As the new deputy director for the Center for International Security and Cooperation, Harold Trinkunas will assume more day-to-day management duties of the center in addition to his research scholarship.

Trinkunas, who starts his new role Oct. 1, will provide additional oversight over CISAC’s core operations, from research and fellowships to administration and finance. He was previously CISAC’s associate director for research; he will continue to be a senior research scholar affiliated with the center.

In his new capacity, Trinkunas will work to ensure that CISAC remains on a sustainable footing as its faculty, scholars and fellows generate knowledge to build a safer world and educate the next generation of security experts. This will contribute to maintaining CISAC’s position as a global thought leader on meeting the most pressing challenges for international security and international cooperation.

CISAC’s associate director position for administration and finance will report to Trinkunas, who joined CISAC in September 2016. Previously, that position (under recruitment now) reported to CISAC’s co-directors.  

The new organizational structure brings CISAC into alignment with other centers at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. It will also allow co-directors Amy Zegart and Rod Ewing  to focus more time on CISAC’s external relationships – with CISAC supporters, policy makers and media. These are key audiences for the Center’s scholarly findings and education programs.

Zegart, CISAC co-director for the social sciences, said, "I couldn't be more delighted that Harold has agreed to become CISAC's deputy director. Creating this deputy director position will enable us to bring together longer-range strategic planning and day-to-day operations -- and Harold is ideally suited to the task, with deep experience in university administration at the Naval Postgraduate School, Brookings, and Stanford as well as an active and exciting scholarly research agenda."

Ewing, CISAC co-director for the sciences, said, “Harold’s expanded role in CISAC will allow for a better coordination of administrative and budgetary decisions on a day-to-day basis.  I certainly look forward to working with Harold as we continue to expand the impact of CISAC scholarship on policy issues.”

Management, research

Trinkunas joined CISAC last year from the Brookings Institution, where he was the Charles W. Robinson Chair and senior fellow as well as director of the Latin America Initiative in the Foreign Policy program.

“This is a great opportunity to work in collaborative ways with exceptional scholars around some very important international security challenges facing today’s world,” Trinkunas said then.

Born and raised in Venezuela, Trinkunas earned his doctorate in political science from Stanford in 1999; he was also a predoctoral fellow and later a visiting professor at CISAC.  His first exposure to CISAC took place when he served as a teaching assistant to Scott Sagan in 1992.

Through the years, CISAC has evolved and adjusted its focus to reflect the global security realities, Trinkunas said. Research at CISAC spans biosecurity and global health, terrorism, cybersecurity, governance, and nuclear risk and cooperation, among others.

Trinkunas said he enjoys the mentoring aspect of working with emerging scholars in the CISAC fellowship program, which he oversees.

Security, governance

Trinkunas’ most recent book, Aspirational Power: Brazil's Long Road to Global Influence, co-authored with David Mares of UC San Digo, was published last year by the Brookings Institution Press.  Aspirational Power was chosen as one of Foreign Affair’s “best books of 2016.”

Trinkunas studies the intersection of security and governance. In his research, he has examined civil-military relations, ungoverned spaces, terrorist financing, emerging power dynamics, and global governance.

MEDIA CONTACTS:

Harold Trinkunas, Center for International Security and Cooperation: (650) 725-8035, antanas@stanford.edu

Clifton B. Parker, Center for International Security and Cooperation: (650) 725-6488, cbparker@stanford.edu

A new biosecurity initiative at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) aims to identify and mitigate biological risks, both natural and man-made, and safeguard the future of the life sciences and associated technologies.

The initiative will be led by David A. Relman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation and FSI. Relman, the Thomas C. and Joan M. Merigan Professor in the Departments of Medicine, and Microbiology & Immunology, has served as the science co-director at CISAC for the past four years. He will leave this position on Aug. 31 to lead the new initiative.

Michael McFaul, director and senior fellow at FSI, said, “With exceptional leadership skills, valuable experience and abundant energy, David Relman is ideally positioned to work with scholars from across campus who offer critical expertise in biosecurity. This is an exciting, challenging and important new initiative for FSI that is designed to protect public health from the many new risks now accelerating.”

