Click here to listen. Miller's comments start around the 5:50 mark.

The EastWest Institute's COO appeared on the show on April 10 to discuss a wide range of current issues, particularly the U.S. military response to reports of chemical weapon use in Syria as well as possible confrontation with North Korea.

Parker believed that President Donald Trump's military action "puts the world on notice to stop misbehaving." 

Asked about North Korea's likely capabilities, Parker said state or non-state actors with nuclear capability could potentially reach the United States with simple delivery systems like trucks, ships and containers.

"Specifically, if you can deliver a nuclear weapon on a ship or in a truck it can have the same devastating result as if it is delivered by a missile. But that means that the weapon must be small enough to deliver and get through a lot of layers of intelligence and defense systems. As far as missile delivery, there are two likely scenarios that North Korea is working towards. The first is a submarine launched ballistic missile (SLBM) and the second is an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). The North Koreans are certainly working hard to obtain this capability, but in my opinion, are not quite there yet with their delivery vehicles or the miniaturization of their weapons. But I have no doubt that they are on track to achieve this capability very soon."

The retired senior U.S. naval officer also said replicating the Iran Nuclear Deal with Pyongyang would not be enough.

"In my opinion, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, signed by P5+1, does a good job of addressing the issues of enrichment reprocessing and monitoring but does not go far enough in eliminating the possibility of Iran creating nuclear weapons in the near future. In the case of North Korea and based on their lack of real interaction with the rest of the international community, the only acceptable option would be a complete elimination of nuclear test facilities and the removal of all fissile materials. Additionally, the immediate cessation of all medium range and long range missiles (beyond those necessary for point defense) should be a requirement," said Parker.

The EastWest Institute’s Brussels Center hosted Dr. Seyed Mohammad Kazem Sajjadpour, Deputy Foreign Minister for Research and Education of the Islamic Republic of Iran and President of the Iranian Institute of Political and International Studies (IPIS), at a roundtable on “Iran's Perspective on Future Relations with Its Neighbors” on April 4, 2017.

Participants attended from Brussels-based European institutions, academia, and think tanks. Dr. Sajjadpour outlined the principles of Iranian relations with its neighboring states and focused on the question of how and in which terms these can be understood, explaining the multidimensionality of the Islamic Republic’s relationships with its neighbors and stating the need of realistic assumptions on Iranian foreign policy. Dr. Sajjadpour’s presentation was followed by a Q&A session focusing on potential areas of further regional and global cooperation as well as the Iranian view on regional conflicts and the country’s bilateral relationship.

Click here to read Sajjadpour's last visit to EWI's Brussels Center in 2014.

When Chinese President Xi Jinping set out to visit U.S. President Donald Trump in Florida last week, the meeting’s potential for drama was clear. During Trump’s campaign for the presidency, he accused China of economically exploiting the United States. As president-elect, he suggested that his administration would call into question the United States’ “one China” policy toward Taiwan—a long-standing pillar of the relationship between Beijing and Washington. (Trump later reaffirmed the United States’ commitment to the policy at Xi’s request.) And just before the summit, Trump remained critical of Beijing, writing on Twitter that he expected a “very difficult” meeting and telling reporters en route to Florida that China had treated the United States “unfairly.”

Considering this backdrop, the first U.S.–Chinese presidential meeting of the Trump administration went remarkably smoothly. There were no major blunders in protocol, and Trump even mustered some self-effacing humor, saying that he’d “gotten nothing, absolutely nothing” out of Xi at a dinner early in their talks. The friendly atmosphere and lack of speed bumps, however, doesn’t mean that the meeting produced major progress. Thanks in part to the Trump administration’s lack of preparation, the summit accomplished little aside from allowing the two leaders and their teams to get acquainted. Although the meeting did produce three notable outcomes—related to trade, the structure of bilateral diplomacy, and North Korea—those results did little to move bilateral ties forward and may have entrenched distrust between the two sides over North Korea.

Click here to read the full article on Foreign Affairs.

On March 14-16, the EastWest Institute (EWI), in partnership with the University of California, Berkeley Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity, hosted a summit featuring over 200 government officials, industry experts, academics, and activists from 30 countries. They met to identify areas of closer collaboration on attacks and sharing of threat information between corporations, governments, and other stakeholders that play a critical role in defending cyberspace.

Peter Altabef, president and CEO of Unisys, delivered a keynote focusing on Smart Cities, and the steps required to keep digital assets and communities safe, securing a balance between four factors: cybersecurity, personal safety, health, and infrastructure. Francis Fukuyama of Stanford University was featured in a discussion on trust in cybersecurity and explored the phenomenon of fake news, what he described as “today’s wild west of information sharing.”

Since 2009, EWI has brought together international actors through its Global Cyberspace Cooperation Summits, aiming to coordinate and consolidate progress, showcase results, and promote collective action. The summits provide a crucial forum for building international, private-public actions to foster international cooperation in cyberspace and norms of responsible behavior.

