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Barack Obama is not the first U.S. president to deal with the problem of overcommitment abroad. How does his record compare with earlier cases? Can the past help us understand the foreign policy debate of 2016? Can it tell us how, when—and whether—today’s retrenchment will end?
Stephen Sestanovich is a professor of international diplomacy at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the author of Maximalist: America in the World from Truman to Obama (Knopf 2014).
From 1997 to 2001, Sestanovich was the U.S. State Department's ambassador-at-large for the former Soviet Union. In previous government assignments, he was senior director for policy development at the National Security Council, a member of the State Department’s policy planning staff, and legislative assistant to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He has also worked at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Ambassador Sestanovich received his BA summa cum laude from Cornell University and his PhD from Harvard University. He has written for Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and other publications. He is a member of the board of directors of the National Endowment for Democracy.
Event co-sponsored by the Center for International Security and Cooperation
Please join us for the upcoming Payne Distinguished Lecture, “NATIONAL SECURITY CHALLENGES FOR THE NEXT PRESIDENT," with R. Nicholas Burns, former Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs and the Roy and Barbara Goodman Family Professor of the Practice of Diplomacy and International Relations, Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
The lecture will take place on Friday, April 29 at 12 noon in the Bechtel Conference Center, Encina Hall. Please RSVP to Scott Nelson at snelson@stanford.edu.
Event is Full. To be added to the waitlist please email Karen Haley: khaley@stanford.edu
Ilya Ponomarev is an opposition member of the Russian Parliament (State Duma). He is a Social Democrat representing Novosibirsk – the capital of Siberia, and chairs the Innovations and Venture Capital (formerly Hi-Tech development) subcommittee which has introduced legislation to support emerging innovation economy in Russia.
Ilya Ponomarev is one of leaders of anti-Putin opposition in Russia. He played key role in protests of 2012; during 2013-2014 he opposed antidemocratic legislation introduced in the country, was the only MP in Duma to vote against annexation of Crimea.
Mr Ponomarev serves as the Advisor on International Business Development, Commercialization and Technology Transfer for the President of Skolkovo Foundation – managing company of the project chaired by Pres. Medvedev. He is member of Society of Petroleum Engineers (IT), Council for Foreign and Defense Policies, Council for National Strategy, fellow at “Open Russia” foundation. Hon. Ponomarev is supervising innovation policies research at Institute of Contemporary Development (INSOR, think-tank chaired by Pres. Medvedev), and political studies at Institute of Globalization Studies (IPROG). Ilya Ponomarev is a member of Global Science and Innovations Council (GSIAC), chaired by Prime Minister of Malaysia.
Previously, Mr. Ponomarev held various positions in private companies, including Vice President of Yukos Oil Company, the largest Russian oil and gas corporation, and Director for CIS Business Development and Marketing for Schlumberger Oilfield Services.
He is an author of numerous research papers and magazine articles about new economy development, regional policies, education and international relations.
David Cameron's promise to renegotiate the terms of British membership and organise an in/out referendum rested on a double gamble. The first one was that he would achieve a successful negotiation in Brussels, which he made possible by watering down his demands and relying on his partners' good will. The second is a more challenging one, which is to convince a majority of British voters to support staying in the EU. This is made particularly difficult by the long-standing anti-EU political culture in the UK, the divisions in the Conservative Party and an underlying crisis of British democracy, which finds expression in the rejection of the political elites, the rise of populist parties (UKIP) and the strains in the union between the component nations of the UK. This makes the outcome of the referendum, with massive consequences in case of a negative vote, hard to predict.
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Pauline Schnapper is professor of British Studies at the Paris Sorbonne Nouvelle University and a former fellow of the Institut Universitaire de France. She is the author (with David Baker) of Britain and the Crisis of the European Union, 2015, Palgrave Macmillan.
Pauline Schnapper
Professeur de civilisation britannique
Speaker
Université Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle
The coordinated suicide bombings that killed more than 30 people and wounded 250 more at an international airport and downtown subway station in Brussels on Tuesday were “shocking but not surprising” and shared many of the hallmarks of previous European terror attacks, according to Stanford terrorism experts.
“My research shows that in general, terrorist plots in Europe involve larger numbers of conspirators than do plots in the United States,” said Martha Crenshaw, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC).
