This is an international conference sponsored by CDDRL's Rule of Law Program and the Stanford University School of Law. Participants include lawmakers, judges and analysts from Mexico as well as from the Stanford community. A full agenda will be posted shortly.
Okimoto Conference Room
Liu Institute for Global Issues
6476 NW Marine Dr.
Vancouver BC V6T 1Z2
Hisham Zerriffi is an Assistant Professor and the Ivan Head South/North Research Chair in the Liu Institute for Global Issues at the University of British Columbia. Prior to joining the UBC Faculty, Dr. Zerriffi was a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development. At PESD, he led a new project on the role of institutions in the deployment and diffusion of small-scale energy technologies. The centerpiece of this on-going study is a comparative analysis of different organizational and business models used to provide rural electricity on a local level.
Dr. Zerriffi received his Ph.D. from the Engineering and Public Policy Department at Carnegie Mellon University. His dissertation, "Electric Power Systems Under Stress: An Evaluation of Centralized Versus Distributed System Architectures" examined the reliability and economic implications of implementing large-scale distributed energy systems as a way to mitigate the effects of persistent stress on electric power systems. He has a B.A. in Physics (with minors in Political Science and Religion) from Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH and a Masters of Applied Science in Chemistry from McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Before joining CMU he was a Senior Scientist at the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research.
In an Oct. 20 talk co-sponsored by SIIS and the World Affairs Council of Northern California, Philip Zelikow, executive director of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States -- better known as the 9/11 Commission -- discussed the United States' continued vulnerability to terrorist attacks; the intelligence reforms that are needed to better protect the country; the attacks and accusations he has endured as head of the controversial commission; and his satisfaction that the body's final report has been widely disseminated to the American public, in a book that has become a best-seller. Zelikow's talk was held at Kresge Auditorium on the Stanford campus.
Zelikow is the White Burkett Miller Professor of History at the University of Virginia, and is director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs (also at the University of Virginia), the nation's largest research center on the American presidency. Before assuming his present positions in Virginia, he served in government with the Navy, the State Department and the National Security Council, and then taught at Harvard University. He was a member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and served as executive director of the National Commission on Federal Election Reform, chaired by former Presidents Carter and Ford. He was also the executive director of the Markle Foundation's Task Force on National Security in the Information Age.
Zelikow's books include The Kennedy Tapes (with Ernest May), Germany Unified and Europe Transformed (with Condoleezza Rice), and the rewritten Essence of Decision (with Graham Allison). He has also been the director of the Aspen Strategy Group, a policy program of the Aspen Institute.
Zelikow's talk was covered by the Stanford Daily and Stanford Report.
Neither the Bush nor the Kerry campaign has chosen to make U.S. policy toward North Korea a central part of its election platform -- and for good reason. Both sides recognize that it may no longer be possible to peacefully resolve the dispute over that country's nuclear-weapons development, and a debate over whether to wage another controversial war would hardly appeal to the electorate.
The fundamental problem is that North Korea believes it needs a sizable nuclear arsenal. Politically, such an asset would transform the country into a regional power whose views on international issues must always be taken seriously. Militarily, the possession of a large number of atomic weapons would bolster North Korea's security by discouraging intimidation of the sort Washington employed in 1994, when it forced President Kim Jong Il to shut down his plutonium-based arms program.
Most compelling, however, is Pyongyang's financial situation. The North Korean economy is so dysfunctional that it cannot reliably generate enough wealth to sustain the state. Kim and his colleagues have dabbled in reform, but they apparently realize that the degree of liberalization necessary to produce strong GDP growth would coincidentally release a wave of popular animosity sufficient to wash the government away. Thus, the safest course of action is to leave the economy unreconstructed while securing a constant stream of foreign aid.
Since Pyongyang needs leverage to obtain this support, it is determined to amass a big nuclear force. The international community would then have no means of persuading North Korea to abandon its weaponry short of risking catastrophic war and would consequently be reduced to bribing the Kim government not to use its new capabilities.
Moreover, if the flow of aid were interrupted, Pyongyang could garner the foreign exchange it requires by selling its new technology, fissile materials or even a few of its bombs.
What this implies is that despite its rhetoric to the contrary, North Korea does not really want to trade its nuclear program for economic assistance and a security guarantee. Pyongyang would plainly prefer to embark on diplomatic talks with nuclear weapons in hand. This is why it cheated on the 1994 agreement by enriching uranium and why it resumed reprocessing plutonium in early 2003. But to realize his strategic aspirations, Kim must still prevent the United States, China, Japan and South Korea from forming a coalition that imposes crippling sanctions before his armament effort has reached fruition.
