FSI researchers strive to understand how countries relate to one another, and what policies are needed to achieve global stability and prosperity. International relations experts focus on the challenging U.S.-Russian relationship, the alliance between the U.S. and Japan and the limitations of America’s counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan.
Foreign aid is also examined by scholars trying to understand whether money earmarked for health improvements reaches those who need it most. And FSI’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center has published on the need for strong South Korean leadership in dealing with its northern neighbor.
FSI researchers also look at the citizens who drive international relations, studying the effects of migration and how borders shape people’s lives. Meanwhile FSI students are very much involved in this area, working with the United Nations in Ethiopia to rethink refugee communities.
Trade is also a key component of international relations, with FSI approaching the topic from a slew of angles and states. The economy of trade is rife for study, with an APARC event on the implications of more open trade policies in Japan, and FSI researchers making sense of who would benefit from a free trade zone between the European Union and the United States.
Improving the U.S.-China relationship is a focus at the Center for International Security and Cooperation.
CISAC continued this tradition in co-sponsoring the 8th Sino-U.S. Security Relations and Cooperation Conference in Beijing from Dec. 14-15, 2016. The conference was hosted and co-sponsored by the Foreign Ministry's China Institute of International Studies (CIIS).
Ambassador Su Ge, president of CIIS, attended the conference and delivered an opening remark. FSI’s Thomas Fingar and Teng Jianqun from CIIS chaired the conference.
Fingar said, “Although held at a time of uncertainty about the future of U.S.-China relations, the conference included constructive exchanges on strategic stability, obstacles to cooperation in space, and other sensitive topics.”
He added, “The exchanges were frank and constructive because they built on the foundation of understanding and trust developed through years-long exchanges between CISAC and CIIS. In the next phase, small teams of American and Chinese experts will develop joint blueprints to enhance understanding of issues critical for nuclear stability and space cooperation.”
CISAC co-founder John W. Lewis has been active for many years encouraging and supporting better ties between the U.S. and China. He is an expert on Chinese politics, U.S.-China relations, China's nuclear weapons program, U.S. policy toward Korea and health security issues in northeast Asia.
During this most recent Beijing conference, scholars and security experts from both the U.S. and China held in-depth discussions on topics including cybersecurity, outer space cooperation, maritime dispute management, missile defense, grey zone cooperation, and China-U.S. nuclear issues.
The American attendees included scholars from CISAC (Fingar, Brad Roberts, and Joseph Torigian); Brad Roberts, director, Center for Global Security Research, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; Major General Roger W. Burg, former commander, 20th Air Force; Vice Admiral Michael Connor (retired), U.S. Navy; Lieutenant General Susan J. Helms (retired), U.S. Air Force general and former NASA astronaut; Lieutenant General James M. Kowalski (retired), U.S. Air Force general; Steven M. Benner,chief, Strategy and Campaign Division, U.S. Strategic Command, among others.
The Chinese experts came from a variety of institutions – CIIS, China Academy of Engineering Physics, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Rocket Force, Rocket Force College, China Defense Science and Technology Information Center, PLA Navy Academy of Military Science, PLA South Command, Chinese Academy of Social Science, Renmin University of China, National Defense University, Tsinghua University, etc.
Due to venue capacity limits, we are no longer accepting RSVPs for this event.
India prides itself on being the "world's largest democracy". In some respects it is certifiably democratic; as in the regular conduct of free and fair elections. But in other respects there are deficits. One such area is freedom of expression. While Indian writers, artists and film-makers are certainly freer than their counterparts in totalitarian countries such as China, they are less free when compared to their colleagues in democracies such as Sweden or the United States. This lecture identifies eight distinct threats to freedom of expression in India, the most important of which are the presence of archaic colonial laws and the rise of identity politics.
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Guha is a historian and biographer based in Bangalore. He has taught at the universities of Yale and Stanford, held the Arné Naess Chair at the University of Oslo, and been the Indo-American Community Visiting Professor at the University of California at Berkeley. In the academic year 2011-2012 he served as the Philippe Roman Professor of History and International Affairs at the London School of Economics.
