About the event: A rigorous understanding of the past provides powerful insights and tools that enable better choices in the present. This is especially true for the extraordinarily consequential worlds of statecraft and strategy. This book proposes ways to apply historical knowledge to understand and navigate the complex, often confusing world around us.

It may seem obvious that we should employ history to improve decision-making, but it is rarely done. History is more often misused, deployed ineffectively, or exploited for problematic and even nefarious purposes. Our times favor other ways of knowing the world over historical thinking. Sadly, historians rarely engage decision-makers, and decision-makers seldom consult historians. This is unfortunate, as good historical work captures, perhaps better than any other discipline, the challenges and complexities the decision-maker faces. The academic discipline of history has not helped: in recent years it has de-emphasized the history of statecraft, strategy, and policy in favor of other subjects.

How can history be better understood and used more effectively? The book explains and deploys two key interconnected concepts: first, a historical sensibility, which is the foundation for the second, the act of thinking historically. Thinking Historically demonstrates how a historical sensibility, married to thinking historically, can generate better insights about the world while improving how we make critical choices facing a complex, uncertain future.

About the speaker: Francis J. Gavin is the Giovanni Agnelli Distinguished Professor and the director of the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins SAIS. Previously, he was the first Frank Stanton Chair in Nuclear Security Policy Studies at MIT and the Tom Slick Professor of International Affairs and the Director of the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas. From 2005 until 2010, he directed The American Assembly’s multiyear, national initiative, The Next Generation Project: U.S. Global Policy and the Future of International Institutions. He is the founding Chair of the Board of Editors for the Texas National Security Journal. Gavin’s writings include Gold, Dollars, and Power: The Politics of International Monetary Relations, 1958-1971; Nuclear Statecraft: History and Strategy in America’s Atomic Age ; and Nuclear Weapons and American Grand Strategy (Brookings Institution Press), which was named a 2020 Choice Outstanding Academic Title. His IISS-Adelphi book, The Taming of Scarcity and the Problems of Plenty: Rethinking International Relations and American Grand Strategy in a New Era in 2024. Thinking Historically – A Guide to Statecraft and Strategy, will be published by Yale University Press, 2025.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: In an international security environment marked by the heightened risk of nuclear weapons use and the weakening of the global nuclear order, reviving arms control between the two largest nuclear weapon States—the United States and Russia—is imperative. But under what circumstances might they return to the negotiating table? One school of thought holds that it may take another event like the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis to (re)awaken American and Russian leaders to the dangers posed by nuclear weapons and the need for greater restraint. Yet this claim, and the interpretation of Cold War history on which it rests, have not been subject to rigorous analysis in existing work. Using insights from cognitive psychology on the phenomenon of “wakeup calls,” I fill this gap by testing prevailing assumptions about the role of nuclear crises in driving arms control and assessing what the results mean for theory and practice. I show that these assumptions are not supported empirically and argue that future nuclear crises could have adverse effects on arms control depending on the priors of the leaders in office. These results challenge normative claims promoted in the scholarship on nuclear learning about the kinds of lessons nuclear crises teach and the influence of these events on elite inferential learning. In so doing, they demonstrate why electing leaders into office who have already learned the value of arms control is more likely to precipitate a return to the negotiating table than relying on external events to teach them.

About the Speaker: Sarah Bidgood is a postdoctoral fellow in technology and international security at the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC), based in Washington, D.C. Her research focuses on nuclear diplomacy and military innovation in the United States, Russian Federation, and beyond. From 2023-2024, Sarah was a Stanton nuclear security fellow in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Security Studies Program. Prior to this, she served as director of the Eurasia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, where she remains a non-resident scholar. Sarah’s work has been published as single and co-authored articles in journals such as International Security, Cold War History, and The Nonproliferation Review, as well as outlets including Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Arms Control Today, and War on the Rocks. She is a coauthor of Death Dust: The Rise, Decline, and Future of Radiological Weapons Programs, which was published by Stanford University Press in December 2023. Sarah received her PhD in Defence Studies from King's College London and holds an M.A. in Russian, East European, and Eurasian studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an M.A. in nonproliferation and terrorism studies from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. She graduated from Wellesley College with a B.A. in Russian.

