The horror of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki has become an inescapable part of childhood in Japan. For Toshihiro Higuchi – a CISAC fellow who this last academic year focused on the political risks and fallout of nuclear weapons – it started with comic books and pencil sales for victims of the American bombs.

“For me, like every kid in Japan, the discourse about Hiroshima and Nagasaki was always familiar – from reading graphic books about the hell-like aftermath to joining a donation drive at school for victim relief,” said Higuchi, a historian and postdoctoral fellow at CISAC. “I remember that I was fascinated by the sheer power of nuclear weapons, and how that power overshadows everything else about war and conflict.”

That fascination with the political and social fallout of nuclear weapons and the complexities of nuclear energy is what drives the six nuclear fellows at the Center for International Security and Cooperation. The fellows – funded by grants from the Stanton Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation – spend their time at Stanford conducting research to build public engagement and shape government policy.

“I have great respect for scientists who can apply their knowledge not just to advance their field, but to use their skills to more directly improve policy,” said Robert Forrest, a physicist examining the role of nuclear reactors driven by particle accelerators. “In some small way, I hope to eventually be one of them. Nuclear issues present not only a fascinating and profound set of problems, but I feel a sort of responsibility toward them as a physicist.”

Seminars, mentorships with Stanford scholars and some of the world’s thought-leaders on nuclear science and policy, as well as annual visits to national laboratories, military bases and security conferences enhance the decades-old CISAC nuclear fellowship program.

“I got properly interested in nuclear weapons on a CISAC trip to the Nevada Test Site,” said John Downer, a Stanton postdoctoral fellow who focuses on the risks of nuclear power. “It’s one thing to read about atomic bombs; it’s another to stand on the edge of a giant crater in the desert.”

Lynn Eden, CISAC’s associate director for research, recently led the center’s postdoctoral fellows to the two-day Strategic Command Deterrence Symposium in La Vista, Neb., in which top military brass, academics and policymakers gathered to discuss nuclear deterrence in the emerging international security environment.

“Panelists had very different ideas about the role of nuclear weapons now and in the future,” said Eden, author of the groundbreaking book, Whole World on Fire, which explores how the U.S. government has underestimated the potential damage of nuclear detonations. “I have to say, the Shultz, Perry, Kissinger, Nunn vision of a world without nuclear weapons was not at the top of the agenda.”

Eden was referring to the watershed editorial in the Wall Street Journal co-authored by the four Cold War veterans, who are now advocating for a vision of a world free of nuclear weapons. The heft of their credentials and the passion behind their argument enabled President Barack Obama to call for the same, and be honored with a Nobel.

Eden said many of Strategic Command’s responsibilities regarding nuclear war planning have not changed under the Obama administration, but the thinking of their top officers has. U.S. Air Force Gen. Robert Kehler, the commander of Strategic Command, met privately with the CISAC fellows. “None of our questions surprised him, and his answers were extremely thoughtful,” she said. 

The March 11, 2011, earthquake in Japan and subsequent tsunami and nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant gave the fellows rich, real-world lessons about the human and environmental costs of nuclear energy gone wrong. The worst nuclear disaster since the Chernobyl meltdown of 1986 galvanized Stanford scholars across the campus to study the cause and effects of the Japanese tragedy.  

“As someone who is interested in technological risk, I think there is no technological sphere where the stakes are higher and the knowledge more political than in nuclear power – except maybe in nuclear weapons,” Downer said. “The way formal reports and journalistic accounts construe nuclear disasters and radioactive fallout is often terrifyingly misleading. I think I can contribute something by helping restructure debates about nuclear risks.”

In keeping with CISAC’s mission, the fellows are encouraged to engage in pubic debate by drawing out the policy relevance of an issue. They publish in scholarly journals and write academic papers, as well as blog and submit op-eds and editorials to online sites.  Forrest, for example, had a commentary on Huffington Post that urged Congress to maintain federal funding for scientific research and development.

Benoît Pelopidas, a postdoctoral nuclear fellow from France, ran a Friday evening film series this last academic year, highlighting such traditional films as the Kurosawa classic “I Live in Fear” – about a Japanese man whose fear of another nuclear bomb drives him to insanity – to the recent South African science fiction thrilled, “District 9,” which explores strands of xenophobia and social segregation behind national security.

“At Stanford, I found a real interdisciplinary community interested in nuclear issues and unexpected access to policymakers,” Pelopidas said, including former U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz and Ambassador James Goodby, senior fellows at CISAC’s neighboring Hoover Institution who called on him to write a paper about the future of nuclear deterrence. “This helped me appreciate the value of interdisciplinary research in the nuclear discourse – to create opportunities for change.”