What makes the EWI summits unique is their emphasis on two areas: fostering robust debate that underscores the aspect of cooperation and finds common ground, and the impactful and results driven role of breakthrough groups, each of which focuses on a key aspect of the cybersecurity dialogue.

To read the full article on Council of Foreign Relations, go here.

For more detailed information, including daily updates and videos from the summit, go here.

Encryption and lawful government-access debate raging for over two decades has become more important in present scenario of ever increasing cyber crimes and terrorism. EastWest Institute's seventh Global Cybersecurity Summit, held at University of California, Berkeley, from March 14-16, included this as an important part of the summit agenda. It looked at policy development in the United States, India and Europe. Both the threat landscape and technology landscape have changed during this period. Encryption was not easy to deploy in the 1990s though it was available since it required high skills to use it. Hence, the intercepted communications were largely in plain text. Clipper and key escrow, though presented as solutions for lawful government access, were not accepted by technologists.

It was concluded that the society would be exposed to more risk if either of these were to be compromised.

The technology developments during the last few years have made it easier for encryption to be used. End-to-end encryption (E2EE) is provided by apps such as WhatsApp and Telegram which are overthetop (OTT) applications. Encryption keys, which are ephemeral, are with the enduser. Since app providers don't have keys, they can't enable access to law-enforcement agencies, even if they have a court warrant. This is a unique situation where even with a warrant, the law-enforcement can't access data in a device of a suspect or shared via an E2EE app.

There is universal agreement that strong encryption is essential for secure etransactions, both by the government and industry. But then, is the cyberspace "going dark" to use the famous phrase of the FBI Director? Is the law-enforcement unable to track terrorists and investigate crimes involving criminals using encryption?

There is increasing use of encrypted smartphones such as the Apple. E2EE messaging traffic is also on the rise, with terrorists using E2EE apps to communicate. This traffic is already touching 275 billion messages per day. Is the Internet truly going dark?

In the "going dark" debate, cryptographers and others have come up with a number of policy options which centre around the following: weak encryption not a solution, hence lawenforcement needs to work around strong encryption by learning to use metadata which continues to grow in the form of location data and call data records; cooperate with tech companies; above all use lawful hacking of devices under court warrant. Compelled disclosure too is an option that lawenforcement often resorts to.

Lawful hacking is possible only for known vulnerabilities, which is often a small subset of the vulnerabilities in a target device. It is the vulnerabilities in underlying software platforms operating system, browser or apps that are exploited before encryption takes place in a device, which enables access to plaintext. So, lawenforcement would like to discover or pay to find as many vulnerabilities and exploits, as possible. They are thus not worried about having to decrypt strong encryption.

Governments have the responsibility to enhance cybersecurity and promote trust in cyberspace. The agencies that discover vulnerabilities should let the vendors know, so that these are plugged through software patches. Cyber surveillance and weapon development is old story. What is new is that it is lawful hacking under court orders that is trying to keep the underlying IT platforms vulnerable. Do we need an encryption policy at all? It is this that reinforces suspicion among policy makers in countries like India, that notwithstanding any encryption policy instrument, the U.S. and the UK will have access to all encrypted data, while India will be advised to work with tech companies and use metadata! No wonder, the Indian government has been unable to come up with a revised encryption policy after it withdrew the draft policy in September 2015.

Read this piece on The Economic Times. 

The views expressed in this post reflect those of the author and not that of the EastWest Institute.

Jordan, a country founded in 1921, has, in its short history, been at the mercy of regional trends and ideologies over which it had little control. Its most recent regional adversary—both ideological and political—is the Islamic State. While the Islamic State appears to be nearing defeat militarily, owing to the increasing efforts by the Global Coalition to Counter ISIS, the transnational terror group might pose a more severe threat to the Hashemite Kingdom once its forces are defeated on the battlefield and dispersed.

Radicalization and Jordan’s Internal State of Affairs

For many years the Muslim Brotherhood and its political party, the Islamic Action Front, was the strongest and most organized opposition group in the kingdom. But, in the beginning of 2012, the Muslim Brotherhood faced the most severe crisis in its history. Status weakened, it has largely been supplanted by more militant Sala jihadists, the natural allies of entities such as the Islamic State and Jabhat al-Nusra.

According to the Islamic State, Syria and Iraq are Dar al-Tamkin (the “enabling region,” i.e., one that allows for the organization’s expansion) en route to Bilad al-Sham (Greater Syria), an entity that also includes Jordan. Nonetheless, the immediate threat to Jordan is not conquest by the Islamic State or Jabhat al-Nusra, but rather a slow subversion of the Jordanian state within its own borders by these terror groups based in Syria and Iraq. This problem will become more acute once Islamic State forces, defeated on the battlefield and severely lacking in territory, return to Jordan and begin to implement insurgency and terror campaigns as seen in Iraq prior to 2014.  

Is Jordan vulnerable?

The Islamic State’s interests in the Jordanian Kingdom are rooted in the internal vulnerabilities of the Hashemite monarchy, which rules on the basis of a delicate balance of power between the various Jordanian tribes.