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About the Event: It has long been a presumption that the president enjoys vast powers with respect to decisions to intervene with military force abroad: the United States has an “imperial presidency”. This book challenges this conventional wisdom by arguing that this is more illusion than reality. Presidents have to operate in the shadow of Congress: they realize that if they act absent sufficient political cover from lawmakers, they leave themselves highly exposed should the use of force end poorly. Introducing a new measure of congressional sentiment toward the use of force, this book shows that while presidents frequently use force without formal approval from Congress, they are virtually always doing so pursuant to Congress’s informal support and urging. Moreover, it demonstrates that presidents are actually unwilling to undertake the largest interventions (full-scale war) absent the formal imprimatur of the legislator. Lastly, it shows that allies and adversaries pay close attention to domestic constraints on the president, yielding implications for deterrence and alliance reassurance. While in reality substantially constrained politically by Congress, presidents intentionally project a facade of imperialism in order to caution adversaries and hearten allies.

About the Speaker: Before coming to CISAC, Patrick was a Research Fellow with the International Security Program at the Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. He completed his Ph.D. in political science at the University of California San Diego in May 2023, and his J.D. at the UCLA School of Law in 2017. For the summer of 2022, Patrick was a Summer Associate with the RAND Center for Analysis of U.S. Grand Strategy, and for the 2020-2021 academic year he was a Hans J. Morgenthau Fellow at the Notre Dame International Security Center.

Patrick’s research and teaching interests include congressional-executive relations in U.S. foreign policy, constitutional law, deterrence theory, and the U.S.-China relationship. He is especially interested in the influence of Congress in use of military force decisions, as well as the role of legal constraints in international security.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

Reception to follow from 5:00pm - 6:30pm in the lobby in front of the William J. Perry Conference Room

About the event: New Cold Wars—the latest from the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and bestselling author of The Perfect Weapon David E. Sanger—is a fast-paced account of America’s plunge into simultaneous confrontations with two very different adversaries. For years, the United States was confident that the newly democratic Russia and increasingly wealthy China could be lured into a Western-led order that promised prosperity and relative peace—so long as they agreed to Washington’s terms. Now the three powers are engaged in a high-stakes struggle for military, economic, political, and technological supremacy, with nations around the world pressured to take sides. Yet all three are discovering that they are maneuvering for influence in a far more turbulent world than they imagined. Based on a remarkable array of interviews with top officials from five presidential administrations, U.S. intelligence agencies, foreign governments, and tech companies, Sanger unfolds a riveting narrative spun around the era’s critical questions. New Cold Wars is a remarkable first-draft history chronicling America’s return to superpower conflict, the choices that lie ahead, and what is at stake for the United States and the world.

About the speaker: David E. Sanger is national security correspondent for the New York Times and bestselling author of The Inheritance and Confront and Conceal. He has been a member of three teams that won the Pulitzer Prize, including in 2017 for international reporting. A regular contributor to CNN, he also teaches national security policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

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About the Event: The civilian role in managing the military has never been more important. Today, civilian leadership of defense policy is challenged by the blurring line between war and competition and the speed of machine decision-making on the battlefield. Moreover, the legitimacy of political leaders and civil servants has been undermined by a succession of foreign policy failures and by imbalances of public faith in the military on the one hand and disapproval of civilian institutions on the other. A central question emerges: What does appropriate and effective civilian control of the military look like?

In this book talk, Dr. Alice Friend will combine scholarly expertise with firsthand civilian experience in the Department of Defense to argue that civilians combine authoritative status, institutional functions, and political expertise to ensure that democratic preferences over the use of force prevail. Friend focuses on the ways political context shapes whether and how civilian controllers—the civilians in professional and institutional positions with the responsibility for defense matters—exercise control over the military and each other.

