Belfer Center

"From the Director"

Newsletter Article, Belfer Center Newsletter, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs

Winter 2008-09

As our colleague Lawrence Summers (a member of the Center’s Board of Directors) noted recently: in each of the last ten presidential elections it has been argued that “this was a uniquely important presidential election—that the country was at a turning point, that the decisions that were going to be made would shape the future irrevocably.  Sometimes clichés turn out to be true.”

For a Center that attempts to advance policy-relevant knowledge about the most important international challenges, the combination of the economic 9/11, an overcrowded national security agenda, and growing consciousness about challenges of energy and climate change, assure that both our hearts and minds are pounding.

This issue offers a few tidbits of the work being done at the Center and offers links to the website for further exploration.

As director, I am especially pleased to welcome new faculty members, fellows, and students here this fall. Nicholas Burns, the highest-ranking career diplomat at the State Department, has become a professor of the practice of diplomacy and international politics and a new member of the Center’s Board.  (See the Q&A with Nick on pg. 8.)

A senior fellow and former director of the Managing the Atom Project here at the Center, Matthew Bunn has been appointed an associate professor of public policy at the School.  This appointment not only acknowledges the quality of Matt’s research and its impact on global nuclear policy, but is also a vote of confidence in the future of the Belfer Center.

Another senior fellow at the Center, Meghan O’Sullivan, who served until September 2007 as President Bush’s Deputy National Security Advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan, has been appointed a lecturer in public policy at the School. Students at the Kennedy School are fortunate to have Meghan as my co-instructor in the course on “Central Challenges of American Foreign Policy.”

The Center is also pleased to provide the intellectual infrastructure for the Kennedy School’s new concentration in International and Global Affairs (IGA). Ash Carter, faculty chair of this effort, has taken the lead in creating this concentration. The Belfer Center has established and funded twelve Belfer student fellowships for a dozen of the most outstanding public policy students who have chosen this concentration. 

As Americans go to the polls to elect a new president, members of the Belfer Center are engaged as citizens on both sides of this campaign. In addition, research at the Center is providing policy analysis as input to both campaigns and recommendations relevant to the new government that will be organized in the months immediately ahead. Advice to the next president on national security and climate/energy is noted on page 1. A brief summary of proposed “to do’s” for the economy (from Feldstein, Frankel, Summers, and Volcker) is featured on page 16. Links to elaborations of these points – in opeds and testimony – can be found here.

For more information about this publication please contact the Belfer Center Communications Office at 617-495-9858.

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