One of the more remarkable underreported stories of 2008 was a speech in which the State department’s legal adviser John Bellinger admitted that there “are also realities about the International Criminal Court that the United States must accept.” He also stated that the Bush administration would work with the Court to maximize its chances of success in Darfur. Bellinger did not say that the United States might actually join the Court, but acknowledged that it enjoyed widespread international support and legitimacy, and that the United States could fruitfully cooperate with it on areas of mutual benefit.

Neither mea culpa nor volte-face, the speech nonetheless indicates the distance the administration has traveled in seven years. While Bellinger’s oratory went largely unnoticed by foreign policy wonks and the attentive public alike, it did not escape the scrutiny of John Bolton, who dismissed it as Clinton-era “pabulum” and reflective of “the yearning the Rice State Department has for acceptance” by academics and foreign intellectuals. He added ominously, “the fight resumes after Jan. 20.”

Bolton has been a powerful influence on Republican foreign policy for the last twenty years. Before his appointment as ambassador to the United Nations in 2005—which was achieved without Senate confirmation—Bolton dominated arms-control policy in the first Bush term. He killed the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, negotiations with North Korea, and the Biological Weapons Convention verification protocol. During the Clinton years, he campaigned tirelessly from his Heritage Foundation perch for missile defense and against global governance, which he seems to equate with global government. In 1998, when then-Secretary-General of the United Nations Kofi Annan released a report critical of both the United Nations secretariat and member states for the failure to prevent genocide in Srebrenica, Bolton chastized Annan for having the temerity to criticize governments for what they did or did not do in the former Yugoslavia. He added menacingly: “I think if he continues down this road, ultimately it means war, at least with the Republican Party.”

Bolton came of age politically during Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign. The future policy heavyweight was a high schooler in Baltimore at the time. He honed his conservatism at Yale College and Yale Law School, ducked Vietnam through a National Guard posting (“looking back, I am not terribly proud of this calculation”), and got his first taste of Washington as an intern to Spiro Agnew. During the Bush Sr. presidency, Bolton was Assistant Secretary for International Organization Affairs in James Baker’s State Department, and was one of the first people who Baker called when he needed a posse of chad-disputing lawyers in Florida in November 2000. Bolton’s name keeps showing up in various articles about the fight inside the Republican Party for the soul of John McCain’s foreign policy.

All of this makes it imperative to read his memoirs, which clarify the stakes in the forthcoming election. Although it is hard to imagine Bolton in a McCain administration—his memoirs offend so many within his party, across the aisle, and overseas, that Bolton could not win Senate confirmation for capitol dog-catcher—Bolton will be plotting, pressing, and pushing to force McCain’s foreign policy back to the unilateralism of George Bush’s first term, when the war on terror meant never having to say you’re sorry. And there are important national security posts that do not require Senate approval.

The memoir reads like an international relations primer done in the style of a modern morality tale—imagine Kenneth Waltz's classic Man, the State, and War as written by Ayn Rand.

To Bolton, the United Nations is a “target rich environment,” and I had a front row seat to watch his gunslinging. In 2005 I served as Special Adviser to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. I was responsible for developing member-state support for his efforts to overhaul the United Nations. In that capacity, I was in Brussels in March 2005 when President Bush nominated Bolton as Ambassador to the United Nations. One high-ranking EU official recoiled in horror, and, to share his agita, repeated two of Bolton’s more famous lines: that “UN headquarters could lose ten floors and no one would know the difference,” and that “there was no United Nations.” How in the world, the official asked, could such a man be Ambassador to the United Nations?

Amidst nodding heads and shared pained looks, I offered that if I could pick the ten floors, I would agree with Bolton. Moreover, I said, any sentient being who spends time in Turtle Bay—the Manhattan site of the United Nations—will at some point in frustration say to themselves that there is no United Nations. Bolton’s sin was to say it publicly. Finally, I suggested that John Bolton was irrelevant: “If the President of the United States and the Secretary of State want a strong, effective United Nations, then Bolton will have to deliver. If they don’t, you could have John Kerry as the U.S. ambassador, and nothing will happen.”

Oh well; win some, lose some. Which is what Condoleeza Rice is rumored to have told a friend who asked how John Bolton could have possibly been nominated for the position under her watch.

Or more accurately, I was half right, half wrong. Reading this book, one can almost feel sorry for how unsuited Bolton was for his new job. For four years he had been the point man for breaking American commitments abroad, insulting allies and enemies alike, ditching the ABM Treaty, and unsigning the Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court (“my happiest moment at State”). In the heady days of the first Bush administration, when it believed the United States was so powerful it could get anything that it wanted without friends, partners, or institutions, Bolton was the “say no” guy, a job he performed with great brio. How could he know that in 2005 his big boss, the President, and his nominal boss, the Secretary of State, would actually decide that international cooperation was necessary, and that maybe we should start worrying about America’s free fall in world opinion? A pit bull in the first term, Bolton would be a yap dog in the second, grating on the Secretary of State, the President, and most American allies.

Almost sorry, for whatever else you say about John Bolton, he is not of the “we can disagree without being disagreeable” school of American politics. This is one of the nastiest, pettiest memoirs in the annals of American diplomatic history. Among the many targets of insults and catty remarks are former and present U.K. ambassadors to the United Nations Emyr Jones Parry, Adam Thomson (“I could never look at or listen to Thomson without immediately thinking of Harry [Potter] and all his little friends”), and John Sawers; recent U.K. foreign ministers; just about every UN civil servant mentioned; indeed, just about every U.S. civil servant mentioned, along with countless journalists and politicians.

The memoir reads like an international relations primer done in the style of a modern morality tale—imagine Kenneth Waltz’s classic Man, the State, and War as written by Ayn Rand. Bolton, usually singlehandedly, takes on what he calls the High Minded, the Normers (those who create international norms of behavior or try to “[whip] the United States into line with leftist views of the way the world should look”), the EAPeasers (career State Department officials who advocate negotiations with North Korea), the Risen Bureaucracy, the Crusaders of Compromise, the Arms Control True Believers, and the EUroids.

The book has the formulaic allegories typical of the genre—the young, innocent female (Kristen Silverberg, Assistant Secretary for International Organization Affairs) driven to tears after being berated by the cold-hearted career bureaucrat (Nicholas Burns); the noble knight (Bolton himself) fighting against the political higher ups who care only about “positioning themselves” (Rice) or their legacy (Colin Powell). And of course Bolton’s plaintive cries that the 2005-06 changes in administration policy occurred against the will of the President. One sees the peasants now: ‘If only the King knew what was happening, this would never go on.’

