Discussions began, tentatively at first, as the delegates slipped into the roles they had been assigned and for which they had prepared for several months. The tension mounted as they anticipated meeting with their heads of state, to whom they would propose their country’s goals for the upcoming U.N. Security Council meeting.

Thus began the Third Annual IDL Student Conference in International Security, sponsored by the Initiative on Distance Learning (IDL). IDL offers Stanford courses in international security to nine Russian universities via distance-learning technologies. Its annual conference brings together top students and instructors from each of the participating universities with students and faculty from Stanford. This was the first year that the conference centered on an international security simulation, led by political science professor Scott D. Sagan, director of CISAC, and Coit D. Blacker, director of FSI. Sagan has been conducting such security simulations for eight years at Stanford and other U.S. universities.

This year’s simulation scenario was the referral of Iran to the U.N. Security Council by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for failure to fully disclose its nuclear activities. Council delegates convened in the Russian provincial capital of Yaroslavl, 150 miles northeast of Moscow, due to “security concerns”— as they were informed—about U.N. headquarters in New York.

Delegates’ opening statements reflected a wide range of views on Iran’s status with the IAEA. The U.S. delegation called for sanctions and showed little interest in negotiation. “We find the Iranian regime corrupt and repressive,” said Oleg Borisov, head U.S. delegate and a student at Petrozavodsk State University. He added, rather menacingly, “The United States is not intending to use military force unless Iran keeps up its nuclear capability and continues to support terrorism.”

At the other end of the spectrum, Venezuela, Pakistan, and Iraq indicated no willingness to consider sanctioning Iran. China urged delegates to “choose the only right option—diplomacy.”

By the end of the two-day session, delegates had overcome seemingly intractable differences during four intensive legal drafting sessions. The council’s resolution gave Iran three months to comply with IAEA demands and provided for Iran to obtain enriched uranium from Russia, with the production, transport, and waste disposal to occur on Russian soil under IAEA controls.

As a learning experience, the simulation is well matched to the IDL program’s goal of fostering critical analysis among a new generation of students in post- Soviet Russia. FSI director Coit Blacker wants to develop future generations of diplomats and policymakers whose worldview is shaped “by how they think, not what they’re told to think.”

After the session ended, students reflected on what they had learned. Putting themselves in others’ shoes seemed the most valuable aspect for many. Natasha Pereira-Klamath, one of the Stanford undergraduates who participated in the Yaroslavl simulation as a representative of the Russian Federation, said she was surprised at the “extent to which people reflected the views of their (assigned) countries.” This was echoed by other students, who expressed their surprise at how easy it was to begin thinking as a representative of another country, although their official position might be very different from their own.

“I’m glad to see the resolution passed today,” said Homkosol Bheraya, an exchange student from Thailand who attends Ural State University. “I hope that in the real world this can happen someday.” Perhaps she will be in a position to advance that goal. “My dream,” she said, “is to one day work for the IAEA.”

The International Outreach Program at Stanford University (IOP) began as a pilot joint venture between FSI and the Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning (SCIL), under the auspices of the Stanford International Initiative. IOP was designed to serve as a bridge between Stanford University and international universities and educational institutions, especially in Africa, South America, and Asia. The program’s mission is to facilitate teaching and other outreach collaborations in each of the three primary themes of the International Initiative—security, governance, and human well-being—and international collaborations in other relevant areas. During the initial startup phase, IOP facilitated collaborations between Stanford and universities in South Africa (ELISA— eLearning Initiative in South Africa, focusing on using mobile devices to support Stanford courses on International Security and the Environment) as well as in China (adapting innovative computer-based learning materials to teach biology to undergraduate students).

A third collaboration facilitated by IOP brings together Stanford experts from the School of Education with professors and researchers from the Universidad Católica de Chile (UC) in Santiago to address the issue of teacher education. While Chile has enacted wide-ranging social and economic reforms to improve the well-being of its citizens, and has been a leader across Latin America in improving educational quality and access, the country still faces challenges with its teacher training institutions and professional development activities.

UC is collaborating with IOP on a proposed $10 million, five-year program to allow Stanford experts and graduate students to work with their Chilean counterparts to design and test new mechanisms to deliver state-of-the-art teacher professional development programs in literacy and mathematics. The group of Stanford experts include Coit D. Blacker, Guadalupe Valdes, Shelley Goldman, Rachel Lotan, Aki Murata, Duarte Silva, and Martin Carnoy.

Another project between Stanford and UC explores the joint development of new models for initial teacher education. In July 2006, Rachel Lotan, director of the Stanford Teacher Education Program (STEP), joined Reinhold Steinbeck, IOP co-director, to meet with members of UC’s School of Education in Santiago. UC is particularly interested in working with STEP on addressing some key issues confronting initial teacher education—pedagogic content knowledge; linkages between theoretical and practical dimensions of teacher training; and the strategic character of university-schools linkages for providing contexts for teacher training. The planned collaboration would include training sessions of teacher educators and program administrators from Universidad Católica at Stanford and in Santiago and would also utilize distance-learning technologies.

IOP is exploring a new collaboration between Stanford and UC’s new center for international studies led by Dr. Juan Emilio Cheyre, a noted reformer of the Chilean Army. Michael A. McFaul, deputy director of FSI, and Katherine M. Kuhns, director of FSI’s Initiative on Distance Learning (IDL), met with Cheyre and other university leaders in July 2006.

IOP is enthused about facilitating this potential collaboration, which would allow Stanford to make a major contribution toward capacity building in teacher education and international studies at UC and across Chile.

The Forum on Contemporary Europe (FCE) continues a multiyear study of the challenges facing European Union integration and global crisis intervention. The increasingly complex demands straining Europe and its trans-Atlantic relations—labor migration, spending on welfare economies, globalized cultures, and threats of terrorism, coupled with Europe’s struggle to ratify a single constitution—underline the need to measure prospects for unification and the EU’s ability to function as a coordinated international actor. This year, FCE is broadening its work to assess the role an integrated EU can play in addressing the world’s most troubling crises.

EU INTEGRATION: THE CASE OF TURKEY

The forum has explored the question of Turkey’s EU membership with Stanford scholars, European leaders, and the public. In spring 2006, former German foreign minister Joschka Fischer and author Christopher Hitchens offered candid analyses of EU expansion. Hitchens challenged commonplace descriptions of “Christian Old Europe” antagonized by “Islamicized” secular Turkey. Europe and Islam are not newly in contention, he said, but are playing out a centuries-old relationship grounded in the European and Ottoman empires in the Eastern Mediterranean. For Hitchens, the portrait of clashing civilizations obscures the crises facing minority Kurdish and neighboring societies whose survival is at stake in EU expansion.

