Heads of international organizations and foreign policy leaders from around the world met in Berlin, Germany on July 15 and 16 to discuss the future of international security and cooperation. Convened by the Managing Global Insecurity Project (MGI) and the Bertelsmann Stiftung, the event -"Responsible Sovereignty: International Cooperation for a Changed World" -was the MGI project's fifth and capstone advisory group conference. The Berlin meeting was convened by three members of MGI's Advisory Group - Strobe Talbott, Brookings President; EU High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy Javier Solana; and Wolfgang Ischinger, Chairman of the Munich Security Conference - in partnership with Gunther Thielen, Chairman and Chief Executive of the Bertlesmann Foundation.

Also in attendance were the co-directors of the Managing Global Insecurity Project, Stephen J. Stedman, CISAC Senior Fellow and Director of the Ford Dorsey Program in International Policy Studies at Stanford University, Carlos Pascual, Brookings Vice President and Director for Foreign Policy, and Bruce Jones, Senior Fellow and Co-Director of the New York University Center on International Cooperation (CIC). The MGI advisory group is made up of U.S. Bipartisan and international leaders.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon; German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier; and Rajendra Pachauri, Nobel Peace Prize winner and Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change opened the event. Notable international officials and other participants included Mohamed El Baradei, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency; former Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin; former Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov; former Indian Foreign Minister Lalit Mansingh; and former U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Sadako Ogata. Also present were Francis Deng, Ban Ki-moon's Special Advisor for the Prevention of Genocide and the originator of the idea of Responsible Sovereignty in the 1990s.

The meeting brought together high-level representatives from influential nations with members of the MGI Advisory Group and world leaders on climate change, nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament, and conflict prevention and response. In particular, the session focused on the idea that all states, whatever their politics and interests, share duties to their citizens and to each other in tackling common threats like terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and global climate change. The goal of the Berlin session was to generate momentum toward a 2009-2010 campaign to expand global partnerships and rejuvenate international cooperation to address today's most pressing global challenges.

One of the more remarkable underreported stories of 2008 was a speech in which the State department’s legal adviser John Bellinger admitted that there “are also realities about the International Criminal Court that the United States must accept.” He also stated that the Bush administration would work with the Court to maximize its chances of success in Darfur. Bellinger did not say that the United States might actually join the Court, but acknowledged that it enjoyed widespread international support and legitimacy, and that the United States could fruitfully cooperate with it on areas of mutual benefit.

Neither mea culpa nor volte-face, the speech nonetheless indicates the distance the administration has traveled in seven years. While Bellinger’s oratory went largely unnoticed by foreign policy wonks and the attentive public alike, it did not escape the scrutiny of John Bolton, who dismissed it as Clinton-era “pabulum” and reflective of “the yearning the Rice State Department has for acceptance” by academics and foreign intellectuals. He added ominously, “the fight resumes after Jan. 20.”

Bolton has been a powerful influence on Republican foreign policy for the last twenty years. Before his appointment as ambassador to the United Nations in 2005—which was achieved without Senate confirmation—Bolton dominated arms-control policy in the first Bush term. He killed the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, negotiations with North Korea, and the Biological Weapons Convention verification protocol. During the Clinton years, he campaigned tirelessly from his Heritage Foundation perch for missile defense and against global governance, which he seems to equate with global government. In 1998, when then-Secretary-General of the United Nations Kofi Annan released a report critical of both the United Nations secretariat and member states for the failure to prevent genocide in Srebrenica, Bolton chastized Annan for having the temerity to criticize governments for what they did or did not do in the former Yugoslavia. He added menacingly: “I think if he continues down this road, ultimately it means war, at least with the Republican Party.”

Bolton came of age politically during Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign. The future policy heavyweight was a high schooler in Baltimore at the time. He honed his conservatism at Yale College and Yale Law School, ducked Vietnam through a National Guard posting (“looking back, I am not terribly proud of this calculation”), and got his first taste of Washington as an intern to Spiro Agnew. During the Bush Sr. presidency, Bolton was Assistant Secretary for International Organization Affairs in James Baker’s State Department, and was one of the first people who Baker called when he needed a posse of chad-disputing lawyers in Florida in November 2000. Bolton’s name keeps showing up in various articles about the fight inside the Republican Party for the soul of John McCain’s foreign policy.

All of this makes it imperative to read his memoirs, which clarify the stakes in the forthcoming election. Although it is hard to imagine Bolton in a McCain administration—his memoirs offend so many within his party, across the aisle, and overseas, that Bolton could not win Senate confirmation for capitol dog-catcher—Bolton will be plotting, pressing, and pushing to force McCain’s foreign policy back to the unilateralism of George Bush’s first term, when the war on terror meant never having to say you’re sorry. And there are important national security posts that do not require Senate approval.

The memoir reads like an international relations primer done in the style of a modern morality tale—imagine Kenneth Waltz's classic Man, the State, and War as written by Ayn Rand.

To Bolton, the United Nations is a “target rich environment,” and I had a front row seat to watch his gunslinging. In 2005 I served as Special Adviser to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. I was responsible for developing member-state support for his efforts to overhaul the United Nations. In that capacity, I was in Brussels in March 2005 when President Bush nominated Bolton as Ambassador to the United Nations. One high-ranking EU official recoiled in horror, and, to share his agita, repeated two of Bolton’s more famous lines: that “UN headquarters could lose ten floors and no one would know the difference,” and that “there was no United Nations.” How in the world, the official asked, could such a man be Ambassador to the United Nations?

Amidst nodding heads and shared pained looks, I offered that if I could pick the ten floors, I would agree with Bolton. Moreover, I said, any sentient being who spends time in Turtle Bay—the Manhattan site of the United Nations—will at some point in frustration say to themselves that there is no United Nations. Bolton’s sin was to say it publicly. Finally, I suggested that John Bolton was irrelevant: “If the President of the United States and the Secretary of State want a strong, effective United Nations, then Bolton will have to deliver. If they don’t, you could have John Kerry as the U.S. ambassador, and nothing will happen.”

Oh well; win some, lose some. Which is what Condoleeza Rice is rumored to have told a friend who asked how John Bolton could have possibly been nominated for the position under her watch.

Or more accurately, I was half right, half wrong. Reading this book, one can almost feel sorry for how unsuited Bolton was for his new job. For four years he had been the point man for breaking American commitments abroad, insulting allies and enemies alike, ditching the ABM Treaty, and unsigning the Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court (“my happiest moment at State”). In the heady days of the first Bush administration, when it believed the United States was so powerful it could get anything that it wanted without friends, partners, or institutions, Bolton was the “say no” guy, a job he performed with great brio. How could he know that in 2005 his big boss, the President, and his nominal boss, the Secretary of State, would actually decide that international cooperation was necessary, and that maybe we should start worrying about America’s free fall in world opinion? A pit bull in the first term, Bolton would be a yap dog in the second, grating on the Secretary of State, the President, and most American allies.

Almost sorry, for whatever else you say about John Bolton, he is not of the “we can disagree without being disagreeable” school of American politics. This is one of the nastiest, pettiest memoirs in the annals of American diplomatic history. Among the many targets of insults and catty remarks are former and present U.K. ambassadors to the United Nations Emyr Jones Parry, Adam Thomson (“I could never look at or listen to Thomson without immediately thinking of Harry [Potter] and all his little friends”), and John Sawers; recent U.K. foreign ministers; just about every UN civil servant mentioned; indeed, just about every U.S. civil servant mentioned, along with countless journalists and politicians.

The memoir reads like an international relations primer done in the style of a modern morality tale—imagine Kenneth Waltz’s classic Man, the State, and War as written by Ayn Rand. Bolton, usually singlehandedly, takes on what he calls the High Minded, the Normers (those who create international norms of behavior or try to “[whip] the United States into line with leftist views of the way the world should look”), the EAPeasers (career State Department officials who advocate negotiations with North Korea), the Risen Bureaucracy, the Crusaders of Compromise, the Arms Control True Believers, and the EUroids.