Belgian authorities said that as many as five people may have been directly involved in the bombings, including two Belgian-born brothers with violent criminal records, and that several suspects were linked to the same terrorist network that carried out the deadly Paris attacks last November.
“It is common for terrorist conspiracies anywhere to be formed from prior social groupings – friends and relatives,” said Crenshaw.
“The bonds that link individuals are not entirely ideological by any means. Criminal backgrounds are also not surprising. Indeed prison radicalization is a well-known phenomenon.”
A Notorious Neighborhood
Many of the suspects in the Brussels bombings had ties to the inner-city neighborhood of Molenbeek, a majority Muslim enclave of mostly Moroccan descent with a long history as a logistical base for jihadists.
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“Brussels and particularly Molenbeek is one of those places that comes up a lot when you’re talking about counter terrorism,” said Terrence Peterson, a postdoctoral fellow at CISAC.
“You do have terrorism networks that use these areas, in the same way that organized crime does, to thrive…It seems to be the place where all the networks are locating in part because Belgian security hasn’t been very effective in fighting terrorism.”
Foreign Fighters Bring the War Home
Belgium is a small nation, with a population of around 11 million people, but it has the highest per capita percentage of any Western country of foreign fighters who have joined the battle in Iraq and Syria, according to a recent report, which estimated the total number at 440.
“People were even saying it was not a matter of if, but when Belgium was attacked,” said Joe Felter, a CISAC senior research scholar and former Colonel in the U.S. Army Special Forces.
“You’ve got a high concentration of radicalized individuals in that neighborhood of Brussels, so logistically it was easier for them to recruit, plan and coordinate the execution of these attacks. Local residents loading up explosive packed suitcases in a cab and driving across town to the airport exposes them to much less risk of compromise than would a plot requiring cross border preparation and movement by foreign citizens.”
Felter said he was concerned that the Brussels bombings, for which the Islamic State group has claimed responsibility, would inspire copycat attacks in other countries.
“The real risk now is these home-grown, self-directed terrorist attacks,” he said.
“A successful attack like this, with all its media attention and publicity, is only going to inspire and motivate more attempts going forward.”
Former U.S. Secretary of State and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton delivers a foreign policy address at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies on March 23, 2016.
Former U.S. Secretary of State and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said European nations needed to do a better job of sharing intelligence to track foreign fighters as they returned home, during a foreign policy speech at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies on Wednesday.
“The most urgent task is stopping the flow of foreign fighters to and from the Middle East,” Clinton said.
“Thousands of young recruits have flocked to Syria from France, Germany, Belgium and the United Kingdom. Their European passports make it easier for them to cross borders and eventually return home, radicalized and battle-hardened. We need to know the identities of every fighter who makes that trip and start revoking their passports and visas.”
Turkey’s president announced at a press conference on Wednesday that his country had deported one of the suspected Brussels bombers back to the Netherlands last year with a clear warning that he was a jihadi.
Identifying Hot Spots
Clinton said authorities also needed to work to improve social conditions in problem areas such as Molenbeek.
“There…has to be a special emphasis on identifying and investing in the hot spots, the specific neighborhoods, prisons and schools where recruitment happens in clusters as we’ve seen in Brussels,” Clinton said.
Other European countries such as Denmark, which has also been struggling to deal with a high percentage of foreign fighters, are trying to proactively to discourage citizens from travelling to Syria to fight, said Anja Dalgaard-Nielsen, former executive director of the Danish Security and Intelligence Service and a CISAC affiliate.
“Politicians are likely to talk about tougher legislation, but there are also measured voices, calling for a strong, long term preventive effort against radicalization to prevent problems from growing out of hand,” said Dalgaard-Nielsen.
Cover of the book "Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian-Heritage Societies" co-authored by Stanford Political Science professor David Laitin.
“Police need to prioritize community outreach and long term trust building to try to ensure the collaboration of minority groups and socioeconomically disadvantaged communities in the effort against terrorism.”
Stanford political science professor David Laitin, who recently published the book “Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian-Heritage Societies,” in collaboration with Claire Adida and Marie-Anne Valfort, said his research found that Muslims faced higher discrimination in the economy, in society and in the political process compared to Christians from similar immigrant backgrounds.