Delivering the Payne lecture, Fischer noted the dilemma of seeking to achieve popular ratification of a European constitution at a time when public attention is galvanized by the Turkish candidacy. Fischer rejected common comparisons between European state rulings on Islamic traditions and models of U.S. multiculturalism. Fischer found admirable aspects of the U.S. inspiration but questioned its relevance for mediating myriad EU interests. For Fischer, the EU as a supra-state actor holds the promise to democratize conflict resolution in the deliberative model of the European Parliament and legitimate its role as a peacekeeping actor.

EU INTERVENTION: CRISIS MANAGMENT AND COMBATING INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM

The forum’s new focus on EU crisis intervention began with addresses by Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of Britain’s Security Services (MI-6), and Alain Bauer, former vice president of the University of Paris–Sorbonne and director of France’s National Institute for Higher Studies in Security, who discussed EU counterintelligence and international early-warning protocols. Greek Ambassador Alexandros Mallias spoke on the Eastern Mediterranean context that frames the Turkish candidacy, the economics of EU integration, and prospects for responding to the tensions in Cyprus. Austrian Ambassador Eva Novotny spoke on Austria’s immediate past EU presidency, evaluating the impact of the EU Council’s intervention in the Israel-Lebanon crisis. Professor Josef Joffe spoke on his new book, Uberpower: The Imperial Temptation of America, and the prospects for U.S.–EU interaction in global affairs.

The forum’s fall series brought public acclaim when Daniel Cohn-Bendit, co-president of the European Parliament Greens/New Alliance Parties, delivered FCE’s 2006–2007 “Europe Now” address, cosponsored by Stanford’s Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies and the Woods Institute for the Environment. Speaking to an overflow crowd, and meeting separately with faculty and researchers, Cohn-Bendit focused his public remarks on European Integration: Society, Politics, and Islam. A European Parliament leader, Cohn-Bendit spoke on his party’s proposal to deploy Joschka Fischer as the EU representative to Middle East peace negotiations. Expanding and integrating the EU, Cohn-Bendit argued, is the most reasonable strategy for strengthening Europe’s role in international relations and crisis intervention.

The Forum on Contemporary Europe continues to deepen scholarly and public understanding of the EU promise to achieve democratic governance, economic growth, security, and social integration among its member states and in its foreign engagements.

Excerpted from Foreign Affairs, September/October 2006

Preventing the unthinkable ongoing crisis with Tehran is not the first time Washington has faced a hostile government attempting to develop nuclear weapons. Nor is it likely to be the last. Yet the reasoning of U.S. officials now struggling to deal with Iran’s nuclear ambitions is clouded by a kind of historical amnesia, which leads to both creeping fatalism about the United States’ ability to keep Iran from getting the bomb and excessive optimism about the United States’ ability to contain Iran if it does become a nuclear power.

A U.S. official in the executive branch anonymously told the New York Times in March 2006, “The reality is that most of us think the Iranians are probably going to get a weapon, or the technology to make one, sooner or later.” Military planners and intelligence officers have reportedly been tasked with developing strategies to deter Tehran if negotiations fail.

Both proliferation fatalism and deterrence optimism are wrong-headed, and they reinforce each other in a disturbing way. As nuclear proliferation comes to be seen as inevitable, wishful thinking can make its consequences seem less severe, and if faith in deterrence grows, incentives to combat proliferation diminish.

Deterrence optimism is based on mistaken nostalgia and a faulty analogy. Although deterrence did work with the Soviet Union and China, there were many close calls; maintaining nuclear peace during the Cold War was far more difficult and uncertain than U.S. officials and the American public seem to remember today. Furthermore, a nuclear Iran would look a lot less like the totalitarian Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China and a lot more like Pakistan, Iran’s unstable neighbor—a far more frightening prospect.

Fatalism about nuclear proliferation is equally unwarranted. Although the United States did fail to prevent its major Cold War rivals from developing nuclear arsenals, many other countries—including Japan, West Germany, South Korea, and more recently Libya—curbed their own nuclear ambitions.

THE REASONS WHY

The way for Washington to move forward on Iran is to give Tehran good reason to relinquish its pursuit of nuclear weapons. That, in turn, requires understanding why Tehran wants them in the first place.

Iran’s nuclear energy program began in the 1960s under the shah, but even he wanted to create a breakout option to get the bomb quickly if necessary. One of his senior energy advisers recalled, “The shah told me that he does not want the bomb yet, but if anyone in the neighborhood has it, we must be ready to have it.” At first, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini objected to nuclear weapons on religious grounds, but the mullahs abandoned such restraint after Saddam Hussein ordered chemical attacks on Iranian forces during the Iran-Iraq War.

The end of Saddam’s rule in 2003 significantly reduced the security threat to Tehran. But by then the United States had taken Iraq’s place. In his January 2002 State of the Union address, President Bush had denounced the governments of Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as members of an “axis of evil” with ties to international terrorism. After the fall of Baghdad, an unidentified senior U.S. official told a Los Angeles Times reporter that Tehran should “take a number,” hinting that it was next in line for regime change.

Increasingly, Bush administration spokespeople advocated “preemption” to counter proliferation. When asked, in April 2006, whether the Pentagon was considering a potential preventive nuclear strike against Iranian nuclear facilities, President Bush pointedly replied, “All options are on the table.”

AGREED FRAMEWORK IN FARSI

A source of inspiration for handling Iran is the 1994 Agreed Framework that the United States struck with North Korea. The Bush administration has severely criticized the deal, but it contained several elements that could prove useful in the Iranian nuclear crisis.

After the North Koreans were caught violating their NPT commitments in early 1993, they threatened to withdraw from the treaty. Declaring that “North Korea cannot be allowed to develop a nuclear bomb,” President Clinton threatened an air strike on the Yongbyon reactor site if the North Koreans took further steps to reprocess plutonium. In June 1994, as the Pentagon was reinforcing military units on the Korean Peninsula, Pyongyang froze its plutonium production, agreed to let IAEA inspectors monitor the reactor site, and entered into bilateral negotiations.

The talks produced the October 1994 Agreed Framework, under which North Korea agreed to eventually dismantle its reactors, remain in the NPT, and implement full IAEA safeguards. In exchange, the United States promised to provide it with limited oil supplies, construct two peaceful light-water reactors for energy production, “move toward full normalization of political and economic relations,” and extend “formal assurances to [North Korea] against the threat or use of nuclear weapons by the U.S.”

