Office Hours @ TMP: Stephen Biddle
By Celia Saada, Varun Thotli, Jean-Claude Lane, and Sidney Poor
Office Hours @ TMP is a monthly podcast where we bring your questions on current events to Columbia professors. This month, we’re joined by Professor Stephen Biddle, a leading expert in U.S. foreign policy, military strategy, and defense.
Professor Stephen Biddle is the International Security and Diplomacy Concentration Director at SIPA, where he teaches the course Foundations of International Security. He is also a member of the Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies and Adjunct Senior Fellow for Defense Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Varun: Welcome to the Morningside Pod, the Morningside Post podcast edition. I'm Varun.
Celia: And I'm Celia.
Varun: And we're both second year students at SIPA, with an interest in bringing office hours to the airwaves.
Celia: In this episode, we're lucky enough to interview Professor Stephen Biddle, an esteemed scholar in defense and security policy. He's also a professor of international and public affairs here at SIPA, Columbia, where he is the director of the International Security and Diplomacy concentration and teaching, famously so, the foundations of International Security Policy or FISP in the fall and Conduct of War in the spring. He's also an adjunct senior fellow for defense policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. Thank you so much Professor Biddle for being here with us today and welcome on the Morningside Pod.
Prof. Biddle: Thanks for having me.
Varun: So, getting started we wanted to talk about your introduction to the defense field: the beginning parts of your career. How did you find your footing in the sector? What was your original vision for what you wanted to do and how do you think it's changed over the years?
Prof. Biddle: When I was in college, I expected I was going to be a lawyer. Probably a very unhappy lawyer, but I expected I was going to be a lawyer. I'd always been interested in public policy, politics, military affairs, defense policy in particular, but I assumed there was no way to make a living doing it. I knew there was this place called the RAND Corporation, and I thought it employed like three people. When one of them dies, they replace them with somebody else, but I didn't think you could make a living doing this. So, a high school friend of mine persuaded me that I should at least explore doing something about public policy and national security rather than just trooping off to law school and doing my duty. So, I marched into the career counseling office on my college campus and asked the woman sitting in the desk inside the front door, uh how do I go about exploring whether you can make a living doing defense policy? And it turns out there was this whole approach that they were able to lay out for how you can figure out how and get yourself a career in this area. I took careful notes, did what they instructed, started getting summer jobs in Washington as an undergraduate and you know a long time later here I am at Columbia. But among the reasons why I'm such a big advocate for career counseling offices like the Career Advancement Center here is because if it weren't for one, that I literally walked in the door you know for in 1978, I would be doing tortfeasors today and that would have been unfortunate.
Celia: Wow, that's an incredible story really and a lot of expectations you're setting onto the CAC here at SIPA actually. So, if you were as SIPA students now here in 2025 eager to get in the field, given the current job market, where would you look for a job if you were graduating this year?
Prof. Biddle: Yeah, I mean there's a question of where to look and then there's a question of how to look. On where to look, to be honest any of the focus areas that ISD presents to students there are jobs available. They're important jobs, it’s important work, and if that's what you really are excited about doing, that's what you should do. Now the labor markets are not of equal size, many SIPA students in my experience tend to assume that the UN is a vast job market, whereas all this defense technology stuff is this tiny little niche subject matter that nobody cares about and there are no jobs in. The sizes of the labor markets are precisely the opposite of that. There is a much larger labor market in defense and national security than there is in diplomacy and conflict resolution. Now, that does not mean you should go decide, “Oh no, I wanted to make a career as a diplomat, but I guess I'm going to have to be a defense policymaker.” Absolutely not. There are jobs in all these fields. What it does mean is if you were interested in defense policy, but you thought I don't want to do it because there are no jobs there, that's an inaccurate assumption. The labor market there is actually larger. I would certainly, if defense policy is of interest, I would explore it. Cybersecurity has a very large labor market. That's not a reason to do it if what you really want to do is conflict resolution. But if you were thinking about cyber but worried that there weren't any jobs there, the labor market is larger there than it is in diplomacy and conflict resolution for better or worse. I guess my first suggestion with respect to where to look is if your interests align with it, the labor market in defense policy and cyber is very large.