The book has the formulaic allegories typical of the genre—the young, innocent female (Kristen Silverberg, Assistant Secretary for International Organization Affairs) driven to tears after being berated by the cold-hearted career bureaucrat (Nicholas Burns); the noble knight (Bolton himself) fighting against the political higher ups who care only about “positioning themselves” (Rice) or their legacy (Colin Powell). And of course Bolton’s plaintive cries that the 2005-06 changes in administration policy occurred against the will of the President. One sees the peasants now: ‘If only the King knew what was happening, this would never go on.’

Now add a heaping dose of xenophobia. Foreigners, appeasing foreigners, foreigners claiming to know us better than we know ourselves: all loom large in Bolton’s memoirs. He insults the former Swedish foreign minister and President of the General Assembly Jan Eliasson as not only having “an ethereal Hammarskjöldian vision problem, but also a Gunnar Myrdal problem, yet another foreigner who ‘understood’ us better than we did ourselves.” (This is the Myrdal who shared the 1974 Nobel Prize in Economics with Friedrich Hayek, and whose classic book on race, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, was cited in Brown v. Board of Education.) At one point in his belittlement of a Bush political appointee, a special assistant to Condoleeza Rice, no less, Bolton adds that she was “a naturalized citizen originally from Pakistan,” in case we wondered why she could not possibly understand America’s real foreign policy interests. In Bolton’s worldview Zbigniew Brzezinski is probably a naturalized American citizen originally from Poland; Henry Kissinger, a naturalized American citizen originally from Germany.

In the Bolton universe, you want Iran and North Korea to be referred to the Security Council, so that when it fails to unite behind a resolute strategy, the United States is then free to take the tough action it needs to take. And in the case of North Korea, Bolton is clear about what that would be: “unilateralist, interventionist, and preemptive.” Is it any wonder that when it came to Iran and North Korea, our allies and adversaries were loathe to refer them anywhere near Bolton?

Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 article “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” was prompted by the supporters of the Goldwater campaign. Bolton strides right off the pages of Hofstadter’s essay:

He is always manning the barricades of civilization . . . he does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated—if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.

According to Bolton, we do not need diplomats who negotiate, seek common ground, and strive for cooperative solutions. We need litigators who will go to the wall defending American interests, who will understand that when others say no, they mean no, and that therefore compromise is illusion. But in a world where the United States needs international cooperation for its own peace and prosperity, what comes next? Bolton’s answers are laughable—we stick with our “closest friends in the United Nations”—Israel, Palau and the Marshall Islands. Or we forge a new alliance with Japan, South Korea, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand to overcome the parasitic and paralytic EU. The road to global primacy runs through . . . Wellington?

There are, of course, some glaring contradictions in the memoirs. Bolton is known as a sovereignty hawk and he spells out the content of that doctrine as “greater independence and fewer unnecessary restraints.” The job of civil servants, politically appointed or career, is “to implement the president’s policies.” So it comes as a double shock when we find Bolton handing a draft Security Council resolution to the Israeli ambassador, in case the ambassador wants to ask his Prime Minister to appeal directly to Bush or Rice to change President Bush’s policy on Lebanon.

Another example concerns Bolton’s recurring beratement of UN officials for forgetting that they work for the member states. He then describes how one Under-Secretary-General, American appointee Christopher Burnham, surreptitiously showed him budget documents that put the United States at an advantage in budget negotiations. It is hard to see how you can have it both ways. Either UN officials serve all member states equally or the organization is up for grabs to the most powerful state.

But it is the big betrayal that is at the heart of the book. Facing a quagmire in Iraq, a faltering coalition in Afghanistan, a nuclear armed North Korea, the possibility of a nuclear Iran, and a war against terror that was creating more, not fewer, terrorists, Condoleeza Rice convinced President Bush that maybe they should stop digging a bigger hole for American foreign policy. And that meant actually trying diplomacy in North Korea, Iran, and the Middle East.

The losers were John Bolton and his acolytes; the winners were the professionals like Nicholas Burns and Christopher Hill. Faced with defeat and repudiation of the failed policies he advocated, Bolton’s response is familiar and tiresome: the professionals had secretly hijacked the president’s policy; the Secretary of State cares more about appeasing foreigners than protecting American interests.

The moment of reckoning for Bolton and for the President that nominated him is not described in the book, but it took place two months after Bolton left the administration. When the United States and North Korea reached a deal in February 2007 that holds the promise of denuclearizing the country, Bolton tried to scuttle it. Asked by reporters whether he was loyal to the President, Bolton answered, “I’m loyal to the original policy.”

What did Bolton achieve at the United Nations? Very little, which was fine by him and fine by the cast of nonaligned Ambassadors who oppose a more effective international organization. I asked one of them in December 2006 if he was happy that Bolton was leaving. He said, “No, we’ve learned how to deal with Mr. Bolton.” When I sought clarification, he said, “Look, Bolton comes in and asks for the sun, the moon, and the stars, and we say ‘no.’ He then says, ‘I told you so’ and leaves. Everybody is happy.”

Which returns us to the question of why anyone would want to wade through these 500 self-serving pages. The best answer: to remind yourself of the stakes of this upcoming election and why the United States needs more old-fashioned diplomacy and less paranoia and arrogance. A McCain presidency might not eschew diplomacy, but in the political free-for-all that is the Republican party, Bolton and his minions are always there, ready to denigrate any agreement or compromise, to sabotage and subvert real diplomacy.

Asked by reporters whether he was loyal to the President, Bolton answered, "I'm loyal to the original policy."

To understand the stakes, consider the little known and even less appreciated record of American negotiations with North Korea since 1994. Between what was called the “Agreed Framework” that brought North Korea back into the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1994 and the end of 2000, the United States and North Korea reached twenty agreements on a wide array of issues. Certain of these agreements foundered in implementation, but an objective assessment shows that some of the noncompliance stemmed from constraints placed by American domestic politics.

The Bolton strategy killed the Agreed Framework, hoping through threats, sanctions, and use of force to end the North Korean regime. Unfortunately for Bolton—fortunately for the rest of us—our ally South Korea and our necessary partner China did not want to deal with the consequences: either a war or a collapsed, deadly state on their borders. In the end, they did not have to because North Korea left the NPT, developed a nuclear bomb, and tested it, bankrupting the Bolton policy and producing the sharp change of strategy that has born fruit in recent North Korean steps to end its nuclear program.

Writing about the successes of American negotiators in bringing North Korea and the United States back together in February 2007, former State Department negotiator Robert Carlin and Stanford Professor Emeritus John Lewis have described why Bolton and his crowd loathe diplomacy is loathed by Bolton and his crowd, and why it is so necessary:

Diplomats strive to put down words all of them can swallow and hopefully their superiors in [the] capital can stomach. Written agreements are difficult to reach. The pain often comes not so much in dealing with the other side but in dealing with your own. Unless you are dictating terms to a defeated enemy, you are going to have to compromise on something, probably several somethings, that will make many people unhappy. That was done for the February 13th agreement, and there is no shame to it.

John Bolton did much damage to American interests in the first Bush administration, but he was implementing the president’s policy. President Bush deserves the blame for putting Bolton in a position to continue hardming American interests even when the overall direction of policy changed.

Given that many countries treated the United States as radioactive in 2005; given that trust and confidence in the United States were at all time lows; given that our record was one of a violator of international law and human rights; President Bush, had he truly wanted to start to move the United States out of the hole he had been so assiduously digging, would have had to send to the United Nations an ambassador with extraordinary listening skills, who could work across various international chasms, rebuild respect for American diplomacy, and, yes, advocate agreements that would make a lot of people unhappy. Someone, in fact, a lot like our present Ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, a naturalized citizen originally from Afghanistan. Instead he sent . . . Yosemite Sam.