“The way for Washington to move forward on Iran is to give Tehran good reason to relinquish its pursuit of nuclear weapons.”By 2002, the Agreed Framework had broken down, not only because Pyongyang was suspected of cheating but also because it believed that the United States, by delaying construction of the light-water reactors and failing to start normalizing relations, had not honored its side of the bargain. When confronted with evidence of its secret uranium program, in November 2002, Pyongyang took advantage of the fact that the U.S. military was tied down in preparations for the invasion of Iraq and withdrew from the NPT, kicked out the inspectors, and started reprocessing plutonium.

President Bush famously promised, in his 2002 State of the Union address, that the United States “will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons.” Yet when North Korea kicked out the IAEA inspectors, Secretary of State Colin Powell proclaimed that the situation was “not a crisis.” Bush repeatedly declared that the United States had “no intention of invading North Korea.” The point was not lost on Tehran.

If Washington is to offer security assurances to Tehran, it should do so soon (making the assurances contingent on Tehran’s not developing nuclear weapons), rather than offering them too late, as it did with North Korea (and thus making them contingent on Tehran’s getting rid of any existing nuclear weapons). As with North Korea, any deal with Iran must be structured in a series of steps, each offering a package of economic benefits (light-water reactors, aircraft parts, or status at the World Trade Organization) in exchange for constraints placed on Iran’s future nuclear development.

Most important, however, would be a reduction in the security threat that the United States poses to Iran. Given the need for Washington to have a credible deterrent against, say, terrorist attacks sponsored by Iran, a blanket security guarantee would be ill advised. But more limited guarantees, such as a commitment not to use nuclear weapons, could be effective. They would reassure Tehran and pave the way toward the eventual normalization of U.S.–Iranian relations while signaling to other states that nuclear weapons are not the be all and end all of security.

Peaceful coexistence does not require friendly relations, but it does mean exercising mutual restraint. Relinquishing the threat of regime change by force is a necessary and acceptable price for the United States to pay to stop Tehran from getting the bomb.

In a 1999 article profiling six of “China’s bright young stars,” the New York Times described Junning Liu as “one of China’s most influential liberal political thinkers.” Today, sitting in a delegate-style conference room, Liu wants to add a point to Thomas C. Heller’s discussion of risk assessment and the role of law in doing business. If assets are not protected by legal institutions, Heller argues, foreign direct investment becomes a riskier prospect and economic growth suffers as a result. Except, he points out, in China. The legal system doesn’t manage risk but China is growing extremely fast.

“There are more businesspeople in Chinese prisons than dissidents,” Liu says evenly, with a suggestion of a smile. “So you see … Chinese people mind the situation more than you [the foreign investors] do.”

Liu is one of 26 change-makers from developing democracies who were selected from more than 800 applicants to take part in this year’s Stanford Summer Fellows on Democracy and Development Program, which is offered by FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). His colleagues in the program are presidential advisors and attorneys general, journalists and civic activists, academics and members of the international development community. They traveled to Stanford from 21 countries in transition, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, China, Russia, Egypt, and Nigeria. And like their academic curriculum during the three-week program, which examines linkages among democracy, economic development, and the rule of law, their professional experiences and fields of study center on these three areas, assuring that each fellow brings a seasoned perspective to the program’s discussions.

“For most of the fellows … democracy is seen not as a luxury or an option, but rather as a necessity for achieving broad-based development and a genuine rule of law.”The curriculum for the first week focused on democracy, with leading comparative democracy scholars Michael A. McFaul, Larry Diamond, and Kathryn Stoner team-teaching the morning seminars. Using selected articles and book chapters as starting points for discussion, McFaul, Diamond, and Stoner-Weiss began the weeklong democracy module with an examination of what democracy is and what definition or definitions might apply to distinguish electoral democracy, liberal democracy, and competitive authoritarianism. Another question discussed was whether there was such a thing as Islamic democracy, Asian democracy, Russian democracy, or American democracy.

As the week progressed, fellows and faculty discussed institutions of democracy, electoral systems, horizontal accountability, development of civil society, democratic transitions, and global trends in democracy promotion. Fellows led sessions themselves in the afternoons, comparing experiences and sharing insights into how well political parties and parliaments constrained executive power and how civil society organizations contributed to democratic consolidation and/or democratic transitions.

In addition to discussing their personal experiences with democracy promotion, fellows met with a broad range of practitioners, including USAID deputy director Maria Rendon, IREX president Mark Pomar, MoveOn.org founder Joan Blades, Freedom House chairman and International Center on Nonviolent Conflict founding chair Peter Ackerman, International Center on Nonviolent Conflict president Jack DuVall, Otpor cofounder Ivan Marovic, A Force More Powerful documentary filmmaker Steve York, and Advocacy Institute cofounder David Cohen. Guest speakers talked about their fieldwork, offered practical advice, and answered fellows’ questions. This component grounded the classroom discussions in a practical context. “It was important for our visiting fellows to interact with American practitioners, both to learn about innovative techniques for improving democracy practices but also to hear about frustrations and failures that Americans also face in working to make democracy and democracy promotion work more effectively,” explains McFaul. “We Americans do not have all the answers and have much to learn from interaction with those in the trenches working to improve governance in their countries.”

The following two weeks would focus in turn on development and the rule of law, but democracy continued to serve as the intellectual lynchpin of the program, with economies and legal institutions analyzed vis-à-vis their relationship to the development of democratic systems.

“For most of the fellows, who come from national circumstances which once suffered (or still do suffer) prolonged authoritarian rule, democracy is seen not as a luxury or an option, but rather as a necessity for achieving broad-based development and a genuine rule of law,” says Diamond. “Unless people have the ability to turn bad rulers out of office, and to hold rulers accountable in between elections through a free press and civil society, countries stand a poor prospect of controlling corruption, protecting human rights, correcting policy mistakes, and ensuring that government is responsive to the needs and aspirations of the people.”

Among the fellows, this idea of democracy as a “necessity,” a fundamental platform from which to pursue economic and legal reforms, was widely recognized. “It appears that like-minded people were selected to participate,” notes Sani Aliyu, a broadcast journalist and interfaith mediator from Nigeria. “Each of us is interested in the development of humanity, and it appears that we have accepted that democracy seems to be the vehicle through which human development can be accessed reasonably. We share this."

