Blog Post
As we come to the end of a busy spring semester, the Center is proud to send our colleague and friend Bob Blackwill, Belfer Lecturer in International Security, to serve the Bush Administration as Ambassador to India. We applaud the extraordinary work of BCSIAers in the new administration including Bob Zoellick (Special Trade Representative), Rich Falkenrath (Director for Counter- proliferation), and Jendayi Fraser (Senior Director for Africa). And we welcome to Harvard Tom Foley (from his tour as Ambassador to Japan) and Dennis Ross (from years spent trying to forge peace in the Middle East) as new BCSIA Senior Fellows, as well as John Ruggie (Assistant Secretary-General of the UN for the past four years) as the new Kirkpatrick Professor of International Affairs and Larry Summers (Clinton''s Treasury Secretary) as Harvard''s 27th President.
As noted in this issue of BCSIA News, under the Chairmanship of Jim Schlesinger (former Secretary of Defense and Energy and CIA Director), the Center''s new International Council held its inaugural meeting in April. An extraordinary group of councilors including Paul Volcker, Bob Belfer, Don Listwin, Tom Foley, Minos Zombanakis, and many others reviewed the research agenda and products of the Center and offered suggestions about issues the Center should be addressing to "advance policy relevant knowledge about the most significant international challenges."
In paying tribute to long-time Board member Bob Blackwill, I find it hard to imagine the Center or the School without him. Having recruited Bob to be my Associate Dean in 1983 - after he had worked for both Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, and more importantly lived to tell the tale - I recall Bob''s leaving us for the first Bush administration in 1989 where he had overall responsibility at the National Security Council for Europe and the Soviet Union and played a crucial role in devising and implementing American strategy that led to victory in the Cold War with Germany unified inside the framework of NATO. Thanks to Bob''s entrepreneurship at the School, the Executive Program for Russian General Officers celebrated its tenth anniversary at the January session, its graduates now numbering more than 200 members in the highest levels of Russia''s military, including the First Deputy Chief of the General Staff Valery Manilov.
Bob is scheduled to arrive in India shortly after the arrival of the billionth Indian citizen. With its massive population, growing middle class, skilled high-tech scientists and technicians, and growing nuclear weapons capability, India has rapidly become a major force in the international economy. It will certainly become a more prominent feature in America''s political geography. Harvard''s loss is thus very much the nation''s gain.
The Center applauds with enthusiasm Harvard''s selection of Larry Summers to lead Harvard into the 21st century. Larry has been a pillar of the Center''s annual U.S.-Russian Investment Symposium, as well as a regular collaborator on issues of global political economy, most recently in a session with the BCSIA Board last December.
Finally, this spring we celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Center''s journal International Security. A gleam in the eye of founding Director of the Center Paul Doty, it has over the past quarter century emerged as the leading journal in its field and a product of which all of us at the Center are proud.
— Graham T. Allison