Stanford University

NATO

The Self-Inflicted Demise of American Power

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NATO leaders have a lot to worry about. The U.K. government is a Brexit hot mess. Germany’s Angela Merkel, who has been holding a unified Europe together on her shoulders like Atlas, may not be able to last much longer. Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been channeling his inner authoritarian, and he’s not the only one. And then there’s President Donald Trump. Never one for subtlety, Europe’s most important ally called nato obsolete, threatened to ignore America’s treaty defense commitments to nato members that don’t pay up, slapped tariffs on European aluminum and steel, and treated nato as an irritating layover on the way to his real destination: Helsinki, where he’ll be meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. And that was before Trump actually touched down in Brussels and started berating European leaders face-to-face.

Many experts believe the chief challenge of managing President Trump’s foreign policy is keeping Trump on message. They’re wrong. Trump isn’t misspeaking when he ignores his talking points, insults allies, or congratulates Putin on winning a sham election. He’s not veering off script when he declares that North Korea is no longer a nuclear threat just because Kim Jong Un posed for a photo in Singapore. Trump is actually on message nearly every day and in every tweet. It’s just not a message that most serious national-security experts want to hear. Deep in the recesses of our brains, we experts just cannot believe that an American president would pursue so many profoundly shortsighted policies—or that he would actually believe he’s doing a good job.

Trump has a foreign-policy doctrine, all right. He’s been advancing it with remarkable speed, skill, and consistency. Its effect can be summed up in one neat slogan: Make America Weak Again.

America’s preeminence on the world stage rests on five essential sources of power: neighbors, allies, markets, values, and military might. The Trump Doctrine is weakening all of them except the military.

To be fair, America’s military might is a biggie in global politics, and Trump deserves high marks for rebuilding America’s fighting forces after years of decline in the face of growing threats. The February 2018 budget deal allowed for a $61 billion increase in military spending in 2018 with another $18 billion increase in 2019, making it the largest defense budget in U.S. history and reversing crippling defense sequestration caps from 2013—a deal designed to be so bad, Congress thought it would bring everyone to their senses but didn’t. Trump isn’t just spending more; he’s modernizing and innovating more, too. The Trump administration is committed to modernizing America’s aging nuclear weapons and delivery systems, and has called for additional research spending for cyber, electronic warfare, artificial intelligence, and space—all key areas where the U.S. is increasingly vulnerable and the country’s innovation edge is narrowing. Trump’s defense-spending policies have received overwhelming bipartisan support, a rare feat in Washington. In a complicated global landscape with Russia seeking to stretch its territorial reach and China undergoing a massive 20-year military buildup, a recommitment to investing in military strength is both welcome and necessary.

But it won’t be enough. In today’s threat environment, military power can’t go it alone. The other four sources of American power are more important now than ever. And under Trump, they are growing weaker by the day.

Friendly neighbors are underrated as a source of global power. The United States was born with good geography and successive presidents have made the most of it. For centuries, the empires and nation-states of Europe and the Middle East have lived in tough neighborhoods, with hostile powers nursing historical grievances and vying for advantages through brutal territorial conquest. By contrast, the United States has prospered in no small measure because it has been flanked by two vast oceans and two friendly neighbors that have provided a level of security other states would envy. The last time American and Canadian soldiers fought one another was in 1815. The Mexican–American War ended in 1848, and the last U.S. president to order troops into Mexican territory was Woodrow Wilson, who did so a century ago. Europe’s latest territorial aggression occurred in 2014 (when Russia invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea). Wars are so prevalent in the Middle East, it’s hard to remember a time when there wasn’t one.

The Trump Doctrine, however, sees dangerous threats massing along America’s borders and calls for a sharp departure from the past. The Trump administration’s policies and pronouncements have sent Canadian–U.S. and Mexican–U.S. relations into tailspins, threatening longstanding ties and close cooperation on everything from defense to drug interdiction to trade. Relations in the ’hood haven’t been this bad in a century. From imposing tariffs on Canadian goods because they’re “national-security threats,” to all those comments about Mexican “rapists” and “bad hombres” flooding into U.S. cities, to the border wall, to vows to jettison the North American Free Trade Agreement that has been pivotal to economic growth across the continent, it’s little wonder the neighbors aren’t feeling so neighborly anymore. Mexican voters just elected an anti-Trump, radical leftist president in a landslide election. Canadian officials have imposed retaliatory tariffs and are now talking about how to protect their nation from the United States. It takes a special kind of stupid to make enemies out of Canadians.