Relman said the biosecurity initiative will seek to advance the beneficial applications of the life sciences while reducing the risks of misuse by promoting research, education and policy outreach in biological security. His CISAC leadership gives him the know-how to lead such a wide-ranging effort across diverse disciplines and communities.

Relman said, “The opportunity to serve as co-director at CISAC has been a wonderful experience, one that has afforded me the chance to get to know outstanding faculty and staff, their scholarship, and critical policy-relevant work, all of which I had not fully appreciated sitting across campus. This experience has made clear the unusual qualities of Stanford University, and the great people that work here. I am now greatly looking forward to this new opportunity at FSI.”

Biosecurity collaborations

During Relman’s term as CISAC’s science co-director from 2013-2017, he led an expansion of the transdisciplinary work in science and security to include biology, biological and other areas of engineering, medicine, and earth and environmental sciences.

The foundations for work in biological science, technology and security were established at CISAC, especially in the hiring of Megan Palmer, a senior research scholar at CISAC and FSI. Both Relman and Palmer worked together on engagements and discussions with a growing network of more than 20 faculty involved in biosecurity across Stanford.

Palmer said, “Stanford has an opportunity and imperative to advance security strategies for biological science and technology in a global age. Our faculty bring together expertise in areas including technology, policy, and ethics, and are deeply engaged in shaping future of biotechnology policy and practices.”

New insights, new risks

In his new post, Relman said he intends to build on this foundation by creating an initiative that consolidates and focuses activity in biosecurity, develops research and educational programs, attracts new resources, and looks outward at opportunities for policy impact and changing practices across the globe.

Relman said that “new capabilities and insights are reshaping important aspects of the life sciences and associated technologies, and are accompanied by a host of new risks.” If misused, whether by malice or accident, “they pose the potential for large-scale harm,” he noted.

Relman added that the initiative will bring together interest and expertise across the centers and programs of FSI in partnership with Schools and Departments across the university.

At FSI, CISAC will co-sponsor the biological security initiative, which will leverage Stanford expertise in the life sciences, engineering, law and policy.  Key partners will include Tim Stearns (biology), Drew Endy (bioengineering), Mildred Cho (bioethics), and Hank Greely (law), according to Relman. The biosecurity group will also partner with another new program at FSI in global health and conflict, which is led by Paul Wise, Frank Fukuyama, Steve Stedman, Steve Krasner, and others, he added.

Stanford’s School of Medicine and Department of Medicine will also co-sponsor the initiative, thanks to leadership from Lloyd Minor, Michele Barry and Robert Harrington. Relman looks forward to establishing similar relationships with other schools and departments, he said.

 “These partnerships are critical. I’m excited to work with a growing community both within and beyond Stanford towards the goal of a peaceful and prosperous world in the century of biology,” he said.

MEDIA CONTACTS:

David Relman, Center for International Security and Cooperation: relman@stanford.edu

Megan Palmer, Center for International Security and Cooperation:  mjpalmer@stanford.edu

Clifton B. Parker, Center for International Security and Cooperation: (650) 725-6488, cbparker@stanford.edu

Rod Ewing will serve as co-director of the sciences for Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation.

Ewing, a mineralogist and materials scientist, is the Frank Stanton Professor in Nuclear Security at CISAC and senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He begins his new position on Sept. 1, following David Relman, the previous co-director for the sciences. Amy Zegart is the CISAC co-director for the social sciences.

Ewing, whose research is focused on the properties of nuclear materials, leads the Reset Nuclear Waste Policy program at CISAC. He describes the center as a unique organization that “explicitly acknowledges” the role of science and the social sciences in formulating policy. 

“CISAC is a rare opportunity for political and social scientists, historians and scientists and engineers to work together on solving pressing problems. The fact that we have two co-directors reflects a serious intent to integrate knowledge from the widest range of perspectives in order to find policy solutions to important problems,” he said.

