About the event: When the U.S.-Russia New START treaty expires on February 5, 2026, there will no longer be any guardrails preventing a global nuclear arms race. Yet the erosion of arms control is just one part of a broader trend of rising nuclear dangers. All nuclear-armed states are either poised to begin or are in the process of modernizing and expanding their arsenals. Risks of nuclear conflict are increasing in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and South Asia. Not surprisingly, interest in nuclear weapons is growing in many countries, primarily U.S. allies worried about threats from China, Russia, and North Korea and fearing the United States will abandon them. Between these geopolitical trends and advances in relevant technologies, proliferation risks are rising, with broad implications for U.S. and global security. How should the United States navigate the dangers of a more nuclearized world? Can it resurrect arms control with Russia and potentially involve China or other countries? How should it manage the potential for proliferation by some of its allies? And, as many countries stand poised to adopt or expand nuclear power, how should it balance proliferation risks and global commercial nuclear energy competition?   

About the speakers:
Mariano-Florentino (Tino) Cuéllar is the tenth president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, an institution created by Andrew Carnegie in 1910 to conduct independent research, support diplomacy, and advise policymakers on international cooperation, conflict, and governance.  A former justice of the Supreme Court of California, Cuéllar has served three U.S. presidents at the White House and in federal agencies and was the Stanley Morrison Professor at Stanford University, where he held appointments in law, political science, and international affairs and led the university’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He serves on the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board and the U.S. Department of State’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board, and chairs the board of the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation.

As director of Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute, he oversaw the university’s major research centers and educational programs focused on governance and development, international security, health policy, climate change and food security, and contemporary Asia and Europe.  Previously, he co-directed Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation and led its Honors Program in International Security Studies. During nearly seven years on California’s highest court while continuing to teach at Stanford, he wrote opinions addressing separation of powers, policing and criminal justice, democracy, technology and privacy, international agreements, and climate and environmental policy among other issues, and led the court system’s operations to better meet the needs of millions of limited English speakers.

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Rose Gottemoeller is the William J. Perry Lecturer at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Research Fellow at the Hoover Institute.

Before joining Stanford 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, and is currently a nonresident fellow in Carnegie's Nuclear Policy Program.

Scott D. Sagan is Co-Director and Senior Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, the Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science, and the Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. He also serves as Co-Chair of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Committee on International Security Studies. Before joining the Stanford faculty, Sagan was a lecturer in the Department of Government at Harvard University and served as special assistant to the director of the Organization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon.

Sagan is the author of Moving Targets: Nuclear Strategy and National Security (Princeton University Press, 1989); The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons (Princeton University Press, 1993); and, with co-author Kenneth N. Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: An Enduring Debate (W.W. Norton, 2012). He is the co-editor of Insider Threats (Cornell University Press, 2017) with Matthew Bunn; and co-editor of The Fragile Balance of Terror (Cornell University Press, 2022) with Vipin Narang. Sagan was also the guest editor of a two-volume special issue of Daedalus: Ethics, Technology, and War (Fall 2016) and The Changing Rules of War (Winter 2017).

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About the moderator: Toby Dalton is senior fellow and co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Before joining Carnegie, he served in policy advisory positions at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration, as energy attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, and as a professional staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. His work focuses on nuclear energy, nuclear security, and international nuclear governance, with a focus on East Asia and South Asia. He is co-author with George Perkovich of Not War, Not Peace? (Oxford University Press) and has published articles and opinion pieces in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Survival, The Washington Quarterly, Dong-A Ilbo, and Dawn, among others. He was a Luce Scholar at the Institute of Far Eastern Studies in Seoul, South Korea. He received a PhD from The George Washington University, MA from the University of Washington, and BA from Occidental College.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speakers.

About the event: International relations scholars have long studied how technological shifts impact the course of wars, especially as armies are forced to innovate on the battlefield. From the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, SpaceX’s Starlink service (a private company) has played a vital infrastructure role for Ukraine’s military, something it was never envisioned or designed to do. In addition, in contrast with past conflicts, Starlink’s major policy choices are primarily controlled by a single individual – Elon Musk –  who has his own political preferences and agenda, distinct from the U.S. or other countries. We leverage a natural experiment to ascertain the effect of Starlink access for Ukrainian forces on battlefield outcomes. We leverage a geographic discontinuity to determine the overall effect of access to Starlink on Ukraine’s territorial control as well as overall volume of munitions and combat activities. The design relies on an idiosyncratic mismatch between SpaceX’s internal system (which uses fixed hexagon shapes) for allocating access and the actual boundaries of the frontline and Ukraine’s provinces. Second, we use a difference-in-differences approach to examine how Starlink access mattered before and after a late 2022 policy change at SpaceX decided personally by Elon Musk to limit Starlink access to Ukrainian forces in certain areas and for certain activities. Initial findings are that Starlink access significantly improves Ukraine’s ability to hold territory, though it appears not to greatly affect the volume of drones, artillery or other munitions. The results suggest Starlink mostly affects quality of strikes rather than quantity. 

