Ten Stories - EWI in the New Millennium

Ten Stories: EWI in the New Millennium

“The EastWest Institute is challenging each of us to rethink our international security priorities in order to get things moving again. You know, as we do, that we need specific actions, not words. As your slogan so aptly puts it, you are a ‘think and do tank.”

Ban Ki-moon

SECRETARY-GENERAL OF THE UNITED NATIONS

2001: 9/11

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n September 11th, Gail Manley was sitting at her desk when a former coworker called from Florida.

“What’s going over there?” she asked Gail. “I just heard a plane hit the World Trade Center.”

Gail ran to tell John Mroz what she’d heard and at the EastWest Institute, everyone turned on their radios and scoured the internet.

“As information became clearer, we acted in a way that is so typical for the Institute,”

At that time, the EastWest Institute was in Greenwich Village, just over a mile from the collapsing towers. Leaving the office to walk to Penn Station, Gail saw a “tide of people walking up Broadway, from lower Manhattan, covered in ash and soot.” Seeing their shock and terror, she was filled with a sudden conviction: “At that moment, I knew without a doubt, that our mission, trying to make the world a safer and better place, was more important now than ever before.”

In the days and weeks afterward, as firefighters combed the wreckage for survivors,

Like so much else, the September 11th attacks dramatically affected the course of the EastWest Institute. Even amidst the initial period of mourning and anger, staff tried to imagine constructive policy responses.

Earlier in 2001, the Institute had directed its attention eastward, planning to extend economic development efforts in Eurasia to China and Iran. Now, the Institute would need to try to bridge the sudden, deep rift between the Western and Islamic worlds – a task that would underlie much of the work of following decade.

In 2002 and 2003, the EastWest Institute created the programs expressly focused on encouraging strong governments equipped to counter extremism, like the Middle East Leadership Initiative. Just last June, the Institute facilitated meetings in Abu Dhabi to build trust between Pakistani and Afghan officials, in an effort to restore stability to the region.

And one of EWI’s most long-standing initiatives, the Global Security Program, was created to counter another ripple effect of the September 11th attacks: a deep threat to the international trust, open borders, and cooperation that make free trade and widespread prosperity possible.

Nine years after that September 11ith, Gail’s observation still stands: the Institute’s mission to make the world safer place is more relevant today than ever before.

“At that moment, I knew without a doubt, that our mission, trying to make the world a safer and better place, was more important now than ever before.”

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Gail remembers. “We came together in our conference room for a quick staff meeting and began asking questions. ‘What does this mean? What should we do?’” John, worried that people might not be able to get home, offered to put people up for the night. After the meeting, several of the staff members rushed up to the roof of the building, where they watched the towers fall.

NATO allies rushed to support Bush in Afghanistan, and anthrax scares made headlines, it became clear that damage wrought by the September 11th attacks would extend deep into the fabric of American society and foreign policy. The far-reaching War on Terror continues to shape our world today.

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2002: Strong Leaders for Democratic States

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“Since the beginning, EWI has looked at security as something that should not be divisive and should include representatives from a broad array of emerging powers.”

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very night Najila Ahrari saw ten to thirty badly injured children pass through her pediatric ward in Kabul, Afghanistan. Najila was dealing with the consequences of America’s war on terror against the Taliban, struggling to help save children injured by rockets. Najila saw bodies of children so ravaged by war that they would die because it was too late to save them; she saw children carrying their own arms wrapped inside a cloth. Najila could have fled Afghanistan, but she stayed in the hopes of rebuilding her country.

In 2002, Najila Ahrari participated in the Central Eurasia Leadership Alliance (CELA), an EastWest Institute initiative founded to bring together young leaders from Central Asia and the Caucasus. At Koc University in Istanbul, Turkey, she joined forty-five men and women from former Soviet Republics and other Central Asian countries, including historic rivals like Uzbeckistan and Kyrgyzstan. Aimed to build a future for both young leaders and young countries, CELA included workshops about business practices in the West. With CELA, the EWI aimed to create a network of individuals bound to contribute to their societies, a generation of leaders dedicated to regional cooperation.

At CELA, Najila met participants like Rahat Toktonaliev who entered Kyrgyz State University Law at just 16 and went on to study at Moscow State University. After the end of Soviet regime, Rahat returned home to a newly-independent Kyrgyzstan, which he helped become the first CIS nation to join the World Trade Organization in 1998. Other participants included Maia Tavadze from Guria, Georgia who, despite a dire lack of local opportunities for education, managed to attend the American Institute of Public Administration. Maia became the Chief Advisor on international relations to the Georgian Governor, and won a scholarship to earn her Masters degree at Duke University.