Alliances are another vital source of American strength on the global stage. In Asia, the U.S. has better bilateral relations with China’s neighbors than China does, including defense treaties with Japan and South Korea. These relationships advance U.S. interests, project American power, protect global commerce, and promote peace and stability. In Europe, one of Russia’s chief aims is to split the nato alliance because Russia has so few friends of its own. Putin knows that alliances are not about spreading some woolly-eyed vision of global peace over lattes and arguing over who pays the bill. They are about the hard-nosed projection of national power in a dog-eat-dog world. The more friends you have, the more economic, diplomatic, and military might you can marshal and the more you can coerce adversaries to do what you want them to do.  

But the Trump Doctrine sees alliances as raw deals in which the U.S. pays too much and gets too little. Yes, it’s true that most nato allies have not lived up to their defense spending commitments and it’s high time they did. But the Trump Doctrine often seems to suggest that alliances should be run more like a market bazaar, where buyers and sellers haggle over everything and often get nothing—even when a lopsided deal is in everyone’s best interest. Joint-readiness drills, foreign sales of American military equipment, and relationship management cannot be boiled down to Buy the scarf with that shirt or you’ll get nothing. For alliances to work, allies have to know they have each other’s backs. And enemies have to know it, too. Just ask Putin if he’d rather have nato—with all of its “raw deals” uniting 29 nations that include economic powerhouses such as Germany and Spain and global leaders such as France and the United Kingdom—or his own allies, which consist of exactly one besieged Syrian tyrant, the six-member Collective Security Treaty Organization (whose other members are the superpowers called Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan), and, on good days, some Iranians.

The third source of American power is the country’s economy, which has become the envy of the world because it trades with the world. Thanks to falling trade barriers and rising globalization since World War II, global economic growth has hit unprecedented levels. More than a billion people have been lifted out of extreme poverty. And the U.S. has prospered. Sure, free trade creates global winners and losers, and many playing fields are not level. China has been stealing American intellectual property and doing everything it can to keep American companies down and out. Beijing isn’t even secret about it. China’s “Made in China 2025” plan declares the country’s intention to corner the market in key growth industries such as robotics and electric vehicles.

The Trump Doctrine views free trade with suspicion, the liberal international order as a rip-off to American workers, and economics as a zero-sum game in which if you win, we lose. Trump is a protectionist and proud of it. It seems he’s never met a tariff he didn’t like. First came the steel and aluminum tariffs on U.S. allies, sparking retaliatory tariffs on everything from American motorcycles to bourbon. Now Trump and China are locked in an escalating trade war that has started at $50 billion worth of goods on each side. It’s anyone’s guess when or how it will end, but this much is clear: It won’t be good.

Why would the president undermine American economic vitality? Because the Trump Doctrine is meeting 21st-century trade challenges with 20th-century tactics: tariffing the heck out of foreign products under the misguided assumption that tariffs will only affect the countries they target. Trump seems stuck in the 1970s, when most cars were made in Detroit and most TVs were made in Japan. In today’s world of global supply chains, products just aren’t made in one place anymore. The Dutch company Fairphone has just 27 employees but sources its parts from Africa, the Middle East, Europe, North America, and China. Made in America doesn’t mean what it used to. In a global-supply-chain world, tariffs don’t just hurt foreign companies and workers. They hurt American ones, too.

The fourth and most unique source of global power is American values. The United States has always been much more than a country. It’s an audacious experiment in democracy and an enduring hope for others. This “shining city upon a hill” has not always lived up to its own aspirations or expectations. But for many oppressed peoples in the far reaches of the globe, the United States has always stood for the triumph of laws over the naked abuse of authority, and for the capacity of democracy to bring freedom, peace, and prosperity to everyone, not just Americans.

The Trump Doctrine rejects these bedrock American values at home and refuses to advance them abroad. Democratic states are considered weak, authoritarian leaders are admired, moral authority counts for nearly nothing, soft power is too soft, and hard power is what gets results. In this presidency, journalists are labeled enemies and dissent is considered unpatriotic. Nobody should count on hearing stirring speeches about the march of freedom or the power of justice during the president’s trips abroad. Or seeing throngs of well-wishers in distant capitals lining up to see the president because of the noble values he represents or the sacrifices he honors in America’s military heroes, who paid the ultimate price to secure the blessings of freedom for others. The effect of the Trump Doctrine is Making America Weak Again by diminishing the role of American values, and with them our standing in the world.