About the Speaker: Alice Friend is a foreign and tech policy expert, with experience in the U.S. federal government, NGOs, the UN system, and academia. She has a PhD in International Relations and was previously the vice president for research and analysis at the Institute for Security and Technology. Her other experience includes performing research at the International Labor Organization in Geneva, roles as a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security in Washington DC, and adjunct professorships at Georgetown University and American University. She served in several positions in the U.S. Department of Defense across two presidential administrations and is the author of Mightier than the Sword: Civilian Control of the Military and the Revitalization of Democracy published by Stanford University Press. Alice has published articles in the Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, War on the Rocks, Lawfare, and Just Security. Her work at Google focuses on national and international artificial intelligence policies and governance.

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About the event: Governments often impose oversight of the police. Proponents argue that oversight curbs bad behavior, while critics counter that it sparks harmful backlash. We provide evidence from the staged rollout of a new code of criminal procedure in Colombia, which introduced judicial oversight of arrests. Judicial oversight caused a 40% drop in the number of arrests, we find, and a simultaneous improvement in arrest quality. Arrests for low-level crimes like vandalism plummeted, while arrests for serious crimes (like homicide) did not decline. Colombia thus reversed the hemisphere-wide run-up in policing of minor offenses, without police backlash and likely without causing a major crime wave.

About the speaker: Dorothy Kronick is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy, U.C. Berkeley. She is a political scientist studying crime, policing, and democracy in contemporary Latin America. Her research on these topics has been published in the American Political Science Review, the Journal of Politics, and Science, among other outlets. Prior to joining GSPP, she was an assistant professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania; prior to that, she received her PhD from Stanford University.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

Reception to follow from 5:00pm - 6:30pm in the lobby in front of the William J. Perry Conference Room

About the event: Thirty years ago, the idea that China could challenge the United States economically, globally, and militarily seemed unfathomable. Yet today, China is considered a great power. How did China manage to build power in international system that was largely dominated by the United States? What factors determined the strategies Beijing pursued to achieve this feat? Using authoritative Chinese sources and granular data, this book demonstrates that China was able to climb to great power status through a careful mix of emulation, exploitation, and entrepreneurship on the international stage. This “upstart” strategy—determined by where and how China chose to compete—allowed China to rise economically, politically, and militarily without triggering a catastrophic international backlash that would stem its rise. China emulated the United States (pursued similar strategies in similar areas) when its leaders thought doing so would build power while reassuring the United States of its intentions. China exploited (adopted similar approaches in new areas of competition) when it felt that the overall US strategy was effective but didn’t want to risk direct confrontation. China pursued entrepreneurial actions (innovative approaches to new and existing areas of competition) when it believed a more effective approach was available that would better enable Communist Party control. Beyond explaining the unique nature of China’s rise, this book provides insights into the next twenty-five years of Chinese power as well as policy guidance on how the United States can maintain a competitive edge in this new era of great power competition.

About the speaker: Oriana Skylar Mastro is a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Courtesy Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University where her research focuses on Chinese military and security policy, Asia-Pacific security issues, war termination, and coercive diplomacy. She is also a Non-Resident Scholar, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She continues to serve in the United States Air Force Reserve for which she currently works at the Pentagon as Deputy Director of Reserve China Global Strategy. For her contributions to U.S. strategy in Asia, she won the Individual Reservist of the Year Award in 2016 (CGO) and 2022 (FGO). She has published widely, including in International Security, Security Studies, Foreign Affairs, Journal of Strategic Studies, The Washington Quarterly, the Economist and the New York Times. Her most recent book, Upstart: How China Became a Great Power (Oxford University Press, 2024), evaluates China’s approach to competition. Her book, The Costs of Conversation: Obstacles to Peace Talks in Wartime, (Cornell University Press, 2019), won the 2020 American Political Science Association International Security Section Best Book by an Untenured Faculty Member. She holds a B.A. in East Asian Studies from Stanford University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University. Her publications and other commentary can be found at www.orianaskylarmastro.com and on twitter @osmastro.