Now add a heaping dose of xenophobia. Foreigners, appeasing foreigners, foreigners claiming to know us better than we know ourselves: all loom large in Bolton’s memoirs. He insults the former Swedish foreign minister and President of the General Assembly Jan Eliasson as not only having “an ethereal Hammarskjöldian vision problem, but also a Gunnar Myrdal problem, yet another foreigner who ‘understood’ us better than we did ourselves.” (This is the Myrdal who shared the 1974 Nobel Prize in Economics with Friedrich Hayek, and whose classic book on race, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, was cited in Brown v. Board of Education.) At one point in his belittlement of a Bush political appointee, a special assistant to Condoleeza Rice, no less, Bolton adds that she was “a naturalized citizen originally from Pakistan,” in case we wondered why she could not possibly understand America’s real foreign policy interests. In Bolton’s worldview Zbigniew Brzezinski is probably a naturalized American citizen originally from Poland; Henry Kissinger, a naturalized American citizen originally from Germany.

In the Bolton universe, you want Iran and North Korea to be referred to the Security Council, so that when it fails to unite behind a resolute strategy, the United States is then free to take the tough action it needs to take. And in the case of North Korea, Bolton is clear about what that would be: “unilateralist, interventionist, and preemptive.” Is it any wonder that when it came to Iran and North Korea, our allies and adversaries were loathe to refer them anywhere near Bolton?

Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 article “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” was prompted by the supporters of the Goldwater campaign. Bolton strides right off the pages of Hofstadter’s essay:

He is always manning the barricades of civilization . . . he does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated—if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.

According to Bolton, we do not need diplomats who negotiate, seek common ground, and strive for cooperative solutions. We need litigators who will go to the wall defending American interests, who will understand that when others say no, they mean no, and that therefore compromise is illusion. But in a world where the United States needs international cooperation for its own peace and prosperity, what comes next? Bolton’s answers are laughable—we stick with our “closest friends in the United Nations”—Israel, Palau and the Marshall Islands. Or we forge a new alliance with Japan, South Korea, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand to overcome the parasitic and paralytic EU. The road to global primacy runs through . . . Wellington?

There are, of course, some glaring contradictions in the memoirs. Bolton is known as a sovereignty hawk and he spells out the content of that doctrine as “greater independence and fewer unnecessary restraints.” The job of civil servants, politically appointed or career, is “to implement the president’s policies.” So it comes as a double shock when we find Bolton handing a draft Security Council resolution to the Israeli ambassador, in case the ambassador wants to ask his Prime Minister to appeal directly to Bush or Rice to change President Bush’s policy on Lebanon.

Another example concerns Bolton’s recurring beratement of UN officials for forgetting that they work for the member states. He then describes how one Under-Secretary-General, American appointee Christopher Burnham, surreptitiously showed him budget documents that put the United States at an advantage in budget negotiations. It is hard to see how you can have it both ways. Either UN officials serve all member states equally or the organization is up for grabs to the most powerful state.

But it is the big betrayal that is at the heart of the book. Facing a quagmire in Iraq, a faltering coalition in Afghanistan, a nuclear armed North Korea, the possibility of a nuclear Iran, and a war against terror that was creating more, not fewer, terrorists, Condoleeza Rice convinced President Bush that maybe they should stop digging a bigger hole for American foreign policy. And that meant actually trying diplomacy in North Korea, Iran, and the Middle East.

The losers were John Bolton and his acolytes; the winners were the professionals like Nicholas Burns and Christopher Hill. Faced with defeat and repudiation of the failed policies he advocated, Bolton’s response is familiar and tiresome: the professionals had secretly hijacked the president’s policy; the Secretary of State cares more about appeasing foreigners than protecting American interests.

The moment of reckoning for Bolton and for the President that nominated him is not described in the book, but it took place two months after Bolton left the administration. When the United States and North Korea reached a deal in February 2007 that holds the promise of denuclearizing the country, Bolton tried to scuttle it. Asked by reporters whether he was loyal to the President, Bolton answered, “I’m loyal to the original policy.”

What did Bolton achieve at the United Nations? Very little, which was fine by him and fine by the cast of nonaligned Ambassadors who oppose a more effective international organization. I asked one of them in December 2006 if he was happy that Bolton was leaving. He said, “No, we’ve learned how to deal with Mr. Bolton.” When I sought clarification, he said, “Look, Bolton comes in and asks for the sun, the moon, and the stars, and we say ‘no.’ He then says, ‘I told you so’ and leaves. Everybody is happy.”

Which returns us to the question of why anyone would want to wade through these 500 self-serving pages. The best answer: to remind yourself of the stakes of this upcoming election and why the United States needs more old-fashioned diplomacy and less paranoia and arrogance. A McCain presidency might not eschew diplomacy, but in the political free-for-all that is the Republican party, Bolton and his minions are always there, ready to denigrate any agreement or compromise, to sabotage and subvert real diplomacy.

Asked by reporters whether he was loyal to the President, Bolton answered, "I'm loyal to the original policy."

To understand the stakes, consider the little known and even less appreciated record of American negotiations with North Korea since 1994. Between what was called the “Agreed Framework” that brought North Korea back into the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1994 and the end of 2000, the United States and North Korea reached twenty agreements on a wide array of issues. Certain of these agreements foundered in implementation, but an objective assessment shows that some of the noncompliance stemmed from constraints placed by American domestic politics.

The Bolton strategy killed the Agreed Framework, hoping through threats, sanctions, and use of force to end the North Korean regime. Unfortunately for Bolton—fortunately for the rest of us—our ally South Korea and our necessary partner China did not want to deal with the consequences: either a war or a collapsed, deadly state on their borders. In the end, they did not have to because North Korea left the NPT, developed a nuclear bomb, and tested it, bankrupting the Bolton policy and producing the sharp change of strategy that has born fruit in recent North Korean steps to end its nuclear program.

Writing about the successes of American negotiators in bringing North Korea and the United States back together in February 2007, former State Department negotiator Robert Carlin and Stanford Professor Emeritus John Lewis have described why Bolton and his crowd loathe diplomacy is loathed by Bolton and his crowd, and why it is so necessary:

Diplomats strive to put down words all of them can swallow and hopefully their superiors in [the] capital can stomach. Written agreements are difficult to reach. The pain often comes not so much in dealing with the other side but in dealing with your own. Unless you are dictating terms to a defeated enemy, you are going to have to compromise on something, probably several somethings, that will make many people unhappy. That was done for the February 13th agreement, and there is no shame to it.

John Bolton did much damage to American interests in the first Bush administration, but he was implementing the president’s policy. President Bush deserves the blame for putting Bolton in a position to continue hardming American interests even when the overall direction of policy changed.

Given that many countries treated the United States as radioactive in 2005; given that trust and confidence in the United States were at all time lows; given that our record was one of a violator of international law and human rights; President Bush, had he truly wanted to start to move the United States out of the hole he had been so assiduously digging, would have had to send to the United Nations an ambassador with extraordinary listening skills, who could work across various international chasms, rebuild respect for American diplomacy, and, yes, advocate agreements that would make a lot of people unhappy. Someone, in fact, a lot like our present Ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, a naturalized citizen originally from Afghanistan. Instead he sent . . . Yosemite Sam.