International-relations scholars have long found that great powers typically fall for two reasons: imperial overstretch or rivalry with other great powers. Never in world history has a country declined because of so many self-inflicted attacks on the sources of its own power.

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RIP INF: The end of a landmark treaty

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Steven Pifer
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Donald Trump did not have to withdraw from the INF Treaty. But now that he has set the wheels in motion, what does that mean for America's national security? Steven Pifer, William  J. Perry Fellow at CISAC, explores this question in this piece, which originally appeared in The National Interest.

President Donald Trump announced at a campaign rally on October 20 that the United States would withdraw from the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. During his October 22–23 visit to Moscow, National Security Advisor John Bolton confirmed that the president intended to withdraw from the treaty.

Keeping the treaty in place presumably would require that Trump change his mind, which at a minimum would require that the Kremlin agree to take corrective action to come back into compliance. That’s not going to happen.

The treaty was already on life support. Trump is pulling the plug, and the United States will exit the agreement six months after it gives formal notification. Russia bears primary responsibility for the treaty’s demise, but both Europe and the United States could have done more to try to save it.

The INF Treaty

Soviet deployment of SS-20 intermediate-range ballistic missiles in the mid-1970s gave rise to concern in Europe about a gap between U.S. and Soviet INF capabilities. In 1979, NATO adopted the “dual-track” decision: the Alliance agreed to deploy U.S. intermediate-range missiles in Europe while the United States sought to negotiate limits on such missiles with the Soviets.

Early rounds of the INF negotiations yielded little progress. The Soviets walked out in 1983 after the first U.S. missiles arrived in Britain and West Germany. The talks resumed in 1985. This time, they produced agreement. Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev signed the INF Treaty in December 1987.

The INF Treaty banned all U.S. and Soviet land-based cruise and ballistic missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers. It entered into force in summer 1988. Three years later, the United States and Soviet Union had destroyed almost 2,700 missiles as well as their launchers, all under the most intrusive verification measures ever agreed, including on-site inspections. It was rightly called a landmark agreement.

Moscow’s Responsibility

Moscow appeared satisfied with the treaty’s performance up until the early 2000s. Senior Russian officials then began to express concern that, while the United States and Russia could not have intermediate-range missiles, third countries could. (The exceptions were Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine, which, like Russia, remained party to the INF Treaty after the Soviet Union’s collapse.)

Third countries such as South Korea, North Korea, China, India, Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel have developed and deployed intermediate-range missiles, with China producing hundreds. Each of these countries is geographically much closer to Russia than it is to the United States.

So one can understand the Russian concern . . . up to a point. Moscow today has a large and improving military in addition to fifteen times as many nuclear weapons as any country other than the United States. It does not need to match third countries in intermediate-range missiles.

Even if the Kremlin leadership found the situation intolerable, it had an honest way forward. It could have invoked Article XV of the INF Treaty, which allows a party to withdraw with six months notice.

Moscow, however, choose a different path. It developed and deployed a land-based cruise missile of intermediate-range, identified in 2017 as the 9M729 (NATO designator: SSC-8). That violated the treaty’s central provision. When the U.S. government charged that Russia had committed a violation, the Russians stubbornly denied those allegation and accused the United States of three treaty violations (one Russian charge, involving the Aegis Ashore missile defense site in Romania may have some merit, but the other two have no basis).

Moscow professed fidelity to the treaty, in effect laying a trap into which Trump has now clumsily stumbled. By announcing the U.S. intention to withdraw, he has set in motion a train that will leave Washington and be seen as responsible for killing the treaty. In addition, withdrawal from the treaty will allow the Russians to deploy land-based intermediate-range missiles without constraint, missiles for which the U.S. military currently has no land-based counterpart. It will be a win-win for Moscow.

Europe’s Silence

Russia thus bears the major blame for the treaty’s demise: it cheated. But U.S. allies in Europe and Washington itself could have taken more robust measures to steer Moscow back toward compliance and perhaps save the agreement.

U.S. officials first briefed their NATO counterparts about the Russian violation in 2014. From the public evidence, however, the leaders of NATO European members had little concern about that violation. None of them publicly complained about the treaty violation during or after their exchanges with Russian president Vladimir Putin.