Co-authored with Tatsuya Koyama and Yuri Zhukov.

About the speaker: Renard Sexton is a Visiting Scholar at CISAC and an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Emory University.

Sexton studies conflict and development with a focus on local level violence and interventions intended to curb violence. His research covers insurgency, terrorism, social conflict around natural resources, and police crackdowns; he has regional expertise in Afghanistan, Southeast Asia and Andean Latin America. His research has been published in top scholarly journals, including the American Political Science Review and American Journal of Political Science. His policy pieces and commentary have been published by The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Guardian, International Crisis Group, Foreign Policy and other outlets. Before joining Emory, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University and Economics of Conflict fellow at the International Crisis Group.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

About the event: The future of European security is at a crossroad. Which road it takes depends on the direction of Russia’s war against Ukraine. The war presents one of the greatest risks for the Europe’s future but at the same time one of the greatest opportunities.

Drawing on their extensive experience in transatlantic defense and diplomacy, the panelists will assess the strategic shifts reshaping Europe’s security landscape, from military deterrence and alliance cohesion to the prospects for long-term stability in the region. The conversation will explore how the conflict continues to redefine NATO’s role, the European Union's approach to security, and Western policy toward Russia and Ukraine.

About the speakers: 

Rose Gottemoeller is the William J. Perry Lecturer at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Research Fellow at the Hoover Institute.

Before joining Stanford 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, and is currently a nonresident fellow in Carnegie's Nuclear Policy Program.  

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

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Colin Kahl is the Steven C. Házy Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). He is also the faculty director of CISAC’s Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance.

From April 2021-July 2023, Dr. Kahl served as the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy at the U.S. Department of Defense. In that role, he was the principal adviser to the Secretary of Defense for all matters related to national security and defense policy and represented the Department as a standing member of the National Security Council Deputies’ Committee. He oversaw the writing of the 2022 National Defense Strategy, which focused the Pentagon’s efforts on the “pacing challenge” posed by the PRC, and he led the Department’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and numerous other international crises. During the Obama Administration, Dr. Kahl served as Deputy Assistant to President Obama and National Security Advisor to then Vice President Biden from October 2014 to January 2017.

He received his B.A. in political science from the University of Michigan and his Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University.

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Gabrielius Landsbergis, formerly the minister of foreign affairs of the Republic of Lithuania, is the Bernard and Susan Liautaud Visiting Fellow at FSI, effective September 15, 2025.

As a Liataud Fellow, Landsbergis will be deeply enmeshed in the daily intellectual life of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, (FSI), with simultaneous affiliations with The Europe Center (TEC), and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL).

Prior to his appointment at Stanford, Landsbergis served as the minister of foreign affairs of the Republic of Lithuania. Previously, he was the chairman of the Homeland Union Party while concurrently a member of the Lithuanian Parliament. Before assuming these roles, Landsbergis was also a member of the European Parliament and began his career as a diplomat for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Lithuania.

Landsbergis’ tenure serving as Minister of Foreign Affairs was defined by a value-based approach to foreign policy. During his time in office, he cemented deepening transatlantic relations, sustained support for Ukraine, and the elevation of global partnerships as strategic pillars of Lithuania’s foreign policy.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

Media: please reach out to cisacevents@stanford.edu

About the Event 

Jill Hruby will be this year's Drell Lecturer presenting on, "The Future of Nuclear Deterrence". The Drell Lecture is an annual public event sponsored by CISAC. By tradition, the Drell lecturer addresses a current and critical national or international security issue that has important scientific or technical dimensions.

About the Speaker

Jill Hruby served as the Under Secretary for Nuclear Security at the Department of Energy and Administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration from July 2021 to January 2025.  Since early 2025, Jill has joined the Lawrence Livermore Board, the Anthropic National Security and Public Sector Advisory Committee, the Science and Security Advisory Board for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, and will join the Atomic Weapons Establishment Board in January 2026.

Prior to being a political appointee, Hruby had a 34-year career at Sandia National Laboratories retiring in 2017 as the Laboratories Director. At Sandia, Hruby held roles of increasing responsibilities in nuclear weapons systems and component design, nuclear non-proliferation, defense and homeland security technologies and systems, renewable energy, materials science, engineering sciences, and microsystems technology.

