Strategic Trust-Building

On Thursday, 25 June, EWI, in cooperation with the Institute of World Economy and International Relations (IMEMO), convened an informal, off-the-record roundtable discussion of its Expert Working Group report Euro-Atlantic Security: One Vision, Three Paths.

Vladimir Baranovsky, Deputy Director of the IMEMO chaired the roundtable. Attendees included representatives of the Russian government, Russian academics and high-level diplomats from the U.S., the EU, Belgium, Romania, Sweden, Australia, Finland, Greece, Hungary and Turkey. EWI and IMEMO convened the event to give Russian colleagues an opportunity to respond to the report, which describes three possible paths towards revitalized security arrangements in the Euro-Atlantic region.

On Tuesday, 23 June, EWI brought together high-level diplomats, academics, journalists and representatives of European Union institutions for a presentation of the recent report, Euro-Atlantic Security: One Vision, Three Paths. The seminar – moderated by EWI Vice President Greg Austin – invited participants to respond to the report, which outlines three possible paths towards a more effective security arrangement the Euro-Atlantic region.

Key members of the Expert Working Group that contributed to the report were on hand to deliver their take on the drafting process. Hall Gardner of the American University of Paris and Wolfgang Zellner of the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg discussed their visions for revitalized Euro-Atlantic security arrangements. Former EWI Vice President Ortwin Hennig and Vadim Lukov of the Russian Embassy in Belgium also responded to the report.

Leaders from governments and businesses, including Makhdoom Shah Mahmood Qureshi, Foreign Minister of Pakistan, and Peter Albatef, President of Dell Services, came together on February 18, 2010 to devise strategies to address the world's most pressing security concerns.

Leaders gathered at EWI’s seventh annual Worldwide Security Conference (WSC7), a platform to reframe perceptions of international security threats and opportunities and determine concrete steps to protect people, economies and infrastructure around the world.

The seventh annual Worldwide Security Conference:

• continued our tradition of articulating new goals for global security and the steps needed to achieve them
• stimulated progressive improvement in the way global security is managed and reviewed
• brought together leading policy makers, specialists, business executives, community leaders and journalists from around the world for debate and networking.

WSC7 is co-sponsored by the Financial Times, Dell and Deloitte.

Registration for the conference is now closed. If you would like to attend, please contact us.

Topics at WSC7 included:

• Cyber threats, financial risk and economic security
• Economic crisis: social radicalization and risk management
• Business resilience after bio-threats
• Cyber threats: Russian, Indian and Chinese perspectives
• Trade recovery contingencies after terrorist attacks
• Integration of Russian ICT systems into European infrastructure
• Business leaders’ role in international cybersecurity
• Towards a global Energy Security Council
• Customs organizations and online criminal activities
• Afghanistan-Pakistan Regional Economic Cooperation
• Counter-radicalization in Afghanistan and Pakistan
• NATO goes global? What role for Russia?
• Alternative Futures for Afghanistan and Southwest Asia: A special, one-day, invitation-only consultation on February 17.
• International Pathways to Cybersecurity: A special, one-day, invitation-only consultation on February 17.
• Accelerating Responses for Climate Security: A special, one-day, invitation-only consultation on February 16.

The Cold War ended two decades ago, but Russia and the U.S. still have thousands of nuclear warheads aimed at each other, ready to go off at a moment’s notice. EWI brought together leaders from Russia and the U.S. to produce new ideas that can build trust between the two countries and take these warheads off their high-alert status.

The objectives of this meeting were to:

1. Examine why past and current efforts to de-alert nuclear weapons have been unsuccessful;
2. Explore alternative ideas that have worked or might work; and
3. Build consensus among U.S. and Russian policymakers to bring these ideas into practice.

Some of the questions the participants considered:

• What is current state of operational readiness of nuclear weapons systems in the U.S. and Russia?
• What is the principal critique of current approaches to decrease operational readiness and increase decision-making time?
• What are the past experiences of nuclear-weapon states in de-alerting arsenals?
• What is the relationship between efforts to de-alert and ongoing disarmament efforts? Are they complementary?
• What de-alert approaches are acceptable to U.S. and Russia in the present context?
• How might we operationalize these approaches?

On June 4, the Swiss Mission in New York hosted a briefing for members of the U.N. Security Council and other select member states on EWI’s U.S.-Russia Joint Threat Assessment on Iran’s nuclear and missile potential.

Ambassador Peter Maurer, Permanent Representative of Switzerland to the United Nations and member of EWI’s Board of Directors, moderated the briefing. Other participants included Leonid Ryabikhin of the Committee of Scientists for Global Security and Arms Control who represented the Russian team, Ted Postol of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who represented the American team, and Professor Gary Sick of Columbia University.

Key findings of the J.T.A. described in the briefing and discussed in the question-and-answer period were:

• The time it would take for Iran to develop a roughly 2,000 km range ballistic missile armed with a nuclear warhead is determined by the time it takes Iran to build a nuclear warhead that is sufficiently light and compact to fly on a ballistic missile.
• Unless Iran receives substantial external assistance, it would take Iran years to produce with indigenous technology missiles of substantially longer range without major new innovations in missile technology.
• In the event that Iran builds such long-range missiles, with or without external assistance, these missiles would be very large and cumbersome and would have to be launched from well-known, specialized launch locations. Such missiles would be highly vulnerable to preemption.
• If Iran takes the political decision to manufacture nuclear devices, it will have to remove IAEA control and monitoring—thus alerting the international community to its intentions. It would take Iran about six years to build nuclear weapons compact and light enough to be used on a ballistic missile. This conclusion assumes that Iran does not have clandestine enrichment capabilities.