As the program’s curriculum shifted to development issues for week two, the all-volunteer assemblage of Stanford faculty expanded to include professors and professional research staff from Stanford Law School, the Graduate School of Business, and the Department of Economics. Avner Greif established the context for the development module with an overview of institutional foundations of politics and markets, followed by discussions of growth restructuring in transitional economies with GSB professor Peter B. Henry and Stanford Center for International Development deputy director Nicholas Hope. Terry L. Karl analyzed corruption in developing economies and the “resource curse,” and Carl Gershman, president of the National Endowment for Democracy, joined Diamond, McFaul, and Karl in discussing how the spectrum of democratic to autocratic systems of government affected a country’s development.

Another salient component of the development module centered on the role of media in promoting democracy and development. The field trip to San Francisco, which included a session with KQED Forum host Michael Krasny, a briefing on international reporting at the San Francisco Chronicle, and a discussion of media strategies at the Family Violence Prevention Fund, provided particularly rich practical content, as did the fellows’ roundtable on maintaining media independence in semi-autocracies.

At KQED Radio, Cuban-born Raul Ramirez, the executive producer of Forum, talked with fellows about the concept of “civic journalism” and KQED’s goal of creating space for civic discussion. Forum host Michael Krasny and Ramirez, who runs workshops on civic journalism at the European Journalism Centre in Maastricht, then fielded a barrage of questions from fellows: How does KQED maintain independence from government and commercial funding? If Rush Limbaugh attacked you, would you respond in your program? Is it possible to have neutral, nonpartisan public radio? How do you manage to deal with political issues, particularly when you start to affect the power structures with your programming? Are there any words, like “terrorist,” that you are banned from using on the air?

“Discussion of this kind is of great importance to both media professionals and the audience,” notes Anna Sevortian, a journalist and research coordinator at the Center for Development of Democracy and Human Rights in Moscow. “It helps you to clarify how a particular newspaper, TV, or radio station is dealing with matters of public policy or of political controversy.”

The third week’s curriculum layered rule-of-law issues onto the conceptual modules of democracy promotion and economic development, drawing on the teaching caliber of constitutional scholar and Stanford president emeritus Gerhard Casper, Erik Jensen, Helen Stacy, Allen S. Weiner, Tom Heller, and Richard Burt. After establishing a theoretical framework through discussions of the role of law, constitutionalism, human rights, transitional justice, the role of law in business and economic development, and strategies for promoting the rule of law, fellows compared experiences defending human rights, met with American immigration and civil liberties lawyers, and had a session with Circuit Court Judge Pamela Rymer on judging in federal courts. Field trips to Silicon Valley-based Google and eBay again put into practical context the free market, rule-of-law components discussed theoretically in the classroom.

Despite the intellectual rigor of the coursework and discussion, and the exploration of practical applicability with guest speakers and field trips, the Stanford Summer Fellows on Democracy and Development Program was designed as much to stimulate connections among field practitioners and to provide a forum in which to exchange ideas. Weekend dinners, stretching late into the evening at the homes of Diamond and Stoner-Weiss, helped to gel the collegiality developing in the classroom. Led by Violet Gonda, a Zimbabwean journalist living in exile in London, and Talan Aouny, director of a major Iraqi civil society development program, the fellows organized a multicultural party, a potluck-style affair in which guests made a dish from their home country to share with their colleagues and friends of the program.

Program directors McFaul and Stoner-Weiss hope this social network will endure well into the weeks and months after the program. “We envision the creation of an international network of emerging political and civic leaders in countries in transition who can share experiences and solutions to the very similar problems they and their countries face,” says Stoner-Weiss. To ensure they fulfill their goal of building a small but robust global network of civic activist and policymakers in developing countries, CDDRL recently launched its Summer Fellows Program Alumni Newsletter. The newsletter is based on an interactive website that will allow the center to strengthen its network of leaders and civic activists and facilitate more groundbreaking policy analysis across academic fields and geographic regions, the results of which will be promptly fed back to its activist alumni in a virtual loop of scholarship and policymaking.

Earlier this year, CDDRL also moved to professionalize the Stanford Summer Fellows on Democracy and Development Program by hiring a program manager, Laura Cosovanu, an attorney with experience in foundations and other nonprofit organizations, to oversee its advancement. The logistical acrobatics Cosovanu performed throughout the three weeks quickly became the object of good-natured teasing for some of the fellows, all of whom seemed to realize and appreciate the work required to get fellows and faculty into the same room.

As Kenza Aqertit, a National Democratic Institute for International Affairs field representative from Morocco, told program faculty at the graduation dinner, “You’ve done a great job and you should be proud of all your efforts. Plus you’ve won so many friends in so many autocracies and semi-autocracies.

Beginning this fall, I have initiated a Program on Global Justice at FSI. We are just getting started, so it strikes me as a good time to explain the fundamental ideas.

I am a philosopher by training and sensibility, and as a philosopher, I take my orientation from Immanuel Kant. Kant said that philosophy addresses three basic questions: What can we know? What should we do? And what may we hope for?

The question about hope is the most important. Philosophy is not about what will be, but about what could be: It is an exploration of possibilities guided by the hope that our world can be made more just by our common efforts.

In our world, 1 billion people are destitute. They live on less than a dollar a day. They are not imprisoned in destitution because of their crimes; they are imprisoned in destitution despite their innocence.

Another 1.5 billion people live only slightly better, on $1–2 a day. They are able to meet their basic needs, but they lack fundamental goods. They, too, are not in poverty because of their crimes. They are in poverty despite their innocence.

That is how 40 percent of our world lives now.

For some of the poor and destitute, things are improving. But the extraordinary global distance between wealthy and poor is growing. The richest 5 percent in the world make 114 times as much as the bottom 5 percent; 1 percent of the world’s people make as much as the poorest 57 percent. So the gap grows and many are left behind. That is morally unacceptable.

The problem of global injustice is not only economic. Billions of people are deprived of basic human rights.

And new forms of global governance, through organizations like the World Trade Organization (WTO), are making decisions with large consequences for human welfare. Whether their decisions are good or bad, they remain largely unaccountable. That, too, is unacceptable.

Some people say that we should not worry so much because there is no such thing as global justice. Some of these skeptics say that justice is an issue only inside a state. Until there is a global state, they say, there is no global justice.

Other skeptics are communitarians. They say that justice only makes sense among people who share a culture. They say that our diverse global society lacks the common culture needed to sustain a commitment to justice.

These statist and communitarian views are misguided in a world of globalization.

Economically, globalization has made the global economy a substantial presence in the economic lives of virtually everyone in the world.