Driving wedges between the other regional powers is not as difficult as it might seem. Paradoxically, perhaps, the United States is the only relevant country that views the achievement by North Korea of significant nuclear status as absolutely unacceptable.
Tokyo and Seoul are worried about that eventuality but conversely fear the geopolitical instability and refugee crisis that would ensue if economic or military pressure caused the Kim regime to collapse. Beijing shares these immediate concerns and additionally worries about the longer-term possibility that a united Korean Peninsula might incline toward the United States.
Only by alleviating these anxieties can the U.S. government unite East Asia against North Korea.
Washington, however, is constrained by its own internal rift. On the one hand are those doves who want to exchange aid and a security arrangement for the termination of North Korea's nuclear projects, on the other are the hawks who oppose all diplomatic contact with the Kim government. The conflict between these two camps has paralyzed Bush administration policy, leaving Pyongyang more or less free to proceed with its nuclear gambit.
If the doves err in overestimating Pyongyang's flexibility, the hawks are guilty of the more serious mistake of thinking that a refusal to negotiate with mendacious states is an actual diplomatic strategy.
In fact, the talks advocated by the doves are an essential step toward the application of coercive force. It is only by offering reasonable deals, and having the Kim government reject them, that Washington can demonstrate to Beijing, Tokyo and Seoul that Pyongyang cannot be bought off with money and a verbal guarantee of its security. This recognition, in turn, is critical both to building a coalition against North Korea and, alternatively, to reducing the political costs of unilateral U.S. military action.
The better course has therefore always been to negotiate earnestly with Pyongyang in the hope that it would accede to a peace agreement while knowing that its failure to do so would facilitate the adoption of more assertive measures, if necessary, at a later date.
Yet rather than taking every opportunity to interact with Kim's representatives, the Bush administration has limited its diplomacy to desultory exchanges at multilateral conferences and only put forward a detailed settlement proposal in June. Pyongyang has exploited the opening created by this stubbornness fairly effectively. It has capitalized on anti-American sentiment in South Korea by persuading Seoul to cooperate economically and militarily while also prevailing upon Tokyo to resume large-scale food aid and seek an early exchange of ambassadors.
In the occasional six-party talks with delegations from China, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United States, Pyongyang's objective has been to stall for time. Its diplomats have postponed specific meetings many times; then behaved so egregiously that the other participants were relieved when the North Koreans consented merely to engage in future negotiations. Those too, however, would soon be rescheduled.
Washington has inadvertently abetted these tactics through thoughtless insults -- canceling, for instance, informal exchanges between U.S. and North Korean officials at the last minute -- which Pyongyang could then cite as proof that the United States was not acting in good faith.
North Korea has also benefited from the awkward developments that inevitably arise when sensitive dialogues are delayed. Seoul's recent declaration that it had reprocessed a small volume of nuclear material is one such event; Pyongyang may use that admission to complicate the next round of six-party discussions. Thus the Kim government buys more time for its nuclear technicians to continue their work.
It is true that North Korea has committed some blunders over the past two years, but it has played its cards more adroitly than the United States. The members of a potential coalition are largely going their own way now, and the odds that those countries will unite behind any U.S. strategy, peaceful or otherwise, have diminished considerably.
So, unless the winner of the November election acts quickly and with better judgment than Washington has so far, the United States may soon be forced to choose between launching military strikes without foreign support and letting Kim attain the nuclear status he desires.
ROBERT MADSEN is a fellow at the Asia-Pacific Research Center, Stanford Institute for International Studies. He wrote this article for Perspective.
A conference hosted by FIRJAN (Federation of Industries of the State of Rio de Janeiro) and co-hosted by PESD in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
This meeting is the first in a series of meetings to be held in each of the five countries that are part of the PESD study on the political economy of power market reform.
Rio de Janiero, Brazil
In a lengthy article in the September/October issue of Foreign Affairs, Larry Diamond -- coordinator of the Democracy Program at CDDRL and a political adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq last spring -- details the United States' blunders in Iraq and asserts that the coalition occupation "has diminished the long-term prospects for democracy there."
The article, titled "What Went Wrong in Iraq?" chronicles the U.S. government's miscalculations on several fronts, including its failure to commit enough forces to ensure security in Iraq after toppling Saddam Hussein; Pentagon officials' disregard for the elaborate postwar planning that had been done by the State Department; a lack of determination to face down political threats such as cleric Muqtada al-Sadr; the launching of a de-Baathification campaign that was too broad; a failure to address early on the widespread grievances with the interim constitution that was drafted this past spring; and above all, the U.S. government's failure to understand Iraqi politics, Iraqi society, and the way average Iraqis viewed the United States and its occupation of their country.
