100 YEARS OF IMPACT
ESSAYS ON THE CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE
Written and researched by David Adesnik.
Š 2011 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. All rights reserved. CarnegieEndowment.org/pubs Carnegie Endowment for International Peace 1779 Massachusetts Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20036 Phone: +1 202 483 7600 Fax: +1 202 483 1840 CarnegieEndowment.org
letter from the president
affairs think tank in the United States. Founded by Andrew Carnegie in 1910 with a gift of $10 million, its charter was to “hasten the abolition of war, the foulest blot upon our civilization.” While that goal was always unattainable, throughout the intervening years the Carnegie Endowment has remained faithful to the mission of promoting peaceful engagement not only between the United States and other nations, but among all countries.
Several defining qualities shine through these accounts: the consistent excellence of the research produced by Carnegie policy experts and scholars over many decades; the institution’s unusual ability to stay young as it grew in age by regularly reinventing itself to stay ahead of the tide of change in the world; and, rarest and most important, a determination that its work should make a difference, should produce real change in the real world. I am pleased that so many Carnegie Endowment experts have gone on to set up their own think tanks, inspired by the Carnegie Endowment’s example—and in so doing have further enriched the world’s intellectual landscape.
ESSAYS ON THE CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE
The eleven chapters of this book do not attempt a comprehensive history. Rather, they describe an array of pivotal moments in the Carnegie Endowment’s life. Their purpose is to investigate the elusive question of impact and their subjects were chosen for their ability to illustrate how the Carnegie Endowment has influenced the making of policy—not just of the U.S. government, but of other governments, multilateral institutions, NGOs, and businesses.
100 YEARS OF IMPACT
The CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE is the oldest international
The most recent, and perhaps most important, reinvention was the announcement of our Global Vision of 2007, a plan to create the world’s first global think tank. Today, with a thriving network of locally staffed centers in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and America, the institution is on its way to achieving that ambitious goal. We owe deep thanks to those who created this book, particularly David Adesnik, who skillfully researched and wrote it. He is a notable example of the gifted alumni of Carnegie’s Junior Fellows program, which, for sixteen years, has been feeding critically needed young talent into the international affairs arena. Jocelyn Soly, a reliable fount of creativity, produced the volume’s beautiful design and layout. Josh Linden provided valuable additional research and Carnegie Endowment librarian Kathleen Higgs uncovered a treasure trove of historical documentation and photos. Tom Carver, vice president for communications and strategy, edited the text and steered the project to completion. Those of us, past and present, who have had the great good fortune to serve this extraordinary institution and the uncountable number who have worked with us as colleagues, critics, funders, and participants in so many projects, can look forward to our second century with a real sense of accomplishment and with the expectation of notable contributions to a more peaceful world yet to come.
Jessica T. Mathews President
letter from the CHAIRMAN
his endowment for peace on its founding. In the letter announcing his bequest, Carnegie granted complete freedom to the board to pursue the cause of peace as the members saw fit. “Lines of future action can not be wisely laid down,” the founder explained, “Many may have to be tried, and having full confidence in my Trustees I leave to them the widest discretion as to the measures and policy they shall from time to time adopt.”
ESSAYS ON THE CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE
The remarkable caliber of the original trustees merited this declaration of unqualified trust. Their leader was Senator Elihu Root of New York, the former secretary of war and of state and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1912. Nicholas Murray Butler, the illustrious president of Columbia University, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931 and succeeded Root as Carnegie Endowment head. The rest of the group was a veritable who’s-who of foreign policy expertise and American leadership and influence: Charles W. Eliot, president (emeritus) of Harvard; philanthropist Robert S. Brookings; former ambassador to Great Britain, Joseph H. Choate; former secretary of state John W. Foster; and many more. After Butler’s retirement, John Foster Dulles became chairman of the board, a position he held until his appointment as secretary of state. The most renowned of the trustees was General Dwight David Eisenhower, who also inherited Butler’s mantle as president of Columbia.
100 YEARS OF IMPACT
Andrew Carnegie placed great faith in the 28 trustees chosen to administer
In the postwar years, the board of trustees chose to invest a great measure of their responsibility in a strong chief executive, to whom they gave the title of president and, increasingly, they assumed the role of strategic advisers, providing invaluable support to the many initiatives upon which the Carnegie Endowment’s presidents have embarked. It has been my privilege, as well as that of my distinguished predecessor, James Gaither, to have played a role in shaping the Global Vision, through which Jessica Mathews has revitalized the Carnegie Endowment and transformed it into the first global think tank, as measured not just by its geographic reach, but by the influence and expertise of its scholars. The 100th anniversary of the Carnegie Endowment finds it among the very top ranks of think tanks around the world, a position that would have made its founder very proud. The spirit of Andrew Carnegie, who hoped that the institution would serve to promote international engagement and cooperation, is as present today in the work of Carnegie’s superb scholars as it ever was. I have no doubt that the twenty-first century will be a time of great opportunity for this wonderful organization.
Richard V. Giordano Chairman
TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: A Century of Impact................................................................................................10 Chapter Two: From Peace to War and Back Again..........................................................................24 Chapter Three: Winning the Nobel Peace Prize..............................................................................30 Chapter Four: A New Hope for Peace............................................................................................38 Chapter Five: The Crime With No Name......................................................................................44 Chapter Seven: The Greatest Threat...............................................................................................60 Chapter Eight: Bosnia and the Founding of the International Crisis Group...................................70 Chapter Nine: The Russia Project...................................................................................................78 Chapter Ten: The Alternative to War..............................................................................................86 Chapter Eleven: Pioneering the Global Think Tank........................................................................94 Appendix A: Board of Trustees.....................................................................................................103 Appendix B: Presidents.................................................................................................................113 Appendix C: Junior Fellows..........................................................................................................115 Appendix D: Chapter Notes.........................................................................................................117 Appendix E: Photo Resources.......................................................................................................125
9 ESSAYS ON THE CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE
Chapter Six: Enriching the Institutional Landscape........................................................................52
100 YEARS OF IMPACT
Chapter One: The Founder and the Founding...............................................................................16
I NT RODUCT ION
A CENTURY OF IMPACT
The difficult but crucial question to answer is how intellectual capital is transferred from its creators to its consumers. There is intense competition among wouldbe advisers hoping to capture the attention of busy officials. What the study of the Carnegie Endowment’s
history illuminates is how scholars have forged the relationships necessary to inject their ideas into the policymaking process at crucial moments. The Carnegie Endowment was ahead of its time in 1910, when it became the first American research institution devoted to international affairs. It was also ahead of its time ninety-five years later, when it began to pioneer the transformation of think tanks from single-country enterprises into networked global institutions. Today, it is recognized worldwide as one of a small circle of institutions that sets the standard for innovative, highquality research.
11 ESSAYS ON THE CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE
The starting point for this influence is the development of new ideas and, in the dozens of interviews conducted for this project, current and former associates often cited “intellectual capital” as think tanks’ most important contribution to the policy-making process. For policy makers determined to replenish their supply of intellectual capital, think tanks are an invaluable resource.
100 YEARS OF IMPACT
by their nature,
think tanks do not succeed alone. Their impact on policy is always part of a collaborative process. Furthermore, the role that think tanks play as part of that process is hugely varied. The chapters that follow illustrate how the men and women of the Carnegie Endowment have continually discovered or invented new ways to impact the policy-making process.
The Carnegie Endowment’s Washington headquarters from 1911–1949, 2 Jackson Pl., NW.
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Yet the mission of the Carnegie Endowment is not to win the respect of scholars and policy makers. It is to have an impact on policy. That mission is reflected in the guidance that Jessica Mathews, the Carnegie Endowment’s president, often gives to associates at annual planning sessions. In her words:
Don’t tell us about how many papers and how many policy briefs [you’ll write]; tell us how the world will be different as a result of what you do here.
The mission of the Carnegie Endowment is dedicated to “achieving practical results.” But this kind of impact is an extraordinarily difficult thing to measure. Academics and think tank leaders have often suggested that any attempt to measure it would be purely quixotic, and few attempts have been made. Rigorous histories either of individual institutions or of the community as a whole are few and far between. Several works have explored specific aspects of the Carnegie Endowment’s history, but no complete history of the institution exists.
Pathways of Influence One way to ensure an attentive audience for a think tank’s output is to win a direct commission from the government to provide it with advice and counsel. In the first decades of the twentieth century, the federal government employed few researchers and analysts. Chapter 2 describes how the Carnegie Endowment’s Division of International Law, under the leadership of James Brown Scott, became the State Department’s de facto research and analysis unit after the United States entered World War I. This arrangement grew out of the close, personal ties between the Carnegie Endowment and the State Department in those years, especially as Elihu Root, president of the board of trustees, had served as secretary of state. Commissioned work remained an important pathway of influence during the twentieth century, despite the tremendous growth of government. Chapter 6 recounts how the Greek government called upon the Migration Policy Institute (MPI)—an outgrowth of Carnegie’s
Migration Policy Program—to help Athens establish itself as a leader on immigration policy during its 2003 presidency of the EU. The success of the Greek initiative led several other European governments to call on MPI for support while they held the presidency.
The benefits of serving on an advisory board may not become apparent immediately. During her tenure as director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, Rose Gottemoeller received an invitation to join a nuclear advisory panel at the Russian ministry of foreign affairs. Gottemoeller was the only American invited. In 2009, she left the Carnegie Endowment to become assistant secretary of state for arms control, verification, and compliance. In that capacity, she served as the chief negotiator of New START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty), which the Senate ratified in December 2010. At the negotiating table in Geneva, Gottemoeller’s counterpart was Ambassador Anatoly Antonov, director of security and disarmament affairs at the Russian foreign
The example of the New START negotiations illustrates the positive value of rotation, whereby onceand-future officials lay the foundation for substantive achievements while in residence at a think tank. It is equally important to note that think tank personnel who enter government often maintain relationships with their former colleagues, which result in the transfer of intellectual capital. After fifteen years of affiliation with the Carnegie Endowment, Michael McFaul became the National Security Council (NSC)’s senior director for Russia and Eurasia in January 2009. His first years at the Carnegie Endowment included an eighteen-month stay at the Moscow Center, whose founding is the subject of Chapter 9. Sitting in his office at the NSC, McFaul recently explained, “I just got a note from [Nikolai] Petrov 30 minutes ago, I mean, [my colleagues in Moscow] are incredibly valuable to me as a policy maker right now . . . . They’re just close friends, and we’ve collaborated for years, so I trust their judgment.” Often, informal contacts between Carnegie Endowment associates and government officials may have a
13 ESSAYS ON THE CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE
Intellectual Capital
According to a recent head count, three-fifths of the current assistant secretaries of state departed from positions at think tanks.1 Although some people deride think tanks for their role as “holding pens,” the real issue of concern is not whether government officials migrate to the think tank sector and vice versa, but whether think tanks compromise their independence and intellectual standards in order to ensure the continual rotation of this revolving door.
100 YEARS OF IMPACT
Instead of commissioning a specific report or proposal, a government may also invite think tank personnel to serve on formal or informal advisory boards. James T. Shotwell, director of the Carnegie Endowment’s Division of Economics and History, led the delegation of nongovernment advisers at the 1945 conference in San Francisco where the United Nations charter was drafted. Chapter 4 describes how Shotwell persuaded the U.S. delegation to insert significant amendments into the draft UN charter, including one that established the permanent UN commission on human rights.
ministry. In Chapter 7, Gottemoeller observes, “There’s no question we were able to negotiate the treaty more quickly because of our work together in Moscow.”
more rapid and dramatic impact than the deliberately paced work of a formal advisory board. In June 2010, ethnic violence in Kyrgyzstan provoked the flight of 75,000 ethnic Uzbeks across the border into neighboring Uzbekistan. In spite of the dire conditions faced by the refugees, the Uzbek regime remained suspicious of the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) and rejected the UN’s offer of help.
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Uzbek officials reached out to Carnegie Endowment Senior Associate Martha Brill Olcott to ask her advice. Olcott explained, “Together we framed the arguments that helped persuade the government to allow in UNHCR to provide assistance.” It was no accident that Uzbek officials reached out specifically to Olcott—her work in Central Asia over more than two decades demonstrated the Carnegie Endowment’s bona fides to governments in the region. Publications or meetings that have no immediate impact on policy may facilitate the exercise of influence much later on. However, one cannot take this outcome for granted. It depends on the ability of a think tank’s scholars to braid the disparate strands of their work into a unified whole.
Overcoming Resistance One of the most difficult challenges for a think tank is to have an impact on policy when a government is actively determined to resist its advice. Chapter 3 tells the story of Shotwell and Nicholas Murray Butler’s innovative campaign to secure the Coolidge administration’s support for a treaty to renounce war as an instrument of national policy. In 1927, Shotwell launched the campaign by persuading
the French government to propose an anti-war treaty to its counterpart in Washington. When President Calvin Coolidge and Secretary of State Frank Kellogg resisted the proposal, Shotwell and Butler mobilized their allies in the press and on Capitol Hill to drum up support for the proposal. The result of their efforts was the KelloggBriand Pact of 1929 and a Nobel Peace Prize for Butler. It also earned Kellogg a Nobel Peace Prize and allowed him to leave his mark on history. More recently, Morton Abramowitz, president of the Carnegie Endowment from 1991 through 1997, launched a multi-faceted campaign to rouse an indifferent Clinton administration to end the slaughter of Muslims in Bosnia. Chapter 8 recounts how Abramowitz brought pressure to bear on the administration with his writing, with invitations to prominent Bosnians to speak at the Carnegie Endowment, by establishing a bipartisan alliance of concerned leaders, and by taking his case directly to leading officials in the Clinton administration, many of whom he knew personally as a result of his years as a senior ambassador with the State Department. One cannot say whether the administration would have acted differently in the absence of such pressure. Perhaps the enormity of the Srebrenica massacre alone would have spurred it to action. Yet the difficulty of tracing lines of causation is a problem for historians, not those engaged in events at the time. In rare instances, words alone have an impact on policy, without any effort by their author or publisher to ensure a receptive hearing from policy makers. Recently, an official from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) mentioned to Carnegie Endowment Vice President for Studies Thomas Carothers that his ideas for the improvement of democracy
ABOVE: Ledger entry showing Andrew Carnegie’s gift to create the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
100 YEARS OF IMPACT
LEFT: The Carnegie Endowment’s current Washington headquarters at 1779 Massachusetts Avenue, NW.
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There are few authors whose work generates this kind of organic response. In 2002, the Carnegie Endowment surveyed its associates to find out which of its programs they considered to be the most influential. According to a memo that summarized the associates’ response, their first choice was the Carnegie Endowment’s democracy assistance program. The memo observed, “Thanks to the work over the last [five] years of Tom Carothers and Marina Ottaway, the Carnegie Endowment has become the resource on the theory and practice of democracy assistance, with an emphasis on long-term, agenda-setting research.”2 Successful institutions influence policy in ways their founders never could have imagined.
Andrew Carnegie would have been surprised to discover that, one hundred years later, the Carnegie Endowment is flourishing on the ground not only in Washington, but in Moscow, Beijing, Beirut, and Brussels. The story of the Carnegie Endowment’s Global Vision is told in the concluding chapter of this book. The chance to have an impact on policy may arise suddenly and necessitate a rapid response, or it may also be ambient and require years of patient work to realize. In either case, success may depend on preparations that began decades earlier. No one knows how the global network that the Carnegie Endowment is creating will influence the policy makers of the twenty-first century. But if the past is prologue, then it is reasonable to expect great things from any institution that bears the name of the Carnegie Endowment.
ESSAYS ON THE CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE
assistance programs would serve as the basis of a major internal reform initiative at USAID.
CHAPTER ONE
The founder and the founding
For two decades, Carnegie had spoken and published, counseled and cajoled leading statesmen on both sides of the Atlantic on behalf of peace and donated millions of dollars to the struggle against war. In doing so, he had developed a reputation as a naïve optimist, a “peace crank,”2 in the words of President William Howard Taft. But given his wealth and his prominence in public life, he was hard to ignore. However, by that winter of 1917, the European powers had been fighting each other for three years, and were mired in the mud of Flanders. Millions of people had died in the conflict. After much soul-searching, Carnegie decided that America could no longer stand
on the sidelines. Reluctantly, he concluded that peace had its limits. To prevent another three years of suffering, the United States had no choice but to intervene, for the German Reich, he wrote, had shown itself to be “completely insane.”3 His turmoil and confusion about whether or not to go to war was a reflection of what many others were going through at the time, including the president. Three months earlier, Wilson had won a second term by campaigning under the slogan, “He kept us out of war.” But by April, his diplomatic initiatives exhausted, Wilson declared war on Germany.
17 ESSAYS ON THE CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE
President Woodrow Wilson, urging him to declare war on Germany. It was a startling volte-face for America’s most famous peace activist. The richest man in America, Carnegie had spent a sizeable portion of his fortune trying to find a way to end armed conflict between nations. In the words of his most recent biographer, he was “something of a national monument . . . and a favorite of reporters.”1
100 YEARS OF IMPACT
On February 14, 1917, Andrew Carnegie sent a letter to
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THE Early Years Carnegie was an easy man to like. A natural raconteur and a generous spirit, his energy and dynamism drew people in. He had enormous self-confidence, an inveterate optimism, and a contagious sense of humor, inducing laughter even while testifying before Congress. He was born in 1835 in a two-room cottage in Dunfermline, Scotland, the son of an impoverished cloth weaver, a profession that was rapidly being eliminated by the mass-production methods of the steam loom. Unable to find work, the Carnegies immigrated to the United States in the hope of finding a better life. They made their way to Pittsburgh, where they had relatives. When he was thirteen, it was decided that Andrew, the oldest of two boys, should leave school to work in a cotton mill. Carnegie did not abandon his learning and read voraciously in his spare time.4 He was blessed with a prodigious memory and could recite long passages by heart
from Shakespeare and Robert Burns, the Scottish poet. His head was also full of history and statistics, many of which would fill the pages of Triumphant Democracy (1886), his one-volume introduction to American life, written for the benefit of foreign audiences. Physically, Carnegie was anything but imposing. He wore high-heeled boots and a top hat to seem taller than his actual height (5’1”). Trim and athletic, he had a passion for horse riding, fishing, and golf. While Carnegie always identified himself as a Christian, he was profoundly skeptical of every kind of belief.5 Margaret Carnegie, Andrew’s mother, lived with him her entire life. Only after her death, when Carnegie was fifty-two years old, did he allow himself to marry Louise Whitfield, to whom he remained fiercely loyal for his remaining thirty-two years. Andrew and Louise had one daughter, Margaret, named for his mother. Carnegie’s head for business showed early in his life. He left the cotton mill to become a messenger boy for a
That year, he decided to leave Pittsburgh for New York. He had ambitions to make his mark as a “man of letters” and the City of Steel had become “too small, too provincial, too uncultured, and too uncultivated for him.”7 Within a decade, Carnegie had become a fixture in the upper reaches of literary and political society. Carnegie was a Republican, having been an abolitionist since the mid-1850s when he described slavery to his cousin as “the greatest evil in the world.” His brief service in the Department of War in 1861 remained a source of pride throughout his life.8 For Carnegie, there was no contradiction between service in a just war and devoting oneself to peace. His closest friends included
James G. Blaine, the Republican secretary of state and candidate for president in 1884.9 Although Carnegie would remain a devout Republican throughout his life, his civility enabled him to build productive relationships with leading Democrats, even those he worked hard to defeat, such as Wilson.
Carnegie’ s Philanthropic Efforts In 1901, J.P. Morgan arranged the sale of Carnegie’s steel interests for $400 million. Instantly, Carnegie became the richest man in America at the age of 66. In today’s dollars, he would have been comfortably ahead of Bill Gates or Warren Buffett.10 Carnegie’s full-time devotion to philanthropy and peace began immediately. The focal point of his agenda was the cause of arbitration, or the judicial resolution of international disputes.11 Since the 1880s, Carnegie had been a vocal supporter of binding bilateral treaties
19 ESSAYS ON THE CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE
telegraph company and from there went to work on the Pennsylvania railways. He made his first investment at the age of 20. By 1870, at the age of 35, Carnegie had a net worth estimated by a trade publication to be $1 million—at a time when per-capita GDP hovered around $200 per year.6
100 YEARS OF IMPACT
LEFT TO RIGHT: A bird’s eye view of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1902. Andrew Carnegie, 1861. In 1903, Andrew Carnegie gave $1.5 million for the construction of a Peace Palace at The Hague, shown here in an architechtural rendering.
of arbitration that would compel each government to submit its disputes to a panel of arbiters. In 1899, the establishment of a Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague provided no small encouragement to advocates of the cause.12 He believed that, in a world of competing empires and increasing tension, America should act as an honest broker to settle disputes and avoid the specter of war.
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That year, Theodore Roosevelt became the youngest president in history, taking office after the assassination of his predecessor, William McKinley. Roosevelt’s youthful energy was immediately appealing to Carnegie who soon became a frequent guest at the White House. He also exchanged long letters with the president, in which they debated current policy. Roosevelt charmed Carnegie, understanding his importance to the Republican Party, and managed to keep his support despite the president’s imperial ambitions, which caused the philanthropist considerable concern.
he observed. Carnegie never seemed to understand that Roosevelt only tolerated him out of necessity because his wealth and connections made him impossible to ignore.
The Carnegie Endowment’ s Founding Taft’s election in 1908 provided Carnegie with a president more receptive to his counsel. Early in 1910, Taft signaled that he was willing to go much further than Roosevelt in the pursuit of binding treaties of arbitration. The previous year, Carnegie had turned aside a proposal from close friends to create a fund for peace.14 But now, in order to strengthen Taft’s resolve and promote his agenda, Carnegie decided that the time was right. In the words of one biographer, Carnegie intended his “peace trust” to “provide the president with whatever assistance he might require to write his new treaties and get the Senate to approve them.”15
During Roosevelt’s second term, Carnegie lobbied hard for the administration to take a leading role at the second Peace Conference at The Hague. Roosevelt and his secretary of state, Elihu Root, trusted Carnegie sufficiently to let him serve as a back channel to the British government in the run-up to the conference.
On December 14, 1910, Carnegie signed the deed of trust, transferring $10 million (the equivalent of $3.5 billion in 2010 dollars) to the trustees. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace was born. Among the first trustees were many veterans of the arbitration movement, especially international lawyers.16
But Roosevelt became increasingly contemptuous of what he saw as Carnegie’s naïveté and hypocrisy. The president wrote to a friend that he had “tried hard to like Carnegie, but it is pretty difficult.” He found Carnegie increasingly hard to tolerate. “All the suffering from [the] Spanish [American] war comes far short of the suffering, preventable and non-preventable, among the operators of the Carnegie steel works,”13
Announcing his gift, Carnegie instructed the board of trustees to direct all of their efforts toward “the speedy abolition of international war between so-called civilized nations,” after which the trustees should “then consider what is the next most degrading [of the] remaining evil or evils whose banishment . . . would most advance the progress, elevation and happiness of man, and so on from century to century without end.”17
Carnegie always spoke in superlatives, especially when cultivating his friends in the White House. In this instance, however, prominent editorial writers seconded Carnegie’s judgment. The New York Times called the treaties “perhaps the crowning achievement” of the Taft administration.19 The Los Angeles Times declared them to be the noblest act by a president since President Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves.20 In spite of such praise, Taft grumbled to his friends that he was being pushed too far and too fast by Carnegie. Roosevelt, eager to wrest the Republican nomination away from Taft, publicly criticized the value of arbitration, much to Carnegie’s dismay. Binding arbitration might be acceptable with Britain and France, Roosevelt
argued, but with Germany or Japan it would threaten the national interest. The dispute confronted the newly created Carnegie Endowment with an uncomfortable choice. Its board of trustees comprised the elder statesmen of the Republican Party. Would they mobilize the Carnegie Endowment’s wealth to support the treaties, or would they insulate the Carnegie Endowment from the bitterness of partisan politics? Right from the outset there was a noticeable difference between Carnegie’s desire to see an activist organization dedicated to pushing forward his agenda, and many of the trustees, who favored a greater focus on research. Root, Roosevelt’s former secretary of state who had become the first president of the board of trustees, said the Carnegie Endowment should undertake a “careful, scientific and thorough study of the causes of war and the remedies which can be applied to the causes, rather than merely the treatment of symptoms.”21 That creative tension
21 ESSAYS ON THE CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE
In August 1911, Taft signed the first two treaties of unconditional arbitration, with Britain and France. Overjoyed, Carnegie dispatched a cable to the president, writing, “You have reached the summit of human glory. Countless ages are to honor and bless your name.”18
100 YEARS OF IMPACT
Andrew Carnegie and President William Howard Taft, center, in front of the Pan American Union Building, Washington, D.C., 1910.
Carnegie came to accept that no private institution— no matter how well-endowed—could chart the course of American diplomacy, let alone save humanity from the scourge of war. Instead, the Carnegie Endowment would shape the landscape in which policy is made by seeking out and sharing with others what Root described as “that deeper insight . . . attained only by long and faithful and continuous study.”24
Letter from Andrew Carnegie to the original board of trustees, December 14, 1910.