Politically, there are new forms of governance that operate outside the state. These new forms are especially important in the arena of economic regulation, but also have a role in areas of security, labor and product standards, the environment, and human rights. So we have new forms of global politics, with important consequences for human well-being.

Moreover, these new settings of global governance are the focus of an emerging global civil society of movements and nongovernmental organizations. In areas ranging from human rights, to labor standards, to environmental protection these groups contest the activities of states and global rule-making bodies.

The skeptical views may have made sense in a world with more national economic independence, less governance beyond the state, and more self-contained national communities. But that is not our world.

What, then, does the project of global justice mean? In general, it has three elements.

First, we need to ensure the protection of human rights, and we need a generous understanding of the scope of human rights. Human rights are about torture and arbitrary imprisonment, but also about health, education, and political participation. The point of human rights is not simply to protect against threats, but to ensure social membership, to ensure that all people count for something.

Second, new global rule-making bodies operating beyond the state raise questions of justice. These bodies, like the WTO, make rules with important consequences for human welfare. Global justice is about ensuring that governance by such bodies is accountable, that people who are affected are represented, that rulemaking is transparent. When an organization makes policies with large consequences for human welfare, it needs to be held accountable through a fair process.

Third, global justice is about ensuring that everyone has access to the basic goods—food, health care, education, clean water, shelter—required for a decent human life and that when the global economy is moving forward, no one is left behind.

These three elements of global justice all start from the idea that each person matters. In short, global justice is about inclusion: about making sure that no one is left out.

Some people will say that global justice is a nice idea, but that it has no real practical importance. They say that globalization leaves no room for political choices, that it requires every country to follow the same path. We must reject this false assertion of necessity.

Some people say that the right choice for global justice is to increase levels of foreign assistance; some people say that the right choice is to provide credit for poor farmers; some people say that right choice is to empower poor women; some people say that right choice is to reduce disgusting levels of overconsumption and agricultural subsidies in rich countries; some people say that the right choice is to promote a more vibrant civil society so that people can become agents in creating their history rather than its victims and supplicants.

Many things are possible. And once we accept that global justice is a fundamental imperative, and that political choices are possible, then we come back to the political tasks in more developed countries. Many citizens in the advanced economies now experience globalization as a threat. Many fear that a better life for billions who are now destitute may mean a worse life for them.

So global justice is not simply an abstract moral imperative. Global justice is connected to greater justice at home. If we leave everything to the market at home, if we don’t fight for social insurance, education and health, employment and income, then we can be sure of an economic nationalist resurgence with all of its terrible consequences. So the political project of global justice requires a political project of a more just society at home.

This unity of justice—this unity of the national and the global: That is our answer to Kant’s question. That is what we may hope for. That is what we should strive to achieve.

On November 16, 2006, FSI convened its annual international conference, A World at Risk, devoted to systemic and human risk confronting the global community. Remarks by Stanford Provost John Etchemendy, FSI Director Coit D. Blacker, former Secretary of State Warren Christopher, former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry, and former Secretary of State George Shultz set the stage for stimulating discussions. Interactive panel sessions encouraged in-depth exploration of major issues with Stanford faculty, outside experts, and policymakers.

“When I was a child, the world was a simpler place,” stated Stanford Provost John Etchemendy. “What has changed is not the risk, but the number and complexity of problems that face the world today.” The complex challenges of the 21st century require that universities change, as well. The International Initiative, led by FSI, was launched “to identify key challenges of global importance and to contribute to their solutions by leveraging the university’s academic strength and international reach.”

Invoking Jane and Leland Stanford’s desire to educate students to become useful, contributing citizens, Etchemendy said, “We can best serve that mission today by producing graduates well-versed in the complex problems of a world at risk and willing to make the difficult choices that might lead to their solution.”

“It has been acutely apparent to us at FSI that we must actively engage a world at risk,” stated FSI director Coit D. “Chip” Blacker, “risk posed by the growing number of nuclear issues on the international agenda; the insurgency in Iraq; global poverty, hunger, and environmental degradation; the tensions of nationalism versus regionalism in Asia; infectious diseases; terrorism; and the geopolitical, financial, and ecological risks of the West’s current energy policies, especially its voracious appetite for oil.”

Introducing three Stanford luminaries, Blacker said, “One of the remarkable things about Stanford is the privilege of working with some of the outstanding intellects and statesmen of our time. Warren Christopher, William Perry, and George Shultz tower among them.”

“As Stanford University’s primary forum for the consideration of the major international issues of our time, we at FSI are dedicated to interdisciplinary research and teaching on some of the most pressing and complex problems facing the global community today.” – Coit D. “Chip” Blacker, Director, Freeman Spogli Institute“The Middle East has descended into hate, violence, and chaos,” said Warren Christopher, the nation’s 63rd secretary of state. “It really is a dangerous mess.” Discussing the Israeli incursion into Lebanon, the war in Iraq, and Iran’s regional and nuclear ambitions, he said the U.S. has aggravated these threats by “action and inaction.” Nonetheless, the U.S. remains the most influential foreign power in the region. “We must not give up on the Middle East,” he said. “We have to return to old-fashioned diplomacy with all its frustrations and delays.”

“We live in dangerous times,” stated William J. Perry, the nation’s 19th secretary of defense and an FSI senior fellow. “Last month about 1,000 of our service personnel in Iraq were killed, maimed, or wounded; the Taliban is resurging in Afghanistan; North Korea just tested a nuclear bomb; and Iran is not far behind. China’s power is rising and Russia’s democracy is falling.” As Elie Wiesel wrote, he said, “Peace is not God’s gift to its children. Peace is our gift to each other.” Comparing major security issues of 1994 to today, Perry assessed the nuclear arms race, North Korea, Iran, and Iraq. He noted that the Clinton administration had eliminated more than 10,000 nuclear weapons and urged that the work continue, because “the danger of terrorists getting a nuclear bomb is very real.”

Citing North Korea’s 2006 missile and nuclear tests, Perry said he was concerned that a robust North Korean nuclear program will stimulate a “dangerous arms race in the Pacific” and increase “the danger of a terrorist group getting a nuclear bomb.” “Iran is moving inexorably toward becoming a nuclear power,” Perry said. “We are facing new dangers,” he concluded, “and we must adjust our thinking accordingly.”

“The world has never been at a more promising moment than it is today,” said George Shultz, the nation’s 60th secretary of state. “All across the world, economic expansion is taking place. The U.S. is giving fantastic leadership to the global economy.” For Shultz, the imperative is to prevent the security challenges “from aborting all these fantastic opportunities.”