So back to January 20. A new American president will take office with grinding wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a nuclear-armed North Korea, an Iran headed that way, and crises in Sudan, Israel and Palestine, Lebanon, and Pakistan. Our foreign policy is anathema; our reputation in tatters. Throw in big issues like global warming, non-proliferation, catastrophic terrorism, and a potential pandemic of a deadly new influenza. It is hard to see how any of these crises or issues can be solved without sustained international cooperation and strong international institutions. Take global warming: protecting Americans from its ravages will depend on exercising sovereignty to strike deals with other countries whose domestic behavior threatens us and whose security our domestic behavior threatens. A narrow view of sovereignty as the ability to do as we damned well please will be—quite literally—the death of us all.

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“Emerging democracies must demonstrate that they can solve governance problems and meet citizens’ expectations for freedom, justice, a better life, and a fairer society.”

If the big global story of the 1980s and 1990s was the remarkable expansion of democracy, the bad news of this decade is that democracy is slipping into recession. In the two decades following the Portuguese revolution in 1974, the number of democracies tripled (from 40 to 120) and the percentage of the world’s states that are at least electoral democracies more than doubled (to about 60 percent). Since the late 1990s however, there has been little if any net progress in democracy. To be sure, significant new transitions to democracy took place in countries like Mexico, Indonesia, Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine. But globally, the democratic wave has been neutralized and is now at risk of being overtaken by an authoritarian undertow, which has extinguished democracy in such states as Pakistan, Russia, Nigeria, Venezuela, Bangladesh and Kenya. In fact, two-thirds (15) of all the reversals of democracy (23) since 1974 have taken place just in the last eight years, since the October 1999 military coup in Pakistan.

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Two other negative trends are important to note. One is the implosion of democratic openings in the Arab world. Under pressure from the George W. Bush administration beginning in 2003, several authoritarian Arab regimes liberalized political life and held competitive, multiparty elections. Then, Islamist political forces made dramatic gains in Egypt and Lebanon and won a majority of seats in Palestine and Iraq — and suddenly the Bush Administration got cold feet. Arab democrats who had surfaced and mobilized felt abandoned and betrayed. The liberal secular politician Ayman Nour, who had the temerity to challenge President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt’s first contested presidential election, languishes in prison three years later. The country’s political opening is now frozen, while more than a billion dollars in American aid continues to flow to the regime.

The second negative trend is that authoritarian states have, unfortunately, learned some of the lessons of democratic breakthroughs of the past decade, particularly the color revolutions that brought down neocommunist autocracies in Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan. As a result, they have closed political space, swallowed up or arrested independent media, crushed independent political opposition, sabotaged or shut down innovative uses of the Internet, and sought to block or sever external flows of democratic assistance. Vladimir Putin’s Russia (with its sinister cabal of savvy Kremlin “political technologists”) has blazed the trail in this authoritarian pushback, but China, Belarus, Iran, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, and other “post” communist and Middle Eastern dictatorships have followed suit. To make matters worse, China and Russia have drawn together with the Central Asian dictatorships in a new club, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, to formalize and advance their authoritarian pushback.

To renew democratic progress in the world, we must understand the reasons for the democratic recession. Authoritarian learning is one. Another has been the inconsistent and often unilateralist policies of the United States. Although President Bush has done much to put democracy promotion at the center of American foreign policy and has substantially increased funding for U.S. democracy assistance programs, he has also alienated potential allies in the effort to advance democracy globally by associating democracy promotion with the use of (largely unilateral) force, as in Iraq; by promoting democracy with a tone that was often self-righteous and a style that was too often poorly coordinated with our democratic allies; and then by failing to sustain pressure for democratic change when the going got rough in the Middle East.

Structural factors have also driven the recession of democracy. One has had to do with the global political economy. As the price of oil has gone up, the prospects for democracy have receded. Russia, Nigeria, and Venezuela have all seen their democracies slip back into authoritarianism as oil prices have skyrocketed, sending huge new infusions of discretionary revenue into the hands of autocratic leaders, which they have used to buy off opponents and strengthen their security apparatuses. In Iran and Azerbaijan, surging oil revenues have shored up authoritarian states that once seemed vulnerable.

A second and more pervasive factor has had to do with the performance of the new democracies. Some new democracies are holding their own (like Mali) and even making progress (like Brazil and Indonesia) in the face of enormous accumulated problems and challenges. But the general reality, even in these countries, is that democracy often does not work for average citizens. Rather, it is blighted by multiple forms of bad governance: abusive police and security forces, domineering local oligarchies, inept and indifferent state bureaucracies, corrupt and pliant judiciaries, and ruling elites who routinely shred the rule of law in the quest to get rich in office. As a result, citizens grow alienated from democracy and become susceptible to the patronage crumbs of corrupt political bosses and the demagogic appeals of authoritarian populists like Putin in Russia and Hugo Chávez in Venezuela.

“If democracies do not work better to contain crime and corruption, generate economic growth, relieve economic inequality, and secure freedom and a rule of law, people will eventually lose faith and turn to authoritarian alternatives.”Before democracy can spread further, it must take deeper root where it has already sprouted. Emerging democracies must demonstrate that they can solve governance problems and meet citizens’ expectations for freedom, justice, a better life, and a fairer society. If democracies do not work better to contain crime and corruption, generate economic growth, relieve economic inequality, and secure freedom and a rule of law, people will eventually lose faith and turn to authoritarian alternatives. Struggling democracies must be consolidated, so that all levels of society become enduringly committed to democracy as the best form of government and to the country’s constitutional norms and restraints. Western governments and international aid donors can assist in this process by making most foreign aid contingent on key principles of good governance: a free press, an independent judiciary, and vigorous, independently led institutions to control corruption. International donors also need to expand their efforts to assist these institutions of horizontal accountability as well as initiatives in civil society that monitor the conduct of government and press for institutional reform.

The only way to stem the democratic recession is to show that democracy really is the best form of government — that it can not only provide political freedom but also improve social justice and human welfare.

Over more than six decades, the partnership between the United States and the Republic of Korea has been subject to many stresses and strains, from the Korean War to coping with the challenge of North Korea’s nuclear ambitions. More recently, the democratization of South Korea has opened the alliance to much greater public scrutiny and pressures from an active and mobilized Korean public. Managing this strategic alliance in an era of democracy has been a focus of the research work on Korea conducted by FSI’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center.