Nothing suggests that European leaders raised the violation in private either. In spring 2017, after Russia had begun deploying the 9M729, I asked a senior official of a major European ally if his leader would raise the violation when meeting with Putin a week later. He said no with a shrug.

That silence sent a message—unintended, but a message nevertheless—to the Russians: Europeans didn’t worry much about the treaty violation or the 9M729.

Some analysts point to the concern expressed in NATO communiqués. That does not absolve European leaders from not speaking out individually about the Russian violation. Moreover, take take a look at the communiqué language.

In the September 2014 summit communiqué, two months after the U.S. government charged Russia with violating the treaty, NATO leaders said that “it is of paramount importance that disarmament and non-proliferation commitments under existing treaties are honored, including the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which is a crucial element of Euro- Atlantic security. In that regard, Allies call on Russia to preserve the viability of the INF Treaty through ensuring full and verifiable compliance.”

The communiqué from the last NATO summit in July 2018 had tougher language: “Full compliance with the INF Treaty is essential. . . . Allies have identified a Russian missile system, the 9M729, which raises serious concerns. . . . A pattern of behavior and information over many years has led to widespread doubts about Russian compliance. Allies believe that,

in the absence of any credible answer from Russia on this new missile, the most plausible assessment would be that Russia is in violation of the treaty. NATO urges Russia to address these concerns in a substantial and transparent way, and actively engage in a technical dialogue with the United States.”

That language was better, but it hardly amounted to a robust denunciation, and it was buried in paragraph forty-six of a seventy-nine-paragraph communiqué.

Although the INF Treaty applied limits globally, it focused on Europe. European leaders should have pressed Putin hard on the violation, publicly condemned it, and raised political heat on the Kremlin. Their silence contrasts oddly with the public criticism of Trump’s decision voiced in Berlin, Rome and Paris and undermines the credibility of pleas for Washington to remain in the treaty. To put it bluntly, if they didn’t care enough to call out the Russian violation, then why care so much if the United States leaves the treaty?

An Ineffective U.S. Response

The U.S. response to the Russian violation could—and should—have been more forceful. The Obama administration sought to bring Moscow back into compliance, a worthy goal, but it applied little real pressure. Washington convened a meeting of the Special Verification Commission, the body established by the INF Treaty to address, among other things, compliance, only in November 2016—two years after charging a violation.

Pentagon officials described a range of military responses, including efforts to develop better defenses against cruise missiles, the European Reassurance Initiative to boost the U.S. military presence in Central Europe and the Baltics, and investments in new technologies to offset the Russian violation. These measures, however, were largely actions that the Pentagon would take in any case and which would continue even if Moscow corrected its violation. They did not create much incentive for a change in Russian policy.

The Trump administration stated on December 8, 2017—the thirtieth anniversary of the signing of the INF Treaty—that it also wanted to bring Russia back into compliance. It announced a three-pronged “integrated strategy” to do so: diplomatic steps, including

convening the Special Verification Commission, creating a military research and development program for a U.S. land-based intermediate-range missile, and enforcing economic sanctions on Russian entities that had been involved in development and production of the 9M729.

This strategy showed no success. The Special Verification Commission met, but by his own admission, Trump has never discussed the violation directly with Putin. The U.S. government either made no effort to stoke up approaches by Allied leaders to the Kremlin or, if it did, then that effort fizzled. Why didn’t U.S. officials use the threat of withdrawal with Allies to persuade them to engage Moscow more earnestly and at the highest level?

As for military steps, research and development on a U.S. intermediate-range missile likely caused little concern for the Russians. Fielding a missile would take years and cost a lot of money, money that the Pentagon does not have. The Russians, moreover, surely understand that it would be difficult, if not impossible, for NATO to reach a consensus on deploying new missiles in Europe. Recalling the huge anti-nuclear protests in Germany, the Netherlands and other countries in the early 1980s, some in the Kremlin might well welcome the intra-Alliance turmoil if NATO were to consider new deployments.

Pentagon officials suggested that the plan to build a new nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missile (SLCM) could be suspended if Russia came back into compliance. That probably did not have much effect on Moscow’s calculations, especially if Russian officials read the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review, which laid down additional conditions: “If Russia returns to compliance with its arms control obligations, reduces its non-strategic nuclear arsenal, and corrects other [unspecified] destabilizing behaviors, the United States may reconsider the pursuit of a SLCM.”