“The Middle East has descended into hate, violence, and chaos. The U.S. remains the most influential foreign power in the region. We have to return to old-fashioned diplomacy with all its frustrations and delays.” – Former Secretary of State Warren ChristopherU.S. leadership should inspire the world, Shultz said, advocating four initiatives. We should aspire to have a world with no nuclear weapons. We should take a different approach to global warning, based on the Montreal Protocols. “This is a gigantic problem we need to do something about and can do something about,” he said. We should build greater understanding of the world of Islam. We must combat rising protectionism. The postwar system reduced tariffs and quotas, promoting trade and growth. “The best defense is a good offense,” Shultz stated. “We need a lot of leadership in that arena.”

Plenary I, chaired by Chip Blacker, examined systemic risk. Elisabeth Paté-Cornell, Burton and Deedee McMurtry Professor and Chair of Management Science and Engineering, discussed how scientists measure risk, asking what can happen, what are the chances it will, and what are the consequences? “The good news is that the worst is not always the most certain,” she noted. Citing challenges of intelligence analysis, she said, “Certainty is rare; signals are imperfect; there is a tendency to focus on one possibility (groupthink) and underestimate others; and it is difficult to assess and communicate uncertainties.” “Success is not guessing in the face of uncertainties,” she said. “It is describing accurately what is known, what is unknown, and what has changed.”

Scott D. Sagan, professor of political science and director of CISAC, examined “Iran and the Collapse of the Global Non-proliferation Regime?” The crux of the issue, Sagan noted, is the emergence of two dangerous beliefs, “deterrence optimism” and “proliferation fatalism.” In Sagan’s view, too little attention has been given to why Iran seeks a nuclear weapon. Arguing that U.N. sanctions are unlikely to work and military options are problematic, Sagan said a negotiated settlement is still possible if the U.S. offers security guarantees to Iran, contingent on Tehran’s agreement to constraints on future nuclear development. As Sagan concluded, “Instead of accepting what appears inevitable, we should work to prevent the unacceptable.”

Siegfried S. Hecker, CISAC co-director, tackled the challenge of “Keeping Fissile Materials out of Terrorist Hands.” Although nuclear terrorism is an old problem, today there is easier access to nuclear materials, greater technological sophistication, and a greater proclivity toward violence. The greatest risk, he said, “is an improvised nuclear device built from stolen or diverted fissile materials.” “Given a few tens of kilograms of fissile material, essentially a grapefruit-sized chunk of plutonium,” he stated, “terrorists will be able to build and detonate an inefficient, but devastating Hiroshima- or Nagasaki-like bomb.” The most likely threat is a so-called “dirty bomb,” he said, which would be a “weapon of mass disruption, not destruction,” but still able to cause panic, contamination, and economic disruption, making risk analysis imperative to mitigate its consequences.

“We are facing new dangers and we must adjust our thinking accordingly. As President Lincoln said, ‘The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew.’” – Former Secretary of Defense William J. PerryTurning to human risk, Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, addressed “Pandemic Influenza: Harbinger of Things to Come?” “The risk is one that a pandemic is going to happen,” he told a riveted audience. Comparing the great influenza of 1918 with the pandemics of 1957 and 1968, he noted that pandemics have differed in season of onset, mortality rates, and number of cases. Avian influenza has a 65 percent mortality rate and could affect 30–60 percent of the world’s 6.5 billion people, producing 1.6 billion deaths worldwide and 1.9 million deaths in the U.S. Inevitably, mutation will reduce its lethality.

“It is not a matter of if, just when and where” the pandemic will strike, said Osterholm. Noting that vaccines will not be available in numbers needed, he argued for measures to safeguard families, communities, and essential infrastructure, such as police, firefighters, and health-care workers. Just-in-time inventory practices, he said, have increased vulnerability to disruptions in food supply, transportation, equipment, and communications, making it vital to plan in earnest, now.

Plenary II, chaired by FSI deputy director Michael A. McFaul, assessed risks to humans from “Natural, National, and International Disasters.” Stephen E. Flynn, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a trade and transportation security expert, decried the “artificial firewalls between homeland and national security.” The Hart-Rudman Commission of 1998 warned of a catastrophic attack on U.S. soil, yet we did not rethink national security even after 9/11. We must approach security as a transnational issue, with no clear “domestic” and “international” lines, he urged. More than 65 percent of critical infrastructure is privately owned and has been given inadequate attention by federal authorities. Hurricane Katrina exposed the vulnerabilities. “We face more threats from acts of God than acts of man,” Flynn stated. We need to move from a concept of “security” to one of “resiliency,” he said, greatly improving our ability to withstand a man-made or natural disaster.

David G. Victor, FSI senior fellow and professor of law, addressed three faces of energy security: oil, natural gas, and climate change. Oil prices are volatile, future fields are in places difficult to do business, and the global supply infrastructure is vulnerable, posing the risk of a one- to six-month supply disruption. For Victor, who directs FSI’s Program on Energy and Sustainable Development, the big threat is less supply than a potential demand-side shock, driven by the U.S. and China. Europe relies on an unreliable Russia for 25–30 percent of its natural gas needs, making it imperative to switch to cheaper, more reliable LNG from North Africa and the Middle East. Oil and gas price volatility has driven further dependence on coal-fired plants, with dire consequences for carbon emissions. New coal plant lifetime emissions, Victor said, are equal to all historic coal emissions, making it critical to invest in advanced technology to protect the environment.

“The world has never been at a more promising moment than it is today. All across the world economic expansion is taking place. Poverty is being reduced dramatically as China and India expand, along with Brazil.” – Former Secretary of State George ShultzPeter Bergen, CNN terrorism analyst and producer of Osama bin Laden’s first television interview, offered the dinner keynote, “Successes and Failures of the War on Terrorism Since 9/11.” Assessing negatives, Bergen noted that al Qaeda continues to carry on attacks from its base in Pakistan; Afghanistan is beset by instability; more than 20 million Muslims in Europe remain dangerously un-integrated; bin Laden has not been apprehended and continues to inspire followers through terrorist attacks; Iraq is an unstable breeding ground for jihad; and anti-Americanism is on the rise. Enumerating positives, there has been no follow-on attack on the U.S.; the government has made the country safer; many Muslims have rejected jihad; plots have been foiled and suspects apprehended across the globe. Weighing whether fighting the terrorists abroad has made the U.S. safer here, Bergen was equivocal: The U.S. can identify and eliminate only so many people and cannot stay in Bagdad forever. A network of educated, dedicated terrorists remains, he warned, capable of bringing down commercial aircraft or deploying a radiological bomb.