The U.S.-China High-Level Security Dialogue brings together influential Chinese and American experts to develop common strategies on traditional and non-traditional security challenges. This meeting, the third in the dialogue, was the first EWI-brokered, high-level, semi-official meeting between the two countries since U.S. President Barack Obama took office. It clarified policy approaches between the new U.S. administration and one of its most important strategic partners.

The meeting included frank discussions on pressing global security concerns that require the active engagement of both China and the U.S. Agenda items included:

• Climate change, carbon emissions and a “green relationship” between China and the U.S.
• The global financial crisis and its effects on security and social stability
• Piracy and maritime security
• Cybersecurity
• Rising tensions on the Korean Peninsula
• The stability of Afghanistan, Pakistan and the region

The meeting included such high-level participants as:

• Ambassador Ma Zhengang, EWI board member and President of the China Institute of International Studies
• C.S. Kiang, Chairman of the Peking University Environment Fund
• Major General Zhu Chenghu, Director General of the Academic Department of Strategic Studies at China’s National Defense University
• Senior Colonel Xu Weidi, Professor at the Institute for Strategic Studies at China’s National Defense University
• Tom Ridge, former Secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security
• Ambassador Thomas Pickering, former U.S. Ambassador to the UN and former U.S. Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs
• General T. Michael “Buzz” Moseley, EWI Distinguished Fellow and former Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force
• Karl Rauscher, EWI Distinguished Fellow and Executive Director of Bell Labs Network Reliability & Security Office of Alcatel-Lucent
• David Kilcullen, EWI Senior Fellow and former adviser to General David Petraeus in Iraq.

On March 13, EWI and International Peace Institute (IPI) convened an expert roundtable, Building a Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament: A Chinese perspective, in New York. The roundtable included presentations by five senior Chinese arms control specialists:

Li Genxin, Secretary General of the China Arms Control and Disarmament Association (CACDA);

Teng Jianqun, Deputy Secretary General of CACDA;

Senior Colonel Xu Weidi, Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Strategic Studies, Chinese National Defense University;

Ouyang Liping, Senior Research Professor and Deputy Director of the Institute of Security and Strategic Studies, China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations (CICIR); and

Fan Jishe, Research Fellow and Deputy Director of the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation Studies, Institute of American Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS). 

Michael Levi, Director of the Program on Energy Security and Climate Change at the Council on Foreign Relations, and Steve Noerper, Senior Fellow at EWI, offered comments on the presentations to lead off the discussions. Warren Hoge, IPI Vice President and Director of External Relations, and Waheguru Pal Sidhu, EWI Vice President of Programs, chaired the event. 

New forms of threats by both states and non-state actors are challenging the stability of the nonproliferation regime, but the main instruments of that regime are eroding. Greater threats challenging the regime’s foundations include:

• tests of nuclear devices,
• the rise of non-state actors and risks of nuclear terrorism,
• illicit smuggling in fissile materials,
• states suspected of pursuing weapons programs under the auspices of peaceful nuclear energy, and
• the questionable progress of states in nuclear disarmament.

At the EastWest Institute’s sixth annual Worldwide Security Conference, international leaders and counterterrorism experts identified lessons to be learned from eight years of the “Global War on Terror” and ways to measure success in the continuing struggle against terrorism.

Leaders from India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and several other countries presented a range of ideas to overcome terrorism, from coordination of military and police forces to an emphasis on political and social dimensions of terrorism.

“The response has to be multidimensional,” said Lieutenant-General Satish Nambiar, former Deputy Chief of Army Staff of India in discussing lessons from the Mumbai terrorist attacks last November. “It may however be appropriate to stress that the primary focus should be on prevention and if necessary preemption.”

Other participants suggested that political solutions are equally important. “A predominantly military approach can at best create the time and space for addressing the root causes that motivate recruitment into the terrorist ranks,” said General Ehsan Ul-Haq, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of Pakistan.

David Kilcullen, Senior Fellow at the EastWest Institute and a former advisor to General David Petraeus in Iraq, criticized current strategies for too much emphasis on purely military solutions, but suggested that the world is adapting for the better.

“In terms of counter-organization, we’re doing quite well,” said Kilcullen, referring to successes in dismantling some terrorist networks. “But our focus has been a little too narrow and too costly.” Referring to President Barack Obama’s decision to send 17,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan while at the same time emphasizing a more sophisticated approach aimed at protecting the civilian population, he added that this is “an important opportunity to redefine what we’re doing today.”

The issue of political buy-in and civil liberties was also of concern.

“Allegations will no doubt surface that human rights are being trampled upon,” said Nambiar. “But it may be time for us in the larger interests to accept some curbs on our civil liberties.”

Alexandre Guessel, Anti-Terrorism Coordinator of the Council of Europe, offered a different view. “There is no contradiction between human rights and the fight against terrorism,” he said. “The major human right is the right to life.”

Pakistan’s Ul-Haq stressed the need for a coordinated political and military strategy, adding: “Success should be measured by the public support that is to be gained by this strategy”

Dmitry Rogozin, Russian ambassador to NATO, proposed concrete steps to build trust and security between Europe, Russia, and the U.S. at an EWI seminar today. The seminar was the third and last in a series of seminars designed to temper tensions between the three powers in the aftermath of the crisis in Georgia. 

Proposals emerging from the discussion, which was conducted under Chatham House rules, included:

1. A summit of political leaders, including heads of state and heads of economic and regional security organizations, to determine concrete steps towards a new European security architecture, and to prevent bureaucratic systems from slowing down the process;
2. Establishment of a joint command structure of all relevant actors in Southeast Europe and the Caucasus.
3. Renovation of the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe.