The sixth Young Professional Nuclear Forum (YPNF6), sponsored by the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University and the Moscow Engineering and Physics Institute (MEPhI), was held at MEPhI, Moscow, on November 4-7, 2019.

The mission of the forums is to foster collaboration between young professionals from Russia and the United States in the nuclear power and nonproliferation fields. The forum allows them to discuss and evaluate pressing global nuclear issues during times that the two governments are not cooperating and are not in serious dialogue. In recent years, the two governments have severely restricted opportunities and venues that previously used to be open to experienced nuclear professionals on both sides to cooperate with each other.  The benefits of nuclear cooperation were clearly demonstrated in hundreds of mutually beneficial collaborative projects by Russian and American nuclear professionals during the breakup of the Soviet Union and in the 20-plus years that followed.

These forums allow Stanford University and MEPhI to prepare the next generation to help rejuvenate cooperation once the governments realize that cooperation in the nuclear arena is essential. The young professionals participating in these meetings are upper level undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs, young faculty and junior specialists. They are the new generation who will be stepping in to solve the mounting challenges including nuclear security, nonproliferation, nuclear disarmament and how to mitigate the effects of climate change and toxic pollution of the planet.

The November 2019 meeting included two and a half days of lectures and group work on two exercises – one on a “World free of nuclear weapons” and the second on “The impact of nuclear accidents on the future of nuclear power.”

Most young professionals acknowledged – or came to realize – the enormity and complexity of Nuclear Zero as both a study area and a goal. At the same time, many noted that this very complexity provoked deeper thinking and the discussion opened new perspectives, especially for those on the engineering side. The young professionals also realized that they share more common ground on the issue of Global Zero than one might have thought.

The feedback on the nuclear accidents exercise also showed several notable takeaways. The aspects that appealed to the young professionals were: the comparative approach that pushed them to look beyond the known facts into similarities and specifics across the three accident cases; a perspective that integrated the technical, social, and cultural angles; and such examination being directly relevant to improved safety of nuclear energy, the objective close to heart to many of them who see their future as nuclear professionals.

It is also interesting that in this exercise the young professionals noted differences of perspective and opinion rather than similarities. As has been the case in all previous forums, these differences were valued and accepted as leading to a richer, more productive, discussions.

Their reports were sufficiently impressive that we have decided to follow the model of YPNF4 and have the young professionals turn the six short articles to be published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. We have the go-ahead from the editor of the Bulletin.

In addition to the working sessions, the forum provided the opportunity for personal interaction and connections. The young professionals rated their overall satisfaction of the meeting as 8.6 out of 10 expressed a strong preference to stay engaged between the forums working on collaborative projects.

On the whole, the response to the 6^th YPNF seems to show a growing engagement and sense of ownership by the young professionals on both sides. The forum presented various opportunities for the young professionals to learn about issues, each other, and each other’s countries. Young professionals approached many of the senior experts individually with questions both within and beyond the Forum discussion areas and exchanged contacts for future interaction.

The forum was supported by MEPhI, the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the MacArthur Foundation.

For more than two weeks now, a stream of current and former U.S. officials, this week including Amb. Bill Taylor, have described to Congressional committees the White House’s sordid effort to outsource American foreign policy to the president’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who sought to advance the personal political interests of Donald Trump. Faced with compelling testimonies to the effect that the president subverted U.S. national interests to his own, the White House has begun to trash those officials.

Even for this White House, that is a despicable new low.

The testimonies make clear that President Trump insisted on a quid pro quo, as his Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney confirmed in an October 17 press conference (he later tried to walk it back, but watch the video of the press conference). The president wanted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate a long-debunked charge about former Vice President Joe Biden, his possible opponent in the 2020 U.S. presidential election. President Trump also wanted the Ukrainians to check whether the Democratic National Committee’s e-mail servers might have ended up in, of all places, Ukraine (no one has offered evidence to suggest that they have).

The Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University is pleased to announce that Rose Gottemoeller has been appointed the next Frank E. and Arthur W. Payne Distinguished Lecturer. She will spend the next three years at Stanford working with FSI’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and will simultaneously be a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Gottemoeller was the Deputy Secretary General of NATO from 2016 to 2019, where she helped to drive forward NATO’s adaptation to new security challenges in Europe and in the fight against terrorism.  Prior to NATO, she served for nearly five years as the Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security at the U.S. Department of State, advising the Secretary of State on arms control, nonproliferation and political-military affairs. While Assistant Secretary of State for Arms Control, Verification and Compliance in 2009 and 2010, she was the chief U.S. negotiator of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) with the Russian Federation.

Prior to her government service, she was a senior associate with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, with joint appointments to the Nonproliferation and Russia programs. She served as the Director of the Carnegie Moscow Center from 2006 to 2008.

“I am thrilled that Rose Gottemoeller will be joining FSI next year,” said FSI Director Michael McFaul. “In addition to her most recent senior appointment at NATO, Rose is one of the most experienced arms control experts in the country. Our students and research community will have a truly unique opportunity to learn from this most talented American diplomat.“

George P. Shultz, former Secretary of State and the Thomas W. and Susan B. Ford Distinguished Fellow at the Hoover Institution, added, “As the highest-ranking civilian woman in NATO’s history, Rose has built a career of service promoting peace and security around the world and will provide expertise to some of the most relevant global policy issues facing the world today. We welcome the wealth of knowledge and real-world experience in foreign relations, diplomacy and international affairs she will bring to the Hoover Institution."

At Stanford, Gottemoeller will teach and mentor students in the Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy program and the CISAC Honors program; contribute to policy research and outreach activities; and convene workshops, seminars and other events relating to her areas of expertise, including nuclear security, Russian relations, the NATO alliance, EU cooperation and non-proliferation.

"Since CISAC's inception, the Center has focused much of its research and teaching on the causes of great power conflict and strategies to avoid nuclear war,” said Colin Kahl, Co-director of CISAC. “Few people in the world have as much practical experience — or enjoy more widespread respect — tackling these existential challenges as Rose Gottemoeller. We are thrilled to welcome her to the CISAC community."

The Payne Lectureship is named for Frank E. Payne and Arthur W. Payne, brothers who gained an appreciation for global problems through their international business operations. The Payne Distinguished Lecturer is chosen for his or her international reputation as a leader, with an emphasis on visionary thinking; a broad, practical grasp of a given field; and the capacity to clearly articulate an important perspective on the global community and its challenges. 

“For me, this is an exciting opportunity,” Gottemoeller said.  “I love teaching and mentoring students, and I am itching to get some writing done.  It’s an honor to have the chance to dive into this work as the Payne Distinguished Lecturer, with great colleagues at both FSI and the Hoover Institution.”

When Colin Kahl came on board as Vice President Joe Biden’s National Security Advisor in 2014, the situation in Ukraine was one of a few “crisis issues” that Biden and his staff were tasked with ameliorating by former President Barack Obama, Kahl told Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) Director Michael McFaul on the World Class podcast.

Less than a year after Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity, the annexation of Crimea by Russia and the ousting of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, Biden and his team were focused on curbing corruption, helping Ukraine’s new leaders with the governance of the country and ensuring that the 2014 Minsk agreements were resolved, said Kahl, who is now co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation.



“A lot has been made of the corruption piece because of the impeachment inquiry and the false allegations against Biden, but [corruption] was really only one of three major baskets of activity that were going on,” said Kahl of the recent allegations against Biden, which suggest that he had asked the Ukrainian government to fire its former prosecutor general Viktor Shokin because Shokin had been investigating a Ukrainian company on which his son, Hunter Biden, sat on the board.

The real problem with Shokin, Kahl explained, stemmed from the fact that there were people working within Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s office who wanted to investigate corruption cases, but they were unable to do so because Shokin was marginalizing those people and pushing them out of the office. As a result, no one of significance was prosecuted for corruption during Shokin’s tenure as prosecutor general, Kahl said.

