Sarin Over Aleppo
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CISAC Predoctoral Fellow Jonathan Hunt illustrates how American military power can be used to limit the spread and use of weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East, particularly in Syria. Russia and the United States agreed that if Russia secured chemical weapons in Syria, the Washington would refrain from intervening in the conflict. Hunt argues that military pressure can be used to strengthen international security.
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Huffington Post
Controversy Dims as Public Opinion Shifts
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CISAC Faculty Member Amy Zegart discusses how changing American attitudes towards torture have impacted presidential appointments to key intelligence positions, such as the Obama administration's appointment of John Brennan to lead the CIA. Four years ago, he withdrew from consideration for the position because of his role as a senior CIA official during the Bush administration and his association with enhanced interrogation techniques. His nomination as CIA Director is much less contentious this time around.
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The New York Times
Ties that Bind: Strategic Stability in the U.S.–China Relationship
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Abstract
Conviction is widespread and increasing in both the United States and China—as well as many other countries—that the U.S.–China relationship is becoming less stable and more dangerous. We do not agree. Relations between Beijing and Washington in 2013 are more extensive, more varied, more interdependent, and more important to one another as well as to the global system than at any time in the past. But suspicion and mutual distrust persist and may have intensified. Yet, despite dramatic changes in the international system and the need to manage fleeting as well as persistent problems, the United States and China have maintained strategic stability for four decades. The relationship is less fragile and volatile than many assert, with strategic stability the result of multiple factors that reinforce one another and limit the deleterious effects of developments threatening specific “pillars” that undergird the relationship. Complacency and failure to address misperceptions and mistrust, however, will have unfortunate consequences for both sides.
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The Washington Quarterly
How to Engage Iran: Abe Sofaer in conversation with Allen Weiner on Diplomacy and the Iranian Nuclear Crisis
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About the Speakers: Abraham Sofaer was appointed the first George P. Shultz Distinguished Scholar and Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution in 1994. Sofaer's work focuses on the power over war within the US government and on issues related to international law, terrorism, diplomacy, and national security. His most recent books are The Best Defense?: Legitimacy and Preventive Force and Taking On Iran: Strength, Diplomacy and the Iranian Threat. From 1985 to 1990, he served as a legal adviser to the US Department of State. He received the Distinguished Service Award in 1989, the highest state department award given to a non–civil servant.
Allen Weiner is senior lecturer in law and co-director of the Stanford Program in International Law at Stanford Law School. He is also the co-director of the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation. For more than a decade, he practiced international law in the U.S. Department of State, serving as an attorney-adviser in the Office of the Legal Adviser and as legal counselor at the U.S. Embassy in The Hague. Weiner is the author of "The Torture Memos and Accountability" in the American Society of International Law Insight and co-author of International Law. Other publications include "Law, Just War, and the International Fight Against Terrorism: Is It War?" in Intervention, Terrorism, and Torture: Contemporary Challenges to Just War Theory.
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Abraham Sofaer
George P. Shultz Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy and National Security Affairs, Hoover Institution, Stanford
Speaker
Allen S. Weiner
Stanford Law School
559 Nathan Abbott Way
Neukom Faculty Office Building, Room N238
Stanford, CA 94305-8610
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aweiner@stanford.edu
Senior Lecturer in Law
Director, Stanford Program in International Law
Director, Stanford Humanitarian Program
Director, Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation
CISAC Core Faculty Member
Allen S. Weiner, JD ’89, is an international legal scholar whose research and teaching focus primarily on the fields of international security and international conflict resolution. He also studies the challenges of online misinformation and disinformation. In the international security realm, his work spans such issues as international law and the response to contemporary security threats; the relationship between international and domestic law in the context of armed conflict; the law of war (international humanitarian law); just war theory, and international criminal law (including transitional justice). In the realm of international conflict resolution, his highly multidisciplinary work analyzes the barriers to resolving intractable political conflicts, with a particular focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His work on misinformation and disinformation includes a focus on the potential harmful uses of social media in conflict settings, including war zones. Weiner’s scholarship is deeply informed by experience; he practiced international law in the U.S. Department of State for more than a decade advising government policymakers, negotiating international agreements, and representing the United States in litigation before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the International Court of Justice, and the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal.
