The overarching question imparting urgency to this exploration is: Can U.S.-Russian contention in cyberspace cause the two nuclear superpowers to stumble into war? In considering this question we were constantly reminded of recent comments by a prominent U.S. arms control expert: At least as dangerous as the risk of an actual cyberattack, he observed, is cyber operations’ “blurring of the line between peace and war.” Or, as Nye wrote, “in the cyber realm, the difference between a weapon and a non-weapon may come down to a single line of code, or simply the intent of a computer program’s user.”
Joseph Braude, President of the Center for Peace Communications, is an expert on the nexus of culture and politics in Arab societies and an active presence in the region’s media and policy debates. A senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and senior advisor to the Al-Mesbar Center for Studies and Research in Dubai, he studied Near Eastern languages at Yale and Arabic and Islamic history at Princeton. He developed his Arabic to broadcast quality over a seven-year stint on Moroccan national radio and added Persian to his Arabic and Hebrew as a graduate student at the University of Tehran.
Braude’s four books include a prescription for post-Saddam institution building in Iraq (The New Iraq, Basic Books, 2003), a study of crime and punishment in Casablanca (The Honored Dead, Random House, 2011), an assessment of prospects to foster liberal social trends through Arab media (Broadcasting Change, Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), and Reclamation: A Cultural Policy for Arab-Israeli Partnership (The Washington Institute, 2019).