CELA also included leaders like Halim Fidai, who came from a small village called Sultani in Afghanistan’s Paktika province. Because of Paktika’s violent reputation, the govern-

ment did not set up elections in the region.

In response, Halim became a local advocate, creating an elected executive council to deal with contentious issues like water rights.

Thanks to Halim’s efforts, Karzai’s’s government granted Paktika voting rights and gave it the funds to build three new wells and a school – a big improvement for the province.

With CELA, the EastWest Institute sought to celebrate and support these young leaders –people who, with their bravery and drive, made their own worlds safer and better places. The program ran for five years, but its effects are still being felt today in the ideas that were shared, in the friendships made across cultures and borders.

2003: Security in a post-9/11 World

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peaking at the United Nations in February 2003, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell held up a vial of white powder and said that the same amount of dry anthrax had shut down the United States Senate in 2001. Iraq, he added, could have as much as 22,700 dry quarts. By linking Saddam Hussein’s regime with global terrorism, the Bush administration sought to build broad support for its decision to use force against Iraq. But when President Bush visited Europe in midNovember, he was greeted with public protests – a far cry from the world’s sympathetic response to the United States after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In dealing with security issues, it was apparent that even allies were sharply divided on how to handle them.

At the same time, EWI was gearing up for the first Worldwide Security Conference, part of an ambitious new initiative started under the direction of Vazil Hudak. Hudak had worked with EWI since 1990, helping to establish the Prague office and build cross border initiatives in the Carpathian Mountains, before starting EWI’s Brussels office in TK. After 9/11, Hudak says EWI searched for new ways for countries to work together for global security.

“Even at the first conference, it was not only the West talking about how we should protect ourselves,” Hudak remembers. “Since the be-

ginning, EWI has looked at security as something that should not be divisive and should include representatives from a broad array of emerging powers.”

Held November 17 and 18 at the Palais d’Egmont in Brussels, the first WSC drew over 400 participants, with delegations from Russia and Central Asia. The main theme of the conference: developing coordinated international strategies for countering global terrorism. EWI’s inclusive approach to world security centered on engaging private sector leaders, like General Electric and Simmons.

“One of clear outcomes of 9/11 was the fact that public and private sectors have to work very closely together, specifically when we’re talking about the protection of infrastructure – roads, power plans, and cyberspace,” Hudak explains. “We decided to really focus on helping to create private-public partnerships.”

Within two years, the WSC became an annual event, held in partnership with the World Customs Organization. Private-public partnerships were often front and center. WSC channeled new solutions to the G8, like cooperative partnerships with a coalition of banks to stem cross border remittances -- the illegal flow of money across borders that is often used to support terrorism. By engaging the private sector, EWI was also able to identify the security risks of tomorrow, like cybersecurity, which the WSC first tackled in 2003 .

“We were working on this before governments knew it was an issue,” says Hudak.

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n 2004, Slobodan Milosovic was in The Hague, defending his role in the wars and ethnic cleansing that consumed Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo during the 1990’s.

Apart from trial updates, the Balkans rarely made international headlines. But from Sarajevo to Pristina, memories of sieges and massacres lingered, straining the fabric of civic life. Trust in the Balkans needed to be repaired– not just between governments, but also between neighbors in villages, towns and cities deeply scarred by the conflicts.

For EWI’s team at the new Center for Border Cooperation, the way forward was clear if unusual: firefighting and soccer.

EWI made its debut in the field of firefighting in Dubrovnik, the ancient capital of Croatia. The city had been shelled and besieged

by Serbian-Montenegrin forces in the early 1990s and, a decade later, animosity persisted. To build cooperation, EWI’s team gathered together Croatian and Serbian community leaders to identify mutual concerns, one of which was firefighting.

Dubrovnik’s main water source lies in the hills on the Serbian side of the border. In Yugoslavia, this water had been tapped to fight fires in the city but now, that supply was uncertain. Working together, the community group crafted policies to grant Dubrovik ready access to the water and to ensure that Serbian firefighters would stand ready to help the Croatian team in case of emergency. This kind of discrete, pragmatic – but deeply symbolic – intervention helped rebuild trust between local Croates and Serbs.