Washington could have adopted a more robust military response. The U.S. military could have moved conventionally-armed Joint Air-to-Surface Strike Missiles (JASSMs) to Europe along with B-1 bombers to serve as delivery platforms. It could have increased the number of conventionally-armed SLCMs in European waters, for example, by sending the USS Florida, a converted ballistic missile submarine that can now carry up to 154 SLCMs, on a cruise in the North and Norwegian Seas, with port calls to let everyone know it was there. Such steps could

have been done quickly with existing capabilities, would have fully complied with U.S. treaty obligations, and would have caught the attention of the Russian military.

The U.S. government also could have treated with greater seriousness the Russian charge that the Aegis Ashore deployment in Romania of an Mk-41 launcher system for SM-3 missile interceptors was inconsistent with the treaty. An Mk-41 launcher on a U.S. warship can carry lots of other weapons, including cruise missiles; Russian officials contended that it was a prohibited launcher of land-based intermediate-range missiles. U.S. officials should have made clear to their counterparts that, if they would seriously address U.S. concern about the 9M729, then the U.S. side would deal with the Russian concern about the Mk-41.

Would these political and military steps have succeeded? We will not know, because Washington did not try. If Trump administration officials had a serious game plan for implementing the December “integrated strategy” to bring Russia back into compliance, then that plan was not apparent. That may be explained by John Bolton becoming National Security Advisor in April. A long-time critic of arms control in general, and of the INF Treaty in particular, Bolton probably was just as happy abandoning the treaty.

One other issue has arisen: Chinese intermediate-range ballistic missiles. The need to balance against those missiles has been cited as a reason for why the United States is leaving the treaty, but it is unclear if the Pentagon has even decided that it has a requirement for land-based intermediate-range missiles in Asia. In 2017, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told a Senate panel that the United States could counter China with air- and sea-based weapons.

R.I.P. INF Treaty

To be sure, Russia committed an egregious violation. The United States could not be expected to remain in the treaty indefinitely under those circumstances. Those who support withdrawal are correct on that point.

However, Trump did not have to withdraw from the treaty at this time, especially when there were political and military measures to apply pressure on Moscow—measures that might have persuaded Russia to come back into compliance. Unfortunately, now we will not know if that tactic would have worked. Instead, the president has delivered a gift to the Russians, who will soon be able to deploy, without constraint, intermediate-range missiles for which the U.S. military has no land-based counterpart. As a bonus for Moscow, Washington will catch the international political flack for the treaty’s demise.

Steven Pifer, a William J. Perry fellow at Stanford and nonresident senior fellow with the Brookings Institution, worked extensively on intermediate-range nuclear forces issues in the 1980s in Washington, Geneva and Moscow.

 

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Alex Stamos

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Alex Stamos is a cybersecurity expert, business leader and entrepreneur working to improve the security and safety of the Internet. Stamos was the founding director of the Stanford Internet Observatory at the Cyber Policy Center, a part of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He is currently a lecturer, teaching in both the Masters in International Policy Program and in Computer Science.

Prior to joining Stanford, Alex served as the Chief Security Officer of Facebook. In this role, Stamos led a team of engineers, researchers, investigators and analysts charged with understanding and mitigating information security risks to the company and safety risks to the 2.5 billion people on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. During his time at Facebook, he led the company’s investigation into manipulation of the 2016 US election and helped pioneer several successful protections against these new classes of abuse. As a senior executive, Alex represented Facebook and Silicon Valley to regulators, lawmakers and civil society on six continents, and has served as a bridge between the interests of the Internet policy community and the complicated reality of platforms operating at billion-user scale. In April 2017, he co-authored “Information Operations and Facebook”, a highly cited examination of the influence campaign against the US election, which still stands as the most thorough description of the issue by a major technology company.

Before joining Facebook, Alex was the Chief Information Security Officer at Yahoo, rebuilding a storied security team while dealing with multiple assaults by nation-state actors. While at Yahoo, he led the company’s response to the Snowden disclosures by implementing massive cryptographic improvements in his first months. He also represented the company in an open hearing of the US Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

In 2004, Alex co-founded iSEC Partners, an elite security consultancy known for groundbreaking work in secure software development, embedded and mobile security. As a trusted partner to world’s largest technology firms, Alex coordinated the response to the “Aurora” attacks by the People’s Liberation Army at multiple Silicon Valley firms and led groundbreaking work securing the world’s largest desktop and mobile platforms. During this time, he also served as an expert witness in several notable civil and criminal cases, such as the Google Street View incident and pro bono work for the defendants in Sony vs George Hotz and US vs Aaron Swartz. After the 2010 acquisition of iSEC Partners by NCC Group, Alex formed an experimental R&D division at the combined company, producing five patents.