What’s next for the six fellows:

• Edward Blandford: University of New Mexico, assistant professor of nuclear engineering in the Department of Chemical and Nuclear Engineering
• Alexandre Debs: Yale University, assistant professor of political science
• John Downer: University of Bristol, U.K., assistant professor of risk and resilience in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies
• Robert Forrest: Continues his research at CISAC into the role of particle accelerators in a nuclear-powered future
• Toshihiro Higuchi: University of Wisconsin-Madison, an ACLS/Mellon Foundation postdoctoral fellow in the Department of the History of Science
• Benoît Pelopidas: University of Bristol, U.K., assistant professor of international relations at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies

Josef Joffe, a senior fellow at FSI and the Hoover Institution and the editor-publisher of Germany's Die Zeit, reviews Jonathan Fenby's  The General: Charles de Gaulle and the France He Saved in The New York Times Book Review Sunday Aug. 19. Fenby, says Joffe, knows how to turn historical breath and depth "into enthrallment " and proceeds to prove his point.

Not just a biography of Charles de Gaulle, the book tells the story of the 20th century giant "who captivated the public's imagination while still alive" and also "traces the story of a great nation that refused to come to terms with the loss of the strategic preeminence it had once enjoyed."

"As France hunkered down behind the Maginot line after World War I, de Gaulle preached the armored offense Hitler's panzer armies would use with devastating efficiency," Joffe says. When Hitler subdued France in 1940 in a matter of weeks, de Gaulle escaped to London, where he sparred with both Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt.   With Germany's defeat finally in sight, de Gaulle returned to Paris. Yet after only a few days as head of government he resigned and went to Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises where he would spend the next 12 years.

After the chaotic years of France's Fourth Republic, where "it lost Indochina, Suez, and l'Algerie francaise," de Gaulle returned to France.  He reigned over the Fifth Republic, Joffe says, "like a latter day Sun King, forced to suffer the ornery ways of democratic politics."

The French student riots of May 1968, "the mightiest student revolt in the West," per Joffe, were to prove his undoing.  de Gaulle went to French Army headquarters then in Germany to plead for the support of the military.  Meanwhile,"the faithful in Paris rallied and de Gaulle won a huge majority in the parliamentary elections of June 1968."  But, as Joffe says, he was the nation's savior no more.  When he called for a referendum on his reforms, he lost and resigned the same day. In November 1970, just before his 80th birthday, he died in Colombey.

As Joffe concludes in his review, "There is no more fitting epitaph than Fenby's last sentence: 'The world would not see his like again.'"

Resilient citizens in times of crisis

Resilience involves the capacity to deal with change and to recover. It is the potential of  a system, of organisations or individuals to adapt to changing circumstances in the face of risk and adversity. Just as importantly, it is the ability to recover after a disaster or a crisis. As such, it is both about resisting shocks and using such events to trigger renewal, innovation and address the ensuing challenges and difficulties through creative solutions. 

It has been increasingly evident over the past couple of years that Europe is undergoing its deepest existentialist crisis since the project of European integration kicked off in the early 1950s. The crisis is deep and does not only concern Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy or Ireland. It goes well beyond the confines of the Eurozone and presents a resilience challenge that has to be addressed well and truly at the European level. It is just as important however that this resilience challenge is also met at the local, societal level.

Crises are transformative; along with the risk of deterioration and disintegration, they also offer an opportunity for growth. The challenge that is therefore posed by the current crisis is not only how much we can expect the European system to be able to absorb before it transforms into something fundamentally different, but also who will be the driving force of change or the game changer in these conditions? Identifying the factors that will be able to drive change and demonstrate resilience to the crisis is necessary for the EU and it is even more fundamental for Greece.

As the crisis has been unraveling in Greece, the focus has been on the negative effects it has been having on citizens’ life, on the country’s public services, on the welfare state, on the political system and on expectations for the future. Without a shadow of a doubt, these negative effects have been tragic and painful. In a country of approximately 10.1 million people, 350,000 jobs have been lost in the past year alone. Unemployment has risen over 23% in the general population, while youth unemployment in particular has soared to over 52%. GDP has declined by 20%, and austerity measures have wrung the middle class dry. In Athens, there was up to 60% fall in revenue for businesses directly associated with the Indignados sit–ins and the consecutive riots during 2011-2012; the commercial centre of Athens has become increasingly derelict, shops are closing, buildings on main streets are no longer repairing their facades from the damages incurred in weekly demonstrations. Suicide rates have increased, along with violent criminality and homelessness, while soup kitchens have made their appearance again - and the lines are growing longer every day. Public hospitals are lacking in many cases even the most basic supplies while public schools and universities are preparing for a tough academic year ahead expecting to have even less of a possibility to afford the heating bills than they did last year.