So back to January 20. A new American president will take office with grinding wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a nuclear-armed North Korea, an Iran headed that way, and crises in Sudan, Israel and Palestine, Lebanon, and Pakistan. Our foreign policy is anathema; our reputation in tatters. Throw in big issues like global warming, non-proliferation, catastrophic terrorism, and a potential pandemic of a deadly new influenza. It is hard to see how any of these crises or issues can be solved without sustained international cooperation and strong international institutions. Take global warming: protecting Americans from its ravages will depend on exercising sovereignty to strike deals with other countries whose domestic behavior threatens us and whose security our domestic behavior threatens. A narrow view of sovereignty as the ability to do as we damned well please will be—quite literally—the death of us all.

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CISAC science fellow Undraa Agvaanluvsan faces no small task this summer: She has returned to her native Mongolia to help draft first-time legal and security protocols to ensure that the country’s uranium-based nuclear industry develops safely while also attracting international investment. “Our government needs to be prepared to move ahead,” the nuclear physicist said. “Mining needs to be regulated, there need to be laws specific to uranium so that extraction won’t cause a risk to security.”

Mongolia boasts rich uranium reserves and the mining industry contributes to about 25 percent of the country’s economy. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian partners exported Mongolian uranium ore for military purposes to a well-guarded enrichment facility in nearby Angarsk, Siberia, Undraa said. (Mongolians use only one name — Agvaanluvsan is Undraa’s late father’s name.) After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, mining in Mongolia almost stopped. “Today the security concern is completely different,” Undraa said. “It is said that some people even dig uranium, among other minerals, out of the ground with no legal right to do so. They’re called ‘ninjas.’ It’s worrisome and it’s completely unregulated.”

According to Undraa, foreign investors want to develop Mongolia’s uranium mines quickly. “Mining companies may be supportive of nuclear nonproliferation but their main objective is their business bottom-line,” she said. “There is not enough concern for security. The area we’re concerned with — nonproliferation and national security — seems very far from them.”

Since November, Undraa has split her time between CISAC and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where she has worked in the lab’s nuclear experimental group for three years. At CISAC, she has focused on the development of Mongolia’s civilian nuclear industry and how such changes are influencing the country’s fledgling democracy and market economy. Mongolia was a socialist state until a peaceful democratic revolution took place in 1990. The vast, landlocked country, squeezed between Russia and China with a population of 3 million, is now a multiparty capitalist democracy.

Undraa, 35, plans to return to Encina Hall this fall to continue this work with CISAC Co-Director Siegfried S. Hecker and consulting professor Chaim Braun. Under the auspices of the recently established Mongolian-American Scientific Research Center in Ulaanbaatar, the scientist is helping to organize two international conferences in the Mongolian capital this September on uranium mining and nuclear physics. Undraa hopes the conference findings will help her country, a non-nuclear weapons state, develop uranium mining profitably and responsibly.

“Mongolia plans to build a nuclear industry, starting from a zero baseline,” Undraa’s research plan states. “With a clean slate, how should Mongolia develop its uranium industry? What does Mongolia need to do to position itself as a trustworthy, global supplier of uranium?”

“With a clean slate, how should Mongolia develop its uranium industry? What does Mongolia need to do to position itself as a trustworthy, global supplier of uranium?”Undraa also wants to assess whether it makes economic sense for a developing Mongolia to turn to nuclear power or construct high-pressure coal-powered plants, which cost less and are faster to build and operate. She is acutely aware of the effects of climate change — in the late 1990s and early 2000s, millions of livestock across Mongolia’s steppes and deserts died due to harsh winters and summer droughts. “I have family members who lost their nomadic way of life — camels, sheep, goats, cattle died,” she said. “They had to move to the city because there was no point staying in the countryside.” As a result, the population of Ulaanbaatar has soared in recent years, with a parallel increase in pollution from coal fires burned by people living in traditional gers or yurts. “People say the pollution there is worse than Mexico City, worse than Beijing,” the scientist said.

Mining for Mongolia

On the uranium production front, Undraa wants to investigate whether her country should develop its own enrichment plant or collaborate with the Soviet-era facility in Angarsk. AREVA, the French multinational industrial nuclear power conglomerate, also is interested in building a power plant in Mongolia in exchange for raw uranium, she said.

An alterative proposal suggested by Sidney Drell, CISAC founding co-director, and Burton Richter, SLAC director emeritus, would establish a multinational uranium enrichment facility in Mongolia with possible collaboration from Japan, a country with a good track record for nuclear transparency. Such a facility could help meet the demands of growing energy markets in nearby China, India, and South Korea. Undraa said she supports exploring this option, which could bolster Mongolia’s position as a global producer of enriched uranium for nuclear power plants. “Mongolia is a democracy with friendly relations with Russia, China, the European Union, Japan, North and South Korea, as well as the United States,” she said during a May 7 presentation at CISAC. “This is a long shot,” Hecker said. “But perhaps an enriched uranium fuel guarantee from Mongolia instead of the United States may be more successful in keeping some countries from building their own enrichment facilities.”

Science as a tool to effect policy

Undraa hopes that her hands-on research at CISAC will help her homeland. “Being from Stanford has given me a platform to talk to the uranium mining people,” she said. “It gives me a right to talk to them as a scientist who is concerned with these global issues.”

The work brings Undraa full circle — as a teenager she wanted to become a diplomat but her father, a coal miner, was pro-western and pro-democratic during the socialist period and he knew that his daughter would face difficulties if she tried to enter the field. He instilled in Undraa what she calls “an American way” of thinking. “I was a very American girl in communist Mongolia in the 1980s,” she said smiling. “What he said was, ‘You’re entitled to have a view, so have a view. You’re entitled to ask questions, so ask questions.’” He also stressed the importance of pursuing education. Undraa took that lesson to heart, excelling in mathematics, then earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in physics from the National University of Mongolia and a doctorate from North Carolina State University.

In addition to helping Mongolia develop protocols for uranium mining and enrichment, Undraa and her husband, Dugersuren Dashdorj, also a nuclear physicist, and like-minded colleagues such as the country’s foreign minister, Sanjaasuren Oyen — the first Mongolian to earn a doctorate from Cambridge — are considering plans to establish their nation’s first major interdisciplinary research English-language university. The project is representative of Undraa’s drive to make a difference in Mongolia. “We don’t have to be bound by how it has been done in the past,” she said. “We can do it differently. We realize this is not a one-to-two-year project — it will take decades to establish. But one has to start somewhere.”

In their column on National Review on June 24, 2008 called “10 Concerns about Barack Obama,” William Bennett and Seth Leibsohn, begin their list of attacks on Senator Obama by writing that “Barack Obama’s foreign policy is dangerous, naïve, and betrays a profound misreading of history.” In arguing against any engagement with Iran, William Bennett and Seth Leibsohn point out that “Ronald Reagan met with no Soviet leader during the entirely of his first term in office.”

This statement is factually correct. And there was most certainly a big debate within Reagan Administration about whether to talk with the leaders of the Evil Empire. However, Bennett and Leibsohn imply in their piece that this debate was only resolved after the Soviet Union met some preconditions to talks and changed internally, that is after, as they write, that Reagan “was assured Gorbachev was a different kind of leader – after Perestroika, not before.”

In fact, the debate about engaging the evil empire was resolved three years before Reagan met with Gorbachev. The debate and the resolution in favor of talking to the leaders of the evil empires is meticulously chronicled in George’s Shultz’s memoir, Turmoil and Triumph: Diplomacy , Power, and the Victory of the American Ideal (1993). Just the title of Chapter 25, "Realistic Reengagement with the Soviets," underscores how misleading the Bennett and Leibsohn rendition of history is.

