Stanford scholars debate whether the Iran nuclear deal can withstand U.S. withdrawal, if a revitalized nuclear program is possible and what a new deal would look like.

Following the announcement of the U.S. withdrawal from the Iran deal, three Stanford scholars consider what it means for American foreign policy and diplomacy.

Stanford scholars debate how the Trump administration’s decision on Iran will affect foreign relations. (Image credit: ruskpp / Getty Images)

In 2015, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action – known as the Iran nuclear deal, or JCPOA – was agreed between Iran and the U.S., United Kingdom, France, Germany, China and Russia. The international agreement limited Iran’s nuclear activities in exchange for a reprieve from international sanctions.

What happens next remains unclear. What does withdrawal signal about American foreign policy? What would a new agreement look like – and is it even possible? To answer some of these questions, Stanford News Service talked to three scholars about the issues:

• Siegfried Hecker is a top nuclear security scholar, former Los Alamos National Laboratory director and senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation. Hecker’s research interests include plutonium science, nuclear weapons policy and international security, nuclear security (including nonproliferation and counter terrorism) and cooperative nuclear threat reduction.
• 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. He has been one of the founding co-directors of the Iran Democracy Project and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. In 2016, he launched the Iran2040 Project that produces research on the future of the Iranian economy, population, energy, water, agriculture and the financial system.
• Allen Weiner is a senior lecturer of law, director of the Stanford Program in International and Comparative Law and co-director of the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation. His scholarship focuses on international law and the response to the contemporary security threats of international terrorism, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and situations of widespread humanitarian atrocities.

What does withdrawal from the Iran deal signal about American foreign policy?

Milani: It signifies that U.S. foreign policy is dependent on the views, even whims, of one person – the president – and the rhetoric he used during the campaign. Views of U.S. government experts or allies has I think never counted for less.

Weiner: The withdrawal from the JCPOA signals a departure from the notion that the U.S. places high value on the benefits of stability, predictability and consistency in its foreign relations. It also reflects the Trump administration’s belief that the U.S. has the ability to persuade other countries to accommodate American interests through coercive mechanisms.

How will withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal be viewed from inside Iran?

Milani: Iran is a country divided. The people, suffering from a profound – even existential – economic crisis, are worried about their future. Bickering political factions in the regime are playing the blame game: first blame the U.S., and then opposing factions.

Can the Iran nuclear deal withstand U.S. withdrawal? What options are available – both politically and legally?

Hecker: I don’t see Iran making a mad dash for nuclear weapons to respond to the U.S. withdrawal. The country has too much to lose. Tehran could decide to keep the essence of the deal with the other countries and isolate the U.S. It may find that it will get adequate sanctions relief from the other countries in spite of U.S. pressure. That may be sufficient for Iran to continue to honor its nuclear deal commitments for now.

Milani: I would be surprised if the deal does not survive. It was never a U.S. deal.  The U.S. was simply a key player. Europe, U.K., China, Russia, the UN, and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) want it to continue – Iran, too.

Weiner: In a sense, yes. Iran is free to continue to comply with the restraints on its nuclear activities negotiated in the JCPOA and to accept IAEA inspections. The other signatories to the JCPOA are free not to re-impose on Iran the sanctions that were lifted under the JCPOA. Because of the reach of U.S. sanctions, however, European companies in particular will face significant risks in doing business in Iran, which means Iran will be deprived of many of the commercial benefits it sought in negotiating the JCPOA. It is far from clear that the remaining, much more limited benefits available under the JCPOA will be appealing enough for Iran to continue to suspend those aspects of its nuclear program that are covered by the JCPOA.

What are reasons to oppose the Iran nuclear deal?

Hecker: The deal was able to get more Iranian nuclear concessions than I had ever thought possible. Apparently, the Trump administration objected primarily that the deal did not include Iran’s other activities, such as missile tests and Iran’s role in the region that it views as unacceptable. However, some of President Trump’s claims about the nuclear deal were simply incorrect.

Milani: The deal surely had flaws. It did not address such critical issues as Iran’s missile program, the regime’s role in places like Syria and Iraq, and human right abuses at home. It surely was not the worst deal in history. It was the least bad option at the time.

Weiner: The key objection voiced by many critics of the JCPOA concerns the “sunset provisions” in the deal, under which many key restrictions in the JCPOA on Iranian nuclear activities last only for 10 or 15 years (depending on the particular restriction). This potentially allows Iran to benefit from sanctions relief now and to merely postpone its pursuit of a nuclear weapon. Other objections concern the failure of the JCPOA adequately to address Iran’s missile development programs or its destabilizing regional activities more generally.

What nuclear facilities remain in place in Iran, and how easily might they be repurposed to create weapons?

Hecker: Iran has dramatically reduced its inventories of enriched uranium in compliance with the deal. It has enrichment facilities that could be restarted rather easily to enrich uranium to weapons grade, but not without withdrawing from the deal. It could also begin construction of a new plutonium-producing reactor, but that would be rather costly since it made the one under construction inoperative in compliance with the deal. The bottom line is that it would take quite some time to get back to the material inventories and facilities Iran had before the deal went into effect.

Milani: Iran’s enrichment facilities remain but much of their capacity has been mothballed. Ninety-eight percent of the country’s low enrichment uranium has been shipped out of the country. The Arak heavy water reactor has been virtually dismantled. All known facilities are under constant surveillance by the IAEA. The regime’s missile program has, however, continued.

What effect could withdrawal have on anticipated talks with North Korea?

Hecker: That’s quite uncertain. North Korea may still want a deal, but it would likely ask for greater assurances from the U.S. about potential withdrawal, just as the U.S. is pressing North Korea about its past history of compliance.

Weiner: Commentators have observed that withdrawal from the JCPOA raises questions about U.S. credibility and its willingness to keep its word. Some suggest that this will make North Korea less likely to move actively in the direction of complete, verifiable, irreversible nuclear disarmament for fear that once it has given up its nuclear program, the U.S. might simply re-impose sanctions or pursue other hostile policies towards it. On the other hand, President Trump has emphasized that he would keep any commitments he makes in negotiations with North Korea; it was only the commitments of the prior U.S. administration that he did not feel obliged to honor. Whether this would provide enough confidence to the North Koreans to trust the United States is, of course, far from clear.

What would a new deal look like?

Hecker: I don’t see a new deal involving this administration as a possibility.

