Michael McFaul, the next director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies who recently returned from his position as U.S. Ambassador to Russia, joins Karl Eikenberry, the former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan and the William J. Perry Fellow in International Security at CISAC, to discuss the current state of foreign policy. The Nov. 11, 2014, talk was part of the fall course, "State of the Union,"  which examined major themes that contribute to the health, or disease, of the U.S. body politic.

Led by Rob Reich (Political Science), David Kennedy (History), and James Steyer (CEO, Common Sense Media), the course brought together distinguished analysts of American politics who noted that we live in an age of rising inequality, dazzling technological innovation, economic volatility, geopolitical uncertainty, and the accumulating impact of climate change. These conditions confront our political leaders and us as citizens of a democracy plagued by dysfunction.

The recently manifested massive failure of America's intervention in Iraq has led outside observers to speculate that the ongoing rapid drawdown of international military forces in Afghanistan will lead to similar chaos in that country, Karl Eikenberry writes in this Foreign Policy commentary about the new Asia Foundation survey of the Afghan People.

Eikenberry notes that Ahmed Rashid, a commentator on Afghanistan security issues and author of the superb book Taliban, wrote in a recentNew York Times op-ed that the U.S. troop withdrawal plan formulated in 2009 "is proving catastrophically wrong now." Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham warned two months ago: "If the President repeats his mistakes from Iraq and withdraws all U.S. troops from Afghanistan, based on a certain date on a calendar, we fear a similar failure will unfold ... as we have seen Iraq."

Eikenberry, the William J. Perry Fellow in International Security at CISAC and former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan, writes that the Asia Foundation's just-released 2014 Survey of the Afghan People indicates that while the Afghans do worry about the future of their country, they by no means share the deep pessimism of the foreign prophets of doom who assert that it is only a matter of time until the disaster on the Euphrates is repeated on the Kabul River. Comparing the attitudes of the Afghan and Iraqi people on key political, security, and economic issues helps explain why this is so.

Journalist Barton Gellman had left his job at The Washington Post and was working on a book about surveillance and privacy in America when he was contacted last year by someone using the code-name VERAX, or “truth teller” in Latin.

So began one of the most dramatic chapters in the history of modern American journalism – and government surveillance. In the spring of 2013, Gellman began having remote, encrypted exchanges with someone who clearly had inside knowledge of the NSA's global and domestic surveillance programs. 

“He was trying to figure out whether he could trust me and ... I was trying to figure out if he was for real,” Gellman told a packed Stanford audience Monday night.

Last December, he traveled to Moscow to put a face to the code-name and determine whether the information he was providing was accurate.

“All extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence – and he was providing that.," Gellman said of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. "I was convinced fairly early on that I was dealing with something fairly serious.”

So Gellman went back to The Washington Post, where he had been on teams that won two Pulitzer Prizes for their coverage of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the power and influence of Vice President Dick Cheney during the Bush administration.

“I went there because I trusted them and because I wanted their resources and their advice,” he told the audience of some 600 people at the CEMEX Auditorium on Monday. The Washington Post would go on to win the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, shared with The Guardian US, for their reporting on the Snowden materials and the NSA.

Gellman today is a senior fellow at The Century Foundation and a visiting professional specialist and author-in-residence at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He is the author of Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency and is currently working on a book about the Snowden affair.

Snowden’s explosive disclosures about the National Security Agency’s intelligence-collection operations have ignited an intense debate about the appropriate balance between security and liberty in America.

In a special series this academic year at Stanford University, nationally prominent experts are exploring the critical issues raised by the NSA’s activities, including their impact on our security, privacy and civil liberties.

Amy Zegart, co-director of CISAC and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, launched the “Security Conundrum” series in October with its first speaker, Gen. Michael Hayden, the former director of the NSA and CIA who defended the government surveillance programs. The metadata collection “is something we would have never done on Sept. 9 or Sept. 10,” Hayden told Zegart during their conversation on Oct.  8. “But it seemed reasonable after Sept. 11. No one is doing this out of prurient interests. No – it was a logical response to the needs of the moment.”

Zegart, in introducing Gellman, said: “Tonight, we move from inside the NSA to inside the newsroom, which played a key role in revealing the NSA’s secret activities over the past year.”