When they first came to Washington, many foreign policy advisors within Reagan administration advocated the Bennett and Leibsohn position and did not want to have any contact with the Soviets, even though every American president since the recognition to the USSR in 1933 had met with their Soviet counterparts. When George Shultz became Secretary of State in 1982, he began to challenge this policy of disengagement, arguing that the United States needed to engage both the Soviet leaders but also Soviet society. As he writes in his memoirs about the start of the New Year in 1983, “I wanted to develop a strategy for a new start with the Soviet Union. I felt we had to try to turn the relationship around: away from confrontation and towards real problem solving.” (p. 159) Shultz is writing about his thinking two years before Gorbachev comes to power.

Shultz’s idea for a turn towards engagement met resistance in the Reagan administration. Again, from his memoirs: “I knew the president’s White House staff would oppose such engagement. There was lots of powerful opposition around town to any efforts to bridge the chasm separating Moscow and Washington.” After listing the opponents to direct negotiations, which included Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and CIA head Bill Casey, Shultz affirmed that “I was determined not to hang back from engaging the Soviets because of fears that the ‘Soviet wins negotiations’.” (p. 159). Sound familiar? Instead the word, Iranians, for Soviets and you capture the essence of the debate today.

Shultz, as we all know, won this debate, convincing Reagan about the need to start talking directly to the Soviets (again well before Gorbachev came on to the scene). A subtitle of Chapter 12 of Shultz’s memoir is A President Ready to Engage. (p. 163). In early February 1983, Shultz even floats the idea of meeting directly with Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin for a private chat, to which Reagan responds, “Great”, and then adds “I don’t intend to engage in a detailed exchange with Dobrynin , but I do tell him that if Andropov is wiling to do business, so am I” (p. 164). (Remember Andropov died in 1983 and his successor, Chernenko, also did not serve long as the Soviet leader before dying in 1985. from 1983-1985, there was a real crisis of leadership inside the Soviet Union, a factor that contributed to the lack of direct talks at the highest levels). Speed forwarding again to today’s Iran debate, which presidential candidate sounds more like Reagan?

Shultz’s approach toward engaging the Soviets offers another profound lesson for today’s Iran debate. Shultz never let the negotiations focus just on arms control. That played o the Soviet’s strengths. Rather, he insisted on an expanded agenda that always included human rights and democracy. Again, from his memoirs, "We were determined not to allow the Soviets to focus our negotiations simply on matters of arms control. So we continuously adhered to a broad agenda: human rights, regional issues, arms control, and bilateral issues." (p.267). This same approach is needed for dealing with the Iranian regime today.

Finally, Shultz never saw negotiations or expanding contacts with Soviets and Americans as a concession to Moscow or a signal of legitimacy for the communist dictatorship. In the debate about opening consulates in both countries – a move that some hardliners at the time saw as a sign of weakness – Shultz firmly supported the idea as a change in the American national interest. As he quotes from a memorandum that he wrote in 1982, "I believe the next step on our part should be to propose the negotiation of a new U.S.-Soviet cultural agreement and the opening of U.S. and Soviet consulates in Kiev and New York...Both of these proposals will sound good to the Soviets, but are unambiguously in our interest when examined from a hard headed American viewpoint."(p. 275). Exactly the same could be said about Iran today.

Historical analogies can only go far. Many dimensions of U.S.-Iranians relations differ radically from Cold War relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. But when observers do roll them out, getting the facts right should be precondition to the substantive date about their relevance.

Preventing the unthinkable ongoing crisis with Tehran is not the first time Washington has faced a hostile government attempting to develop nuclear weapons. Nor is it likely to be the last. Yet the reasoning of U.S. officials now struggling to deal with Iran’s nuclear ambitions is clouded by a kind of historical amnesia, which leads to both creeping fatalism about the United States’ ability to keep Iran from getting the bomb and excessive optimism about the United States’ ability to contain Iran if it does become a nuclear power.

A U.S. official in the executive branch anonymously told the New York Times in March 2006, “The reality is that most of us think the Iranians are probably going to get a weapon, or the technology to make one, sooner or later.” Military planners and intelligence officers have reportedly been tasked with developing strategies to deter Tehran if negotiations fail.

Both proliferation fatalism and deterrence optimism are wrong-headed, and they reinforce each other in a disturbing way. As nuclear proliferation comes to be seen as inevitable, wishful thinking can make its consequences seem less severe, and if faith in deterrence grows, incentives to combat proliferation diminish.

Deterrence optimism is based on mistaken nostalgia and a faulty analogy. Although deterrence did work with the Soviet Union and China, there were many close calls; maintaining nuclear peace during the Cold War was far more difficult and uncertain than U.S. officials and the American public seem to remember today. Furthermore, a nuclear Iran would look a lot less like the totalitarian Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China and a lot more like Pakistan, Iran’s unstable neighbor—a far more frightening prospect.

Fatalism about nuclear proliferation is equally unwarranted. Although the United States did fail to prevent its major Cold War rivals from developing nuclear arsenals, many other countries—including Japan, West Germany, South Korea, and more recently Libya—curbed their own nuclear ambitions.

THE REASONS WHY

The way for Washington to move forward on Iran is to give Tehran good reason to relinquish its pursuit of nuclear weapons. That, in turn, requires understanding why Tehran wants them in the first place.

Iran’s nuclear energy program began in the 1960s under the shah, but even he wanted to create a breakout option to get the bomb quickly if necessary. One of his senior energy advisers recalled, “The shah told me that he does not want the bomb yet, but if anyone in the neighborhood has it, we must be ready to have it.” At first, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini objected to nuclear weapons on religious grounds, but the mullahs abandoned such restraint after Saddam Hussein ordered chemical attacks on Iranian forces during the Iran-Iraq War.

The end of Saddam’s rule in 2003 significantly reduced the security threat to Tehran. But by then the United States had taken Iraq’s place. In his January 2002 State of the Union address, President Bush had denounced the governments of Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as members of an “axis of evil” with ties to international terrorism. After the fall of Baghdad, an unidentified senior U.S. official told a Los Angeles Times reporter that Tehran should “take a number,” hinting that it was next in line for regime change.

Increasingly, Bush administration spokespeople advocated “preemption” to counter proliferation. When asked, in April 2006, whether the Pentagon was considering a potential preventive nuclear strike against Iranian nuclear facilities, President Bush pointedly replied, “All options are on the table.”

AGREED FRAMEWORK IN FARSI

A source of inspiration for handling Iran is the 1994 Agreed Framework that the United States struck with North Korea. The Bush administration has severely criticized the deal, but it contained several elements that could prove useful in the Iranian nuclear crisis.

After the North Koreans were caught violating their NPT commitments in early 1993, they threatened to withdraw from the treaty. Declaring that “North Korea cannot be allowed to develop a nuclear bomb,” President Clinton threatened an air strike on the Yongbyon reactor site if the North Koreans took further steps to reprocess plutonium. In June 1994, as the Pentagon was reinforcing military units on the Korean Peninsula, Pyongyang froze its plutonium production, agreed to let IAEA inspectors monitor the reactor site, and entered into bilateral negotiations.

The talks produced the October 1994 Agreed Framework, under which North Korea agreed to eventually dismantle its reactors, remain in the NPT, and implement full IAEA safeguards. In exchange, the United States promised to provide it with limited oil supplies, construct two peaceful light-water reactors for energy production, “move toward full normalization of political and economic relations,” and extend “formal assurances to [North Korea] against the threat or use of nuclear weapons by the U.S.”