Milani: I think the U.S. could have had more impact on a possible revamped deal had it stayed in the agreement. It remains to be seen whether Europeans will continue to try to coordinate with the U.S. and will try to forge a different agreement with the regime.

Weiner: A new agreement, to be acceptable to the U.S., would have to eliminate (or at least significantly extend) the sunset clauses and address Iran’s missile program. From Iran’s side, a revised deal would have to involve more than just lifting sanctions against Iran. It would also have to more emphatically embrace the prospect of American companies doing business in Iran. With respect to commercial relations, Iran argues that even though the United States formally lifted sanctions against Iran after the JCPOA took effect, the ongoing threat that U.S. sanctions would be re-imposed has effectively dissuaded many businesses in both the U.S. and Europe from pursuing long-term business arrangements in Iran.

The U.S. Army invited scholars and researchers from Stanford University’s FSI to visit the National Training Center, Fort Irwin, California from 11-13 February 2018 to build relationships, share insight, and develop a shared understanding. National Training Center leaders familiarized Stanford participants with the Army’s training and learning philosophies and techniques. Stanford participants provided expert research and context on the Korean Peninsula, Eastern Europe, and emerging technology to National Training Center leaders.

 U.S. Army soldiers and Stanford scholars spent two full days together learning about how the Army prepares its Brigade Combat Teams for war as part of a Joint Force. The scholars and soldiers crossed the desert, ate together, and learned together while observing the 3rd Cavalry Regiment operate against the U.S. Army’s professional Opposing Force, the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment. 

Stanford scholars provided Army leaders with strategic policy perspectives and research while the soldiers shared their experience, outlook, and vision. Senior Army leaders from the NTC, the 11th ACR, and 3rd CR shared insight about the nature of evolving threats, challenges to preparing for those threats, and ideas for turning theory into practice. Stanford scholars shared their research and perspective.

The following remarks were delivered at events memorializing CISAC's late co-founders, Sidney Drell and John Lewis.

Sid Drell Symposium on Fundamental Physics, SLAC, 12 January 2018

• David Holloway: The Friendship of Sidney Drell and Andrei Sakharov

John Lewis Legacy Conference, January 13, 2018

• Remebrance by Thomas Fingar
• Remembrance by David Holloway

This interview originally appeared in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists March 9, 2018.

It was an extraordinary week in North Korean nuclear affairs. First, high-level South Korean envoys met with the North’s leader Kim Jong-un, returning to Seoul with promises of an inter-Korean summit and other seemingly conciliatory statements. That news was quickly eclipsed, though, when later in the week, one of the South Korean envoys turned up in Washington with a personal invitation from Kim Jong-un to US President Donald Trump to meet him in Pyongyang. Trump agreed to meet “at a place and time to be determined.” It would be the first-ever meeting between a sitting US president and a North Korean head of state. But just as everyone was getting their heads around the idea that these two leaders—who just last year were threatening each other with nuclear destruction—would soon meet face to face, the White House added a caveat. On Friday, Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Trump would only attend if North Korea first took unspecified “concrete and verifiable steps.” In case your head isn’t spinning yet, a Wall Street Journal reporter later tweeted that a White House official told him “the invitation has been extended and accepted, and that stands.”

As the Trump White House broadcast its internal confusion, the Bulletin turned to someone who could give the longer view. Siegfried S. Hecker is the former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and has visited North Korean nuclear facilities multiple times. We published several interviews with him as North Korea developed its nuclear program last year. (For his in-depth takes on Pyongyang’s recent weapon testing, see here, here, and here.) We asked him what he made of this week’s events, and what they bode for the future.

BAS: Not so long ago, Trump and Kim were trading mockery and threats of nuclear annihilation. In our September 2017 interview, you recommended that Washington dispatch a team to talk to Kim to establish lines of communications and avoid a nuclear catastrophe. It was envoys from South Korean President Moon Jae-in, though, who seem to have broken the stalemate by acting as Pyongyang-Washington intermediaries. Are you surprised that Seoul was able to take on this role? And what do you think of Trump accepting the invitation to talk directly to Kim?

SH: Nothing short of amazing. I did not expect Kim Jong-un to be willing to talk to Seoul first. It was a very clever move on his part to take advantage of Moon’s desire to engage diplomatically and help ensure a peaceful Olympic games. Kim’s invitation to Trump is not so surprising, since he had given hints of being ready to talk, and Moon teed this up nicely. The most surprising part is Trump’s acceptance.

BAS: Let’s get to Trump in a minute. First, how had Kim signaled that he was prepared to talk?

SH: Kim Jong-un gave hints of a diplomatic initiative in his New Year’s message. He announced in early January, “we achieved the goal of completing our state nuclear force in 2017,” and added, “the entire area of the US mainland is within our nuclear strike range, and the US can never start a war against me and our country. These weapons will be used only if our security is threatened.” So, he opened the door for dialogue, and followed up by sending a team to the Olympics along with a high-level delegation that included his sister.

BAS: What did Kim Jong-un tell the South Korean envoys to Pyongyang on Monday?

SH: Kim said that the North would have no reason to possess nuclear weapons if the security of its regime could be guaranteed and military threats against North Korea removed. Moreover, he expressed willingness to talk to Washington on denuclearizing the peninsula and normalizing bilateral ties, and to do so without pre-conditions. He also agreed to a moratorium on missile and nuclear testing while Pyongyang and Washington talk. Kim even said he is willing to accept the joint South Korean-US military drills as a reality. The North has objected vehemently to these in the past.

BAS: Why would Trump accept an invitation to a summit now, when last fall he threatened Kim with fire and fury and the total destruction of North Korea?

SH: We may have an unusual confluence of events. As well as issuing those threats, Trump widely broadcast that he was considering preventive military strikes, and also urged what he calls maximum pressure, both economic and political, on North Korea. He can claim, perhaps even with some justification, that his policies and actions brought Kim Jong-un to the diplomatic table to discuss denuclearization. Kim, on the other hand, can tell his people that he is coming to negotiations from a position of strength now that he has intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and can threaten the United States. In other words, both can declare victory.

BAS: Kim claims that all of the United States is within nuclear strike range, but you said in September that it would take another couple of years before North Korea could hit the US mainland. What has changed?