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between advocacy and research has remained a part of the Carnegie Endowment’s DNA for the last hundred years. The ambitions of the founder have often served to remind the Carnegie Endowment’s scholars and staff of the work that remains to be accomplished. In a collection of essays published on the occasion of the Carnegie Endowment’s fiftieth anniversary in 1961, President Joseph E. Johnson noted it was unclear how the Carnegie Endowment should celebrate this milestone. “A look back over the past five decades permitted no self-congratulatory recording of progress made in fulfillment of the mandate ‘to hasten the abolition of international war, the foulest blot on our civilization.’”22 A decade later, Johnson’s successor as president, Thomas L. Hughes, remarked that “the magnitude of our professed objective still looms so large as to appear presumptuous. The sheer implausibility of relating our goal to our means has, I suspect, always plagued us.”23
The huge scale of Carnegie’s ambition and the almost childlike zeal with which he pursued it has generated much criticism from historians. Yet Carnegie wrestled with the same great issues of international order, peace, and justice that perplex us today. If there is no law that binds the sovereign state, then a resort to arms will remain the final arbiter of disputes. Carnegie understood that courts alone could never impose such a law on sovereign states and eventually broadened his proposals to include an international police force and a “league of peace” or “league of nations” governed by a council of the great powers.25 Carnegie foresaw the way in which the international community would attempt to build such institutions in the aftermath of the Great War. Today, few people invest their hopes in international institutions to the extent that Carnegie did. Yet he himself often moderated his ambitions when confronted by an insuperable reality. With the benefit of hindsight, he may also have tempered his aspirations. Although Carnegie’s poor health made it impossible for him to travel, Wilson told Carnegie that he would “be present in spirit” at the peace talks that followed the First World War.26 Thanks to the Carnegie Endowment and other legacies, Carnegie’s spirit is still an active presence in the ongoing struggle to establish a peaceful and just international order one hundred years later.
CH A P T ER T WO
FROM PEACE TO WAR AND BACK AGAIN
carnegie and the great war: Supporting american diplomacy
on the Western Front forced the Carnegie Endowment to reconsider fundamental questions concerning its identity and purpose. The institution had been set up by Andrew Carnegie with the express purpose of “ending war,” but just five years after its creation, mankind was engaged in the greatest destruction ever known.
One trustee, Judge Thomas Burke, proposed that the name be changed to the “Carnegie Endowment for International Justice.”1 “The events of the last twenty months in Europe,” he declared, “must have shown to all the world that international justice is more important than international peace, because without international justice there can be no international peace.” International justice at least allowed for the possibility of the use of arms as a last resort. At the first meeting of the board of trustees after the war began, Nicholas Murray Butler, the future president of the Carnegie Endowment, borrowed an image from Greek mythology to capture the prevailing sense
of disillusionment at the time: “The stone of Sisyphus, which we had thought had been brought so nearly to the top of the hill, is now at the bottom of the longest and most difficult hill that history records in international affairs.”2
Wrestling with neutrality The United States had declared its neutrality in the war, but no one was very sure what the limits of its actions were. It fell to the Carnegie Endowment to provide such expert guidance when President Woodrow Wilson asked the Carnegie Endowment’s secretary, James Brown Scott, to head the Joint State and Navy Neutrality Board, the body charged with advising the government on the laws of wartime neutrality.
25 ESSAYS ON THE CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE
At what point does a principled commitment to peace demand support for armed resistance to aggression?
100 YEARS OF IMPACT
THE SLAUGHTER IN THE TRENCHES
Like the young Carnegie, Scott was the son of Scottish immigrants who landed on American shores in the late 1840s.3 He pursed a doctorate in law at Heidelberg in Germany and one day, while on a boat sailing from Egypt to the port of Jaffa, he encountered a young professor from Columbia University by the name of Nicholas Murray Butler. They became friends for life and Scott joined Butler at Columbia to become a professor of law. One of his students at the law school was the young Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who later addressed his letters to Scott, “Revered Preceptor of My Youth.”
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In 1906, Scott sent an unsolicited letter4 to Elihu Root, then secretary of state, advertising his interest in the open position of chief legal adviser to the State Department. The two men had never met before, but Root was so taken with Scott’s unaffected prose that he read Scott’s letter aloud at a cabinet meeting. Upon hearing it, President Theodore Roosevelt thumped the table and cried, ‘We must appoint that man!’” When Root then became president of the Carnegie Endowment and chairman of the board of trustees, Scott left the State Department to become the Carnegie Endowment’s secretary—in effect, its chief operating officer—as well as director of its Division of International Law. His tenure in both positions would last for three full decades. The Neutrality Board met every day at 10 a.m. at the Carnegie Endowment’s offices. The staff of Scott’s Division of International Law doubled as the staff for the board. The Carnegie Endowment’s headquarters at 2 Jackson Place, NW, was perfectly located to serve as a nexus of government policy. It sat just across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House and was surrounded by the departments of state, navy, and war.
As a result of Scott’s deep knowledge of the law, he became, in the words of one prominent historian, “a trusted and influential adviser to the Secretary of State on all questions relating to American neutrality.”5 But neutrality proved extraordinarily difficult to maintain, because of the warring powers’ constant provocations and the increasing polarization of public opinion on the home front. The board “dealt with all major issues arising during the time of American neutrality, including the sale of arms to belligerents, interference with neutral trade, the use of submarines and mines, the delineation of war zones, the definitions of contraband, and construction of ships for either side.”6 Often Scott found that the law was not sufficiently well developed to provide answers to the novel questions raised by the war. Scott told Secretary of State Robert Lansing with regard to the question of armed merchant vessels, “As a new question, with no known precedents, the solution almost of necessity involves new elements.”7 One of the most controversial questions addressed by the Neutrality Board concerned British pressure on the United States to impose a de facto blockade against Germany. In the first days of the war, the British government reserved the right to confiscate the cargo of neutral ships traveling from one neutral port to another, if it believed their cargo would ultimately contribute to the German war effort.8 This decision threatened the lucrative American trade with neutral ports such as Rotterdam, from which cargo could theoretically travel over land to Germany. In a lengthy memorandum to the secretary of state, the Neutrality Board argued that accepting the British
On the basis of the board’s finding, Lansing prepared a sharp protest for delivery to London,10 only for it to be toned down by Wilson. Although Wilson chose a more conciliatory approach to the British than Scott and Lansing wanted, this episode illustrates the degree to which Scott’s work influenced the highest levels of government.
Yet Elihu Root, the president of the Carnegie Endowment, chairman of its board of trustees, and former secretary of state and war, realized that any action short of actual military intervention was a gesture in futility:
War with Germany
“Anybody who interferes in a dog fight must do it by force,” he said. “It has been revolting to me to remain silent and not to cry aloud in the interests of right and justice and morality . . . . But always the question is between saying things for one’s own satisfaction . . . and on the other hand saying things with a clear, definite conception of what benefit they will cause.” 14
The records of the Carnegie Endowment board meeting of 1915 show an institution deeply divided by the war. Butler declared that his department felt “more or less crushed . . . by the complete collapse of the whole European structure of civilization.”12 One board member, Oscar Straus, a former secretary of commerce and labor in the Roosevelt administration, lamented:
The trustees heeded Root’s advice, including Carnegie himself, whose health would soon falter and who would never attend another meeting of the board. Despite his reputation as a tireless evangelist for peace, Carnegie agreed with Root and the majority of the board: “I am in thorough accord with the decision arrived at this morning,” he said. “I am satisfied that the part of wisdom is silence.”15
On April 6, 1917, both houses of Congress finally voted to declare war on Germany. The vote in the House was 373–50 and in the Senate 82–6. Two weeks later, the Carnegie Endowment’s board of trustees gathered for its annual meeting. The trustees unanimously approved a declaration stating that “the most effective means of
International agreements, international understandings, are being cast aside and thrown into the scrap heap…Are we right in remaining silent? Should we let it pass?…Perhaps we can effectively do something now, do something while events are
27 ESSAYS ON THE CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE
The Carnegie Endowment’s work in Europe was suspended for the duration of the war.11 In Paris, the staff of the Carnegie Endowment’s European headquarters departed in order to serve in the French armed forces. The caretaker at the Paris headquarters was wounded in action and later died as a prisoner of war.
marching before us, in order to live up to the principle for which we are working and have worked. Why cannot we, by [speaking out], do a hundred-fold more than by publishing a hundred volumes on international law?13
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position amounted to giving “Great Britain the advantages of a paper blockade, and without its difficulties.”9 In sum, the British position trampled on America’s rights as a neutral power by forcing the United States to take actions harmful to itself as well as to Germany.
As part of its support for the war effort, the trustees placed the Carnegie Endowment’s staff and facilities at the disposal of the federal government. Those facilities included two buildings adjacent to the Carnegie Endowment’s headquarters. One of them—6 Jackson Place, NW—became the headquarters of the Committee on Public Information, the government agency charged with awakening public enthusiasm for the war effort. The institution that Carnegie had founded as an advocate of peace had become, in effect, now part of the U.S. wartime government. With the Neutrality Board closing once the United States entered the war, the Carnegie Endowment’s Division of International Law focused on assessing the legal issues that American negotiators would face at the peace conference expected to follow the war and prepared a series of 24 volumes.
28
The dilemmas of peace The International Commission’s inquiry into the Balkan Wars was sponsored by the Carnegie Endowment at the urging of Carnegie Endowment Director Nicholas Murray Butler. Eighty years later, when violence again erupted in the Balkans after the fall of the Soviet Union, the Carnegie Endowment re-released the study with an introduction by former U.S. diplomat, the late George Kennan.
promoting durable international peace is to prosecute the war against the Imperial Government of Germany to final victory for democracy.” In case anyone might think that a body with “international peace” in its name might be less than fully behind the war effort, the Carnegie Endowment added a new motto to its stationery: “Peace through Victory”!16
When peace was declared, five members of the Carnegie Endowment’s staff, led by Scott, sailed across the Atlantic with President Wilson on the USS George Washington. Scott remained an influential adviser to the secretary of state, even though Lansing found himself marginalized at Versailles as a result of personal and political disputes with Wilson.
Although the president’s closest advisers recommended that he appoint Root, president of the Carnegie Endowment’s board, to the U.S. delegation to Versailles, Wilson demurred.17 At the time, no Republican had greater influence than Root over his party’s foreign policy. Had Root become part of the American delegation, the United States might well have ratified the outcome at Versailles.
ABOVE: President Woodrow Wilson delivers his war message to a joint session of Congress, April 2, 1917.
100 YEARS OF IMPACT
LEFT: James Brown Scott, secretary and director of the Carnegie Endowment’s Division of International Law, 1914.
29
Once again the board found itself divided, this time over the merits of the Versailles Treaty. While regretting the bitterness of public debate and the shallow sensationalism of American journalists, Root also gave voice to a much deeper pessimism. He told the board:
We are impressed by the inadequacy of everything that is being attempted, the League of Nations, Supreme Council, peace organizations, the
inadequacy of it all is the great fact we have to deal with, and, if any of you can think of anything, why for God’s sake let’s have it. . .
Where can we help? Every man who has accepted the responsibility of this Trust is under an obligation to put his mind to that great question and see if we can turn in some way our forces toward promoting something that will be of consequence or effective.19
Europe lay devastated, and an uneasy peace, which satisfied no country that signed it, had been forced upon the warring parties. The Carnegie Endowment turned to the monumental task of building or rebuilding the institutions of peace, but after the death of so many people and so many years of fighting, Carnegie’s appeal to “hasten the abolition of war, the foulest blot upon our civilization” seemed further away than ever.
ESSAYS ON THE CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE
Yet in one important respect, Root did leave an impression on the postwar settlement. On his advice, the American proposals presented at Versailles included a provision to establish a court associated with the League of Nations. Shortly after the war, both Root and Scott served on the Commission of Jurists charged with setting up the Permanent Court of International Justice—predecessor of today’s International Court of Justice.18
CHAPTER THREE
WINNING THE nobel peace prize
The idea, in fact, did not belong to the French but to an American, James T. Shotwell, who at the time was director of the Division of Economics and History at the Carnegie Endowment. The story of how it came about is a remarkable example of how one scholar’s dedication to an idea can influence national and international policy.
After the First World War, Shotwell, who was also professor of history at Columbia University, had been preoccupied with compiling a comprehensive study of the Great War and eventually oversaw production of the Carnegie Endowment’s seminal Economic and Social History of the World War, a series of 150 volumes that included contributions by statesmen and
31 ESSAYS ON THE CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE
unusual offer from the French government. In a brief Associated Press report, the French Foreign Minister, Aristide Briand, announced that his country would “subscribe publicly with the United States”1 to a mutual agreement for the renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy. The date was significant: it was ten years to the day after the United States’ entry into the Great War. Within one year, this offer had been turned into an international treaty known as the Kellogg-Briand Pact, also known as the Pact of Paris. By the time it went into effect a year later, it had attracted signatories from 46 nations.
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On APRIL 6, 1927, America’s leading newspapers carried an
scholars from all of the major belligerent powers.2 He was beloved by students at Columbia for his “deep, resonant voice, his wit . . . and his willingness to experiment with new teaching techniques.”3
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He profoundly regretted the United States’ refusal to ratify the Treaty of Versailles and join the League of Nations and was determined to promote deeper U.S. engagement with Europe. By the 1920s, he had become particularly concerned about the increasingly poor relationship between the United States and France.4 Many Americans saw France as a militarist power bent on humiliating the vulnerable and impoverished Germans. For their part, the French were unsettled by the Americans’ apparent contempt for the idea of collective security, on which France relied to allay its concerns about the expected resurgence of Germany.
During a visit to France in the spring of 1927, Shotwell set into motion an unorthodox plan to bring the French and Americans together in the name of peace. After reaching Paris on March 15, Shotwell approached his friend Albert Thomas, director of the International Labour Organization (ILO) secretariat, who facilitated an immediate audience with Briand on March 22. Shotwell advised Briand that France’s resistance to various American disarmament initiatives had resulted in widespread suspicion of French motives in the United States. Yet this misunderstanding could easily be resolved, Shotwell said, by “not merely the renunciation of instruments of war but the renunciation of war itself.”5 With the tenth anniversary of the United States’ entrance into the First World War just two weeks away,
nicholas murray butler Nicholas Murray Butler, director of the Division of Intercourse and Education since its inception, succeeded Elihu Root as the Carnegie Endowment’s second president in 1925. Butler immediately set out to survey some 200 statesmen from around the world for their assessment of the Carnegie Endowment during its first fifteen years. With only one exception, the statesmen voiced approval of the Carnegie Endowment’s activities. Butler took the results to indicate that the Carnegie Endowment had “established itself in practically every land as a major influence in the enlightenment and instruction of public opinion in all that relates to war and peace.” Although known for his hyberbolic rhetoric at times, Butler truly did believe that informed public opinion would lead to sensible government policy. Thus, the Carnegie Endowment continued to resource its Division of Intercourse and Education at much higher levels than its other two departments.
Shotwell impressed upon Briand that a proposal to renounce war as an instrument of national policy would be the perfect way for France to commemorate the occasion. Briand questioned how exactly to follow through on Shotwell’s advice. Mindful of the laws that prohibited private citizens from engaging in official diplomacy, Shotwell offered to draft a message that the foreign minister could then release to the American public through the Paris office of the Associated Press.6
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The Carnegie Endowment published International Conciliation, a widely respected source of information for those interested in law, education, ethics, economics, and government. The journal featured articles and addresses by distinguished leaders and dignitaries, notes from international conferences, texts of treaties, and statements of government policy. The final volume of the journal appeared in March of 1972.
ESSAYS ON THE CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE
Despite their professional association and shared values, Butler and Shotwell were not friends.8 Unassuming where Butler was ostentatious, Shotwell considered his colleague at the Carnegie Endowment to be condescending and pretentious.9 Yet to his many admirers and political allies, Nicholas Butler was “Nicholas Miraculous,” a nickname bestowed in recognition of the impressive things he accomplished at an early age.10 At 22, Butler received the first Ph.D. in philosophy awarded by Columbia University. At forty, he became the university’s president, then built Columbia into the largest university in the world at the time. In 1912, when President William Howard Taft’s vice president, James S. Sherman, died just days before the November elections, the Republican Party chose Butler to replace him. One Columbia professor who taught both Butler and Teddy Roosevelt even remarked that Butler held more “executive potential” than the future Rough Rider sitting in the first row of his class.11
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Yet when Shotwell returned to the United States on April 15, he discovered to his dismay that the American press had treated Briand’s offer with relative indifference; devoting significantly more column space to an April 8 debate on the subject of prohibition, with Senator William Borah (R-ID) speaking in favor and Nicholas Murray Butler, the president of the Carnegie Endowment, speaking against.7
LEFT: In 1920, the Carnegie Endowment began sponsoring international relations clubs (IRCs) at universities across the United States. This map outlines the various conferences around the country. ABOVE: Carnegie Endowment President Nicholas Murray Butler was presented with the Nobel Peace Prize on December 10, 1931, for his active role in promoting the Kellogg-Briand Pact.
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Shotwell hoped that Butler would provide the kind of high-profile, charismatic leadership necessary to mobilize support for Briand’s initiative. But initially, Butler was not particularly interested. Undeterred, Shotwell visited his friend John Finley, the editor of the New York Times, and recounted the story of his exchange with Briand.12 Finley suggested that Shotwell recruit Butler to write a letter to the editor in support of the idea. Five days later, on April 25, the Times published Butler’s letter, buttressed by a concurring editorial from Finley and his colleagues.13 Butler’s letter, composed by Shotwell, exhorted the American public to recognize the “extraordinarily important message” delivered by the French foreign minister nineteen days prior.14 Shotwell later wrote that “had it not been for the sympathetic understanding of Dr. Finley and the backing that the Times gave from that time on, there would have been no Kellogg-Briand Pact; for nowhere else was the offer taken seriously in those early days.”15
Butler’s letter in the New York Times generated exactly the kind of widespread support for which Shotwell had hoped. But the secretary of state, Frank B. Kellogg, was unenthusiastic. He resented having diplomatic exchanges conducted via newspaper, subject to the fleeting passions of a particular moment.16 Second, Kellogg and Butler were not fond of each other. Finally, Kellogg and others in President Calvin Coolidge’s administration suspected a degree of parochial self-interest within Briand’s apparently selfless proposal. A bilateral renunciation of war would be tantamount to a negative military alliance, serving not only as a pledge for both countries to abstain from violent action against each other—which was improbable—but also precluding the United States from coming to the aid of any potential victims of French aggression. Kellogg refused to meet with Shotwell, so Undersecretary of State Robert E. Olds, a trustee of the Carnegie Endowment, recommended that Shotwell
draft a sample treaty to clarify what such a pact would entail, particularly with regard to American commitments.17 Together with Columbia professor Joseph Chamberlain, Shotwell immediately set out to do just that. The idea, Shotwell explained, was to “simply try to set down in the plainest English the meaning of such an offer . . . and then to throw the matter open for public discussion in order that the Government may feel out the public sentiment in this matter without being involved.”18
This time the American press provided extensive coverage of Briand’s proposal and the public greeted it with considerable enthusiasm.22 Still, the French communiqué did not move the Coolidge administration.
tens of thousands of persons directly, and hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions,
”
over the radio.
Meanwhile, in contrast to Shotwell’s quiet advocacy, Butler made his case directly to the public. He embarked on a campaign that took him to “twenty-two states, reaching tens of thousands of persons directly, and hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, over the radio.”25 Eventually, Kellogg found himself unable to stall any longer. Shortly after Christmas 1927, Kellogg told the French government that he was willing to negotiate on the basis of Briand’s core principles, but preferred a multilateral pact, open to signatures from any country that wished to join.26 This innovation alarmed Briand, who feared that a multilateral renunciation of force as an instrument of policy would undermine the League of Nations’ collective security system and other defensive
35 ESSAYS ON THE CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE
The strong public response persuaded France to take it a stage further. On June 20, the French presented a formal proposal to the American chargé d’affaires in Paris. Entitled the “Pact of Perpetual Friendship between France and the United States,” it consisted of a concise and simplified version of the ShotwellChamberlain draft.21
“ twenty-two states, reaching
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Shotwell spent the next two months advocating for a treaty and, on May 30, Butler unveiled the ShotwellChamberlain draft during a public address at Columbia’s Memorial Day services. “The Draft Treaty,” Shotwell later wrote, “became an item of national and even international news.”19 Constructed to be a general agreement between the United States and any one of the major powers, it expanded upon Briand’s bilateral framework. This framing of the pact as a potential agreement between the United States and any other nation reflected Shotwell’s underlying aspiration to engage the United States much more broadly in the protection of Europe’s fragile postwar order.20
Kellogg advised the president that the Senate would never accept such a proposal.23 So once again, Shotwell set to work behind closed doors. In November, he persuaded Senator Arthur Capper to introduce a favorable resolution written by Butler, Chamberlain, and himself.24 Senator Borah, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, introduced a similar resolution.
arrangements on which France relied for its protection from a resurgent Germany.27 Briand suggested a compromise: he would circulate the treaty to friendly powers—if none objected, France and the United States would announce it bilaterally. It was presented for signature in Paris on August 27, 1928. By the time the treaty went into effect the following year, 46 governments had signed. With considerable hyperbole, Butler described the renunciation of war by the pact’s signatories as “the most stupendous and most revolutionary change that has ever taken place at any time in the history of the world.”28
36 james t. shotwell Few leaders promoted the cause of peace in the first half of the twentieth century more than James T. Shotwell. During a visit to France in the spring of 1927, Shotwell, then the Carnegie Endowment’s director of economics and history, proposed to French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand that the two countries renounce war as an instrument of national policy. After Briand publicly announced the idea, Shotwell advocated tirelessly for the agreement, which was expanded into an international treaty. When the Kellogg-Briand Pact took effect in 1929, 46 nations had signed it. In 1940, Shotwell hosted a weekly CBS radio network show, “Which Way to Lasting Peace,” which reached an estimated 5 million Americans. Later, as chairman of the U.S. delegation to the conference that led to the creation of the United Nations, Shotwell helped establish a permanent UN commission on human rights, which exists to this day. In his autobiography, he reflected, “I have never had a more inspiring experience than that of helping, at last, to weld [our] aspirations for peace into a world-wide organization.”
Although Butler professed indifference toward public recognition of his efforts, James Brown Scott, the secretary of the Carnegie Endowment and Butler’s friend of many years, spearheaded a campaign to secure the Nobel Peace Prize for Butler. But the following year, the Nobel Committee awarded the prize instead to Kellogg. (It had already awarded one to Briand in 1926 for his work on the Treaty of Locarno.) In 1930, the committee passed over Butler again. Finally, in 1931, the committee awarded the prize to both Butler and the pacifist social reformer Jane Addams, the first Americans to win the prize without ever holding public office. The extent of Shotwell’s involvement was not fully understood until many years later, though he did receive a gold medal from the National Institute of Social Sciences in 1928.29 Unlike Butler, Shotwell was never fully satisfied with the outcome of his efforts. For him, the pact was intended as the beginning of a process that would involve the United States much more deeply in the search for stability and peace in Europe, perhaps even drawing the United States into the League of Nations and its nascent collective security system. In the
100 YEARS OF IMPACT
Prominent New York City civil servant George McAneny with Nicholas Murray Butler (right), circa 1925.
ly effective advocacy campaign that mobilized public opinion as well as their own connections to the French government, the media, the State Department, and both houses of Congress.
The Kellogg-Briand Pact has not fared well among historians. Diplomatic historian Robert Ferrell describes the pact as an example of “immature American idealism.”30 According to Walter Russell Mead, “The collapse of the ambitious peace and disarmament movement of the 1920s has been used by realist critics of Wilsonian idealism to show the futility of using paper agreements to stop war.”31 Yet for activists like Shotwell, any attempt to prevent another world war was worth embarking on.
In the process, they overcame the indifference of a president and a secretary of state with little interest in their ideas. Even though the Kellogg-Briand Pact did not address the underlying causes of instability in Europe, there is still much to learn from Shotwell and Butler’s remarkable aptitude for shaping policy outcomes from outside of government. In fact, what they accomplished was only possible because they represented no one but themselves and the Carnegie Endowment.
More importantly, Shotwell and Butler’s campaign on behalf of the treaty remains an early example of a high-
ESSAYS ON THE CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE
years to come, Shotwell continued to labor on behalf of American engagement in Europe, although, as the next chapter describes, his greatest success would not come until after the onset of another devastating war.
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CHAPTER FOUR
A NEW HOPE FOR PEACE
carnegie and the great war: Supporting american diplomacy
After the First World War, Shotwell had thought long and hard about how to avoid a repetition of the slaughter that had occurred in Western Europe and had edited a huge, 150-volume series on the war’s economic and political causes. The solution, he decided, lay in building strong international institutions, and he founded an organization called the Commission to Study the Organization of Peace (CSOP). He and his fellow members on the CSOP regretted deeply the failure of the League of Nations, and longed for a second chance to show that an international organization, not power politics, was the best hope for peace. In their eyes, the most important cause of the League’s failure was the isolationist sentiment that prevented American statesmen from joining the League. CSOP’s
mission was to reach out to the American public and build support for the idea that “Americans cannot succeed by themselves in making their lives and jobs secure . . . . No longer can we enjoy our privileges and avoid our responsibilities. We are part of the world community.”2 From the beginning of the Second World War to its end, no nongovernmental organization did more than CSOP to promote the cause of internationalism.
Reaching Across America In a marked difference to its focus today on policy makers, the Carnegie Endowment in the 1930s had a very large outreach program aimed at the general public. In fact, the Carnegie Endowment spent from half to
39 ESSAYS ON THE CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE
evenings, an estimated 5 million Americans tuned in to a new series of broadcasts on the CBS radio network entitled “Which Way to Lasting Peace?”1 The series’ host was James T. Shotwell, director of the Carnegie Endowment’s Division of Economics and History.
100 YEARS OF IMPACT
IN THE WINTER OF 1940, at 6:30 on Saturday
two-thirds of its annual budget on the outreach activities of its Division of Intercourse and Education. In his annual reports, the president and chairman of the board of trustees, Nicholas Murray Butler, described how Carnegie Endowment–sponsored programs reached every part of the country, from the Pacific Northwest to the Great Plains to the Deep South. The Carnegie Endowment sponsored a network of collegiate international affairs clubs, which had a presence on several hundred campuses, including many in the United Kingdom and Europe.