Guha’s books include a pioneering environmental history, The Unquiet Woods (University of California Press, 1989), and an award-winning social history of cricket, A Corner of a Foreign Field (Picador, 2002). India after Gandhi (Macmillan/Ecco Press, 2007) was chosen as a book of the year by the Economist, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the San Francisco Chronicle, Time Out, and Outlook, and as a book of the decade in the Times of India, the Times of London, and The Hindu. His most recent book is Gandhi Before India (Knopf, 2014), which was chosen as a notable book of the year by the New York Times.
Apart from his books, Guha also writes a syndicated column, that appears in six languages in newspapers with a combined readership of some twenty mllion. Guha’s books and essays have been translated into more than twenty languages. The New York Times has referred to him as ‘perhaps the best among India’s non fiction writers’; Time Magazine has called him ‘Indian democracy’s pre-eminent chronicler’.
Ramachandra Guha’s awards include the Leopold-Hidy Prize of the American Society of Environmental History, the Daily Telegraph/Cricket Society prize, the Malcolm Adideshiah Award for excellence in social science research, the Ramnath Goenka Prize for excellence in journalism, the Sahitya Akademi Award, and the R. K. Narayan Prize. In 2009, he was awarded the Padma Bhushan, the Republic of India’s third highest civilian honour. In 2008, and again in 2013, Prospect Magazine nominated Guha as one of the world’s most influential intellectuals. In 2014, he was awarded an honorary doctorate in the humanities by Yale University. In 2015, he was awarded the Fukuoka Prize for contributions to Asian studies.
About the colloquia:
In 2014, Indian voters gave Narendra Modi and the BJP a mandate to accelerate India’s economic reforms and revitalize its foreign relations, in particular with the United States and with partners in East Asia. But the pace and depth of reforms and economic transformation have not met the high expectations, despite strong GDP performance. Economic growth remains uneven, job creation sluggish, and massive infrastructural and administrative problems continue to trouble many sectors of the economy. After twenty-five years of economic reforms, India’s potential as a new global industrial hub has still not been realized and its vast resources of labor and talent remain underdeveloped.
During the 2017 winter and spring quarters Shorenstein APARC and the Center for South Asia will host a series of lectures and discussions that explore what makes India democratic and dynamic, and the obstacles that prevent the country from realizing its enormous potential.
Also, in 2017, the next Global Entrepreneur Summit will be in India, sequel to the 2016 Stanford-hosted Summit. This colloquium will help prepare for that event by reaching out to scholars, students, interested stakeholders, business leaders and others in the Bay Area.
Since its independence, India’s statesmen, policymakers and social scientists all firmly believed that the entrenched hierarchical caste order and the deep divisions between religious communities would become less salient, and perhaps wither away, as the country developed a modern economy and a new division of labor based on skill and merit rather than a ‘traditional’ inherited status. Today, after seven decades of democracy and steady economic growth, it is clear that both caste and religious community are as important as ever. Rather than disappearing, these cultural identities and social networks have evolved along with the economy. A closer look at how the Indian economy is organized reveals that caste and community fundamentally shape how labor is organized, how markets function, how urban development happens, and how industry is owned and organized. Two case studies, one of skilled labor in South India and another of the structure of industrial growth in a city in central India, will illustrate how India actually works.
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Thomas Blom Hansen, Director, Center for South Asia; Reliance-Dhirubhai Ambani Professor in South Asian Studies; Professor in Anthropology, Stanford University
As the Director of Stanford’s Center for South Asian Studies, Hansen is charged with building a substantial new program. He has many and broad interests spanning South Asia and Southern Africa, several cities and multiple theoretical and disciplinary interests from political theory and continental philosophy to psychoanalysis, comparative religion and contemporary urbanism..
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Aruna Ranganathan, Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior, Stanford University
Aruna Ranganathan studies questions of work and employment in the context of economic development. By applying novel methods that combine field-experimental and quantitative research designs with ethnography and interviews, Aruna's research investigates how low-income occupations in developing countries are governed, organized, seek meaning through their work and navigate the market. Through her research, Aruna strives to advance our theoretical understanding of work, while informing the design of labor-market institutions and policy for the developing world. In previous projects based in India, Aruna has studied the boom of IT and business process outsourcing, the professionalization of plumbing, price-setting behavior among handcraft artisans and the transition of women into formal employment in garment factories.