Diamond writes that the Bush administration deserves credit for changing its posture after the "rapid implosion of its plan for a political transition in Iraq." And he praises several aspects of the Coalition Provisional Authority's work, such as the training programs it set up to offer Iraqi political parties the skills and tools needed to organize and mobilize. He writes encouragingly that "I have found many Iraqis to have a deep ambition to live in a decent, democratic and free society and found them prepared to do the hard work that building a democracy will require."
But Diamond concludes that because of the failures of the U.S. occupation, along with the intrinsic difficulties of establishing order and democracy in a society like Iraq, "it is going to take a number of years to rebuild the Iraqi state and to construct any kind of viable democratic and constitutional order there."
STANFORD -- With oil prices heading toward $50 a barrel, what would happen if the markets really blew?
Ever since the late 1970s, Washington's answer to such an event has relied on oil stockpiled mainly by the federal government, to be released if market instability warranted it. Today, the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve contains 666 million barrels -- nearly 65 days of imports -- worth nearly $30 billion at current prices. Our industrialized allies have similar stocks, India has started one and China, whose oil imports are rising rapidly, is expected to create a reserve soon. Through the International Energy Agency in Paris, the major oil importers have agreed, in principle, to coordinate their stockpiles.
Unfortunately, reserves in the United States and most democracies are nearly feckless as a policy instrument. The legislation that created the U.S. reserve gave the power to buy and sell stocks to a federal agency, now the Department of Energy, that, in effect, passes the decision on to the president. White House control automatically converts every key decision into a highly political act.
In July 2000, President Clinton's order to transfer some strategic reserves to fill a newly created Northeast Home Heating Oil Reserve had obvious political implications for Al Gore's presidential bid. In 1996, Congress required the sale of more than $220 million of stockpiled oil to help pay down the budget deficit, another political move, though one that, in hindsight, looked wise when oil prices tanked two years later.
The uncertainty of reliable production in Russia and Iraq, coupled with the general threat of new terrorist attacks, makes for many worrisome scenarios. But a cloud of political suspicion would hang over any management decision. If President Bush released stockpiled oil to stabilize prices in an election year, no matter how justified his action, he surely would be accused of political pandering. And if he rightly refused to release oil because speculative trading doesn't meet the standard of "severe energy supply interruption," as called for in the 1975 legislation setting up the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, would he face charges that he was rewarding his oil buddies with record profits?
One way to take the politics out of governing the Strategic Petroleum Reserve would be to mechanize decision-making, such as by setting a price trigger for sales and fills. President Reagan's Council of Economic Advisors, among others, considered this option and wisely demurred. In the 1980s, the international spot market for oil was not fully developed; prices were mainly driven by opaque long-term contracts, not market dynamics. Price triggers act similarly to price controls, increasing the risk of creating true scarcities in oil supply. Such automatic triggers would have smoothed small gyrations in the oil market but failed when most needed to dampen large price swings.
There's a better way: independent management of the strategic reserve. In contrast to an automatic mechanism, an independent authority would be able to detect subtle economic and political shifts that determine our true vulnerability to oil shocks. More important, such an authority would depoliticize Strategic Petroleum Reserve decision-making, which would enable us to use the stockpile for its originally intended purpose of providing a credible bulwark against the most severe chaos in oil markets.
The president could create an independent board to manage the reserve within existing legislation, but that would not completely remove a political taint. New legislation would better accomplish the job. Congress and the president should look to the Federal Reserve as a model. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve needs its own resources, with politicians supplying broad guidelines for action and periodic review rather than direct control. Such a change would not only affect the United States but would also require remaking the International Energy Agency into something closer to a central bankers' forum.
New management for America's oil reserve would spark new thinking about the optimal size and operation of strategic stocks. Until now, most public debate has focused on the reserve's size. The International Energy Agency suggests that its member countries keep a petroleum stockpile roughly equivalent to 90 days of domestic consumption. In truth, the optimal size of strategic reserves is not a single quantity but depends on political and economic conditions. A competent independent authority would make it possible to carry a smaller stockpile -- at lower cost. Because today's oil prices are formed in highly liquid markets, the standard of "severe supply interruption" is largely meaningless. The better standard is our willingness to absorb price shocks. For that there is no simple answer, yet independent economic authorities can make the wisest choices.
More than 30 years after our first oil shock, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve still wears polyester and bell-bottoms. A dose of market reform and political independence can bring its fashion up to date and create a truly useful tool for protecting the U.S. economy.
Whole World on Fire, by CISAC associate director for research Lynn Eden, received the 2004 Robert K. Merton Professional Award from the Science, Knowledge and Technology section of the American Sociological Association. The award was presented to Eden on Aug. 15 during the association's annual meeting in San Francisco.
