Jeff Decker knows what war can do to a person. He lived it for four deployments, as an Army special operations squad leader in Iraq and Afghanistan who twice earned the Army Commendation Medal for valorous conduct in combat.

Decker, who now serves as a research assistant in Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation under Joe Felter, is the founder of March on Veteran, an organization that supports veterans suffering from mental health issues, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. March on Veteran is a free, online program available to any former member of the military.

Decker joined CISAC in September, about a year after he launched March on Veteran. Felter, a special forces veteran, is a senior research scholar who studies counterinsurgencies, terrorism and political violence for CISAC.

Decker, after his military service, struggled with the transition to civilian life due to the anger, anxiety, chronic pain, and sleeplessness that PTSD caused. On top of this, he did not have access to a Veteran Affairs treatment facility. That’s when the native of Buffalo, N.Y. turned to self-educating himself on mental health treatments available to veterans.

“When I studied for my doctorate in Australia, I cobbled together a mental health program to help myself. Now I’m sharing that and making those resources available to other veterans with the same needs,” said Decker, who earned his doctorate in international relations from Bond University, where he wrote his dissertation “Enhancing the Effectiveness of Private Military Contractors.”

So far, about 83 veterans have begun March on Veteran’s pilot program, which is a web-based and self-directed study. Decker handles almost all of the human contact. He is currently expanding the program to incorporate the veteran-to-veteran peer element with the help of other veteran volunteers.

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March on Veteran is, as Decker calls it, “support for veterans by veterans.” It is a recovery program personalized to one’s particular needs and is provided by people who have lived experience. It is not affiliated with any government organization like the VA or Department of Defense to maintain the veteran’s confidentiality. Veterans can access the program or sign-up to meet other veterans online.

“This program focuses on trying to help veterans reach their personal goals instead of focusing on ‘fixing’ them,” Decker said. “We are all about improving veteran quality of life, and a big part of that is connecting with other veterans.”

With Felter, Decker will be mostly working on his Hacking for Defense class project, which uses startup methodology to innovate and find solutions for critical challenges facing America’s defense and intelligence agencies.

Before arriving on campus, Decker conducted national security and international affairs research as a RAND Corporation summer associate for two summers in Washington, D.C.

The consequences of state collapse anywhere in the world can be devastating and destabilizing for neighboring and even distant countries.

The complexity of each situation demands a tailored response, according to Stanford scholars embarking on a new American Academy Arts & Sciences project to identify the best policy responses to failing states embroiled in civil wars.

A failed state is that whose political or economic system has become so weak that the government is no longer in control. Such instability has already threatened or affected Syria, Libya, Yemen and other polities.

The project, Civil Wars, Violence and International Responses, is led by Stanford’s Karl Eikenberry and Stephen Krasner. Eikenberry is a faculty affiliate at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and the former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan. Krasner is a faculty member in the political science department and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Relations and Hoover Institution.

Other Stanford scholars involved include Francis Fukuyama and Steve Stedman of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law; CISAC's Martha Crenshaw, political scientist James Fearon; Paul Wise of the Center for Health Policy and the Center for Health Policy and the Center for Primary Care and Outcomes Research; and Michele Barry, the senior associate dean for global health at the medical school.

The effort will culminate in a two-volume issue in AAAS’s journal Dædalus. On Nov. 2-4, the academy will hold an authors’ workshop in Cambridge, Mass., to discuss journal content.

Different approaches

In an interview, Eikenberry said the problematic U.S. interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan make it clear that different approaches must be used for different countries.

“The robust counterinsurgency campaign that the U.S. employed for periods of time in both Afghanistan and Iraq was premised on the viability of the standard development model that aims to put countries on the path to economic well-being and consolidated democracy,” he said.

However, such an approach assumes that decision makers in those states have the same objectives as the intervening states, which typically seek to improve the lives of people in those countries, said Eikenbery. Prior to serving as the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan from 2009 until 2011, Eikenberry had a 35-year career in the U.S. Army, retiring in 2009 with the rank of lieutenant general.

As Krasner points out, when intervention occurs, the hope is that improvements in one area – such as the quality of elections, rule of law, economic growth, or military recognition of civilian authority – would lead to improvements in other areas, according to Eikenberry.

But opposition and a constrained sense of “limited opportunities” can arise to thwart a well-meaning intervention, Eikenberry said.

He added, “Information asymmetries and the absence of mutually compatible interests between national and external elites, make it impossible to put target countries on a rapid path to prosperity and consolidated democracy. External actors must have much more modest goals.”

Syrian consequences

As for the case of Syria, Eikenberry noted that such civil wars can actually become more lethal and dangerous to global order than inter-state conflicts.

These types of conflicts like that in Syria tend to escalate into high levels of violence because of the costs that the losing parties believe they will incur, he said.

