William J. Perry, in a talk at the "Innovations for Smart Green Cities: What's Working, What's Not, What's Next" conference, explained how a lack of investment in energy research and development continues America's addiction to foreign oil. He illustrated how game-changing research and events could shake up the industry.

Enrique Peña Nieto was elected Mexico's president promising to curb the drug-related violence that exploded during Felipe Calderon’s past six years in office. His victory means the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, will return to power after being defeated 12 years ago in the country’s first truly democratic election.

The PRI has a complicated history of corruption. But it also built a reputation for guaranteeing political stability and making the peace among Mexican post-revolutionary warlords during its 71 years as the country’s ruling party.

Associate professor of political science Beatriz Magaloni talks about what to expect from Peña Nieto, what his policies may mean for Mexican-U.S. relations, and how his government would likely allow drug cartels some freedom to operate in exchange for the promise of peace.

Magaloni is the director of the Program on Poverty and Governance at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

What do we know about Enrique Peña Nieto? Who is he?

His campaign slogan was “Because you know me.” But the paradox is that nobody knows him at all. He’s been the governor of Mexico State for six years, but he doesn’t have a particularly good or impressive record. There hasn’t been a lot of scrutiny of his performance, and people perceive him as a product of the media. He’s married to a soap opera star, and he’s known for his good looks – but also his shallowness. He was asked to list three books that have influenced him, and he had a lot of trouble answering the question.

Peña Nieto is the new face of an old party. What did the PRI accomplish in its 71 years of power?

Mexico had a social revolution in 1910. After the revolution there was continuous violence for almost two decades, and the PRI was created to put an end to the violence by bringing together all the post-revolutionary warlords into one single organization. The idea was they would stop killing each other and as long as they joined this organization, they would be guaranteed a piece of the pie.

The party did tame violence in Mexico, and that’s a big accomplishment. The party also has a history of social reform. They organized massive land redistribution, expanded welfare benefits to workers and oversaw moderate economic growth.

But the PRI was so successful in monopolizing power that they became increasingly corrupt. In the end, the corruption wound up destroying Mexico’s development. By the time of the PRI loss in 2000, we had more than 20 years of economic catastrophe. There was huge inflation, devaluation, unemployment, and a lot of corruption that was exceedingly destructive.

What does corruption in Mexico look like today, and how can it be addressed?

The relationships among cartels, police and politicians are very complicated throughout the country. Mexico has 31 states and one federal district. There are more than 2,400 municipalities, each with its own police force. There are also state and federal police. There are about 15 cartels, and as many as 10 different gangs operating in many of the larger cities. So in each region, you never know who the police are really working for.

The drug trade is so profitable that there are huge incentives for vast sectors of Mexican society to participate. You have to offer people opportunities and chances to make money outside of the drug market. You have to give civil society groups the room they need to grow and influence communities. Tijuana has been successful in turning things around. There was a big push to engage entrepreneurs and make them understand it was up to them to reclaim the city. They helped support the arts and culture. And, most importantly, they gave young people opportunities.

There have been at least 50,000 drug-related killings during Calderon’s term. Why has it been such a bloody six years?

This is a big debate. Some people blame Calderon’s policy of attacking the cartels, which they say forced them to strike back with more force. They say that if he didn’t do that, Mexico wouldn’t be as violent as it is now. Implicit in that critique is that Mexico shouldn’t have done anything about the drug problem. This is the argument that PRI is capitalizing on now – this notion that things were better off when we did nothing.

The other argument from Calderon and his supporters is that criminal organizations were already out of control when he took office. He said cartels were the de facto power holders in vast areas of the territory throughout Mexico, and the government had to do something about it to regain control.

How will the drug war shift?

Peña Nieto says he’s going to control the violence more than fight the cartels. So that’s implying that you have to let the cartels operate. Wars are ended with either a pact or a victory. There can be no victory as long as the drug market is as lucrative as it is. So you need a pact that says as long as the cartels don’t kill or kidnap or do violence, they can operate. But the problem with that is they will continue to be extremely powerful and in control of state institutions. It is very hard to draw the line between that kind of pact and absolute state corruption. I fear it’s hard to reach that pact without acknowledging that Mexico will never have rule of law.

