President Obama recently announced his intent to to nominate Richard Norland as ambassador to Georgia. Congrats to a BSFS grad!
Ambassador Richard Norland, a career member of the Senior Foreign Service, serves as the International Affairs Advisor and Deputy Commandant at the National War College. From September 2007 to July 2010, he was U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Uzbekistan. Prior to which, he served for two years as Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan. Additional overseas assignments have included: Deputy Chief of Mission in Riga, Latvia; Diplomat with the U.S. Army Civil Affairs team in Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan; Political Counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Dublin; and Political Officer at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. He was Director for European Affairs on the National Security Council for two years during the Clinton and Bush administrations. Ambassador Norland has a B.S. from Georgetown University School of Foreign Service and master's degrees from Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and National War College.
Read more about Richard Norland.
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Posted in SFSWalshWire on Feb 17th, 2012 No Comments »
NPR's Neal Conan interviewed Professor Daniel Byman about his Washington Post piece, "Can We Help Syria Without Making Things Worse?"
CONAN: ...[Y]ou said, quote, "The United States should present a cohesive front, use tough love to cajole and reward the opposition for unity and cooperation, while recognizing that some fissures will be inevitable." In order - in other words, to work with the opposition?
BYMAN: That's correct. For the United States - right now, at least - direct intervention is not in the cards. You mentioned Russia blocking various international efforts at the Security Council. I think there's no appetite in the United States for a sustained U.S. military intervention. So if we want to get Assad out, we have to work with the Syrians for them to do it, and the opposition is the key to that.
CONAN: And work with them how? Provide them with money, with weapons, what?
BYMAN: Yes. The opposition has many problems. They are divided. They are untrained. They are not ready to go directly up against Assad. And we see this on a daily basis, where they're being shot down in the streets. And the first thing to do is to get them unified. And while that's going on, the United States can also train them.
Read the transcript (or listen to the interview) from NPR's Talk of the Nation -- and see the full op-ed in the Post.
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Following the devastating 9.0 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear crisis on March 11, 2011, Ambassador Roos helped lead the American mission to support Japan’s response to the multi-dimensional and unprecedented disaster. On February 8, 2012, Ambassador Roos shared his first-hand account of what it was like to be on the ground as events unfolded, discussed U.S. efforts to assist Japan, and explained what the experience means for U.S.-Japan relations.
Ambassador Roos’ tenure in Tokyo comes at an historic period. Shortly after his arrival, power shifted from the Liberal Democratic Party for essentially the first time in fifty years to the Democratic Party of Japan and Ambassador Roos played a key role in managing the relationship through the transition. On August 6, 2010 he became the first U.S. official ever to attend the commemoration ceremony of the atomic bombing in Hiroshima. During his two and a half years in Japan, Ambassador Roos has built relationships and established a rich and active dialogue with government leaders, businesspeople, media and students over the course of his travels across 44 of Japan's 47 prefectures.
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Fannin is the author of Startup Asia: Top Strategies for Cashing in on Asia's Innovation Boom, she spoke at Georgetown on February 3, 2012. Her book is about how entrepreneurs and investors can start up in Asia and go global. It provides a first-hand, on-the-ground tour of the new technology centers that are gaining momentum all over Asia. Interviews with the most successful venture capitalists and entrepreneurs reveal their winning strategies and show how a new generation of entrepreneurs in China and India are no longer looking to the West for their cues—but are instead crafting their own local business models and success strategies.
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Ambassador Robert Orr was confirmed by the Senate as United States Executive Director with rank of Ambassador to the Asian Development Bank (ADB) in September 2010. From 2007-2010 he was Chairman of the Board of the Panasonic Foundation and concurrently Vice Chair of the National Association of Japan-America Societies, a member of the Board of Trustees of J.F. Obirin University and a member of the Board of the East-West Center Foundation.
From January 2002 until March 2007 Ambassador Orr was President of Boeing Japan. He held this position during the development of the most successfully selling airplane in history, the 787 Dreamliner, 35% of which is made in Japan. Prior to joining Boeing, Dr. Orr was Vice President and Director of European Affairs for Motorola based in Brussels. And before that he held various senior level posts with Motorola in Japan culminating as Vice President of Government Relations. In that capacity he successfully led the negotiations that opened up the cellular phone market in Japan.
In addition to the corporate world, Ambassador Orr also has spent many years in academia and the United States Government. Between 1985 and 1993 he was a professor of Political Science at Temple University in Japan with two years off to run the Kyoto Center for Japanese Studies and the Stanford Center for Technology and Innovation at the Stanford Japan Center in Kyoto. His book The Emergence of Japan’s Foreign Aid Power published by Columbia University Press won the 1991 Ohira Prize for best book on the Asia Pacific.