After retiring from Sandia, Hruby served as the inaugural Sam Nunn Distinguished Fellow at the Nuclear Threat Initiative from 2018-2019 and continued as a nonresident Distinguished Fellow until her appointment. In addition, she was a member of the Defense Science Board and the National Academy Committee for International Security and Arms Control. Hruby earned her bachelor’s degree from Purdue University and her master’s degree from the University of California at Berkeley, both in mechanical engineering. She has received honorary doctorate degrees from Purdue University and Michigan State University. In 2022, she was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. Jill has received the Department of Energy Secretary’s Exceptional Service Award, the National Nuclear Security Administrator’s Distinguished Service Gold Award, and Office of the Secretary of Defense Medal for Exceptional Public Service.

Please join us for refreshments in Oksenberg Hall following the conclusion of the lecture from 5:00 - 6:00 PM.  All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the event: The Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities supported by select American bombing in June 2025 changed the nuclear and political landscape in the Middle East. We will explore how much the bombing set back Iran’s nuclear capabilities and prospects, and how that may influence the political situation in Iran, Israel and the region.

About the speakers:

Siegfried Hecker was at the Los Alamos National Laboratory for 34 years, including 12 years as director. He was at Stanford University for 17 years, including 6 years as co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation. He is now part-time professor of practice at Texas A&M University and at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. Hecker has worked on nuclear matters for most of his career, including having visited all countries with declared nuclear weapons programs, including North Korea.  

He is the author (with collaborating author Elliot Serbin) of Hinge Points: An Inside Look at North Korea’s Nuclear Program (Stanford University Press, January 2023) and editor of Doomed to Cooperate: How American and Russian Scientists Joined Forces to Avert Some of the Greatest Post-Cold War Nuclear Dangers, Los Alamos Historical Society, June 2016.
 

Abbas Milani is the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University and a Professor (by courtesy) in the Stanford Global Studies Division. He is also one of the founding co-directors of the Iran Democracy Project and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. His expertise includes U.S.-Iran relations as well as Iranian cultural, political, and security issues. He taught at Tehran University’s Faculty of Law and Political Science until 1986, where he was also a member of the Board of Directors of the university’s Center for International Relations. After moving to the United States, he was the Chair of the Political Science Department at the Notre Dame de Namur University for 14 years. He was a visiting Research Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley’s Middle East Center for eight years.

Professor Milani came to Stanford in 2003 and became the founding director of the Iranian Studies Program in 2005. He also worked with two colleagues to launch the Iran Democracy Project at the Hoover Institution. He has published more than twenty books and two hundred articles and book reviews in scholarly magazines, journals, and newspapers. His most recent books include A Window into Modern Iran: The Ardeshir Zahedi Papers at the Hoover Institution Library & Archives (Hoover Institution Press, October 2019); Saadi and Humanism (in Persian), with Maryam Mirzadeh (Zemestan publisher, February 2020); and Thirty Portraits, Vol. 1 and 2 (Persian Circle, September 2022 and July 2023).
 

Or (Ori) Rabinowitz is a tenured senior lecturer (Associate Professor) at the International Relations Department of the Hebrew University and a Visiting Fellow of Israel Studies at Stanford, 2025-2026. After receiving the British Foreign Office's Chevening Scholarship, Rabinowitz completed a PhD at the War Studies Department of King’s College London in December 2011. In 2014, her book Bargaining on Nuclear Tests was published by Oxford University Press. She has published numerous peer-reviewed articles, think pieces, and op-eds in leading journals and magazines. She is the recipient of several prizes, grants, and awards, including two personal grants from the Israel Science Foundation. Her book manuscript on the evolution of US and Israeli counter-proliferation policy in the Middle East is currently under review.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

Mary Elise Sarotte received her AB in History and Science from Harvard and her PhD in History from Yale. She is an expert on the history of international relations, particularly European and US foreign policy, transatlantic relations, and Western relations with Russia. Her book, Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate, was shortlisted for both the Cundill Prize and the Duke of Wellington Medal, received the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Prize Silver Medal, and won the Pushkin House Prize for Best Non-Fiction Book on Russia. Not One Inch is now appearing in multiple Asian and European languages, including a best-selling and updated version in German, Nicht einen Schritt weiter nach Osten. In 2026, Sarotte will return to Yale for a joint appointment as a tenured professor in both the Jackson School of Global Affairs and the School of Organization and Management.

Kathryn Stoner is the Mosbacher Director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), and a Senior Fellow at CDDRL and the Center on International Security and Cooperation at FSI. From 2017 to 2021, she served as FSI's Deputy Director. She is Professor of Political Science (by courtesy) at Stanford, and she teaches in the Department of Political Science, in the Program on International Relations, as well as in the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy Program. She is also a Senior Fellow (by courtesy) at the Hoover Institution.

