Rose Gottemoeller, the Steven C. Házy lecturer at the Center for International Security and Cooperation in Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and research fellow at the Hoover Institution, leads a conversation on international security and cooperation.

Watch with the Council on Foreign Relations

Introduction to Issues in International Security is a collaboration between the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and the Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE). Four CISAC scholars are featured in accessible video lectures that aim to introduce high school students to issues in international security and increase awareness of career opportunities available in the field. Free discussion guides, developed by SPICE, are available for all of the lectures in this series.

The CISAC scholars and descriptions of their lectures are listed below.

• Martha Crenshaw: Terrorism and Countertterrorism

Professor Crenshaw explores some fundamental issues about terrorism, such as why people resort to terror, the political goals of terrorism, and the importance of understanding the complex web of relationships among terrorist organizations.

• Rose Gottemoeller: International Security and DPRK’s Nuclear Program

The Honorable Gottemoeller discusses the difference between national and international security. She takes a close look at the nuclear weapons program of North Korea and highlights the possible danger that North Korea’s nuclear weapons could pose to the world, as well as different ways to mitigate this risk.

• Norman Naimark: Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide

Professor Naimark discusses the difference between ethnic cleansing and genocide. He highlights key historical events that have taken place around the world and discusses the “Responsibility to Protect” and how it has shaped the way the international community responds to such atrocities.

• Megan Palmer: Biosecurity

Dr. Palmer discusses how biological threats shape our world—different types of threats and what we can do to prevent and to prepare for them.

An online symposium for high school students from four high schools is being planned for May 2022. They will have the opportunity to meet with one or two of the CISAC scholars to discuss issues in international security and careers in the field of international security. The online symposium is part of CISAC’s and SPICE’s DEI-focused efforts. In the 2022–23 academic year, CISAC and SPICE will invite high school teachers, who introduce the curriculum series, to recommend students to a second online symposium.

For more information about the curriculum series and the 2022–23 symposium, contact Irene Bryant at irene3@stanford.edu.

Depend on your smart phone? Enjoy a flat screen tv? How about an electric vehicle, do you drive one? These technologies—and other clean energy, information, and defense applications— all rely on rare-earth elements that could be mined in most parts of the world but are primarily processed and refined only in a limited number of countries, like China.

“Right now, the U.S. doesn’t have enough supply to fulfill the objective of the steady clean energy transition, ensure national security, and achieve long-term economic goals” said Gorakh Pawar, a staff scientist at the Idaho National Laboratory who is a visiting scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation.  The importance of rare earths mining is highlighted in the series of reports recently issued by the U.S.  Department of Energy in response to President Biden’s Executive Order "America's Supply Chains" signed in 2021.

“This means that the U.S. depends on other countries and therefore, the U.S. needs a strategic approach to resolve the major rare earth elements supply chain issues urgently,” Pawar added. 

Mountain Pass Rare Earth Mine and Processing Facility, Mountain Pass, San Bernardino Co., California (Image credit: MP materials.com)

Rare-earth elements “are moderately abundant in the earth’s crust, but they need to be concentrated to be economically viable,” said Sulgiye Park, a Fellow at CISAC. “What we want is concentrated rare-earth reserves because we are going to spend a lot of money mining and processing it.”

Important deposits of rare earths exist in the U.S. and previously the U.S. was self-reliant in domestically produced rare-earth elements, but mining operations have declined over the last several decades, allowing China to command roughly 90 percent of the global market. Now, however, there are signs that domestic production is making a comeback, and CISAC scholars are both studying and providing support to accelerate this resurgence.

Pawar, Park and CISAC co-director Rod Ewing toured the Mountain Pass Rare Earth Mine and Processing Facility in southern California to learn more about its operation and to determine how their research could help support this important industry.

“We were provided with critical insights into MP Materials' strategy for securing the domestic rare earth supply chain that would significantly reduce U.S. economic dependence on foreign REE,” Ewing said.

