are critical for any kind of U.S. military intervention.

The U.S. knows that, wants to protect its forces. It has potentially preemption incentives itself to attack and prevent these missiles, or the command and control systems that enable them, from working. The whole article is based on this kind of analogy to the nuclear history where Albert Wohlstetter and Thomas Schelling were arguing in the 50s that the U.S. needed to posture its nuclear forces in a way to assure a second strike.

They were worrying — probably worrying too much — that the Soviets could have an incentive to just . . . what do we call it? . . . do a splendid first strike, to make it impossible or largely impossible for the U.S. to retaliate.

So, we're arguing that the situation is similar at a conventional level in the Western Pacific. So you could increase both crisis stability, lower the risk of war, and also strengthen deterrence by building an assured, secure, conventional second strike.

Kahl: The article is fantastic. People should check it out.

One of the concerns you hear out of the Pentagon these days . . . not at the very top, but through the many leaks that get into the Washington Post and the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and other outlets . . . is just how concerned the professional military is and the combatant commands are with how depleted our long-range munitions stockpiles and also our air defense and missile defense interceptor stockpiles are, in large part because of the conflict with Iran, which has spent through a lot of those munitions.

The not so dirty little secret in the Pentagon is we had lots of war plans. But if you executed any one of them with a degree of protraction, you basically made the other war plans very difficult to execute for some period of time.

And we're we're seeing that happen in real time and we've kind of gone all in with Iran. And I think a lot of people at the Pentagon are worried that that has undermined our deterrent vis-a-vis China and and Russia, because they know how depleted we are on some of these types of munitions.

I want to pivot now to your new job, the job you have graciously agreed to take on, which is the social science co-director of CISAC, the Center for International Security and Cooperation.

For our listeners who don't know about CISAC, it's one of the oldest centers, one of the founding centers of FSI at Stanford. And it's always had, from the very beginning, a social science co-director and a science co-director. Because from the very outset, it's been a center focused on the relationship between science and technology on the one hand and international security on the other, initially focused on nuclear weapons and arms control, and now with a much broader research agenda.

So first of all, thank you for taking on the job. You're the perfect person at this time.

What types of issues do you think CISAC in particular, and maybe security studies more broadly, needs to prioritize at this particular moment in world history and as we look to the future?

Fearon: I'm excited to do it. I'm looking forward to it. It's a great opportunity, and I'm fully expecting that being a center director will be more fun than being a department chair.

Taking kind of a big picture look here: Secretary Blinken used to like to say the post-Cold War is over, right? And I think he's right about that. We're living through a really big set of changes in the international system. Probably bigger and more fundamental than the changes I lived through as a grad student with the end of the Cold War. Really quite fundamental.

This is a whole bunch of dimensions, but definitely one of the biggest ones is that interstate conflict among major powers has just come roaring back. After twenty-five years or so, where a lot of the issues of focus in international security were things like civil war, transnational terrorism, insurgency, counterinsurgency, state building, peacekeeping operations, non-proliferation. Now, none of those things have gone away; it upsets me that civil war in particular, which has actually gotten quite a bit worse, has kind of just fallen off the radar screen.

But nonetheless, good reason to be concerned about major power conflict, which has come back very much, and with it, increased risk of nuclear war. We haven't seen so much risk of this since the hot days of the Cold War. But it's come back in a technological context that's really different from the Cold War.

And I think that's where studying, thinking about, conceptualizing, framing, intervening on, like, how to think about and what to do about major power conflict in this technologically changed and rapidly changing environment is what CISAC will be focused on. And that CISAC, being at Stanford, is the place to do this: to study AI and and AI and international security implications for conflict, cyber offense, cyber defense, cyber capabilities and and and their implications.

There's something of an underreported arms race going on in space. That's another thing I'd love to get more work going on. Space capabilities have become absolutely essential enablers for military operations of not just the U.S., but perhaps especially still the U.S.

Kahl: I'm super excited about all of that. I'm not excited about the world we live in; the world seems more turbulent and violent by the day. But as it relates to CISAC: CISAC's core mission of thinking about how academia can inform questions about nuclear deterrence and nuclear stability and arms control, that's back.