Scholarship, research

Ewing is the author or co-author of more than 750 research publications and the editor or co-editor of 18 monographs, proceedings volumes or special issues of journals. He has published widely in mineralogy, geochemistry, materials science, nuclear materials, physics and chemistry in more than 100 different journals. Ewing was granted a patent for the development of a highly durable material for the immobilization of excess weapons plutonium. He is also a founding editor of the magazine, Elements. In 2015, he won the Roebling Medal, the highest award of the Mineralogical Society of America for scientific eminence.

“My work on nuclear waste started out with a focus on technical issues, but over several decades, I realized that technical solutions were not enough.  I now focus on trying to understand why institutions – universities, national laboratories and federal agencies – fail to arrive at the technical solutions. I have been surprised to learn how little science has been applied to the nuclear waste problem – and how social issues have dominated the outcome,” Ewing said.

Expertise, policy

In particular, Ewing seeks to understand why so little information from experts rise through an organization and change accepted ‘truths.’

“I first saw this when I was a soldier in Vietnam and continue to see the same problem in many other areas, that a disconnect exists between the on-the-ground reality and policy,” said Ewing who served in the U.S. Army as an interpreter of Vietnamese attached to the 25th Infantry Division from 1969 to 1970.

“At the very highest levels, policies seem to be based on a hunch or a bias rather than an analysis of the problem. I have always wondered why this is so common – as it often leads a country or organization down a wrong and often dangerous path,” he added.

Born in Abilene, Texas, Ewing attended Texas Christian University (B.S., 1968, summa cum laude) and graduate school at Stanford University (M.S., 1972; Ph.D., 1974). He began his academic career as an assistant professor at the University of New Mexico (1974) rising to the rank of Regents’ Professor of Earth & Planetary Sciences in 1993.

From 1997 to 2013, Ewing was a professor at the University of Michigan, and in 2014, he joined Stanford.

MEDIA CONTACTS:

Rod Ewing, Center for International Security and Cooperation: (650) 725-8641, rewing1@stanford.edu

Clifton B. Parker, Center for International Security and Cooperation: (650) 725-6488, cbparker@stanford.edu

When it comes to cybersecurity, Stanford is the hot spot, especially if you work in national security.

On Aug. 18, officials from the U.S. military, National Security Agency, U.S. Cyber Command, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and from countries known as the “Five Eyes,” attended cybersecurity discussions on campus. Most attendees were chief information officers. John Zangardi, the principal deputy chief information officer for the U.S. Department of Defense, led the group.

The "Five Eyes" refers to an alliance comprising the U.S., Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. These countries abide by an agreement for joint cooperation in signals intelligence, military intelligence, and human intelligence.

The event was held at the Hoover Institution, a co-sponsor along with Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, a center in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Relations. Participants took part in two roundtables – the first one, “Geopolitical Perspectives,” provided a strategic overview of international security with Stanford’s William J. Perry (CISAC and the Hoover Institution), Michael McFaul (FSI and the Hoover Institution), Toomas Henrik Ilves (Hoover Institution), and Francis Fukuyama (the Hoover Institution and FSI's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law).

The second discussion, the “Cyber Information Warfare Panel,” focused on cyber challenges with Amy Zegart (CISAC and the Hoover Institution), Herb Lin (CISAC and the Hoover Institution), John Villasenor (CISAC and the Hoover Institution), and Jay Healey (CISAC).

As cyber attacks escalate in magnitude – reflected in the 2016 Russian meddling in the U.S. election and the 2014 Sony Pictures hacking – the red alert has gone out to Washington D.C. to confront the issue.

At Stanford, Capitol Hill staffers are doing just that, thanks to the Congressional Cyber Boot Camp that takes place Aug. 14-16. The third installment of its kind since 2014, the workshop offered panel discussions, role-playing exercises, informational sessions, and networking opportunities -- all aimed at getting Congress on top of a fast-accelerating issue that has ramifications throughout the American domain.