“The substantial challenges include developing domestic supply chains for mill equipment and capacity to process rare earths, such as neodymium-praseodymium magnets,” Ewing added.

Pawar, Park and Ewing toured the mine for three hours to see the facilities, ask and answer questions. They wanted to understand the facts on the ground, supply chain issues and industry challenges in a more complete way to enhance their own research.

Open pit mine (Sulphide Queen deposit) at Mountain Pass. The open pit is ~600 m wide. A massive carbonatite forms the core of Mountain Pass that hosts REE mineral resources, including bastnäsite. (Image credit: Gorakh Pawar)

Before the trip, Pawar and Park relied on academic literature, open source information, news stories and press releases about rare-earth elements, like this recent White House release titled “Securing a Made in America Supply Chain for Critical Minerals,” which announced a Department of Defense grant to MP Materials, who operate the Mountain Pass mine.

“Open source is great,” Park said. “But if you have a chance to visit the site, you can learn from the people on the ground who provide a whole new perspective. “

The tour also fortified connections so that the Pawar, Park and Ewing could share their own knowledge and policy-relevant research, as well as their network of colleagues who have different areas of expertise.

CISAC was created in 1983 with the goal of bringing together experts in science and technology with experts in policy. The mission statement has always been “to generate new knowledge for a better world.” And this trip to Southern California was another opportunity to fulfill this mission.

About Idaho National Laboratory
Battelle Energy Alliance manages INL for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy. INL is the nation’s center for nuclear energy research and development, and also performs research in each of DOE’s strategic goal areas: energy, national security, science and the environment.

During the last two months of 2021, Russia created a crisis by deploying large military forces near Ukraine and demanding security guarantees from the United States and NATO.  In mid-December, Moscow publicized draft U.S.-Russia and NATO-Russia agreements encapsulating its demands, many of which were clearly unacceptable.

Over the past four days, U.S. and Russian officials have held bilateral talks, the NATO-Russia Council met, and a meeting of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe took place.  Russian officials now have an idea of what is and is not negotiable.

The question remains as it was in late December:  does the Kremlin seek a genuine give-and-take negotiation, or will the Kremlin use rejection of certain of its demands as a pretext for military action against Ukraine?  Unfortunately, it increasingly looks like the latter.

By the end of 2021, the Russian military had deployed some 100,000 troops on or near the Ukrainian border.  U.S. intelligence projected that the number could reach 175,000 soldiers early in 2022.

In December, Vladimir Putin called for security guarantees for Russia.  This seemed ironic.  The Kremlin controls the world’s largest nuclear arsenal and the most power conventional forces of any country in Europe, and Russian military forces are deployed—unwanted—on the territory of Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova.

In mid-December, Russian officials gave U.S. officials a draft U.S.-Russia treaty and a draft NATO-Russia agreement and promptly made them public.  The fact that the drafts contained provisions, such as NATO foreswearing further enlargement, that Russian officials had to know NATO would not accept, their immediate publication, the inflammatory rhetoric pouring out of Moscow, and the continuing troop build-up near Ukraine raised questions about whether the Kremlin truly sought a negotiation.

Presidents Biden and Putin held two video conferences in December.  The U.S. president outlined the costs that would ensue if Russia launched a new attack on Ukraine—new, more punitive sanctions, greater Western military assistance to Ukraine, and a bolstering of NATO’s military presence on its eastern flank near Russia (all in addition to the costs that Ukraine would impose in resisting the Russian assault)—but he also expressed a readiness for dialogue.  The two leaders agreed to discussions in January.

U.S. and Russian officials met for nearly eight hours in Geneva on January 10.  Deputy Secretary of State Sherman afterwards told the press that some Russian ideas, such as limits on missile placement in Europe and reciprocal constraints on military exercises, might provide a basis for discussion and negotiation.  However, the Americans were firm “in pushing back on security proposals that are simply non-starters for the United States.  We will not allow anyone to slam closed NATO’s “Open Door” policy [on enlargement].”   