The salience of nuclear weapons is arguably higher than it's been in many decades. And then there are all these emerging technology areas: cyber, AI, space, undersea, in the not too distant future, quantum. And what's interesting about it is that they are all entangled with one another. AI and cyber are highly entangled. Cyber and space are highly entangled. Cyber and undersea are highly entangled. Quantum will be highly entangled with other domains as well, and all of them are entangled with nuclear weapons, nuclear deterrence, nuclear command and control.

And so as you said, there's no place on earth to study all of these things, all of this intersectionality like CISAC. I'm super excited that you're going to take that on.

The last question I always ask our guests: so, Ezra Klein — one of my favorite podcasts — always asks his guests for three favorite books. And I'm always always impressed that non-academics, let alone academics, have time to read three books.

I have an easier question, which is: what is one article that you would recommend to our listeners to get a better understanding of contemporary international security challenges?

Fearon: So, my suggestion here is a little bit of a departure from what we've been talking about. It's not really hard on the military emerging tech, nuclear defense policy things, but more of a how to think about what's going on in the world.

I like a piece in Foreign Affairs by an IR political scientist named Seva Gunitsky and co-author Semuhi Sinanoglu. It's called “The Personalist Global Order: When Individual Whims Drive Great Power Policy.” And they make an argument that Trump and Xi Jinping to some extent, and Putin are. . . to understand how they're acting in foreign policy, it really helps to draw on this comparative politics.

People who study autocracy have a set of commonly used distinctions between types of autocracies. A personalist is in contrast to, like, a military dictator or a single party regime. Someone who governs by personal patron-client connections, often family-based, and views institutions as potential threats and tends to want to undermine them. And there's a bunch of patterns associated with personalist autocrats. There's a lot of erratic behavior.

In general, I think the IR field doesn’t pay enough attention to comparative politics, and this is a place where if you're looking to understand what's going on at the international level, it's a concept that's quite useful.

Kahl: It is a great article. And I also think where international relations can come to bear is in thinking about how these personalist systems become intertwined. The way in which Trump's network is intertwined with the networks in the Persian Gulf monarchies, for example. Great recommendation. Folks should go check it out if they haven't already.

Jim, thank you so much for joining us today.

Fearon: Thanks, Colin.

Kahl: You've been listening to World Class from the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. If you like what you're hearing, please leave us a review and be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts to stay up to date on what is happening in the world, and why.

Q&A with Martha Crenshaw, a senior fellow at FSI’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. Written with Katy Gabel Chui.

On Wednesday, President Trump announced he wants to pull troops out of Syria because the United States military had achieved its goal of defeating the Islamic State militant group there. In this Q&A, terrorism expert Martha Crenshaw addresses the president’s decision.

Has the U.S. defeated the Islamic State in Syria? What does “defeat” mean in this context?

U.S. leaders have talked optimistically about “defeating” first Al Qaeda and then the Islamic State since the declaration of a global war on terror in 2001. If it were possible to vanquish such an adversary on the battlefield through the application of superior military force, we would already have accomplished the mission. The Islamic State combines insurgency with transnational terrorism, and its operations flow easily across national borders. Since its beginnings in 2003, it has demonstrated a capacity for resilience and reconstitution — and for surprising us. The loss of the Caliphate has not changed this equation.

What regional impacts might this decision have?

The Iraqi government has not shown itself capable of providing the security or legitimacy that might undermine the appeal of the Islamic State. Despite [Syrian President] Assad’s ruthless consolidation of power with the aid of Iran and Russia, opposition to his regime will continue. If the American-supported Kurdish resistance is abandoned by the U.S. and then destroyed or weakened by Turkey, there will be even more scope and rationale for jihadists such as the Islamic State. Also, we shouldn’t forget that the Al Qaeda branch in Syria is still active.

What about in terms of the U.S. relationship with Russia and Iran versus with allies in the region?