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The response to the first radio series by CSOP was so favorable that CBS commissioned a follow-on series, broadcast the following spring.3 In a memo dated December 6, 1941—the day before the attack on Pearl Harbor—CSOP described the impressive extent of the outreach programs it had built in just two years.4 There were 300 CSOP study groups meeting across the country. Thirty-five hundred organizations and individuals received CSOP course materials every month. In total, CSOP distributed 1 million pieces of literature, including 100,000 copies of “Preliminary Report,” its first major statement on the principles of the postwar order.5 The report invoked the Wilsonian ideal of collective security while demanding changes that were far more sweeping than any of President Woodrow Wilson’s proposals at Versailles. The report insisted that “national sovereignty must yield more and more to the community of nations.” To ensure the rule of law among nations, there would be an international legislature to define the law, an international court to administer the law, and an international police organization to enforce it. In hindsight, such plans to exchange national sovereignty for global government may seem fanciful or even
dangerously naïve. Yet when CSOP issued its Preliminary Report in November 1940, Europe belonged to Adolf Hitler and most of Asia would soon belong to Japan. All options were on the table if they held out some promise, however slim, of preventing another such catastrophe. Some of the observations in CSOP’s Preliminary Report were eerily prescient. For example, the report anticipated the march toward union in postwar Europe, noting, “Whatever the outcome of the present war, it is unlikely that there will again be twenty-seven international sovereignties in Europe, each having the right to make war, surround itself with tariff walls, and to maintain a different currency.”6
Looking Beyond the War One of the 28 men and women who attended CSOP’s very first meeting on November 5, 1939, was a New York lawyer by the name of John Foster Dulles.7 In 1940, Dulles approached the Federal Council of Churches with a proposal to study the principles of postwar order and, in December, the delegates at the council’s convention established a “Commission to Study the Bases of Just and Durable Peace,” with Dulles as its chairman. Journalists referred to it simply as the Dulles Commission.8 The imprimatur of the Federal Council—the leading organization of Protestant churches in America—ensured that the work of Dulles’ commission would reach a vast audience. The print runs of the commission’s publications sometimes were as many as 700,000 copies. In 1944, Dulles joined the Carnegie Endowment’s board of trustees. his writing appeared in Life and Reader’s Digest, while Newsweek and Time frequently
UN Photo/Yould
It wasn’t until after Pearl Harbor that the State Department began to think seriously about the postwar era. Secretary of State Cordell Hull invited Shotwell to join the department’s subcommittee on postwar political order. On Shotwell’s advice, the department appointed CSOP’s second-ranking officer, Clark Eichelberger, to the subcommittee on postwar international organization. Fearing an isolationist backlash, Hull instructed the postwar advisory committee to keep its work entirely confidential. The department’s silence meant that CSOP and the Dulles Commission continued to serve as the country’s most prominent voices of
internationalism. New CSOP initiatives included the establishment of regional international relations centers with the support of a $25,000 grant from the Carnegie Endowment.9 By the end of 1942, new centers had opened in Chicago, Minneapolis, Des Moines, Denver, San Francisco, Dallas, and Chapel Hill. In June 1943, again with a grant from the Carnegie Endowment, CSOP produced a series of broadcasts on the NBC radio network entitled “For This We Fight.” The series featured guests such as Nelson Rockefeller and Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts, as well as Dulles. The broadcasts reached an estimated audience of 4 million people.
Pioneering Human Rights As the war drew to a close, the White House and the State Department assumed control of negotiating the peace. Even so, the role of nongovernmental organizations in the San Francisco conference that led to the
41 ESSAYS ON THE CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE
covered the commission’s work. According to Dulles, “The sovereignty system [was] no longer consonant either with peace or with justice.” Only the “dilution of sovereignty” in favor of international organization could secure the peace. What the Dulles Commission added to the work of CSOP was a framework of Christian values that provided a moral and spiritual inspiration for the postwar order.
100 YEARS OF IMPACT
Edward Reilly Stettinius, Jr., secretary of state and chair of the U.S. delegation, signs the UN Charter at a ceremony held at the Veterans’ War Memorial Building, June 26, 1945. At left is President Harry S. Truman.
UN Photo
LEFT: A view of the United Nations Charter. Book open on the signatory page. April 25–June 26, 1945.
UN Photo/Rosenberg
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creation of the United Nations was unprecedented in the history of great-power conferences.10 In consultation with the Carnegie Endowment, the State Department selected 42 individuals to serve as official consultants to the U.S. delegation at the conference.11 Unsurprisingly, they elected Shotwell to serve as their chairman. The most important contribution the consultants made was in the field of human rights. Early on, the U.S. delegation was not concerned about the absence of human rights provisions from the UN Charter. But the consultants, under the direction of CSOP’s Eichelberger, quickly drafted four amendments to the charter as well as a letter to the U.S. delegation, which was signed by Shotwell and 20 other consultants. The same day, the consultants presented their letter to the secretary of state, who admitted that he had no idea of “the intensity of feeling on this subject.” In his report to the president after the conference, the secretary would explicitly give credit to the consultants
ABOVE: Reproduction of the covers of the French, Russian, English, Chinese, and Spanish editions of the pamphlet Universal Declaration of Human Rights, published by the Department of Public Information.
for ensuring the inclusion of human rights language in the UN Charter.12 The most important amendment to the charter was the provision to establish a permanent UN commission on human rights, which exists to this day. In his autobiography, Shotwell reflected, “I have never had a more inspiring experience than that of helping, at last, to weld [our] aspirations for peace into a world-wide organization.”13
Supporting the United Nations The creation of the UN was a special moment for the Carnegie Endowment. Its early belief in internationalism had helped to prepare Americans for the creation of the global body and the partial loss of sovereignty it required. So many of the Carnegie Endowment’s members had been a part of the UN’s birth in San Francisco that it was not surprising that the leadership decided the Carnegie Endowment’s most important mission was to provide all possible support to the UN.
In 1945, Nicholas Murray Butler stepped down after twenty years as president and chairman of the board of trustees. Butler was the last living member of the original board selected by Andrew Carnegie in 1910. The following year, the trustees chose17 one of the brightest young stars18 at the State Department to become the next president of the Carnegie Endowment. Alger Hiss had clerked for Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, but decided to join the State Department in place of a legal career. He rose rapidly and at age fortytwo served as secretary-general of the UN conference in San Francisco before being promoted to director of the State Department’s Office of Special Political Affairs. However, in August 1948, Hiss was denounced as a communist and a spy by the former communist
Shotwell’s final duty to the Carnegie Endowment was to step up as interim president after Hiss’ resignation. He was seventy-four years old. In 1951, a campaign supported by Eleanor Roosevelt, J. William Fulbright, and Adlai Stevenson persuaded the Norwegian Nobel Committee to nominate Shotwell for the Peace Prize for his long service to the cause of peace through the concept of internationalism, but the world had changed and he did not win.20 The board of trustees appointed Joseph E. Johnson, a historian and former State Department official, to take the Carnegie Endowment’s helm. Johnson realized that the Carnegie Endowment needed a new vision that accommodated the new Cold War realities in which it found itself. He moved the institution away from an unswerving support for the UN and other international bodies, and began to elaborate the sober and self-critical approach toward peace that became a lasting hallmark of the Carnegie Endowment. The Carnegie Endowment would still strive to prevent conflict and to strengthen the machinery of international cooperation, but for the first time, a president of the Carnegie Endowment would describe Andrew Carnegie’s vision of peace as the artifact of an age gone by, rather than an inspiration for the present. Any hope of permanent peace was an illusion. Anchored by this realistic assessment, Johnson would lead the Carnegie Endowment into the second half of its first hundred years.
43 ESSAYS ON THE CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE
The Carnegie Endowment’s commitment to the UN did not waver after the onset of the Cold War, even though the Carnegie Endowment’s leadership realized that the UN would never assume its role as impartial defender of the peace. But in the late 1940s, the Carnegie Endowment learned from bitter experience how Cold War tensions could ensnare an organization with the best of intentions.
Whittaker Chambers. Hiss was forced to resign as president of the Carnegie Endowment after less than three years, before going on trial for perjury in May 1949.19 Hiss fought his conviction all the way to the Supreme Court, but eventually served forty-four months in federal prison.
100 YEARS OF IMPACT
In 1947, the Carnegie Endowment designated its New York office as its new headquarters, while the Washington office became a subsidiary branch.14 The next year, the Washington office was shuttered and the Carnegie Endowment transferred its European office from Paris to Geneva, to be closer to the wellspring of UN activity.15 In New York, the Carnegie Endowment relocated its headquarters from a brownstone near Columbia University to a brand-new, twelve-story International Center on the corner of First Avenue and 46th Street, right across the street from the UN. In its first year of operation, the center hosted 750 programs attended by 40,000 guests from 60 countries.16
CHAPTER FIVE
THE CRIME WITH no NAME
carnegie and the great war: Supporting american diplomacy
Just four years after the book’s publication, the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide made genocide (derived from the Greek word genos for family, tribe, or race and the Latin root –cide for killing) a crime under international law. The UN General Assembly passed the genocide convention without a single dissenting vote. Although the Carnegie Endowment published hundreds of works on international law in the first half of the twentieth century, none has had as far-reaching an effect as Lemkin’s book. However, for many years Lemkin’s name and his tireless activism were all but forgotten—even though “genocide” remained an integral part of the world’s
vocabulary. Then in 2002, Samantha Power ignited a resurgence of interest in Lemkin’s life and work with her Pulitzer Prize–winning treatise, A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide.1 Power’s own interest in the concept of genocide began at the Carnegie Endowment in the early 1990s, when she was an intern in the office of its president, Morton Abramowitz. Power decided to write a book about genocide after reporting from the Bosnian war and, ultimately, her research led her back to Lemkin’s seminal work. She said that it was Abramowitz’s “advocacy on Bosnia, combined with the prescriptive genius of the late, great Frederick C. Cuny, that convinced me to go
45 ESSAYS ON THE CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE
published one of the most seminal books in its history. Raphael Lemkin’s Axis Rule in Occupied Europe introduced the word “genocide” to the English language, and in doing so provided the legal basis for prosecuting Nazis for their crimes.
100 YEARS OF IMPACT
IN 1944, THE CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT
to the Balkans to see for myself what might be done.”2 (In response to the tragedy in Bosnia, Abramowitz, Cuny, and a host of others established the International Crisis Group, a story detailed in Chapter 8.)
Lemkin’ s Early Years As a Polish Jew, Lemkin had had firsthand experience of the Nazi genocide. He was born near the village of Bezwodene in eastern Poland on June 24, 1900.3 During the First World War, German forces laid waste to his family farm twice, first on their march toward Russia and again during their retreat back west.
In 1926, Lemkin received his doctorate in law from the University of Lvov. The publication of his first book on Soviet law won him appointment to the position of secretary to the Court of Appeals in Warsaw. He became a public prosecutor, a rare distinction for Jewish lawyers, who faced considerable discrimination in Poland. As early as 1933, Lemkin proposed that “barbarity”— defined as the attempted extermination of ethnic, social, or religious groups—be designated as a crime under international law. But his efforts to promote his ideas provoked a backlash both from the Polish government and from influential anti-Semites. Under pressure, Lemkin resigned his position as a prosecutor and
46 rAPHAEL LEMKIN Raphael Lemkin devoted his life to ending what he would term “genocide” in his seminal 1944 book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, published by the Carnegie Endowment. A Polish Jew, Lemkin fled his homeland after the Nazi invasion in 1939. He made his way to the United States two years later and became consumed with explaining to the world the full horror of what was happening in Europe.
UN Photo
In his activism, Lemkin bore an unlikely resemblance to Andrew Carnegie. Both men wore down their health and literally collapsed because they were so obsessed with their mission. Whereas Carnegie was rich, Lemkin survived on charity, preferring to eat scraps and dedicate every moment to politics rather than earn a living. Yet each seemed to regard his physical health as little more than a distraction from a higher cause.
entered private practice instead. For the first and only time in his life, Lemkin became a prosperous man.
100 YEARS OF IMPACT
When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, Lemkin fled eastward, eventually slipping through Russian lines and into Lithuania. A former minister of justice in Sweden who had read Lemkin’s work secured for him a visa that brought him to Stockholm, where he lectured at a university until receiving an offer to join the faculty at Duke University in North Carolina. On April 18, 1941, Lemkin arrived in the United States, a country that would remain at peace for just a few months longer.
Carnegie and “ Axis Rule” Lemkin was a polymath who spoke nine languages and published works on subjects as diverse as art criticism and rose cultivation, in addition to well-regarded treatises on the law. But by the time he arrived in America, he was consumed by one mission—to explain to the world the full horror of what was happening in Europe.
Finch’s demonstration of interest provided a welcome contrast to the disappointing response of Lemkin’s colleagues at the U.S. government’s Board of Economic Warfare, where he worked at the time. “My companions were mildly and only politely interested,” Lemkin wrote. “Their attention was rather absorbed by their
Raphael Lemkin’s seminal work, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, was published by the Carnegie Endowment in 1944, introducing the word “genocide” into the global lexicon.
ESSAYS ON THE CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE
In the summer of 1942, he met with George Finch, director of the Division of International Law at the Carnegie Endowment, to discuss his proposal for the book. In his unpublished autobiography, Lemkin recalls that Finch “was reading the material while lounging in a soft chair in the sleepy Cosmos Club . . . I watched his face and read in it an approval of . . . my book, even before he said yes” to publication.4
47
An undated picture of the women’s barracks in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Oswiecim.
48
own assignments . . . . They were masters in switching the discussion in their direction.”5 Over the next two years, the Carnegie Endowment provided him with a remarkable degree of support. In a May 1944 letter, Finch inventoried the extent of the Carnegie Endowment’s support for Lemkin. It included:
. . . the full services for over a year of a permanent member of the Endowment’s staff during which the Endowment paid her salary at the rate of $2,750 per annum. . . . The chief editorial and research assistants of the Endowment devoted respectively onehalf and one-fourth of a year’s time to the revision and editing of Dr. Lemkin’s manuscript. This service cost the Endowment a minimum of $3,000.6
The Carnegie Endowment also underwrote the cost of printing the 674-page manuscript and provided him with an honorarium. But perhaps more important than the funding invested in Lemkin’s endeavor was Finch’s
patience with the project. Lemkin was becoming increasingly agitated and confrontational, as he became consumed by the conviction that his entire family had been wiped out by the Germans. Lemkin received a final letter from his parents shortly after his arrival in North Carolina in 1941. By the end of that year, reports in the public domain increasingly indicated that the Nazis had embarked on a war of extermination. Lemkin suffered from nightmares, high blood pressure, and nervous exhaustion. Gradually, the engaging and erudite gentleman who fled the war in Europe became an awkward zealot who exasperated even those who respected him greatly.
Zealotry and Grief The relationship between Lemkin and Finch became increasingly strained after the completion of the manuscript for Axis Rule. Conflict arose in the spring and summer of 1944, after Finch sent Lemkin a standard copyright agreement to sign. In spite of all the sup-
port the Carnegie Endowment had provided, Lemkin responded that he would grant the Carnegie Endowment nothing except “first book publication rights and that all other rights shall be and are hereby reserved for the Author.”7
In June, Finch seemed to despair of a resolution, suggesting that if Lemkin returned his honorarium and arranged to pay the printer’s expenses already incurred by the Carnegie Endowment, Finch would sign away any right to Lemkin’s work.12 In July, Finch submitted an accounting of those costs to the Authors’ Guild.13 But then, as both parties approached the brink of divorce, something happened. The paper trail leaves off at that point, so it is hard to know for certain. Yet six weeks later, Lemkin sent Finch a final manuscript, ready for publication. Perhaps both men recognized that shed-
“ My companions were mildly
and only politely interested," Lemkin wrote. " Their attention was rather absorbed by their own assignments . . . They were masters in switching the discussion in
”
their direction.
Finch’s files also list the recipients of 68 copies of Axis Rule that the Carnegie Endowment distributed to the military, intelligence, and diplomatic communities.15 Recipients included the judge advocates general of the Army and Navy, the assistant chief of staff for planning at the supreme headquarters of Allied forces in Europe, and the legal adviser at the State Department, as well as nine European ambassadors in Washington. The British Embassy responded by asking for an additional twelve copies because “there are a number of Government Departments at home that would be
49 ESSAYS ON THE CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE
Initially, Finch had hoped to show off the book to the board of trustees at its annual meeting in May.9 Instead, the conflict escalated, with Lemkin calling on the Authors’ Guild to intervene with the Carnegie Endowment. The guild’s vice president told Finch that since “the timeliness of the script requires publication at the earliest possible date,” it would be “ethical” for Lemkin to approach another publisher if the Carnegie Endowment proved intransigent.10 Finch shot back that the Carnegie Endowment had invested heavily in Lemkin’s work. “Furthermore, the publication of this work was initiated at the solicitation of Dr. Lemkin, as part of the Endowment’s copyrighted series,”11 Finch wrote.
In spite of all that transpired, Finch did not hesitate to publicize Lemkin’s groundbreaking work. Finch sent one of the earliest advance copies to Major General John Hilldring, director of the Army’s Civil Affairs division, established in 1943 to administer liberated and occupied territories.14 100 YEARS OF IMPACT
Finch was then taken aback when Lemkin dispatched a lawyer to the Carnegie Endowment to press his concerns. Finch demanded to know whether Lemkin was attempting to negotiate a contract with another publisher or institute without informing the Carnegie Endowment.8
ding light on the true nature of Nazi rule in Europe was far more important than which one of them came into possession of re-publication and translation rights.
UN Photo
50
keenly interested in it.”16 The U.S. Army then ordered 4,000 copies of Lemkin’s book, which were printed in a special paperback edition and sold to the Army at a considerable discount.17
“Genocide” Enters the International Lexicon Lemkin’s own determination ensured that the Washington Post and New York Times paid full attention to his book. In late 1944, Lemkin approached the Post’s proprietor, Eugene Meyer.18 Soon afterward, the Post published an editorial with the simple title of “Genocide.”19 On January 21, 1945, the Times devoted the cover of its book review section to Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, under the headline “Twentieth-Century Moloch,” a reference to the false god of Biblical times, in whose honor children were burned alive.20 The book was widely praised by the Harvard Law Review, Cambridge Law Review, Times Literary Supplement, and many other publications.21
As soon as the war ended, Lemkin became a sort of self-appointed ambassador for the inclusion of genocide in international law. He attended the war trials in Nuremberg, where his efforts led to the inclusion of genocide in the third count of the indictment against all 24 defendants. He then returned to New York, where his relentless lobbying facilitated the passage of an anti-genocide resolution by the UN General Assembly. Finally, Lemkin made his way to Geneva, where the UN genocide convention was being drafted.22 During his campaign on behalf of the UN genocide convention, Lemkin met cub reporters Kathleen Teltsch and A. M. Rosenthal of the New York Times. Many years later, Teltsch, who was fond of Lemkin, wrote of his indifference to rejection and of his constant entreaty to all those he met, “You and I, we must change the world.” Teltsch recalled,
FAR LEFT: Raphael Lemkin, left, and Ricardo Alfaro of Panama, chairman of the UN General Assembly’s Legal Committee, before the plenary meeting of the General Assembly at which the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was approved, in the Palais de Chaillot, Paris, December 9, 1948.
He was always there like a shadow, a presence, floating through the halls and constantly pulling scraps of paper out of his pockets. He was not loved because he was known as a time consumer. If he managed to nab you, you were trapped. Correspondents on deadline used to run from him like mad.23
In addition to reaching out personally to diplomats, he organized broad coalitions of nongovernmental organizations to pressure their countries’ representatives at the UN. Lemkin’s great moment of triumph finally arrived on December 9, 1948, when the General Assembly approved the convention without a single dissenting vote. The United States would not ratify the genocide convention until three decades after Lemkin’s death in 1959. By then, Lemkin was all but forgotten. However, A. M. Rosenthal, one of the cub reporters who met Lemkin forty years earlier, had risen to become executive editor of the New York Times and was then one of its columnists. After Congress passed legislation imple-
menting the convention, Rosenthal penned a tribute to Lemkin. In it, he recalled asking Lemkin, “What good will it do to write mass murder down as a crime; will a piece of paper stop a new Stalin or Hitler?” Lemkin replied: “Only man has law. Law must be built, do you understand me? You must build the law!”24 In Lemkin’s position, it must have been impossible to believe otherwise. The genocide convention provided democratic nations with a compelling mandate for intervention, if they possessed the will to act. But as Samantha Power discovered a half-century later, the United States and western Europe found many excuses for inaction when thousands of people were being slaughtered in Bosnia and Rwanda. Lemkin hoped that his convention would prevent any future genocide from occurring; that has not happened, but at least the world now has the legal framework to act if it so chooses—thanks to the perseverance of Raphael Lemkin.
51 ESSAYS ON THE CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE
100 YEARS OF IMPACT
UN Photo/MB
LEFT: The ratification of the Genocide Convention by Korea, Haiti, Iran, France, and Costa Rica, October 14, 1950. Standing at far right is Raphael Lemkin.
CHAPTER SIX
enriching the institutional landscape
carnegie and the great war: Supporting american diplomacy
little time for think tanks and even ordered his staff to break in to the Brookings Institution to rifle through its files—though the break-in never happened.1
“Nixon’s perspective of Carnegie and other public policy institutes evolved considerably over time,” Simes explained in a recent essay. He attributed the change mainly to a Carnegie Endowment–sponsored discussion group chaired by his former secretary of defense, Jim Schlesinger, that Nixon participated in.3 “This,” Simes observed, “was ultimately a catalyst of [Nixon’s] decision to establish the Nixon Center, which drew many
of its staff from Carnegie.” Among them were Geoffrey Kemp, a specialist on Middle Eastern affairs, who left the Carnegie Endowment to join the center, and Robert Leiken, who is director of the Nixon Center’s program on immigration and national security. The birth of the Nixon Center illustrates just one of the many ways in which the Carnegie Endowment has
53 ESSAYS ON THE CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE
But three months before his death, the former president announced that he would be giving his name to a new think tank, the Nixon Center, charged with carrying on his legacy in foreign affairs. He chose as head of the center a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment, Dimitri Simes, who had served as Nixon’s adviser and with whom he had traveled regularly to Russia and Central Europe.2
100 YEARS OF IMPACT
WHEN he was president, Richard Nixon had
facilitated, directly incubated, or indirectly encouraged the founding of new institutions committed to the analysis and betterment of public policy over the years. One of the Carnegie Endowment’s greatest achievements has been to create a model of highly professional research and a nonpartisan approach to solutions that has been emulated widely. At a time when think tanks are more numerous and more partisan than ever, the Carnegie Endowment’s scholarship has retained the respect—if not always the agreement—of Democratic and Republican administrations alike over the last century. And, in doing so, it has served as an inspiration to others.
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The rise of think tanks In 1970, Thomas Hughes became the sixth president of the Carnegie Endowment and immediately embarked on some dramatic changes. Firstly, he brought the Carnegie Endowment back to Washington, D.C., after an absence of more than twenty years, then sold the Carnegie Endowment’s twelve-story headquarters building in midtown Manhattan, just across from the United Nations.4 Hughes also closed down the Carnegie Endowment’s European Center in Geneva, which, like the New York headquarters, provided far less programming per dollar than the new office at 11 Dupont Circle.
german marshall fund In 1972, West German Chancellor Willy Brandt announced that his country would recognize the twentyfifth anniversary of the Marshall Plan with a gift of 150 million deutschmarks to establish a new German Marshall Fund of the United States, a living memorial to American support for the reconstruction of Europe.
Craig Kennedy, GMF’s president, explained, “We don’t have as many people that are just here to write books. What we’re really looking for [are] policy entrepreneurs that kind of understand how to use [GMF’s] grantmaking and [the] network of people who have a connection with GMF to do innovative things.”
The Germans chose a young professor at Harvard, Guido Goldman, to help administer the gift and Goldman then recruited a committee of six prominent Americans, including the Carnegie Endowment’s president, Thomas Hughes, to serve as supporters and advisers.5 The Carnegie Endowment’s offices served as the home for the German Marshall Fund (GMF) throughout the 1970s, so the younger organization could grow in a supportive environment.
One of Kennedy’s inspirations was Morton Abramowitz, Hughes’ successor as president of the Carnegie Endowment. “One of the people that really provoked me to think in different ways was actually Mort Abramowitz,” Kennedy said. “I think the style that he really pushed at that time, which was [an] emphasis on how . . . you focus your work on things where you can see tangible progress, not on kind of big global architecture or continent-wide issues . . . really inspired, I think, a lot of the things that we try to do.”