It is clear that we cannot continue with the violence as it is. That’s the biggest thing that needs to be addressed. People are suffering so much. Crimes are not being solved. There is no real sense of justice.

As Mexico’s neighbor and the largest consumer of drugs moving out of Mexico, what role does the United States need to play in reducing the violence?

Much of the problem is about the demand for drugs in the U.S. That’s the source. But people aren’t going to stop consuming drugs. So you need to do something about the legal nature of drugs. Making all drug use and trafficking into an illegal activity is what’s fueling a lot of the violence. So if you legalize drugs – that doesn’t mean you sell them as freely as you sell alcohol, but you can sell them under legal regulation – I think violence will be reduced. And if the United States doesn’t become more engaged and rethink its policies, the violence is going to eventually come across its borders.

He’s been a presidential adviser, academic administrator, scholar and mentor.
But listening to those who best know Coit Blacker talk about his professional achievements is to hear people describe a close friend nearly everyone calls “Chip.”

“One of the reasons Chip has been so successful as a leader is that he is simply a good guy,” said Condoleezza Rice, who first met Blacker at Stanford in the early 1980s – long before she would become the university’s provost and later serve as President George W. Bush’s secretary of state.

“Great leaders are first and foremost good people,” Rice said.

After a decade leading Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Blacker is stepping down from the position on Aug. 31. He will be succeeded by President Emeritus Gerhard Casper.

Following a yearlong sabbatical, Blacker plans to return to campus and continue teaching about foreign policy – a topic he mastered through academic research and as President Bill Clinton’s special assistant for national security affairs and senior director of Russian, Ukrainian and Eurasian affairs at the National Security Council.

Reading letters written by Clinton, former national security adviser Sandy Berger and Michael McFaul – the U.S. ambassador to Russia and FSI senior fellow who studied closely with Blacker – Rice capped a lineup of colleagues, students and donors who honored the departing director during a farewell reception held June 14 at the Cantor Arts Center.

“Under your directorship, the institute has enhanced its status as one of the globe’s most prominent and influential centers for the study of international relations,” Clinton wrote. “The institute’s research is helping us move toward a more stable, sustainable and equitable world in this age of interdependence. In addition to your devotion to Stanford, I will always be grateful for your outstanding work at the National Security Council during my presidency.”

Nearly 20 years before joining the Clinton administration in 1995, Blacker arrived at Stanford as a postdoctoral fellow in the university's Arms Control and Disarmament Program. He lectured and taught through the 1980s, becoming a popular professor known for working closely with his students.

“I saw in him a mentor who not only excelled in his field, but did so with intellectual fortitude, integrity, and a deep-seeded sense of service to which I only hoped I could aspire,” said Theo Milonopoulos, a former student of Blacker’s who is now a Fulbright Scholar at King’s College London.

In 1991, Blacker became a senior fellow at the Institute for International Studies – the precursor to FSI. He was appointed as the institute’s deputy director in 1998, and took over as director five years later.

Under Blacker’s tenure, FSI expanded its number of research centers from four to seven, and grew its faculty from 21 to 32 professors. The institute’s endowment is nearly $200 million, up from $122 million in 2002.

“FSI has really become the jewel in the crown of Stanford’s interdisciplinary institutes under Chip’s leadership,” said Ann Arvin, Stanford’s dean of research. “I hesitate to say how many times I have advised others to just ask Chip how they do it at FSI – whatever `it’ may be.”

Continuing to move between the academic and political worlds, Blacker advised Vice President Al Gore on foreign policy issues during the 2000 presidential race.

Back at Stanford a year later, he was awarded the Laurence and Naomi Carpenter Hoagland Prize for undergraduate teaching, and was named the Olivier Nomellini Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education in 2002.

Even surrounded by faculty at Stanford, Blacker was never far from policymakers in Washington and working abroad. In a letter read by Rice, McFaul wrote directly to his old teacher.