With the election in December of Lee Myung-bak as South Korea’s president, ending two terms of progressive rule, Shorenstein APARC decided to launch a nonpartisan group of former senior U.S. government officials, scholars, and other American experts on Korea to explore how to revitalize the U.S. alliance with the Republic of Korea (ROK) after a decade of tensions. In partnership with the New York-based Korea Society, Shorenstein APARC assembled this policy study group at Stanford in early February for in-depth discussion of the challenges facing the alliance and then took the group to Korea for meetings with key figures, from President-elect Lee and his advisors to leaders of the opposition, Korean businessmen, and American diplomats and security officials.

Based on these intensive meetings, the members of this “New Beginnings” policy study group concluded that the United States now has a major opportunity to bolster and broaden its relationship with the ROK. Lee, Korea’s first businessman to be elected president and a self-proclaimed “pragmatist,” has stressed that he gives top priority to the United States in his foreign policy. His fixed five-year tenure will coincide with the entire first term of the next U.S. president, allowing the two new leaders an extended period of cooperation.

Immediately before Lee’s first visit to the United States as president in mid-April, New Beginnings members led by Shorenstein APARC Director Gi-Wook Shin, APARC Distinguished Fellow Michael H. Armacost, and Korea Society President Evans J.R. Revere visited Washington, D.C., and New York City to release their report, New Beginnings in the U.S.-ROK Alliance: Recommendations to U.S. Policymakers. They also addressed a forum in San Francisco co-hosted by the World Affairs Council and the Asia Society of Northern California on June 3 to discuss their recommendations and subsequent developments in U.S.-South Korean relations. The report received extensive coverage in the South Korean news media and was noted in American media as well.

Surrounded by a rising China, a more assertive Russia, a Japan seeking a greater international role, and a nuclear North Korea, the ROK can play a key role in working with the United States to maintain peace and stability in East Asia. No effort to address the nuclear and other challenges posed by North Korea is likely to succeed without the closest U.S.-South Korean cooperation. The ROK, as the world’s 13th-largest economy and one of Asia’s most democratic countries, is a model of the virtues of a market economy, of the values of freedom and human rights, and of alignment with the United States. The two countries are also bound by personal ties: 2 million people of Korean descent live in the United States, and 100,000 Koreans come to the United States each year for study and exchanges, more than from any other country.

President Lee’s election reflects four key changes in South Korea: (1) a shift from the political left back toward the center; (2) greater skepticism about North Korea; (3) increased wariness of China; and (4) enhanced support for the U.S.-ROK alliance. The protests against the United States seen in South Korea in 2002 were the result in part of transitory circumstances and no longer reflect the reality there.

President Lee seeks a global partnership with the United States while maintaining good relations with Korea’s neighbors, Japan, China, and Russia. He favors improved relations with North Korea and has stated his willingness to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il. In major departures from the earlier “sunshine” policy of the South Korean government toward North Korea, however, Lee will not provide large-scale economic assistance to the North until after it abandons its nuclear weapons program. In another major departure from the previous ROK policy, he has also criticized human rights abuses in North Korea. Lee supports continued food and other humanitarian aid to the people of North Korea.

New Beginnings group members believe that the United States cannot afford to lose the opportunity presented by President Lee to build a global partnership with one of the United States’ most important allies. The group identified a number of steps that the United States, in cooperation with the ROK, could take to move the alliance into a new era (see sidebar).

The New Beginnings group has announced that it plans to continue its efforts in support of strengthened U.S.-South Korean relations. Among other projects, the group intends to present recommendations early next year to the South Korean government on how to develop a close relationship and bolster the alliance with the incoming U.S. administration.

Recommendations to United States Policymakers

• Global Partnership — Building on the cooperation between Presidents Bush and Lee, the new U.S. president next year should issue a vision statement with Lee detailing their partnership and goals for the alliance. To advise them, the two new presidents should establish a bi-national panel of distinguished Koreans and Americans. The United States and the ROK should also give increased emphasis to the foreign ministerial strategic dialogue they initiated in 2006.
• Security Alliance — We support the ongoing realignment of U.S. forces in the ROK. Congress should increase its budget for the relatively small U.S. portion of the total cost of its implementation. The decision to transfer wartime operational control of Korean forces back to the ROK in 2012 was likewise correct, but the United States should respond positively to any South Korean proposal to discuss conditions related to the transfer. We welcome the Lee administration’s apparent desire to review the main North Korea war plan and to prepare jointly for other contingencies, including that of a North Korean collapse. The United States should conduct regular, joint consultations with South Korea and other allies in East Asia to determine whether security conditions warrant changes in our respective force levels and, if so, in what direction.
• North Korea — The ROK election has brought the United States and South Korea into essential agreement, for the first time in seven years, on how to deal with North Korea and its nuclear aspirations. To avoid the danger that their North Korea policies will again diverge, they must establish stronger consultative mechanisms, including with Japan.
• Economy and Trade — Congress should ratify the U.S.-ROK Free Trade Agreement now. U.S. failure to approve the FTA would not only represent foregone business opportunities; it would damage U.S.-ROK relations and be seen by the international community as a weakening of U.S. self-confidence and engagement, in East Asia and around the globe.
• People-to-People Ties — The U.S. government should set an early target date to include the ROK in the Visa Waiver Program and encourage the Korean government to support a major expansion of the Fulbright Program’s English Teaching Assistant Program. The United States should create a new program to allow U.S. federal employees to intern in Korean ministries and increase the budget for the State Department’s International Visitor Program for young South Korean leaders. U.S. military personnel stationed in Korea should be joined by their families. The United States should, at long last, construct a new U.S. embassy in Seoul.

CISAC science fellow Undraa Agvaanluvsan faces no small task this summer: She has returned to her native Mongolia to help draft first-time legal and security protocols to ensure that the country’s uranium-based nuclear industry develops safely while also attracting international investment. “Our government needs to be prepared to move ahead,” the nuclear physicist said. “Mining needs to be regulated, there need to be laws specific to uranium so that extraction won’t cause a risk to security.”

Mongolia boasts rich uranium reserves and the mining industry contributes to about 25 percent of the country’s economy. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian partners exported Mongolian uranium ore for military purposes to a well-guarded enrichment facility in nearby Angarsk, Siberia, Undraa said. (Mongolians use only one name — Agvaanluvsan is Undraa’s late father’s name.) After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, mining in Mongolia almost stopped. “Today the security concern is completely different,” Undraa said. “It is said that some people even dig uranium, among other minerals, out of the ground with no legal right to do so. They’re called ‘ninjas.’ It’s worrisome and it’s completely unregulated.”

According to Undraa, foreign investors want to develop Mongolia’s uranium mines quickly. “Mining companies may be supportive of nuclear nonproliferation but their main objective is their business bottom-line,” she said. “There is not enough concern for security. The area we’re concerned with — nonproliferation and national security — seems very far from them.”

Since November, Undraa has split her time between CISAC and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where she has worked in the lab’s nuclear experimental group for three years. At CISAC, she has focused on the development of Mongolia’s civilian nuclear industry and how such changes are influencing the country’s fledgling democracy and market economy. Mongolia was a socialist state until a peaceful democratic revolution took place in 1990. The vast, landlocked country, squeezed between Russia and China with a population of 3 million, is now a multiparty capitalist democracy.

