The Institute of World Politics

About the Lecture: Edward Snowden is a polarizing figure in the world today, known by millions and the press as a champion of freedom and a whistle blower exposing extensive activities on the part of the US intelligence community to violate the civil rights of millions of Americans. This one of the many myths that surround this case. In fact, almost all the information in the public domain about Snowden is false. The vast majority of the "Snowden narrative" has been provided by Snowden himself and never verified by the media. Snowden has repeatedly lied about himself, his expertise, the NSA, and his motivations. This discussion exposes truth about the man, his background, and the duplicity of his claims. It is essential for professionals to know the truth to counter the false claims made by Snowden and his supporters and to set the record straight.

About the Speaker: David Major is a retired FBI Supervisory Special Agent and President of the Center of Counterintelligence and Security Studies.

About the Panel: The 2016 U.S. presidential election provides an extensive database for scholars. Not only was the election characterized by a dramatic increase in “nasty politics,” but also by the rise of populism and political showmanship that strategically employed character attacks to shock the audience. Other ongoing political developments urge researchers to address many questions. Among them are: Does character assassination work? What are the underlying psychological and rhetorical bases of character assassination? How does the media contribute to the viral effect of smear campaigns? How can one prevent and defend against character assassination? This panel will address these and many other questions related to the nature of character attacks and reputation management.

About the Lecture: Brigadier General Pekka Toveri discussed Finland's history and concentrated on the current structure, tasks, and development programs.

About the Lecture: Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Daniel Golden will expose how academia has become the center of foreign and domestic espionage—and why that is troubling news for our nation's security through his book Spy Schools: How The CIA, FBI, and Foreign Intelligence Secretly Exploit America's Universities.

Grounded in extensive research and reporting, Spy Schools reveals how academia has emerged as a frontline in the global spy game. In a knowledge-based economy, universities are repositories of valuable information and research, where brilliant minds of all nationalities mingle freely with few questions asked. Intelligence agencies have always recruited bright undergraduates, but now, in an era when espionage increasingly requires specialized scientific or technological expertise, they’re wooing higher-level academics—not just as analysts, but also for clandestine operations.

Golden uncovers unbelievable campus activity such as a Chinese graduate student at Duke University stealing research for an invisibility cloak, and a tiny liberal arts college in Marietta, Ohio, exchanging faculty with China’s most notorious spy school. He shows how relentlessly and ruthlessly this practice has permeated our culture, not just inside the US, but internationally as well. Golden, acclaimed author of The Price of Admission, blows the lid off this secret culture of espionage and its consequences at home and abroad.

This event was sponsored by Walter Thinfen, President and CEO at Visioneer Inc.

About the Lecture: The purpose of this discussion is to better understand the perspective of the President of the United States regarding cyber conflict. Primary sources will be reviewed including speeches, tweets, and actions.

About the Speaker: Joe Billingsley is the founder of the Military Cyber Professionals Association, Adjunct Faculty at the George Washington University, Advisor of the Cyber Security Forum Initiative, Fellow at the Center for Network Innovation and Experimentation, Special Advisor of the peer-reviewed journal "Military Cyber Affairs," and collaborates with organizations including the Atlantic Council and Smithsonian Institution. He is an instructor for The Cyber Intelligence Initiative (Ci2) at the Institute of World Politics. This May he will be teaching a course on Cyber Strategy Development.

He is an Iraq War veteran and former US Army Strategist and Cyber Operations Officer, having graduated programs at the Army War College, Naval War College, Military Intelligence School, and Army School of Information Technology. He hold a BA in History from the University of Connecticut, a MS in Cyber Systems and Operations from the Naval Postgraduate School, and is pursuing a PhD in Information Sciences.

About the lecture: Based on a large-scale survey and a choice experiment, this presentation will discuss energy-related preferences and climate change beliefs in Western Estonia and Southern Ukraine. Special attention will be given to the issues of social acceptance of large wind energy projects, since the surveyed regions have a high potential for wind power development.

About the speaker: Dr. Anna Ebers Broughel is a visiting research fellow at the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she works at the Center for Global Sustainability. She has been a postdoctoral fellow at the Chair for Management of Renewable Energies at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland since 2014. At the University of St. Gallen, she was responsible for the Consumer Barometer of Renewable Energy, one of the largest annual surveys of Swiss energy consumers. Her other engagements included an international cooperation project with the universities from Switzerland, Estonia and Ukraine to improve energy security in Eastern Europe. Previously, she worked at a large commercial bank in Estonia, a solar research institute in Germany, and at SUNY-ESF and Syracuse University, where she defended her PhD in economics as a Fulbright Fellow.

About the Book: Reagan’s 1968 Dress Rehearsal: Ike, RFK, and Reagan’s Emergence as a World Statesman is an inspiring never-before-told history of how Ronald Reagan first began to restore pride in America when he first ran for president in the late 1960s. Against the back-drop history of Reagan’s first campaign for the presidency, it can now be revealed that behind the scenes, none other than former President Dwight Eisenhower was Ronald Reagan’s hidden political mentor. In fact throughout the 1960s, Ronald Reagan was tutored by former President Dwight D. Eisenhower: how to enter politics, and then how to run his 1966 gubernatorial primary, and then general election campaigns. Eisenhower even counseled Reagan on how to fight charges of antiSemitism and critiqued Reagan’s speaking style. Reagan followed Eisenhower’s political advice virtually to the letter, and indeed Reagan based his 1966 campaign theme (common sense) and campaign persona (the citizen politician) on Ike. Ike certified him as presidential timbre, said he would endorse Reagan for president if he were the 1968 nominee, urged him to run for president as California’s favorite son, and may actually have favored political winner Reagan over loser Nixon as the 1968 Republican nominee.