“You have been and remain one of my most important mentors,” McFaul wrote. “I have not made a single decision in my professional career without first seeking your advice.”

“Chip has had a distinguished career – not just as a scholar, not just as a teacher – but of course as a policymaker,” Rice said. “It is that wonderful sensibility for what policymakers need and listen to that helps him to translate Stanford and its great research for the policy world.”

In 2005, Blacker was instrumental in securing a $50 million naming gift from Brad Freeman and Ronald Spogli, partners in a private equity investment firm.

“We believed very much in the guiding principal of interdisciplinary research which is at the core of FSI today,” said Spogli, a former U.S. ambassador to Italy and San Marino. “But the most important reason that we made our gift is Chip Blacker. We believed in Chip as the leader who would be able to take FSI to a new and greater level.”

Much of Blacker’s success has revolved around his development and support of FSI’s faculty. Stephen Krasner, FSI’s deputy director who has worked with Blacker for about 20 years, praised his friend and colleague for fostering an environment where researchers are eager to collaborate and share ideas.

“From the outside – when Chip does these things – they all look flawless, effortless, perfectly organized, well structured,” Krasner said. “From the inside, you can see how astute, wise and generous Chip has been in developing FSI and its faculty and activities.”

 

The president, surrounded by his Cabinet members and senior national security and foreign policy advisors, appears grim as he declares: “This is certainly the greatest crisis I’ve ever faced as a president.”

He has ordered the deployment of U.S. forces into Syrian territory to protect civilians and establish safe zones. His Cabinet must now determine whether to order a pre-emptive strike against Syrian troops on word from the CIA that the Bashar al-Assad regime appears ready to use chemical and biological weapons stored in underground bunkers east of Damascus.

After a military briefing by the commander of CENTCOM, the president cautions those assembled at the classified briefing: “Remember, history will judge us, in part, by how thoroughly we discuss all the options today.”

With imagined top-secret memorandums from the CIA and the White House – as well as the real-deal Obama Nuclear Posture Review – some 20 Stanford undergraduate and law students dressed in suits and armed with laptops and position papers spend three hours debating the merits of an attack on Syrian forces.

Scott Sagan, a political science professor and senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), plays Obama in the class co-taught by Allen Weiner, director of the Center on International Conflict and Negotiation at the Law School.

The Ethics and Law of War class presents law and political science students with some of the political, legal and moral consequences of war. For their final simulation, they must stay in character, grill one another as policymakers and world leaders might do behind closed doors – and then defend their final decisions.

“Instead of simply learning abstract just-war theory or international law doctrine, the simulations encourage students to apply what they've learned to real problems,” says Weiner, once a legal adviser at the State Department. “This provides for much deeper awareness of the subject matter and richer appreciation of the nuances and complexities.

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Scott Sagan as President Obama

 

Ethics & War

The class grew out of Stanford’s hugely successful, two-year War & Ethics lecture series, which concluded last month. Philosophers, writers, journalists, historians, social scientists, human rights activists and policy makers came together several times a month to grapple with the complex ethical equations of war. Co-sponsored by a dozen centers and departments across campus, the series drew big names and big crowds.

Vietnam War veterans and award winning authors Tobias Wolff – a Stanford English professor – and Tim O’Brien told a sold-out audience that writing about war was both therapeutic and heartbreaking. O’Brien was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for “The Things They Carried,” a harrowing string of stories about a platoon of American soldiers in Vietnam.

How do you write about war? “You do it sentence by sentence, line by line, character by character, even syllable by syllable,’ O’Brien told a mesmerized audience. “You dive into that wreck and try to salvage something.”

Journalist Sebastian Junger spoke at the screening of  “Restrepo,” his documentary about the Afghanistan War. Stanford students and faculty performed in George Packer’s play, “Betrayed,” which illuminated the U.S. abandonment of young Iraqi interpreters who risked their lives for Washington during the Iraq War. For the final event, Debra Satz, a philosophy professor and director of the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society, Sagan, and Charles Dunlap, a retired Air Force general who now leads the Center on Law, Ethics and National Security at Duke University, debated the future ethical challenges of war.

