How do you effectively advise senior-level policymakers when a political crisis emerges? Stanford students taking the course U.S. Policy Towards Northeast Asia (IPS 244), sponsored by the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC), are learning and putting into practice these very skills. Over the ten weeks of the 2011 winter quarter, students will learn about contemporary U.S. policy towards Japan, China, and Korea, and about how to write and present policy-style memoranda to top-level government decision makers. They will also take part in an in-class simulation of a Six-Party meeting to negotiate North Korea's nuclear program.

Students cover a great deal of content in a short amount of time. "Ten weeks goes by pretty quickly," says course leader Michael H. Armacost, the Shorenstein Fellow at FSI and a former U.S. Ambassador to Japan and the Philippines. The real-world approach to the course is similar to what you would find in a professional international relations school, he explains. In previous years, Armacost has taught the course both alone and as part of a team with other former U.S. senior-level policy officials. The current course has been offered in the Ford Dorsey Program in International Policy Studies (IPS) for the last three years. It is co-taught with Daniel C. Sneider, the associate director for research at Shorenstein APARC and a former long-time foreign correspondent in Asia; David Straub, the associate director of the Stanford Korean Studies Program and a former U.S. senior foreign service officer; and Thomas Fingar, the Oksenberg/Rohlen Distinguished Fellow at FSI and a former Chairman of the National Intelligence Council.

In addition to providing a strong understanding of the U.S. foreign policymaking process, each week of the course is dedicated to a different aspect of the relationship of the United States with the countries of Northeast Asia, including Taiwan and the Russian Federation. Students will closely examine the history and dynamics between the great powers of the region; U.S. security relations with Japan and China; East Asian regionalism; democratization in South Korea; the North Korean nuclear crisis; and economics and human rights in China.

Although the case studies that the policy-writing exercises are based upon are hypothetical, they are closely tied to real-world issues and events. A previous year's case study dealt with tensions between China and Japan over rival claims to the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, anticipating the September 2010 conflict between Japan and China in the waters around these islands. The simulation exercise, another highlight of the course when students have the opportunity to collaborate with one another, is also closely tied to current regional events.

In addition to the rich content of the course and the expertise of its instructors, the diverse background of the students lends itself to the overall learning experience. Some of the students are pursuing a master's degree through IPS or the Center for East Asian Studies, while others come from the Graduate School of Business and various other Stanford units. Each year, there are always a few undergraduate students, who Armacost describes as "very strong," as well as early-career foreign affairs and military officials from Northeast Asia.

Interest in the course remains strong each year, and Shorenstein APARC will continue to offer it in order to provide solid, real-world policy training for the next generation of scholars and government officials.

Sherman’s introduction to the psyche of the soldier was personal: Her father, a World War II veteran, carried his dog tags on his keychain with him for 65 years before passing away just over a year ago. Sherman perceived her father’s choice to carry his dog tags not as one of honor, but instead as an obligation he felt to carry the moral load of his war. “He was a medic; he never fired an arm. But he carried the war, and what he saw in the war, with him.” 

To understand the moral psyche of the soldier, Sherman studies three forms of guilt: accident guilt, “luck” guilt and collateral-damage guilt. Accident guilt occurs when soldiers blame themselves for an accident that occurred under their watch. Sherman told the story of Capt. John Prior, who came to speak to her after the gun on a Bradley Fighting Vehicle accidentally fired, blowing off the face of a private under Prior’s watch. “It was as if an ice-cream scoop scooped out his face in front of me,” Prior told Sherman. “It was one of the few times in my life I’ve really cried.” Objectively, Sherman explained, one would not place blame on Prior because he was simply part of a causal chain and not the culpable link. But this fails to explain the despair, the self-indictment and the empathy that still invade Prior’s mind. “I’m the one who placed the vehicles. I’m the one who set the security. And as with most accidents, I’m not in jail right now,” he told Sherman. “Probably not a day goes by that I don’t think about it, even fleetingly.” In the case of Prior, Sherman says a deep moral accountability is at the heart of the soldier’s guilt, similar to the philosopher Nietzsche’s concept of “bad conscience.”

Luck guilt occurs when soldiers feel that by remaining alive following a catastrophic event of war, they betray those who gave their lives to battle, or feel, if they are not on the field of battle, that they are not sharing the burden shouldered by their comrades. Sherman told of when she visited the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis and spoke to marines who felt that they did not deserve to be surrounded by green scenery while their brothers fought in the deserts of Iraq and Afghanistan. The same was the case at the Army’s Walter Reed Medical Center, Sherman said. Even a student of Sherman’s at Georgetown spoke to her of the “dereliction of duty” he felt when insurgents in the Iraqi city of Tal Afar attacked a unit he formerly led, killing his friend. Sherman’s student yearned to have shielded his unit, even from thousands of miles away, and only after waging a moral battle within himself did he come to the reasonable conclusion that he could not, in fact, re-assimilate at home while also still protecting his friends on the war front.