SH: North Korea successfully launched its largest missile to date, the Hwasong-15 ICBM, on November 29th. It was an impressive feat. Yet it was launched on a highly lofted trajectory to fly high rather than far. One rocket test does not constitute an operational ICBM fleet. Besides, they have yet to demonstrate that the nuclear warheads that would be mounted on this—or its sister Hwasong-14—can be made sufficiently small, light, and robust to survive a fiery reentry into the atmosphere. It still needs to do more missile and nuclear tests. But if Kim tells his people that they can threaten the United States, let’s not argue too much.

From my perspective, there is no imminent threat that a North Korean nuclear-tipped missile will detonate on American soil. However, Kim does deter the United States because he likely has shorter-range nuclear-tipped missiles that can reach all of South Korea and Japan. That alone should deter Washington from military action against North Korea, because they can inflict unacceptable damage to US assets and allies.

BAS: Is the inter-Korean summit that the North and South agreed to earlier this week a good idea? What about the Kim-Trump summit that now seems likely?

SH: The inter-Korean summit is a good idea. It is what South Korean President Moon wants in order to pursue peace on the Korean peninsula, and he has an experienced team in place. The initial visit to Pyongyang by the South Korean envoys has already told us more about Kim than we have learned over the past six years. It moved us at least one step away from the nuclear brink.

The Kim-Trump summit is also welcome, because it has the potential to move us much farther away from the brink and toward an eventual peaceful resolution to the nuclear crisis on the Korean peninsula. But while it offers many opportunities, it also presents serious challenges.

BAS: On Friday, the White House press secretary seemed to waffle on whether Trump was really accepting the invitation to Pyongyang, saying the United States would require North Korea to take “concrete and verifiable steps” before a sit-down with Kim. Any idea what those might be? Is this a White House effort to keep its options open?

SH: I really don't know. If she was referring to the points that Kim agreed on with the South Korean envoys, the only one that would require action is refraining from missile and nuclear tests. This is verifiable, and of course, should the North conduct such tests, there should be no meeting.

BAS: If talks go forward, does the Trump administration have an experienced team in place? If the meeting is to take place by the end of May, as has been proposed, does the United States have sufficient time to make the best of the opportunity?

SH: The administration’s diplomatic team is understaffed and lacks people who have experience negotiating with North Korea. Time is very tight, especially since these efforts were not preceded by lower-level diplomatic engagement. The administration would be well advised to call on experts outside of government who have diplomatic and technical/military experience in Korea.

BAS: What do you see as the biggest challenges?

SH: In spite of the willingness to talk by both sides, Washington and Pyongyang have dramatically different views on what brought us to this nuclear crisis. It will take a long time and tedious negotiations to resolve. The best we can hope for at this time is for the leaders to reach an understanding that they must avoid war. To do so, they must lower tensions and establish mechanisms to avoid misunderstandings. The Trump administration must enter the summit with the understanding that it represents the beginning of a long journey, not the end destination. Even if an agreement is eventually reached, it will be the follow-through and implementation that determine its success. Washington has done very poorly on both over the years.

BAS: There’s a lot of speculation about why Kim Jong-un chose now to talk. Some think the US and UN sanctions were biting hard, but others say his move was taken right out of his father’s playbook. That is, that he is offering a dialogue on arms control to wrest concessions and aid from Washington. Or, he may be buying time to enhance his nuclear arsenal. Or, he is very cleverly trying to drive a wedge between South Korea and the United States. What do you think?

SH: To sort this out requires a comprehensive understanding of both political developments in North Korea over the last 25 years and the growth of its nuclear and missile programs. We are working on that. For now, let me offer one other possibility. Kim may simply be following through on what he laid out in March 2013. He said that North Korea plans to follow a dual-track policy, featuring both military and economic development. His nuclear and missile developments in 2017 may have provided him with sufficient security to allow him to turn to economic development. And economic development will require a link to the international community and at least for now that link goes through Washington.

BAS: In the United States, many responses to the potential summit have been cautious, skeptical, or downright negative. Are you surprised?

SH: Many in the US government and much of the US news media have demonized North Korea’s leaders, and in fact the entire country. So the general public mood is conditioned to be negative or at least skeptical about anything proposed by the North. Moreover, some of the public is concerned that Washington doesn’t have the wisdom and staying power to pull this off.

Although I don’t think we are on the verge of solving the North Korean crisis, Kim’s initiative and Trump’s willingness to meet must be viewed as serious moves to lower tensions on the Korean peninsula. They are welcome steps away from the brink of nuclear war. Now, the hard part begins.

The following is a statement by CISAC Affiliate and Professor Emeritus William J. Perry on potential talks between President Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un. It was originally posted on the website of the William J. Perry Project.

I was very encouraged to hear that a summit meeting is being planned for May to deal with the dangerous North Korea nuclear program. This is a major improvement over diplomacy that consisted of shouting insults at each other.

But there are two key questions about this meeting:

First: what will we talk about? That is, what does the U.S. expect to get, and what is the U.S. willing to give?

Second:  what will we and North Korea be doing while we are talking? Are the U.S. and its allies going to sustain the pressure presently on North Korea? And will North Korea continue the development and testing of missiles and nuclear weapons?

Statements from the administration suggest that the U.S. goal is for North Korea to dismantle its nuclear arsenal and become a non-nuclear power. There is every reason to doubt that North Korea would be willing to go that far; but even if they are, there remains a fundamental question: How could we possibly verify such an agreement?

We don’t know how many nuclear weapons they have operational or under construction; we don’t know where all their nuclear facilities are; and we have never implemented a treaty that counts warheads, simply because it is so difficult to verify (and so easy to cheat on). Our nuclear treaties with the Soviet Union and Russia counted missiles, not warheads (the number of operational warheads was assumed based on the number of operational missiles counted). We still do not know how many total nuclear warheads the Russian have, in the field, in their labs, and in their storage facilities, and our estimates may be off by thousands. So it is a fundamental error to think that we could reliably verify a treaty by which North Korea agreed to dismantle all of their nuclear weapons.

We could verify an agreement that banned testing of nuclear weapons and long-range missiles, and such an agreement would be very much in our interest. It would be equally in our interest to have an agreement stopping the proliferation of North Korean nuclear components and technology, although such an agreement would be much harder to verify than a test agreement.

There is good reason to talk, but only if we are talking about something that is worth doing and that could be reasonably verified - otherwise we are setting ourselves up for a major diplomatic failure.