INTERNATIONAL CRISIS GROUP The Carnegie Endowment was also instrumental in the creation of the internationally recognized International Crisis Group (ICG). The concept for the organization was created by Carnegie Endowment President Morton Abramowitz and others during the height of the Bosnian war, and the meetings to create the ICG’s scope, name, and budget were held at the Carnegie Endowment in early 1994. For the full story of how the ICG came into existence, please see Chapter 8. 100 YEARS OF IMPACT
The second set of changes implemented by Hughes concerned the hiring and retention of personnel. “Departing from an earlier tradition,” Hughes wrote, “the Endowment has ended tenure for professional staff and embarked upon a practice of term appointments, normally for one- or two-year projects.”6 This change reflected a crucial aspect of Hughes’ strategy for increasing both the public profile and policy relevance of the Carnegie Endowment’s work. Shorter terms ensured greater flexibility, enabling the recruitment of associates with expertise on critical issues of the day. Hughes explained that he was looking for associates who were “ready to write”—that is, those who already had
significant knowledge or experience, but hadn’t yet had an opportunity to pause, reflect, and share their insights with the broader public and with those still in government. Selig Harrison spent more than two decades as a foreign correspondent with the Associated Press and Washington Post before joining the Carnegie Endowment in 1974. “[Tom] had been in the government,” Harrison said, “and he knew that a lot of people in the government . . . were unable to do much about the areas they knew anything about.” He added, “So when [Tom] knew about people who he thought had something important to say based on real knowledge,” he brought them to the Carnegie Endowment. Barry Blechman, who came to the Carnegie Endowment after serving under President Jimmy Carter, described how “Carnegie was, in the early 1980s, really in the forefront of this push to get away from books and toward more
55 ESSAYS ON THE CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE
Michael Krepon worked at the Dupont Circle office during its first years of operation. “It was interesting to see the start of Carnegie in D.C. And I think it was a far-sighted decision on Tom’s part,” Krepon said. “The shift from New York to Washington was crucial.”
PETERSON institute for international economics The success of the German Marshall Fund (GMF) inspired the launch of other policy institutes, principally the Peterson Institute for International Economics. While serving as a consultant to GMF in 1979–1980, Carnegie Endowment Senior Associate Leslie Gelb advised that the growing importance of international economic issues was not being matched by an institutional capacity to address those issues in their full complexity.7
GMF then asked C. Fred Bergsten, another Carnegie Endowment senior associate who had recently joined from the Treasury Department, to develop a blueprint for a new organization that would fill the vacuum Gelb had identified. GMF provided $4 million over five years—its largest grant to a single recipient—to launch the new institute.
accessible forms of communicating your ideas. Obviously it wasn’t electronic at that point, but it was ‘Let’s do op-eds, and let’s do magazine articles and journal articles.’”
As these other organizations started to fill Washington’s new demand for commentary and analysis in the 1970s and 1980s, the Carnegie Endowment might easily have been pushed to the sidelines. Instead, under Hughes’ guidance, it reinvented itself and became a model for the top-tier Washington think tank.
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The 1970s and 1980s saw an explosion in the number of think tanks in Washington as the government became hungrier for research and policy advice. In Think Tanks, Public Policy and the Politics of Expertise, political scientist Andrew Rich reported that there were 306 political think tanks in the United States in 1996, of which 80 percent had been founded since 1970.8 But in many ways, a rise in quantity led to a decline in quality. In particular, rising partisanship “damage[d] the reputation of experts generally among policy makers,” wrote Rich.9
Here are a few institutions that the Carnegie Endowment has helped to bring into existence. In all cases, their reputations for thorough research and analysis command the attention of policy makers, both in the United States and abroad. As a result, their work has had a clear and positive impact on the policies made by both governments and international organizations. The Carnegie Endowment has every reason to be proud of its contribution to their birth.
HENRY L. stimson center
Blechman and Krepon’s experience at the Carnegie Endowment also prepared them for the challenges of building a new institution. “Tom [Hughes] provided a home for Barry Blechman and me where we could establish a programmatic track record and develop ties to funders,” Krepon explained. “When it was time to take it to the next level professionally, and Barry and I wanted to create an institution of our own, we could go to funders that had gotten comfortable with us, and who were comfortable with our track record, which we developed at Carnegie.”
AND IDEALISM DIDN'T JUST COME OUT OF THE ETHER. I THINK I BREATHED
”
THAT AIR AT CARNEGIE.
First established in a cluster of six offices near Dupont Circle, the center now occupies 19,000 square feet of floor space a few blocks from its original site.10 One of the Stimson Center’s first projects, funded by a grant from the Ford Foundation, focused on UN peacekeeping operations, which were both expanding in size and taking place in more hostile environments. Senior Associate William Durch served as the project director for a panel on UN peace operations chaired by Undersecretary-General Lakhdar Brahimi. The panel played a crucial role, Blechman explained, in “strengthening the institution’s ability to conduct these operations effectively.” Durch remains with the center today and continues to advise the UN on peace operations.
57 ESSAYS ON THE CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE
Krepon said, “Carnegie was hugely influential for me. Barry and I wanted a think tank that focused on the question, ‘How do we get from here to there?’. . . Our initial motto was, ‘Pragmatic steps toward ideal objectives.’ And that mix of pragmatism and idealism didn’t just come out of the ether. I think I breathed that air at Carnegie.”
“ ... AND THAT MIX OF PRAGMATISM
100 YEARS OF IMPACT
In 1989, two Carnegie Endowment senior associates, Barry Blechman and Michael Krepon, co-founded the Henry L. Stimson Center. To emphasize the importance of pragmatism and bipartisanship, Blechman and Krepon named the center after the Republican secretary of state and war, Henry Stimson, who served in both the Roosevelt and Truman cabinets during World War II.
MIGRATION POLICY INSTITUTE
58
In September 2000, Carnegie Endowment President Jessica Mathews announced that the organization’s International Migration Policy Program would become the Migration Policy Institute (MPI), the first-ever standalone think tank focused on international migration.11 MPI’s founders consisted of three Carnegie Endowment senior associates, Kathleen Newland, Demetrios Papademetriou, and Alexander Aleinikoff. Newland explained that during the 1990s, “the whole [issue] of international migration just kept sort of climbing up the policy agenda and becoming more complex and sort of more demanding. And we grew the program in response to that, but we just in the end concluded that it really needed its own institute.” The MPI staff now numbers more than 30 people. Papademetriou serves as president, while Newland is a program director and trustee, and Aleinikoff is now the United Nations’ deputy high commissioner for refugees. One indicator of MPI’s influence is the direct support it receives from governments that want its advice on migration policy. MPI began to assume a leading role in European policy debates during the Greek
“ THE WHOLE [ ISSUE ] OF INTERNATIONAL
MIGRATION JUST KEPT SORT OF CLIMBING UP THE POLICY AGENDA AND BECOMING MORE COMPLEX AND SORT OF MORE DEMANDING. ..WE GREW THE PROGRAM ... AND IN THE END CONCLUDED THAT IT REALLY NEEDED ITS OWN INSTITUTE.
presidency of the EU. Newland recounted that the Greek government “wanted to make migration their issue. They wanted to put Greece in a position of leadership on an issue rather than being sort of a demandeur.” The Greeks turned to MPI to provide the substantive foundation for their leadership on migration issues. The success of the Greek effort led other governments to call on MPI for support and counsel during their presidencies as well.
”
center for global development
Birdsall said “there’s no question that spending three years at Carnegie and seeing how it was operated was totally important for me, I mean, it was a hugely important experience in having some feel for how to proceed once I had the opportunity” to establish a new organization.
The [Nigerian] technocrats, and even the legislature, they could not make an open offer to buy back some of their debt. That would have been a political killer internally. And the Germans and the French, they didn’t want to do this write-down in a country seen as very corrupt with a lot of oil money unless the country was buying back some of it, using this windfall of oil money. So it was one of those things where I think it was important to have a third party who was seen as having no agenda, interacting and trying to set up the deal.
In April 2006, Nigeria signed a deal to buy back its debt from the Paris Club at a cost of $12 billion, or 40 cents on the dollar.12 The deal enabled Nigeria to receive its first-ever sovereign debt rating, which paved the way for its return to the international bond market.
59 ESSAYS ON THE CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE
In November 2001, Birdsall founded the Center for Global Development (CGD). Her co-founders were IIE Director Fred Bergsten and philanthropist Ed Scott.
Like Carnegie, CGD was committed to having a tangible impact on policy outcomes. One of its first big successes was to develop a proposal for Nigeria to become the first developing nation to buy back its debt from the Paris Club of lender nations. The proposal’s success depended intimately on CGD’s independence, for as Birdsall explained,
100 YEARS OF IMPACT
Before joining the Carnegie Endowment as a senior associate, Nancy Birdsall had been executive vice president of the Inter-American Development Bank with responsibility for a $30 billion lending portfolio. As a result of her experience, Birdsall came to recognize that the multilateral banks’ emphasis on improving the policy performance of developing nations was not matched by a similar commitment to improving the policy of wealthy states toward the developing world. Since wealthy nations are the multilateral banks’ shareholders, the banks’ staff tends not to criticize the wealthy nations’ policies. Thus, there was a compelling need to establish an independent organization capable of influencing those policies.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE GREATEST THREAT
carnegie and the great war: Supporting american diplomacy
Senior Associate Leonard “Sandy” Spector published a pioneering work called The New Nuclear Nations, which described for the first time in detail the global clandestine traffic in nuclear materials and technology.1
While the world was still focused on the nuclear arsenals of the Cold War superpowers, Spector wrote in The New Nuclear Nations that “with the spread of nuclear capabilities, the threat of nuclear terrorism also grows.” 2 He emphasized the risk that other nations, especially in the Middle East, would be “tempted to strike pre-emptively against the nuclear
installations of potential adversaries,” foreshadowing the problems that would follow the end of the Cold War. In another book, Nuclear Proliferation Today, Spector described the burgeoning nuclear programs in a dozen nations. Its publication made frontpage news in more than 30 American and international newspapers.
61 ESSAYS ON THE CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE
Drawing on published sources and confidential interviews, Spector warned in particular of the efforts of a Pakistani engineer called A. Q. Khan, who had stolen critical information about how to enrich uranium from his Dutch employers. After fleeing the Netherlands to avoid prosecution, Khan directed the Pakistani nuclear enrichment program, which entailed the illicit acquisition of materials and technology from suppliers in the United States, Canada, and elsewhere.
100 YEARS OF IMPACT
IN 1985, Carnegie endowment
62
It was twenty years before the American government openly condemned Khan’s criminal behavior. President George W. Bush described his network’s operations in great detail to an audience at the National Defense University.3 Evidence showed that Khan’s network was responsible for the export of nuclear technology to Iran, Libya, and North Korea.4 Later in 2004, in their first presidential campaign debate, Bush and Senator John Kerry agreed that the greatest threat to American national security was the risk of a terrorist organization acquiring nuclear weapons.
portion of its operating funds as well as housing ACA staff in the Carnegie Endowment building. Almost all of the leading practitioners and advocates of arms control affiliated themselves with ACA in one way or another. In a 1974 discussion with Richard Holbrooke, then a young editor at Foreign Policy, ACA President Herbert “Pete” Scoville, Jr., explained that ACA sought to educate the public about nuclear weapons and arms control precisely because it “had been considered such an esoteric subject that the public couldn’t address itself to that problem.”
Spector’s prescient analysis is an impressive example of how think tanks can provide policy makers with an early warning of critical threats.
As arms control became an increasingly controversial subject in the 1980s, ACA and the Carnegie Endowment staked out a strong position in favor of bilateral and multilateral negotiation as the best means of reducing the threat of nuclear weapons.
For forty years, Carnegie Endowment scholars have been at the leading edge of the debate over how to handle nuclear weapons and nuclear fuel. They have educated journalists and elected officials, mobilized the arms control and nonproliferation communities, and served in senior positions in government, where they implemented lessons learned at the Carnegie Endowment. By sustaining this commitment year after year, the Carnegie Endowment has become a major pillar of the nuclear policy community.
“An Esoteric Subject” In the early 1970s, shortly after the Carnegie Endowment returned to Washington after two decades in New York, it developed a close partnership with the newly formed Arms Control Association (ACA). For fourteen years, the Carnegie Endowment fed and nourished the ACA, providing it with a substantial
ACA and the Carnegie Endowment sought to influence the policy-making process by opposing several of the U.S. administration’s initiatives, such as the controversial missile defense program known as Star Wars. According to Michael Krepon, who spent six years at the Carnegie Endowment in the 1980s, “Our job was pushback. Try and keep them honest. Make them defend their positions. Ask tough questions.” One of the most important audiences for ACA and the Carnegie Endowment was Capitol Hill. Back then, Krepon explained, “Capitol Hill needed help from people who were inside the government but now out. And conservative Republicans, anti-arms control Republicans, were being fed ammunition from this newfangled Heritage Foundation, and those who were inclined to use diplomacy to reduce nuclear dangers were looking for help.” In 1985, Spurgeon Keeny, a nuclear policy adviser at the White House under four presidents,
100 YEARS OF IMPACT
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became the executive director of ACA. According to Keeny, ACA and the Carnegie Endowment “served as a principal source of education for the media.”
Front-Page News On June 9, 1994, in the midst of a standoff that brought the United States to the brink of war with North Korea, Carnegie Endowment Senior Associate Selig Harrison found himself unexpectedly sitting down in Pyongyang with North Korea’s “Great Leader,” Kim Il Sung, for three hours of discussion.
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“ No one had ever done this
before....IT was the first time a
group of north koreans, key north koreans, was brought to the united states for a dialogue
”
with a group of key americans.
Harrison had worked for years to strengthen ties between the United States and North Korea, and the relationships he had built placed him in a position to advise the senior leadership of the Democratic People’s Republic at a pivotal moment. Five years earlier, Harrison had brought the North Koreans to Washington. “No one had ever done this before,” he recalled. “It was the first time a group of North Koreans, key North
Koreans, was brought to the United States for a dialogue with a group of key Americans.” In 1991, the Carnegie Endowment sponsored a visit to Pyongyang by an American delegation that included Harrison, Spector, and Edward C. “Shy” Meyer, the former U.S. Army chief of staff. “We found out for the first time during our meetings that they were producing weapons-grade plutonium,” Harrison recalled. When Harrison arrived in Pyongyang on that June 1994 visit, his hosts asked him a surprising question: would inviting former President Jimmy Carter to visit North Korea help defuse tensions with the United States?5 Harrison answered in the affirmative, but never expected his hosts to extend an invitation to Carter just two days later. During the three-hour meeting with Harrison on June 9, Kim indicated, in response to a suggestion from Harrison, that North Korea would be willing to freeze its plutonium production program in exchange for a civilian nuclear energy capability in the form of two light water reactors. This offer made front-page news. Carter’s own meetings with Kim led to a detailed proposal for a freeze, and within four months the United States and North Korea had signed what became known as the Agreed Framework, which stabilized U.S.-North Korean relations for several years, until evidence began to emerge that North Korea, in violation of the agreement, had embarked on a clandestine effort to enrich uranium. In 1998, Joseph Cirincione became director of the Carnegie Endowment’s Nonproliferation Program and launched an ambitious effort to brand the program
as the authoritative source of expertise on nonproliferation. This effort focused on three channels for broadcasting the Carnegie Endowment’s research and policy proposals. The first was the Internet: “We built a first-class website, when people didn’t yet do websites,” Cirincione remembered.
According to George Perkovich, the current director of the Nuclear Policy Program, “It’s often the case that folks don’t ever make it into one of the sessions that are in the meeting rooms, they’re in the hallways the entire time networking. . . . There’s nothing else like it.” Senior officials from many countries rely on the conference as a platform for major policy statements. Although publicity is indispensable, Cirincione argued that the foundation of successful public relations is first-rate scholarship. “One of the things that distinguished the Carnegie project from all other projects
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Carnegie Senior Associate Leonard Spector published Nuclear Proliferation Today, the first in a series of books on the spread of nuclear weapons that generated a serious rethinking of global nuclear nonproliferation policy.
was the quality,” as well as the breadth of its work, he says. During Cirincione’s tenure, the program published two editions of Deadly Arsenals, a compendium of information and analysis that built on the precedent set by Spector’s seminal reports. Deadly Arsenals has gone on to become a staple of nuclear policy and arms control courses in universities and colleges around the world.
ESSAYS ON THE CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE
Third, the Carnegie Endowment built its International Nuclear Policy Conference into the premier gathering of nuclear policy experts from across the globe. From a base of 100-plus participants in the late 1990s, the conference grew by 2009 to attract over 800 policy experts, government officials, journalists, and scholars from 46 countries.
100 YEARS OF IMPACT
Second, Cirincione aggressively sought to raise the Carnegie Endowment’s profile in the media at a time when the number of cable news networks was expanding and the Internet was growing rapidly. “All these new outlets were desperate for content,” explained Jon Wolfsthal, who joined the Carnegie Endowment in 1999 and now works on nuclear policy for Vice President Joe Biden. As a result of this growing exposure, “when people thought about [nonproliferation], the first people they thought about were Carnegie.”
In 2004, at the Carnegie Endowment’s annual international conference on nuclear policy, the authors of Universal Compliance unveiled the first version of their report, while emphasizing its provisional status. The authors then embarked on an almost year-long process of consultation with representatives from dozens of countries in order to discuss and debate the draft.
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Their agenda included a meeting in Geneva with 50 diplomats and experts associated with the Conference on Disarmament, a day-long session with German officials and experts in Berlin, as well as extensive discussions in India, Israel, Russia, and other countries. As a result of this process, Universal Compliance evolved to reflect international perspectives as well as policy recommendations that would engender international support. Carnegie Associates Joseph Cirincione, Jon Wolfsthal, and Miriam Rajkumar published Deadly Arsenals, a comprehensive assessment of global nuclear proliferation and international enforcement efforts, 2002.
Nuclear Policy in the Twenty-First Century In recent years, the Carnegie Endowment Nuclear Policy Program has undertaken two global initiatives that represent significant departures from the think tank community’s standard operating procedure. The first was the 2005 publication of Universal Compliance, a comprehensive strategy to ensure that all nations comply with “the norms and rules of a toughened nuclear nonproliferation regime.”6 Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Universal Compliance was the process that led to its publication.
The objective of the program’s second new initiative is to develop a set of principles of social responsibility for the multinational corporations that are the leading exporters of nuclear power plants. These principles encompass safety, security, sustainable waste management, nonproliferation, and compensation for the victims of accidents. This endeavor is the first of its kind for the power plant industry, and was a vote of confidence in the Carnegie Endowment that it would facilitate the effort in a fair and confidential manner. Over a period of three years, exporters from Canada, China, France, Japan, Russia, South Korea, and the United States all participated in negotiating a text for their industry’s Principles of Conduct. The earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear crisis in Japan in March 2011 caused a postponement of the public announcement of this project as participants want to reflect on the lessons of the crisis, but the exporters and Carnegie are committed to the initiative.
New START One of the Carnegie Endowment’s greatest successes in influencing nuclear policy was the Senate’s ratification of the New START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) agreement between the United States and Russia.
The treaty limited the United States and Russia to a total of 1,550 deployed warheads, a 30 percent reduction from the ceiling imposed by the Moscow treaty of 2002. According to Wolfsthal, the New START process was “historic in terms of the speed with which the treaty was negotiated. . . . No one can doubt Rose was instrumental.”
The Carnegie Endowment’s work on nuclear policy and nonproliferation has spanned the entire range of activities in which a think tank or nongovernmental organization can impact policy making.
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In some instances, such as Spector’s work, that impact has been through the steady dissemination of highoctane scholarship and sometimes pointed advocacy over several years. In other instances, such as the Carnegie Endowment’s preparatory work for New START, the efforts have translated directly into policy action. The political and intellectual demands of a given moment may determine which of these approaches is most appropriate, but over time they reinforce each other. For four decades, the Carnegie Endowment has demonstrated a singularity of purpose and a flexibility of means in advancing the causes of arms control and nonproliferation; in doing so, it has earned itself an undisputed place at the forefront of the nuclear policy community.
ESSAYS ON THE CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE
In 2009, Gottemoeller was recruited by President Barack Obama to become assistant secretary of state for arms control, verification, and compliance, where she then served as the chief negotiator of New START. At the negotiating table in Geneva, Gottemoeller’s Russian counterpart was Antonov. “There’s no question,” she said, “that we were able to negotiate the treaty more quickly because of our work together in Moscow.”
A team of Carnegie associates, led by President Jessica Mathews and Carnegie Vice President for Studies George Perkovich, produced Universal Compliance. The authors provided a blueprint for rethinking the international nonproliferation regime, starting with the premise that the United States cannot solve the nuclear proliferation challenge alone.
100 YEARS OF IMPACT
From 2006 through 2008, Rose Gottemoeller served as the Carnegie Moscow Center’s director. In those years, the center became what Gottemoeller described as a “platform to plan the next stages of arms reduction” between Russia and the United States. The effort was bipartisan, conspicuously incorporating the input of personnel from the Bush administration as well as from the Democratic side of the aisle, alongside the participation of Russian experts and officials, such as Ambassador Anatoly Antonov. In addition to participating in Moscow Center events, Antonov invited Gottemoeller to join his advisory panel at the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She was the only American invited.
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The story of
Foreign Policy
As the Vietnam War was winding down, Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington and Warren Manshel, a banker and former colleague of Huntington’s at Harvard,1 had an idea for a new type of magazine that would “restore communication between people who had been shouting at each other.”2 Immediately, Foreign Policy became a home for writers from across the political spectrum, especially those with “iconoclastic viewpoints”3 who sensed that their opinions—in particular with regard to the continuing war in Vietnam—were not welcome on the pages of moreestablished periodicals like the venerable Foreign Affairs. Huntington and Manshel’s determination to repair the divisions sown by the war resonated with the Carnegie Endowment’s own desire to address the “contemporary breakdown of the American dialogue on foreign policy,
and the need for a new and realistic domestic consensus,”4 in the words of President Thomas Hughes. When Huntington and Manshel accepted positions in the Carter administration, the Carnegie Endowment became the sole owner and publisher of Foreign Policy in 1978. At the same time, the magazine also lost the services of a talented young editor by the name of Richard Holbrooke, who became an assistant secretary of state. He was replaced by Charles William “Bill” Maynes, who had served as secretary of the Carnegie Endowment. The Washington Post reported that Maynes “was known for his ability to discuss, at a moment’s notice, foreign policy concerning any part of the world.”5 In 1997, the Carnegie Endowment turned to a former economics minister from Venezuela to lead Foreign Policy into the age of globalization. Under the leadership of
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During Naím’s fourteen years at the helm, FP took on a visual flair that was in sharp contrast with other publications in the field of international affairs. It began to publish every two months instead of quarterly, and launched a website, foreignpolicy.com. In addition, FP expanded its international offerings to include editions in Arabic, Bulgarian, French, Japanese, Portuguese, Korean, and Spanish. On three separate occasions, FP received the National Magazine Award for general excellence, the top prize in the magazine industry. As the magazine grew in popularity, it became clear that it needed a new home that could invest greater financial
resources in the magazine’s future as well as provide professional capital to support both print and online endeavors—something that was beyond the scope of a think tank. In 2008, after twenty years of very successful ownership, the Carnegie Endowment sold FP to the Washington Post Company. Since then, FP has grown to become one of the most popular destinations in the policy arena, with an impressive stable of bloggers, including Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Thomas Ricks, the pioneering scholar-blogger Daniel Drezner, and the collective of “former policy makers from the loyal opposition” known as the Shadow Government. FP remains what it set out to be: an innovative vehicle for debate within the foreign affairs world.
ESSAYS ESSAYS ON THE ON THE CARNEGIE CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT ENDOWMENT FORFOR INTERNATIONAL INTERNATIONAL PEACE PEACE
Moisés Naím, Foreign Policy (or simply FP) rapidly increased its visibility while also breaking new ground with its analysis of the impact that nontraditional actors— such as protest groups, terrorist cells, mercenaries, and philanthropies—were having on global affairs.
CH APTER EIGHT
BOSNIA AND THE FOUNDING OF THE INTERNATIONAL CRISIS GROUP
carnegie and the great war: Supporting american diplomacy
In April 1991, Abramowitz found himself at the Incirlik air force base in southern Turkey, awaiting the huge exodus of Kurdish refugees that was heading over the mountains from Iraq, driven by Saddam Hussein’s persecution of the Kurds. It was turning into the biggest mass movement of people in modern times. Ravaged by cold, starvation, and illness, the refugees began to die at an alarming rate. The U.S. government had launched Operation Provide Comfort to care for the refugees and
a team of experts from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) had just arrived at Incirlik. Fred Cuny, one of the experts from USAID, cornered Abramowitz at a coffee shop on the air base. “He just sat down across from me and said, ‘I’ve got a plan that’ll get all the Kurds back home in two months,’” Abramowitz later recalled. “I said, ‘Well, that’s great, Fred, but you’re full of [it]. That’ll never happen.’”1 Amazingly, it did.
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greatest achievements over the years has been its ability to serve as an incubator of new think tanks, thereby enlarging the impact on policy far beyond its own remit. In late 1990, as the world struggled to come to terms with the disappearance of the Soviet Union and what it meant for international relations, Morton Abramowitz, the U.S. ambassador to Turkey, agreed to become the seventh president of the Carnegie Endowment. One of America’s most experienced and thoughtful diplomats, Abramowitz could see that the end of the Cold War was in danger of causing an upsurge in conflict around the world as the glue that had held the bipolar world disintegrated and old fault lines re-emerged.
100 YEARS OF IMPACT
ONE OF THE CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT’S
A partnership is born The accidental friendship between Abramowitz and Cuny, which grew out of that crisis, would have a profound impact on Abramowitz’s tenure at the Carnegie Endowment. Together, they would work to relieve the suffering of Bosnian Muslims during the Yugoslav civil war, as well as strive to mobilize a more forceful American response to Serb ethnic cleansing. Abramowitz saw these wars not as isolated tragedies, but as a harbinger of things to come. He sensed that the timidity of Western governments and the ad-hoc nature of their humanitarian efforts were not exceptions, but likely to become the rule.