A noted speaker and writer, he has appeared at the Munich Security Conference, NATO CyCon, Web Summit, DEF CON, CanSecWest and numerous other events. His 2017 keynote at Black Hat was noted for its call for a security industry more representative of the diverse people it serves and the actual risks they face. Throughout his career, Alex has worked toward making security a more representative field and has highlighted the work of diverse technologists as an organizer of the Trustworthy Technology Conference and OURSA.

Alex has been involved with securing the US election system as a contributor to Harvard’s Defending Digital Democracy Project and involved in the academic community as an advisor to Stanford’s Cybersecurity Policy Program and UC Berkeley’s Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity. He is a member of the Aspen Institute’s Cyber Security Task Force, the Bay Area CSO Council and the Council on Foreign Relations. Alex also serves on the advisory board to NATO’s Collective Cybersecurity Center of Excellence in Tallinn, Estonia.

Former Director, Stanford Internet Observatory
Lecturer, Masters in International Policy
Lecturer, Computer Science
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Renegotiating the World Order: Institutional Change in International Relations

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Rising powers often seek to reshape the world order, triggering confrontations with those who seek to defend the status quo. In recent years, as international institutions have grown in prevalence and influence, they have increasingly become central arenas for international contestation. Phillip Y. Lipscy examines how international institutions evolve as countries seek to renegotiate the international order. He offers a new theory of institutional change and explains why some institutions change flexibly while others successfully resist or fall to the wayside. The book uses a wealth of empirical evidence - quantitative and qualitative - to evaluate the theory from international organizations such as the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, European Union, League of Nations, United Nations, the International Telecommunications Satellite Organization, and Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. The book will be of particular interest to scholars interested in the historical and contemporary diplomacy of the United States, Japan, and China.

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Challenges and Perspectives for NATO in the 21st Century

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About the Event: NATO is entering today the 4th phase of its history and must adapt to changes in today’s security environment in order to remain relevant. NATO’s ability to adapt will ultimately redefine NATO’s place in the world.  General Mercier will discuss challenges facing NATO faces such as maintaining the unity between members in the Alliance, addressing potential crises in Eastern Europe, reopening dialogue with Russia, and addressing instability on NATO-member borders.

About the Speaker: General Denis Mercier is the North Atlantic Council as Supreme Allied Commander Transformation. Prior to this assignment, he served as the French Air Force Chief of Staff from 2012-2015.

He graduated with a Master’s of Science from the French Air Force Academy in 1981, qualifying as a fighter pilot in 1983. He has more than 3000 flying hours including 182 hours in combat missions. Gen. Mercier commanded the 1/12 "Cambrésis" Fighter Squadron, a founding unit of the NATO Tiger association. He participated in numerous other NATO exercises and operations, including Operation Deny Flight over Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1994, "Strong Resolve” in 1998, and Operation Allied Force in Kosovo.

From 1999 to 2002, Gen. Mercier was deputy head of the combined joint task force deputy branch at Regional Headquarters where he contributed to the development of the Combined Joint Task Force concept. He was a member of the combined analysis team for exercise "Allied Effort '01" and an evaluator of the CJTF HQ for Exercise "Strong Resolve '02". He also acted as liaison officer for the Commander Striking Fleet Atlantic stationed in Norfolk, VA.

He later served as the commander of Reims Air force base, integrating Mirage F1CR squadrons with ISAF in Afghanistan. From 2004 to 2008 he served as the head of the plans division at the French Air Force headquarters and was nominated as a flag officer in 2007. He then commanded the French Air Force Academy in Salon-de-Provence. As senior military advisor for the Minister of Defence from 2010-2012, Gen. Mercier prepared and participated in all NATO ministerial meetings, summits in Lisbon and Chicago, and was special advisor to Operation Unified Protector over Libya.

Among other awards, Gen. Mercier has been awarded the rank of Grand Officier of the French Legion of Honor and, among other distinctions, an officer of the National Order of Merit.

