As the U.S. presidential election campaign moves into full bore, what role will foreign policy play in the national debate and the presidential election? Does foreign policy matter to voters or do international issues take a back seat to domestic concerns?  How does the election affect the conduct of foreign policy?

Here to shed light on the presidential election and U.S. foreign policy are three prominent commentators, with moderator Coit Blacker.

Michael H. Armacost is the Shorenstein Distinguished Fellow at FSI’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, a position he has held since 2002. He is the former president of the Brookings Institution, former under secretary of state for political affairs and former U.S. ambassador to Japan and the Philippines. 

David Brady is deputy director and Davies Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is the Bowen and Janice Arthur McCoy Professor of Political Science and Leadership Values in Stanford's Graduate School of Business, a professor of political science in the School of Humanities and Sciences, and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. He is a specialist on U.S. national elections. 

David M. Kennedy is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History, Emeritus at Stanford and Faculty Co-Director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West. Most famously, Professor Kennedy won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for History for his book  Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (1999). 

Moderator: Coit D. Blacker is director and senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the Olivier Nomellini Professor in International Studies in the School of Humanities and Sciences, and the Olivier Nomellini Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education. During the first Clinton administration, Blacker served as special assistant to the president for National Security Affairs and senior director for Russian, Ukrainian, and Eurasian affairs at the National Security Council (NSC). 

Life expectancy at aged 65 is remarkably similar in the three Chinese cities of Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Taipei, even though the cities differ in levels of socioeconomic development, health systems, and other factors. Edward Jow-Ching Tu will discuss research that aims to understand this phenomenon. Despite unprecedented increases in life expectancy and attainment of similar current levels of life expectancy, the cities differ in the contributions of changes in major causes of death to the improvements in life expectancy among the elderly. Tu and colleagues have explored several possible determinants of these different patterns and trends in the three cities, including socioeconomic development, health service delivery systems, cause-of-death classification systems, and competing risks from cardiovascular disease and other diseases. Their analysis suggests that the effect of equity of health service delivery has become more important over time.

Edward Jow-Ching Tu is a senior lecturer of demography in the Division of Social Science at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His work is focused on the impact of fertility, mortality, and migration on socio-economic changes in East Asia countries with special emphasis on nations experiencing a transition from planned economy to market economy; on causes and impacts of mortality changes and health transition on aging societies; and on the causes of lowest-low fertility in many East Asia countries. He has several active research projects ongoing in China, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. He holds graduate degress from West Virginia University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Tennessee (Knoxville). Tu has worked extensively in Asia, and has served as an adjunct professor and taught in many universities in China, including Peking University, Peoples University, Nankai Univerity, and Fudan University. He had served as a senior research scientist at the New York State Health Department and as a research fellow (full professor) at the Institute for Social Sciences and Philosophy at Academia Sinica. Tu has also taught at the State University of New York in Albany.

Abstract:

Nunn's paper examines the effect of U.S. food aid on conflict in recipient countries. To establish a causal relationship, he and Nancy Qian exploit time variation in food aid caused by fluctuationsin U.S. wheat production together with cross-sectional variation in a country's tendency to receive any food aid from the United States. Their estimates show that an increase in U.S. food aid increases the incidence, onset and duration of civil conflicts in recipient countries. The results suggest that the effects are larger for smaller scale civil conflicts. No effect is found on interstate warfare.

Speaker Bio: 

Professor Nunn was born in Canada, where he received his PhD from the University of Toronto in 2005.  In 2009, Professor Nunn was selected as an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow and grant recepient.

Professor Nunn’s primary research interests are in economic history, economic development, political economy and international trade. One stream of Nunn’s research focuses on the long-term impact that historic events can have on current economic development. In “Historical Legacies: A Model Linking Africa’s Past to its Current Underdevelopment”, published in the Journal of Development Economics in 2007, Nunn develops a game-theoretic model showing how the slave trade and colonial rule could have had permanent long-term effects on economic performance. In “The Long-Term Effects of Africa’s Slave Trades” (Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2008), Nunn documents the long-term adverse economic effects of Africa’s slave trades. His current research continues to examine the specific channels through which the slave trade affects current development within Africa. In "The Slave Trade and the Origins of Mistrust in Africa" (American Economic Review, forthcoming), coauthored with Leonard Wantchekon, he empirically documents how the slave trade engendered a culture of mistrust amongst the descendants of those heavily threatened by the slave trade.

A second stream of Professor Nunn’s research focuses on the importance of hold-up and incomplete contracting in international trade. He has published research showing that a country’s ability to enforce written contracts is a key determinant of comparative advantage (“Relationship-Specificity, Incomplete Contracts and the Pattern of Trade,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2007). Other work, coauthored with Daniel Trefler, examines the relationship between the cross-industry structure of a country's tariffs and its long-term economic growth (“The Structure of Tariffs and Long-Term Growth,” American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, 2010). The study identifies growth-promoting benefits of a tariff structure focused in skill-intensive industries. It also shows how and why governments that succumb to political influence and rent-seeking are unable to focus tariffs in these key industries.

This seminar is based on a recently published article that reviews the history of the September 22, 1979 double flash recorded by the VELA satellite and concludes that the flash was an Israeli nuclear test assisted by South Africa. The work of a government panel created at the time to determine the cause of the flash is discussed as is the author's own involvement in the issue.

About the speaker:

Leonard Weiss is an affiliated scholar at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). He is also a national advisory board member of the Center for Arms control and Non-Proliferation in Washington, DC. He began his professional career as a PhD researcher in mathematical system theory at the Research Institute for Advanced Studies in Baltimore. This was followed by tenured professorships in applied mathematics and electrical engineering at Brown University and the University of Maryland. During this period he published widely in the applied mathematics literature. In 1976 he received a Congressional Science Fellowship that resulted in a career change. For more than two decades he worked for Senator John Glenn as the staff director of both the Senate Subcommittee on Energy and Nuclear Proliferation and the Committee on Governmental Affairs. He was the chief architect of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Act of 1978 and legislation that created the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board. In addition, he led notable investigations of the nuclear programs of India and Pakistan. Since retiring from the Senate staff in 1999, he has published numerous articles on nonproliferation issues for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Arms Control Today, and the Nonproliferation Review. His current research interests include an assessment of the impact on the nonproliferation regime of nuclear trade with non-signers of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and more generally the relationship of energy security concerns with nonproliferation.