Undraa, 35, plans to return to Encina Hall this fall to continue this work with CISAC Co-Director Siegfried S. Hecker and consulting professor Chaim Braun. Under the auspices of the recently established Mongolian-American Scientific Research Center in Ulaanbaatar, the scientist is helping to organize two international conferences in the Mongolian capital this September on uranium mining and nuclear physics. Undraa hopes the conference findings will help her country, a non-nuclear weapons state, develop uranium mining profitably and responsibly.

“Mongolia plans to build a nuclear industry, starting from a zero baseline,” Undraa’s research plan states. “With a clean slate, how should Mongolia develop its uranium industry? What does Mongolia need to do to position itself as a trustworthy, global supplier of uranium?”

“With a clean slate, how should Mongolia develop its uranium industry? What does Mongolia need to do to position itself as a trustworthy, global supplier of uranium?”Undraa also wants to assess whether it makes economic sense for a developing Mongolia to turn to nuclear power or construct high-pressure coal-powered plants, which cost less and are faster to build and operate. She is acutely aware of the effects of climate change — in the late 1990s and early 2000s, millions of livestock across Mongolia’s steppes and deserts died due to harsh winters and summer droughts. “I have family members who lost their nomadic way of life — camels, sheep, goats, cattle died,” she said. “They had to move to the city because there was no point staying in the countryside.” As a result, the population of Ulaanbaatar has soared in recent years, with a parallel increase in pollution from coal fires burned by people living in traditional gers or yurts. “People say the pollution there is worse than Mexico City, worse than Beijing,” the scientist said.

Mining for Mongolia

On the uranium production front, Undraa wants to investigate whether her country should develop its own enrichment plant or collaborate with the Soviet-era facility in Angarsk. AREVA, the French multinational industrial nuclear power conglomerate, also is interested in building a power plant in Mongolia in exchange for raw uranium, she said.

An alterative proposal suggested by Sidney Drell, CISAC founding co-director, and Burton Richter, SLAC director emeritus, would establish a multinational uranium enrichment facility in Mongolia with possible collaboration from Japan, a country with a good track record for nuclear transparency. Such a facility could help meet the demands of growing energy markets in nearby China, India, and South Korea. Undraa said she supports exploring this option, which could bolster Mongolia’s position as a global producer of enriched uranium for nuclear power plants. “Mongolia is a democracy with friendly relations with Russia, China, the European Union, Japan, North and South Korea, as well as the United States,” she said during a May 7 presentation at CISAC. “This is a long shot,” Hecker said. “But perhaps an enriched uranium fuel guarantee from Mongolia instead of the United States may be more successful in keeping some countries from building their own enrichment facilities.”

Science as a tool to effect policy

Undraa hopes that her hands-on research at CISAC will help her homeland. “Being from Stanford has given me a platform to talk to the uranium mining people,” she said. “It gives me a right to talk to them as a scientist who is concerned with these global issues.”

The work brings Undraa full circle — as a teenager she wanted to become a diplomat but her father, a coal miner, was pro-western and pro-democratic during the socialist period and he knew that his daughter would face difficulties if she tried to enter the field. He instilled in Undraa what she calls “an American way” of thinking. “I was a very American girl in communist Mongolia in the 1980s,” she said smiling. “What he said was, ‘You’re entitled to have a view, so have a view. You’re entitled to ask questions, so ask questions.’” He also stressed the importance of pursuing education. Undraa took that lesson to heart, excelling in mathematics, then earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in physics from the National University of Mongolia and a doctorate from North Carolina State University.

In addition to helping Mongolia develop protocols for uranium mining and enrichment, Undraa and her husband, Dugersuren Dashdorj, also a nuclear physicist, and like-minded colleagues such as the country’s foreign minister, Sanjaasuren Oyen — the first Mongolian to earn a doctorate from Cambridge — are considering plans to establish their nation’s first major interdisciplinary research English-language university. The project is representative of Undraa’s drive to make a difference in Mongolia. “We don’t have to be bound by how it has been done in the past,” she said. “We can do it differently. We realize this is not a one-to-two-year project — it will take decades to establish. But one has to start somewhere.”

Dr. Alejandro Toledo, former president of Peru, describes his vision as “democracy that delivers.”

“My colleagues and I who have taken the challenge of public life as a vocation and a life commitment,” Toledo says, “cannot but feel concerned about the great challenges faced by our continent where half its population lives between poverty and misery and where inequalities and social exclusion are at their highest.” Toledo has spent the past academic year in residence at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, applying theoretical rigor to a bold new plan for Latin America and also making a sweeping call to action. At the same time, as Distinguished Visiting Payne Lecturer for the Freeman Spogli Institute, Toledo has shared his vision and his plans for the future with the Stanford community in a three-part special Payne Lecture Series, titled “Can the Poor Afford Democracy? A Presidential Perspective.”

Forty percent of Latin Americans — 230 million people — are trying to survive on less than $2 a day, and 110 million live on less than $1 a day, Toledo is quick to point out. He also notes that income levels do not reflect the “drama of poverty”— things like infant mortality, malnutrition, lack of access to health care and education, and ethnically based social exclusion. Impoverished populations see corruption, exclusion, and economic inequality, and they begin to associate these things with democracy and become impatient with it. Toledo is calling for leaders to have the courage to invest in human development through nutrition, education, and microfinance programs and to make decisions that may not have short-term political benefits. “This is a moment for more leadership and less politics,” he said in January.

With the Global Center for Development and Democracy, the non-governmental organization that he founded, Toledo is organizing a new, broad-sweeping initiative to construct a social agenda for democracy in Latin America for the next 20 years. This Social Agenda for Democracy Initiative will identify specific and measurable goals to demonstrate that democracy is capable of “delivering concrete results to the poor.” To do this, Toledo says, the group of former Latin American presidents, democratic leaders, experts, and exponents of civil society that he is organizing will need to map out an agenda for both stimulating economic growth and reducing inequality and exclusion. Their agenda will be supported by parallel and ongoing efforts to promote and strengthen democratic institutions including judicial systems, freedom of speech, human rights, and the independence of all branches of government.

Toledo’s working group met for the first time on November 26, 2007, at the National Endowment of Democracy in Washington, D.C. The core team is made up of 12 former presidents, including Presidents Vicente Fox (Mexico), Fernando H. Cardoso (Brazil), Carlos Mesa (Bolivia), Ricardo Lagos (Chile), Cesar Gaviria (Colombia), Jose Maria Aznar (Spain), Rodrigo Carazo (Costa Rica), and Ricardo Maduro (Honduras). The group met again in Lima, Peru, on April 25, a meeting that Toledo is particularly excited about. “Our meeting in Lima has special significance for the initiative,” Toledo explains. “First, because the Latin American, Caribbean, and European Union Summit between 60 heads of state was held this year in Lima, just one month later, and second, because the theme of this year’s summit is ‘Poverty, Inequality, and Exclusion.’”