On May 1, 2003, President Bush publicly declared an end to combat in Iraq. Four years later, the conflict had only intensified, fueled by a violent insurgency, sectarian strife, and a resurgent al-Qaeda in Iraq. More than 3,000 American servicemen and servicewomen had been killed and 790,000 Iraqi civilians were dead. What had gone so disastrously wrong? Charles Ferguson, an MIT-trained political scientist, determined to find out.

Drawing on shockingly frank interviews with U.S. government officials, military personnel, diplomats, journalists and Iraqi leaders and citizens, his first film, No End in Sight: The American Occupation of Iraq, examines comprehensively how the Bush administration constructed the Iraq war and subsequent occupation. The film won the Special Jury Prize, documentary competition, at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, as a “timely work that clearly illuminates the misguided policy decisions that have led to the catastrophic quagmire of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq.”

“Overnight rendered unemployed and infuriated are 500,000 armed men,” one of many ill-advised moves that ignited resentment, desperation, and a still-raging insurgency.On May 23, the Freeman Spogli Institute hosted a special screening of the film, followed by a distinguished panel of experts. Among the film’s central themes was the failure to commit sufficient troops to maintain order, secure the borders, or protect government ministries, historic sites, or ammunition depots. The destruction of national treasures, depicted vividly, was heartbreaking.

Soon after one watershed—the toppling of Saddam Hussein and the defeat of the military—there was another watershed, characterized by widespread looting, lawlessness, and a growing feeling among Iraqis that Americans could not protect them. The film chronicles three especially fateful decisions: to halt the formation of an Iraqi interim government (as Iraqi opposition leaders felt they had been promised) and impose an American occupation instead; a wide-ranging campaign of de-Baathification—the purging of higher-level Baath Party officials who ran the civil service and even staffed many schools and hospitals; and the hasty decision to disband the Iraqi military and intelligence services.

Said Col. Paul Hughes (Ret.), “We could have used Iraqi units to clean up, build roads, and rebuild their country.” Instead, the military were told they were going to be out of work, leaving millions of Iraqis suddenly without support. The film recounts, “Overnight rendered unemployed and infuriated are 500,000 armed men,” one of many ill-advised moves that ignited resentment, desperation, and a still-raging insurgency. Ambassador Barbara Bodine recalled, “When we were first starting the reconstruction, we used to joke that there were 500 ways to do it wrong and two to three ways to do it right. What we didn’t understand is that we were going to go through all 500.”

The riveting documentary was followed by a lively panel discussion among Stanford political scientists, historians, and experts on the war in Iraq. Moderating the panel was Larry Diamond, Hoover Institution senior fellow and coordinator of the Democracy Program at FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, who called the war “one of the greatest policy tragedies in American history.” Diamond served as an advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority and wrote a book about the experience, titled %publication1%.

Writer and director Charles Ferguson noted that the shooting to inclusion ratio was 100:1 and said he will release more than 100 hours of film and 3,000 pages of transcripts as a public archive for the historical record. Col. Christopher Gibson, a 2006–07 National Security Affairs fellow at the Hoover Institution, who served in both the Gulf and Iraq wars, observed in his opening remarks, “For this to work in a republic, soldiers have to be there to take the tough questions.” Drawing on his experience during two tours of duty supervising national elections, he underscored the Iraqi people’s desire for freedom and “their deep and sincere desire for democracy.”

David Kennedy, Stanford’s Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History and a 2000 Pulitzer-Prize winner, commended the film for making an important contribution to the historical record. Future historians will have to consider a number of major questions, Kennedy said, including these two: “What was the deep strategic rationale for this war and how was that rationale related to the declared reasons for going to war,” namely the now discredited claims that the regime possessed weapons of mass destruction and had verifiable links to al-Qaeda.

In a lively discussion among panelists, it was agreed that the calculus was complex and many factors converged—an Iraq believed both to be a menace and weakened by many years of sanctions under a brutal leader; a son wishing to redress the policy of the father and avenge a near assassination attempt. But the ideological factor was significant—the belief that we had the ability to effect political change in a country that would transform the character of an entire region.

The debate addressed other critical issues—could the outcome have been better had policy been better informed and more skillfully implemented? Could anything change the outcome now? Said Diamond, the only thing that could materially change the outcome now “would be to combine a military surge with a diplomatic surge,” involving the United Nations, the European Union, the United States, and a cooperative Iraqi leadership. The United States should let Iraq know we’ll leave, he stated, if Iraqi leaders fail to undertake the requisite political reconciliation and compromise. As the lively debate and discussion with more than 300 audience members ended, there was little doubt that all these questions would be debated for some time to come.

“Preparing the next generation of leaders and creating more informed elementary and secondary students means changing and improving curricula, setting higher standards, and ensuring that content is based on current research relevant to the world’s critical problems and urgent issues.” Coit “Chip” Blacker, FSI Director and Co-Chair, International Initiative

SPICE was established more than 30 years ago and serves as a bridge between FSI and elementary and secondary schools in the United States and independent schools abroad. SPICE’s original mission in 1976 was to help students understand that we live in an increasingly interdependent world that faces problems on a global scale. For 30 years, SPICE has continued to address this original mission and currently focuses its efforts primarily in three areas:

1. curriculum development for elementary and secondary schools;
2. teacher professional development; and
3. distance-learning education.

SPICE hopes to continue to educate new generations of leaders by addressing five key initiatives of The Stanford Challenge, announced by President Hennessy last fall.

Initiative on Human Health / 1

SPICE is working with the School of Medicine and the Center for Health Policy on a high school curriculum unit that focuses on HIV/AIDS. SPICE is collaborating with Drs. Seble Kassaye, David Katzenstein, and Lucy Thairu of the School of Medicine’s Division of Infectious Diseases & Geographic Medicine. Using an epidemiological framework, students will be encouraged to consider the many issues involved in the pandemic, including but not limited to poverty, gender inequality, and biomedical research and development. Two Stanford undergraduates, Jessica Zhang and Chenxing Han, are working with the physicians on this unit.

Initiative on the Environment and Sustainability / 2

SPICE recently completed a curriculum unit called 10,000 Shovels: China's Urbanization and Economic Development. 10,000 Shovels examines China’s breakneck growth through a short documentary that integrates statistics, video footage, and satellite images. The documentary, developed by Professor Karen Seto of the Center for Environmental Science and Policy, focuses on China’s Pearl River Delta region while the accompanying teacher’s guide takes a broader perspective, exploring many current environmental issues facing China. Stanford’s School of Earth Sciences is helping to promote this unit and documentary.