“The way for Washington to move forward on Iran is to give Tehran good reason to relinquish its pursuit of nuclear weapons.”By 2002, the Agreed Framework had broken down, not only because Pyongyang was suspected of cheating but also because it believed that the United States, by delaying construction of the light-water reactors and failing to start normalizing relations, had not honored its side of the bargain. When confronted with evidence of its secret uranium program, in November 2002, Pyongyang took advantage of the fact that the U.S. military was tied down in preparations for the invasion of Iraq and withdrew from the NPT, kicked out the inspectors, and started reprocessing plutonium.

President Bush famously promised, in his 2002 State of the Union address, that the United States “will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons.” Yet when North Korea kicked out the IAEA inspectors, Secretary of State Colin Powell proclaimed that the situation was “not a crisis.” Bush repeatedly declared that the United States had “no intention of invading North Korea.” The point was not lost on Tehran.

If Washington is to offer security assurances to Tehran, it should do so soon (making the assurances contingent on Tehran’s not developing nuclear weapons), rather than offering them too late, as it did with North Korea (and thus making them contingent on Tehran’s getting rid of any existing nuclear weapons). As with North Korea, any deal with Iran must be structured in a series of steps, each offering a package of economic benefits (light-water reactors, aircraft parts, or status at the World Trade Organization) in exchange for constraints placed on Iran’s future nuclear development.

Most important, however, would be a reduction in the security threat that the United States poses to Iran. Given the need for Washington to have a credible deterrent against, say, terrorist attacks sponsored by Iran, a blanket security guarantee would be ill advised. But more limited guarantees, such as a commitment not to use nuclear weapons, could be effective. They would reassure Tehran and pave the way toward the eventual normalization of U.S.–Iranian relations while signaling to other states that nuclear weapons are not the be all and end all of security.

Peaceful coexistence does not require friendly relations, but it does mean exercising mutual restraint. Relinquishing the threat of regime change by force is a necessary and acceptable price for the United States to pay to stop Tehran from getting the bomb.

What nuclear threats do we face today? America went to war because its leadership believed Iraq had nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction. We are reminded daily of the potential dangers of Iran turning its quest for nuclear energy into a weapons capability. We are locked in a deep struggle to get North Korea to give up its nuclear status demonstrated in last fall’s test. Concerns about Russia’s nuclear arsenal are resurfacing. And, we are constantly reminded that we must wage America’s “war on terror” to avoid the nexus of international terrorism and nuclear weapons.

All nuclear threats are not alike. How do these and other nuclear threats compare in terms of severity or likelihood? And how can we effectively address them? It is useful to think of today’s nuclear threats at three levels. First is an all-out exchange of nuclear warheads—hundreds of them—that would destroy civilization as we know it. Next is a limited, but still disastrous exchange—tens of warheads —that would create levels of destruction not seen since World War II. The third level is the use of one or several nuclear bombs, which would threaten our way of life. Reframing the nuclear threat in this way allows us to gauge our level of concern and formulate meaningful preventive strategies.

An all-out nuclear exchange could occur today only between the United States and Russia, which still maintain many thousands of warheads in their nuclear inventories. A nuclear war between these two countries represents the only existential threat to the United States.

The end of the Cold War rendered this threat highly improbable but not impossible. An accidental or unauthorized launch followed by a response is still possible. To eliminate this threat, the United States and Russia should follow through on detargeting and commit to de-alerting their nuclear forces—to remove them from high alert status that allows a launch within minutes to pre-identified targets.

The two nations should commit to making major reductions in their nuclear stockpiles and eventually eliminating them. In the midst of the Cold War, President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev reduced their stockpiles and even came close to an agreement to lead the world in abolishing nuclear weapons. Last January in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, George Shultz, William J. Perry, Henry Kissinger, and Sam Nunn called for a renewal of that vision by outlining steps to be taken now.

To move more rapidly toward much smaller numbers, I would add that leaders in both nations should undertake a zero-base nuclear assessment that would answer this question: If you were creating a stockpile from scratch today, how many weapons would you need to meet the current threat? Such a calculus would yield much lower numbers than trying to decide how many weapons you can live without. U.S. and Russian nuclear postures toward China should also carefully avoid provoking a Chinese nuclear buildup.

An exchange of tens of nuclear warheads is somewhat less improbable than nuclear war between Russia and the United States. But at this level, potential confrontations include nuclear exchanges between India and Pakistan, or between the United States and China—over Taiwan, for example, or on Russia’s southern border, or in the Middle East, between Israel and possibly Iran in the future. To limit the possibilities, it is crucial to stop more countries from acquiring nuclear weapons. The fewer fingers on the nuclear trigger, the better.

The United States should play a leading role in reinforcing the nuclear nonproliferation regime, centered on the 37-year-old Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which allows a country to come within a whisker of building a bomb. A global expansion of nuclear power will pose additional challenges to the system. We need new rules of engagement for expanding nuclear power, including viable international controls on uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing.

To encourage non-nuclear weapon states to keep their end of the NPT bargain and refrain from acquiring the bomb, the five nuclear weapon states must show a greater commitment to working in good faith toward eventual elimination of their arsenals, as pledged under Article VI of the treaty.

Security guarantees from the United States and other nuclear weapon states can help curb some countries’ nuclear ambitions by alleviating fears of invasion by major world powers or by regional foes. India and Pakistan—two nuclear weapon states that aren’t parties to the NPT—should continue to pursue confidence-building measures to avoid miscalculation and potential nuclear war. We should help realize the nuclear-free zones that states are calling for in the Middle East, on the Korean peninsula, in Central Asia and in as many other regions as possible.

The United States and other states with nuclear weapons can also lower the risk of limited war by declaring a no-first-use policy, reserving nuclear weapons only as weapons of last resort.

The use of one or several nuclear bombs today is more likely than it was during the Cold War. If detonated in a big city, the damage would be catastrophic. Humankind would survive such a catastrophe, but it could gravely threaten our way of life. A country or a terrorist group in possession of a rudimentary nuclear bomb could deliver such a weapon in a van, boat, or plane. North Korea could do so, in desperation; Israel could do so in response to an existential threat; and under current doctrine, the United States or Russia could do so in response to a chemical, biological, or radiological attack. More likely, and hence of greater concern, is that terrorists would use a nuclear bomb, if they could get one.

The most likely route for terrorists to acquire a bomb is to devise one from stolen or diverted fissile materials. Theft or diversion of a ready-made weapon is far less likely.Building a rudimentary bomb is not easy but is judged to be within the capabilities of some sophisticated terrorist groups if they are able to obtain fissile materials.

Although it is widely recognized that keeping bomb materials out of terrorists’ hands is essential, the difficulty of doing so, especially from a technical standpoint, is not well understood. Only a few tens of kilograms of plutonium or highly enriched uranium are required for a bomb, yet almost 2 million kilograms of each exist in the world today, and some of it is not adequately secured. Securing these materials requires greater commitment to nuclear materials safeguards by all countries that possess them. It calls for greater urgency to protect and eventually eliminate highly enriched uranium in research reactors and facilities around the world. Bilateral or multilateral sting operations to intercept nuclear black market trade may help locate material already outside of state control. International cooperation in building databases and detection systems will improve nuclear forensics and attribution.

Each level of nuclear threat implies a different strategy of prevention. But three common aspects emerge as priorities for national and international policymaking:

• The fewer nuclear weapons, the better.
• The fewer fingers on a nuclear trigger, the better.
• Keeping fissile materials out of terrorists’ hands is essential.

Finally, this is not a problem for the United States alone to solve. It can only be solved through international cooperation.

On November 15, 2007, FSI held its third annual international conference, Power and Prosperity: New Dynamics, New Dilemmas, examining seismic shifts in power, wealth, security, and risk in the global system. Acting FSI Director Michael A. McFaul, former Secretary of State Warren Christopher, and former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry offered stagesetting remarks before a capacity crowd of business and civic leaders, diplomats, policymakers, faculty, and students. Interactive panel sessions encouraged exploration of contemporary issues with Stanford faculty and outside experts.