About the colloquia:
In 2014, Indian voters gave Narendra Modi and the BJP a mandate to accelerate India’s economic reforms and revitalize its foreign relations, in particular with the United States and with partners in East Asia. But the pace and depth of reforms and economic transformation have not met the high expectations, despite strong GDP performance. Economic growth remains uneven, job creation sluggish, and massive infrastructural and administrative problems continue to trouble many sectors of the economy. After twenty-five years of economic reforms, India’s potential as a new global industrial hub has still not been realized and its vast resources of labor and talent remain underdeveloped.
During the 2017 winter and spring quarters Shorenstein APARC and the Center for South Asia will host a series of lectures and discussions that explore what makes India democratic and dynamic, and the obstacles that prevent the country from realizing its enormous potential.
Also, in 2017, the next Global Entrepreneur Summit will be in India, sequel to the 2016 Stanford-hosted Summit. This colloquium will help prepare for that event by reaching out to scholars, students, interested stakeholders, business leaders and others in the Bay Area.
Long a laggard on human rights, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is being pressed from within to reconsider its indifference. In 2009 an ASEAN Human Rights Commission (AICHR) was created and tasked with promoting (not protecting) human rights in Southeast Asia. In 2012 its members agreed to issue a first-ever ASEAN Human Rights Declaration. Most observers dismissed these moves as symbolic—an effort mainly to assuage foreign critics and gain international legitimacy. Prof. Jetschke differs. She will argue that the AICHR’s formation was prompted in part by the swelling flows of refugees across borders inside Southeast Asia, especially from Myanmar, and the problems thereby created for the region’s states and societies. She will also explore the extent to which these factors have eroded one of ASEAN’s strongest regional norms—the taboo on interfering in members’ domestic affairs. That erosion could strengthen ASEAN as something more than the sum of its sovereign members.
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Anja Jetschke is Professor of International Relations at the University of Göttingen’s political science department since 2012. Her Comparative Regional Organizations Project has developed the world’s largest database on regional organizations. Previously she headed a research program on international governance at the German Institute of Global and Area Studies (Hamburg) and was an assistant professor at the University of Freiburg. She also held research fellowships at Ohio State University and the University of Berlin. Her publications include many articles and chapters on comparative regionalism, ASEAN, and the AICHR, and a prize-winning book, Human Rights and State Security: Indonesia and the Philippines (2011). Her doctorate is from the European University (Florence).
Anja Jetschke
Professor of International Relations, University of Göttingen
Siegfried Hecker wrote the following op-ed for the Jan. 12 edition of The New York Times:
Since my first visit to North Korea’s Yongbyon nuclear complex in 2004, I have witnessed the country’s nuclear weapons program grow from a handful of primitive bombs to a formidable nuclear arsenal that represents one of America’s greatest security threats. After decades of broken policies toward Pyongyang, talking to the North Koreans is the best option for the Trump administration at this late date to limit the growing threat.
North Korea broke out to build the bomb because President George W. Bush was determined to kill President Bill Clinton’s 1994 “Agreed Framework,” a bilateral agreement with the North to freeze and eventually dismantle the North’s nuclear program. Hard-liners in the Bush administration viewed it as appeasement. Mr. Bush labeled the North, along with Iran and Iraq, part of an “axis of evil” in January 2002.
At the first bilateral meeting with Kim Jong-il’s regime in Pyongyang in October 2002, Bush administration officials accused North Korea of violating the Clinton pact by clandestinely pursuing the uranium path to the bomb. Washington had already detected this effort in the late 1990s, but it was deemed an insufficient threat not worthy of jeopardizing the gains made by the plutonium freeze.
For the Bush administration, the clandestine uranium effort was all it needed to walk away from the Agreed Framework. Yet Mr. Bush’s team proved unprepared for the consequences and stood by as North Korea resumed its plutonium program and built the bomb.