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Eighteen months later, in January 1993, Abramowitz embarked on a hazardous trip into the besieged city of Sarajevo. He was part of a small advisory group assembled by the philanthropist George Soros to assess
how best to spend $50 million to relieve the suffering of the Bosnian people. On the flight out of Sarajevo on the U.S. Air Force’s C-130 Hercules, Abramowitz found himself seated next to fellow adviser Mark Malloch-Brown, who would later become deputy secretary-general of the United Nations and a member of the British cabinet. Malloch-Brown recalled how Abramowitz looked distinctly uncomfortable in the undersized flak jacket and helmet he’d been given by the Air Force. “I had to urgently distract myself to suppress my laughter,” said Malloch-Brown. “He looked like Michael Dukakis in the tank. I had to look somewhere else and talk about something else!”2 They began to discuss the question of how to help the international community respond to the crises that were starting to flare up around the world. It was clear
MORTON ABRAMOWITZ Morton Abramowitz became the seventh president of the Carnegie Endowment in 1991, leading the organization through five eventful post–Cold War years. Under his direction, in 1992 the Carnegie Endowment generated the first comprehensive studies of the new foreign policy establishment, including Changing Our Ways: America and the New World and Memorandum to the President-Elect: Harnessing Process to Purpose, a bipartisan assessment of the executive branch. In 1993, Abramowitz established the Carnegie Moscow Center to “help refurbish intellectual life” after the fall of the Soviet Union; it is now one of the leading public policy institutions in the region. Also during his tenure, the Carnegie Endowment built its new, permanent headquarters at 1779 Massachusetts Avenue in Washington, D.C.
that the United States and other governments lacked the mechanisms to be able to respond effectively and early enough; what was needed was some kind of early warning system that could alert governments to the dangers before it was too late.
Cuny and others would have to brave sniper fire at the airport while unloading the filtration units. For that reason, Cuny had the units disassembled into smaller parts, while he and others practiced unloading them
Sounding the Alarm Back in Washington, Abramowitz worked hard to make sure that the Bosnian crisis stayed high on the agenda of the Clinton White House. The Carnegie Endowment became one of the main forums where visiting Balkan officials could interact with American diplomats and congressional staffers. Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic visited on three separate occasions. So did Bosnian Foreign Minister Haris Silajdzic, as well as Croat Foreign Minister Mate Granic and the UN ambassadors from Croatia, Bosnia, and Yugoslavia (that is, SerbiaMontenegro). The list of visitors also included the president and prime minister of the then-little known Serb province of Kosovo. The Carnegie Endowment “became
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Abramowitz and Malloch-Brown recommended to Soros that Cuny be hired to implement the aid program in Sarajevo. The siege of the city by Serb forces had cut off Sarajevo’s main supply of drinking water. Hundreds of residents had died while drawing water from the Miljacka river or from outdoor wells, where they were exposed to Serb sniper fire.4 Cuny’s solution to the problem was to fly in three massive water filtration modules that could purify the Miljacka’s water and deposit it into Sarajevo’s main reservoir.
Cuny also flew in planeloads of reinforced plastic piping so local residents could tap safely into the city’s functioning gas lines. He organized brigades of Sarajevo residents to dig trenches through the streets for the pipe to be laid. When the filtration system started working in the summer of 1994, sniper casualties fell precipitously and 250,000 residents gained access to running water5—for a total cost of just $2.5 million.6 “Fred really helped to keep Sarajevo alive,” said Aryeh Neier, who organized the Soros advisory group and then became president of the Open Society Institute. “The siege might well have broken the city.”
100 YEARS OF IMPACT
What came out of their discussion was the idea for a standing organization that would be prepared to confront perilous situations as they emerged, combining first-hand knowledge of the situation on the ground with high-level advocacy in Western capitals. “The core problem, they convinced me, was not just Bosnia at this moment but the wider failure of the international community to deal effectively with all the Bosnias around the world as they arise,” Soros later recalled. “Rwanda the following year drove the point home: governments and other international actors simply could not, or would not, stop the worst crimes against human decency around the world. ‘Never again’ may have been a mantra for some, but it didn’t seem to be an actionable policy for anyone.”3
with a stopwatch. While visiting Bosnia, Carnegie Endowment intern Samantha Power watched the crew practice loading and unloading the aircraft. “They had to load the airplanes with these water pipes and everything, lickety split, because you were going to get shot at, at the other side in Sarajevo,” she recalled. “It was just this amazing kind of Indiana Jones, James Bond thing.”
the kind of go-to place around town,” recounted Power, now the senior director for human rights and multilateral affairs at the National Security Council. Abramowitz also put pressure on the administration through the U.S. media. His essays calling for a stronger American response appeared regularly in the New York Times and Washington Post. In April 1994, Abramowitz and former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick co-authored a column for the Times entitled “Lift the Embargo.”7 In it, they wrote, “If we are unwilling to give the Bosnian Serbs (and Belgrade) an ultimatum to withdraw from their sieges or endure punishing air bombardment, then NATO and the U.N. should get out of the way and give the Bosnians the arms to fight for their own country and their own lives.”
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Together, Abramowitz and Kirkpatrick, an outspoken conservative, served on the executive committee of the Action Council for Peace in the Balkans, a new organization that brought together prominent figures from both sides of the political aisle to exert maximum pressure on the administration.8 “They were really the people that drove things,” the Action Council’s first executive director, Marshall Harris, said of the executive committee. A former Foreign Service officer, Harris had resigned from the State Department in protest of its refusal to acknowledge that a genocide was under way in Bosnia. The prominence of the Action Council’s leadership ensured that its voice was heard in government, both through direct meetings with senior officials and its members’ influential writings. Abramowitz recalled, “We were relentless in our attacks on the Clinton administration . . . every time I wrote a piece attacking the administration I got a call from [State Department adviser] Greg Craig or somebody. I knew they were reading it!”
But it wasn’t enough. Abramowitz had not forgotten his conversations on board the C-130; he knew something more substantial needed to be built. Thus Abramowitz set out, with the help of Cuny and others, to establish a permanent organization whose mission was to assess the plight of threatened populations and to mobilize the political will necessary to ensure a meaningful response.
Assess, Advise, Advocate The blueprint for what was to become known as the International Crisis Group (ICG) emerged from a series of discussions held at the Carnegie Endowment at the beginning of 1994. In addition to Abramowitz and Cuny, the group included visiting fellows Jim Schear and Anne Richard. Schear had previously served as the Washington representative of the top UN official in Bosnia, Yasushi Akashi. Richard worked at the State Department. By June of 1994, the working group had settled on a name and distributed its initial proposal, including detailed projections of the staff and budget it would require.9 With the proposal in hand, former congressman Stephen Solarz of New York embarked on a tour of more than 20 countries to gauge international support for the concept. The first foreign leader with whom Solarz met was Martti Ahtisaari, the newly elected president of Finland and future Nobel Peace Prize winner. “When I explained to Martti what we had in mind, he immediately and graciously offered to provide $100,000 in funding from Finland,” Solarz later wrote.10 Australian Foreign Minister Gareth Evans responded with similar enthusiasm. Some governments opposed the idea of an ICG because they understood very well that its purpose was to compel elected officials to make
hard decisions they desperately wanted to avoid. In the memorable words of one European foreign minister, “What you are trying to do is to get us to give you a golden stick with which to beat us over the head, in order to get us to do what we’ve already decided we do not want to.”11
FRED CUNY Carnegie Endowment President Morton Abramowitz suggested to George Soros that Fred Cuny, an engineer from Texas widely regarded for his courage, creativity, and stubborn drive to succeed within dangerous environments, should implement a $50 million aid program that aimed to relieve the suffering of the Bosnian people when war erupted. In Sarajevo, hundreds of residents died from sniper fire from Serb forces while drawing water from the Miljacka river or from outdoor wells after the city’s main supply of drinking water was cut off by the siege. Braving gunfire himself, Cuny arranged to have three massive water filtration modules flown in—these served to purify the river’s water and allowed it to be deposited into Sarajevo’s main reservoir. To allow local residents to tap safely into the city’s functioning gas lines, he also flew in planeloads of reinforced plastic piping. Sadly, Cuny disappeared on a mission to Chechnya in 1995. His remains were never found.
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The final proposal presented in London envisioned an organization with three primary roles: to assess, to advise, and to advocate.13 The purpose of assessment was to identify crises as they emerged, or even beforehand.
Finally, there was the need for “sustained high-level advocacy on an international scale”15 to overcome the lack of political will responsible for inaction in the midst of crisis. Thus, the ICG board of trustees would comprise individuals with the kind of international stature necessary to focus global attention on the assessments and advice of ICG representatives in the field. The design elaborated for the ICG was unorthodox. As Abramowitz noted, its founders “were combining an analytical organization with an advocacy organization, which is not usually done.”
100 YEARS OF IMPACT
To prepare for the ICG’s official launch, Abramowitz convened a high-profile Steering Committee in London in January 1995. The committee’s members included the former presidents or prime ministers of Australia, Costa Rica, Mexico, and Nigeria; former foreign ministers from Germany, Japan, Norway, and the Philippines; the crown prince of Jordan; two members of the House of Lords; and three Nobel Peace Prize winners.12
There had been clear indicators of the violence to come well in advance of the crises that devastated Yugoslavia, Somalia, and Rwanda. Advice on how to handle the crises was also necessary because “the major humanitarian and peacekeeping organizations are individually and collectively short of institutional memory,”14 as the proposal noted. Instead of implementing lessons learned, each new operation had to climb its own learning curve.
Girls standing by a UN armored vehicle in Bosnia, 1995.
76 When her internship at the Carnegie Endowment ended, Power returned to the Balkans.16 She later wrote, “It was [Mort’s] advocacy on Bosnia, combined with the prescriptive genius of the late, great Frederick C. Cuny, that convinced me to move to the Balkans.” The result was Power’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, a searing analysis of the Clinton White House’s failure to respond in the face of so much suffering. Clinton held out against the pressure to act for two-and-a-half years—even though as a candidate he had once written, “If the horrors of the Holocaust taught us anything, it is the high cost of remaining silent and paralyzed in the face of genocide.”17
inaction began to outweigh the risks of military intervention. Abramowitz and others had successfully turned Bosnia into an influential cause on both sides of the Atlantic; it was Srebrenica that finally pushed the administration into action. Six weeks later, NATO aircraft launched a three-week assault against Serb targets across Bosnia.18 The Serbs quickly agreed to stop shelling civilians and to return to the negotiating table. Within three months, the war had ended with the Serbs accepting the terms of the Dayton peace accords. It demonstrated the value of sustained pressure.
Then on July 11, 1995, Serb forces entered the UN “safe area” of Srebrenica and massacred upward of 7,000 of its Muslim inhabitants. In the face of such brazenly genocidal behavior, the embarrassment of
The ICG came close to collapse several times in its early days. The greatest set back was Cuny’s sudden disappearance while on a mission to Chechnya in 1995. ICG had intended to appoint Cuny as its first director
Finding Its Feet
of foreign operations; Cuny’s assessments and advice were going to be the foundation for ICG’s advocacy. His remains were never found nor his killers identified. President Bill Clinton personally asked Boris Yeltsin for Russian support in the search for Cuny.19 Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott told a journalist, “Finding Fred Cuny is not just a concern for us. It is a preoccupation.”
In spite of these hardships, ICG began to establish itself as a respected source of first-hand analysis.
Although the UN and NATO refused to heed the warning, the elections’ outcome vindicated ICG, adding credibility to its subsequent reports. One of the consumers of ICG reports was Jim Schear, who became the deputy assistant secretary of defense for peacekeeping after his departure from the Carnegie Endowment. “I was actually an avid reader of their materials. I was always looking for other sources of research and analysis,” he said. When Gareth Evans, the former Australian foreign minister, became ICG president in 2000, the organi-
Anne Richard, now the vice president of government relations and advocacy at the International Rescue Committee, added that ICG’s influence is even greater in many European countries, especially in Scandinavia. “They’re not big enough to have personnel posted in all these hot spots, but they want to know what’s going on, and they want to do the right thing in response. So they see the ICG as sort of an extension of their governments, of information collection, policy recommendations. To me that was such a successful thing, I mean that’s real influence.” Fifteen years on, ICG—conceived at the Carnegie Endowment—stands tall in the community of think tanks. It is hard to imagine a world without the ICG’s unique mixture of assessment, analysis, and advocacy. It is constantly drawing governments’ attention to littleknown flashpoints around the world, hoping to prevent the next Bosnia, Somalia, or Rwanda.
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In August 1996, ICG reported that the parties to the Dayton peace accords were violating their commitment to lay the groundwork for free and fair elections in Bosnia. Its report insisted, “Under such conditions, the OSCE should not preside over an election which will only lend a sheen of democratic legitimacy to a process neither fair nor free, and which will only legitimize ethnic cleaning and expedite partition.”20
Richard Holbrooke, the architect of the Dayton peace accords, called CrisisWatch “sheer genius.” He added, “Nothing I saw in government was as good as this.”22 Richard Armitage told ICG, “During my time as Deputy Secretary [of State] I don’t think I ever failed to have Crisis Group in whenever they were in Washington . . . Crisis Group forced me to get out of my usual thought patterns, to get out of my usual comfort zone.”23
100 YEARS OF IMPACT
The tragedy of Cuny’s loss was then compounded by the sudden death of ICG’s first president, Nicholas Hinton, who suffered a massive heart attack in 1997 while en route from Croatia to Bosnia to visit the ICG field team in Sarajevo. Abramowitz stepped in as acting president.
zation embarked on a period of sustained growth, in terms of both size and influence. Its staff and budget grew by a factor of five during Evans’ presidency. Today, the organization has a $15 million annual budget, 120 full-time staff from 49 different countries, a presence on five continents, and a reputation that commands the attention of governments.21 It produces more than 80 reports and briefing papers a year, in addition to the monthly publication CrisisWatch.
CHAPTER NINE
THE RUSSIA PROJECT
carnegie and the great war: Supporting american diplomacy
After several visits to Russia, Abramowitz concluded that “the most important thing was to help refurbish Russian intellectual life” in the post-Soviet era. Initially, he attempted to support individual Russian scholars but “that concept didn’t work.” So, over the course of the next couple of years, the Carnegie Endowment embarked on a far more ambitious course: the “establish[ment] of a sort of free-wheeling American think tank in Russia.” It was a concept that was daring both in its intellectual reach and its logistical challenges. No Washington think tank had ever
attempted to set up a parallel operation overseas—and certainly not in a country with as unstable a future as the new Russia.
The Early Years The next couple of years brought a lot of frustrations. But in late 1993, just as the pro-Boris Yeltsin forces began to shell the Russian parliament building known as the White House, Abramowitz invited Stephen
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Mikhail Gorbachev under house arrest at his dacha in the Crimea; for a few days, it looked like the era of perestroika might be over. But then, just as suddenly as it began, the conspiracy unraveled. The Soviet Union crumbled and a new order began to appear. That same month, Morton Abramowitz took over the helm at the Carnegie Endowment and “decided then and there we had to focus on Russia.”
100 YEARS OF IMPACT
ON AUGUST 19, 1991, high-ranking Soviet officials placed
Sestanovich, a former director for policy development at the National Security Council (NSC), to breakfast. Abramowitz was eager for Sestanovich to lead the Carnegie Endowment’s effort to build a program in Russia. “His first proposal to me was one I wasn’t interested in,” Sestanovich recalled, “but he kept coming back to me each time describing not only my job as a bigger one but expanding his own conception of what it is he wanted me to do.”
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After several breakfasts, Sestanovich finally accepted the offer to direct the Carnegie Endowment’s Russia and Eurasia Program. “A sense of social and systemic collapse” prevailed in Moscow, said Sestanovich. “To come in with a concept of building a new institution seemed sort of outlandish.” Suitable office space was hard to come by, but with support from the MacArthur and Starr foundations, the Carnegie Moscow Center opened its doors the following year. From the beginning, the Moscow Center was determined to invite Russians from across the political spectrum. “That was not easy,” said Michael McFaul, who spent a year-and-a-half at the center. “Remember, [in] 1993 Yeltsin bombs the parliament and arrests a bunch of people and fascists and communists are part of that; and we deliberately one day decided to jump into this breach and have people that were arrested, people that were literally on the other side of the barricade being bombed, and we invited them” to the Moscow Center. The decision set an important precedent. Maria Lipman, the editor of Pro et Contra, the Moscow Center’s quarterly journal, said that events in the early years “were extremely exciting on top of being highly professional.”
The atmosphere of decay heightened sensitivities to a foreign presence. “Most of our interlocutors assumed we were CIA and explicitly said so, often at times in print and media,” McFaul said. Even the catering at center events became a point of contention. For most visitors, free food and drink was a welcome sign of generosity. Yet if the provisions seemed too generous, some would be offended by what they saw as an ostentatious and condescending display of American wealth.
“An Independence of Mind” From the outset, the Moscow Center sought to hire associates capable of working together closely with their Washington counterparts and demonstrate a clear sense of intellectual candor and freedom. Two of the center’s earliest hires turned out to be its most successful. Dmitri Trenin has been part of the center since its inception and now serves as its director. He retired from the Russian Army in 1993, shortly after serving as a senior research fellow at the NATO Defense College in Rome, the first Warsaw Pact officer to do so. Lilia Shevtsova joined the Moscow Center in 1994. Previously, she had served as deputy director of the Moscow Institute of International Economic and Political Studies, an affiliate of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Both Trenin and Shevtsova had “an unmistakable independence of mind and that’s what we were looking for most,” explained Sestanovich. Trenin recalled the enthusiasm that animated the center in its early years. “It was seen by people on both sides as an adventure,” he said. “Human relationships were struck . . . and they were extremely durable.”
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Another of the longest-serving associates at the Moscow Center is Nikolai Petrov, who came from the Analytical Center of the President of the Russian Federation, a research unit established to support the Kremlin. In the first years after the fall of the Soviet Union, a widespread expectation existed that the “authorities themselves would become much more intellectual,” Petrov recounted, since the number of scholars in government was growing rapidly. Yet when Petrov submitted candid reports about the state of affairs in Chechnya, he encountered stubborn resistance from his superiors. Petrov left the Analytical Center “because instead of playing the role of a real center providing analysis for authorities . . . it played a role of propagandist department which was sort of explaining why President Yeltsin was absolutely right.”
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Cooperation between American and Russian associates gradually developed into a full and equal partnership. The falling cost of international phone calls and the rise of email facilitated interaction between Washington and Moscow. As Abramowitz intended, American fellows began to spend significant amounts of time in Moscow while Russian fellows did so in Washington. The enthusiasm of the Carnegie Endowment’s board of trustees for the project led many of its members to visit the Moscow Center as well. In the first years at the center, there was an “understanding that programs originated in Washington,” Trenin recounted. Yet over time, Moscow and Washington became equal partners. Scholars in Moscow developed their own research agendas and independent
The Moscow Center opened its doors as a division of the Carnegie Endowment in 1994. The center was, and remains, a one-of-a-kind institution in Moscow.
ESSAYS ON THE CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE
“I Am Not a ‘Russian’ Director”
LEFT: Dmitri Trenin, current director of the Moscow Center, has been with the center since its inception. Pictured in 1994. RIGHT: Lilia Shevstova, co-chair of Carnegie’s Russian Domestic Politics and Political Institutions Project, was one of the Moscow Center’s earliest hires. Pictured in 1994.
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projects. Trenin’s appointment as director in 2008 was “interpreted by the Russian establishment as a sign of [the Moscow Center’s] maturity.” Yet Trenin insisted, “I am not a Russian director.” He rejected the categorization of analysts by their nationality. Lipman observed, “I think it’s impossible to say this part [of the center] is American, this part is Russian. It’s a merger, it’s an amalgamation.” Although some people remained suspicious, the Moscow Center quickly became the place where Russians with widely differing perspectives could have debates they couldn’t have anywhere else. The temperature of those debates often rose sharply. Sestanovich recalled, “I remember going to seminars that Mike [McFaul] convened in Moscow . . . a phrase he would often use is ochen' sporny vopros, which means ‘a very contentious question.’ Almost every single question that would come up would be extremely contentious!”
Nonetheless, many Russian officials participated in the Moscow Center’s events. “At that time we had a lot of different people, including from the parliament, the presidential administration, the government, who were eager to come to us,” recounted Petrov. Trenin noted that “in those days, there were very few regulations” that constrained government officials. Many of Trenin’s former colleagues from the military attended Moscow Center seminars. In one instance, a general from the Russian security service, the FSB, participated openly in a working group on arms sales. In the current political environment, however, this sort of casual and informal engagement has become much less common.
“The Full Debate” The success of the Moscow Center made the Russia and Eurasia Program in Washington more influential.
Government officials and experts on Russian affairs recognized that Carnegie Endowment associates in Washington had access to unique insights and perspectives because of their interaction with the Moscow Center.
The Kremlin took notice of what the Carnegie Endowment’s associates were writing as well. Thomas Graham joined the Carnegie Endowment after his second tour as an American diplomat in Moscow. Graham recalled, “The piece of work I did that probably had the most impact was an essay I wrote that was called ‘A World Without Russia?’ that I know was read at the highest levels of the Russian government and played some role in the way they thought about what had happened in the 1990s.” The Carnegie Endowment’s influence remained substantial during the administration of President George W. Bush. “The first meeting that Bush had before his
to stumble over each other; you can’t Have two carnegie people and nobody else, right? That would
”
happen all the time.
The extraordinary concentration of expertise at the Carnegie Endowment in the late 1990s resulted in an extremely high profile for its associates in the media. Major newspapers placed limits on how often Russia experts from the Carnegie Endowment could be quoted. “For talk shows,” McFaul remembered, “we would have to stumble over each other; you can’t have two Carnegie people and nobody else, right? That would happen all the time.” Such etiquette aside, there was substantive value in quoting multiple experts from the Carnegie Endowment, because they often disagreed with each other vociferously about pivotal aspects of U.S.-Russian relations, ranging from NATO enlargement, to the conditionality of economic assistance, to domestic political reforms. “You could go to Carnegie and get the full debate,” said Graham.
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Anders Åslund, a senior Swedish diplomat, joined the Carnegie Endowment in 1994. He had previously advised the Russian and Ukrainian governments on their transitions to a market-based economy and continued advising the Ukrainians until 1997. Åslund also gave advice to top American officials, such as Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and Undersecretary David Lipton, who later became a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment.
“ for talk shows, we would have
100 YEARS OF IMPACT
From 1997 to 2001, James Collins, the current director of the Russia and Eurasia Program, served as the American ambassador in Moscow. He recalled that President Bill Clinton, “before he had a Russia meeting, would have people into the White House and Carnegie was almost always represented.” Sestanovich was recruited by Clinton to serve as ambassador-at-large and special adviser to the secretary of state for the former Soviet Union, a position he held from 1997 through 2001.
first Europe trip, he had five [experts] come in to spend two hours with him,” McFaul remembered. “The two Russia people were Tom Graham and myself and they promptly hired Tom Graham,” who served on the NSC staff until 2007.
and Eurasia Program, who had moved to Moscow a few months before. Kuchins and Åslund had recently secured a $1.5 million grant from Khodorkovsky’s firm, Yukos, which pro-Kremlin media used to tar the Carnegie Endowment as an enemy of the state. After the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2005, the Kremlin targeted foreign nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) with a new law designed to curtail their operations.
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“If it had been passed in its initial form,” Kuchins said, “it would’ve forced us to close down.” In part because of a “quiet campaign, nothing public,” launched by U.S. and European diplomats and NGOs, the law was revised, allowing the Moscow Center to continue its work. In the fall of 1996, the Carnegie Moscow Center launched Pro et Contra, a quarterly journal devoted to topical Russian and international issues.
The Challenges of the Putin Era The ascension of Vladimir Putin to the Russian presidency presented the Moscow Center with challenges it never faced in the Yeltsin era. The October 2003 arrest of billionaire oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky represented a critical turning point both for the Moscow Center and for Russia writ large. Two weeks before his arrest, Khodorkovsky had delivered an address at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington, where he affirmed that he would rather be a political prisoner than a political émigré. “[The arrest] was a watershed, it was an earthquake,” observed Andrew Kuchins, director at the time of Carnegie’s Russia
The pressure increased again as Putin approached the end of his term as president and sought to install Dmitry Medvedev as his successor. “We had a tax audit going for a year or year-and-a-half [in] the run-up to the elections—not an accident,” Collins remarked. Even so, the Russian authorities threatened the Moscow Center with a substantial fine for unspecified violations of the tax code. “They kept us guessing for months,” Trenin said, only to provide a clean bill of health shortly after Medvedev’s election. Yet “even in the difficult times,” Collins added, certain senior officials, such as Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, continued “to endorse Carnegie implicitly as a significant and useful asset.” Lavrov spoke at the Moscow Center and met its board. On less contentious issues, such as nuclear policy and economics, Russian officials continue to engage in a genuine exchange of ideas with scholars at the Moscow Center. From 2006 to 2008, Rose Gottemoeller served as the center’s director, during which time
the center became what she described as a “platform to plan the next stages of arms reduction.” Gottemoeller’s work with Russian officials laid the foundation for New START (see Chapter 7), which Gottemoeller subsequently negotiated on behalf of the U.S. government after her 2009 appointment as assistant secretary of state for arms control, verification, and compliance.
“I’m not saying that we made it possible and it wouldn’t have been possible otherwise,” Sestanovich suggested, “but I think [Lilia and Dmitri] are examples of a kind of independent standing for social and political commentators that certainly did not exist when we set up [the Moscow Center].” In the mid-1990s, “the difference between an op-ed and a reporting piece, there was no difference at all,” McFaul argued, but “you now have in the Russian press the notion that you might go to Dmitri Trenin or [Nikolai] Petrov and quote them in your article . . . that was new, and I think we had a lot to do with that, this notion of ‘We’re not in a party and we’re not working for Pravda’. . . that was a great success.” Today, the Moscow Center remains as valuable as ever for American scholars and officials. Sitting in his of-
On occasion, the center continues to be a target for those within the Russian government who fear the consequences of intellectual freedom and open debate. Thanks in part to the center’s work, there is still a space in Moscow for criticism of the Kremlin’s authoritarianism and human rights violations, though the regime continues to make clear that those who violate its unspoken rules will pay a heavy price. Yet precisely because of the narrowing of political space in twenty-first century Russia, the Moscow Center’s singular contribution to Russian public life has become ever more valuable and relevant. And in the process, it has stretched the boundaries of what is possible in the world of think tanks.