Which is the task that lies before Toledo and his colleagues.

One of the main aims of the Social Agenda for Democracy Initiative is to develop a social matrix to measure progress on key indicators such as economic growth, health, education, employment and salaries, poverty and income distribution, and access to technology. Several working group members reported on May 14 to the Latin American, Caribbean, and European Union Summit on the Social Agenda for Democracy Initiative and their progress in constructing this social matrix — giving the bold plan of this already super-charged group additional visibility and opportunity for capacity building. The group will meet two more times in 2008: in Bolivia this July and again in September in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

For Toledo, the link between democracy and social change is palpable — he is both the product of and an advocate for the transformative powers of these two processes. Democratically elected in 2001, Toledo was Peru’s first president of indigenous descent, having grown up in an impoverished and remote Andean village. “For 500 years, someone with my ethnic background was never accepted to be a candidate,” Toledo said in May, in his final Payne lecture. “I was a political intruder in the establishment of politics in Latin America and in Peru.”

In his five-year term as president, Toledo achieved 6 percent average annual growth, increased foreign direct investment by 50 percent, balanced the budget, and brought 25 percent of the population above the poverty line. He also initiated a program called Juntos, or “Together,” a system of conditional, direct cash transfers to female heads of the poorest households. In return for obtaining pre- and post-natal checkups, vaccinating their children, and making sure their children went to school, the women received $30 per month to invest in their economic self-sufficiency. The short-term solution provided by Juntos was initially criticized by the IMF but has been so successful that it is now being evaluated as a policy option by both the IMF and the World Bank and has been continued by the current government.

In his first Payne lecture, held in January, Toledo interwove firsthand observations with quantitative research to support his argument that a reduction in poverty and inequality does not necessarily follow economic growth. While he has “cautious optimism” that Latin America is poised to “make a substantial jump and take a prominent place in the world economy in the next 15 to 20 years,” he said that only an ambitious social agenda to reduce poverty and inequality will stimulate economic growth, strengthen democratic institutions, and consolidate democratic governance in the region.

Having analyzed the relationship between democratic reform, economic growth, and poverty, inequality, and social exclusion in Latin America, Toledo focused his second Payne lecture, in April, on some of the political dynamics in Peru leading up to his election to president. His multimedia presentation included footage of the mass protests that followed Alberto Fujimori’s controversial re-election to a third term in 2000 amid allegations of electoral fraud. Fujimori ultimately agreed to schedule a new election the following year and stepped down as a candidate.

In his third and final Payne lecture, on May 14, Toledo answered the question that served as the organizing principle for the series: Can the poor afford democracy? Yes, he said — but more importantly, “Democracy cannot afford to neglect the poor.”

Like Toledo, former president of Mexico and Social Agenda for Democracy colleague Vicente Fox sees positive economic and social growth for Latin America. He accepted Toledo’s invitation to visit the Stanford community and on March 5 spoke with intensity about Latin America’s prospects for both social welfare and economic well-being in the coming century. Mexico, which Goldman Sachs recently projected to be the world’s fifth largest economy by 2040, was emblematic of this electrifying future, he said. On the one hand, there is great promise for economic growth, stability, and entrepreneurship; and with this great promise, he was careful to note, comes great responsibility for the reduction of poverty and inequality through a “package of powerful social policies.”

Looking ahead, Fox hoped that Latin American democracy would not to be taken for granted; “it has to be nourished, it has to be taken care of, it has to be promoted.” But his outlook for Latin America is that this is a time for its countries to consolidate democracies and freedoms, consolidate economies, and promote new leadership. After years of military dictatorships, corruption, inefficiency, and poor development, “People decided to go for change,” Fox said, “and change is a magic word. It moves people to action.”

In their column on National Review on June 24, 2008 called “10 Concerns about Barack Obama,” William Bennett and Seth Leibsohn, begin their list of attacks on Senator Obama by writing that “Barack Obama’s foreign policy is dangerous, naïve, and betrays a profound misreading of history.” In arguing against any engagement with Iran, William Bennett and Seth Leibsohn point out that “Ronald Reagan met with no Soviet leader during the entirely of his first term in office.”

This statement is factually correct. And there was most certainly a big debate within Reagan Administration about whether to talk with the leaders of the Evil Empire. However, Bennett and Leibsohn imply in their piece that this debate was only resolved after the Soviet Union met some preconditions to talks and changed internally, that is after, as they write, that Reagan “was assured Gorbachev was a different kind of leader – after Perestroika, not before.”

In fact, the debate about engaging the evil empire was resolved three years before Reagan met with Gorbachev. The debate and the resolution in favor of talking to the leaders of the evil empires is meticulously chronicled in George’s Shultz’s memoir, Turmoil and Triumph: Diplomacy , Power, and the Victory of the American Ideal (1993). Just the title of Chapter 25, "Realistic Reengagement with the Soviets," underscores how misleading the Bennett and Leibsohn rendition of history is.

When they first came to Washington, many foreign policy advisors within Reagan administration advocated the Bennett and Leibsohn position and did not want to have any contact with the Soviets, even though every American president since the recognition to the USSR in 1933 had met with their Soviet counterparts. When George Shultz became Secretary of State in 1982, he began to challenge this policy of disengagement, arguing that the United States needed to engage both the Soviet leaders but also Soviet society. As he writes in his memoirs about the start of the New Year in 1983, “I wanted to develop a strategy for a new start with the Soviet Union. I felt we had to try to turn the relationship around: away from confrontation and towards real problem solving.” (p. 159) Shultz is writing about his thinking two years before Gorbachev comes to power.

Shultz’s idea for a turn towards engagement met resistance in the Reagan administration. Again, from his memoirs: “I knew the president’s White House staff would oppose such engagement. There was lots of powerful opposition around town to any efforts to bridge the chasm separating Moscow and Washington.” After listing the opponents to direct negotiations, which included Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and CIA head Bill Casey, Shultz affirmed that “I was determined not to hang back from engaging the Soviets because of fears that the ‘Soviet wins negotiations’.” (p. 159). Sound familiar? Instead the word, Iranians, for Soviets and you capture the essence of the debate today.

Shultz, as we all know, won this debate, convincing Reagan about the need to start talking directly to the Soviets (again well before Gorbachev came on to the scene). A subtitle of Chapter 12 of Shultz’s memoir is A President Ready to Engage. (p. 163). In early February 1983, Shultz even floats the idea of meeting directly with Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin for a private chat, to which Reagan responds, “Great”, and then adds “I don’t intend to engage in a detailed exchange with Dobrynin , but I do tell him that if Andropov is wiling to do business, so am I” (p. 164). (Remember Andropov died in 1983 and his successor, Chernenko, also did not serve long as the Soviet leader before dying in 1985. from 1983-1985, there was a real crisis of leadership inside the Soviet Union, a factor that contributed to the lack of direct talks at the highest levels). Speed forwarding again to today’s Iran debate, which presidential candidate sounds more like Reagan?