There exists a sense of pervasive breakdown. There is a feeling of disorientation and lost identity that comes with the collapse of the assumptions people lived by until just a couple of years ago and the expectations they had for their future. The grim picture does not end here. Young Greeks are emigrating in increasing numbers as this crisis’ harshest toll has been on their dreams of a better tomorrow in their home country that until recently appeared consolidated within what the EU jargon referred to as ‘core Europe’. Greece’s democratic institutions are being systematically undermined: the media are more often than not mouthpieces of the political parties; the judiciary is distrusted and degraded; the Parliament and the party system are discredited.

Yet in all this, encouraging signs must be sought out, emphasized and supported. They are necessary if the resilience challenge is to be met.

The Greek state with all its failures, weaknesses and mishaps is retreating, and as it retreats it is leaving a number of voids. Rather than see this as a zero-sum game, it can be seized as an opportunity by new forms of civil society. Greek civil society has traditionally been significantly under-developed, poorly organized with limited influence and even more limited independence. Yet it is maybe this sector that has the widest scope for independent action at present. As the state and private sectors are being hammered by the economic and political crises the country is undergoing, the non-governmental and not-for-profit sectors that have been long under-performing, have perhaps the best opportunity to be creative and offer novel solutions and be a true agent of change in the present conjuncture of circumstances.

As economic conditions have severely deteriorated, there has been an unprecedented mushrooming of initiatives and efforts to cater to the needs of society’s most vulnerable groups. Radio stations have paired up with supermarket chains and civil society organizations to collect donations and contributions in kind; medical networks such as ‘Medecins du Monde’ and ‘Medecins Sans Frontiers’ have dynamically responded to the health needs of migrant minorities and homeless citizens particularly in downtown Athens; voluntarism has bounced back (the Athens 2004 Olympic Games had constituted a unique eruption of voluntarism that fizzled out shortly after the games ended) and is becoming the last level of support that many humanitarian and philanthropic NGOs can count on given that the state has not only frozen all funding to NGOs but has also cut back on basic social services. New networks bringing together young Greeks rely on the internet and social media platforms to mobilize citizens in environmental protection initiatives. Similarly, media outlets and artists are mobilized to support events aimed at promoting human rights, tolerance, and respect for cultural and religious diversity in a vibrant effort to fight back against the electoral rise of the neo-nazi Golden Dawn party.

Tuesday, July 24th marked the 38th anniversary of the restoration of democracy in Greece after a seven-year military dictatorship (1967-1974). If this anniversary constitutes an opportunity to reflect on why the post-dictatorship era, known as the metapolitefsi, is ending in such socio-political anxiety and anger, it should also be approached as a milestone from which to spark a fundamental shift in public mentality in Greece and for citizens to express their democratic resilience.

As has been often argued, social innovation tends to thrive in the most challenging, unsettled times and seemingly restrictive conditions. In effect, in times of crises, the ability of citizens to develop resilience is fundamental for their country’s democratic life. This social activism may become the platform upon which Greek civil society can develop and strengthen its credibility as a socially responsible sector that will seize this momentum to contribute dynamically and creatively to addressing the weaknesses that characterize democracy in Greece. The scope for action is wide: multiculturalism, religious diversity, racism and xenophobia, gender equality, anti-discrimination, protection of the most vulnerable and marginalized sections of society, protection of the environment, governmental accountability are but a few of the core sectors that urgently need to be addressed.

Europe Center Director Amir Eshel's new book Futurity: Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past, argues for the prospective rather than retrospective vision of literary works.  "Bringing to light how reflections on the past create tools for the future, Futurity reminds us of the numerous possibilities literature holds for grappling with the challenges of both today and tomorrow," says the University of Chicago Press.  Recently released in German (Suhrkamp Verlag, May 2012), the English version will be published by the University of Chicago Press in December 2012.