All Photos by Rod Searcey

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In the second lecture in the “Security Conundrum” series, Gellman was in conversation with Philip Taubman, former correspondent and Washington and Moscow bureau chief for The New York Times and a consulting professor with Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). Taubman teaches the class Need to Know: The Tension Between a Free Press and National Security Decision Making.

Gellman recounted his dealings with Snowden and described how he and his editors weighed the Snowden materials. Few questions are more difficult for American journalists than determining how far a free press can venture in disclosing national security secrets without imperiling the nation’s security.

“I asked him very bluntly, `Why are you doing this?’” Gellman said of Snowden.

“He gave me very persuasive and consistent answers about his motives. Whatever you think of what he did or whether or not I should have published these stories, I would claim to you that all the evidence supports his claim that he had come across a dangerous accumulation of state power that we, the people, needed to know about.”

One of the first Snowden revelations, Gellman said, was the top-secret PRISM surveillance program, in which the NSA is allowed to tap into the servers of nine large U.S. Internet companies, including Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook and Skype. Snowden believed the extent of mass data collection about American citizens was far greater than what the public knew.

The Post reported that PRISM allows the U.S. intelligence community to gain access from the Silicon Valley firms to a wide range of digital information, including audio, video chats, photographs, emails and stored data that enable analysts to track foreign targets. The program does not require individual warrants, but instead operates under the broader authorization of the federal Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court.

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The FISA Court had also been ordering a subsidiary of Verizon Communications to turn over to the NSA logs tracking all of its customers’ telephone calls.

Gellman said Snowden asked for a guarantee the Post would publish the full text of a PowerPoint presentation that he had obtained describing the PRISM program. Gellman told him that his editors would not make any guarantees about what they would publish and in the end the paper only reproduced several slides so as not to harm national security.

Taubman asked Gellman what gives any journalist the right to publish classified documents and not hand those papers back to the NSA.

“I’m not accountable to anyone for my decisions about what is in the interest or not in the interest of the national security of the United States,” Gellman said. “What happens is the government tries to keep information a secret and I try to find it out – and then when that spillage happens, well, then we talk.”

In the case of PRISM, he sent emails to two “quite senior people” in the government and told them this was the type of email he only sends once every several years, when he is onto a big story they would want to know about. But he didn’t want to do anything over email, so when the senior officials called, Gellman gave them the title of the document about which he was going to write.

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That started the negotiations with the government and The Washington Post. In the end, the paper only published several of the government’s PowerPoint slides that explained the PRISM program because they were concerned about harming national security.

“We had no interest in doing that; we only had an interest in writing about the public policy question on a program that had secretly expanded in ways that almost no one knew about,” Gellman said. “To the extent that it involves drawing new boundaries allowing the government to spy on its citizens and the citizens never get to know that – that is quite relevant to know when you’re trying to decide whether you like what your government is doing.”

In a statement responding to the PRISM revelations by the Post, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said information collection under the program “is among the most important and valuable foreign intelligence information we collect, and is used to protect our nation from a wide variety of threats.”

Clapper called the Snowden leaks about the legal program “reprehensible and risks important protections for the security of Americans.”

Gellman said Snowden has turned down million-dollar book and movie deals and lives in  “ascetic” asylum in Russia. Snowden told NBC News earlier this year that he was on his way from Hong Kong to Latin America, via Moscow, when his passport was confiscated and that Russia then granted him a one-year asylum.

“He is fascinating to me because he’s an unusual figure,” Gellman told Taubman, who had asked him what Snowden was like. He said the 31-year-old former systems administrator for the CIA did something most Americans would not: He gave up his personal freedom and changed the course of his life to make public the government surveillance programs that he believes are a danger to the American people.

“He described himself to me once as an indoor cat,” Gellman said. “He lives in a virtual world; there’s not a whole lot of difference for Snowden whether he’s living in Moscow or Hawaii – he’s is what I would call a net native. He has an ascetic personality; he doesn’t have or want very much stuff.”

Gellman added: “He is sort of Zen-like in his confidence that he has done the right thing.”

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The Security Conundrum series is co-sponsored by CISAC, Hoover, and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford Continuing Studies, Stanford in Government and the Stanford Law School.

Other nationally prominent speakers will include Reggie Walton, the former presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Asia-Pacific leaders recently met in Beijing at the annual APEC summit, and after two days of discussion, concluded with some significant pledges and remarkable moments. President Xi Jinping of China and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan held a landmark meeting, and the United States and China discussed two agreements that are both symbolic, and lay groundwork for regional progress, say Stanford scholars.