During six visits between 2004 and 2009, I watched the North continue to try to engage Washington, while the Bush administration preferred the six-party talks led by China, believing that the North would have greater difficulty cheating in the context of multilateral diplomacy. In a 2004 visit, I was even allowed to hold a piece of plutonium — in a sealed glass jar — to convince me and Washington that North Korea had the bomb.
In September 2005, China orchestrated a six-party joint statement calling for a nuclear-weapon-free Korean Peninsula. When the Bush administration concurrently slapped financial sanctions on Pyongyang, the North Koreans walked out of the six-party talks and responded with their first nuclear test in October 2006.
I was in Pyongyang three weeks later and found that although the test was only partly successful, it marked a turning point in the North’s nuclear program. North Korea became a nuclear weapon state and insisted that all future negotiations proceed from that reality. Mr. Bush left office with the North most likely possessing up to five plutonium-fueled nuclear weapons and an expanding uranium program.
North Korea greeted the Obama administration with a long-range rocket launch, followed by a second nuclear test in May 2009 — this one, successful. Unlike the Bush administration, which faced the prospect of the North’s violating the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the Obama administration faced the North’s steady march to an expanding arsenal.
Mr. Obama was also unwilling to engage directly with Pyongyang, insisting instead that the North denuclearize before starting talks. It appears the Obama administration also viewed the regimes of Kim Jong-il and his son and successor, Kim Jong-un, as repugnant and hoped for their collapse, while also staying in step with two conservative South Korean administrations. Mr. Obama’s preferred path has been to tighten United Nations and United States sanctions and to pressure Beijing to rein in Pyongyang. Neither strategy has stopped the Kim regime from expanding its nuclear program.
Pyongyang upped the ante on its nuclear program with a remarkable revelation during my seventh and last visit in November 2010: the existence of a modern uranium centrifuge facility in Yongbyon. That facility served notice that the North was now capable of pursuing the second path to the bomb. No outsiders are known to have been in Yongbyon since my 2010 visit.
Satellite imagery of the Yongbyon complex combined with official North Korean propaganda photos and three additional successful nuclear tests point to a robust and rapidly expanding nuclear arsenal. My best estimate, admittedly highly uncertain, is that North Korea has sufficient plutonium and highly enriched uranium to build 20 to 25 nuclear weapons.
The North also launched some two dozen missiles in 2016, including partly successful road-mobile and submarine-based missiles that could potentially carry nuclear warheads.
President-elect Donald J. Trump faces a much graver threat from the North than his two predecessors. Pyongyang can most likely already reach all of South Korea, Japan and possibly even some United States targets in the Pacific.
The crisis is here. The nuclear clock keeps ticking. Every six to seven weeks North Korea may be able to add another nuclear weapon to its arsenal. All in the hands of Kim Jong-un, a young leader about whom we know little, and a military about which we know less. Both are potentially prone to overconfidence and miscalculations.
These sensitive nuclear issues require focused discussions in a small, closed setting. This cannot be achieved at a multilateral negotiating table, such as the six-party talks.
Mr. Trump should send a presidential envoy to North Korea. Talking is not a reward or a concession to Pyongyang and should not be construed as signaling acceptance of a nuclear-armed North Korea. Talking is a necessary step to re-establishing critical links of communication to avoid a nuclear catastrophe.
Mr. Trump has little to lose by talking. He can risk the domestic political downside of appearing to appease the North. He would most likely get China’s support, which is crucial because Beijing prefers talking to more sanctions. He would also probably get support for bilateral talks from Seoul, Tokyo and Moscow.
By talking, and especially by listening, the Trump administration may learn more about the North’s security concerns. It would allow Washington to signal the strength of its resolve to protect its allies and express its concerns about human rights abuses, as well as to demonstrate its openness to pragmatic, balanced progress.
Talking will help inform a better negotiating strategy that may eventually convince the young leader that his country and his regime are better off without nuclear weapons.
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Pedestrians walk before the portraits of former North Korean leaders Kim Il-Sung, left, and Kim Jong-Il, right, in Pyongyang in 2016. Siegfried Hecker says that bilateral talks between the U.S. and North Korea may eventually convince that country's leadership that their regime is better off without nuclear weapons.