Amir Eshel is the Edward Clark Crossett Professor of Humanistic Studies, Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature, and the Chair of Graduate Studies, German Studies.  His website is at http://aeshel.com/

TEC Director Amir Eshel weighs in on the strength and ability of Europe to overcome its fiscal problems in his blog article "Europe, beyond bashing."  In it, he reminds us that "the highly educated, democratic, and often quite-transparently-and-efficiently governed European Union houses 500 million citizens who earn three and a half times the average world GDP per capita. Crises come and go, but Europe’s foundation stands strong."  To read more, please visit Professor Eshel's website.

With Spain as the current hotspot in the European financial crisis, it is easy to lose sight of the broader features of the Spanish predicament, which, I submit, was political and cultural before it emerged as financial. One reason for the dramatic escalation of the risk premium on Spanish bonds is the government’s low credibility - itself the consequence of a heady mix of self-contradiction, lack of transparency, and downright lying. On November 20, 2011, after years of corrosive opposition, Mariano Rajoy rose to the presidency of the government on assurances that he understood the crisis and knew how to handle it.  He now feels trapped in a situation he cannot control, not least because much of the damage is of his own party’s making. To be sure, the socialists contributed mightily to the public debt, exacerbated it by denying the crisis when it was already in evidence, and worst of all, did not act to control the housing bubble, which left in its wake banks filled with toxic assets and a severe credit crunch. But at the root of the housing and mortgage bubble were the dangerous liaisons between the banking system and regional governments such as those in  Madrid and Valencia, that have long been steeped in the Partido Popular’s reckless politics and corrupt practices (epitomized by Bankia’s lurid ambitions and costly rescue.)

The banking crisis is dragging down the Spanish economy and bringing the country’s financial structure into uncharted territory. This is a seemingly paradoxical outcome for a country that a few years back boasted a positive balance and a higher growth rate than its neighbors. What happened to upend the triumphant rhetoric of presidents Aznar and Zapatero? To a certain extent the markets appear to have overreacted, and their knee-jerk response to rising debt caused in part by investors’ demand for higher interest on Spanish bonds threatens to bring about a self-fulfilling prophecy. Before the market developed these jitters however, Spain’s public debt was in fact lower than Germany’s, even as the latter functions as the basis against which the financial risk of other countries is measured. In the last week of June 2012, the distance between Spain's and Germany's debt risk was 504 basis points, while that between the US and Germany was only 13. In relation to GDP however, Spain’s public debt remains significantly lower than that of the U.S. At the end of 2011, Spain’s public debt was 68.5% of its GDP, while the US’s was 110.2%.  In spite of this, the US continues to have no trouble financing its debt, and the American dollar has been rising in recent months and continues to be regarded as a safe haven, while the euro is at risk.

Why all the fuss about Spain? The answer lies in a combination of causes.  In the first place, there is the big hole punched into Spanish banks by the large-scale default on loans irresponsibly pushed on overly optimistic borrowers; and then there is the unlikelihood of an economic recovery vigorous enough to guarantee the debt’s financing. Saddled with debt, subjected to salary cuts, and adrift in a dwindling job market, Spanish consumers will hardly be able to fuel a meaningful recovery for some time.  At present, the combined debt ofSaish families is nearly 100% of national GDP. Corporate debt is even larger. And it is not the private sector alone that is stuck. The loss of confidence also affects the Bank of Spain. For a long time the country’s central banking authority turned a blind eye to the bad lending practices of private institutions, and so it shares the blame for the illusion of an ever-expanding and ever-appreciating housing sector. When the fantasy receded, thousands of families, as well as the owners of small and middle-sized companies, were left stranded in a financial desert; and once the economy actually began to shrink, the government increasingly lost its ability to finance the debt.

Is Spain at risk of leaving the Eurozone? While this cannot be ruled out, it is unlikely. The possibility of going back to the peseta is precluded by the fact that foreign, mostly German and Chinese, investors, whose money helped pump up the housing bubble, now make up the bulk of Spain’s creditors. They will hardly sit by and allow Spain to devalue its way out of the mess. Although he dragged his feet, Rajoy has finally applied to Brussels for rescue funds and will submit to European oversight.  The proposed solution will undoubtedly involve further dismantling of services, salary cuts, and higher unemployment.  This is a bitter pill that will test Spain’s already shaky social cohesion. Rajoy will dispense it because he has no alternative, or rather because the alternative—letting the sick banks fail instead of nationalizing their losses—is not acceptable to the financial markets. Adding to the markets’ nervousness is the fact that Rajoy has proven to be singularly maladroit at administering the medicine.  This is where politics and culture come into the picture.