Officials from NATO allies took similar positions when the NATO-Russia Council met in Brussels on January 12.  Following the four-hour session, NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg told the press that NATO allies “reaffirmed NATO’s Open Door policy and the right for each nation to choose its own security arrangements” and “made clear that they will not renounce their ability to protect and defend each other, including with presence of troops in the eastern part of the Alliance.”   However, NATO was prepared for a discussion of concrete proposals on military transparency, arms control and reciprocal limits on missiles.

Sherman separately said “Thirty sovereign nations spoke separately—NATO allies—and also spoke as one.”  They made clear “that all countries must be able to choose their own foreign policy orientation, that sovereignty and territorial integrity are sacrosanct and must be respected, and that all nations are and must be free to choose their own alliances.”

The Organization for Security Cooperation in Europe session in Vienna on January 13, in which Ukrainian officials took part, concluded with no movement reported on resolving the tensions between Russia and Ukraine.

The Kremlin spokesperson gave a downbeat assessment of the U.S.-Russia and NATO-Russia discussions.  He noted that, while there were “some positive nuances, positive elements,” the sides disagreed on what Russia considered the principal issues [Russia’s demands that NATO agree to no further enlargement and remove military forces deployed to countries that had joined the Alliance after 1997].  Other Russian officials likewise depicted the West has showing no movement on Moscow’s key demands.

While Russian officials suggested that there might yet be written responses to their proposals, U.S., European and Ukrainian officials consulted intensely in the run-up to this week’s meetings.  There is no reason to expect that any written response would differ from what Russian diplomats heard in Geneva, Brussels and Vienna.  Moscow now should have a good sense for what in their draft agreements would and would not provide a basis for negotiation.

The Kremlin has largely framed this as a crisis between NATO and Russia.  Putin is unhappy about how the post-Cold War situation in Europe has evolved, especially the enlargement of NATO.  He would like to wind back the clock, something NATO members will not agree to do.

For the Kremlin, however, this is first and foremost about Ukraine and Moscow’s desire for a sphere of influence in the post-Soviet space.  After meeting U.S. officials on January 10, Deputy Foreign Minister Ryabkov said “it’s absolutely mandatory to make sure that Ukraine, never, never ever becomes a member of NATO.”  (While there is little enthusiasm among NATO members now for putting Ukraine on a membership track, as the Russians almost certainly understand, NATO will not foreswear the future possibility.)

Moscow worries that it is losing Ukraine, which it is.  Over the past eight years, the Russian military seized Crimea, and Russia instigated and sustained a conflict in Donbas that has claimed more than 13,000 lives.  Such actions, not surprisingly, have driven Ukraine away from Russia and bolstered elite and public support there for joining NATO. 

The Kremlin’s policy toward Ukraine has produced a strategic failure.  Launching a new attack now would hardly improve Ukrainian attitudes toward Russia, but the Russian military is by all appearances preparing for a major operation.

It may be that Putin has not yet decided what to do.  However, he seems to be painting himself into a corner in which military action remains his only feasible choice.  While leaving the path for dialogue open, the West should redouble its effort to dissuade and deter him from taking that choice.  But it increasingly appears that the West will not succeed. 

Russia’s massing of military power near Ukraine was certain to dominate the December 7 video conference between Presidents Biden and Putin. A Russian assault would turn into a bloody affair (for Russians and Ukrainians alike) and plunge relations between Russia and the West deeper into crisis. Is Putin prepared to take that step?  Perhaps even he has not yet decided.

By all appearances, Biden did what he had to do. He spelled out for Putin the costs that would ensue if Russia attacked. These include more painful Western economic sanctions, more military assistance for Ukraine, and a bolstering of NATO’s military presence in the Baltic states and Poland. Moreover, he strengthened his hand by consulting the day before with the leaders of Britain, Germany, France and Italy.  That meant he could talk to Putin on the basis of a consolidated Western position.