In Kosovo, still a NATO protectorate, EWI looked for ways to help decrease tension between Kosovars and Serbs through youth education. To help preserve the traditional joint schools that taught children of different ethnicities, EWI met with local educators to discuss arbitration of student conflicts. EWI also worked to connect schools near the Serbia, Kosovo and Macedonian borders. To that end, the team created local women’s councils, as women had automatic credibility in their communities. Among several cross-border projects, the women helped launch a youth

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Eight years after the first WSC, the world is faced with more diverse security challenges than ever before, from terrorism that exploits the internet to the looming threats of resource scarcity. The security situation in Iraq is still tenuous, and Afghanistan even more so. At EWI, the eighth WSC is on the calendar, offering not the promise that every problem can be solved, but real opportunities to solve problems together.

2004: Building Trust from the Ground Up

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soccer league for Christian and Muslims, in the hopes that by playing together, the kids would see each other as individuals rather than enemies.

The games turned out to be a great success on several levels. As former EWI Vice President Ortwin Hennig liked to say, a young boy of fifteen will eventually become a young man, and seemingly small actions –like playing on an interethnic soccer team–can change the way he sees the world.

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“The dialogues project was built on the motto of EWI, to bring together people who would not ordinarily speak.”

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Although EWI no longer works in Kosovo, Vazil Hudak’s Institute for Stability and Development, headquartered in Prague, carries on EWI’s cross-border efforts in the region. Hudak reports that, four years later, the youth soccer games go on in Kosovo: a small victory for peace, no matter who wins.

2005: New Solutions to Old Problems

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n the summer of 2005, Israel pulled the last of its settlers and army out of Gaza, after 38 years in the territory. While many Israelis protested the forced relocation of 7,500 settlers, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his supporters saw leaving Gaza as a road to peace. As the last tanks withdrew behind a newly-completed fence, crowds of Palestinians celebrated. A 21 year-old Palestinian student told a New York Times reporter that, finally able to move freely, he and his friends had “seen places we’ve never seen before, that we’ve heard about for years.”

For Mathias Mossberg, the head of the Middle East Program at the EastWest Institute, the withdrawal from Gaza represented an opportunity for positive change. A former Swedish ambassador, Mossberg began work with EWI in 2003 and began two projects. In the Private Sector Initiative, Mossberg’s team successfully interested a powerful group of financiers from Chicago to invest in a Gaza industrial property that provided 500 local jobs. EWI’s hope was that once convinced of its value, Israelis and Palestinians would transfer the asset safely. A second program encouraged frank talk between Israelis and Palestinians.

“The dialogues project was built on the motto of EWI, to bring together people who would

not ordinarily speak,” says Mossberg. He remembers that, during the talks, there was a growing sense that a traditional two-state solution would not work for Israel. “So we started to think outside the box, engaging well-connected people on both sides.”

What emerged from EWI’s dialogues was a new vision of a peaceful Israel in which Palestinians and Israelis lived together side by side, as citizens of two superimposed states.

Mossberg wrote about “parallel states” for Foreign Affairs and The Guardian and, after leaving EWI, continued to study the idea with the support of the Swedish government.

Mossberg himself concedes that this dual system of government is far-fetched, although he points out that all so-called realistic peace plans have failed. Recently, he presented the results of his academic study in Israel. He says the reception was enthusiastic, even among some Israeli settlers. He particularly remembers one young Palestinian woman from Ramallah who lit up at the thought.

“She said, ‘Wow, that would mean I could go see the coast,’” Mossberg recounts. “And this was so interesting because on the one hand it shows you the tragedy that people can’t go 30 miles to the coast, but on the other shows that a young person confronted with new ideas sees the possibilities and not the obstacles.”

The five years since Israel withdrew from Gaza have, of course, not lived up to Sharon’s hopes. Hamas radicalized the territory. Rocket launches, retaliations, a tight embargo and accusations of war atrocities have made a lasting peace seem all the more elusive. The industrial park EWI sought to protect was destroyed in border fighting.

But still, something has survived from EWI’s intervention in the Middle East: the tentative connections made between Israelis and Palestinians in the dialogues, and some of their ideas. Ideas that may not bring peace tomorrow, but that can offer new hope to a new generation.

2006: Enter China

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n 1981, the year EWI was founded, China had only just opened its markets to foreign investment. Its GDP was ranked twelfth in the world and 65 percent of its people were living in poverty. 25 years later, China’s GDP was the fourth highest in the world and its poverty rate had dropped to just 10 percent. In 2006, The New York Times declared that China was “shedding” its reserved approach to international affairs. That year China, itself a recent recipient of foreign aid, emerged as a major donor, pledging over $10 billion over the next two years to developing countries; it also sent peacekeepers to the Middle East for the first time.