Spain’s troubles go back to the origin of its current regime in the late 1970s. They are rooted in a faulty transition that was expected to convert a country without democratic traditions into a full-fledged western democracy. But today all of Spain’s core institutions have fallen into disrepute: after years of covering its scandals, the monarchy has finally disgraced itself irreparably; the Supreme Court is affected by corruption at its core; the president of Madrid's regional government (a militant and vocal member of the extreme right wing of the Partido Popular) is calling for the dissolution of the Constitutional Court (i.e. for a return to undisguised authoritarian rule); and the tone of the debates in Congress could hardly fall to a lower level. Spanish democracy is ailing, but for anyone who has observed it with attention since its inception, the confirmation of what was once merely an inkling can hardly be cause for surprise.

In the 1970s, Spain’s bid for democratic legitimacy and admission to the European Community required the restoration of Basque and Catalan self-government, which Franco had suppressed. At the time, the provision of institutional guarantees for these nationalities was seen as a requirement of justice meant to correct decades of persecution. The Basque Country and the semi-Basque region of Navarre emerged from the transition with an important privilege. They collect their own taxes. From this revenue they transfer an amount to Madrid and use the rest as they see fit. Fiscal independence in the hands of a responsible government led to a clear improvement in the Basque standard of living and, and, not incidentally, to a certain insulation from the current crisis. Catalonia, with a larger economy, was denied that privilege. In fact the opposite occurred: its economy was made hostage to a state that, under the pretext of redistribution, severely impaired its growth and development.  Since Franco’s death, Catalonia’s leading position within Spain and its capacity to compete globally (it still accounts for 25% of all Spanish exports) have been eroded through an unfair fiscal burden and hostile decisions in matters of territorial development. Year after year, Spain’s government has defaulted on the execution of public works approved for Catalonia in the former's budget, thus retarding the latter's modernization and straining its finances to the breaking point.  Rajoy’s government will not even honor the state’s appropriations for Catalonia mandated by current fiscal law. In a display of cynical reason, the central Spanish government now blames regional governments for Spain’s public debt, obscuring the fact that the combined debt of the 17 autonomous communities is only 16% of the total, while that of the central government accounts for 76%. The remaining 8% is municipal debt. By shifting the responsibility for the crisis to the regional governments, Rajoy is patently using the current emergency as an opportunity to dismantle the structure of regional autonomy enshrined in Spain's current constitution.  The result of course would be to abrogate the limited degree of self-government that Spain only grudgingly conceded to Catalonia in the former's hour of democratic need.

As usual, propaganda is based on plausibility. It is true that Spain’s system of regional governments is costly, and a revision is long overdue. Most autonomous communities were invented ad hoc by the central government for the purpose of generalizing the autonomy principle and dissolving Catalonia’s historic claim to autonomy within a so-called “autonomous common regime” that as popularized at the time as “coffee for all.”  While history required the articulation of a state with two or three autonomous regions based on tangible cultural differences, Madrid’s politicians created 17 “autonomous communities” by administrative fiat. And since Madrid was unwilling to slim down the state’s bureaucracy, parallel administrations were created, adding to the cost of government. Since the beginning, the unwieldy system of “autonomous governments” was financed through the transfer of funds from the most productive to the least productive regions with a regularity and volume that ended up crippling the donors. These have been, with predictable monotony, the regions on the Mediterranean seaboard that possess a distinct culture and language: Catalonia, Valencia, and the Balearic Islands. So striking is the fiscal imbalance that for decades Spanish governments have refused to publicize the figures, even though this refusal constitutes the violation of a standing congressional order to make them available. But how the cookie crumbles is made evident by the president of Extremadura’s admission that a new fiscal deal for Catalonia would be catastrophic for his region. Catalonia suffers from a political paradox. As a “wealthy region” in a “poor country,” it never benefited from the European structural and cohesion funds of which Spain was the largest recipient, but instead became a net contributor on a level higher than France. Economists calculate that the Catalan fiscal deficit, that is, the percentage by which taxation exceeds allocations, rests anywhere between 8 and 10% of Catalonia’s GDP (roughly $20 billion annually for a region of 7,000,000 people.) Over time, the magnitude of such siphoning of resources impacts an economy, leading to obsolescent infrastructure, the impoverishment of the service sector, the deterioration of the educational system, and the inevitable loss of competitiveness. Catalonia’s public debt in 2011 was $52 billion, approximately 20.7% of the Catalan GDP. Two and a half years of a balanced fiscal relation with the rest of Spain would have sufficed to mop up all Catalan public debt.

