Middle East & North Africa

"Belfer Center Newsmakers" highlights members of the Belfer Center community who have been featured recently in the news.

In March, the Justice Department unsealed an indictment against seven Iranians for hacking the U.S. financial sector and a dam in New York. In doing so, it also clarified what information security officials have argued for years: that the vast majority of hacks exploit known vulnerabilities.

Join Dan Meridor, former Chairman of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee of the Knesset, former Chairman of the committee which wrote the report on the Israel Defense Doctrine, and former Minister of Intelligence and Atomic Energy, for a three-session study group on Israel's Defense in the Changing Middle East in November.

In this new oped for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist, MTA Associate Aaron Arnold and colleague Nikos Passas consider the role of banks in monitoring and verifying proliferation-related transactions. He outlines steps that the P5+1 and Iran can take in a final agreement that will allow them to remain vigilant about proliferation financing.

"In little more than a generation, the Internet has become the substrate of the global economy and governance worldwide. Several billion more human users will be added in the next decade, as will tens of billions of devices, ranging from thermostats to industrial control systems (the 'Internet of Things'). All of this burgeoning interdependence implies vulnerabilities that governments and non-governmental actors can exploit. At the same time, we are only beginning to come to terms with the national-security implications of this. Strategic studies of the cyber domain resemble nuclear strategy in the 1950s: analysts are still not clear about the meaning of offense, defense, deterrence, escalation, norms, and arms control."

While decisionmakers warn about the cyber threat constantly, there is little systematic analysis of the issue from an international security studies perspective. Cyberweapons are expanding the range of possible harm between the concepts of war and peace, and give rise to enormous defense complications and dangers to strategic stability. It is detrimental to the intellectual progress and policy relevance of the security studies field to continue to avoid the cyber revolution's central questions.

"As for the perceived loss of America's much-vaunted superpower status, we simply need to come to terms with the changing reality of international relations, and accept that the United States will have to work with others to achieve its global aims. The changes of a global information age mean that even the world's only superpower can't go it alone."

"...[Y]es, I think Stuxnet had a few down sides. One of those down sides was that the actual attack code became publicly available. As far as I can tell the attack code was supposed to die and not get out onto the Internet, but apparently the same way it got into Natanz [Iranian nuclear enrichment facility], it got out...."

Given the seriousness of the ongoing standoff on the Korean peninsula, South Korea's emergence as an active contributor to international security addressing challenges far from the Korean peninsula is a striking new development, marking South Korea's emergence as a producer rather than a consumer of global security resources. This volume outlines South Korea's progress and accomplishments toward enhancing its role and reputation as a contributor to international security.

In March 2009, the South Korean National Assembly approved the first foreign deployment of South Korea's naval forces to join the U.S.-led Combined Task Force (CTF-151). The purpose of CTF-151 is to conduct antipiracy operations in the Gulf of Aden and off Somalia's east coast by the Horn of Africa. South Korea joined the navies of twenty four other countries that participate in the Combined Maritime Forces (CMF) through one of three combined task forces, CTF-150, CTF-151, and CTF-152, to help ensure maritime security in this region. The CMF is an international effort to conduct maritime security operations in the Gulf of Aden, the Arabian Sea, and the Indian Ocean.