The Rumi Forum presented “The upcoming US Elections and the Global Security” with John D. Steinbruner, Director of the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM).
John D. Steinbruner is Director of the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM). His work has focused on issues of international security and related problems of international policy. Steinbruner was Director of the Foreign Policy Studies Program at the Brookings Institution from 1978-1996. Prior to joining Brookings, he was an Associate Professor in the School of Organization and Management and in the Department of Political Science at Yale University. From 1973 to 1976, he served as Associate Professor of Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, where he also was Assistant Director of the Program for Science and International Affairs. He was Assistant Professor of Government at Harvard from 1969 to 1973 and Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1968 to 1969. Steinbruner is currently Co-Chair of the Committee on International Security Studies of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Chairman of the Board of the Arms Control Association, and board member of the Financial Services Volunteer Corps. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. From 1981 to 2004 he was a member of the Committee on International Security and Arms Control of the National Academy of Sciences, serving as Vice Chair from 1996 to 2004. He was a member of the Defense Policy Board of the Department of Defense from 1993 to 1997.Born in 1941 in Denver, Colorado, Steinbruner received his A.B. from Stanford University in 1963, and his Ph.D. in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1968.
The American political system faces the difficult problem of revising fundamental security policies forged during six decades of formative experience. The necessity of doing so emerges from the circumstances of globalization. The difficulty of doing so derives from the inertia of cherished attitudes. The imperatives of globalization will predictably require intimate collaboration for mutual protection across diverse cultural boundaries and hence accommodation with countries such as Russia, China, Iran and India traditionally treated as potential enemies. The substantive issues involved are not likely to be discussed in any detail during the election campaign, but there may be a test of basic attitudes.