Sagan, an expert in nuclear policy and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction who worked at the Pentagon and was a consultant to the Secretary of Defense, said the lecture series enriched his students by forcing them to pay attention and question the moral and legal underpinnings of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“I was stretched, intellectually, by this series,” he said. “It encouraged me to read and discuss both fiction and philosophy that raises the same ethical issues – from a very different perspective – that we analyze in political science.”

Back to class

Weiner, as stand-in for Vice President Joe Biden, tells those assembled they must consider that within 24 hours, 6,000 American troops will be in danger. The CIA has a “high degree of confidence” that Assad has ordered the removal of the chemical weapons from the underground bunkers and transport trucks have been spotted at the sights.

“As we head into an election cycle, the difficulties of the decision that we make today will be placed under even greater scrutiny,” Weiner says.

That decision will be to make one of these hard choices:

• The U.S. military withdraws its troops and avoids a military confrontation, but risks further civilian deaths and the condemnation of Arab Spring allies;
• Obama orders conventional airstrikes against Syrian troops, which could lead to thousands of inadvertent civilian casualties;
• Washington takes extraordinary measures and uses nuclear weapons to destroy the underground storage bunkers for its weapons of mass destruction. This last option likely would eliminate any chance of Syrian troops using chemical weapons, but it would open a Pandora’s box for the Nobel Peace Prize president who has pledged to work toward a nuclear-free world.

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U.S. Army Col. Viet Luong as CENTCOM Commander Gen. James Mattis

The students know Americans are weary of war after the WMD fiasco in Iraq and a decade-long war in Afghanistan, both of which have claimed countless lives and a trillion-plus in taxpayer dollars. Their decision – as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, among others – is weighted by the concern that Americans likely won’t re-elect a president who drags them into another costly warm, and by the fear that a successful president cannot let American troops be exposed to deadly chemical attacks.

The mock military briefing by Gen. James Mattis – played by visiting CISAC military fellow, U.S. Army Col. Viet Luong, himself a commander in Afghanistan – lays out the risks and probabilities of casualties under each scenario.

A student asks Luong which military option he would recommend.

The general prevaricates: “I’m a military guy; I tend to lean toward success and then I also consider civilian casualties. But I’m also very concerned about putting my soldiers at risk.”

Clinton, voiced by international policy student Micaela Hellman-Tincher, says she’s concerned about mission creep. “Consider the international implications of us entering into conflict,” she says.

The fake Samantha Power of the National Security Council, played by Ashley Rhoades, urges diplomatic measures and a stand-down from military conflict. “I’m not advocating in any way for inaction,” she says. “There are several diplomatic solutions. We ask that you give us 24 hours to be able to work on these diplomatic options and multilateral diplomacy.”

Such as what? Such as calling on Moscow to mediate or seeking a U.N. envoy.

The legal team from the law school lays out their arguments for why a preventive strike would be illegal under certain conventions; while a pre-emptive strike based on imminent and unavoidable threats of attack might be permissible.

Then Stanford law student Alex Weber – playing Avril Haines, legal advisor to the National Security Council – addresses the elephant in the room: the nuclear option.

“If you use a nuclear weapon, regardless of whether the Syrians use chemical weapons against our troops, you are, as Colin Powell said in the 1991 Gulf War, opening a Pandora’s Box, particularly because Syria has no nuclear weapon,” Weber says. “You are the nuclear nonproliferation president. There is a psychological button that you push that will prompt the media to take the ethical debate to new levels.”

In the end, consensus appears to be growing around an immediate preventive strike against the storage bunkers using conventional forces. The Cabinet knows this could lead to deaths on both sides, but allowing the Syrians to use chemical weapons could lead to even more.

“You can’t cut and run, Mr. President,” insists student Torry Castellano, playing White House Chief of Staff Jacob Lew.

Obama says he will take their advice under advisement and all rise as he leaves the war room.

 

More photos of the student simulation are available at CISAC's Facebook page.