“This in turn leads to state fragmentation and the possibility of transnational groups with international ambitions getting involved,” he said. “Civil wars can result in an enormous number of civilian casualties, which generates large scale refugee flows” and puts huge pressure on neighboring states.

Eikenberry said Syria is being “internationalized by entangling regional and great powers in proxy wars,” which is exacerbating that conflict beyond Syria and throughout the greater Middle East. As for the immediate, direct threat to the U.S., that debate still continues, he added. 

On that note, one project goal is to assess risks to other countries that may emanate from civil wars and protracted intrastate violence like that in Syria, Eikenberry said. He and his colleagues will examine the effects of  international terrorism, massive displacements of people, proxy wars that escalate to interstate warfare, criminal organizations that displace governments, and pandemics. 

Policy implications

Eikenberry is hopeful the project influences policy and practice toward countries experiencing civil war and violence.

“Facilitating dialogue among a variety of constituencies with knowledge on the dynamics and impact of civil wars that might not normally or directly interact, including government and military officials, human rights organizations, academic and scholarly experts, and the media, will be one outcome of the project,” he said.

The idea is to allow “new ideas to emerge” regarding how to handle such states, as well as methods of applying such findings, he said.

“Exploring ways to create stability and more lasting peace, taking into consideration voices from academic and practical fields, should prove valuable to the policy community,” Eikenberry said.

Following publication of the volumes, the project will convene international workshops aimed at developing better regional perspectives. Such outreach activities will provide the feedback for the publication of another AAAS paper aimed at informing U.S. and international policy and research on the subject. A series of roundtable discussions in Washington is also planned.

Three foreign policy experts explored U.S.-China relations in a panel discussion at Stanford earlier this week. In a wide-ranging conversation, they described current relations as often complementary, sometimes conflicting, and above all, unavoidably crucial.

The panel titled “The United States, China and Global Security” included He Yafei, former Chinese ambassador to the United Nations, and Stanford’s Michael Armacost, Shorenstein Distinguished Fellow and former U.S. ambassador, and Karl Eikenberry, a distinguished fellow and former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan.

Jean Oi, a Stanford professor of political science, moderated the event, which was co-hosted by the China Program and the U.S.-Asia Security Initiative, two entities in the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

“The [U.S.-China] relationship is very complicated and full of complexity,” said He, a career diplomat who was recently appointed as a professor at Peking University.

Shifts in the international system that accompanied the end of the Cold War and China’s rapid growth have brought new demands and necessitated more engagement, He said, weighing the outcomes of “the great convergence,” or closing of the development gap between developed and developing countries, and its impact on the bilateral relationship.

“China has been a major beneficiary of the global system created by the United States,” He said, suggesting it would be unrealistic to assume China would have become the second largest economy without that context, moreover, that Beijing would seek its deterioration.

Uncertainty and the next U.S. administration

China and the United States, as two of the world’s most populous countries, face domestic politics and a range of challenges such as slowed economic growth, population aging and minority and ethnic issues.

“There’s a lot of uncertainty,” Oi said. “As you know, the U.S. presidential election will be taking place quite soon and China itself is going through a period of some uncertainty in its economic development.”

The panelists from the United States offered an optimistic view of the outcome of the presidential election. Armacost, who held a 24-year career in the U.S. government before coming to Stanford, said he foresees consistency in U.S. policy toward China, and more broadly, toward the region, during the next administration.

“Asia is destined to be a huge priority,” Armacost said. Two outstanding areas bound to be “sticking points” on the policy agenda are territorial issues in the South China Sea and international trade, he said. The Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade agreement between 12 countries of which the United States is a party, has drawn tepid support in the U.S. Congress. And in July, China rejected a ruling by the Permanent Court of Arbitration on maritime rights in a case brought by the Philippines respective to the South China Sea.

Eikenberry shared a similar sentiment about the likelihood of policy continuity from the current U.S. administration to the next, and described the capacity for deepened cooperation between China and the United States as “profound.”

“And we’re already doing it,” he remarked. The Paris Agreement on climate change is one recent testament of the countries’ ability to successfully cooperate and galvanize support for solving global issues, he said.

The panelists agreed that the future of U.S.-China cooperation may well depend on youth, citing surveys of younger generations that show they are more amenable to engaging the other than older generations.

‘Global network of partnerships’

Asked to evaluate the China-Russia relationship, He said the countries have reached a “historic high” in their relationship, underscored by common interests, shared borders and a fraying U.S.-Russia relationship. Russia and China, however, have no intension of forming a formal strategic alliance, he added.

China’s approach to interaction with other countries is based on “a global network of partnerships” focused on trade, cultural exchange and relationships, He said.

The panelists highlighted the importance of striving for more dialogue and consultation between the United States and China on security, an area that is often superseded by economic aspects in bilateral talks.

Concluding the event, Oi emphasized the need for “frank discussions” about the challenges that affect the two countries. During the day, He held closed-door discussions with faculty members, senior research scholars and students focused on East Asia.