About the event: Multiple large bodies of scholarship engage with questions directly concerned with political violence, social unrest, and human rights abuses. Yet, efforts to collect data on these variables are fraught with challenges, and many extant empirical findings rely on data (particularly news report based events) suspected of or known to be biased in aggregate. We explore the use of anonymous, online surveying to detect otherwise unobserved activity. We run anonymous, online surveys in Bangladesh and Pakistan in the run up to, during and in the period following recent contentious 2024 elections in both countries and, separately, in the immediate aftermath of Bangladesh’s 2024 Students–People’s Uprising and expulsion of then-Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. To assess the efficacy of the surveys, we partnered with professional journalists working on both countries to verify the authenticity of reported incidents. Results confirm their effectiveness in uncovering many instances of political violence, social unrest, and human rights abuses otherwise likely to be missed/excluded from major news media reporting and ultimately major datasets derived from it. Yet, they also suggest that anonymous online survey responses and leading event datasets effectively complement, rather than substitute for, one another. Such surveys can be deployed rapidly to communicate with some of the most difficult to reach populations globally about the most sensitive political issues of interest to social scientists and policy professionals.

About the speaker: Andrew Shaver is an assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Merced. Prior to that, he completed postdoctoral research fellowships at Stanford University's Political Science Department and, separately, at Dartmouth College. Professor Shaver earned his PhD in Public Affairs (security studies) from Princeton University's School of Public and International Affairs and is the founding director of the Political Violence Lab. His research focuses on the causes, consequences, and detection and measurement of political violence and social unrest globally. His work appears in the American Political Science Review, American Economic Review, Annual Review of Sociology, and Journal of Politics, amongst other outlets. Professor Shaver previously served in different foreign affairs/national security positions within the U.S. Government.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

About the event: For years, development agencies have expanded, perceived as complements to national security with support for their autonomous administration. Today, however, issues of humanitarian aid and development are seen as increasingly linked to concerns about national security and politics, while aid skepticism is growing. The fruits of this shift were made all too clear when, in July 2025, the United States under the second Donald Trump administration merged its Agency for International Development (USAID) into its Department of State, echoing a similar move unfolding in other western donor countries. The merger in the U.S. solidified a global trend following similar mergers in the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Norway, Denmark and New Zealand. Indeed, around the world over the past thirty years, many of the world’s wealthiest countries have merged their aid and diplomacy agencies.  Although mergers are trending, are they helping countries advance their security goals? While the U.S. merger is still unfolding with many of its results yet-to-be seen, other global merger experiences offer stories that collectively indicate lessons to be learned about the rising trend to merge development and diplomacy. This presentation presents research from a review of the twenty-year history of global affairs mergers, drawing on interviews with leaders, civil servants, and activists from around the world. Considering rising Chinese development investments, ongoing fallout from COVID-19, crises in Syria, Gaza, Sudan and Ukraine, climate change, and other global challenges, can development and diplomacy truly be integrated, or do these fields require distinction for their effective delivery? How might the U.S. consider the evidence from other aid-diplomacy mergers to inform its efforts to reform global affairs administration to address connected security and development challenges? This research explores the effects of recent mergers of aid and foreign policy agencies in the context of evolving global challenges and discusses the implications for foreign policy agendas moving forward.

About the speaker: Rachel A. George, PhD is a Lecturer in International Relations at Stanford University. She is also a Research Project Lead with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a Research Fellow at Georgetown’s Institute for Women, Peace, and Security. Previously, she served as Lecturing Fellow at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy and Visiting Assistant Professor at Duke Kunshan University. She was also Director for Education Content at the Council on Foreign Relations and a Research Fellow at the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) in London.

Her work focuses on foreign policy, democracy, Middle East politics, international law, women, peace, and security, AI and other emerging technologies, and the connections between development and international security. Her research has been published in a range of outlets, including in Foreign Policy, Just Security, The Washington Quarterly, World Politics Review, The National Interest, CFR.org, Human Rights Review, and as chapters in The Arab Gulf States and the West: Perception and Misperception, Opportunities and Perils, and The Routledge History of Human Rights. She has also served as a contributor for BBC News, CNN and Arise America TV News. She has worked on projects with the UN Counter Terrorism Executive Directorate, Transparency International, The World Bank, Global Affairs Canada, Swedish International Development Agency, UN Development Program, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Packard Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, among others.

She holds a BA in Politics from Princeton University, an MA in Middle East Studies from Harvard University, and PhD in International Relations from the London School of Economics.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.