The sizable influx of refugees from Iraq and Syria, which threatens the economic and social order in the country, is liable to upset this delicate balance. Jordan is currently home to over 650,000 refugees, which amount to 10 percent of the population.  

According to a poll published in September of 2014 by the Center for Strategic Studies at the University of Jordan, only 62 percent of Jordanians view ISIS as a terrorist organization. In fact, more than 1,500 Jordanians have reportedly joined the Islamic State over the last two years.

The Islamic State and Jabhat Al-Nusra (Al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate) have found a base of support in Jordan’s Salafist population as well as the country’s poorest areas. Economically depressed regions like Rusayfa, Zarqa, and Ma’an have become a fertile breeding ground for Jordanian jihadists looking to extend the chaos of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

Zarqa and terrorism

Zarqa, an industrial city with a population of 800,000, is best known as the birthplace of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the former leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, the group that later became the Islamic State. In his early years, Zarqawi was a petty criminal in Hai Masoum, a mostly-Palestinian neighborhood before becoming Iraq’s terrorist mastermind.

Hard-line Salafist groups have succeeded in gaining ground in Jordan, particularly in the country's poverty pockets of which Zarqa is one of the worst—the governorate of the city has the second-highest rate of unemployment anywhere in Jordan.

According to Amer Sabaileh, a Jordanian researcher who was raised in the same neighborhood as Zarqawi, things have gotten worse in many respects there despite government attempts to prevent youth from joining jihadist groups. Over 60 of the population is under 30, while the official youth unemployment rate (ages 15 to 24) stood at 28.8 percent in 2015.

As a result, the city of Zarqa continues to serve as one of the central points in the region for furnishing foreign fighters to the Islamic State and the recruitment of young Jordanians —encouraged vicariously  by religious authorities.

Within Jordanian society, religious leaders are playing a prominent role in shaping public debate and perception. While forbidden from giving overt support to what is considered terrorism, they are quite free in what they can say and some of them are followers of an ultra-conservative stream of Islam preaching Jihad. Their extremist position was exemplified in January 2017, when Jordan's Religious Affairs Ministry dismissed 15 mosque preachers for their refusal to pray for Jordanian troops killed fighting ISIS-inspired militants.

Nevertheless, as of now, Salafi-jihadists in Jordan remain a small group. Estimates are between 5,000-10,000, although quantifying their size is difficult. Oraib Rantawi, the director of the al-Quds Center for Political Studies, a think tank in Amman, recently said: "It's not just about the military or security approach. (…) We are good enough at that already. But with the second track—to create generations of Jordanians who are immune to the extremism wave—we are not good at all.”

Time and again, the Islamic State has shown an ability and willingness to adapt its ideology and carry out its plans through independent or loosely connected groups and cells while still fulfilling the Caliphate’s agenda. Jordan is not immune from these mushrooming, semi-independents groups that have pledged allegiance to the Islamic State.  

As ISIS is fighting for its survival in Iraq and Syria, it is likely that what we will see more independent terror groups with ties to the Islamic State emerging in Jordan and the wider Middle East. Countries such as Jordan will need to be ready to effectively combat these groups, eliminate their safe havens and drain their support base through a combination of economic, political and military means. Without addressing some of the root causes—including Jordan’s poverty and high unemployment rates, as well as religious indoctrination—these efforts are bound to fail in the long run.

Lucrezia Savasta is a PhD Student in Political Science and a Research Assistant Higher School of Economics—National Research University in Moscow.

The views expressed in this post reflect those of the author and not that of the EastWest Institute.

Photo: "Petra, Jordan" (CC BY 2.0) by eviljohnius

New York, April 10, 2017 - The EastWest Institute (EWI) has submitted "Comments on Developing a Framework to Improve Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity" to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). These comments—submitted on behalf of the Breakthrough Group on Increasing the Global Availability and Use of Secure ICT Products and Services under EWI's Global Cooperation in Cyberspace program—are designed to assist the U.S. government in improving its guidance to federal agencies and private sector critical infrastructure owners and operators on how to better secure their critical information systems.  

This work builds on EWI's Purchasing Secure ICT Products and Services: A Buyers Guide. The Guide—released in September 2016, in cooperation with our partners, Huawei Technologies, Microsoft and The Open Group—is intended to help the buyers, suppliers and users of information and communications technologies better understand and address the cybersecurity and privacy risks inherent in information and communications technology (ICT) products and services. Supporting the work outlined in the Guide, the comments submitted to NIST recommend to increase the importance of acquiring secure commercial hardware and software as a part of an organization's overall cybersecurity practices.  

NIST is a federal agency within the United States Department of Commerce. NIST's mission is to develop and promote measurement, standards, and technology to enhance productivity, facilitate trade, and improve the quality of life. NIST is also responsible for establishing computer- and information technology-related standards and guidelines for federal agencies to use. Many private sector organizations are already making use of the cybersecurity framework to improve the security of their information resources. 

Click here to read the full submission.