“But there is no evidence that higher degrees of discrimination lead Muslims into the unspeakable acts that members of an inhuman cult are performing in the name of Islam,” said Laitin, who is the James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences.
“From what we have tragically seen, the attractiveness of the present murderous cult does not derive from everyday discrimination," he said. "Research has shown that it is not the poor and downtrodden who are radicalized in this way; but rather reasonably educated second-generation immigrants from largely secular backgrounds.”
Europe Divided
Laitin said he expected to see many European countries tighten their border controls in response to the Brussels attacks, as well as greater support in the United Kingdom for the movement to leave the European Union in the upcoming referendum.
“The biggest short-term effect, in my judgment, will be the erosion of one of the great achievements of European integration, namely Schengen, which promised open borders throughout the continent,” Laitin said.
“I foresee greater security walls that will come to divide European countries.”
Fighting a Hostile Ideology
Felter said that while it was undoubtedly important to improve intelligence sharing and invest in greater security measures as part of concerted efforts to target ISIS and interdict future terrorist plots, the key to undermining support for and defeating ISIS was combating its perverted version of Islam.
And, he said, that effort would have to come largely from within the Islamic community itself.
“The symptoms may be suicide bombers in airports, but the root cause is this hostile ideology that’s being pushed on these at-risk individuals through aggressive radicalization and recruitment efforts carried out largely via the internet that then inspires them to carry out these self-directed, ISIS-inspired attacks,” Felter said.
“There’s got to be a longer-term effort to address the root causes of this, to discredit and delegitimize the appeal of this ideology that they’re promulgating online and through social media that’s inspiring these young men and women to go off and commit these horrible acts in the misguided belief that it is their religious obligation to do so.”
Hero Image
A woman arrives with flowers at a cordoned-off area near Maelbeek subway station in Brussels on March 23, 2016, a day after bomb attacks in the Belgian capital killed about 35 people and left more than 200 people wounded.
Hillary Clinton, former Secretary of State and current presidential candidate, delivered a policy address on March 23 at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.
"It's a great treat not only for me to be at the university, but at this particular institute as well," said Clinton in her opening remarks. "You have made Stanford a center for national security scholarship, and that is the principal reason why I am here today."
Responding to the recent attacks in Brussels, which she called a "brutal reminder" of the ongoing global struggle with radical terrorism, Secretary Clinton laid out a set of counter-terrorism policy proposals that emphasized adaptability, diplomacy, and cooperation with other countries, intelligence services and Muslim communities.
"We face an adversary that is constantly adapting and operating across multiple theaters,” she said. “Our response must be just as nimble and far reaching. We need to reinforce the alliances that have been pillars of American power for decades.”
FSI Director Michael McFaul, former US ambassador to Russia, introduced Secretary Clinton, reminding the audience of her personal connection to Stanford (daughter Chelsea and son-in-law Marc Mezvinsky both attended the University). Former Secretary of State George Shultz and former Defense Secretary William Perry were in attendance. A sample of media coverage is listed below:
Abstract: What drives jihadi violence in Europe? Terrorists of today are seen as pursuing social rather than political revolt, motivated by failed integration, identity crisis and nihilism. Europe's segregated suburbs are regarded as incubators for violent radicalization, and some suggest online propaganda produces 'lone wolves' who act in unpredictable, volatile fashions. An examination of jihadi terrorist plots in Europe between 1994 and 2015 contradicts such assumptions. Terrorist cells emerge through intricate interplay between jihadi groups in war zones and European extremists. Most cells are traced to the same transnational network, which has evolved and expanded since the early 1990s. The plots are linked in time and space through people involved, and there are striking similarities between cases. This talk will reveal that lone wolves are largely a myth in Europe, as most perpetrators have network ties and interact with militants during radicalization. Terrorist cell formation is not confined to gritty suburbs and disenfranchised immigrants are not necessarily key actors. On the contrary, cells emerge in diverse settings where resourceful, well-connected and ideological entrepreneurs (cell builders) are present. Entrepreneurs recruit misfits and drifters as manpower, and embody the foremost driving force for the occurrence of plots and attacks.