Collateral-damage guilt affects soldiers whose actions result in the death of civilians. Sherman told the story of Col. Bob Durkin, who led a battalion in Baghdad during Operation Iraqi Freedom 2. Durkin told Sherman that his unit was “emotionally devastated” when children were killed in attacks on vehicle checkpoints. Soldiers would often go out of their way to order a medical evacuation for children, even when their own lives were still at risk. One might speculate that these soldiers rationally feel guilty, but Sherman believes that a deeper, moral intuition is at play: The soldiers internalize that they are not fighters at checkpoints; they are police, social developers – and healers. Their job is to remove children from the chaos that war has become, not watch as they are killed by a bomb meant for the soldiers.

Studying soldier guilt is especially pertinent to the current war in Afghanistan because the U.S. strategy there is grounded in population-centric, counterinsurgency warfare. Such operations require soldiers to restrain themselves from all-out battle and instead win the hearts and minds of the population they aim to protect from insurgent forces. Sherman argues that soldiers should be better trained and prepared to exercise restraint, thereby reducing the moral burden they carry in and after war. At the same time, she acknowledges the difficulty: When a soldier returns from war, the uniform does not come off so easily. As Will Quinn, a student of Sherman’s who once interrogated prisoners at Abu Ghraib, told her: “War takes place in a different time and space. But I know I’m the same person who was doing those things, and that’s what tears at your soul.”

The Drell Lecture series is an annual public event sponsored by CISAC. It is named for Sidney Drell, CISAC’s founding co-director.

The toppling of Egypt's modern-day pharaoh through peaceful mass protests, aided by Facebook and Twitter, marks a watershed for Egypt and the entire Arab world. Contrary to widespread anxieties in the U.S. foreign policy establishment, it will also serve the long-term interests of the United States - and Israel.

Many analysts of Egypt have been warning for years that the status quo under Hosni Mubarak was not sustainable. A repressive and deeply corrupt dictatorship was sitting on top of a social volcano - an increasingly young, urbanized, digitally connected population seething over the lack of freedom, dignity and economic opportunity. A quarter of Egypt's working-age youth are unemployed and many more under-employed. Over the past two decades, average incomes in Egypt stagnated while they doubled or tripled elsewhere in the region.

Think of what could have happened. Many observers (including myself) worried that the growing alienation of young Egyptians might flow in anti-American, anti-Israeli and radical Islamist directions. The inevitable eruption could have turned violent, resulting in the kind of bloody suppression that gripped Algeria in the early 1990s, when 200,000 died. Or it might have been hijacked by radical Islamists who would ride the popular revolution to power, as in Iran in 1979.

So far, none of these have happened. The millions of Egyptians who have poured into the streets of Cairo and other cities have not been chanting "down with America," nor have their protests been about Israel (or the Palestinians). Rather, they want freedom, justice and accountability in Egypt. They have mobilized for democratic change with extraordinary discipline, imagination and moderation. In the face of killings, provocations, arrests and torture, they have adhered to nonviolence as a sacred principle.

In achieving the first condition for Egypt's liberation, the departure of the pharaoh, through peaceful grassroots mobilization, a huge chip has been lifted from their shoulders. Now Egyptians feel a new sense of pride, confidence and empowerment. And they are beginning to view the United States in a fresh and more hopeful light, not because of President Obama's Cairo Speech in 2009 but because of what he said and subtly did in the last two weeks (after several rhetorical blunders by some in his administration). As the mass protests grew, Obama aligned the United States more explicitly behind the goal of peaceful democratic change, warned the regime against the use of force, and urged Mubarak to step aside. The experience could mark a turning point not just for Egypt but for Barack Obama personally. He now has the chance to nurture democratic change in the Arab world through artful diplomacy and timely assistance, where George W. Bush failed with blunter rhetoric and means.

Israel as well should be reassured by developments so far. Egypt's new (and hopefully temporary) military junta has quickly reaffirmed the country's treaty obligations. Few protesters are calling for abrogation of Egypt's peace with Israel. Most protesters resent Israel's treatment of the Palestinians and want an independent Palestinian state, but mainly they want to transform their own country politically and economically. They know their aspirations for human dignity and economic opportunity can only be met with far-reaching internal reforms, and that the worn-out theme of anti-Zionism is a divergence from that. Israel and its friends should thus welcome democratic change in Egypt. The only way to guarantee a lasting Middle East peace is to root negotiated agreements in the same democratic legitimacy that undergirds the stability and resilience of Israel's political system. As Thomas Friedman recently observed, it is a better bet to make peace with 82 million people than with one man.

The challenge now is to ensure that Egypt's revolution produces a genuine pluralist democracy. This is far from assured.

Egypt's military rulers may well seek to sabotage the transition and restore the old order with a slightly more democratic façade. Or the Muslim Brotherhood (which rejects violent means but clings to Islamist political ends) could gain the upper hand in popular mobilization or elections. But the second scenario will be much more likely to follow, rather than prompt, the first. If a democratic transition unfolds seriously and peacefully through negotiations and reform, and if democratic institutions are well designed, the Muslim Brotherhood will be a significant but minority player.

For Egypt, Mubarak's fall is only the first step along a tortuous path. If its transition leads to democracy, it will produce a much more reliable partner for peace and progress in the Middle East. That is why other democracies in the world should support it in every way possible.