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About the event: Histories of political science and of the laws of war identify the nineteenth-century scholar Francis Lieber as their modern founder. His 1863 General Orders 100 codified the modern laws of war, internationalizing his political thought. Yet relatively unremarked is that Lieber wrote his foundational texts during U.S. settler colonization, which he justified in whole. I argue that GO100 facilitated settler colonial violence by defining modern war as a public war, arrogating it to sovereign states; distinguishing revenge from retaliation, attributing revenge to the “savage”; and elevating a certain racialized/gendered governance, ascribing it to the Cis-Caucasian race. Producing Native peoples and Native wars as lacking in the proper characteristics of sovereign belligerency resulted in a subordination of status and a legitimation of exterminatory tactics that were subsequently universalized and (re)internationalized through GO100’s determinative influence on the laws of war. Tracing GO100 further exposes the founding of the discipline in Native peoples’ dispossession and extermination.

About the speaker: Helen M Kinsella is a Professor of Political Science & Law, Affiliate Faculty of the Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies, the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs, the Human Rights Center, and the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change and a Visiting Scholar, The Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice, Queens University, Belfast, Northern Ireland.  

She writes on gender and armed conflict and on the histories of international humanitarian law and humanitarianism. She has published in the American Political Science Review, Review of International Studies, International Theory, Political Theory, International Studies Quarterly, Feminist Review, among others.
She is the author of the award winning book The Image before the Weapon: A Critical History of the Distinction between Combatant and Civilian (Cornell University Press) and recently  “Settler Empire and the United States: Francis Lieber on the Laws of War,” in the American Political Science Review.

She is currently writing on two longer projects on U.S. Native peoples and Native wars the the development of the laws of war, and on sleep in war.

https://www.helenmkinsella.com

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About the Event: In recent years, a series of initiatives have emerged with the aim to advance women’s participation in the nuclear weapons field. These initiatives are informed by two assumptions. Women are missing, and women’s inclusion can bring change. Currently, empirical evidence is missing to support either of the two assumptions. Systematically collected data is lacking on the number of women working in the nuclear weapons field. Women's experiences have been recorded only anecdotally and the impact of women's increased participation remains unclear. The Women and the Bomb project collects the missing data. It studies the roles, experiences and views of women in various sectors of the US nuclear weapons field, including government departments and agencies, national nuclear laboratories, the military and non-governmental organizations.

About the Speaker: Jana Wattenberg is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at Aberystwyth University (funded by UKRI). She is also a visiting scholar at American University (Washington DC), a Lecturer in Security at Aberystwyth University and a Senior Fellow with Women in International Security.

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About the Event: Why do states start conflicts they ultimately lose? Why do leaders possess inaccurate expectations of their prospects for victory? Tyler Jost’s book, Bureaucracies at War: The Institutional Origins of Miscalculation (Cambridge Studies in International Relations series; Cambridge University Press, 2024) examines how national security institutions shape the quality of information upon which leaders base their choice for conflict – which institutional designs provide the best counsel, why those institutions perform better, and why many leaders fail to adopt them. Jost argues that the same institutions that provide the best information also empower the bureaucracy to punish the leader. Thus, miscalculation on the road to war is often the tragic consequence of how leaders resolve the trade-off between good information and political security. Employing an original cross-national data set and detailed explorations of the origins and consequences of institutions inside China, India, Pakistan, and the United States, this book explores why bureaucracy helps to avoid disaster, how bureaucratic competition produces better information, and why institutional design is fundamentally political.

About the Speaker: Tyler Jost is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Brown University. He is currently on sabbatical leave as the David and Cindy Edelson Fellow in U.S. Foreign Policy and International Security at Dartmouth College. His research focuses on national security decision-making, bureaucratic politics, and Chinese foreign policy. His research has been published in International Organization, International Security, Journal of Conflict Resolution, and International Studies Quarterly. Dr. Jost’s first book, Bureaucracies at War (Cambridge University Press), examines how different types of bureaucratic institutions across the world lead to better and worse foreign policy decisions. He is currently working on a second book examining the domestic origins of international engagement. Dr. Jost completed his doctoral degree in the Department of Government at Harvard University and held postdoctoral fellowships at the Belfer Center International Security Program at the Kennedy School of Government, as well as in the China and the World Program at Columbia University.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.