It seems that the assumption behind the withdrawal is that the U.S. is willing to leave Syrian affairs to Russia and Iran and to allow Turkey to pursue an offensive against our Kurdish allies. We should probably call them “former allies” now. Turkey is likely to draw closer to Iran and Russia.

Some American military leaders have spoken up against this decision, calling it wrongheaded. Does that matter?

Probably not to the President’s decisions, but vocal military opposition would matter to Congress and other opinion leaders.

Views expressed here do not necessarily represent those of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies or Stanford University, both of which are nonpartisan institutions.

The two-day forum, part of a project of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, led by the Freeman Spogli Institute’s Karl Eikenberry and Stephen Krasner, gathered experts to examine trends in civil wars and solutions moving forward.   

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The Council on Foreign Relations presently tracks six countries in a state of civil war, including three (South Sudan, Afghanistan, and Yemen) where the situation is currently worsening. Furthermore, three states (Central African Republic, Myanmar, and Nigeria) are experiencing sectarian violence with the potential to become larger conflicts. With two months still remaining in 2018, the combined fatalities in Afghanistan, Syria, and Yemen alone is fast approaching 100,000 for the year.

It was against this backdrop that Shorenstein APARC’s U.S.-Asia Security Initiative (USASI), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS), and the School for International Studies at Peking University recently co-hosted the security workshop “Civil Wars, Intrastate Violence, and International Responses.” Held in Beijing, on October 22-23, the workshop brought together thirty-five U.S. and international experts to gain a wider perspective on intrastate violence and consider the possibilities for, and limits of, intervention. The workshop is the latest activity of the AAAS project on Civil Wars, Violence, and International Responses, chaired by Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, director of USASI, and by Stephen Krasner, senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and professor of international relations.

“Some of the major discussion topics included the appropriate political and economic development models to apply to fragile states recovering from internal conflict, justifications for intervention, and the likely impact of great power competition on the future treatment of civil wars." - Karl Eikenberry

Workshop participants included academics and professionals with expertise in political science, global health, diplomacy, refugee field work, United Nations, and the military. Countries represented at the table included the United States, Ethiopia, France, and China. Throughout the two-day session, they examined three crucial questions: What is the scope of intrastate conflicts and civil wars, and to what extent is it attributable to domestic or international factors? What types of threats to global security emanate from state civil wars? What policy options are available to regional powers and the international community to deal with such threats?

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USASI Director Karl Eikenberry addresses one of the sessions

China’s Emerging Role in Addressing Intrastate Violence

The workshop’s timing and location was prescient. Over the past two decades, China’s global exposure–through trade, investment, and financing–has increased dramatically. Coupled with a growing number of its citizens living abroad, China’s equity in other states has reached the point where it has a direct interest in those experiencing or are at risk of political instability and internal violence. Indeed, through its ambitious Belt and Road Initiative, China has the opportunity to help stabilize fragile states by stimulating economic development.

“The workshop revealed, at least for me, that China is backing away from its absolute defense of sovereignty and non-intervention,” said Stephen Krasner. “As Chinese interests have expanded around the world, and as both its investments and the number of its citizens living abroad have increased, the Chinese have become more concerned with political conditions in weakly governed countries.”

With China’s growing policy and academic interests in addressing civil wars and intrastate violence, as well as its higher international profile in places like United Nations peacekeeping operations, the Beijing event provided an excellent opportunity for Chinese experts to exchange views with their international colleagues.

Paul H. Wise, MD, MPH; Senior Fellow at Stanford Health Policy

Where We are Today, Where We Go Tomorrow

The Beijing workshop was arranged into four sessions, with themes focusing on trends in intrastate violence, the threats it poses to international security, the limits of intervention, and advice to policymakers.

Each panel included presentations of prepared papers, moderator comments, and an open discussion by all participants. A fifth and final session provided an opportunity to summarize the preceding discussions. The workshop then closed out with an open conversation, where participants offered insight and policy recommendations developed over the preceding two days of dialogue.