Finally, to hedge against such failure, it would be wise to have a prior agreement that limited objectionable actions such as like nuclear tests while we are talking, as North Korea has suggested that it would. (Before Clinton agreed to begin the diplomatic talks that led to the Agreed Framework, he required North Korea to stop all processing at their nuclear facility at Yongbyon.)

I highly favor talks, but such talks must be based on realistic expectations of what can be negotiated and what can be verified. As I have written before:  “We must deal with North Korea as it is; not as we would wish it to be.” That remains true.

William J. Perry

19th U.S. Secretary of Defense

The following are remarks delivered by Professor Thomas Fingar at the John Lewis Legacy conference on January 13, 2018.

We've heard many characterizations and word picture descriptions of John.  My own image is that of John as the Energizer Bunny wearing a Nike tee shirt that says, “Just Do It.”  The bunny is also wearing a huge grin.  My memory of  John Lewis includes all of the scholarly and other attributes described by previous speakers, but at the core there is a wonderful human being who touched many lives in many ways.  Things that others have said today prompt me to use my time to relate a series of little vignettes that I think help capture who and what John was.

The first was prompted by the discussion of getting Siri to call Bob Carlin.  The world entered an exciting new era when John Lewis was mated with a cell phone.  From that time on, it was possible for John to act instantaneously whenever he had an idea or wanted to do something.  I've traveled a lot, and for many years had worried that when the phone rang in the middle of the night, it probably was to report bad news from home.  John’s acquisition of a cell phone changed that.  Time and time again, the 3:00 am phone calls were from John.  He seemed never to remember—or never to care—that I was traveling.  When he had an idea, telling me about it was always more important than the fact that I was in New Zealand or some other distant land.  This happened so often that I was almost surprised and disappointed when I made it through the night without a call from John.

John didn't watch the clock.  With John, everything was urgent.  His unique combination of vision,  passion, commitment, and urgency came with a blind spot for the possibility that not everyone might share the vision, the passion, or the urgency.  And, as was noted earlier, if you didn't share John’s vision, passion, and urgency, you might as well head to the outer darkness.

There is much about John that I admired greatly, but my long and wonderful relationship with him never clarified when or why he would switch from all-in exuberance to total disinterest.  I have been described by a former boss as having an emotional range that goes from A almost all the way to B.  I don’t get very excited about anything.  John was either very excited about an idea or opportunity, or utterly dismissive.  But with the ideas that excited him, he was quite prepared to give them away so others could take credit or figure out how to act on the idea.  Over the years, when John would call me in, or phone me on the other side of the world,  my normal response was to listen.  The excitement in his voice caused me to visualize him hovering a few inches from the ceiling.  He had long ago figured out that we had different scales of excitement and that I would treat the idea seriously until I had determined that it simply would not fly.  Or would not fly without more effort than I was willing to expend.  If I said, “let me think about it,” John would move on to something else because we both knew that I had effectively made a commitment to run with the idea.  If I did so more slowly than he thought necessary, he would prod me with a question about where things stood.  He cared about the idea, not who had proposed it.  Addressing the underlying problem was more important than the specific way in which it was to be addressed.

John’s de facto delegation of tasks to me and to others, and greater focus on developing ways to deal with problems than on specific solutions reminds me of one of his favorite Chinese words and concepts.  That word is jizhi or mechanism.  John was always looking for ways to build connections and arrangements that would endure beyond a one-time meeting or conference.  His constant query asking “How are we going to solve this problem?” was always followed by some version of  “How do we put in place arrangements-- people, procedures, relationships—that are enduring?  That don't solve the problem once, but that are there when that solution proves to be inadequate or when a new challenge comes up?”

The people in this room, and many, many more who are not here today, are part of the activist network that John developed.  I don't know how conscious or self-conscious it was on his part.  Regardless of how deliberately John tried to instill in us a model approach to tackling problems, the fact is,  we found a model worthy of emulation. We saw what worked for John and thought it was a good idea to try something approximating what he did.  As I look around at friends in this room, I see not just fantastically successful academic scholars.  I also see people who have run things—run big organizations and made significant things happen.

John created a network of people. We're all part of it. And I think he probably left feeling pretty good about that aspect of his legacy.  He had an uncanny ability to spot people with abilities and potential—he often saw more in us that we saw in ourselves—but he was also remarkably effective at putting people in place to “do something important.” Along the way, he taught us how to approximate doing what he did.

Mention was made of his first Rottweiler.  It was an enormous dog.   I think his name was Amigo.  I was in awe of John from the time I first encountered him as an undergraduate until the last time I saw him.  But awe was infused with a degree of intimidation when I was a junior graduate student.  I had a meeting with John in his Owen House office.  Amigo was there, alertly lying under the conference table.  The dog was even more intimidating than John, probably because he looked like he would eat anything smaller than he was.  Something on or in the sole of my shoe caught Amigo’s attention.  I was sitting at the table discussing a research paper with John.  Amigo was underneath.  And he was eating my shoe.  That dog was so damn big, I certainly wasn't going to kick him. I thought to myself, the dog is going consume my shoe and eat my leg.  To say the least, I was distracted, but I was not about to tell the professor that his dog was eating my shoe.  We finished our conversation and I departed with a very unbalanced pair of shoes.  If I had told John, he would have laughed like hell, told Amigo to stop, and would not have been upset that I was dismayed by his dog.   But I did not realize that in 1969.

I want to shift gears in the remainder of my time to provide illustrations of the way John built teams and institutions to refine and implement his ideas.  Several have mentioned the book on the United States and Vietnam that John wrote with George Kahin.  I was introduced to the arguments in that book in a classroom lecture before the book was published.  The lecture and the book evolved into a series of teach-ins on the Vietnam War.  It also led to the establishment of the Stanford chapter of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, and to a much larger series of teach-ins and the incorporation of more information on Asia into national security courses across the United States.