About the Speaker: Petter Nesser (Cand. Polit, Dr. Philos) is a senior research fellow with the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI). Trained in social science, Middle East studies and Arabic at the University of Oslo and The American University in Cairo, Dr Nesser has conducted extensive research on jihadism in Europe for more than twelve years. His work focuses mainly on radicalization processes and terrorists’ modus operandi. Nesser communicates findings through conferences, speeches, and the media. He teaches at academic institutions and acts as advisor for Norwegian authorities on issues related to extremism. His most recent publication, Islamist Terrorism in Europe, A History (Hurst and Oxford University Press, 2015), provides a comprehensive account of the emergence and evolution of transnational militant Islamism in Western Europe.
Petter Nesser
Senior Research Fellow
Norwegian Defense Research Establishment
When assistant professor of medicine Eran Bendavid began a study on livestock in African households to determine impact on childhood health, he'd already anticipated common field problems like poorly captured or intentionally misreported data, difficulty getting to work sites, or problems with training local volunteers.
But he'd never gotten that particular question from a fieldworker before. It didn't occur to him that participating families, in reporting their livestock holdings, would completely omit the chickens running around at their feet, thereby skewing the data.
"They didn't consider chickens to be livestock," recalled Bendavid. Along with Scott Rozelle, the Helen F. Farnsworth Senior Fellow at FSI, and associate professor of political science and FSI senior fellow Beatriz Magaloni, Bendavid spoke to a full house last week on lessons learned from fieldwork gone awry. The return engagement of FSI's popular seminar, "Everything that can go wrong in a field experiment” was introduced by Jesper Sørensen, executive director of Stanford Seed, and moderated by Katherine Casey, assistant professor of political economy at the GSB. The seminar is a product of FSI and Seed’s joint Global Development and Poverty (GDP) Initiative, which to date has awarded nearly $7 million in faculty research funding to promote research on poverty alleviation and economic development worldwide.
Rozelle, co-director of the Rural Education Action Program, spoke of the obstacles to accurate data gathering, especially in rural areas where record-keeping is inaccurate and participants' trust is low. Arriving in a Chinese village to carry out child nutrition studies, said Rozelle, "we found Grandma running out the back door with the baby." The researchers had worked with the local family planning council to find the names of children to study, but the families thought the authorities were coming to penalize them for violation of the one-child policy.
Cultural differences make for entertaining and illuminating (if frustrating) lessons, but Beatriz Magaloni, director of FSI's Program on Poverty and Governance at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law had a different story to tell. Over the course of three years, her GDP-funded work to investigate and reduce police violence in Brazil - a phenomenon resulting in more than 22,000 deaths since 2005 - has encountered obstacle after obstacle. Her work to pilot body-worn cameras on police in Rio has faced a change in police leadership, setting back cooperation; a yearlong struggle to decouple a study of TASER International’s body worn cameras from its electrical weapons in the same population; a work site initially lacking electricity to charge the cameras or Internet to view the feeds; and noncompliance among the officers. "It's discouraging at times," admitted Magaloni, who has finally gotten the cameras onto the officers' uniforms and must now experiment with ways to incentivize their use. "We are learning a lot about how institutional behavior becomes so entrenched and why it's so hard to change."
Experimentation is a powerful tool to understand cause and effect, said Casey, but a tool only works if it's implemented properly. Learning from failure makes for an interesting panel discussion. The speakers' hope is that it also makes for better research in the future.
The Global Development and Poverty Initiative is a University-wide initiative of the Stanford Institute for Innovation in Developing Economies (Seed) in partnership with the Freeman Spogli Institute (FSI). GDP was established in 2013 to stimulate transformative research ideas and new approaches to economic development and poverty alleviation worldwide. GDP supports groundbreaking research at the intersection of traditional academic disciplines and practical application. GDP uses a venture-funding model to pursue compelling interdisciplinary research on the causes and consequences of global poverty. Initial funding allows GDP awardees to conduct high-quality research in developing countries where there is a lack of data and infrastructure.
Former U.S. Secretary of State and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton delivers a foreign policy address at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies on March 23, 2016.
Cover of the book "Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian-Heritage Societies" co-authored by Stanford Political Science professor David Laitin.