“ Only in those few years was
it possible to create an americanstyle think tank in russia. Not
”
before and not after.
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“Only in those few years was it possible to create an American-style think tank in Russia. Not before and not after,” observed Åslund. Yet because the roots the Moscow Center were laid down before the resurgence of authoritarianism, it has been able to weather the assaults of the past decade and continue to provide an open space for debate and analysis that would not exist had the opportunity to create it been missed in the 1990s.
100 YEARS OF IMPACT
If the Moscow Center did not already exist, creating it would be impossible in Russia today.
fice at the NSC, where he has held the post of senior director for Russia and Eurasia since January 2009, McFaul said excitedly, “I just got a note from Petrov 30 minutes ago, [my colleagues in Moscow are] incredibly valuable to me as a policy maker right now . . . . When I travel to Moscow on official business, I always find time to see my colleagues there, often for a very late dinner after a long day of meetings with senior Russian officials. They’re just close friends and we’ve collaborated for years, so I trust their judgment.”
CHAPTER TEN
THE Alternative to war
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carnegie and the great war: Supporting american diplomacy
In 2002, a working group assembled by the Carnegie Endowment developed a unique proposal that identified “a middle ground between an unacceptable status quo . . . and the enormous costs and risks of an invasion.”1 Known as “coercive inspections,” the Carnegie Endowment proposal commanded the attention of the most senior policy makers in both the United States and Europe and had a clear impact on the public debate in the run-up to the Iraq war. The United Nations Resolution 1441—which forced Iraq to allow UN inspectors to return for the first time since 1998—incorporated critical recommendations made by the working group, such as ensuring access to socalled “Presidential Sites,” which had been off-limits under previous inspection regimes.
The working group assembled by the Carnegie Endowment in the spring of 2002 designed a policy that was not just highly innovative, but also ready for full and immediate implementation under difficult conditions on the ground in Iraq. It was a superb example of practical policy recommendations in action. “What Carnegie did during the summer and fall of 2002 to improve public discourse was a model for NGOs committed to research, analysis and policy impact,” said Robert Gallucci, a UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) veteran and member of the Carnegie Endowment working group. “Jessica and her colleagues convened groups of experts, produced a creative, intelligent, and realistic document offering an alternative to
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and polarizing debate that preceded the invasion of Iraq? What if there had been a policy capable of exposing the whole truth about Iraq’s nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programs without first removing Saddam Hussein from power?
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what if there had been an alternative to the bitter
his extraordinary heroism as a fighter pilot and POW during the Vietnam War. Boyd designed the concept of operations—in military parlance, the CONOPS— which specified how coercive inspections would actually be conducted on the ground.
88 The Carnegie Endowment’s approach of “coercive inspections” was adopted by the French and German delegations during the pre-war debates at the United Nations.
The proposal’s authors laid out its details in a collection of papers, Iraq: A New Approach, made public in September 2002. The first paper, by Jessica Mathews, elaborated on the logic and strategy of coercive inspections, to be carried out by “a powerful, multinational military force, created by the UN Security Council,” which would operate in Iraq, thus enabling “UN and [International Atomic Energy Agency] inspections teams to carry out ‘comply or else’ inspections.”2 The inspectors and the multinational force would operate under new rules that enabled them to go wherever they wanted, whenever they wanted. If the Iraqi government refused to admit the force or chose to obstruct the inspections in any way, it would be removed from power.
The impact inside the White House war, and aggressively put it before policy makers and attentive publics.” Seven of the 30 members of the working group had extensive experience as weapons inspectors in Iraq, including Rolf Ekeus, the Swedish diplomat who had served as chairman of UNSCOM from 1991 to 1997, charged with uncovering and eliminating Iraq’s WMD programs after the first Gulf War. Another essential member of the group was General Charles Boyd, a retired Air Force officer with years of experience as an operational planner at the highest levels, also known for
Given the priority placed on developing a workable alternative that the administration would take seriously, “It was only appropriate to take it to them before it went public,” Mathews explained. Over Labor Day weekend in September 2002, the White House suddenly gave notice that National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice would be available for a meeting the next day at 10 a.m. Boyd received the message after checking into a hotel in southwestern Virginia after a long day of riding his motorcycle in the rain. Exhausted, he left his motorcycle at the hotel and arranged for a car to take him back to Washington.
Originally scheduled for 20–30 minutes, the meeting with Rice and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, lasted almost an hour-and-a-half. Mathews recalled, “The very first thing [Rice] said, she turned to the title page [of our report] and pointed to the word ‘coercive’ and said, ‘I like that.’” Boyd remembered, “Condi really seemed interested. She asked a lot of questions. She was really ingesting [the proposal].”
The George W. Bush administration never embraced the underlying logic of coercive inspections, but it drew heavily on the working group’s recommendations for how to strengthen the hand of UNMOVIC, the United Nations Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Commission, which had been authorized by Resolution 1441 to renew the search for Iraqi WMD. According to Canadian diplomat David Malone, “The substantive genesis of [Resolution] 1441 was a Carnegie
In addition, the final text enabled inspection of the socalled “Presidential Sites,” which had enjoyed immunity from inspections under the previous regime and which together comprised more than 30 km2 and hundreds of buildings.5 The Carnegie Endowment working group insisted that lifting this immunity was essential to the success of any future inspections.
At the United Nations There was a strong interest at the UN in the core provisions of the proposal for coercive inspections, namely the creation of a robust multilateral force to accompany UN inspectors in Iraq. Mathews and Boyd met multiple times with Secretary General Kofi Annan, whose
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For several months, there was no further contact between the working group and the White House. Neither the Office of the Vice President nor senior officials at the Pentagon showed any interest in the proposal. Just weeks before the invasion, Boyd asked the White House for another meeting, which he attended along with Ekeus. Rice was not there. Boyd recalls that after fifteen minutes of discussion with Hadley, “I could see it was over. I told him we shouldn’t waste each other’s time.”
Even those who questioned the Carnegie Endowment’s approach acknowledged the depth of its influence. In his memoir, Disarming Iraq, UNMOVIC Chairman Hans Blix recalled that the Carnegie Endowment’s report on coercive inspections was the inspiration for a draft of Resolution 1441 that he reviewed in late September 2002.4 In particular, Blix had reservations about the draft’s insistence that UNMOVIC have the right to establish no-fly and no-drive zones, as well as “exclusion zones” that would be enforced by UN troops or member states. In fact, the exclusion zones later became part of the final text approved by the Security Council, although not the provision for their enforcement by UN or foreign troops.
100 YEARS OF IMPACT
The one discordant note in the discussion arrived when Rice asked, “What about the human rights issues?” Beyond Iraq’s WMD programs, she wondered, did the proposal address the other aspects of Saddam’s misrule? Mathews responded, “‘No,’ the whole idea here is you need a policy that is focused on this one thing [that is, WMD] and that way you can get support” from the other nations on the UN Security Council.
Endowment for International Peace report of August 2002 advancing a proposal for … coercive inspections.”3 From contacts in the U.S. government, Boyd learned that there were “direct lifts from my essay in some of the stuff [the most senior American diplomats] took to the UN.”
Soldiers boarding a United States Air Force C-130 Hercules in Tikrit, Iraq, to fly to Baghdad, 2006.
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deep interest in coercive inspections was clear to both of them. They also had extensive interaction with German and French officials. Mathews explained, “France and Germany had agreed to work together on this and it was mostly the Germans that I ended up having lengthy conversations with at several different levels, [including] in Berlin.” The concept of coercive inspections was very attractive to the French and Germans because they wanted to address the challenge presented by Saddam “in a tough-minded way, without going to war.” One of the clearest signs of their interest was just how much time they spent studying the issue. Mathews recalled, “I was spending twenty minutes, half-an-hour a day” on the phone with French, German, and other European diplomats. In discussions with senior French diplomats, Boyd discovered a certain discomfort with the Carnegie Endowment proposal that the chairman of the coercive inspections force have the final say with regard to au-
thorizing the use of force. “The French wanted a second trigger,” Boyd remembered, meaning that the Security Council would have to vote in favor of the use of force even after the chairman reported that Iraq was noncompliant. From Boyd’s perspective, a second trigger would undercut the most important incentive for Iraqi compliance, namely that failure to cooperate would make the use of force an absolute certainty. Could the issue of a second trigger have been resolved? Given the depth of French and German interest, it seems likely they would have sought an effective compromise if the idea of coercive inspections had overcome the initial hurdle of American opposition. What is harder to know is whether the Chinese and Russians would have settled for anything less than a second trigger. In spite of their interest in coercive inspections, what the French and Germans would clearly not do was take a public stand in the proposal’s favor while the United
Yet in spite of their strong interest, no Democrats became public advocates of the proposal. “Remember,” Mathews said, “this was in the run-up to the [2002] elections” and the administration scheduled a vote on the war less than one month before the election, which had a “bulldozer effect.” The Senate voted to authorize the use of force by a margin of 77–23, with 29 Democrats voting in favor and 21 against.6 By way of contrast, only ten Democrats had voted to authorize the use of force against Iraq in 1991, with 45 voting against. In the House, the percentage of Democrats who supported the war was also greater in 2002 than it had been in 1991.
A “ pretty lonely” place to be At a time of intense ideological conflict, the Carnegie Endowment led an international effort to develop a pragmatic middle ground between inadequate inspections and regime change. While vigorously defending inspections as the most effective means of disarmament, Mathews condemned the deficiencies of “the earlier international inspection effort in which the playing field was tilted steeply in Iraq’s favor.” While warning of the terrible costs of war, Mathews observed that coercive inspections had become a viable option precisely because of “the Bush administration’s threats of unilateral military action, which have opened a political space that did not exist before.”7 The logic of coercive inspections rested on the proposition that the surest way to disarm Iraq without war was to demonstrate the absolute certainty of war should Iraq fail to cooperate with inspections. This did not sit well with those hawks whose goal was regime change, not disarmament.
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States remained aloof. A similar dynamic played out on Capitol Hill, where Mathews and Boyd briefed members of both the House and Senate, in addition to testifying before the House International Relations Committee. Mathews met with one Senate committee chairman who had heavily underlined his copy of the working group’s report.
100 YEARS OF IMPACT
A statue of Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein falls as it is pulled down in central Baghdad, April 9, 2003.
The Carnegie Endowment’s advocacy for coercive inspections also played a critical role in defining its values as an institution. Reflecting on that advocacy, Mathews observed, “I think it says a lot about this institution, about the kind of people that have been here, and about a culture that was willing to stand up and was not just a government-in-waiting. I think that’s the key. . . . We were very brave. And at the time it was pretty lonely.” For Mathews, the comments of a senior executive at another think tank illustrate the Carnegie Endowment’s isolation in the months before the war began. She recounted, “He stopped one of our vice presidents on the street one day, and said, ‘What is Jessica doing? Nobody at Carnegie is ever going to get confirmed again by the Senate.’”
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From Mathews’ perspective, that is exactly the point. “I think the reason we put so much effort into [coercive inspections] is because we are quite different from other think tanks that are [so] much more focused on people going back into government.” Mathews noted that a major philanthropic foundation that had supported many Carnegie Endowment programs refused to fund the coercive inspections project because “they thought it was too hawkish.” “We said, ‘Wait a minute. The whole purpose here is to avoid a war!’” Yet, as Mathews recounted, the foundation still resisted. For Mathews, the Carnegie Endowment’s advocacy stood in contrast to the acquiescence of others who might have been expected to speak up. “I’ve never seen a time quite like this,” Mathews recalled. “The Democratic leadership from the Clinton administration supported [the war] . . . The press almost one hundred percent. There was only a tiny handful of people” who challenged prevailing assumptions.
War Looms As war approached, Mathews persistently challenged the assertion that Saddam represented an imminent threat, a point she had made consistently since early 2002. As Mathews and Boyd wrote in the New York Times in September, “Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction pose a pressing threat but not an immediate one.”8 Mathews did not hesitate to characterize Saddam as an inveterate liar and a “classic bully.”9 She maintained her focus on the wisdom of going to war. Shortly before Secretary of State Colin Powell’s February 2003 address to the United Nations, Mathews wrote in the Washington Post, “Iraq’s failure to come clean is indisputably a material breach of the resolution [i.e., Resolution 1441], but the question remains, Is it a reason to go to war?”10 After the UN address, Mathews told PBS unequivocally that Powell “didn’t make, and didn’t even try to make, a case for the imminence of the threat.”11 In addition, she denounced the administration for attempting to “pull the plug on [the UNMOVIC inspectors] when they’d barely gotten started.”12 Why rush to declare inspections a failure unless “the government’s true aim is not, as stated, to disarm Hussein but rather to remove him”?13 At the same time, Mathews chastised UNMOVIC for its “intolerable mistakes,”14 which undercut the credibility of the inspections process. The even-handed approach advocated by the Carnegie Endowment found clear expression in a passage from Mathews’ final essay in the Post before the invasion. “The idea isn’t to avoid war at all costs,” she wrote. “The idea is to disarm Iraq, and that can be done by truly muscular inspections backed by a multinational military force.”15
What If...? What if the United States and then the full UN Security Council had embraced coercive inspections as the approach most likely to ensure both peace and security in the Middle East? Might war have been avoided, saving thousands of American lives and preventing the dramatic growth of al-Qaeda in Iraq, as well as the rise of Sunni and Shi’i death squads that claimed tens of thousands of Iraqi lives? Might one even suggest that if Saddam remained in power today, he would now be the target of an uprising like the one in Libya?
“ I think it says a lot about this
Revelations since the war “make it clear the Bush administration was not, in fact, focused on the threat of WMD,” Mathews said. “Rather, the administration had settled on using the fearsome specter of what Condoleezza Rice called the ‘mushroom cloud’ as the primary means of building public support for a war of regime change.”
culture that was willing to stand up and was not just a government-inwaiting. . . We were very brave. And at
”
the time it was pretty lonely.
With the benefit of hindsight, we know that no inspections, no matter how coercive and thorough, would have found threatening WMD in Iraq. “Would the United States—and others—have accepted the negative finding?” Mathews asked. “Could they have taken no for an answer?” Almost certainly not, she said. Nonetheless, this episode remains a shining example of how the Carnegie Endowment lived up to its mandate—as first enunciated by its founder, Andrew Carnegie—of trying to prevent war. The institution produced a carefully thought-out, practical alternative to war that was debated at the highest level of governments around the world—and in different circumstances, might well have been fully adopted as policy. And, in the face of widespread opposition and even ridicule, the Carnegie Endowment stood by its proposals and by the principle of peaceful solutions.
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Three years after the invasion, the United States’ Joint Forces Command (JFCOM) published a study of Saddam’s decision-making process in the months before the war based on captured documents as well as interviews with detained Baathist officials.16 The evidence suggests that Saddam cultivated his subordinates’ illusion that Iraq truly had an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction while discounting the prospect of an American invasion in response to this charade. Confronted by an adversary with such an idiosyncratic mind-set, it may be a fool’s errand to ask “What if?”
that have been here, and about a 100 YEARS OF IMPACT
Even in hindsight, it remains extraordinarily difficult, perhaps impossible, to know whether Saddam would have allowed 50,000 American-led troops to operate on Iraqi soil or whether it would have represented an unacceptable threat to Saddam’s hold on power.
institution, about the kind of people
CHAPTER ELEVEN
pioneering the global think tank
religion is globalizing, entertainment is globalizing,” observed Jessica Mathews, the eighth president of the Carnegie Endowment. “Of all the sectors that you’d think would be on the leading edge of globalization, think tanks—especially international affairs think tanks—should be the one,” yet they remain far behind.
“After the Cold War, Washington began to resemble a two-way radio that was stuck on ‘send’ and had lost its receive function,” said Mathews. “What we were struggling with was years of saying to ourselves, ‘The United States has got to change, the United States has got to
be better at listening to what others think, listening to how others define the issues, listening to what their needs are’ . . . but you can only criticize for so long before people tune you out.” The better approach, Mathews concluded, was to “be the change you wish to see in the world,” as Mohandas Gandhi said. The Carnegie Endowment would demonstrate in microcosm how America’s approach to the world should be transformed. It would aim to become the place that brings what the world thinks into thinking about U.S. policy and to communicate that thinking to a global audience.
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So, in 2007, the Carnegie Endowment—under Mathews’ leadership—took the momentous decision to transform itself from a traditional Washington think tank concerned with international affairs into the first truly international think tank. But the purpose was not simply to change itself—or even the world of think tanks—but to try to influence the entire direction of America’s engagement with the world.
100 YEARS OF IMPACT
“BUSINESS science is globalizing, is globalizing,
Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts When Mathews became president in 1997, the Carnegie Endowment had a single outpost abroad, its center in Moscow. Today, Washington is the hub for a network that extends to Beijing, Beirut, Brussels, and Moscow. And plans to expand further are under consideration. The establishment of new centers in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East built on some existing assets that gave the Carnegie Endowment a comparative advantage. A 2006 internal study noted that “40 percent of Carnegie senior researchers [in Washington] are foreign born and raised,” and that the language capabilities of the Washington staff included “four members fluent in Russian,
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five fluent in Chinese, and five fluent or able to read or converse in Arabic.” In addition, the Carnegie Endowment was committing significant resources to the publication of original and translated material in Chinese, Russian, and Arabic. Above all, the success of the Moscow Center provided a compelling model for the establishment of an influential presence overseas. Given such assets, the physical globalization of the Carnegie Endowment represented a natural extension of its global mind-set. “I actually came to the idea of a global expansion first, and then realized we already had the model,” Mathews recalled.
jessica t. mathews Jessica Tuchman Mathews has served as president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace since 1997. She was director of the Council on Foreign Relations’ Washington program and a senior fellow from 1994 to 1997. While there she published her seminal 1997 Foreign Affairs article, “Power Shift,” chosen by the editors as one of the most influential in the journal’s seventy-five years. From 1982 to 1993, she was founding vice president and director of research of the World Resources Institute, an internationally known center for policy research on environmental and natural resource management issues. She served on the editorial board of the Washington Post from 1980 to 1982, covering energy, environment, science, technology, arms control, health, and other issues. Later, she became a weekly columnist for the Washington Post, writing a popular weekly column that appeared nationwide and in the International Herald Tribune. From 1977 to 1979, she was director of the Office of Global Issues of the National Security Council, covering nuclear proliferation, conventional arms sales, and human rights. In 1993, she returned to government as deputy to the Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs. Earlier she served on the staff of the Committee on Energy and the Environment of the Interior Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Second, there is no substitute for a long-term commitment. The Moscow Center weathered the deep suspicion provoked by its initial founding, the collapse of the ruble in the late 1990s, the Kremlin’s harassment of foreign nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and many other hardships. This persistence has given credibility to the center’s claim to be a truly Russian, as well as an American, entity. Third, new centers thrive when they are complemented by counterpart programs in Washington dedicated to the same regions of the world. Furthermore, it soon became clear that the new centers would become part of an integrated network whose value is greater than the sum of its parts.
On critical subjects such as nuclear policy, this network can now bring together experts and expertise reflecting radically different viewpoints that might otherwise remain fragmented. In addition to a firsttier nuclear policy program in Washington, said Mathews, “we’ve got two top experts in Moscow, three more in Europe, as well as two in China that are focusing just on nuclear [policy]—who else has anything remotely like that?”
Middle East Beirut, Cairo, and Dubai emerged as the leading candidates in a field of six when the Carnegie Endowment sought a home for its Middle East Center. Several factors influenced the selection of Beirut, according to Vice President of Studies Thomas Carothers, who, together with Middle East Program Director Marina Ottaway, helped to oversee the center’s establishment. “Intellectual freedom was a dominant consideration,” he recalled.
97 ESSAYS ON THE CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE
The experience gained from building up the Moscow Center provided the Carnegie Endowment with an indispensable set of lessons learned. First, there was no substitute for being physically on the ground, in order to observe and become part of a changing society. Being on the ground in Moscow enabled American associates to tap into Russian networks, and Moscow Center scholars to do the same in Washington.
100 YEARS OF IMPACT
The Carnegie Middle East Center was established in Beirut, Lebanon in 2006.
Even though Egypt was the historic center of cultural and intellectual life in the Arab world, at the time it did not offer a favorable intellectual environment because of the presence of an authoritarian regime that would likely mean regular monitoring by the country’s internal security service and political pressure on its Egyptian and Arab staff. Although Dubai was more open, there was concern about whether its location might generate a sense of insulation from the conflicts and hardships facing the region. In addition to Lebanon’s open climate and central location, its leadership welcomed the Carnegie Endowment with considerable enthusiasm. Prime Minister
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“ it was one of the largest program
grants carnegie had received in
many years and was a great boost at the crucial moment of start-up... and dfid took a hands-off approach
”
in supporting the center.
Fouad Siniora called Mathews to discuss plans for the center, then asked to meet with her during his official visit to Washington. Saad Hariri, who would become prime minister in 2009, also met with Carnegie Endowment representatives to offer his support. Finally, Beirut’s
cosmopolitan environment made it a place where scholars from across the Middle East would want to live. But for all of the benefits, the Middle East Center still faced serious challenges. In the summer of 2006, shortly after the Carnegie Endowment chose Lebanon as the center’s home, Israel and Hizbollah engaged in a brief but fierce war. To support the new center’s establishment, the British government’s Department for International Development (DFID) provided a five-year, $5 million grant. “It was one the largest program grants Carnegie had received in many years and was a great boost at the crucial moment of start-up,” said Carothers, “and DFID took a hands-off approach in supporting the center.” The value of having a center in the Middle East quickly became apparent when the Carnegie Endowment’s staff canvassed the region’s intellectuals. After dozens of conversations with locals, Ottaway reported on a consensus “that there are many good scholars in the Arab world, but no truly independent center from which they can operate.” Carothers noted that scholars in the region tend to avoid the difficult subject of political reform, yet the new center in Beirut would prioritize it. To lead the center, the Carnegie Endowment chose Lebanese scholar Paul Salem, whom Carothers described as one of the rare figures capable of commanding respect on all sides in Lebanon’s tense political environment. And the center added Egyptian political scientist Amr Hamzawy, whose topical writings on Arab politics and governance—together with his frequent presence on Arab satellite television—had made him a “star” in the Arab world.
Asia In China, the Global Vision faced its greatest challenges.
In September 2004, the Carnegie Endowment opened a small office in Beijing. After more than a year of intense negotiations, the Beijing office entered into a partnership with the China Reform Forum (CRF), led by Zheng Bijian, previously the executive vice president of the Communist Party Central School and a confidant of Chinese President Hu Jintao. This symbol of the Carnegie Endowment’s acceptance was extremely valuable at a time when the Color Revolutions, as well
Committed to establishing a permanent presence in China, the Carnegie Endowment revisited its options. Through a cooperative agreement with Tsinghua University, the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy officially opened its doors in April 2010. Its director is Paul Haenle, whose service as an Army officer included several years living in China as a Foreign Area Officer (FAO), as well two years in Washington as the National Security Council’s director for China, Taiwan, and Mongolia. “We’ve got somebody,” Mathews said, “[who] more than being completely fluent in the language, has lived for a long time in China . . . [and] has traveled all over the country. He really has a deep feel for its culture, politics, and society.” Finally, Mathews added, Haenle
99 ESSAYS ON THE CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE
The situation there has raised difficult questions about how much freedom is necessary for an independent policy center to thrive, as well as what concessions should be made to ensure continued operation. “We knew from the beginning that in China it was going to be a very long row to hoe,” Mathews explained. “There were going to be some things you could do and some things you couldn’t. And you had to find, you know, the right mix of honey and vinegar.”
as intensifying domestic protest, had resulted in deep suspicion of foreign NGOs. Yet after Zheng’s departure from the CRF, the Forum was no longer positioned to maintain the presence of an independent institution in its midst, so the partnership ended.
100 YEARS OF IMPACT
The Carnegie Endowment launched the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy, housed at Tsinghua University in Beijing, on April 14, 2010.
Nearly three decades after closing its Geneva office, the Carnegie Endowment returned to Europe with a new center in Brussels in the spring of 2007.
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has the kind of entrepreneurial approach that is essential to building a new institution. The center’s research program, established in collaboration with the Carnegie Endowment’s new partners at Tsinghua, focuses on global challenges that the United States and China can address most effectively by working together, such as climate change, nuclear security, and international economic recovery. Beyond cooperation on specific issues, the purpose of the center is to help bring the U.S.China relationship to a new level at a time when China has begun to play a role of unprecedented importance on the global stage. The limits imposed on the center remain considerable, however. To build long-term trust, the research agenda must avoid hot-button issues such as corruption and human rights. Yet, that leaves a broad and challenging scope for joint work. For the first time, China and the United States have to find ways to work together to resolve common threats, from climate change and nuclear security to the policy changes necessary for a global economic recovery. All of these and more are on the table.