European states expect the confrontation with Russia to last. And they are adjusting to a continued deterioration of relations with Moscow, short of armed conflict, as Moscow shows no sign of changing its position on Ukraine, Crimea, the status of the “in-between states” (Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, Armenia…) and European security more broadly. The new US administration will most likely fail to improve the West-Russia relationship, and maybe worsen it further if they overplay their hand. New governments in the Netherlands, France and Germany in 2017 will face limited options to start anew a serious dialogue with Vladimir Putin. The Russian president does not appear to be much in demand of a repaired partnership.
Marie Mendras is an expert at the Kennan Institute, and a Professor at Sciences Po - Paris School of International Affairs.
This event has reached full capacity. Please contact Magdalena Fitipaldi at magdafb@stanford.edu to get on the waiting list.
This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.
Eggleston, an FSI senior fellow and director of the Asia Health Policy Program, studies comparative health policy and the economics of demographic transition in Asia, with a focus on China.
“Karen’s record of scholarship and astute ability to work across research, teaching and administration will support Shorenstein APARC as it continues to grow. We’re very fortunate to have someone of her caliber ready to help oversee the center’s operations,” Shorenstein APARC Director Gi-Wook Shin said.
Eggleston first came to Stanford as a center fellow in 2007 to lead the Asia Health Policy Program and was promoted to senior fellow in 2015. Now in its 10th year, the program maintains a robust research agenda, supports an annual postdoctoral fellowship, and convenes conferences in the United States and Asia.
Eggleston teaches students through the East Asia studies program on-campus, and has published over 50 peer-reviewed articles in economics, medicine, demography and health policy journals such as Journal of Economic Perspectives, Journal of Health Economics, Population Studies, Lancet and Health Affairs. She has also written and edited several books, most recently Policy Challenges from Demographic Change in China and India (2016), part of Shorenstein APARC’s publishing program.
“I am honored to serve Shorenstein APARC in this new capacity and look forward to working with Professor Shin and my colleagues to find innovative ways to strengthen the center and promote our intertwined missions of research, education and policy engagement,” said Eggleston, who is also a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
The deputy director position was created to accommodate the increasing size and scope of the center. The deputy director works closely with the director on strategic vision and objectives.
The colloquia, co-sponsored by Stanford’s Center for South Asia, will include lectures from scholars, policymakers and other thought leaders on India’s democratic system and society, and provide a forum to discuss how the country can overcome obstacles to long-term prosperity.
Kathleen Stephens, the William J. Perry Fellow at Shorenstein APARC and former U.S. ambassador to the Republic of Korea, has organized and will moderate the colloquia. She served as the chargé d'affaires at the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi in 2014.
Stephens said, “Now is the right time and Stanford is the right place for a renewed focus on India, its daunting challenges and its extraordinary potential. This series will consider the strategic bet U.S. policymakers have made on India's rise, and India's own aspirations to play a bigger global role, particularly in Asia.
“In this series and beyond, we want to knit together the expertise and resources at Stanford and in Silicon Valley with policy leaders from India and elsewhere to expand our understanding of India in all its contemporary complexity and importance.”
From 1999 to 2013, Shorenstein APARC had a prolific initiative that supported scholarly work related to South Asia. The center envisions the colloquia will be some of many activities about the region going forward.
A listing of the seminars and related multimedia can be accessed here; more information will be added as it becomes available.
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A rickshaw is driven across Ellis Bridge in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India.
Encina Hall
616 Serra Street
Stanford, CA 94305-6165
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drupnow@stanford.edu
Distinguished Visiting Austrian Chair Professor (2016-2017)
Professor of Contemporary History, University of Innsbruck
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Prof. Dr. Dirk Rupnow studied history, German literature, art history and philosophy in Berlin and Vienna, earning his M.A. in 1999 (Vienna), Ph.D. in 2002 (Klagenfurt) and Habilitation in 2009 (Vienna). Prof. Rupnow was Project Researcher with the Historian’s Commission of the Republic of Austria in 1999/2000. He has been awarded numerous research stays and fellowships in Austria, Germany, France, Israel, and the USA and the 2009 Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History of the Wiener Library, London. Prof. Rupnow has been on faculty at the University of Innsbruck since 2009 and the Head of the Institute for Contemporary History since 2010. His main research interests are 20th Century European History, Holocaust and Jewish Studies, Cultures and Politics of Memory, Intellectual and Migration History.