Biden also described a way out of the crisis: de-escalation and dialogue, or dialogues, to address the Russia-Ukraine conflict in Donbas and broader European security questions. Neither of those discussions will prove easy. For example, NATO will not, and should not, accede to the Kremlin’s demand that the alliance renounce its "open door" policy on enlargement. But diplomacy is all about finding ways to defuse such difficult problems.

Did Biden succeed? That remains to be seen. One thing to watch is whether Moscow’s recent over-the-top rhetoric moderates. Of course, the more important signal would come from the movement of Russian troops away from Ukraine and back to their regular garrisons.

Read more views on what the Biden-Putin video call means for the regional security situation on Atlantic Council.

All eyes are on Ukraine (including ours). Steven Pifer, a William J. Perry Research Fellow at CISAC and former ambassador to Ukraine, joins co-host Tom Collina to discuss Putin’s motivations for Ukraine and more. 

Ploughshares Fund · Will Russia Invade Ukraine?

Click here for a transcript of “We Need To Rethink Our Assumptions about China’s Strategic Goals”

Where China Was in the 1990s

Twenty years ago, the Chinese-Taiwan invasion plan was to take a couple of fishing vessels and paddle their way across the strait. In the 1990s, China had very limited, and often no ability to fly over water, or at night, or in weather, and their ships had no defenses.

For many, many years we knew that China was willing to fight if Taiwan declared independence. Fighting a war in any country that is big and resolved is problematic. But it was never the case that the United States was going to lose that war; it was always a matter of, “How many days?” How many days is it going to take us to win?

Where China Is Now

In the intervening years, China's military has changed both quantitatively and qualitatively. Now they have the largest navy in the world, and those ships are some of the most advanced surface ships that can be comparable to those of the United States. Same with their fighters; they have fifth generation airplanes and the largest airforce in the region. They’ve put all these capabilities online, and at the same time, they [have also] started developing capabilities to reach out and touch the United States with.

They developed the capability to hit moving ships at sea, which is something the United States doesn’t have the capability to do. They have a huge cruise and ballistic missile program that basically can take out a U.S. base like Kadena  in the region in a matter of hours, should they ever be willing to make a direct hit on the U.S.

This doesn't mean that China is more powerful than the United States; China still can’t project power outside the Indo-Pacific region, and even there it’s mostly through space, cyber, and nuclear weapons. But most of the contingencies we're talking about are really close to China, so it doesn’t really matter that they can’t project power. So, on the conventional side, I’m very concerned.

Why Taiwan Matters

The whole goal of the Communist Party, since its founding in 1949, has been to resolve this Taiwan issue.

Now they have the ships, the aircraft, and they’ve reorganized their whole military so that they can do joint operations, so that the navy and the air force can do an invasion of Taiwan. And a lot of those efforts came to a successful conclusion at the end of 2020. And that's why people like myself, not because of  the capabilities, but because when I was in Beijing and talked to the Chinese military and government officials, they said, “We could do this now, and maybe we should think about it.”

We know from behavioral economics that countries and people are much more willing to take risks to not lose something that they think is theirs, versus when they are trying to get something which they don't think is theirs. In the Chinese mindset, Taiwan, the South China Sea, East China Sea, etc. is already theirs, and the United States is trying to take it from them. That makes the situation even more problematic. 

What the United States Should Do

The Biden administration is doing a lot of political maneuvering to show that the United States is willing to defend Taiwan. And I think it’s just upsetting Beijing, because they think we’re changing the political status quo. It also does nothing to enhance our deterrence, because it doesn't signal anything about our capability to defend Taiwan.

The Chinese basically assume the United States will intervene. Their big question is, can they still win? We need to show China that they cannot win, and that’s about showing out capabilities in the region. It’s about aggressively negotiating new host arrangements, more access for the U.S. military, and new international institutions and treaties that constrain the ways China leverages power.