That same year, recognizing China’s increasingly pivotal role in international affairs, EWI launched the China program. Partnering with the China Institute of International Studies, the Chinese foreign ministry’s think tank, EWI developed the “Trialogue21” initiative, a platform for Track 2 discussions among Chinese, European, and U.S. leaders from government, business, academia, and civil society.

At the time, the China program was headed

by EWI Vice Presidents Greg Austin and Ambassador Ortwin Hennig and focused heavily on energy security, a key area of mistrust between the West and China. As China looked to overseas sources to meet its burgeoning energy demand, Chinese energy companies— many of them state-owned—entered an increasing number of foreign energy markets.

This led to questions about China’s strategic intentions in those countries.

“The Chinese energy companies invested based on where they could be most competitive,” Kok says, recalling the Chinese participants’ explanation. “Since most of the mature markets were already dominated by Western countries, they invested in geopolitically highrisk markets. This insight helped clarify that a single government agency was not making investment decisions with grand plans of expanding China’s strategic influence.”

“Our experience with China is relatively nascent compared to other organizations,” Kok explains. “Because we didn’t come with baggage, we were prepared to question the status quo and are possibly more likely to bring a fresh approach to issues like Taiwan or party relations.”

Thanks to that approach, EWI has developed close relations with leaders in China and is the only organization that regularly brings officials from the Communist Party of China (CPC) into direct dialogue with senior U.S. Democrats and Republicans. In March and April 2010, EWI coordinated the first round of the party-to-party talks in Beijing, followed by a second round of talks in Washington, D.C. in December. The D.C. dialogue was the firstever visit of a delegation of CPC officials to the U.S.

“Because we didn’t come with baggage, we were prepared to question the status quo and are possibly more likely to bring a fresh approach to issues like Taiwan or party relations.”

It is clear that the United States and China share one of the most important bilateral relationships of the 21st century. At EWI, our China program is pursuing an ambitious agenda. From a new focus on Taiwan to military-to-military relations, EWI will continue to bring a fresh perspective to the most critical issues facing the United States and China today.

2007: Parliamentarians for Peace

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n 2007, the cost of the war in Iraq hit $1.2 trillion – far more than the Pentagon’s original $50 billion estimate. In 2007, 11.4 million refugees crossed borders to escape conflict and persecution, more than half of whom fled Iraq or Afghanistan.

From 2004-2007, in post-conflict Congo, 45,000 people a month died of hunger and disease, despite an infusion of peacekeeping forces and billions of dollars in international aid. In 2007, the cost of war was easy to tally, but preventing future conflicts seemed as difficult as ever.

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According to Piin-Fen Kok, EWI’s China Program Associate, the early Trialogue discussions helped to clear up some of the misperceptions surrounding Chinese energy policymaking decisions.

The China program has expanded considerably since those early Trialogue21 dialogues, but its mainstay—and what distinguishes EWI’s work in the field of U.S.-China relations—has remained consistent: seeking to build trust by opening up new channels for dialogue.

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At the EastWest Institute, there was a growing sense that true international conflict prevention was prevented by a lack of political will.

In 2007, under the direction of Ambassador Ortwin Hennig, EWI established the International Task Force on Preventive Diplomacy, which in turn created something completely new: a network of lawmakers working across borders to make conflict prevention “real.”

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“We will support our colleagues in countries across the world in their efforts to bring peace and stability to their region.”

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On October 8, 2008, the task force launched the Parliamentarians Network for Conflict Prevention and Human Security. German MP Angelika Beer and Zimbabwe MP Kabwe Zitto were elected as the first co-chairs of the network, which initially included 50 parliamentarians from 25 countries. From the beginning, the Network worked to connect and empower parliamentarians to advocate in their own governments – and for each other.

“We will support our colleagues in countries across the world in their efforts to bring peace and stability to their region,” Beer and Zitto told the media.

In the years that followed, the Network worked to bring conflict prevention onto legislative floors, convening debates on conflict prevention at the German Bundestag and in the U.K. House of Lords, and played a vital role in the U.K. Parliament’s decision to annualize the conflict prevention debate. Keeping its promise to work across borders, the Network directed its efforts in 2010 to a group of lawmakers in in special need of support: Afghan women parliamentarians.