Shultz’s approach toward engaging the Soviets offers another profound lesson for today’s Iran debate. Shultz never let the negotiations focus just on arms control. That played o the Soviet’s strengths. Rather, he insisted on an expanded agenda that always included human rights and democracy. Again, from his memoirs, "We were determined not to allow the Soviets to focus our negotiations simply on matters of arms control. So we continuously adhered to a broad agenda: human rights, regional issues, arms control, and bilateral issues." (p.267). This same approach is needed for dealing with the Iranian regime today.

Finally, Shultz never saw negotiations or expanding contacts with Soviets and Americans as a concession to Moscow or a signal of legitimacy for the communist dictatorship. In the debate about opening consulates in both countries – a move that some hardliners at the time saw as a sign of weakness – Shultz firmly supported the idea as a change in the American national interest. As he quotes from a memorandum that he wrote in 1982, "I believe the next step on our part should be to propose the negotiation of a new U.S.-Soviet cultural agreement and the opening of U.S. and Soviet consulates in Kiev and New York...Both of these proposals will sound good to the Soviets, but are unambiguously in our interest when examined from a hard headed American viewpoint."(p. 275). Exactly the same could be said about Iran today.

Historical analogies can only go far. Many dimensions of U.S.-Iranians relations differ radically from Cold War relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. But when observers do roll them out, getting the facts right should be precondition to the substantive date about their relevance.

WASHINGTON, June 10 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Leading global development experts today called on Congress and the President to elevate development as a key component of the U.S. foreign assistance system to meet the challenges of the 21st century.

The international and domestic challenges of the 21st century -- including transnational threats such as economic instability, terrorism, climate change, and disease -- cannot be met with a foreign assistance apparatus created to confront the challenges of the 20th century, said the experts in a report released today. The report, New Day, New Way: U.S. Foreign Assistance for the 21st Century, contains various proposals of this coalition of experts, the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network (MFAN).

Foreign assistance and other investments in developing countries are vital tools for strengthening U.S. foreign policy, restoring American global leadership, and fighting global poverty, said MFAN co-chair Steve Radelet of the Center for Global Development. Foreign policy experts on both sides of the political aisle now recognize the importance of strong foreign assistance programs. But they also recognize that our foreign assistance programs are out of date and badly in need of modernization to meet the challenges of the 21st century.

The report lays out the importance of foreign assistance as a foreign policy tool which includes defense, diplomacy, and development. It makes the case that it is in the countrys national interest to elevate development assistance and makes specific recommendations such as better accountability, a national strategy for the coordination of the entire U.S. foreign assistance system, and making development a sustainable piece of Americas long-term investments overseas.

"By giving development a seat at the foreign policy table we can narrow the gap between the world's haves and have nots, tackle the challenges posed by climate change, the global food crisis, and the world's weak and failing states and, most importantly, strengthen the moral foundation from which we lead, said MFAN co-chair Gayle Smith of the Center for American Progress.

The report was released today during the launch of MFAN in Congress. Speakers included Rep. Howard L. Berman, chair, House Foreign Affairs Committee; Rep. Nita Lowey, chair, State and Foreign Operations Subcommittee; and Sen. Chuck Hagel, member, Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Members of MFAN include: Steve Radelet (Center for Global Development), Gayle Smith (Center for American Progress), Brian Atwood (Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota), David Beckmann (Bread for the World), Lael Brainard (Brookings Institution), Larry Diamond (Hoover Institution, Stanford University), Sam Worthington (Interaction), Francis Fukuyama (The Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University), Carol Lancaster (Mortara Center for International Studies, Georgetown University), George Ingram (Academy for Educational Development), Larry Nowels, Charles MacCormack (Save the Children), Michael A. McFaul (Center on Democracy, Development and Rule of Law, Stanford University), Ray Offenheiser (Oxfam America), Stewart Patrick (Council on Foreign Relations), and William Reese (International Youth Foundation).

The failure of Irish voters to ratify the Lisbon Treaty points to a problem for Europe that goes far beyond that specific referendum. The vote in Ireland, coupled with the rejection by voters in France and the Netherlands in 2005 of the now failed European Constitution, provides indisputable proof that many European citizens are strongly suspicious of the European Union and that European leaders must take strong action to remedy the misperceptions of those citizens. There are a variety of reasons why voters rejected the Constitution and now the Lisbon Treaty that have been commented on extensively. But as an outsider, I would submit that the most significant underlying reasons for rejection were a lack of understanding of the EU as an institution, the perception of its "unaccountability" and a resulting lack of loyalty to the EU as an entity. Speaking as a friend of Europe and as a strong proponent of transatlantic relations, I believe that these are the major issues that European leaders must address. The EU must have a "face" to which Europeans can relate. The chickens have finally come home to roost. If the EU is to move forward and deal with the challenges of the future, it can afford no longer to be viewed by much of the public, albeit unfairly, as a "mindless" bureaucracy running people's lives from Brussels.

European leaders must think about and be able to provide understandable answers to the most basic questions. What is the EU? How many Europeans can answer that question? Is the EU the equivalent of a nation-state with full sovereignty? Clearly not. Is it some kind of supra-national organisation where members have agreed to share sovereignty in agreed upon areas? That is a start but can it be articulated in a simple understandable way? Do Europeans have any idea as to how decisions are made within the EU? How many Europeans understand the "qualified majority" voting system? It would take a mathematics major to understand how votes are calculated, let alone the multiple layers of decision-making. Is there a simple way to explain how the EU is accountable to European citizenry? How does the EU serve the common good? If the EU remains a mystery to many Europeans, there should be little mystery as to why voters are uncomfortable expanding its powers. It is no wonder that when voters think that they are facing a choice between "national sovereignty" and surrendering sovereignty to a little-understood institution that may impinge on their perceived security, they will vote for "national sovereignty".

If the EU is so little understood in Europe, one can only imagine the lack of understanding among Americans. When I was nominated in 1999 by President Clinton to be the United States Ambassador to the European Union, the most common questions that were asked by my friends were: What is the EU? Isn't that the economic organisation in Europe? Or are you our first ambassador to the EU?

One can also understand why American policymakers, whichever party is in power, have often been reluctant to deal with the EU as an entity and retreat to working through member states. Over recent years US administrations have better recognised the need to work with the EU, and the US and EU have accomplished much working together. But still too often policymakers have become befuddled and frustrated in dealing with the EU. So, for example, even with the ups and downs of the US-French relationship, some US policymakers are more comfortable dealing with France than with the EU because there is a history to the relationship. We have been working with France for over 200 years. There is a texture to the relationship that does not exist with the EU. Until that texture begins to develop, policymakers will often tend to look first to the member states.