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Christopher and former Secretary of State Jim Baker are heading a new National War Powers Commission to study and resolve these issues. Planning to do something of a prospective nature, they will focus their recommendations on the 2009 Congress, seeking to bring to bear the collective judgment of both the president and a Congress traditionally reluctant to exercise the power it has under the Constitution.

“I spent most of my adult life under the dark cloud of a nuclear holocaust, a war that threatened no less than the annihilation of humanity,” said former Secretary of Defense William Perry. Now the Cold War is over, but its end did not bring about the end of history. “History is being written every day in the streets of Bagdad, in the deserts of Darfur, in the nuclear test range of North Korea, and in the nuclear laboratories of Iran.”

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A complementary route is to work to reduce and then eliminate nuclear weapons. Getting to the political will to take those steps was a major objective of a January 4, 2007, Wall Street Journal op-ed, “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons,” published by Perry, George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, and Sam Nunn, and conferences at Stanford. “This conference can teach us what to do,” Perry said, “what is needed is the political will to do it.”

Gi-Wook Shin, director of FSI’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, chaired Plenary I, “Asia’s Triple Rise: How China, India, and Japan Will Shape our Future.” “While our policymakers are preoccupied with the Middle East, Asia is going to have much more impact on our future,” Shin said. Asia is experiencing a unique moment in Asian and world history. Can three great nations rise simultaneously, creating a regional architecture for stability and security? What role can the United States play?

“There are two defining characteristics of today’s world,” said J. Stapleton Roy, former U.S. ambassador to China, “America’s role as the sole superpower and China’s precipitous rise to power and influence.” Roy traced China’s resource demands, military development, and global economic impact and evaluated China’s influence on U.S. foreign policy. “While we see a more powerful and prosperous China as a security threat,” he stated, “the case could be made for a more optimistic scenario in which growth creates a sizable middle class, greater global dependence, and a more open society as the fifth generation of Chinese leaders takes over, the first to mature in a period of openness to the world and the power of modern democracies.”

“The only democracy in the world with which the United States had endemically bad relations during the Cold War was India. Happily that has changed,” said Robert Blackwill, former U.S. ambassador to India. He addressed our many areas of common interest: the fight against global terrorism, energy security, a healthy global economy, and shared democratic values. Analyzing the pending civil nuclear cooperation deal, he placed India’s need for 15–20 new nuclear reactors in the context of domestic growth. Some 450 million people make less than $1.50 per day; India will not tolerate outside direction to slow growth. “The United States and India are natural allies,” he concluded.

“The India entering its seventh decade as an independent country is one that is open to the contention of ideas and interests within it and outside … wedded to the democratic pluralism that is its greatest strength and determined to fulfill the creative energies of its people. Such an India truly enjoys soft power in today’s world.” former under secretary-general of the united nations shashi tharoor“Japan has resumed a solid growth track,” said Michael H. Armacost, Shorenstein Distinguished Fellow and former U.S. ambassador to Japan. The country seeks respect and wants a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council, which it deserves. Japan’s economy is four times the size of China’s; Japan’s military budget is just 1 percent of GDP, yet it is the third largest in the world and the most sophisticated in Asia. Japan has the resources of a great power—huge financial reserves, modern science and technology, and enormous aid and investment flows. As Japan assumes a more robust international role, we should expect the Japanese to “hedge their bets,” he said, balancing strong U.S. ties with other nations and competing with China in pan-Asian community building efforts. Japan-U.S. relations should not be forgotten, he advised, as we focus on China and India.

Shashi Tharoor, diplomat, historian, and former U.N. under secretary-general, mused about “India’s Future as a Great Power.” Asking what makes a country a world leader, he acknowledged that India has the world’s second largest population, fourth largest military, status as a nuclear power, and the fifth largest economy. Yet a nation that cannot feed, educate, or employ its people cannot be termed a “great power,” Tharoor noted. He suggested that India’s greatest asset is its “soft power”— its liberal democracy, social and cultural diversity, and enormously popular culture. All hold important lessons. “The India entering its seventh decade as an independent country,” he said, “is open to the contentions of ideas and interests within it and outside … wedded to the democratic pluralism that is its greatest strength and determined to liberate and fulfill the creative energies of its people. Such an India truly enjoys soft power in today’s world.”

Lynn Eden, associate director for research at CISAC, chaired Plenary II, “Critical Connections: Faces of Security in the 21st Century,” examining security risks posed by Iraq, nuclear weapons, and food security and the environment—issues, she noted, “that are also central themes of the Stanford International Initiative: improving governance, pursuing security, and advancing human well-being.”

“There are now multiple indications that conditions on the ground in Iraq have improved quite substantially,” said Hoover Institution denior fellow and CDDRL faculty member Larry Diamond. Violence is down and there is a return to something approaching normalcy, as a result of the 30,000 “surge” in U.S. troops and a more effective counterinsurgency strategy adopted by General David Petraeus. The new military-sized force and strategy come at a propitious moment, when the Sunni Arab heartland has turned against Al Qaeda. As Al Qaeda has been weakened, fear, fatal bombings, and Iraqi and U.S. fatalities have declined significantly. The problem is that strategic military gains have not been matched with requisite political progress: enacting an oil revenue sharing bill, reversing de-Baathification, and scheduling provincial elections. “The harsh fact is that military progress on the ground is not sustainable,” warned Diamond, “without political progress toward reconciliation in Bagdad and the provinces.”

“As Americans, we have not thought systematically about what it means when we use the phrase ‘Islamic fundamentalism.’ We tend to treat it holistically. If we are going to understand this threat, we have to disaggregate that big thing called ‘the Muslim world’—we have to know the difference between Islamic fundamentalist, Islamist, and liberal Muslims.” acting fsi director and political science professor michael a. mcfaulAssessing nuclear proliferation, CISAC Co-Director Scott D. Sagan said, “In 1963, John F. Kennedy famously relayed his nuclear nightmare that by the 1970s there might be 15–20 nuclear weapons states. Was Kennedy’s fear inaccurate or only premature?” Today there are nine nuclear states, but the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) is cracked and challenges abound. The A.Q. Khan network in Pakistan exported nuclear technology to Libya, North Korea, and Iran. North Korea withdrew from the NPT and conducted a 2006 test, before agreeing to dismantle its nuclear program. Iran has rejected international demands to suspend uranium enrichment. The United States has not lived up to its NPT commitment to work toward eventual elimination of nuclear weapons. For Sagan, keys to nonproliferation include a successful U.N. 2010 NPT Review Conference, peaceful resolution of the North Korean and Iranian crises, developing control of the international fuel cycle, and American ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

Turning to human security, Rosamond L. Naylor, the Julie Wrigley Senior Fellow at FSI and the Woods Institute for the Environment, reported that 1 billion people face acute risks every day from hunger, infectious disease, resource depletion, climate change, and civil conflict. Incredibly, 15 percent of the world’s population lives on less than $1 per day and 50 percent live on less than $2 a day. Three billion people are vulnerable to disruptions in food prices because of competing biofuels and climate change. While terrorism kills 3,000 people each year and battle deaths claim 20,000, more than 6–8 million people die every year from hunger and malnutrition. “What can be done?” asked Naylor. We urgently need to conserve our genetic crop resources and invest in rural development, agriculture, and education.