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The "Civil Wars, Intrastate Violence, and International Responses” workshop marks the second phase of the AAAS project by the same name that launched in 2015. The first phase of the project culminated in the publication of 28 essays across two volumes of the AAAS quarterly journal Dædalus. The ongoing second phase consists of a series of roundtables and workshops in which project participants engage with academics and with government and international organization officials to build a larger conceptual understanding of the threats posed by the collapse of state authority associated with civil wars, and to contribute to current policymaking. Project activities have included meetings with the United Nations leadership and staff; academic activities in the United States; sessions with the U.S. executive and legislative branches; and a visit to Nigeria.

Throughout the workshop, Chatham House Rule of non-attribution applied to all dialogue. A workshop report will be published by the co-hosts in early 2019.

The U.S.-Asia Security Initiative is part of Stanford University’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC). Led by former U.S. Ambassador and Lieutenant General (Retired) Karl Eikenberry, USASI seeks to further research, education, and policy relevant dialogues at Stanford University on contemporary Asia-Pacific security issues.

March 1, 2019 update: the workshop report is now available online. Download the report >> 

Participants in the “Civil Wars, Intrastate Violence, and International Responses” workshop

An anti-poverty aid program that’s been implemented in the Philippines for nearly a decade is gaining attention for the progress it has made in not only helping the poor, but also for its role in decreasing political violence and insurgency.

Joe Felter, senior research scholar at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and research fellow at the Hoover Institution, presented the results of his joint research on the program before senior political figures at a conference in the Philippine capital of Manila in January.

CISAC senior research scholar Joe Felter (left) joins Philippine President Benigno Aquino (right) and the Secretary of the Department of Social Welfare and Development Corazon “Dinky” Soliman (center) onstage at a conference on sustaining the gains of the conditional cash transfer program held in Manila in January, 2016.

“We worked for several years on this study and it was a privilege to provide these findings and results to senior officials in the Philippine government who are in a position to act on them,” said Felter. “It’s really gratifying to know that academic research can contribute to actual improvements in the conditions, livelihood and safety of those in need.”

The focus of the conference was on the conditional cash-transfer (CCT) anti-poverty aid program called Pantawid Pamilya. Administered by Soliman’s Department of Social Welfare and Development, the Philippines began deploying the program in 2007. It is similar to other CCT programs used in Brazil, Columbia, India, Indonesia and Mexico where households must meet certain income thresholds and basic health and education requirements to qualify for its benefits. CCT programs distribute cash payments to targeted poor households and are proving to be an increasingly popular tool for reducing poverty and improving livelihoods in poverty-affected areas.

The effect of aid on conflict

Felter and his colleagues conducted an analysis of the impact of aid on civil conflict that takes advantage of a randomized control trial (RCT) initiated in the Philippines by the World Bank in 2009 as part of an impact evaluation of the Pantawid Pamilya CCT program. Impact evaluations of CCT programs to date limit their findings to those areas the program was intended to address such as health, education, and employment. Published in the January 2016 Journal of Development Economics, the study estimates the effect of conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs on two other critical outcomes- civil conflict and insurgent influence.

CISAC senior research scholar Joe Felter shakes hands with Philippine President Benigno Aquino onstage at a conference in the Philippine capital of Manila.

“Considering the types of conflicts taking place around the globe, it is both timely and important to study how aid can be delivered in a manner that reduces poverty without exacerbating conflict,” said Felter. “Development aid can sometimes have the unintended effect of increasing conflict in civil wars when insurgents believe the successful implementation of government-sponsored development projects will boost support for the government and undermine their position.” 

Felter himself is no stranger to international conflict. He retired from the U.S. Army as a colonel in 2012 following a career as a Special Forces and foreign area officer that took him on missions to Central America, Southeast Asia, Afghanistan, and Iraq.  Now in academia, he uses data and rigorous quantitative methods to help those in the field better understand and more effectively and efficiently approach the challenges of stabilizing conflict areas through development aid and economic assistance. 