This year’s event involved almost three dozen staffers hailing from U.S. Senate and House member offices and committees such as the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Homeland Security, Appropriations, Judiciary, Energy and Commerce. Top cyber and policy experts addressed them about some of the thorniest issues emerging in cyber realms -- and what it means for this country's political leadership and citizenry.

The boot camp was held at the Hoover Institution, a co-sponsor along with Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Relations, the Stanford Cyber Initiative, and the Stuart Family Congressional Fellowship Program.

CISAC co-director Amy Zegart said, "The Congressional Cyber Boot Camp is our signature event because we’re connecting the worlds of public policy and cybersecurity in ways that help advance national security." Zegart, also the Davies Family Senior Fellow at Hoover, was a co-convener of the boot camp along with Herbert Lin, a CISAC  and Hoover senior fellow, and widely-known cybersecurity expert.

Zegart said the boot camp has grown so popular that a waiting list now exists. And, she points to policy impacts after just three years. For example, a legal counsel to U.S. Sen. John McCain, the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, attended a prior boot camp, which resulted in McCain visiting and reaching out to CISAC and the Hoover on cybersecurity issues over the past few years. A lot of those discussions are confidential, but that input had its roots in the boot camp and Stanford experts gather there.

“We created the cyber boot camp precisely because many Congressional staffers had told us this was the type of help they needed,” Zegart said.

In her introductory remarks to the group, Zegart said, “If we can help you, you can help our country.” The boot camp would be focused on, she said, encouraging “new knowledge” and building “new networks of people” in the field of cybersecurity.

Sean Kanuck, an affiliate with CISAC who served as the U.S.’ first national intelligence officer for cyber issues from 2011 to 2016, talked about reframing cybersecurity problems in his keynote address to the Stanford Congressional Cyber Boot Camp.

Exercises, networking

As Zegart said, cybersecurity is an urgent issue for policy makers like those at the boot camp, and last year’s presidential election and major hacking of corporations and security organizations attest to the increasing importance that Washington D.C. now places on it. Preparation is considered critical.

And so, this year’s camp included a simulation exercise with Congressional staffers assuming the roles of executives at a large, fictitious company (“Frizzle”) that is under a major cyberattack.

Each boot camp gets a new round of fresh Congressional faces. Last year, the Los Angeles Times published a story on the boot camp and all of the questions and issues that arose in such a scenario. For example, when should customers or authorities be informed, and what about retaliation? For most, cyber is a brave new world – and expert advice is appreciated – something that Stanford’s boot camp offers.

Evolving security threat

Cyber experts point out that nations are increasingly dependent on information and information technology for societal functions. This makes ensuring the security of information and information technology — against a broad spectrum of hackers, criminals, terrorists, and state actors – a top priority for any country. And it seems like every day, something new is introduced.

“Cybersecurity challenges are evolving at a rapid pace, and the cyber threat the nation faces today will be different from the one it faces tomorrow,” Zegart and Lin wrote in the workshop’s agenda.

Cybersecurity is not merely a technical matter, but a “multi-faceted enterprise” that requires drawing on computer science, economics, law, political science, psychology, and other disciplines, they noted.

The idea behind the boot camp is to help congressional staffers – those writing the nation’s policies on cybersecurity – use “multiple perspectives and disciplines” as they analyze and act on cybersecurity issues.

“The Stanford Cyber Boot Camp endeavors to give congressional staffers a conceptual framework to understand the threat environment of today and how it might evolve so that they are better able to anticipate and manage the problems of tomorrow,” Zegart and Lin said.

That seems to be happening on Capitol Hill, where staffers now know who to call for cyber advice.

Lin said he routinely receives calls from Congressional staffers who are alumni of the boot camp – they are seeking his feedback and guidance on cyber policy or legislation. Of course, those discussions are not for public disclosure, given the sensitivity. Lin was also asked to testify twice before Congress on cyber issues, and he was chosen by the Obama Administration to serve on the President’s Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity. He attests that the boot camp opened up the door for him being invited to that commission.