I think it was in 1968 that the US was about to deploy the Safeguard anti-ballistic missile system.  The stated purpose was to protect us from the Chinese, who, it was asserted,  had no respect for human life.  The basis for the assertion was a statement by Mao Zedong about how many deaths China could sustain in a nuclear war.  Debate about whether deployment of the ABM system would increase security more than it increased uncertainty and instability was conducted during China’s “Cultural Revolution,” which certainly looked pretty irrational to the outside world.  It is easy to find echoes of statements about China in the 1960s in contemporary arguments about the need for missile defense to protect us from “irrational” leaders in Iran and North Korea.  John worried that the proposed “solution” would make the situation less stable and more dangerous.  Acting on that concern, he reached out to physicists and others who knew more than he did about the situation and the systems.  This led, again,  to a series of  teach-ins.  The teach-ins led to a team-taught multidisciplinary course.  And that led to a book on arms control compiled by Chip Blacker and Gloria Duffy.  The story continues.  Later fruits of John’s initial efforts to “do something” include the CISAC Honors Program and Post-Doctoral Fellows.  Today what John launched includes a very large and diverse group that continues to build upon John’s idea, and missions.

Earlier speakers have mentioned SPICE.  SPICE is the descendant of BACEP—the Bay Area China Education Project.  Another dimension of John’s reaction to assertions that Chinese don't care about human life that played out in a public debate about the need for an anti-missile system was his effort to address the poor quality, indeed the almost total absence, of information about China and Asia more broadly, in American textbooks.  World history was all about Europe.  John was determined to “fix” that.  He raised money from the Wingspread Foundation to convene a meeting to talk about what needed to be done.  He enlisted the assistance of more people here at Stanford, notable David Grossman and others in the school of education.  Asian Studies grad students deployed around the Bay Area and beyond to do public panels, public lectures, and workshops for teachers.  The initial focus was on California, because that is where we are but also because it is the gateway to Asia and, more strategically, because the California textbook market is so large that changes to California textbooks are likely to be incorporated into books used in many other states.  The program has evolved, is now much larger, and has had a tremendous impact.

Would these—and many other—things have happened without John?  Maybe.  But maybe not.  In the event, the way that they happened bears the imprint of John's activism and organizational skills..

My final observation is to underscore a point made by others,  John was almost always more interested in results than in who got credit.  But he sometimes craved more recognition for his role than he, in fact, received.  There was always an element of ambiguity here.  Getting it done, accomplishing the goal, solving the problem—these were always first and foremost in his thinking.  Except for those times where it would have been easier to tackle the next problem if he had received greater recognition for what he had already done.  John could—and did—harbor resentments that sometimes got in the way of accomplishing even more.

Despite flaws and foibles, John’s legacy of seminal books, new courses,  mechanisms to ensure continuing work on a problem, etc. is extraordinary.  So are the interdisciplinary friendships, collaborative relationships, and international ties that he helped establish.  So too was his ability to raise money.  He made the time to cultivate and inform funding organizations about what he was doing and always had a proposal ready to go.  When he saw a problem,  he had a template, wrote a proposal, and phoned the potential funder to make it a part of the process.  The lessons he taught were not difficult to learn.  A number of people in this room learned them and apply them.  The activist and organizational parts of John’s legacy will live on.  Thank you.

The following are remarks delivered by Professor David Holloway at the John Lewis Legacy conference on January 13, 2018.

John was a founder – CISAC, APARC, and Center for East Asian Studies at Stanford, to name but a few of his creations. And we honor founders. There is a passage somewhere in Montesquieu where he explains why we do so. It goes something like this: When institutions are first founded, it is the men who make the institutions; once the institutions have been created, it is they that make the men. In other words the founder’s ideas and values, embodied in the institution, shape those who come later. In that way John’s values are transmitted not only by his students, but also by the institutions he created.

One of the crucial values John embedded in CISAC was the need for dialogue with adversaries of the United States. It was important to talk to one’s potential enemies and to try to understand how they thought and why they thought the way they did. Only then could one pursue genuine cooperation. And John acted on this belief with great determination in arranging meetings and dialogues with Chinese, North Koreans, and Russians. This is a tradition that CISAC continues to this day. Tom Fingar and Bob Carlin and I are continuing work that John began in his last round of Track 2 efforts.

I first met John at the very end of 1982. He came on a visit to Edinburgh where I was teaching at the time. I had already accepted an invitation to spend three years at CISAC. The invitation had come from Condi Rice, whom I knew, but John must have approved the invitation. Jackie was with John in Edinburgh. I invited them to our home for a haggis dinner, but John declined, so I did not meet Jackie until we arrived in Palo Alto in August 1983.

I was bowled over by CISAC when I came to Stanford. John and Sid Drell had created a very active interdisciplinary community. I had never come across anything like it. It was a real treat to be working there. I feel very fortunate to have been able to spend a large part of my career here at Stanford, connected to CISAC.

John Lewis at his 80th birthday party.

I was struck when I first met John by how much he fitted my image of a certain type of American: tall and broad-shouldered, with a friendly manner and a big smile. He was almost a comic-book character. But of course he knew a great deal and he had a subtle mind. I used to watch with interest how Chinese and Russian specialists would respond to him. Those who knew him well knew, of course, what kind of mind he had, but it was interesting to watch Chinese and Russian interlocutors come to that realization. I know mainly from Russian colleagues how much they appreciated John’s genuine attempts to understand Russian views. He avoided the all too common trap of conveying to them that he knew better than they did what their true interests were.

here is an amusing short essay by CISAC’s first fellow from the Soviet Union. Arsenii Berezin, a physicist from Leningrad, came to CISAC in the fall of 1989. John and I had travelled to Moscow three times in the mid-1980s in an effort to build contacts with Soviet institutions, and Berezin’s stay at CISAC was a result of that. Berezin did not continue with work on arms control and went into business when he returned to Leningrad. He achieved modest fame as a writer of feuilletons. I want to quote two passages from an essay entitled “Keep Smiling Attitude.” Berezin captures a certain side of John’s character. It’s a slightly ironic but also affectionate tribute to John and to America (or at least California).

“After a week, the director of the Center, Professor Lewis, called me to his office. He sat me down in an armchair, offered me a cup of coffee, made a worried face, and asked:

                 ‘Bad news from home?

                  ‘No, nothing bad.’

                  ‘Then jetlag?

I had no jetlag. A couple of bottles of Californian wine over two evenings and my biorhythms had adjusted.

                  ‘Which wine?’ John Lewis wanted to know.

                  ‘Chardonnay from Sonoma Valley.’

                  ‘That’s fine. A good wine. Then it must be the climate. It’s hot. The eucalyptus trees give off a scent, everything is strange.’

                  ‘No, no again. The scent of the eucalyptus is in general healthy. I walk in the grove on purpose to breathe.