Despite the growing popularity of CCTs, and assessments of their effectiveness at reducing poverty and improving livelihood, there is limited evidence on how the payment programs affect the civil conflict often present in these poverty stricken areas. Felter, along with his coauthors Benjamin Crost of the University of Illinois, and Patrick Johnston of RAND Corporation, took advantage of the World Bank’s randomized experiment to identify the effect CCT programs had on conflict-related incidents and the influence of insurgent groups, even though the experiment was not originally designed to study the effect of Pantawid Pamilya on these outcomes. Their research compared these aspects of the CCT program’s impact in treatment villages to control villages in the Philippines from 2009-2011.

The Philippines is home to some of the world’s most protracted civil conflicts, including a separatist insurgency in Mindanao island with roots dating back to Spanish colonial times, and a decades long communist insurgency affecting nearly all of the country’s provinces across this archipelago.

“Studying the impact of conditional cash transfers on political violence and insurgent influence in the Philippines is especially instructive and generalizable because you have multiple, long-running insurgencies, each with distinct characteristics, and with an array of government sponsored aid programs implemented in these areas over time,” said Felter.

Two key findings resulted from the team’s analysis. First, the CCT program caused a substantial reduction in the number of conflict-related incidents in the villages where it was administered. Second, the program was effective at reducing insurgent influence in the treated villages. Significantly, their findings provide evidence that the effects of CCTs can differ from other types of aid interventions based on the type of aid provided and how it is implemented.

“That Pantawid Pamilya helped reduce the presence of rebel groups in the targeted villages is especially consequential.” Felter said. “A program that reduces violence by weakening insurgent influence is likely to have more beneficial long-term effects since insurgent influence can still undermine the rule of law and oppress citizens even without violence.”

Not all aid programs created equal

An effective aid program such as this can result in more than an economic boost for a village or community and a reduction in violence. It can also provide a psychological victory that enables the government to gain increased support from the local population – effectively “winning hearts and minds” – thus potentially enabling the government to gain better security through increased cooperation and information sharing about insurgents from the population. This is a win-win result, especially in regions where insurgents often gain support by exposing weaknesses of the government, not just through fear and coercion. Insurgents win when they are able to achieve legitimacy in the eyes of a local population whose own government is unable to provide for their basic needs.

However, a “winning hearts and minds” strategy for disbursing government aid can sometimes backfire depending on how these programs are carried out. For example, KALAHI-CIDSS, a large-scale community-driven development (CDD) infrastructure program took place in similar regions in the Philippines during the same time period as the Pantawid Pamilya experiment period. This aid program was also implemented by the DSWD, but in some cases led to different and unintended results. The CDD program was designed to empower the poorest Filipino municipalities through enhanced participation in community projects and training, but the way in which the projects were determined and the mechanisms they were delivered created incentives and opportunities for insurgents to attack the projects, resulting in increased local conflict in some cases where the program was implemented. CDD programs involve a series of public meetings and result in the implementation of widely publicized and often highly visible infrastructure projects. As a result, insurgents often attack these government “hearts and minds” initiatives that, if successful, threaten to shift popular support away from their rebel groups and towards the government.

In contrast to CDD programs, CCT programs disburse aid directly to its beneficiaries’ bank accounts, making it difficult for insurgents to anticipate when and where the transfers are occurring and inhibiting their capacity to disrupt and dismantle the program. The findings in Felter’s study provide preliminary evidence that the type of aid and mechanism in which it is delivered can be a major factor in determining its impact on civil conflict.

“The stakes are high in human and economic terms when it comes to stabilizing conflict areas and preventing a return of the deadly violence associated with civil wars and insurgency,” said Felter.

The results of this study provide rare empirical evidence that some forms of aid, and how it is implemented can reduce the intensity of civil conflict and the influence of the groups responsible for it. This evidence can help governments determine what type of aid to invest in to achieve their desired results.

“Distributing aid effectively and achieving maximum benefits from these investments is definitely a challenge and an area where more research is needed to better appreciate the many nuances and complexities of these efforts,” said Felter.

During the two-day conference in Manila, President Aquino noted how his administration had increased the CCT budget to cover close to 4.4 million poor households, up from 786,000 five years ago.

You can read Felter’s full paper in the January issue of the Journal of Development Economics.