Ronald Reagan’s 1968 campaign was a crucial dress rehearsal for his ultimate triumph in 1980. During 1968, Reagan became a world statesman and shaped his crusade to restore pride in America. For Reagan, Ike’s tutelage was critical. Indeed Ronald Reagan now may be seen as one of Dwight Eisenhower’s proteges and his major political heir. This political mentorship changed America’s national priorities through the end of Reagan’s presidency, whose effects still are very much with us today.

About the Speaker: Gene Kopelson is president of the New England chapter, on the Board of Trustees and Book Prize committee, of the Theodore Roosevelt Association, an active Churchillian, and a holocaust educator. As a historian, he has published works on Theodore Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet, Ronald Reagan’s 1966 campaign and Mexican American voters, the 1968 Nebraska and Oregon Republican primaries, and Washington State Republican politics in the 1960s. The Robert F. Kennedy Memorial featured his research on Robert F. Kennedy as an inspiration to Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. His research on Reagan and Eisenhower was featured in 2015 at the 125thCommemoration of the Birth of Dwight Eisenhower at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library.

When not researching and writing history, Dr. Gene Kopelson is a cancer physician. He has published over forty medical articles, contributed chapters in medical textbooks, and lectured in the U.S. and abroad on radiation oncology.

About Dr. Russell Kirk: For more than forty years, Russell Kirk was in the thick of the intellectual controversies of his time. He is the author of some thirty-two books, hundreds of periodical essays, and many short stories. Both Time and Newsweek have described him as one of America’s leading thinkers, and The New York Times acknowledged the scale of his influence when in 1998 it wrote that Kirk’s 1953 book The Conservative Mind “gave American conservatives an identity and a genealogy and catalyzed the postwar movement.” Dr. Kirk wrote and spoke on modern culture, political thought and practice, educational theory, literary criticism, ethical questions, and social themes. He addressed audiences on hundreds of American campuses and appeared often on television and radio.

About the Book: "Putin Watches Russian Economy Collapse along with His Economic Stature,” blared a headline in Time in late 2014. Yet three years have passed since the price of oil crashed in 2014, halving earnings on the product which once funded half of Russia’s government budget. That same year, the West imposed harsh economic sanctions on Russia’s banks, energy firms, and defense sector, cutting off many of Russia’s largest firms from international capital markets and high-tech oil drilling gear. Many analysts—in Russia as well as abroad—thought that economic crisis might threaten Vladimir Putin’s hold on power. It doesn’t look that way now.

Today, Russia’s economy has stabilized, inflation is at historic lows, the budget is nearly balanced, and Putin is coasting toward reelection on March 18, giving him a fourth term as president. Putin has recently overtaken Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev as the longest-serving Russian leader since Stalin. How did he do it? This talk will examine Putin's economic policies and how they have supported his domestic and foreign policies.

About the Author: Chris Miller is Assistant Professor of International History at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. He is also Eurasia Research Director at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He is the author of Putinomics: Power and Money in Resurgent Russia (2018) and The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy (2016). He received his PhD from Yale University and his AB from Harvard University.

About the Lecture: Rarely in history has a political movement and its leaders promised more and produced less than Communism and its dictators from Lenin, Stalin and Mao to Castro, Pol Pot and Kim Jong Un. As chairman of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, Dr. Lee Edwards has long studied communism and is considered one of the nation’s leading authorities on the victims and crimes of communism, past and present.

About the Speaker: Lee Edwards, distinguished fellow in conservative thought at The Heritage Foundation, is a leading historian of American conservatism and the author or editor of 25 books. Edwards also is adjunct professor of politics at the Catholic University of America and chairman of a foundation that dedicated the Victims of Communism Memorial in Washington, D.C., in 2007. His books include biographies of Ronald Reagan, Barry Goldwater, William F. Buckley, Jr. and Edwin Meese III as well as histories of The Heritage Foundation and the American conservative movement. His works have been translated into Chinese, Japanese, French, Hungarian and Swedish. Edwards’ next book, written with Elizabeth Edwards Spalding, is A Brief History of the Cold War, to be published by Regnery in the spring of 2016. Edwards was the founding director of the Institute of Political Journalism at Georgetown University and a fellow at the Institute of Politics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He is a past president of the Philadelphia Society and a media fellow at the Hoover Institution.

He has appeared frequently on broadcast and cable outlets such as Fox News Channel, CNN, Bloomberg, NBC, PBS, C-SPAN and NPR. His work has been published in The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, National Review, Human Events, Claremont Review of Books and The American Spectator, among other places. His awards and honors include the Order of Merit of the Republic of Hungary, the Millennium Star of Lithuania, the Cross of Terra Mariana of Estonia, the Friendship Medal of Diplomacy from the Republic of China (Taiwan), the John Ashbrook Award, the Reed Irvine Media in Accuracy Award, Legend of YAF from Young America’s Foundation, and the Walter Judd Freedom Award. Edwards received a doctorate in world politics from Catholic University as well as a doctor of humane letters degree from Grove City College. He did graduate work at the Sorbonne in Paris. He also holds a bachelor of arts degree in English from Duke University.