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