The International Initiative / 3

All of SPICE’s curriculum units focus on international topics. Two of SPICE’s most popular units are Inside the Kremlin: Soviet and Russian Leaders from Lenin to Putin and Democracy-Building in Afghanistan. Inside the Kremlin introduces students to key elements of Soviet and Russian history through the philosophies and legacies of six of its leaders—Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Putin. The unit includes (on DVD) six lectures by six FSI faculty members, including FSI director Coit D. Blacker; professors David Holloway and Gail W. Lapidus, CISAC; professor and deputy FSI director Michael A. McFaul; history professor Norman M. Naimark; and history professor Amir Eshel, Forum on Contemporary Europe.

Democracy-Building in Afghanistan is a teacher’s guide for a film called Hell of a Nation. The film’s lead advisor and SPICE’s key advisor was former CDDRL fellow J. Alexander Thier. Hell of a Nation documents the lives of two Afghans participating in the political process to develop a new constitution for Afghanistan—illustrating the “human face” of democracy-building and elucidating the complexities and difficulties of democratic construction in a divided and historically conflict-ridden nation.

Arts and Creativity Initiative / 4

Following 9/11, SPICE decided to develop a unit called Islamic Civilization and the Arts, which introduces students to various elements of Islamic civilization through a humanities approach. Lessons on art, the mosque, Arabic language and calligraphy, poetry, and music provide students with experience analyzing myriad primary source materials, such as images, audio clips, sayings of Muhammad, and excerpts from the Quran. In each lesson, students learn about the history, principles, and culture of Islam as they pertain to particular forms of art.

SPICE recently completed a new unit called Along the Silk Road, which explores the vast ancient network of cultural, economic, and technological exchange that connected East Asia to the Mediterranean. Students learn how goods, belief systems, art, music, and people traveled across such vast distances to create interdependence among disparate cultures. This was a collaboration with the Silk Road Project, the Art Institute of Chicago, Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center and Center for East Asian Studies, and the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center.

The K-12 Initiative / 5

SPICE develops curriculum based on FSI scholarship, conducts teacher professional development seminars locally, nationally, and internationally, and also offers a distance-learning course called the Reischauer Scholars Program to U.S. high school students. At seminars at Stanford, FSI faculty members offer lectures to the teachers and SPICE curriculum writers give curriculum demonstrations that draw upon the content presented in the lectures. Last summer, Stanford professor Al Dien (Asian Languages) and the SPICE staff gave a workshop for 80 teachers in the Chicago Public Schools. World-renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma performed at the workshop.

The Reischauer Scholars Program is a distance-learning course sponsored by SPICE. Named in honor of former ambassador to Japan Edwin O. Reischauer, a leading educator and noted scholar on Japanese history and culture, the RSP annually selects 25 exceptional high school juniors and seniors from throughout the United States to engage in an intensive study of Japan. This course provides students with a broad overview of Japanese history, literature, religion, art, politics, and economics, with a special focus on the U.S.-Japan relationship. Top scholars affiliated with the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (including Ambassador Michael H. Armacost, Professor Daniel I. Okimoto, and Professor Gi-Wook Shin), leading diplomats, and young professionals provide web-based lectures as well as engage students in online dialogue. These lectures and discussions are woven into an overall curriculum that provides students with reading materials and assignments.

SPICE has for many years focused on the initiatives that have been identified by President Hennessy to be at the core of The Stanford Challenge. By continuing to focus on these initiatives, the SPICE staff hopes to continue to make FSI scholarship accessible to a national and international audience of educators and students, with the ultimate goal of empowering a new generation of leaders with the tools needed to deal with complex problems on a global scale.

FSI faculty members discussed global risk, democracy, and security issues this spring before Stanford alumni and friends in San Francisco and New York City. Elizabeth and Joe Mandato, parents ’03, hosted a faculty panel in San Francisco and Ruth Porat ’79 and Anthony Paduano welcomed FSI faculty and friends to their home in New York.

In San Francisco, Scott D. Sagan, professor of political science and co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation; Larry Diamond, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and coordinator of the democracy program at FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law; and Rosamond L. Naylor, Julie Wrigley Senior Fellow and director of the Program on Food Security and the Environment at FSI, joined a panel moderated by FSI Director Coit D. Blacker.

Sagan spoke about North Korea and commented on the recent conclusion of the six party talks that resulted in an agreement by North Korea to suspend nuclear weapons production. He argued that the United States will be most successful in containing North Korea’s nuclear ambitions by taking regime change off the table. Diamond addressed conditions on the ground in Iraq and the limited choices now facing U.S. policymakers. He argued that they should focus on securing a viable political agreement among the Kurds, Sunnis, and Shiites in Iraq, but warned that the danger of chaos is great. Naylor emphasized the ways in which hunger and malnutrition jeopardize security and create havoc for women, children, and governments worldwide. She examined the “deadly connections” that link food security, climate risk, poverty, and civil conflict— challenges whose resolutions are critical to human survival over the long term.

In New York, faculty members from FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law addressed Democracy, Security, and the National Interest: Dealing with Iraq, Iran and Russia. Michael A. McFaul, deputy director of FSI and director of CDDRL, and Kathryn Stoner, associate director for research at CDDRL, joined Diamond for the discussion. Blacker moderated, and Stephen D. Krasner, professor of political science and former director of CDDRL who just stepped down as director of policy planning at the U.S. State Department, commented.

As in San Francisco, Diamond offered his view of the Bush administration’s policy in Iraq. He stressed the need for a coherent strategy for extracting U.S. troops from Iraq and urged that the United States make conclusion of a power-sharing agreement among Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish factions a top priority. McFaul discussed two options for America in shaping policy with Iran: pursue regime change or make a deal to disarm the regime. He argued that while both goals are worthwhile, the only way to change the regime and stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons is to actively engage it. Stoner-Weiss discussed trends in Russia away from democracy under President Putin. She argued that while Putin has posed as a democracy reformer, he has systematically undermined democracy and consolidated political and economic power. Krasner reviewed some of the conceptualizations and longer-term policy initiatives that characterize policy planning and reflected on the high degree of uncertainty policymakers face in the current international environment.

An FSI presentation to alumni and friends in London in June, on the topic of The Future of the Trans-Atlantic Relationship, completed the institute’s outreach events for this academic year, as FSI actively supports a key goal of The Stanford Challenge: to bring Stanford to the world.