The award committee cited the book's merits:
"Whole World on Fire is an ambitious undertaking that examines a critical problem using theory and methods from two fields of sociology: the sociology of science and technology and the sociology of organizations. It is a study of how organizational processes led nuclear scientists to drastically underestimate the damage of a nuclear attack. At a deeper level, it is a study in the social construction of organizational knowledge.
"The question Eden addresses is: How and why, for more than half a century, did the U.S. government fail to predict nuclear fire damage as it drew up plans to fight strategic nuclear war? Eden's research shows that U.S. efforts focused on the damage that would result from the explosion while systematically ignoring the far more damaging effects of subsequent fires. How and why could this 'ignorance' continue until today? . . .
"This book takes a position on an ongoing scientific controversy about the predictability of fire damage and on scientists' current assessments of risk. There is a debate in science and technology studies about whether we should take positions on scientific controversies--that is, on the science itself. Some scholars prefer to leave arguments about the 'science' to the scientists and instead follow the activities and political logics of the various debating parties. In this case, Eden chooses to take a stand on the truth claims of the science in question. As such, Whole World on Fire is a work of intellectual daring.
"To our knowledge, there have been few sociological studies that have penetrated the inner workings of the military establishment. Few sociologists have studied the highest reaches of the social structure, as does Eden in this study. In fact, those of us who study science and medicine usually do our research in university-based laboratories or teaching hospitals--that is, we study people who are in some senses like ourselves.
"While the book addresses a critical issue--that is, nuclear-weapons policy, it is an exemplar of how sociological concepts can illuminate important public issues. Eden's analysis can be readily applied to explaining how decision makers construct relevant and legitimate science to illuminate disasters such as the collapse of the Twin Towers. But what convinced one committee member of the book's power was a recent New York Times article describing the findings of the committee investigating the Iraq War. The Committee reported that the CIA had systematically denied the credibility of numerous reports that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction did not exist, in part because those reports were outside its organizational frame.
"Finally, we all believe that this book will have a major public impact. In addition to its accessible style and meticulous research, the book is often riveting and sometimes chilling. We had thought that by now everyone believed that survivable nuclear war is an oxymoron; that people had filled in their bomb shelters long before the close of the Cold War. That a significant portion of the military establishment still believes that a limited, winnable and survivable nuclear war is possible gave us nightmares. That Eden's book may give people nightmares is only appropriate, given the frightening scenario she presents."
Serving on the award committee were Renee Anspach, Department of Sociology, University of Michigan; Sydney Halpern, Department of Sociology, University of Illinois at Chicago; Kathryn Henderson, Department of Sociology, Texas A&M University; and Joan Fujimura (Chair), Department of Sociology and Robert F. and Jean E. Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
This curriculum unit examines three case studies of ongoing regional wars—Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Kashmir—and one past regional war, Guatemala. Students are introduced to these wars in their historical and global context, as well as in the context of efforts to establish and maintain peace.
After an intensive selection process, the Korean Studies Program (KSP) at the Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC), Stanford Institute for International Studies at Stanford University has selected the first class of its Pantech Fellowships for Mid-Career Professionals. Philip W. Yun and John Feffer will be in residence during the 2004-2005 academic year and collaborate with the faculty and fellows at KSP and APARC. The fellowship was made possible by generous gift from Pantech Group.
Philip Yun received his law degree from Columbia University and was a Fulbright Scholar at the Yonsei University Graduate School of International Studies. Yun has had a remarkable career working both in the private and the public sector. While holding high-level positions at the U.S. Department of State, Yun worked closely with the Secretary of Defense, Dr. William Perry, to develop broad expertise on international negotiations, strategic planning and problem solving. He has practiced law both in Korea and in the U.S., worked in private equity investment, and provided comments and opinions for the media on North Korean issues. While in residence, he will work on developing an outline of a comprehensive roadmap that will lead to a secure and prosperous Northeast Asia that would include North Korea.
John Feffer is an accomplished writer and editor who has written on numerous topics such as the politics of food, Asia, Eastern Europe, Russia, foreign policy, economics, and nationalism. As a frequent traveler to North Korea (and to South Korea), he has a rare knowledge of and balanced perspective toward North Korea. His most recent publication is "North Korea/South Korea: U.S. Policy at a Time of Crisis". He is a former associate editor of World Policy Journal and has worked for the American Friends Service Committee, most recently as an international affairs representative in East Asia. He serves on the advisory committees of the think tank Foreign Policy in Focus and the Alliance of Scholars Concerned about Korea. While in residence, he will concentrate on examining food policy on the Korean peninsula.
KSP and APARC look forward to their joining us in the fall.