Ironically, the Lisbon Treaty would begin to put a face on the EU. The EU would have a president with a set term and a single person responsible for the implementation of EU foreign policy. The treaties upon which the EU is based would be incorporated into a single document. More efficient procedures to deal with an enlarged EU would be put in place. From an American standpoint the treaty should enhance US-European co-operation in areas of vital common interest.

But for the Lisbon Treaty to be ultimately ratified in Ireland and to be accepted by citizens in the other member states even though a referendum is not required in those states, Europe needs to get back to the basics and leaders must be able to explain what the EU is, how the EU is accountable to Europe's citizens and why the Treaty is in the interests of all Europeans.

Ambassador Richard L. Morningstar served as Ambassador to the European Union from 1999-2001. He is a Senior Director at Stonebridge International, a global strategy firm, a Lecturer at Stanford Law School, and an Adjunct Lecturer at the Kennedy School at Harvard University.

Four years after the ouster of the extremist Taliban government , Afghanistan is moving ahead but needs investment and expertise to recover from 30 years of war, the country’s ambassador to the United States said during a Nov. 14 luncheon at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

“Afghanistan has come a long way but the journey has just started,” said Said Tayeb Jawad, a former exile who returned to work for his homeland in 2002. The one-time San Francisco-based legal consultant was named Afghanistan’s ambassador to Washington two years ago by then-Interim President Hamid Karzai. “We would like to join the family of nations once again and stand on our own feet as soon as possible,” he said.

In an address to about 100 faculty, students, staff, and donors, Jawad spoke of his country’s strategic role in the war on terrorism. “Global security is one concept,” he said. “In order to fight terrorism effectively, better investment in Afghanistan is needed to stabilize the country and make [it] a safer place for Afghans and, therefore, global security.”

Afghanistan has established all the institutions needed for the emergence of a civil society, Jawad said. A new constitution was approved in January 2004, presidential elections took place in October of that year, and elections for a new parliament were held two months ago. “The constitution we have adopted is the most liberal in the region,” he said. Although problems abound—Afghanistan is the poorest country in Asia, only 6 percent of its residents have access to electricity and only 22 percent have clean water—the ambassador expressed hope for the future. About 3.6 million refugees have returned home, he said, and 86 percent of Afghans think they are better off today than four years ago, according to an Asia Foundation survey.

Émigrés are the leading investors in the country, Jawad said, noting that an Afghan American recently pumped $150 million into the country’s nascent cell phone system. Many others, including Jawad himself, have heeded President Karzai’s call for émigré professionals to aid their homeland. Other international expertise is also moving in: Eleven foreign banks have opened for business and 60,000 skilled workers from Pakistan and Iran have moved to Kabul. “We are trying to reconnect the country by building roads and the communication system,” Jawad said. “Reconnecting the country is important for national unity but also for the fight against terrorism and narcotics.”

Tackling the profitable opium trade is a top challenge facing the government and its greatest obstacle to national reconstruction, Jawad said. “Its proceeds feed into terrorism and lawlessness,” he said. In the past, horticulture comprised 70 percent of Afghanistan’s exports. But 30 years of war decimated a generation of farmers and destroyed traditional farming. “If you have a vineyard or orchard, you have to have a prospect of 10 years,” the ambassador said. “If you don’t have a sense of hope, you grow poppy seeds. It takes three months to harvest poppy. You can put it in a bag, take it with you and become a refugee again.”

While terrorists and the Taliban are defeated in Afghanistan, Jawad said, they are not eliminated and they continue to attack what he described as soft targets: schools and mosques and aid workers. But in the last two days, a U.S. soldier and NATO peacekeepers were killed in attacks, which police blame on al-Qaida. To help counter this, efforts are under way to build a trained national army and police force. More than 36,000 soldiers already have been trained. While the country is grateful for foreign military assistance, the ambassador said, “It’s our job to defend our country.”

The country’s leadership also allowed lower-ranking Taliban to join the government; three former officials have been elected to the new parliament. “This was a decision that was difficult to take,” Jawad said. “But we want to deny terrorists a recruiting ground. We are trying to pursue a policy of reconciliation. We cannot afford to have another circle of violence and another circle of revenge.”

At the end of the address, FSI Director Coit D. Blacker reiterated a formal statement initially made in August inviting President Karzai to visit Stanford.

TheStanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE) develops innovative materials on key issues in international affairs for K-14 students in the United States and independent schools abroad. Multidisciplinary SPICE materials serve as a bridge between classrooms of receptive students and teachers and FSI scholars and collaborative partners. SPICE offered a number of important new publications for an emerging generation of scholars this year.

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As with all SPICE projects, collaboration with scholars and other experts on the Cultural Revolution was essential to the development of this unit. Andrew G. Walder, former director of the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, served as principal advisor and was instrumental in the conceptualization of the curriculum. Connie Chin of Stanford’s Center for East Asian Studies translated entries from a Chinese textbook that students compare with textbooks of Taiwan and the United States. Jiang, a local author and survivor of the Cultural Revolution, oversaw the development of a lesson that features her book, Red Scarf Girl. Jiang worked with many Chinese who provided their own memoirs of the Cultural Revolution for the curriculum, exposing students to first-hand experiences of Chinese youth during this time.

Another new SPICE unit, titled Tea and the Japanese Tradition of Chanoyu, results from a collaboration with the Urasenke Foundation of Kyoto, Japan. This unit traces the history of tea from its origins in China 5,000 years ago to modern times, with an emphasis on its prominent role in Japan. By the 16th century, Japan’s tea practice had become formalized by Sen Rikyu, who integrated art, religion, social interaction, and economics into his tea practice. He so revolutionized chanoyu that he is universally recognized as the most important tea master who ever lived. The Urasenke School of Tea was established by one of his descendants some 400 years ago, and the Sen family has continued to pass on its way of tea for 16 generations.

SPICE worked with two of Sen Rikyu’s descendants, Great Grand Master Sen Soshitsu XV and Grand Master Sen Soshitsu XVI Iemoto, to develop this unit. Each wrote a personal letter, expressing their excitement about introducing American students to a cherished Japanese tradition. Grand Master Sen Soshitsu XVI Iemoto says, “In the age of globalization, there is a great need for truly international people, that is, those who understand and appreciate their own culture as well as that of others, and those who value both the diversity of mankind and the universality of the human spirit. These are the people who will enrich and reinvigorate our global society in the future.” His father, Great Grand Master Sen Soshitsu XV, adds, “I am very happy to have been involved with this project which, I pray, will help to contribute to world peace and goodwill through my motto ‘Peacefulness through a Bowl of Tea.’”