                  ‘So everything is fine? John asked gloomily.

                  ‘Simply great!’

                  ‘Then, if all at home are well, the jetlag has passed, the climate suits you, and in general everything is wonderful, why are you so sad, so gloomy? Look at yourself – my colleagues can’t work. ‘Why is Arsenii so sad here? What has happened to him, how can we help him? If nothing bad has happened, don’t traumatize people, smile – smile. It’s even written in our Rules of the Road: Be friendly! Keep a smiling attitude! The first policeman will take you to the police station for breaking that rule.

               Look out the window! The sky is blue, the sun is shining, the hummingbirds are flying, your office is comfortable, the coffee tastes good, the stipend is good – smile, for God’s sake, just the way I’m doing.’

He stretched out his jaw in an immense smile. I also, with a creak, drew my cheeks up to my ears and like that left him, holding the smile the whole length of the corridor to my office door. After that, every morning, going out to work, I looked in the mirror, stretched my mouth, grinned and continued that exercise in mimicry for several minutes. It was as strange for me as holding awkward positions when I took up fencing. But in the end I got used to it and even had some success. This was a task I couldn’t shirk! After two weeks I was already walking around like a normal Californian. I kept my idiotic smiling attitude and didn’t inspire in anyone the desire to give me humanitarian first aid.” 

Berezin was here during the Loma Prieta earthquake. He describes in the essay how people responded. They were disciplined. The traffic lights weren’t working, so people got out of cars and took off their red and green shirts to direct the traffic – and drivers followed their instructions. Shopkeepers offered free food for victims of the earthquake. At one point Berezin acquired a trolley full of fruit and other food and brought it to Galvez House, where CISAC was then housed. He was even given a box of Pedigree dog food, so he was able to feed John’s dog.

Berezin concludes his essay as follows:

“And so, when someone somewhere says how greedy Americans are, how soulless, how cruel, I remember the San Francisco earthquake, the volunteers at the crossroads naked to the waist, the shopkeepers of the small shops who, not waiting for appeals or orders, wheeled out their goods to give them to victims for free. The words ‘Are you a victim of the earthquake? Take this, whatever you want.’ still ring in my ears. They write, and they say, that it was different in New Orleans. I don’t know. I wasn’t in New Orleans. I was in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1989 and remember with wonder what I witnessed. The most astonishing thing was that, in spite of the terrible natural disaster, they kept their smiling attitude, in accordance with the Rules of the Road of the state of California.”

I think this essay brings out several things: John’s concern for visiting fellows at the Center; his American-ness, as seen by Russian eyes; and also his wholeness – this is the same John Lewis that his former students have been describing. The same John Lewis who cared for those of us who fell under his wing and whom we all admired so much.

The following are remarks by Professor David Holloway at the Sid Drell Symposium on Fundamental Physics given at SLAC on 12 January 2018.

I want to thank the organizers for inviting me to speak at this conference. It’s a particular pleasure for me as a historian and political scientist to be a speaker at a symposium on Fundamental Physics. More seriously it is an honor for me to speak at a symposium in memory of Sid Drell, with whom I had the privilege to work for over thirty years. Sid agreed with Einstein that politics was much harder to study than physics. “The laws of physics stay the same,” he said. “The laws of politics change. And besides, you are supping with the Devil.”

Sakharov

My topic is Sid’s friendship with Andrei Sakharov, whom Sid greatly admired and more than once referred to as a saint. Sakharov was born in Moscow in 1921, five years before Sid. He died in 1989. I don’t want to go through Sakharov’s life, but I do want to mention a couple of things to provide context for Sid’s meetings with him and for their friendship. Sakharov’s mentor, Igor Tamm – a Nobel Prize-wining physicist – drew Sakharov into work on the design of thermonuclear weapons in 1948. From 1950 to 1968 Sakharov lived and worked in Arzamas-16 (now Sarov), the Soviet equivalent of Los Alamos. He played a key role in the development of Soviet thermonuclear weapons.

In 1968 Sakharov was removed from secret work after an essay he had written – Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom – was published abroad. In the opening paragraph Sakharov states that his views were formed in the milieu of the scientific-technical intelligentsia, which was very worried about the future of humankind. Their concern, he continued, was all the stronger because what he called "the scientific method of directing politics, economics, art, education, and military affairs" had not yet become a reality. What did he mean by the "scientific method" in this context? His answer: "We consider 'scientific' that method which is based on a profound study of facts, theories, views, presupposing unprejudiced and open discussion, which is dispassionate in its conclusions." In other words, Sakharov wanted open discussion of important policy issues – something that did not happen in the Soviet Union.

Image

In his essay Sakharov expressed ideas he had been coming to for some time, but the immediate stimulus to his writing the essay appears to have been that he was refused permission to publish an article about ABM systems. He (and other senior scientists at Arzamas-16) had come to the conclusion that “creating ABM defenses against massed attacks is not realistic, while for individual missiles it is difficult but possible.” Sakharov had written to Mikhail Suslov, an ideologically rigid Politburo member, whom he had met, expressing this view and asking for permission to publish an article on ABM systems. Suslov had denied him permission.

The publication of the essay abroad converted Sakharov from a scientist engaged in secret work into a world-famous figure. The essay sold 18 million copies in one year (it was printed in full in many newspapers).

I mention this episode and this essay to show that Sakharov, like Sid, was interested not only in physics but also profoundly interested in the application of science to policy, something that Sid had begun to do, starting in 1960 with Panofsky’s encouragement. It was the publication of the essay abroad that got Sakharov expelled from secret work. It is only then that he began to turn his attention to the defense of human rights in the Soviet Union, especially after 1970, when he met Elena Bonner, whom he married in 1972. In 1975 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work for human rights. In his 1968 essay he had seen intellectual freedom as crucial for progress – how else could we deal with environmental degradation and the danger of thermonuclear war? In his Nobel lecture, Peace, Progress, and Human Rights, he named over one hundred of the political prisoners being held in the Soviet Union. He also made the general point that peace, progress, and human rights were indissolubly linked. For progress to be beneficial and peace secure, human rights (freedom of conscience, freedom of assembly, freedom of expression etc.) had to be protected. Thus the rights of the individual were intimately linked to our capacity to deal with global problems facing the human race.