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“Shokin was clogging up the system such that corruption cases couldn’t go forward because they’d get stuck in a file in a drawer in his office,” Kahl said. “And so the sense was not only in the U.S. government, but also in the European Union and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), that Shokin had become a single point of failure. The notion of getting rid of Shokin didn’t emanate from Biden.”

Biden, Kahl and others on Biden’s staff traveled to Kiev in December 2015 to discuss the conditions for securing a $1 billion loan guarantee from the U.S. and the IMF with former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. Several of the conditions of the loan had to do with deterring corruption in the country, and one of those conditions was the reform of the Prosecutor General’s office, Kahl said. Biden asked Poroshenko to dismiss Shokin during that trip; three months later, Shokin resigned, and Ukraine ultimately received the $1 billion in financial assistance.

“This is not a ‘he’ story, it’s a ‘we’ story,” Kahl explained. “That is, the State Department was all in on this, the White House was all in on this, and so were the Europeans, the IMF and Ukrainian reformers. This isn’t a Biden story — this is a U.S. story.”
 

Smoking guns are the stuff of spy movies. In real-life intelligence-gathering, they are exceptionally rare. That’s why the business of intelligence typically requires collecting and analyzing fragments of information—putting together secret nuggets with unclassified information—to try to make sense of complex reality. If nothing else, the whistle-blower who filed a complaint against President Donald Trump clearly followed his or her training. SECOND PARAGRAPH I’ve spent 20 years reading intelligence reports and researching the U.S. intelligence community. And I’m not automatically inclined to believe the worst allegations about any administration; everyone has agendas and incentives to reveal information, some more noble than others. Trump and his allies have dismissed the complaint as hearsay and accused the whistle-blower of acting on political motives. But a close reading of the whistle-blower’s lengthy complaint, which accuses Trump of “using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election,” yields a lot of concrete leads for investigators to follow.

Here are three things I learned:

Read the rest at The Atlantic

Although the first in-person meeting between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on September 25 at the United Nations General Assembly looked like a “normal first meeting,” the question of whether Trump was pushing Zelensky during a July 25 phone call to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden remains, former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Steven Pifer told Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) Director Michael McFaul on the World Class podcast.



It’s important to look at the context of what was happening between the U.S. and Ukraine on July 25, Pifer told McFaul. For one thing, Trump had put nearly $400 million in military aid for Ukraine on hold before the call took place. In addition, the two countries were in the midst of planning a meeting between the two leaders at the Oval Office at the time.

“Those are big things for Zelensky, particularly at the beginning of his term in office,” said Pifer, who is a William J. Perry fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation. “If he can show that he delivers on the assistance and also on the photo op with the American president — that looks really good at home. And it’s also a good message to send to the Russians: ‘I’ve got a relationship with the Americans.’”

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Pifer noted that Trump’s attorney, Rudy Giuliani, has played a peculiar role in this situation. For several months, according to Pifer, Giuliani has been talking about “a story that has long been debunked.” That story — which alleges that in 2015, Joe Biden asked the Ukrainian government to fire its prosecutor general who had at one point been investigating Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian company on which his son, Hunter Biden, sat on the board  — has “zero evidence” of being true, said Pifer.

“If anything, the Ukrainian prosecutor general offices were hampering investigations into Burisma Holdings,” Pifer pointed out. “And everybody wanted to see [former prosecutor general] Viktor Shokin gone — he was not doing his job. Giuliani has taken these two pieces and has tried to create an appearance of some big scandal, but there really is nothing there.”

Pifer added that he could not recall another instance during the span of his career when a private individual has been so deeply involved in what appears to be a “diplomatic or national security matter.”

“I believe this is damaging to American diplomatic efforts with Ukraine because you have an embassy there that is trying to pursue American interests,” he said. “For example, we want Ukraine to do more on reform, and we want Ukraine to help put pressure on Iran. And you have Giuliani coming in with a very different agenda.”

Related: Read Pifer’s recent blog post for the Brookings Institution: "The Dueling U.S. Foreign Policy Approaches to Ukraine Pose a Risk for Kyiv.”