High-level intergovernmental meetings are often more theatre than substance, but this year the 21-member Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, the oldest trans-Pacific regional organization, delivered important messages and may spur actions by member governments.

“Any summit is a ‘hurry up, get this done’ motivator,” says Thomas Fingar, the Oksenberg-Rohlen Distinguished Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. “The head of state goes to the meeting – and generally speaking – he doesn’t want to arrive and say ‘my guys were asleep for the last year.’”

Fingar says the APEC summit prodded countries to work on “deliverables,” particularly the goals and projects on the agenda from previous meetings. He recently returned from Beijing, and shared his perspectives with students in the Asia-Pacific Scholars Program.

Writing for the East Asia Forum, Donald Emmerson, director of the Southeast Asia Program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, said many of the commitments declared at the APEC summit, and at the subsequent meetings of the G20 in Australia and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in Myanmar, will have implications for global governance, particularly as China holds a more influential role in the region.

APEC countries account for over 40 percent of the world’s population and nearly half of global trade – and true to form, the grand vision of the summit is to advance regional economic integration.

Yet, “the ancillary things – things that went on in the margins – are in many ways more important,” Fingar says, referring to areas outside of the summit’s obvious focus, and what’s discussed on the sidelines of the public talks.

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Key outcomes from the 2014 gathering include:

• The leaders of Japan and China met for the first time since coming into office, afterward acknowledging that the two countries have “disagreements” in their official statements. Of the Xi-Abe meeting, Fingar says, “it helps clear the way for lower level bureaucrats to go to work on real issues."

• The United States and China announced a proposal to extend visas for students and businesspeople on both sides. While the immediate effects would be helpful, the change is symbolically superior. “You don’t give 5-10 year visas to adversaries,” he says, it shows that “‘we’re in [the relationship] for the long-term.’”

• China proposed the development of a new “Silk Road,” pledging $40 billion in resources toward infrastructure projects shared with South and Central Asian neighbors. “It’s tying the region together and creating economy-of-scale possibilities for other countries,” he says. “A real win-win situation.”

• The United States and China, the world’s two largest energy consumers, announced bilateral plans to cut carbon emissions over the next two decades. “It’s significant because those two countries must be the ones to lead the world in this area. Unless we are seen to be in basic agreement, others will hold back.”

• China codified the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), a global financial institution intended as an alternative to institutions like the World Bank. “China has been frustrated with its role in existing international institutions,” Fingar says, explaining a likely motivation behind the AIIB’s creation.

Emmerson said the outcomes of the APEC summit from the U.S.-China standpoint were better than expected, speaking to McClatchy News. The visa and climate deals, as well as their commitment to lowering global tariffs on IT products, will lessen chances of conflict between the two countries. 

However, the summit did leave some areas unsolved. One of the most important is the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade pact proposed by the United States that includes 11 others countries in the region, but does not yet include China.

Leaders “made positive noises” coming out of the TPP discussions, Fingar says, but nothing was passed. The gravity and complexity of trade-related issues, especially agriculture and intellectual property, is likely to blame for slow action.

Michael McFaul, a Stanford political scientist and former U.S. ambassador to Russia, has been selected as the next director of the university’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

The announcement was made Wednesday by Stanford Provost John Etchemendy and Ann Arvin, the university’s vice provost and dean of research. McFaul will succeed Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, who was nominated in July as an associate justice of the California Supreme Court and elected Tuesday.

McFaul takes the helm of FSI in January.

"Stanford has long been a home for scholars who connect academia to policy and public service, and Professor McFaul is the embodiment of that model," Etchemendy said. "We are grateful for Mike's service and confident he will be a strong leader for FSI."

Arvin said McFaul is a strong fit for the position.

“Professor McFaul’s background as an outstanding scholar and his service as an influential ambassador give him a vital perspective to lead FSI, which is Stanford’s hub for studying and understanding international policy issues,” she said. “His scholarship, experience and energy will keep FSI and Stanford at the forefront of international studies as well as some of the most pressing global policy debates."

McFaul has been a faculty member in the department of political science at Stanford since 1994.  He joined the Obama administration in January 2009, serving for three years as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Russian and Eurasian Affairs at the National Security Council at the White House. He then served as U.S. Ambassador to the Russian Federation from 2012 to 2014.