Spain’s troubles were political before they became financial, but politicians will not resolve them. The country needs to be further integrated into the European structure through a common fiscal policy and a commonly regulated banking system; more importantly however, Spain needs to be politically accountable to Brussels and meet European standards of justice and democratic procedure.  This would do much to bring about economic rationality. A country on the brink of default cannot afford to build unprofitable fast-speed trains to provincial destinations, boondoggle expressways in a radial system stemming from Madrid, or airports without air traffic.  Nor should it insist on an extravagant freight train route that requires drilling through the thick of the Pyrenees instead of building a cheaper and commercially sensible coastal itinerary, a plan that, without Brussels' better judgement, the Spanish government would have rejected for the ostensible purpose of isolating Barcelona’s harbor, the busiest in Spain.  The senseless megalomania and castigation of specific territories cannot be explained along traditional ideological lines — such projects have been developed by socialists and conservatives alike — but by long-term cultural continuities. The recent bout of megalomania was buoyed by billions in structural funds, while the territorial grievances, notorious to anyone who is conversant with Spanish history, went on as before, shielded by Spain’s membership in the core Western institutions.

Spain would gain much from trading sovereignty for rationality, and from being forced to invest for economic rather than merely symbolic payoff. A dishonored monarchy, a politicized justice, and a corrupt party system are as much toxic assets as those the banks hold, and if intervention is inevitable, the discipline mandated from outside ought to touch the country to the quick. If and when Brussels decides to put the Iberian house in order, it ought to recognize which administrations have practiced fiscal restraint and are capable, under good governance, of meeting European standards. Spain could well be the last ditch of the European monetary union and of the political union itself. But timely political reform in Spain could be the last opportunity not only to keep the country within the EU but also to hold it together as a meaningful political project.

Former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry has been awarded a William J. Perry Fellowship in International Security at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), where he will continue to address emerging security challenges facing the United States.

Ambassador Eikenberry has an ambitious agenda for the coming academic year, which includes teaching and mentoring students, public speaking and working closely with former Secretary of Defense William Perry. He also will take part in activities at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC), such as the new China and the World research initiative.

“It’s a lifetime honor to receive the Perry Fellowship,” says Eikenberry. “I can’t think of an American in modern times who has better exemplified inspirational commitment to public service than Dr. William Perry. And I can’t think of a better institute of higher learning to be associated with than Stanford University.”

Ambassador Eikenberry has been at Stanford since September 2011 as the Frank E. and Arthur W. Payne Distinguished Lecturer and is an affiliated faculty member for CISAC, APARC and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), as well as research affiliate at the Europe Center – all policy research centers within Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute of International Studies.

Before coming to Stanford, Ambassador Eikenberry led the civilian surge directed by President Obama from 2009 to 2011 in an effort to reverse the momentum gained by insurgents, and set the conditions for a transition to Afghanistan sovereignty. He retired from his 35-year military career in April 2009 with the rank of U.S. Army Lieutenant General after posts including commander and staff officer with mechanized, light, airborne and ranger infantry units in the United States, as well as Korea, Italy and as the Commander of the American-led Coalition Forces from 2005-2007.

"Karl Eikenberry's record of public service amply demonstrates his unique qualities, not only as a leader of the American military at a challenging time, but as a strategic thinker and an insightful diplomat,” says CISAC Co-Director Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar. “He has a rare understanding of the profound challenges facing our world, and has been a tremendous asset to CISAC and Stanford.”

Ambassador Eikenberry’s research areas include U.S. strategy in the Asia-Pacific region; China’s evolving security strategy; the United States and NATO; the future of the U.S. military; Washington’s policies in Central and South Asia; and assessing the risks of military intervention.

The fellowship was established to honor Perry, the 19^th U.S. secretary of defense and former CISAC co-director, and to recognize his leadership in the cause of peace. Perry is co-director of the Preventive Defense Project and the Nuclear Risk Reduction Initiative at CISAC and is an expert on U.S. foreign policy, national security and arms control. Perry Fellows spend a year at CISAC conducting policy-relevant research on international security issues. They join other distinguished scientists, social and political scientists and engineers who work together on problems that cannot be solved within a single field of study.

Ambassador Eikenberry is a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, has master’s degrees from Harvard University in East Asian Studies and Stanford University in Political Science, and was a National Security Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He earned an Interpreter’s Certificate in Mandarin Chinese from the British Foreign Commonwealth Office while studying at the United Kingdom Ministry of Defense Chinese Language School in Hong Kong, and has an Advanced Degree in Chinese History from Nanjing University in the People’s Republic of China.