Encina Hall, 2nd floor

General Denis Mercier Supreme Allied Commander Transformation, NATO
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NATO Expansion and the Swap Lines: the Unspoken Geopolitics of the Financial Crisis in Europe, 2007-2013

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2008 witnessed a double shock to the post Cold War order. The North Atlantic financial system suffered a historic crisis, which could be managed only by unprecedented financial intervention by the US state. Weeks before Wall Street imploded, Russia invaded Georgia, a country which earlier in the year had been promised NATO membership. Too little remarked upon at the time, this paper will argue that this conjuncture revealed stark limits to the North Atlantic system of security and financial stability, which since 2013 have come back to haunt us in the on-going Ukrainian crisis. 
 

Adam Tooze is the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History at Columbia University.

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CISAC Central Conference Room

Adam Tooze Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History Speaker Columbia University
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Missile Defense and Nuclear Risks in the Current Strategic Environment

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Abstract: Once limited by concerns about its technological feasibility, affordability and destabilizing potential, today, missile defense is becoming a multinational enterprise deployed on a global scale. The 21st century renaissance of missile defense technology has been powered by the belief that the capability to defend against ballistic missiles will reduce nuclear risks in the post-cold-war era. The assumptions that underpin this conclusion are challenged by a shift in the international security environment – the re-emergence of Russia, a major nuclear power, as a regional threat to the United States and its European allies. Both Cold War and more recent scholarship cannot fully explain contemporary dynamics. I will provide an overview of the current U.S., NATO and Russian missile defense programs and discuss their strategic, operational and technical dimensions. I will explain why we need a new understanding of the relationship between missile defense and nuclear weapons in the current strategic environment.

 

About the Speaker: Ivanka Barzashka is a MacArthur Nuclear Security Fellow at CISAC. Her research focuses on how ballistic missile defense (BMD) affects nuclear risks in the changing strategic environment. She is concurrently a researcher at the Department of War Studies of King’s College London (KCL). As a visiting scholar at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Barzashka examined options for Bulgarian active participation in NATO’s BMD system, for which she did fieldwork at NATO’s Joint Forces Training Center in Poland. She also assessed technical options for BMD cooperation between NATO and Russia in collaboration with American, European and Russian scientists. Barzashka continued that project at the Centre for Science and Security Studies at KCL, where she developed a physics-based model for assessing BMD effectiveness for policy applications.

MacArthur Nuclear Security Predoctoral Fellow CISAC
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Perry Warns Against the Dangers of a Nuclear ISIS

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Former U.S. Secretary of Defense William J. Perry said he was concerned that the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) could buy, steal or build a nuclear weapon capable of killing a hundred thousand or more people in a single strike.

And, he said, stopping the flow of oil money to ISIS should be the main, short-term objective of the United States and its allies in the fight against the terrorist organization.

“They have demonstrated their objective is just killing as many Americans as they can, or Europeans as the case may be…and there is no better way of doing that than with nuclear weapons,” Perry said.

Perry made his comments in front of a crowd gathered at Stanford University to celebrate the launch of his new memoir “My Journey at the Nuclear Brink.”

“If they can buy or steal a nuclear bomb, or if they could buy or steal fissile material, they could probably make a bomb – a crude improvised bomb,” he said.

Even a crude nuclear weapon could have an explosive power equivalent to around fifteen thousand tons of TNT – similar to the bomb that destroyed the Japanese city of Hiroshima near the end of World War II.

Perry said there was evidence that Al Qaeda had actively tried to get nuclear weapons, and he said it was likely that ISIS was also pursuing its own nuclear strategy.

“The big difference between ISIS and Al Qaeda in that respect is that ISIS has access to huge amounts of resources through the oil that they now control,” Perry said.

“I believe that our primary objective in dealing with ISIS should be to stop that flow of money, stop the trading they’re doing in oil which is giving them the resources.”

U.S. warplanes reportedly destroyed 116 trucks in Eastern Syria on Monday that American officials said were being used to smuggle crude oil.

U.S. fighter jets dropped leaflets before the attack, warning the drivers to abandon their vehicles, according to a report in The New York Times.

The Russian Air Force also claimed its planes had struck around 500 oil tankers that were carrying oil from Syria to Iraq for processing.

Perry said that combating ISIS over the long run was a “hugely difficult problem” for Western powers.

“To really stop ISIS completely it would be a long and brutal and ugly fighting on the ground, which I don’t believe we’re going to want to do again,” he said.

“What we can do however, a more limited objective is stopping the resources they’re getting, stopping their access to this oil money. And that limits quite a bit what they can do…That can be done I think in more of a targeted and effective way, and without having to put armies on the ground to do it.”

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