This is not the first time that the Carnegie Endowment has faced such challenges, however. In Russia, during a time of hostility toward foreign NGOs, one of the Kremlin’s detentions of an outspoken critic led the Carnegie Endowment’s board of trustees to consider the conditions under which the Moscow Center should continue to operate. Mathews recalled, “Our conclusion, which was almost unanimous, was we stay as long as we feel the space allowed is enough for us to make a difference. We don’t just shut down in solidarity with some other group . . . . You do make choices in order to operate,” which is the only way to achieve long-term goals. “I told the board that ups and downs have to be expected” in the process of establishing new enterprises in difficult environments. In spite of such limitations, the Moscow Center has thrived and the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center has already made a strong impression on seasoned observers. After a February 2011 visit, Stapleton Roy, whose four-anda-half decades as a foreign service officer included postings as the U.S. ambassador in Beijing, Singapore, and
Brussels. That’s what is really a big surprise. You think about Brussels as having this enormous number of foreign policy people, but many niches are at best partly filled. Russia, China, the Middle East, climate, energy. Everything that’s not either transatlantic or EU is very under-paid-attention-to in Brussels.”
Europe
Events there took advantage of the unique concentration of expertise at the Carnegie Endowment’s other international outposts. For example, a conference on Russia with the French foreign ministry incorporated the Moscow Center’s staff. Also, experts from Beirut participated in several “road shows” that touched down in numerous European capitals to raise awareness of the Carnegie Endowment’s innovative work on political Islam. As a result of the demand for its out-
The original plan for the Carnegie Endowment’s overseas expansion did not include the establishment of a center in Brussels. The EU capital had no shortage of think tanks. Yet Carothers made the case that Europe had to be a part of the Global Vision because of its importance on so many international issues. Carothers pushed for a center in Brussels with the idea that it would become a regional hub, supporting activities in Paris, London, Berlin, and elsewhere.
Yet after the launch of the center in Brussels, under the enterprising leadership of its first director, Fabrice Pothier, it quickly became clear that a policy institute that examined Europe and the EU’s engagement with the outside world—rather than another think tank examining internal EU issues—would be an important addition to the European landscape. Contrary to the Carnegie Endowment’s expectations, Europeans did not respond to the proposal by saying, “We’ve done this already.” Mathews recalled, “We didn’t anticipate, or at least I didn’t, how much of a need there was for this in
“
you think about brussels as having this enormous number of foreign policy people, but many niches are at best partly filled ... everything that ’s not either transatlantic or eu is very under-paid-attention-
”
to in brussels.
put, the office in Brussels increasingly resembles the Carnegie Endowment’s other centers. Carnegie Europe has become an integral part of the Global Vision.
101 ESSAYS ON THE CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE
Initially, there was no plan to establish a full-fledged research institute in Brussels, but rather a platform to reach out to European audiences, including both policy experts and officials, in order to keep them apprised of the work being done in Beirut, Beijing, Moscow, and Washington.
100 YEARS OF IMPACT
Jakarta, wrote, “The current reality is well in excess of what I previously thought possible. This is a tribute to our current leadership at the Center, in particular Paul Haenle and [associate] Lora Saalman, who have the vision and skills to turn ideas into accomplishments.”
Connecting Past and Future In surprising ways, the Global Vision represents not just a strategy for confronting the challenges of the twenty-first century, but a fulfillment of Andrew Carnegie’s vision a hundred years ago.
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The Carnegie Endowment’s earliest yearbooks include long lists of prominent international figures from Europe, China, Japan, Latin America, and the Middle East—many of them Carnegie’s personal friends— who served as its official “correspondents” overseas. Shortly after its founding, the Carnegie Endowment established a permanent center in Paris. The Carnegie Endowment also supported the establishment of the Academy of International Law at The Hague, with which it worked closely to educate a generation of international lawyers.
an enthusiastic response to the vision’s achievements, including an $11 million gift from the Carnegie Corporation to support further expansion. The challenge in the coming years will be to complete the job. “We’re right now wrestling with how to do this,” Mathews explained. “How do we preserve high standards for research while continuing to expand our global presence? How do we sustain financial support for our new centers while ensuring they have the freedom to explore critical subjects that are not funding magnets—such our early work on political reform in the Arab world?”
The Second World War dealt a serious blow to the Carnegie Endowment’s overseas operations, compounded by the financial difficulties it faced after the war. The Carnegie Endowment’s European center—relocated to Geneva after the founding of the United Nations—survived until 1978, but also became a casualty of unsustainable costs. Against this backdrop, the rapid expansion of the Carnegie Endowment today is even more remarkable.
Whatever the challenges ahead, it is already clear that the Carnegie Endowment’s centers in Beirut, Beijing, Brussels, and Moscow have tapped into a reservoir of unmet demand for independent, innovative, and globally minded thinking about critical problems in the world. All four centers are full-fledged research institutions, not just liaison offices. The Carnegie Endowment now runs websites in four different languages. In Moscow, there are more than 40 Russians on the staff and just one American. In Beirut and Brussels, the staffs are entirely Middle Eastern and European, respectively.
At the official launch of the Global Vision in February 2007, Mathews announced that the Carnegie Endowment would seek to raise an additional $36 million to fund the new centers for a period of ten years. By the middle of 2007, $25 million of commitments were already in place. Although the 2006 study for the Global Vision projected that ten years would have to pass for “an undertaking such as this to be realized and evaluated,” there has already been
In just a few short years, the Global Vision has shown the way for think tanks to become multinational institutions; it represents a renewal of the entrepreneurial spirit that has animated the Carnegie Endowment ever since its founding. The concept of the global think tank is a work in progress, whose look and shape will be determined by the talent that lies within the doors of the Carnegie Endowment, and by the events that await us in the twenty-first century.
APPENDIX A
BOARD OF TRUSTEES 100 YEARS OF IMPACT
“ Let my Trustees therefore ask themselvs from
- Andrew Carnegie
ESSAYS ON THE CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE
time to time, from age to age how they can help man in his glorious ascent onward and upward and to this end devote this fund.”
103
CURRENT TRUSTEE FOUNDING TRUSTEE
104
ABRAMOWITZ, MORTON I.
1991-97
ALEXANDER, WALLACE MCK.
1935-39
ANDERSON, DILLON
1953-74
ANNAN, KOFI A.
2009-
BACON, ROBERT
1913-19
BAILEY II, CHARLES W.
1972-2000
BALLANTINE, ARTHUR A.
1936-50
BANCROFT, EDGAR A.
1918-25
BANCROFT, HARDING F.
1964-81
BARNES, JR., HARRY G.
1989-97
BARROWS, DAVID P.
1931-51
BEARD, CHARLES E.
1958-61
BELL, JAMES F.
1939-42
BENNET, JR., DOUGLAS J.
1989-93
BENTON, MARJORIE CRAIG
1980-92
BLUM, ROBERT
1958-65
BRADEN, THOMAS W.
1966-83
BRADLEY, BILL
1997-
BREWSTER, KINGMAN, JR.
1976-88
BRITTAIN III, ALFRED
1968-76
BROOKINGS, ROBERT S.
1910-32
BULLITT, WILLIAM MARSHALL
1933-57
BUNDY, HARVEY H.
1948-60
BURKE, THOMAS
1910-25
BURNEY, DEREK H.
1995-99
BUTLER, NICHOLAS MURRAY
1910-47
CADWALADER, JOHN L.
1910-14
CARSWELL, ROBERT
1988-2009
CATLIN, DANIEL K.
1930-51
CHANCELLOR, JOHN
1973-82
CHAPIN, W. W.
1939-54
CHERRINGTON, BEN M.
1943-57
CHOATE, JOSEPH H.
1910-17
CLAPP, MARGARET
1951-57
COHEN, JEROME A.
2000-08
COLE, DAVID L.
1951-72
CORDIER, ANDREW W.
1962-71
COWLES, JOHN
1960-69
CRAIG, GREGORY B.
1989-97; 1999-2009; 2010-
DAVIS, JOHN W.
1921-50
DAVIS, NORMAN H.
1931-43
DEBS, RICHARD A.
1977-2010
DELANO, FREDERIC A.
1920-49
DODGE, CLEVELAND H.
1910-19
105 ESSAYS ON THE CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE
1971-84
100 YEARS OF IMPACT
BRYAN, ANTHONY J. A.
106
DONALDSON, WILLIAM H.
1988-
DONOVAN, HEDLEY
1966-85
DOUGLAS, JOHN W.
1972-92
DUBRIDGE, LEE A.
1951-57
DULLES, JOHN FOSTER
1944-52
DUNN, FREDERICK S.
1951-62
EISENHOWER, DWIGHT D.
1948-52
EISENHOWER, SUSAN
2000-05
EL-ERIAN, MOHAMED A.
2011-
ELIOT, CHARLES W.
1910-19
ELLIOTT, OSBORN
1979-83
EVANS, LAWTON B.
1926-34
FERGUSON, JR., CLARENCE CLYDE
1975-84
FERGUSON, JR., ROGER W.
2005-2010
FINCH, GEORGE A.
1940-56
FINEBERG, HARVEY V.
2009-
FITES, DONALD V.
2001-
FOSTER, ARTHUR WILLIAM
1910-25
FOSTER, JOHN W.
1910-17
FOWLER, HENRY H.
1979-2000
FOX, AUSTEN G.
1910-37
FRANKS, ROBERT A.
1910-35
FRASER, DOUGLAS A.
1984-87
FRASER, LEON
1938-45
FREMONT-SMITH, MARION R.
1972-97
GAINES, FRANCIS PENDLETON
1933-51
GAITHER, JAMES C.
1981-
GELB, LESLIE H.
1991-2005
GEORGE, WILLIAM W.
2000-
GIORDANO, RICHARD
1999-
GOHEEN, ROBERT F.
1981-91
GOLDBERG, ARTHUR J.
1958-61
GORELICK, JAMIE
1997-2010
GRAY, GEORGE
1915-25
GROSS, ERNEST A.
1953-77
HADLEY, STEPHEN J.
1999-2001
HAFSTAD, LAWRENCE R.
1961-75
HAMLIN, CHARLES S.
1923-38
HARLAN, STEPHEN D.
1996-2007
HARRISON, EARL GRANT
1947-55
HAUGE, GABRIEL
1962-68
HEINZ, HOWARD
1926-41
HERNaNDEZ-COLoN, RAFAEL
1973-91
HEWITT, WILLIAM A.
1971-75
HILL, DAVID JAYNE
1918-32
HISS, ALGER
1947-50
107 ESSAYS ON THE CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE
1937-53
100 YEARS OF IMPACT
FREEMAN, DOUGLAS S.
'
2010-
'
FREEMAN, JR., CHAS W.
108
HOLMAN, ALFRED
1920-30
HOUGHTON, ALANSON B.
1930-41
HOUSE, PATRICIA
2011-
HOWARD, WILLIAM M.
1910-30
HUFSTEDLER, SHIRLEY M.
1984-94
HUGHES, THOMAS L.
1971-96
JESSUP, PHILIP C.
1937-60
JOHNSON, JAMES A.
1992-2000
JOHNSON, JOSEPH E.
1950-76
KAISER, EDGAR F.
1961-66
KATZ, MILTON
1954-78
KENNEDY, DONALD
1993-2009
KENNEDY SMITH, JEAN
1979-87
KIRK, GRAYSON L.
1953-61
KIRKLAND, LANE
1975-81
LANGER, WILLIAM L.
1961-66
LANSING, ROBERT
1920-28
LEACH, JAMES A.
2007-2009
LEGVOLD, ROBERT
1993-2010
LEMELLE, WILBERT J.
1989-2003
LEWIS, JR., STEPHEN R.
1988-
LEWIS, JR., WILLIAM M.
2005-09
LINDSAY, GEORGE N.
1980-90
LINDSAY, JOHN V.
1967-70
LOWDEN, FRANK O.
1923-41
LUCE, CLARE BOOTHE
1958-64
MACKAY-SMITH, ANNE C.
1984-88
MACOMBER, WILLIAM B.
1979-91
MANNING, RICHARD I.
1930-31
MASON, LINDA
2010-
MATHER, SAMUEL
1910-19
MATHEWS, JESSICA T.
1992-
MCGILL, RALPH E.
1962-68
McGuire, Raymond
2011-
MEYER, CHARLES A.
1958-60
MILLIKAN, MAX F.
1964-69
MINOW, NEWTON N.
1987-93
MINTON BEDDOES, ZANNY
2000-
MITTAL, SUNIL BHARTI
2009-
MOLYNEAUX, PETER
1934-51
MONTAGUE, ANDREW J.
1910-37
MORRIS, ROLAND S.
1930-45
MORROW, DWIGHT W.
1925-30
MURROW, EDWARD R.
1951-57
NELSON, JR., OTTO L.
1949-73
NEWELL, BARBARA W.
1972-2000
NICELY, JAMES M.
1956-64
109 ESSAYS ON THE CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE
1966-98
100 YEARS OF IMPACT
LODGE, GEORGE C.
110
NOLDE, O. FREDERICK
1951-70
OLDS, ROBERT E.
1925-32
OTUNNU, OLARA A.
1993-2008
OVERHOLSER, GENEVA
1995-2001
PAGE, ROBERT NEWTON
1920-25
PAGLIA, CATHERINE JAMES
2010-
PARKER, EDWIN B.
1926-29
PARSONS, RICHARD D.
1987-88
PATTERSON, ELLMORE C.
1951-75
PERCY, LEROY
1925-29
PERKINS, GEORGE W.
1910-20
PERRY, WILLIAM J.
1983-93; 1999-2006
PETERS, WILLIAM A.
1926-29
PETERSEN, HOWARD C.
1957-80
POSVAR, WESLEY W.
1969-96
PRITCHETT, HENRY S.
1910-39
RAMSEY, NORMAN E.
1962-86
REED, PHILIP D.
1945-53
REUTHER, WALTER P.
1965-70
REVELEY III, W. TAYLOR
1999-
RICE, CONDOLEEZZA
1988-89
ROBERTSON, HOWARD P.
1958-61
ROCKEFELLER, DAVID
1947-60
ROOT, ELIHU
1910-37
RUIZ, VANESSA
2007-
RYERSON, EDWARD L.
1933-56
SCHIEFFELIN, JR., W. J.
1941-62
SCHMIDLAPP, JACOB G.
1910-19
SCHMIDT, BENNO C.
1977-81
SCOTT, JAMES BROWN
1910-43
SEVERANCE, CORDENIO A.
1918-25
SEYMOUR, WHITNEY NORTH
1956-71
SHEFFIELD, JAMES R.
1919-38
SHERMAN, MAURICE S.
1926-47
SHOTWELL, JAMES THOMSON
1925-51
SHUSTER, GEORGE N.
1954-65
SIBLEY, HARPER
1938-56
SLAUGHTER, JOHN B.
1984-85
SLAYDEN, JAMES L.
1910-24
SMILEY, ALBERT K.
1910-12
SMITH, JR., JEREMIAH
1930-34
SPENCER, EDSON W.
1984-97
SPRAGUE, CHARLES A.
1954-58
STRAUS, DONALD B.
1966-87
STRAUS, OSCAR S.
1910-26
STRAWN, SILAS H.
1926-46
STREIBERT, THEODORE C.
1960-69
111 ESSAYS ON THE CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE
2006-
100 YEARS OF IMPACT
ROY, J. STAPLETON
112
SUTHERLAND, GEORGE
1920-25
TAFT, ROBERT A.
1935-38
TALBOTT, STROBE
1986-93; 2001-04
TAVITIAN, ASO O.
2009-
TAYLOR, CHARLES L.
1910-22
TILGHMAN, SHIRLEY M.
2005-
TOWER, CHARLEMAGNE
1910-23
WADSWORTH, ELIOT
1937-51
WAKEFIELD, LYMAN E.
1943-45
WATSON, ARTHUR K.
1957-70
WATSON, THOMAS J.
1934-51
WAYMACK, W. W.
1941-59
WEERASINGHE, ROHAN S.
2011-
WHITE, ANDREW D.
1910-18
WHITNEY, JOHN HAY
1961-64
WILLIAMS, JOHN SHARP
1910-22
WILSON, JOSEPH C.
1968-71
WOODCOCK, LEONARD
1975-81
WOODWARD, ROBERT S.
1910-24
WRIGHT, LUKE E.
1910-18
WRISTON, HENRY M.
1943-54
YNTEMA, THEODORE O.
1962-70
ZWICK, CHARLES J.
1974-97
APPENDIX B
presidents 100 YEARS OF IMPACT
113 ESSAYS ON THE CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE
Andrew Carnegie chose longtime adviser Elihu Root, senator from New York and former secretary of war and of state, to be the Carnegie Endowment’s first president.
114
1910-25 ELIHU ROOT
1950-71 Joseph E. Johnson
1925-45 Nicholas Murray Butler
1971-91 Thomas L. Hughes
1945-46 JOhn w. davis
1991-97 Morton I. Abramowitz
(Acting President)
1947-49 Alger Hiss 1949-50 James t. shotwell
1997-Present Jessica T. Mathews
APPENDIX C
JUNIOR FELLOWS 100 YEARS OF IMPACT
“ Altogether, the knowledge that I’ve acquired
- Kevin Slaten Junior Fellow, 2008
115 ESSAYS ON THE CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE
and the connections and friendships gained will have clear, lasting effects on my future, both personally and professionally. I am fortunate for all of this.”
“The Junior Fellowship was really the key opportunity that allowed
me to get into the policy world. It was a phenomenal opportunity right out of undergraduate study to work closely with the experts in my field. The experience and incredible mentorship I had was an important factor in my interest in pursuing further studies in economics, and in my being awarded the Rhodes Scholarship to study development at the University of Oxford.”
- Kate Vyborny, 2006
“The Junior Fellows Program is widely
regarded as the best opportunity to gain research experience, improve one’s expertise in a specific area, and experience politics in Washington, D.C. My experience in the China program more than lived up to my expectations. This opportunity inspired me to dedicate my own career to conducting high-quality, policy-relevant research.”
- Oriana Mastro, 2007
FOR MANY YEARS, the Carnegie Endowment has been committed to identifying and nurturing promising young talent. The Junior Fellows Program is a highly prized fellowship for the next generation of leaders in foreign policy and international affairs. Each year, eight to ten fellowships are offered to college graduates through a rigorous national competition process. Throughout the one-year program, junior fellows work with leading experts in the field, serve as research assistants, and gain unique access to the policy debate and the role think tanks play.
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“My experience at Carnegie has been
extremely rewarding. The Junior Fellows Program has provided me with an insider’s perspective on the process of policy making in Washington, right from generation of ideas to their implementation.”
- Ashesh Prasann, 2008
“As a Junior Fellow, I had truly unique opportunities to conduct original
research, contribute substantively to highly professional research products, including books like Deadly Arsenals, Universal Compliance, and Bomb Scare. I worked closely on a one-on-one basis with Joseph Cirincione and other Carnegie senior fellows, many of whom are true leaders in their respective policy areas. I also had the opporutnity to write and publish a number of articles and analyses on my own, including op-eds that were published in Defense News and the Baltimore Sun. I absolutely credit my experience at Carnegie with propelling me into a career in the foreign policy community. ” - Josh Williams, 2005
APPENDIX D
CHAPTER NOTES
100 YEARS OF IMPACT
117 ESSAYS ON THE CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE
Except where otherwise noted, all statements above were made during the course of interviews conducted for the Carnegie Endowment centennial research project.
9 Blaine first served during the brief presidency of James Garfield in 1881, then for three additional years under Benjamin Harrison. 10 Calculated using GDP per capita for 1901 values vs. 2010. 11 See Larry F. Fabian, Andrew Carnegie’s Peace Endowment – The Tycoon, the President, and their Bargain of 1910 (Washington D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1985), 14–26.
introduction 1 Peter W. Singer, “Washington’s Think Tanks: Factories to Call Our Own,” Washingtonian, August 2010, 46. 2 C. MacDougall, “Activities With Greatest Impact, 1997–2002,” June 13, 2002. The memo is stored along with other institutional records in the Carnegie Endowment Library.
12 See C. Roland Marchand, The American Peace Movement and Social Reform, 1898–1918 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 30–31. 13 Roosevelt to Whitelaw Reid, November 13, 1905. Roosevelt’s observations were so trenchant that every one of Carnegie’s modern biographers has felt compelled to quote from the letter at length. See Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie, 675; Krass, Carnegie, 467; and Joseph Frazier Wall, Andrew Carnegie (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 928. 14 See Fabian, Andrew Carnegie’s Peace Endowment, 28–46. 15 Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie, 742.
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CHAPTER one 1 David Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie (New York: Penguin, 2006), 660. 2 Quoted in entry for April 30, 1911, Archibald W. Butt, Taft and Roosevelt, The Intimate Letters of Archie Butt (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1930), II, 635. Taft worked closely with Carnegie to advance a common diplomatic agenda, yet the president sometimes found the Scotsman to be meddlesome and officious.
16 See Fabian, Andrew Carnegie’s Peace Endowment, 24–26. See also Marchand, American Peace Movement, Ch. 2, on the growing influence of the international legal establishment. 17 Andrew Carnegie letter to Board of Trustees, December 14, 1910, in Carnegie Endowment Yearbook, 1911. An advocate of spelling reform, Carnegie often employed phonetic spelling in his correspondence. 18 Andrew Carnegie to Taft, August 4, 1911, quoted in Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie, 752. 19 Cited in Fabian, Andrew Carnegie’s Peace Endowment, 51.
3 Andrew Carnegie to Woodrow Wilson, February 14, 1917, quoted in Peter Krass, Carnegie (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2002), 531.
20 Los Angeles Times, quoted in John P. Campbell, “Taft, Roosevelt, and the Arbitration Treaties of 1911,” Journal of American History, September 1966, 280.
4 Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie, 45.
21 Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie, 744.
5 Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie, ix.
22 Joseph E. Johnson, “Preface” in Perspectives on Peace, 1910–1960 (New York: Frederick A. Prager Inc., 1960), vii.
6 From a profile of Carnegie in Railroad Gazette, quoted in Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie, 121. By his mid-twenties, Carnegie had risen from telegraph clerk to senior executive with the Pennsylvania Railroad. While still at the railroad, Carnegie launched other ventures, including a successful oil company, which made him independently wealthy. Iron and steel soon became his principal business. 7 Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie, 119. 8 Andrew Carnegie, Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1920), 99–108. Carnegie never completed the autobiography, which was published the year after his death with the editorial assistance of the historian John C. Van Dyke, a friend of the Carnegies. In the book, Carnegie claims to have “shed my blood for my country,” describing an accident that left a bloody gash on his face during his service in the Department of War. David Nasaw, the biographer, argues that this story was nothing more than a figment of Carnegie’s imagination. (Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie, 70).
23 Thomas L. Hughes, “The Carnegie Endowment in Transition,” in Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (Washington D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1974), 2. 24 Transcript, Meeting of the Board of Trustees, December 14, 1910, Carnegie Endowment Papers, Columbia University. 25 Andrew Carnegie, “The Next Step—A League of Nations,” Outlook, May 25, 1907. Joseph Wall notes that Carnegie was among the earliest to use the phrase “League of Nations” (Wall, Carnegie, 920–21). 26 Wilson to Andrew Carnegie, quoted in Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie, 797‒98.
CHAPTER two 1 Transcript, Annual Meeting of the Board of Trustees, April 21, 1916, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace records, 1910-1954, Box 13, Carnegie Collections, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University in the City of New York, 44. 2 Transcript, Meeting of the Board of Trustees, November 13, 1914, Box 13, Carnegie Archives, 8. 3 For a thorough treatment of Scott’s early life, based on archival sources, see Ralph D. Nurnberger, “James Brown Scott: Peace Through Justice,” Ph.D. dissertation, Georgetown University, 10–50. 4 Ibid., 129–132.
6 Nurnberger, “James Brown Scott,” 241. 7 Memorandum, “Serial No. 6-bis (2), Subject: Written assurance before clearance of armed merchant vessels,” August 20, 1914, Scott papers, Georgetown.
9 Memorandum, “Serial No. 26, Subject: Adoption of Declaration of London by the British government,” September 5, 1914, Scott papers, Georgetown, 10. 10 Tansill, America Goes to War, 142–162. Tansill argues that the pro-British faction in the Wilson administration had no reservations about sacrificing American rights under international law in order to placate the British. Furthermore, he asserts that the United States only declared war on Germany because the pro British faction subverted President Wilson’s efforts to keep the United States out of the war. 11 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Yearbook – 1916, 49–51. 12 Transcript, Annual Meeting of the Board of Trustees, April 16, 1915, Box 13, Carnegie Archives, 4. 13 Transcript, Meeting of the Board of Trustees, November 13, 1914, Box 13, Carnegie Archives, 32–34. 14 Transcript, Meeting of the Board of Trustees, November 13, 1914, Box 13, Carnegie Archives, 41, 45. The definitive work on Root is Philip C. Jessup, Elihu Root (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1938). Jessup was a trustee of the Carnegie Endowment and admired Root deeply, yet remained critical of Root’s fierce anti-German stance during the First World War.
17 Jessup, Elihu Root, vol. 2, 379–96. Root strongly disagreed with certain key provisions of the Treaty of Versailles, but said little in public. 18 On Scott’s contribution, see Nurnberger, “James Brown Scott,” 264–93. On Root’s, see Jessup, Elihu Root, vol. 2, 419–24. 19 Transcript, Semi-Annual Meeting of the Board of Trustees, December 7, 1920, Carnegie Archives, 55–56.