Gilles Kepel, professor and chair, Middle East and Mediterranean Studies, at Sciences Po, delivered the dinner keynote, “Islamic Fundamentalism: On the Rise or the Decline?” “As Americans we have not thought systematically about what it means when we use the phrase ‘Islamic fundamentalism,’” said Acting FSI Director Michael McFaul. “If we are going to understand this threat, we have to disaggregate that big thing called ‘the Muslim world’—we have to know the difference between Islamic fundamentalist, Islamist, and liberal Muslims.” Gilles Kepel, a leading author and scholar of the Middle East, who has “invested tremendously in the study of Islam,” was invited to fill that void. “When it comes to understanding Islamic fundamentalism, Paris is the 21st century,” said McFaul. “I see it as a real challenge to all of us to learn from our French colleagues, and tonight I promise you, you will learn from one of our French colleagues.”

In a December 2001 manifesto, Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s mentor and Al Qaeda ideologue, admitted Islamic jihadists had failed to mobilize the masses to overthrow their corrupt rulers, “the nearby enemy,” and establish Islamic states, Kepel began. By inflicting a massive blow on 9/11 on “the far enemy,” the United States, they would demonstrate that America was weak, Islamic militants were strong, and the masses could revolt against their leaders without fear. The Muslim world and then the whole world would become ruled by Shariah under Islamist aegis. Kepel then asked, “Have they succeeded in what they set out to do?”

“After 9/11, we had a clash of two grand narratives: ‘jihad and martyrdom’ where the apostate regimes of the West and the Middle East were about to fall and ‘the War on Terror’ in which the roots of terrorism would be eradicated and autocratic regimes would tumble, bringing about democracy and a transformation of the Middle East.” professor gilles kepel, institute of political studies, parisKepel’s answer was no. Since 9/11, he said, “There have been two grand narratives: the narrative of jihad and martyrdom preached by Zawahiri and bin Laden, arguing that the rotten regimes of the West and the Middle East would fall, as jihadists waged copy-cat bombings in Africa, Europe, and the Middle East, suicide operations, and so forth” and “the narrative of the American-led War on Terror,” hammering that the roots of terrorism would be eradicated and autocratic regimes would tumble, bringing about democracy and the transformation of the Middle East.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq opened a new area for radical Islamic mobilization. But the two clashing narratives gave ground to something unexpected: the rise of Iranian influence in the region and “a golden opportunity not for Sunni Islamic fundamentalists but for the radical Shia in Iran,” who after the 2005 election of President Ahmadinejad found they could engage in nuclear blackmail with the world and threaten the United States with the activation of Shiite militias in Iraq, where American forces would be at a disadvantage fighting two enemies at the same time.

While Zawahiri continues to paint the “triumphal march of Sunni fundamentalism,” Kepel stated, “the discrepancy between his world view and reality is growing bigger and bigger.” To date, the bigger winner from 9/11 is not Al Qaeda but the Islamic Republic of Iran. Iran and Hezbollah have become the heroes and champions of the Muslim world. This fragmentation in the Muslim world, pitting Shia against Sunni, has weakened the Sunni radical movements’ ability to mobilize. How the confrontation plays out, he concluded, will determine the future of the Middle East.

POWER AND PROSPERITY: NEW DYNAMICS, NEW DILEMAS

INTERACTIVE PANEL DISCUSSIONS ON CRITICAL ISSUES
In an FSI conference highlight, participants engaged in spirited debate on leading issues with Stanford faculty and outside experts. Audio recordings of the plenary and panel discussions are available below.

IS DEMOCRACY GOOD FOR HEALTH?
Alan M. Garber, Grant Miller, Douglas K. Owens, and Paul H. Wise

NUCLEAR POWER WITHOUT NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION?
Scott D. Sagan, David G. Victor, Robert Rosner, and Siegfried S. Hecker

A CHANGING CONTINENT? OPPERTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES FOR EUROPEAN UNION EXPANSION
Katherine Jolluck, Mark Leonard, Monica Macovei, and Wolfgang Münchau

GROWING PAINS - GROWTH AND TENISIONS IN CHINA
Andrew G. Walder, Jean C. Oi, Scott Rozelle, and Xueguang Zhou

AUTOCRATIC HEGEMONS AND THE NATIONAL INTEREST: DEALING WITH CHINA, IRAN, AND RUSSIA
Kathryn Stoner, Larry Diamond, Michael A. McFaul, and Abbas Milani

FOOD SECURITY, CLIMATE CHANGE, AND CIVIL CONFLICTf
Rosamond L. Naylor, David Lobell, and Edward A. Miguel

FACES OF ENGERY SECURITY
David G. Victor, Bryan J. Hannegan, and Chris Mottershead

OVERCOMING BARRIERS TO CONFLICT RESOLUTION: THE MIDDLE EAST
Allen S. Weiner, Byron Bland, Bruce Jones, and Lee D. Ross

Thank you Chairman Dorgan, Senator Domenici and distinguished members of the Committee for giving me the opportunity to comment on the National Nuclear Security Administration's Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation programs and its 2009 budget request. I have a written statement that I would like to submit for the record.

This morning I will summarize the three main points in my statement. My opinions have been shaped by 34 years at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and nearly 20 years of practicing nonproliferation with my feet on the ground in places like Russia, China, India, North Korea and Kazakhstan.  Much of this I have done with the strong support and encouragement of Senator Domenici.

1) The proliferation of nuclear weapons and weapons capability is growing. Today, we face a nuclear threat in North Korea, nuclear ambitions in Iran, a nuclear puzzle in Syria, recently nuclear-armed states in Pakistan and India, and an improved, but not satisfactory, nuclear security situation in Russia and other states of the former Soviet Union. The danger of nuclear terrorism is real. This is not a fight the United States can win alone. We cannot simply push the dangers beyond our borders. It is imperative to forge effective global partnerships to combat the threat of nuclear terrorism and the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Meeting these challenges requires diplomatic initiative and technical cooperation. The United States must lead international diplomacy and DOE/NNSA must provide technical leadership and capabilities. The NNSA has done a commendable job in nuclear threat reduction and combating nuclear proliferation. However, funds to support these activities are not commensurate with the magnitude or the urgency of the threat.

2) CTR began with Nunn-Lugar followed by Nunn-Lugar-Domenici legislation directed at the aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet Union. We must stay engaged with Russia and the other states of the Soviet Union. Much progress has been made, but more needs to be done. We have to change the nature of the partnership to one in which Russia carries more of the burden.

We should expand the cooperative reduction programs aggressively to other countries that require technical or financial assistance. The nuclear threat exists wherever nuclear materials exist. These materials cannot be eliminated, but they can be secured and safeguarded. We should more strongly support the International Atomic Energy Agency and provide more support to countries that try to implement UNSCR 1540 to prevent nuclear terrorism, for example.

We should enlist other nations such as China, India, and for that matter, Russia, to build a strong global partnership to prevent proliferation and combat nuclear terrorism. China and India have for the most part sat on the sidelines while the U.S. has led the fight. Russia has not engaged commensurate with its nuclear status. These efforts are particularly important if nuclear energy is to experience a real renaissance.

3) The hallmark of all of these efforts must be technology, partnership and in-country presence. The DOE/NNSA has in its laboratories the principal nuclear expertise in this country. It should be applauded for sending its technical experts around the world, often in very difficult situations (I met up with the DOE team in North Korea on a bitterly cold February day). However, both for structural reasons and budgetary shortfalls, that technical talent is slowing fading away. We do not have in place the necessary personnel recruitment or the working environment in the laboratories or the pipeline of students in our universities to replenish that talent. I strongly support the NNSA's Next Generation Safeguards Initiative, which is aimed at tackling this problem.

Mr. Chairman, when I first visited Russia's secret cities in 1992 shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, I feared that its collapse may trigger a nuclear catastrophe. The fact that nothing really terrible has happened in the intervening 16 years is in great part due to the DOE/NNSA programs that your are considering today. We must now be just as innovative and creative to deal with the changing nuclear threat today.

In my statement I also mention the implications of my recent trips to North Korea and to India. However, since I am out of time, I will need to leave those for your questions.