Sid and Sakharov meet

In the early 1970s Sakharov was under intense pressure to curtail his activities, This came from the authorities and also from fellow members of the Academy of Sciences. That was the state of affairs in 1974 when he and Sid had their first meeting, which took place in Moscow, at a small conference on composite nucleon structure. Sid recalled “what I considered a great compliment to me, he apparently knew enough about me through whomever to sit down next to me at the meeting.” In his memoirs Sakharov writes of this meeting that Sid was a “young man,” “already a very well-known physicist.” They exchanged notes because Sakharov’s English was very poor and Sid’s Russian even worse. They could both get along a little bit in German. Sakharov then asked Sid about people in the West and invited Sid (and Viki Weisskopf) to dinner at his apartment on Chkalov Street (ulitsa Chkalova) where they met Elena Bonner and Bonner’s daughter Tanya Yankelevich, who was probably the person who made the conversation possible. 

At that first meeting Sid and Sakharov formed a bond. They met again two years later at a High Energy International Meeting in Tbilisi. Sakharov and Bonner were both there. Sid spent a week with them, forming a close and warm rapport.

Sid maintained a steady correspondence with both Sakharov and Bonner. In the late 1970s much of this correspondence had to do with the repression of human rights in the Soviet Union and the persecution of physicists (and others). Sid was particularly helpful to Elena Bonner’s children in Boston, Efrem and Tanya Yankelevich. He also did what he could to keep Sakharov’s name – and his plight – in the news. He made sure Sakharov’s papers were published in the West; he helped to organize conferences on Sakharov, and to keep Sakharov’s name in the public mind. He was not alone in this – there was an organization called SOS (Sakharov, Orlov, and Shcharansky) founded at Berkeley – but he was one of a few, and he was persistent.

There is a touching letter from Sakharov to Sid in June 1981:

“Dear Sidney, I want to write to you this time not an ‘open’ but a most ordinary letter, to thank you from the bottom of my heart. Lusia [Elena Bonner] and I feel all the time that in that infinitely distant world to which our children have been mislaid and where they now live, there are some (very few) people who have not forgotten them or us, and you are one of them.” And then Sakharov writes, perhaps rather slyly in view of Sid’s liking for Madras jackets: “I sense that almost physically, seeing you in my mind’s eye in your check suit (although perhaps you now dress differently.)”

In 1978 Sid wrote N.N. Bogoliubov to explain that he would not take part in a Dubna-sponsored symposium on Elementary Particle Theory because of the way the physicist Yuri Orlov was being treated. Orlov had been condemned to seven years in the GULAG for documenting Soviet infringements of human rights, contrary to Soviet commitments in the Helsinki Final Act of 1975. Sid told Bogoliubov that he was very sorry to miss what would doubtless be a stimulating symposium and that he hoped the conditions would soon return for normal scientific collaboration.

The “Open Letter”

 Sakharov was arrested in January 1980 and exiled to Gorkii for criticizing the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. Gorkii was a closed city; foreigners could not travel there. Up to that point Sakharov had been able to use the prestige he had won by his role in nuclear weapons development to avoid arrest, though he had been under considerable social and political pressure from the authorities. In Gorkii he was cut off from Moscow, though Elena Bonner was able, at least initially, to travel back and forth from Gorkii to Moscow.

In 1982 Sid was invited by the Soviet government to visit Moscow to talk to high-level government and military officials about arms control. He made it a condition that he be allowed to see Bonner; and in fact he did so in a meeting arranged by the American Embassy. Sid gave her papers and copies of recent speeches he had made about arms control to take back to Gorkii.

Among those papers was a lecture Sid had given at Grace Cathedral and also recent Congressional testimony. Those statements prompted Sakharov to write one of his most important papers: “On the Danger of Thermonuclear War – an open letter to Dr. Sidney Drell,” which was published in the Summer 1983 issue of Foreign Affairs. The paper caused a great stir, because it intervened on a particular issue in an American debate about strategic weapons policy. Sakharov expressed qualified support for deployment by the US of the heavy MX ICBM.

Sid replied in a letter to Sakharov, pointing out the many areas of agreement between them that Sakharov had discussed in his letter: the dangers and the scale of disaster of nuclear war, which would be an act of suicide with no winners; the sole purpose of nuclear weapons being to deter nuclear aggression; the importance of parity in conventional arms in order not to feel driven to a nuclear “first use” policy; the grave dangers of escalation once the nuclear threshold was crossed; the overriding importance of arms negotiations and reductions; and the unlikelihood that a “star wars” ABM system would be practical.

Sid justified his opposition to the MX by noting that the silo-based system would be vulnerable to destruction in a Soviet first strike and therefore was essentially a first-strike weapon itself, because it would have to be used first if it were to be used at all.

In his memoirs Sakharov wrote: “I consider [Drell] a friend. For many years Drell was an advisor to the US government on questions of nuclear policy and disarmament. In a series of articles and presentations in recent years he has formulated his position on these questions. I fully share Drell’s basic principled positions, but I can’t completely agree with those assertions relating to recent actions, to assessments of the existing military and political situation, to the ways of attaining the goal of all reasonable people of eliminating the danger of nuclear war.” Then, in a note added in October 1983, he wrote that after reading Sid’s response he thought their differences were not so great after all.

After 1986

Through the years of Sakharov’s exile to Gorkii Sid kept up his activities on Sakharov’s behalf. In January 1986 he wrote an eloquent letter to Mikhail Gorbachev, who had become General Secretary in March the year before, urging him to allow Sakharov to return to Moscow from Gorkii. Gorbachev allowed Sakharov to come back to Moscow in December 1986. That Sid’s letter played a role in this decision seems unlikely, but the campaign for Sakharov in which Sid played such a large part surely was an important factor in Gorbachev’s decision, for it kept Sakharov in the public eye and meant that Gorbachev had to make a decision. Sid visited Moscow in the summer of 1987, seeing Sakharov for the first time in eleven years.

