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.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

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.

About the event: The battlefield of Ukraine has been a laboratory for understanding what 21st-century conflict will look like. Having provided many of the capabilities that Ukraine has used and depended on—from Abrams tanks to Patriot missiles—the U.S. Army is now at the forefront of keeping Ukraine in the fight, while learning important lessons about how the Army must transform itself for the future. The Honorable Gabe Camarillo serves as the 35th Under Secretary of the Army, responsible for building and executing a $187 billion annual budget and overseeing the training and equipping of more than 970,000 Army Soldiers. His conversation with former NATO Deputy Secretary General Rose Gottemoeller will illuminate key insights from Ukraine as the Army thinks through its future strategies, technologies, and capabilities.

About the speaker: The Honorable Gabe Camarillo was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on February 3, 2022 and sworn in as the 35th Under Secretary of the Army on February 8, 2022. As the Under Secretary of the Army, Mr. Camarillo serves as the Army’s Chief Operating Officer and Chief Management Officer, helping oversee a budget of more than $170 billion and sharing responsibility for the manning, training, and equipping of more than 970,000 Soldiers across the active, Guard, and Reserve components. Mr. Camarillo is also responsible for the Army’s enterprise management and business operations as well as budget development and execution.

Mr. Camarillo’s prior career includes significant experience in law, government, national security and private industry. Mr. Camarillo previously served as Assistant Secretary of the Air Force (Manpower & Reserve Affairs) where he was responsible for military and civilian personnel and reserve component matters for the Air Force. He previously also served as the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army (Acquisition, Logistics & Technology), helping to lead and supervise Army modernization programs, procurement, logistics and R&D investment.

His private sector experience includes legal practice at several law firms with emphasis in the areas of commercial litigation, campaign finance law and government ethics. Mr. Camarillo also taught campaign finance law as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. Recently, Mr. Camarillo served as Senior Vice President at SAIC, where he led two business units for an engineering and IT services company.

Mr. Camarillo received a Bachelor of Arts in Government at Georgetown University and a law degree from Stanford University.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

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.