Prof. Rupnow will be teaching the course "The Holocaust and its Aftermath" for the Department of History in the Spring Quarter.
Head, Institute for Contemporary History, University of Innsbruck
Founding Coordinator, Center for Migration & Globalization, University of Innsbruck
The following essay by CISAC's Amy Zegart -- "Trump vs. the Spies: In defense of the Intelligence Community" -- appeared in The Atlanticon Jan. 6.
Something stunning happened on Capitol Hill yesterday: Republican and Democratic members of the Senate Armed Services Committee practically stood shoulder to shoulder with senior officials from the U.S. intelligence community as they declared that America’s spies were right after all: The Russian government sought to interfere in the U.S. presidential election by hacking into election-related email and leaking information. It was a striking bipartisan rebuke to President-elect Donald Trump, who has consistently cast skepticism on allegations of Russian involvement and seemed to disparage the intelligence community. Perhaps in anticipation of that committee hearing, Trump was already backpedaling on Twitter before it started, declaring, “The media lies to make it look like I am against ‘Intelligence’ when in fact I am a big fan!”
Trump’s “never mind” tweet is unlikely to repair the dangerous breach between the incoming president and the intelligence agencies that serve him. Presidents often throw intelligence agencies under the bus when they fail. Never before has a president-elect thrown them under the bus for succeeding. But that’s exactly what Trump has been doing for weeks, in an unrelenting frenzy. Since his election, Trump has spent more time fighting Langley than ISIS. He has called the CIA’s assessment of the Russian government’s role in election hacking “ridiculous” and has insisted, repeatedly, that the culprit could be anyone, including a 400-pound hacker or “somebody sitting in a bed some place.” His transition team has disparaged and discredited the CIA as “the same people who thought Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction”—even though they aren’t the same people, Russian cyber hacking isn’t the same intelligence target as Iraq WMD, the Iraq failure was 14 years ago, and intelligence agencies have radically overhauled their analytic process since then. The president-elect has also said he won’t bother getting daily intelligence briefings—making him the first president since 9/11 to skip them—because he’s smart. And just a day before Trump declared himself an intelligence fan, The Wall Street Journal reported that his team was cooking up a Nixon-esque scheme to purge the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence of suspected politicization in the ranks by trimming and reorganizing both agencies. (The Trump team has denied this report, which was based on the accounts of sources “familiar with the planning,” including at least one close to the transition.)
With fans like this, who needs enemies?
Some skepticism toward intelligence is healthy. And tension between presidents and their intelligence agencies is nothing new. Lyndon Johnson was said to compare the intelligence community to his boyhood cow, Bessie, who would swing her “shit smeared” tail through a bucket of milk as soon as he’d finished milking her. Bill Clinton met so infrequently with his CIA Director, Jim Woolsey, that when a plane crashed on the White House lawn, aides joked that it was Woolsey trying to get a meeting. (Woolsey, incidentally, had been advising the Trump transition team until resigning yesterday, reportedly due to “growing tensions over Trump’s vision for intelligence agencies.”) Nearly all presidents leave office disappointed and disgruntled with their intelligence apparatus, for two reasons: because presidents want crystal balls and even the CIA’s smartest people don’t have them; and because presidents resort to covert operations for the toughest of problems, when all else fails—which is why covert operations usually fail, too. But no president until now has entered office with such a profound, publicly vented distrust of his own intelligence establishment.
Trump’s doubts are both understandable and alarming. Understandable because we live in an era where threats are moving faster than bureaucrats, and where hacks, tweets, leaks, and internet “news” (both real and fake) make information available everywhere, all the time, instantly. In this digital age, it is reasonable to ask just what America’s intelligence community still brings to the table.