Sid made the comment that if you met Sakharov you would know he was an extraordinary person. Thanks to Sid, I had the opportunity to spend an evening with Sakharov in Moscow in June 1987, and my impression confirms Sid’s judgment. I talked to Sakharov about his role in the nuclear weapons program. I remember as I approached his front door thinking, “What am I doing here? This man has very important things to do in Russian public life. Why am I bothering him with my historical research?” Within a minute of his opening the door that feeling was gone. His personal charm made me feel totally at ease and he seemed very happy to talk about his life at Arzamas-16. Two impressions from that meeting: first, Sakharov did not speak quickly. If you asked a question, you could sense his mind turning like a searchlight and illuminating the issue you had brought up. Second, he had a clear, but detached, understanding of his own importance in Soviet history. I recalled at the time that one of the characteristics the Catholic Church looks for in a candidate for sainthood is the person’s awareness of their own holiness, but that awareness should be devoid of all arrogance. Humility does not mean denying one’s own gifts or role in life, but it does mean not taking the credit for oneself.

Drell, Sakharov, and Panofsky at Stanford,1989

In August 1989 Sakharov and Bonner visited Stanford. There was a physics meeting, I think, but what I remember is the talk Sakharov and Elena Bonner gave at CISAC, in Galvez House. 1989 was a tempestuous year in Soviet politics. Sakharov had been elected in March to the new Congress of People’s Deputies and at the first session of the Congress he had been the focal point of several tumultuous debates. He and Elena Bonner talked about that and discussed three broader issues: the constitutional issue; the question of nationalities; and the question of property. It was an extraordinary session. Four months later Sakharov died in his sleep in his apartment, a huge loss for the Soviet Union and the world.

Conclusion

The friendship between Sid and Sakharov was a genuine and close one, though they did not meet often. But they had maintained a correspondence during the difficult years between 1976 and 1987, and Sid had done whatever he could to help Sakharov and his family. The two men were in some ways alike. Physicists of course, and theoretical physicists. They had similar views on nuclear weapons. They were both greatly interested in the implications of new technologies.

The main similarity that strikes me, however, is their integrity. They both took their ethical responsibilities seriously. They thought about what was right, but once they decided what that was, they stuck with it, even if it looked like stubbornness to others. They had a commitment to do what they thought was right, and that was especially important when you engaged in policy or in politics – for then, in Sid’s words, you were “supping with the Devil.” The situations in which Sid and Sakharov found themselves were of course very different, but I think that integrity was there in both of them. Sid greatly admired Sakharov’s moral courage – he saw it as heroic, tantamount to sainthood. And my sense is that Sakharov recognized the same quality in Sid.

I want to end by reading from a poem by Boris Pasternak, which I think captures that quality. It was written in 1956 and addressed to himself. But it can be applied to physicists too. Sakharov organized his obituary of his mentor, Igor Tamm, around this poem. And I hope you will agree that the qualities Sakharov admired in Tamm are qualities we saw in Sid too. It is a short poem, and I will read only part of it, in my own (inadequate) translation.

It’s not becoming to be famous,

For that is not what lifts us up.

So do not build yourself an archive

Or pore over your manuscripts.

To be creative, give of yourself.

Don’t seek sensation, or success.

It’s shameful, when you don’t signify,

To be on everybody’s lips.

But live your life without imposture,

And live it so that, in the end,

You hear the summons of the future

And draw love in from far and wide.

…….

And never for a single moment

Renounce your true self, or pretend.

But be alive, alive and only

Alive and only, to the end.

Boris Pasternak 1956

The Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies is proud to congratulate Stanford’s 2018 Rhodes and Schwarzman Scholars. In today’s climate, our scholarly work on foreign policy and international issues can feel ominous, so FSI is especially pleased to share the good news that four of the Rhodes and three of the Schwarzman Scholars studied with us.

Among the newly-appointed Rhodes scholars are Jelani Munroe, Alexis Kallen and Qitong “Tom” Cao, all current or former honors students in the Fisher Family Undergraduate Honors Program at FSI’s Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). Madeleine Chang, co-president of the FSI-sponsored American Middle Eastern Network for Dialogue at Stanford (AMENDS), joins them as well. The Rhodes Scholarships provide all expenses for study at Oxford University; all four will commence in October 2018.

The Schwarzman Scholarships fund one-year master's degrees in global affairs at Beijing’s distinguished Tsinghua University. Scholars include Claire Colberg and Daniel Kilimnik, alumni of the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) Honors Program, and Lucienne “Lucy” Oyer, a current Fisher Family honors student at CDDRL. They will begin study in August 2018.

“We are very proud of these terrific students in the FSI family and our exceptional faculty who have mentored them,” said FSI Director Michael McFaul. “These seven have exhibited extraordinary ideas and leadership here at FSI, and we look forward to seeing the great contributions they will make in their fields.”

While working on his honors thesis on the role of the armed forces in German security policy, Daniel Kilimnik relied on an FSI research grant that enabled him to interview legislators, government officials and academics in Berlin. Once he heads to Beijing, Kilimnik will investigate relationships between China, the U.S. and Europe.

“I can't imagine my undergraduate experience without the professors, mentors, friends and peers I got to know through FSI,” he said. “Without support from CISAC and FSI, I would not have been able to write my thesis.”

One CISAC mentor is Donald Emmerson, an emeritus senior fellow at FSI. As honors student Claire Colberg explored Vietnam’s policies toward China, Emmerson advised her to challenge conventional wisdom.

“All I did for Claire was to encourage her to be intellectually less respectful and more creative,” he said. “I would like to believe that merely by giving her free rein, I helped her develop her own voice.”

Madeleine Chang found her voice by embracing creative problem-solving. With help from FSI Student Programs, Chang was able to do the seemingly impossible: work around President Trump’s travel ban to hold a conference with undergraduates from all over the world, including students affected by the ban.

“The irony of being an American-Middle Eastern group unable to meet in America itself spoke to why we needed to meet: to remind ourselves and others of the incredible potential of young people connecting across borders,” Chang told Stanford News.

Unable to bring all students to the United States, Chang looked across the pond and was able to hold the AMENDS conference at Oxford. FSI senior fellow Larry Diamond and academic program manager Gina Gonzales provided support on- and off-the-ground to keep things moving, even outside the Stanford realm.

“It was incredible to see Maddie leverage her connections at Oxford to turn the challenge of overcoming the travel ban into a fantastic opportunity,” said Gonzales.

Diamond believes interactions with international students are particularly valuable to the academic community. He has advised several Rhodes-bound students who grew up outside the United States.

“It is always a particular joy working with foreign students,” he said. “They teach us so much about their countries, the development challenges they face, and how other parts of the world view the United States.

“You know when you are teaching students like Qitong and Jelani that you are engaging, in some way, future leaders in their fields.”