McFaul already has a deep affiliation with FSI. Before joining the government, he served as FSI deputy director from 2006 to 2009.  He also directed FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) from 2005 to 2009.

During his four years leading CDDRL, McFaul launched the Draper Hills Summer Fellowship program for mid-career lawyers, politicians, advocates and business leaders working to shore up democratic institutions in their home countries. He also established CDDRL’s senior honors program.  From 1992-1994, McFaul also worked as a Senior Research Fellow at FSI’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC).

“I am thrilled to be assuming a leadership role again at FSI,” McFaul said.  “FSI has become one of the premier institutions in the country for policy-relevant research on international affairs.  I look forward to using my recent government experience to deepen further FSI’s impact on policy debates in Washington and around the world.”

Arvin said McFaul’s previous positions at FSI and CDDRL will make for a smooth transition in the institute’s leadership.

“His familiarity with FSI’s history and infrastructure will allow him to start this new position with an immediate focus on the institute’s academic mission,” she said.

McFaul is also the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and plans to build on his long affiliations with both Hoover and FSI to deepen cooperation between these two premier public policy institutions on campus.

He has written and co-authored dozens of books including Advancing Democracy Abroad: Why We Should, How We Can; Transitions To Democracy: A Comparative Perspective (with Kathryn Stoner); Power and Purpose: American Policy toward Russia after the Cold War (with James Goldgeier); and Russia’s Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin.

“In so many ways, Mike represents the best of FSI,” said Cuéllar, who has held leadership positions at FSI since 2004 and begins his term on the California Supreme Court in January. “He knows the worlds of academia and policy extremely well, and will bring unique experience and sound judgment to his new role at FSI.”

McFaul currently serves as a news analyst for NBC News, appearing frequently on NBC, MSNBC, and CNBC as a commentator on international affairs. He also appears frequently on The Charlie Rose Show and The Newshour, as well as PBS and BBC radio programs. He has recently published essays in Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, Politico, and Time. 

McFaul was one of the first U.S. ambassadors to actively use social media for public diplomacy. He still maintains an active presence on Facebook at amb.mcfaul and on Twitter at @McFaul.

McFaul received his B.A. in International Relations and Slavic Languages and his M.A. in Russian and East European Studies from Stanford University in 1986.  As a Rhodes Scholar, he completed his D. Phil. in International Relations at Oxford University in 1991.

“Since coming here in 1981 as 17-year-old kid from Montana, Stanford has provided me with tremendous opportunities to grow as a student, scholar, and policymaker,” McFaul said. “I now look forward to giving back to Stanford by contributing to the development of one of the most vital and innovative institutions on campus.” 

Perception can often trump facts in politics, and the topic of security in East Asia isn’t exempt from this reality, exemplified by the dominance of China’s “rise” and Japan’s  “ramped up” defense posture in current policy debates. Yet, those dynamics create a need as well as an opportunity for increased multilateral engagement, says Thomas Fingar, the Oksenberg-Rohlen Distinguished Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

“Developments in China and Japan should be viewed as creating new opportunities and imperatives to deepen multilateral co-operation,” Fingar writes in a Global Asia essay.

“It would be a mistake to view them only as the cause of eroding confidence in the co-operative mechanisms that remain critical to peace and prosperity in the region.”

China’s rise has actually been a result of policies supported by the United States and other countries, despite prevailing commentary that they are intended to “contain” China, he says. In fact, Beijing’s rise was achieved by working within the rules-based international system, not outside of it.

China’s actions and growing power, especially military power, are compelling other regional actors, notably Japan, to reconsider their strategic situation. The reinterpretation of defense policy guidelines proposed by the Abe government is a long-delayed response to China’s military buildup, not an effort to remilitarize as a popular narrative holds. Fingar says the proposed relaxation of self-imposed policy constraints on Japan’s military forces could help pave the way for a future collective security arrangement in Northeast Asia.

So, where does this leave the U.S.-South Korea relationship?

He says the two countries can maintain their bilateral commitments while also deepening partnerships with, and between China and Japan. Both the United States and South Korea can help push for improved ties on trade and regional security issues. 

“We need continued bilateral – and increased multilateral – co-operation,” he says, particularly, “to mange the challenges of a nuclear-armed North Korea.”

The full article can be viewed on the FSI website.