To help give women a voice in Afghanistan’s peace and security processes, the Network and EWI convened Afghan women parliamentarians and their peers from Pakistan, neighboring countries and the West in the European Parliament. At the conference, the highlight for many attendees was the rare chance of hearing Afghan lawmakers describe their experiences in person.

“The first time I met an Afghan female MP was in Brussels,” says Donia Aziz, a member of the Pakistani Parliament. “I didn’t meet them in Islamabad because our female colleagues are never part of visiting delegations.

That is something that the Parliamentarians Network for Conflict Prevention can do, provide the platform for us to get together, to share experience and work together.”

In 2011, the Parliamentarians will help facilitate a dialogue between Afghan and Pakistani lawmakers. This process will not only help women from both countries learn from each other, it will help build bilateral trust in this volatile region – one parliamentarian at time.

2008: Toward a Nuclear-Free World

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n 2008, international tensions over nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction had reached an all-time high since the Cold War. There had been the disappointing failure of the 2005 NPT Review Conference, anxiety over North Korea’s first nuclear weapons tests in 2006, growing fears that Iran might possess nuclear weapons, and the prospect of START’s looming expiration. All of which contributed to a sense of hopelessness about the future of nonproliferation and disarmament. ”The period between 2005 and 2008 was perhaps the most challenging in the sphere of weapons of mass destruction in general, and nuclear weapons in particular,” says weapons of mass destruction expert and former EWI Vice President W. Pal Sidhu.

Still, he says, there were rays of hope, such as the appointment of Mohammed ElBaradei to the position of Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and a landmark series of editorials written for The Wall Street Journal by the “Four Horsemen” of the Cold War – Sam Nunn, George Schultz, Henry Kissinger and William Perry – which called for action toward a “Toward a NuclearFree World.”

The EastWest Institute answered that call.

On October 24, 2008, EWI hosted a high level consultation at the United Nations between the key players in the nuclear weapons sphere: “Eliminating the Nuclear Threat: Forging a New EastWest Consensus on Weapons of Mass Destruction.”

This historic conference, which came together under the leadership of Sidhu in partnership with the Monterey Institute, the Global Security Institute and other NGOs, brought together disparate voices to achieve an EastWest consensus on nuclear weapons and all

other weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

The event included Director General of the IAEA Mohammed ElBaradei, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Russian Ambassador to the United States Sergey L. Kislyak, and UN Secretary General Ban KiMoon, who delivered the keynote address.

In his address, Ban unveiled his 5-point agenda for nuclear weapons, now referred to as “The EWI Speech.” The speech provided practical proposals on how to break through the logjam on WMD policy, which included his support for a nuclear weapons convention to spur disarmament.

According to Sidhu, Ban’s speech was a “tremendous recognition on the part of the UN of the work that EWI and its key supporters have done in this very very difficult field.”

Ban and others offered new hope for an intensified international dialogue on WMD. Through this conference, EWI and its partners were able to set the agenda for the prime areas of focus in the nuclear weapons discussion for years to come. Ban‘s 5-point agenda was reflected in the successful 2010 NPT Review Conference.

Today, EWI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction program is a vital component of the institute’s work. EWI holds a monthly nuclear weapons discussion forum with representatives of about 40 countries, continuing the push towards practical measures to promote nonproliferation and disarmament. The spirit of that first high-level consultation at the UN in 2008 is still very much in evidence in each of these sessions.

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n 2009, tensions between the United States and Russia were worse than they’d been in a decade, despite pledges by both President Medvedev and President Obama to improve the bilateral relationship. In a Washington Post op-ed, Medvedev blamed much of the rift on the Bush administration’s plans to build a global missile defense system in Central Europe. The White House cited a looming threat from Iran, but the Kremlin suspected that the system was

At the EastWest Institute, the question was clear: was Iran close to developing a nuclear weapon, or not? The need for clarity – and for some kind of U.S.-Russian consensus – was urgent. Beginning in March 2008, EWI brought together a U.S. team, led by General (ret.) James L. Jones, Jr., and Russian team led by Ambassador Anatoly Safonov.

Over four meetings, the technical experts examined Iran’s missile and nuclear weapons capabilities, finally producing the first U.S.Russia Joint Threat Assessment – with the indispensible help of David Holloway.

Ban unveiled his 5-point agenda for nuclear weapons, now referred to as “The EWI Speech.”

“I thought it would take three weeks,” says Holloway, the Stanford history professor and nuclear weapons expert who led the writing process. “It took five months.”