The answer is a lot. U.S. intelligence agencies have one overriding mission: giving the president decision-making advantage in a dangerous and deceptive world. Intelligence officials risk their lives to recruit foreign assets, they intercept foreign email and cell-phone communications, they build and deploy spy satellites, they track obscure foreign government reports and trends for vital clues about the stability of a regime or the health of a foreign economy. Sure, you can find a Wikipedia page on just about anything these days. Where intelligence agencies add value is by integrating the best open-source information and integrating it with the secret nuggets they gather. All intelligence is information. But not all information is intelligence. Agencies like the CIA or NSA sort through a crushing daily stream of information and marry it with secrets to yield insights that keep Americans safe and advance the country’s national interests.
Do they get it wrong sometimes? Of course. In 1962, just weeks before an American U-2 spy plane discovered unmistakable evidence of Soviet nuclear missile installations in Cuba, the intelligence community completed an assessment that concluded the Soviets would not dare place missiles in Cuba. Today Americans remember the U-2 photos but forget the intelligence failure that preceded them and led the United States to the nuclear brink. The intelligence failures of 9/11 and Iraq WMD are still fresh and searing.
But castigating intelligence officials because they don’t succeed every time is like saying Stephen Curry is a terrible NBA basketball player because he doesn’t make every 3-point shot he takes. Intelligence agencies are paid to pierce the fog of the future as best they can. They tackle the toughest targets—trying to divine the capabilities and intentions of adversaries who hide in caves, send children to be suicide bombers, enrich uranium in secret underground facilities, seek space weapons that could destroy GPS and every digital system people use, and would detonate a nuclear bomb in a New York minute to take out New York City if they ever got one. As one former senior intelligence official told me, if the intelligence community is getting it right 100 percent of the time, then they should be fired because they aren’t asking hard enough questions.
This is serious business, and intelligence agencies take it deadly seriously. They are the silent warriors of America. There’s no holiday in their honor. There’s no big public memorial on the National Mall. There are no Air Force flyovers or standing ovations at football games for them. There are only unmarked stars on the walls at Langley and Fort Meade honoring those at CIA and NSA who died in silent service to their country. Mr. Trump should visit those walls and feel their sacrifice. Better yet, he should honor America’s intelligence professionals by listening to what they have to say—starting with the daily intelligence briefing.
The president cannot afford to delegate intelligence briefings to underlings in today’s threat environment, for three reasons that Mr. Trump should know well from his experience in the business world. First, nothing generates knowledge and results like face-to-face meetings. That’s why CEOs fly around the world to meet in person instead of Skyping. Whether in the boardroom or the Oval Office, good briefings are two-way interactions that build trust and insight. They’re golden moments for a senior intelligence official to converse with the nation’s leader, to better understand what’s on his mind, what he wants to know, what he finds unconvincing, and how the vast assets of the intelligence community can better serve him. Second, good briefings inform—they arm the commander-in-chief with a view of what matters right now and what could matter tomorrow, so that he isn’t surprised. Because in foreign policy, surprises are never the good kind. Third and finally, the daily briefing boosts morale. It says to the men and women of the intelligence community, “you matter.” Nothing signals importance like minutes of the president’s schedule. Given the dangers America confronts, the nation needs the intelligence community now more than ever. The 45th president needs to show that he thinks so, too.
Amy Zegart is the co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University. She is the author of three books examining U.S. intelligence challenges, including Spying Blind: The CIA, the FBI, and the Origins of 9/11.
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Defense Undersecretary for Intelligence Marcell Lettre II, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and United States Cyber Command and National Security Agency Director Admiral Michael Rogers testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill, Jan. 5, 2017 in Washington, DC. The intelligence chiefs testified to the committee about cyber threats to the United States and fielded questions about effects of Russian government hacking on the 2016 presidential election.
FSI researchers strive to understand how countries relate to one another, and what policies are needed to achieve global stability and prosperity. International relations experts focus on the challenging U.S.-Russian relationship, the alliance between the U.S. and Japan and the limitations of America’s counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan.