Thank you for your attention.

Nuclear weapons today present tremendous dangers, but also an historic opportunity. U.S. leadership will be required to take the world to the next stage -- to a solid consensus for reversing reliance on nuclear weapons globally as a vital contribution to preventing their proliferation into potentially dangerous hands, and ultimately ending them as a threat to the world.

Nuclear weapons were essential to maintaining international security during the Cold War because they were a means of deterrence. The end of the Cold War made the doctrine of mutual Soviet-American deterrence obsolete. Deterrence continues to be a relevant consideration for many states with regard to threats from other states. But reliance on nuclear weapons for this purpose is becoming increasingly hazardous and decreasingly effective.

North Korea's recent nuclear test and Iran's refusal to stop its program to enrich uranium -- potentially to weapons grade -- highlight the fact that the world is now on the precipice of a new and dangerous nuclear era. Most alarmingly, the likelihood that non-state terrorists will get their hands on nuclear weaponry is increasing. In today's war waged on world order by terrorists, nuclear weapons are the ultimate means of mass devastation. And non-state terrorist groups with nuclear weapons are conceptually outside the bounds of a deterrent strategy and present difficult new security challenges.

Apart from the terrorist threat, unless urgent new actions are taken, the U.S. soon will be compelled to enter a new nuclear era that will be more precarious, psychologically disorienting, and economically even more costly than was Cold War deterrence. It is far from certain that we can successfully replicate the old Soviet-American "mutually assured destruction" with an increasing number of potential nuclear enemies world-wide without dramatically increasing the risk that nuclear weapons will be used. New nuclear states do not have the benefit of years of step-by-step safeguards put in effect during the Cold War to prevent nuclear accidents, misjudgments or unauthorized launches. The United States and the Soviet Union learned from mistakes that were less than fatal. Both countries were diligent to ensure that no nuclear weapon was used during the Cold War by design or by accident. Will new nuclear nations and the world be as fortunate in the next 50 years as we were during the Cold War?

Leaders addressed this issue in earlier times. In his "Atoms for Peace" address to the United Nations in 1953, Dwight D. Eisenhower pledged America's "determination to help solve the fearful atomic dilemma -- to devote its entire heart and mind to find the way by which the miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death, but consecrated to his life." John F. Kennedy, seeking to break the logjam on nuclear disarmament, said, "The world was not meant to be a prison in which man awaits his execution."

Rajiv Gandhi, addressing the U.N. General Assembly on June 9, 1988, appealed, "Nuclear war will not mean the death of a hundred million people. Or even a thousand million. It will mean the extinction of four thousand million: the end of life as we know it on our planet earth. We come to the United Nations to seek your support. We seek your support to put a stop to this madness."

Ronald Reagan called for the abolishment of "all nuclear weapons," which he considered to be "totally irrational, totally inhumane, good for nothing but killing, possibly destructive of life on earth and civilization." Mikhail Gorbachev shared this vision, which had also been expressed by previous American presidents.

Although Reagan and Mr. Gorbachev failed at Reykjavik to achieve the goal of an agreement to get rid of all nuclear weapons, they did succeed in turning the arms race on its head. They initiated steps leading to significant reductions in deployed long- and intermediate-range nuclear forces, including the elimination of an entire class of threatening missiles.

What will it take to rekindle the vision shared by Reagan and Mr. Gorbachev? Can a world-wide consensus be forged that defines a series of practical steps leading to major reductions in the nuclear danger? There is an urgent need to address the challenge posed by these two questions.

The Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) envisioned the end of all nuclear weapons. It provides (a) that states that did not possess nuclear weapons as of 1967 agree not to obtain them, and (b) that states that do possess them agree to divest themselves of these weapons over time. Every president of both parties since Richard Nixon has reaffirmed these treaty obligations, but non-nuclear weapon states have grown increasingly skeptical of the sincerity of the nuclear powers.

Strong non-proliferation efforts are under way. The Cooperative Threat Reduction program, the Global Threat Reduction Initiative, the Proliferation Security Initiative and the Additional Protocols are innovative approaches that provide powerful new tools for detecting activities that violate the NPT and endanger world security. They deserve full implementation. The negotiations on proliferation of nuclear weapons by North Korea and Iran, involving all the permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany and Japan, are crucially important. They must be energetically pursued.

But by themselves, none of these steps are adequate to the danger. Reagan and General Secretary Gorbachev aspired to accomplish more at their meeting in Reykjavik 20 years ago -- the elimination of nuclear weapons altogether. Their vision shocked experts in the doctrine of nuclear deterrence, but galvanized the hopes of people around the world. The leaders of the two countries with the largest arsenals of nuclear weapons discussed the abolition of their most powerful weapons.

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What should be done? Can the promise of the NPT and the possibilities envisioned at Reykjavik be brought to fruition? We believe that a major effort should be launched by the United States to produce a positive answer through concrete stages.

First and foremost is intensive work with leaders of the countries in possession of nuclear weapons to turn the goal of a world without nuclear weapons into a joint enterprise. Such a joint enterprise, by involving changes in the disposition of the states possessing nuclear weapons, would lend additional weight to efforts already under way to avoid the emergence of a nuclear-armed North Korea and Iran.

The program on which agreements should be sought would constitute a series of agreed and urgent steps that would lay the groundwork for a world free of the nuclear threat. Steps would include:

• Changing the Cold War posture of deployed nuclear weapons to increase warning time and thereby reduce the danger of an accidental or unauthorized use of a nuclear weapon.

• Continuing to reduce substantially the size of nuclear forces in all states that possess them.

• Eliminating short-range nuclear weapons designed to be forward-deployed.

• Initiating a bipartisan process with the Senate, including understandings to increase confidence and provide for periodic review, to achieve ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, taking advantage of recent technical advances, and working to secure ratification by other key states.

• Getting control of the uranium enrichment process, combined with the guarantee that uranium for nuclear power reactors could be obtained at a reasonable price, first from the Nuclear Suppliers Group and then from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) or other controlled international reserves. It will also be necessary to deal with proliferation issues presented by spent fuel from reactors producing electricity.

• Halting the production of fissile material for weapons globally; phasing out the use of highly enriched uranium in civil commerce and removing weapons-usable uranium from research facilities around the world and rendering the materials safe.

• Redoubling our efforts to resolve regional confrontations and conflicts that give rise to new nuclear powers.

 
Achieving the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons will also require effective measures to impede or counter any nuclear-related conduct that is potentially threatening to the security of any state or peoples.

Reassertion of the vision of a world free of nuclear weapons and practical measures toward achieving that goal would be, and would be perceived as, a bold initiative consistent with America's moral heritage. The effort could have a profoundly positive impact on the security of future generations. Without the bold vision, the actions will not be perceived as fair or urgent. Without the actions, the vision will not be perceived as realistic or possible.

We endorse setting the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons and working energetically on the actions required to achieve that goal, beginning with the measures outlined above.

Mr. Shultz, a distinguished fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, was secretary of state from 1982 to 1989. Mr. Perry was secretary of defense from 1994 to 1997. Mr. Kissinger, chairman of Kissinger Associates, was secretary of state from 1973 to 1977. Mr. Nunn is former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

A conference organized by Mr. Shultz and Sidney D. Drell was held at Hoover to reconsider the vision that Reagan and Mr. Gorbachev brought to Reykjavik. In addition to Messrs. Shultz and Drell, the following participants also endorse the view in this statement: Martin Anderson, Steve Andreasen, Michael Armacost, William Crowe, James Goodby, Thomas Graham Jr., Thomas Henriksen, David Holloway, Max Kampelman, Jack Matlock, John McLaughlin, Don Oberdorfer, Rozanne Ridgway, Henry Rowen, Roald Sagdeev and Abraham Sofaer.