I'm a military person, but I'm totally on board with leading with diplomacy. But I don't see those types of efforts coming out of the Biden administration. They seem to want to double down and do the same things, just with more allies and partners.  I'm supportive of it, but I just don't think it's enough.

Thirty years after the end of the Cold War, nuclear weapons pose a far greater threat to the safety and security of Americans than is reflected in our public discourse. While the United States must maintain a strong nuclear deterrent as an important tool of U.S. foreign and defense policy, an oversized global arsenal of nuclear weapons makes Americans equally unsafe. It is time to reinvigorate arms control discussions to seek reasonable reductions that will make us all more secure.

Too many nuclear weapons increase the risk of theft by terrorists or other nefarious actors, encourage more countries to develop nuclear arms, and raise the risk of nuclear war. Reasonable arms control measures, taken in conjunction with adversaries like Russia, make Americans safer by diminishing the large Russian nuclear arsenal, reinforcing norms against the development and use of nuclear arms, securing or eliminating nuclear material from theft or misuse by terrorists, and saving money that can be used to strengthen the United States military’s conventional deterrence against costly and destructive wars. 

In order to achieve those goals, Washington and Moscow have cut their strategic nuclear weapons since the height of the Cold War. Through the 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or New START, which the U.S. and Russia recently extended, both countries each reduced their nuclear arsenals to no more than 1,550 deployed strategic warheads arming no more than 700 deployed strategic ballistic missiles and bombers.

Yet, despite these historic cuts, the United States and Russia each still have far more nuclear weapons than either side could conceivably use in a conflict, and at least ten times more weapons than any other country in the world. This actually makes Americans less safe, rather than the other way around.

In 2013, the Joint Chiefs of Staff concluded that the United States could safely reduce the number of deployed strategic warheads by one-third. The Biden administration should use that study—along with the current Nuclear Posture Review– to set the United States on the path to reasonable reductions. 

The Biden administration should aim for new negotiations between the United States and Russian to limit each country’s armed forces to 1,000 deployed strategic warheads. The agreement can be executed incrementally, and the sides might informally agree once negotiations began to deploy no more than 1,400 strategic warheads, as an early confidence-building measure. This first step is an easy and safe one to take, as there have been times over the past decade when both countries already deployed fewer than 1,400 strategic warheads.

As part of a bold new vision for arms control and strategic stability, U.S. negotiators should seek an agreement that encompasses all U.S. and Russian nuclear warheads, including reserve (non-deployed) strategic warheads, and non-strategic nuclear weapons. Negotiators should work to limit all nuclear warheads to no more than 2,500 each, with an embedded sub-limit of 1,000 deployed strategic warheads within the overall aggregate limit. Even with the dramatic arsenal reductions outlined here, the United States would maintain the ability to deter and, if necessary, defend against any global adversary.

Such a nuclear arms reduction agreement would have significant additional advantages for the United States:

First, it could position Washington and Moscow to press China to freeze or limit its build-up of nuclear arms as long as the United States and Russia are reducing their nuclear arsenals. 

Second, such an agreement could give the Pentagon additional resources to support wider force modernization requirements for nuclear and conventional forces alike, including new ballistic missile submarines and the B-21 bomber. If we have the forces to deter conventional conflict, we dramatically reduce the prospect of nuclear war.

Third, such an agreement would bolster America’s non-proliferation credentials and leadership. A new U.S.-Russia nuclear arms reductions treaty may not lead North Korea to abandon its nuclear program overnight, but it would increase the ability of U.S. diplomats to urge third countries to pressure and sanction outliers such as North Korea.

Right-sizing U.S. and global nuclear arsenals strengthens deterrence, reduces proliferation risks, and lowers the threat of nuclear war to the United States and our allies. The Biden administration has an opportunity to reduce that risk. It should seize it.

Rep. Ami Bera, D-Calif., is chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Asia, the Pacific, Central Asia, and Nonproliferation. Steven Pifer is a William J. Perry Research Fellow at Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation.

Originally for Defense One