Senior Lecturer Weiner is director of the Stanford Program in International and Comparative Law, director of the Stanford Humanitarian Program, and director of the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation. Before joining the Stanford Law School faculty in 2003, Weiner served as legal counselor at the U.S. Embassy in The Hague and attorney adviser in the Office of the Legal Adviser of the U.S. Department of State in Washington, DC. He clerked for Judge John Steadman of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals.
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Seminars
India's Energy [In]Security and Growing Competition from China
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There is considerable optimism that India will continue to grow economically, address the crippling poverty that the majority of the population still faces and become a great nation. Dr. Gupta will first analyze India's energy security by examining the different energy sectors and evaluate to what extent it can meet its energy needs. Dr. Gupta will then analyze the economic, geographical and technology advantage that China holds over India and what India must do to address these challenges.
Dr. Rajan Gupta is a theoretical physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and a Laboratory fellow. He currently serves as Program Manager of the High Energy Physics Program an LANL and previously served as Group Leader of Elementary Particles and Field Theory. He obtained his Masters in Physics from Delhi University, India, and earned his Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from The California Institute of Technology in 1982. The main thrust of his research is to understand the fundamental theories of elementary particle interactions. Dr. Gupta has also worked extensively on a project related to the mapping of global energy systems. He has published over 125 research papers and is a fellow of the American Physical Society. During 2007 he served as the chair of the LANL energy council, helped create a strategic plan for LANL's investment in energy R&D and advocated for energy security to be made a part of the core LANL mission.
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Rajan Gupta
Speaker
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Seminars
War and Democratic Constraint: Parties, the Press, and Public Influence on Decisions of War and Peace
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About the Topic: Media outlets in multi-party electoral systems tend to report on a wider range of policy issues and present more competing policy frames than media in two-party systems. This suggests we should observe more challenges to governments’ preferred framing of foreign policy in multi-party democracies. Citizens in multi-party democracies are better equipped to hold their leaders accountable, relative to their counterparts in two-party democracies. This, in turn, ought to result in greater caution when leaders consider the prospect of employing military force abroad. By analyzing the news coverage of interventions in Iraq and Libya, as well as public support for war and joining multinational coalitions that fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, Baum proposes a mechanism through which leaders can be constrained in decisions concerning war and peace.
About the Speaker: Matthew Baum is the Marvin Kalb Professor of Global Communication and professor of public policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. His research focuses on delineating the effects of mass media and public opinion on international conflict and cooperation and on American foreign policy, as well as on the role of the mass media and public opinion in contemporary American politics. He has published in over a dozen leading scholarly journals, including American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, and International Organization. He is also author of Soft News Goes to War: Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy in the New Media Age and co-authored, War Stories: The Causes and Consequences of Public Views of War. Baum received his PhD in political science at the University of California, San Diego in 2000.
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Matthew Baum
Marvin Kalb Professor of Global Communication; Professor of Public Policy, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard
Speaker
Seminars
Climate and Social Stress: Implications for Security Analysis
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Summary
Climate change can reasonably be expected to increase the frequency and intensity of a variety of potentially disruptive environmental events-slowly at first, but then more quickly. It is prudent to expect to be surprised by the way in which these events may cascade, or have far-reaching effects. Over the coming decade, some climate-related events will produce consequences that exceed the capacity of affected societies or global systems to manage; these may have global security implications. Although focused on events outside the United States, Climate and Social Stress: Implications for Security Analysis recommends a range of research and policy actions to create a whole-of-government approach to increasing understanding of complex and contingent connections between climate and security, and to inform choices about adapting to and reducing vulnerability to climate change.
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Policy Briefs
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The National Academies Press
Governing Security: The Hidden Origins of American Security Agencies
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Description from Stanford University Press:
The impact of public law depends on how politicians secure control of public organizations, and how these organizations in turn are used to define national security. Governing Security explores this dynamic by investigating the surprising history of two major federal agencies that touch the lives of Americans every day: the Roosevelt-era Federal Security Agency (which became today's Department of Health and Human Services) and the more recently created Department of Homeland Security.
Through the stories of both organizations, Cuéllar offers a compelling account of crucial developments affecting the basic architecture of our nation. He shows how Americans end up choosing security goals not through an elaborate technical process, but in lively and overlapping settings involving conflict over agency autonomy, presidential power, and priorities for domestic and international risk regulation. Ultimately, as Cuéllar shows, the ongoing fights about the scope of national security reshape the very structure of government, particularly during—or in anticipation of—a national crisis.
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Stanford University Press
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