Reuben W. Hills Conference Room, 2nd floor, Encina Hall East
Until recently, analysts of civil war focused their attention on the negotiation of peace agreements and paid scant attention to the implementation process. Rather legalistically, they assumed that a contract between state and insurgent leaders would remain binding in the post-agreement phase. In the 1980s and 1990s, however, negotiated agreements in such countries as Angola, Cambodia, Liberia, and Rwanda collapsed and resulted in new deadly violence. In some cases more blood was shed after the failure to implement a peace accord than before the peace negotiations began.
As part of a response to growing government concern over the threat of cyber attacks directed against critical national infrastructures, the National Security Agency (NSA) contracted with Stanford University in 1998 to undertake a multi-track program to provide a forum, develop information, and to analyze options for addressing this threat.
Deborah C. Gordon is a Senior Fellow, Global Federation of Competitiveness Councils. Gordon serves as a Senior Advisor for Longview Fusion Energy Systems, Inc. and several other high technology companies where she helps them bridge the gap in understanding between science, industry and government institutions. She is an Affiliate at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University from which she retired in August 2019 after 22 years where she served as the Executive Director, Stanford-Harvard Preventive Defense Project, co-directed by Sec. William Perry and Sec. Ashton Carter. In this role, Ms. Gordon participated in the highest-level interactions with political and military leaders around the world. Her expertise is in promoting highly informed, non-governmental dialogues, known as track-two diplomacy, to provide opportunities for international innovation, agreement and cooperation. The Preventive Defense team devised creative and innovative policy approaches to U.S. defense policy and communicated them directly to high-level government officials. Gordon has over 40 years of experience in algorithm design, signal processing, network design, and network security and holds several U.S. and Canadian patents. She is the former Mayor of Woodside, CA and served 17 years on the Woodside Town Council; Chair and Director, City/County Association of Governments of San Mateo County; and Chair for many San Mateo County and California State policy advisory bodies including for energy and water policy. She serves on the Board of Directors of the Council on Strategic Risks, Arms Control Association, and Probability Management. Gordon is a founder and director (emerita) of the Institute for Security and Technology. She holds a BS in computer science from the University of Southern California.
During the Cold War, the United States carried out a number of covert actions against elected governments in the Third World. Critics of the "democratic peace" suggest these covert operations are potential invalidations of, or at least exceptions to, the proposition that liberal democracies rarely or never wage war on one another. Democratic peace theorists, however, argue that the targets of these covert actions were not long-term, stable democracies, that covert action falls short of interstate war by Correlates of War (CoW) criteria, and that the covert nature of these operations meant that liberal norms and institutions in the United States did not have an opportunity to function. Even so, by forcing the executive to use covert means, democratic institutions may have prevented the higher level of international violence known as war, although they were not robust enough to prevent covert action. Liberal interventionist and anti-communist ideology provided policymakers with a justificatory frame for intervention which, however, did not amount to war between democracies.
This article will consider whether the principles of the Geneva Protocol have become so widely accepted that they apply to the United States even though it is not a party. It will analyze the effect of existing reservations to the Protocol, discuss the United States use of tear gases and herbicides in Vietnam in light of its provisions, and recommend that the Protocol be approved by the Senate. This article will first describe the international agreements dealing with poison gas and germ warfare, and the reasons which prevented the United States from becoming a party to them.