According to Holloway, the Russians experts were reluctant to include mention of a technical transfer between Russia and Iran, and the Americans tended to think that Iran was closer to developing a nuclear device than the Russians did. Since it was a joint report, everyone needed to agree on every word.

“It led to an enormous amount of email traffic,” Holloway laughs.

The report ultimately concluded that the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear missile program was not imminent, and that planned missile defense system would not be effective. According to The Wall Street Journal, the report played a role in the Obama administration’s decision to scrap the plans and design a system more in line with existing threats – a decision that went a long way toward pushing the reset button on U.S.-Russia relations.

“The results and outcome of that decision, and the way it was framed, was very close to the conclusion of our report,” says Holloway.

“Everyone felt good about that.”

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2009: Pushing the Reset Button

poised to intercept Russian intercontinental ballistic missiles. If implemented, Medvedev wrote, the plan “would inevitably require a response on our part.”

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2010: The New Warfare

In 2009, the EastWest Institute recognized cybersecurity as the decade’s defining security challenge – one that can only be solved through cooperation across borders and sectors.

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oday’s wars are fought on land, and, increasingly, online. In May 2010, the United States government established a new military wing: the Cyber Command. William J. Lynn II, the U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense explained, “As a doctrinal matter, the Pentagon has formally recognized cyberspace as a new domain of warfare.” But this new warfare doesn’t even acknowledge traditional national boundaries or lend itself to purely national defenses: Every day, personal data is stolen from websites, new viruses are crafted and thousands of attacks are launched on private and public and computer systems around the world.

In 2009, the EastWest Institute recognized cybersecurity as the decade’s defining security challenge – one that can only be solved through cooperation across borders and sectors. In May 2010, EWI held the first Worldwide Cybersecurity Summit in Dallas, bringing together more than 400 business, technical and government experts to find solutions for protecting our world’s shared digital infrastructure.

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At the summit, one expert group focused on securing the undersea fiber optic cables that carry over 97% of intercontinental internet traffic. Another considered ways to empower young “digital citizens.” Still others explored how the China, Russia, the United States and other countries might begin to craft international agreements to protect cyberspace – and to address the specter of cyber war.

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In advance of the Munich Security Conference in February 2011, EWI released the first joint U.S.-Russian report on cyber conflict.

Prepared by a team of Russian and U.S. experts convened by EWI, Working Towards Rules for Governing Cyber Conflict: Rendering the Geneva and Hague Conventions in Cyberspace explores how to extend the humanitarian principles that govern war to cyberspace.

“Today, nearly all critical civilian infrastructure is online, from the electricity grids that support hospitals to the systems that guide passenger planes through the air,” says EWI’s Chief Technology Officer Karl Rauscher, who led the U.S. experts group. “And, by and large, it is not protected by international norms.”

At the Second Worldwide Security Summit in London in June 2011, the cybersecurity team will release the first joint U.S.-China cybersecurity report on spam. And breakthrough groups will continue the work of the first summit, including conversations on “rules of the road” for cyber war.

For EWI and the world, the chapter on cybersecurity is really just beginning.

Looking back at the past thirty years, it’s incredible to reflect on how EWI has changed since the Cold War – and how it’s stayed the same. In 1981, when Ira Wallach and John E. Mroz started the institute, their goal was clear: to avert war, communication needed to be improved between the United States and its allies, and the Soviet Union and Eastern bloc. Today, geopolitical realities and worldwide threats have changed beyond imagining. Still, EWI’s core principles remain constant. That is, by building trust through open conversation, we have the power to make the world a safer and a better place.

Founded in 1980, the EastWest Institute is a global, action-oriented, think-and-do tank. EWI tackles the toughest international problems by: Convening for discreet conversations representatives of institutions and nations that do not normally cooperate. EWI serves as a trusted global hub for back-channel “Track 2” diplomacy, and also organizes public forums to address peace and security issues.

Reframing issues to look for win-win solutions. Based on our special relations with Russia, China, the United States, Europe, and other powers, EWI brings together disparate viewpoints to promote collaboration for positive change.

Mobilizing networks of key individuals from both the public and private sectors.

EWI leverages its access to intellectual entrepreneurs and business and policy leaders around the world to defuse current conflicts and prevent future flare-ups.

The EastWest Institute is a non-partisan, 501(c)(3) non-profit organization with offices in New York, Brussels and Moscow. Our fiercely-guarded independence is ensured by the diversity of our international board of directors and our supporters.

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