The Ambassador’s career began in 1976 when he served for two years as Legislative Assistant to Congressman Paul G. Rogers (D-FL) a 12 term member of the U.S. House of Representatives. Between 1978 and 1981 he served on the House Foreign Affairs Asia Subcommittee staff seconded from the Select Committee on Narcotics. In 1981 he was appointed as Special Assistant to the Assistant Administrator of Asia in the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Department of State.
Dr. Orr holds a B.A. in History, cum laude, from Florida Atlantic University, an M.A. in Government from Georgetown University and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Tokyo University.
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SFS Dean Carol Lancaster was recently part of a panel entitled "Is Foreign Aid Worth the Cost?" at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. The Woodrow Wilson Center's blog New Security Beat summed up some of Dean Lancaster's statements, saying:
Lancaster listed four vulnerabilities in the future course of U.S. foreign aid that should be avoided, including trying to merge our various interests through the State and Defense Departments with our aid programs in countries like Pakistan, where the institutions are weak and corrupt; the danger of creating an entitlement dependency through funding of HIV/AIDS drugs, where we will be guilty of causing deaths if we reduce funding; the danger of attempting to undertake too many initiatives at once, such as food aid, global health, climate change, and science and technology innovations, while simultaneously trying to reform the infrastructure of USAID; and trying too hard to demonstrate results from aid given the difficulty of disentangling causes and effects and gauging success over too short a time frame.
Read more about the panel on foreign aid, or watch the video at the Woodrow Wilson Center.
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SFS Distinguished Professor Andrew Natsios wrote about Sudan's oil crisis, and how that is the least of Bashir's problems, with threats of being overthrown and an economy in tatters looming for Foreign Affairs this week.
But the referendum and the South's formal declaration of independence have not produced a lasting peace, yet. Despite the mediation of former South African President Thabo Mbeki, negotiations before independence (and since) left several unresolved issues to fester: How much the South would pay to transport oil through the North, where the actual border would lie (especially the status of the disputed region of Abyei), debt sharing, and what the citizenship status of South Sudanese remaining in the North, and vice versa, would be. In addition to tension surrounding these questions, a wider opposition that includes the three major Darfur rebel movements, the Northern arm of the Southern political movement, is growing. It is making this moment all the more precarious for Khartoum. In fact, the tangle of contestations and conflicts across the country marks the most serious challenge to the survival of Omar al-Bashir's Islamist government since it usurped power more than two decades ago.
Read more about the troubles in the Republic of South Sudan in Foreign Affairs.
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North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il died suddenly of an apparent heart attack on December 17th, 2011, leaving his youngest son, Kim Jong-un in power. About a month later, on January 18th, 2012, the Asian Studies Department, along with the Mortara Center for International Studies and the Center for Peace and Security Studies hosted an event in the ICC Auditorium where Georgetown professors Victor Cha, Michael Green and Paul Pillar and American University's Ji-Young Lee came together to discuss the intelligence, security, and geopolitical situation surrounding North Korea. In this podcast, the Asian Studies Wire brings you some highlights of the event.
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Another exciting announcement about a SFS alumna comes from the President's office! BSFS alumna Erin C. Conaton has been announced the nominee for Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness at the Department of Defense.
Erin C. Conaton is currently the Under Secretary of the Air Force. Prior to her confirmation in 2010, she served on the House Committee on Armed Services as Staff Director (2007-2010), Minority Staff Director (2005-2007), and Professional Staff Member (2001-2005). From 1998 to 2001, she worked on the U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century, also known as the Hart-Rudman Commission. She holds B.S. from Georgetown University School of Foreign Service and an M.A. from The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.
Read more about Erin and other White House nominations.
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Colin H. Kahl, associate professor for the SSP program, recently wrote a rebuttal to an article in Foreign Affairs arguing that it was time to attack Iran saying that Washington should not choose war when there are still other options. He went on to say that Washington should not base decisions off of best-case scenarios of how it hopes the situation would turn out.
In "Time to Attack Iran" (January/February 2012), Matthew Kroenig takes a page out of the decade-old playbook used by advocates of the Iraq war. He portrays the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran as both grave and imminent, arguing that the United States has little choice but to attack Iran now before it is too late. Then, after offering the caveat that "attacking Iran is hardly an attractive prospect," he goes on to portray military action as preferable to other available alternatives and concludes that the United States can manage all the associated risks. Preventive war, according to Kroenig, is "the least bad option."
But the lesson of Iraq, the last preventive war launched by the United States, is that Washington should not choose war when there are still other options, and it should not base its decision to attack on best-case analyses of how it hopes the conflict will turn out. A realistic assessment of Iran's nuclear progress and how a conflict would likely unfold leads one to a conclusion that is the opposite of Kroenig's: now is not the time to attack Iran.
Click here to read Kahl's whole piece in Foreign Affairs on why it's "Not Time to Attack Iran".
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