In December 2016, the White House cyber commission, with the help of experts like Lin, issued strong recommendations to upgrade the nation’s cybersecurity systems.

That’s the kind of policy impact the cyber boot camp seeks.

Topics and speakers

Themes covered at this week’s cyber camp:

• the role of offensive operations in cyberspace for improving the nation’s cybersecurity;

• why cyber defense is more difficult than offense;

• the role of market forces in enhancing or weakening cybersecurity;

• automotive cyber security; problems in applying existing law to accelerating technology;

• the economic, psychological, and organizational factors involved in cybersecurity;

• and the fundamental principles of cybersecurity.

Scheduled speakers included:

• Condoleezza Rice, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and former U.S. Secretary of State and National Security Advisor.

• Michael McFaul, director and senior fellow at both FSI and the Hoover Institution.

• Marc Andreessen, co-founder and general partner of Andreessen Horowitz.

• Toomas Hendrik Ilves, the former president of Estonia; and distinguished visiting fellow this past year at CISAC, Hoover, and FSI.

• Andy Grotto, CISAC fellow, Hoover research fellow, and former senior director for cybersecurity policy at the National Security Council.

• Joel Peterson, chairman of JetBlue Airways; professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business; and chairman at the Hoover Institution Board of Overseers.

The group also will take a walking tour of the Hoover Institution’s Library and Archives and a trip to the Tesla factory in Fremont.

Prior coverage of boot camps:

Stanford News story on 2014 event

CISAC story on 2014 event

CISAC video of 2014 event

Stanford News story on 2015 event

Hoover story on 2016 media boot camp

MEDIA CONTACT:

Clifton B. Parker, Center for International Security and Cooperation: (650) 725-6488, cbparker@stanford.edu

CISAC's William J. Perry issued the following statement today (Aug. 9) on the North Korea crisis that urged a return to deterrence on the part of the U.S.: 

Learn more at the William J. Perry Project web site.

This Stanford news release describes research by CISAC's Scott Sagan on American public opinion toward the use of nuclear weapons during wartime. He found that views on nuclear weapons usage has not fundamentally changed since 1945, and many people would support the use of such weapons to kill millions of civilians if the U.S. found itself in a similar wartime situation. Sagan and his co-author used a survey experiment to recreate the situation that the United States faced in 1945 in the Hiroshima nuclear bombing with a hypothetical American war with Iran today.

The results showed little support for the so-called “nuclear taboo” thesis, or that the principle of “noncombatant immunity” – civilian protection from such weapons – has become a deeply held norm in America. The conclusions are stark and disturbing, Sagan said.

“These findings highlight the limited extent to which the U.S. public has accepted the principles of just war doctrine and suggest that public opinion is unlikely to be a serious constraint on any president contemplating the use of nuclear weapons in the crucible of war,” wrote Sagan and his co-author, Benjamin Valentino, a Dartmouth College professor of government.

Across the world, many democracies are sliding further and further toward authoritarianism. NPR's Ari Shapiro talks with Larry Diamond of Stanford University about this "global democratic recession." Listen here.

In this podcast with the Carnegie Council, CISAC's Scott Sagan says that major changes must be made if U.S. nuclear war plans are to conform to the principles of just war doctrine and the law of armed conflict. He proposes a new doctrine: "the nuclear necessity principle." In sum, the U.S. will not use nuclear weapons against any target that could be reliably destroyed by conventional means.

In 2016, Sagan co-authored an op-ed in The Washington Post on this topic: "It is time to turn nuclear common sense into national policy. A declaration that the United States would never use nuclear weapons when conventional weapons could destroy the target could reduce the number of nuclear weapons we need for legitimate deterrence purposes. Placing conventional weapons at the center of debates about the future of deterrence would also help focus the policy discussion on plausible scenarios with realistic plans for the use of U.S. military power. And it would more faithfully honor the just-war principles of distinction, necessity and proportionality, by placing them at the heart of our deterrence and security policies, where our highest ideals belong."