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IN CHARACTER: TA (and "reporter")
Kai Stinchcombe eavesdrops on Libya and China.
Glenn Matsumura |
The Chinese delegation,
somewhat predictably, walked out of the auditorium as
the Taiwanese representative approached the podium.
But no one was quite prepared for the posturing of the
North Koreans. When it came time for their chair to
address the plenary session, each minister and officer
stood at attention in the Cubberley balcony and applauded
loudly. They continued to stand throughout his remarks.
“We had our top-secret instructions, and it seemed
very like North Korea to isolate ourselves,” says
sophomore political science major Stefanie Garcia, recently
of the national security agency of the Democratic People’s
Republic of Korea.
Garcia is one of 198 students enrolled in International
Security in a Changing World, offered by the departments
of political science and of management science and engineering.
A star attraction is the simulation exercise that takes
place during the fourth week of the course. This year
students were divided into teams representing 24 countries
that United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan “invited”
to Stanford to review the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation
of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and to consider concerns about
nuclear weapons in North Korea and Iran.
Prior to the plenary session, student delegates met
with their heads of state to plan negotiating strategies.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, in the person of Scott
Sagan, a political science professor and co-director
of the Center for International Security and Cooperation
(CISAC), grilled his minister of defense and national
security adviser on the state’s uranium enrichment
program, and said that he would brook few compromises.
“I do not hold discussions,” Sagan-as-Kim
told the North Korean delegates. It was up to them,
he said, to “confuse the Americans” and
“create a fear of our strength.”
“Because we weren’t signatories to NPT,
we were sort of messing with other countries’
plans,” says sophomore Megan Stacy, deputy chair
of the DPRK delegation. “We signed a positive
security agreement with China, in which they stated
that an attack on North Korea would be considered an
attack on China, in exchange for very minimal concessions
on our part.”
Sagan co-teaches the course with Coit Blacker, director
of the Stanford Institute for International Studies,
and former U.S. Secretary of Defense William Perry,
a professor of management science and engineering and
SIIS senior fellow. “The purpose of the course
is to provide Stanford undergraduates, relatively early
in their career, with a very structured but very comprehensive
interdisciplinary exposure to the broad area of contemporary
international security relations,” says Blacker.
“They know this is the gateway course for the
CISAC honors program, and they want to be the next Condi
Rice” (a previous TA and lecturer for the class).
Launched in 1971 as Arms Control and Disarmament, the
course has had its own post-Cold War transformation.
About one-third of the readings on the syllabus change
each year, as do the guest lecturers. Physicists have
explained uranium enrichment, political scientists have
talked about the demand for nuclear weapons and biologists
have discussed anthrax and smallpox as weapons of mass
destruction. “People [teach] this course because
they feel a responsibility to help train the next generation
of security specialists,” Sagan says.
Blacker, who served on the National Security Council
during the Clinton administration, and Sagan, who worked
for the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Reagan administration,
also share their knowledge of negotiating skills. “Early
undergraduates have a tendency to argue passionately
because they know so little,” Blacker says. “They
learn a lot [in the course] and tend to become more
modest in terms of how they present ideas. And they
learn that simply doing well on the debate team is no
guarantee of success in an environment like the simulation
because it’s not judged by reference to the elegance
of your rhetoric. The standard is, ‘Did you get
a deal?’”
As cell phones rang, students in natty business attire
darted in and out of the plenary session to confer with
heads of state and collect press releases. Delegates
leaked documents that hinted at nuclear tests and new
missile technologies, and brokered behind-the-scenes
power plays. “We basically sat up in the balcony
and sold $7.5 billion worth of plutonium to Iran and
Libya,” says DPRK national security specialist
Garcia. Good thing it’s only a simulation. |