CHAPTER three 1 James Shotwell, The Autobiography of James T. Shotwell (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1961), 212. 2 See Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Yearbook – 1937, 148–52. 3 Harold Josephson, James T. Shotwell and the Rise of Internationalism in America (Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1975), 102–5. 4 Shotwell, Autobiography, 206–207. 5 Ibid., 208. 6 Josephson, Shotwell, 160. 7 Robert H. Ferrell, Peace in Their Time: The Origins of the Kellogg-Briand Pact (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952), 74; Josephson, Shotwell, 163. 8 Michael Rosenthal, Nicholas Miraculous: The Amazing Career of the Redoubtable Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), 366. 9 Shotwell, Autobiography, 47. 10 Rosenthal, Nicholas Miraculous, 13, 53, 130. Many Jewish leaders criticized Butler for his efforts to restrict Jewish enrollment at Columbia, as well as to prevent the appointment of Jews to the university’s board of trustees. 11 Rosenthal, Nicholas Miraculous, 85. 12 Shotwell, Autobiography, 212. 13 Ferrell, Peace in Their Time, 75; Josephson, Shotwell, 163. 14 Nicholas Murray Butler, “Briand Proposes Eternal Peace with U.S.,” New York Times, April 25, 1927.
119 ESSAYS ON THE CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE
8 Tansill, America Goes to War, 135–41. In technical terms, the dispute between Britain and the United States concerned the category of goods referred to by international law as conditional contraband. The British sought to apply the broadest possible definition of this category of goods, then sought to apply to those goods the doctrine of continuous voyage, which allowed the confiscation of cargo if its ultimate recipient was the armed forces of a belligerent nation. The Neutrality Board argued that this application of the doctrine of continuous voyage represented a gross violation of precedent.
16 George Finch, History of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1910–1946 (Unpublished manuscript, 2 vol., 1946), 651–55. Finch’s history resembles a chronology more than it does an analytical study of the Endowment’s development and programs.
100 YEARS OF IMPACT
5 Charles Callan Tansill, America Goes to War (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1938 [Reprinted Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1963]), 167–68.
15 Transcript, Meeting of the Board of Trustees, November 13, 1914, Box 13, Carnegie Archives, 56.
15 Shotwell, Autobiography, 213. 16 Rosenthal, Nicholas Miraculous, 367. 17 Josephson, Shotwell, 164–65.
5 “Preliminary Report of the Commission to Study the Organization of the Peace,” November 1940, Box 283, Folders 13–14, CEIP Records.
18 Ibid.
6 Ibid., 6.
19 James T. Shotwell, War as an Instrument of National Policy, and Its Renunciation in the Pact of Paris (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1929), 54.
7 Divine, Second Chance, 31.
20 Josephson, Shotwell, 166.
8 Ronald W. Pruessen, John Foster Dulles: The Road to Power (New York: The Free Press, 1982), 185–99.
21 Shotwell, War as an Instrument of National Policy, 83.
9 Ibid., 53–55, 101–103.
22 Ibid.
10 Harold Josephson, James T. Shotwell and the Rise of Internationalism in America (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1975), 260.
23 Josephson, Shotwell, 169.
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4 Memorandum, “Re: The Work of the Commission to Study the Organization of the Peace,” December 6, 1941, Box 283, Folders 13–14, CEIP Records.
24 Ibid., 170.
11 Divine, Second Chance, 283-92; Stephen Schlesinger, Act of Creation: The Founding of the United Nations (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2003), 122–24.
25 Rosenthal, Nicholas Miraculous, 368.
12 Josephson, Shotwell, 259.
26 Ferrell, Peace in Their Time, 144–45.
13 James T. Shotwell, The Autobiography of James T. Shotwell (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1961), 314.
27 Shotwell, War as an Instrument of National Policy, 130–34; Josephson, Shotwell, 171–73; Rosenthal, Nicholas Miraculous, 370. 28 Rosenthal, Nicholas Miraculous, 373–76. 29 Josephson, Shotwell, 175. 30 Ferrell, Peace in Their Time, 264–65. 31 Walter Russell Mead, Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How it Changed the World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), 318.
CHAPTER FOUR 1 Memorandum, “Re: The Work of the Commission to Study the Organization of the Peace,” December 6, 1941, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace records, 1910–1954, Box 283, Folders 13–14, Carnegie Collections, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University in the City of New York. (Hereafter: CEIP Records) 2 “A Statement of American Proposals for a New World Order,” June 6, 1941, Box 283, Folders 13–14, CEIP Records. The “Statement” begins by emphasizing the responsibility of the American public for the breakdown of peace. Specifically, “The American people are now paying the price of two decades of international irresponsibility.” 3 Robert Divine, Second Chance: The Triumph of Internationalism in America during World War II (New York: Athenaeum, 1967), 32.
14 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Yearbook – 1948, 5. 15 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Yearbook – 1949, 40; Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Yearbook – 1953–54, ix. 16 Ibid., 53. 17 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Yearbook – 1947, 108. The trustees also elected John Foster Dulles as chairman of the board. Hiss accepted the Carnegie Endowment’s offer because he understood, despite appearances to the contrary, that his diplomatic career lay in ruins. Investigators at the State Department had come to the conclusion that Hiss was a Communist and possibly a spy. Apparently, neither Hiss nor the State Department ever informed the board of trustees that it was about to hire a marked man. See Allen Weinstein, Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case (New York: Random House, 1997), 364–72 and Pruessen, Dulles, 369–73. 18 Weinstein, Perjury, 349–57. 19 Ibid., 501–502. For decades, debate raged about whether Hiss was a spy or just a victim of anti-Communist paranoia. In the 1990s, the declassification of the VENONA cables led the bipartisan Commission on Government Secrecy, chaired by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, to conclude that Hiss was clearly guilty. See Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Secrecy: The American Experience (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 146–47. 20 Josephson, Shotwell, 290.
CHAPTER Five 1 Shortly before Power published A Problem From Hell, William Korey published An Epitaph for Raphael Lemkin (New York: Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights, 2001). In 2000, Michael Ignatieff, Power’s colleague at Harvard, delivered a lecture on Lemkin at Washington’s Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Raphael Lemkin and the Moral Imagination” (December 13, 2000). Prosecutors at the war crimes tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia also appreciated Lemkin’s work. [See Power, A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 479–86] Whereas these specialists in international law and human rights never forgot Lemkin, Power’s book restored Lemkin’s standing in intellectual circles across the globe. 2 Power, A Problem From Hell, 590.
4 Quoted in Cooper, Lemkin, 52–53. 5 Lemkin autobiography, quoted in Power, A Problem From Hell, 27. The quotation refers to Lemkin’s colleagues at the U.S. government’s Board of Economic Warfare, which Lemkin joined as a consultant in the summer of 1942. Given Lemkin’s obsession with his own work and his inclination to subject all those he met to unsolicited lectures, one may speculate that Lemkin perceived his colleagues’ wariness of his impositions as a sign of their apathy toward his work.
7 Letter, Lemkin to Finch, March 6, 1944, Box 83, Folder 8, CEIP Records. 8 Letter, Finch to Lemkin, March 31, 1944, Box 83, Folder 8, CEIP Records. 9 Staff memo for George Finch, March 18, 1944. 10 Letter, Christopher LaFarge to George Finch, May 12, 1944, Box 83, Folder 8, CEIP Records. 11 Letter, George Finch to Christopher LaFarge, May 12, 1944, Box 83, Folder 8, CEIP Records.
18 Cooper, Lemkin, 60; Power, A Problem From Hell, 44. 19 “Genocide,” Washington Post, December 3, 1944, B4. 20 Otto D. Tolischus, “Twentieth-Century Moloch,” New York Times, January 21, 1945. 21 Clippings from these and other sources may be found in Box 83, Folder 8, CEIP Records. 22 Power, A Problem from Hell, 47–78. 23 Kathleen Teltsch, “The Early Years” in Amy Jannello and Brennon Jones, eds., A Global Affair: An Inside Look at the United Nations (New York: Janello & Jones, 1996), 12. 24 A. M. Rosenthal, “A Man Called Lemkin,” New York Times, October 18, 1988, A31.
CHAPTER six 1 James A. Smith, The Idea Brokers: Think Tanks and the Rise of the New Policy Elite (New York: The Free Press, 1991), 196–97; Evan Thomas, “Nixon off the Record,” Newsweek, November 3, 1997. 2 Dimitri K. Simes biography, http://www.nixoncenter.org/index. cfm?action=showpage&page=simes, accessed October 24, 2010. 3 Dimitri Simes, [No Title] in James G. McGann, ed., Think Tanks and Policy Advice in the United States: Academics, Advisors and Advocates (New York: Routledge, 2007), 124–27. 4 Thomas Hughes, “The New Endowment,” in Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: In the 1970s (Washington D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1979), 7–9. 5 GMF Virtual Forum, “Origins of the German Marshall Fund,” Interview with Guido Goldman, August 17, 2007.
12 Letter, George Finch to Christopher LaFarge, June 14, 1944, Box 83, Folder 8, CEIP Records.
6 Hughes, “The New Endowment.”
13 Letter, George Finch to Christopher LaFarge, July 17, 1944, Box 83, Folder 8, CEIP Records.
7 C. Fred Bergsten, The Peter G. Peterson Institute of International Economics at Twenty-Five (Washington D.C.: Peterson Institute of International Economics, 2006), 8–10.
14 Letter, George Finch to Maj. Gen. John Hilldring, October 28, 1944, Box 83, Folder 8, CEIP Records. 15 Memo, “Lemkin: Axis Rule in Occupied Europe distributed as follows,” December 9, 1944, Box 83, Folder 8, CEIP Records.
8 Andrew Rich, Think Tanks, Public Policy and the Politics of Expertise (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 14–15. 9 Rich, Think Tanks, 220.
121 ESSAYS ON THE CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE
6 Letter, George Finch to Christopher LaFarge (Vice-President of the Authors’ Guild), May 22, 1944, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace records, 1910–1954, Box 83, Folder 8, Carnegie Collections, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University in the City of New York. (Hereafter: CEIP Records)
17 Letter, George Finch to Charles G. Proffitt, April 18, 1945, Box 83, Folder 8, CEIP Records.
100 YEARS OF IMPACT
3 John Cooper, Raphael Lemkin and the Struggle for the Genocide Convention (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 6–40. The first two chapters of Cooper’s biography describe Lemkin’s youth in Poland, the beginning of his legal career, and his escape after the Nazi invasion.
16 Letter, Harold Butler to George Finch, January 2, 1945, Box 83, Folder 8, CEIP Records.
10 Michael Krepon and Barry M. Blechman, The Stimson Center at Fifteen (Washington, D.C.: The Henry L. Stimson Center, 2004), 3–4. 11 Migration Policy Institute, Annual Report 2004, 3. 12 Lydia Polgreen, “Nigeria Finalizes Plans to Pay Off $30 Billion Debt,” New York Times, April 21, 2006.
CHAPTER seven
1 Scott Anderson, The Man Who Tried to Save the World: The Dangerous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Fred Cuny (New York: Doubleday, 1999), 105–20. Cuny was a consultant to USAID, not a full-time employee. 2 International Crisis Group, Fifteen Years on the Front Lines: 1995–2010, available at www.crisisgroup.org/en/about/annual-report/15-year anniversary.aspx, 14. 3 Ibid., 11. 4 Anderson, The Man Who Tried to Save the World, 135–36.
1 Leonard S. Spector, The New Nuclear Nations (New York: Vintage Books, 1985), 17–79.
5 Ibid.
2 Spector, The New Nuclear Nations, 5.
6 William Shawcross, “Money Can’t Buy You Hope,” Washington Post, November 28, 1993, C1.
3 George W. Bush, “Remarks at the National Defense University,” Public Papers of the President of the United States, February 11, 2004. 4 Congressional Research Service, “Weapons of Mass Destruction: Trade Between North Korea and Pakistan,” CRS Report RL31900, March 11, 2004.
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CHAPTER EIGHT
5 This account of Harrison’s interactions with Kim Il Sung and other North Korean officials is drawn from Harrison’s book, Korean Endgame (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), chapter 18. 6 George Perkovich et al., Universal Compliance: A Strategy for Nuclear Security (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2007), 33. First published in 2005, Universal Compliance was reprinted in 2007 with the addition of a report card on progress toward its objectives.
7 Jeane J. Kirkpatrick and Morton I. Abramowitz, “Lift the Embargo,” New York Times, April 20, 1994. 8 The other members were Zbigniew Brzezinski, Frank Carlucci, Hodding Carter, and Max Kampelmann. 9 Morton Abramowitz, Fred Cuny, Anne Richard, and James Schear, “Proposal for an International Crisis Group,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, June 28, 1994. (Manuscript available from the Carnegie Endowment library) 10 ICG, Fifteen Years, 12–13. 11 Ibid. 12 Press release, “Effort Launched Toward Creation of New International Crisis Group,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, November 17, 1994.
the story of Foreign Policy
13 “The International Crisis Group: A Proposal Presented to the Steering Committee,” January 1995. (Manuscript available from the Carnegie Endowment library)
1 “W.D. Manshel, 66; Magazine Publisher Was an Ambassador,” (obituary) New York Times, February 27, 1990.
14 Ibid., 10, 16.
2 Samuel P. Huntington, Warren Demian Manshel, and Richard Holbrooke, “Foreign Policy” in The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (New York and Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1974), 41.
15 Ibid., 4. 16 Samantha Power, A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 590.
3 Huntington et al., “Foreign Policy,” 42.
17 Ibid., 275.
4 Thomas F. Hughes, “The Carnegie Endowment in Transition,” in The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 4.
18 Ibid., 440–41.
5 Matt Schudel, “Charles W. Maynes, 68; Foreign Policy Expert at State Department,” (obituary) Washington Post, June 7, 2007.
19 Anderson, The Man Who Tried to Save the World, 32. 20 International Crisis Group, “Why the Bosnian Elections Must Be Postponed,” ICG Bosnia Report no. 14, August 14, 1996, 4. 21 “About Crisis Group,” ICG website, www.crisisgroup.org/en/about.aspx, accessed on March 19, 2011.
22 ICG, Fifteen Years, 30. 23 Ibid., 39.
CHAPTER TEN 1 Jessica T. Mathews, “A New Approach: Coercive Inspections,” in Iraq: A New Approach (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2002), 7. 2 Ibid.
11 “Dialogue: Why War?” moderated by Gwen Ifill, PBS, NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, February 12, 2003. 12 “Analysis: Robust weapons inspections in Iraq,” hosted by Melinda Penkava, National Public Radio, Talk of the Nation, February 12, 2003. 13 Mathews, “War is Not Yet Necessary.” 14 Jessica T. Mathews, “Is There a Better Way to Go?” Washington Post, February 9, 2003. 15 Ibid. 16 Kevin M. Woods, Iraqi Perspectives Project: A View of Operation Iraqi Freedom from Saddam’s Senior Leadership, Joint Center for Operational Analysis (JCOA) – Joint Forces Command (JFCOM), March 2006.
4 Hans Blix, Disarming Iraq (New York: Pantheon Books, 2004), 76–78. 5 For a concise description of the sites, see “Iraq’s Presidential ‘Palaces,’” bbc.com, October 1, 2002. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2288895.stm. 6 The THOMAS database, maintained by the Library of Congress, contains the outcome of all roll call votes since 1990 at http://thomas.loc.gov/home/roll callvotes.html. The House and Senate voted to authorize the use of force against Iraq on January 12, 1991 and again on October 10–11, 2002.
8 Jessica T. Mathews and Charles G. Boyd, “Arming the Arms Inspectors,” New York Times, September 19, 2002. 9 “Interview: Jessica Tuchman Mathews and Judith Yaphe discuss details of Secretary of State Colin Powell’s presentation to the UN Security Council,” National Public Radio, All Things Considered, February 5, 2003; National Public Radio, Talk of the Nation, February 12, 2003 (2:00 PM ET).
The full title of the April 2006 study that discusses the Global Vision is “A New Vision for the Carnegie Endowment: Reinventing the Foreign Policy Think Tank.” It is available at the Carnegie Endowment’s library. The library also maintains a collection of all yearbooks and annual reports, beginning with the first yearbook from 1911.
123 ESSAYS ON THE CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE
7 Jessica T. Mathews, “A New Approach: Coercive Inspections” in Iraq: A New Approach, 8.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
100 YEARS OF IMPACT
3 David M. Malone, The International Struggle Over Iraq: Politics in the UN Security Council, 1980–2005 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 193.
10 Jessica T. Mathews, “War Is Not Yet Necessary,” Washington Post, January 28, 2003.
APPENDIX E
PHOTO RESOURCES
100 YEARS OF IMPACT
125 ESSAYS ON THE CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER THREE
Page 1: Andrew Carnegie, 1913.
Page 30:
Pages 10–11: The U.S. Capitol Dome framed by cherry blossoms, spring 2007. Page 12: The Carnegie Endowment’s Washington headquarters from 1911–1949, 2 Jackson Pl., NW.
Page 32: Nicholas Murray Butler, 1925.
Page 15: LEFT: The Carnegie Endowment’s current headquarters at 1779 Massachusetts Ave. NW, Washington, D.C.
Page 33: Cover of International Conciliation, published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, no. 200, July 1924
Page 34: LEFT: Map of regional conferences of the International Relations Clubs, 1920.
ABOVE: Ledger entry showing Andrew Carnegie’s gift to create the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
CHAPTER ONE Page 16: Allegheny River from Highland Park, Pittsburgh, PA, 1900–1915. Photograph from the Detroit Publishing Company, 1880–1920, no. 039112, Library of Congress. Pages 18–19: LEFT TO RIGHT: 1902 map showing the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers, Pittsburgh, PA, T. M. Fowler.
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President Calvin Coolidge looks on as Frank Kellogg, the U.S. Secreatary of State, puts his signature to the Kellogg-Briand Pact (also known as the Pact of Paris), in the East Room of the White House, January 17, 1929. Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS.
Andrew Carnegie, 1861.
Watercolor of Thomas Mawson’s gardens for the Peace Palace at the Hague, 1908, Robert Atkinson.
Page 21: Andrew Carnegie and William Howard Taft, center, with others posed in front of the Pan American Union Building, Washington, D.C., 1901. Photo by the Pan American Union. Page 22: Letter from Andrew Carnegie to the original board of trustees, December 14, 1910. Page 23: TOP LEFT TO BOTTOM RIGHT: Pittsburgh Wall Street (4th Ave.), Pittsburgh, PA. Photographs from the Detroit Publishing Company, 1880–1920, no. 500309, Library of Congress.
The Carnegie Endowment’s European Center in Paris, 1912.
Andrew Carnegie, 1861.
Carnegie Steel Company, “Lucy” furnace, Pittsburgh, PA. Photographs from the Detroit Publishing Company, 1880–1920, no. 039100, Library of Congress.
James T. Shotwell, President Emeritus of the Carnegie Endowment, participating in the Cornerstone Ceremony of the Carnegie International Center under the supervision of his granddaughter, July 1, 1953.
CHAPTER TWO Page 24: USS George Washington (ID # 3018) arrives in New York Harbor with President Woodrow Wilson and his party on board, as they return to the U.S. from the World War I peace conference in France, July 8, 1919. U.S. Naval Historical Center Photograph, NH 10. Page 28: Report cover of the International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars. Published by the Carnegie Endowment, Washington, D.C., 1914. Page 29: Painting of James Brown Scott by his sister Jeannette Scott, 1932.
President Woodrow Wilson delivers his war message to a joint session of Congress, April 2, 1917, Library of Congress.
RIGHT: Nobel Peace Prize, 1931.
Page 36: James T. Shotwell, 1927. Page 37: Prominent New York City civil servant George McAneny with Nicholas Murray Butler (right), circa 1925.
CHAPTER FOUR Page 38: The New York City Building, at the old World’s Fair grounds, Flushing Meadows, headquarters of the United Nations General Assembly. Fifty-foot flag poles flying the colors of the 59 member states from a circle around the garden in front of the meeting hall, January 1, 1946. United Nations (Flushing Meadows), New York. UN Photo # 123671. Page 41: Edward Reilly Stettinius, Jr., Secretary of State, Chairman of the delegation from the United States, signing the UN Charter at a ceremony held at the Veterans’ War Memorial Building. At left is President Harry S. Truman, June 26, 1945. San Francisco, United States. UN Photo # 1326. Page 42: A view of the UN Charter. Book open on the signatory page, April 25–26 June, 1945. San Francisco, United States. UN Photo # 97326.
Reproduction of the covers of the French, Russian, English, Chinese, and Spanish editions of the pamphlet: “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” published by the Department of Public Information, no date. United Nations, New York. UN Photo # 182920
CHAPTER FIVE Page 44: Bombs lie on an Allied airfield ready to be loaded into Royal Air Force Liberators. The British bombers of the Mediterranean Allied Air Force worked with American Liberators to strangle German supply lines feeding Nazi troops on the Anzio, Cassino, and Eighth Army fronts, 1940–1946. Farm Security Administration Office of War photography collection, Library of Congress. Page 46: Raphael Lenkin, who coined the word “Genocide.” The Convention on Genocide was drafted by the United Nations to prevent and punish the crime of genocide—the mass destruction of national, ethnical racial or religous groups as such. Lake Success, New York. UN Photo # 80008. Page 47: Cover of Axis Rule in Occupied Europe by Raphael Lemkin. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington, D.C., 1944. Page 48: An undated file picture of the women’s barrack in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Oswiecim. Oswiecim, Poland. Reproduction/ epa/CORBIS.
Page 50:
Professor Raphael Lemkin, left, originator of the Genocide Convention and Ricardo Alfaro of Panama, chairman of the Assembly’s legal committee, in conversation before the plenary meeting of the General Assemby at which the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was approved, in the Palais de Chaillot, Paris, December 11, 1948. UN Photo # 83971.
Page 51: Representatives of four states who ratified the Convention on October 14, 1950. Seated (left to right): John P. Chang of Korea; Jean Price-Mars of Haiti; Assembly President, Ambassador Nasrollah Entezam of Iran; Ambassador Jeabn Chauvel of France, and Ruben Esquivel de la Guardia of Costa Rica. Standing, left to right: Ivan Kerno, assistant secretary general for the department of legal affairs; Mr. Trygve Lie, secretary-general of the United Nations; Manuel A. Fournier Acuña of Costa Rica, and Raphael Lemkin, crusader of the Genocide Convention. Lake Success, New York, New York. UN Photo # 66374.
CHAPTER SIx CHAPTER SEVEN Page 60: Atomic energy officials gathered at a Nevada test site to conduct an underground nuclear test, code-named “Baneberry.” Something went wrong and the force of the underground blast tore open a 315-foot long fissure in the earth’s surface and a radioactive cloud (shown) emerged, December 18, 1970. Bettmann/CORBIS. Page 63: TOP LEFT TO BOTTOM RIGHT: Selig Harrison, senior associate, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1994.
Page 70: Downtown Sarajevo through a bullet-shattered window, 1994. Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Chris Rainier/CORBIS. Page 72: Morton Abramowitz, former president, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1991. Page 75: Fred Cuny, 1993. Page 76: Girls standing by UN armored vehicle, 1995. Bosnia and Herzegovina. David Turnley/CORBIS.
CHAPTER NINE Page 78: President Bill Clinton walks past an honor guard at a Moscow airport as he departs for Minsk, Belarus following a summit meeting with Boris Yeltsin, January 15, 1994. Moscow, Russia. Wally McNamee/CORBIS. Page 81: Carnegie Moscow Center brochure, 1994. Page 82: Dmitri Trenin, director, Carnegie Moscow Center, 1994.
Lilia Shevstova, co-chair of Carnegie’s Domestic Politics and Political Institutions program, 1994.
Page 84: Pro et Contra.
CHAPTER TEN Page 86: Soldiers from the First Armored Bridage patrol the streets of Baghdad, Iraq, July 12, 2003. Ed Kashi/CORBIS. Page 87: Cover, Iraq: A New Approach, 2002.
Nuclear Radiation warning sign, Chernobyl, Ukraine, 2010.
A woman protesting nuclear testing outside the White House, 1940s–1950s. Bettmann/CORBIS.
Page 90: Soldiers boarding a United States Air Force C-130 Hercules in Tikrit, Iraq, to fly to Baghdad, December 18, 2006. Owen Franken/CORBIS.
High ranking personnel are illuminated by the flare of an atomic detonation at the Atomic Energy Commission’s Pacific Proving Ground during Operation Greenhouse, 1951. Sygma/CORBIS.
Page 91: A statue of Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein falls as it is pulled down in central Baghdad, April 9, 2003. Goran Tomasevic/Reuters/CORBIS.
New START negotiators Rose Gottemoeller, assistant secretary of state for verification, compliance, and implementation and Ambassador Anatoly Antonov of the Russian Federation made a joint presentation on the New START Treaty to international arms control diplomats at a June 3, 2010 plenary of the Conference on Disarmament. U.S. Mission Photo by Eric Bridiers.
Page 65: Cover of Deadly Arsenals: Tracking Weapons of Mass Destruction by Joseph Cirincione, Jon Wolfsthal, and Miriam Rajkumar, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington, D.C., 2002. Page 66: Leonard Spector, Senior Associate, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1984. Page 67: Cover of Universal Compliance: A Strategy for Nuclear Security by Jessica T. Mathews, George Perkovich, et al., Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington, D.C., 2004. Page 68: Foreign Policy magazine covers, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington, D.C. 1978–1997. Page 69: FP magazine covers, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington, D.C. 1997–2008.
CHAPTER ELEVEN Page 94–95: Beijing skyline at night, 2010. Page 96: Jessica T. Mathews, President, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1997. Page 97: A busy street scene with ongoing daily life, in the heart of Dahiya in southern Beirut, Lebanon where photos of Hezbollah fighters martyred during the 2006 war hang on lamp-posts, August 26, 2008. Kaveh Kazemi/ Getty Images. Page 99: Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy launch, April 14, 2010. Page 100: A view of the Grand Place, Brussels, Belgium, 2006.
127 ESSAYS ON THE CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE
100 YEARS OF IMPACT
Page 52: Aerial view of Washington, D.C., October 29, 1984. CORBIS.
CHAPTER EIGHT