Just as important though is how to look. As I mentioned a minute ago, I'm very impressed with what career counselors taught me 200 years ago when I was an undergraduate… dinosaurs walked the earth… before internal combustion engines and all of that. But a lot of what they recommended back then is still sound now. And the first step in that process, which ultimately led me to Columbia, is information interviewing. That's what they had me start doing. And those information interviews were gold. They told me who the good employers were, who to avoid. Most important, they told me what employers in the defense field that I was interested in at the time were looking for. What skills did they value? And therefore, what coursework will they find attractive on an application and a resume? How I should present myself to employers in this field to emphasize the skills I had that they knew they wanted and needed. I wouldn't have known any of those things without actually talking to mid-career professionals in this field using the approach that I was taught back in the 12th century, but it's still the best way to start.
In ISD, we’ve invested considerable effort in facilitating that process for current students. We have an alumni list comprised of recent graduates, often of this program, who are currently working in these fields and have agreed in advance that they will do information interviews with students. It doesn't have to be limited to our alumni. There's a world of people out there currently working in all of the fields that ISD is preparing people for. You can find their names and their contact information online on the organization’s websites, reach out to them, say, “Hi, I'm Celia, I'm a second-year student at SIPA at Columbia University, I'm interested in a career in defense policy. I would very much like to learn more about your career and how you got to be the director of the Strategy, Forces, and Resources Division at the Institute for Defense Analyses…” or whatever. And to learn more about what the work is like, what skills are needed, what abilities and talents are most sought after, what does the career trajectory look like from entry level until retirement in this field. All these kinds of questions can be asked to people who aren't necessarily our alumni.
In my experience, lots of people are happy to talk about their career and how they got to be the wonderful, impressive, influential people that they are. The first step in the process, and ideally this should happen as early as possible, is get out there and start talking to people who are in the fields that you're thinking about entering and learn more about what they're after, what the work is like, whether you would want to do it, and if so, how to prepare yourself of the panoply of courses that SIPA offers are the best choices to make yourself effective and attractive to employers in that field.
Celia: Alright, so it's time to get some coffees.
Varun: Yeah, I just wanted to say I think the alumni network has been really effective for me too. Just looking through there and seeing all the different sorts of career opportunities that are out there, gives you a really good perspective on what subtopics are in general under the umbrella of ISD in general.
Celia: Absolutely.
Varun: Moving on to more current events in the defense sector, uh we want to speak a little bit about the Department of Defense, or the Department of War as the administration has termed it. What do you make of that effort by the administration to return, or coin the Department of Defense as the Department of War and reignite this warrior ethos within their department?
Prof. Biddle: Well, first of all, it's still the Department of Defense until Congress passes a law to change it. We can call it whatever we want to call it. We can call it the Department of Wombats if it makes us happy. But legally, it's still the Department of Defense. The Administration that wants to change the name from defense to war is also an administration that seems quite interested in using the US military for things that are clearly not wars. Whether this is a branding that reflects the purposes to which this organization is to be put is far from clear. The whole soldier warrior distinction is one that personally I think is handled in a problematic way. The distinction between a soldier and a warrior historically has many dimensions to it. But among these dimensions are that soldiers are typically conceived of as servants of the state in a collective project in which their activities are directed at a mission and not at self-glorification. The mental model of the warrior in literature and in military history is the opposite of all those things. Whereas soldiers are disciplined members of collectives serving a mission determined by someone other than themselves, warriors are individuals taking pride in individual prowess, seeking individual glory in formations that may be no larger than themselves and in service not of a state but often of a much smaller group, a tribe, an identity group, something that is not sort of the organized nation state of the modern political world. The degree to which we want, as citizens of these countries, to have the armed forces that are protecting us conceiving of themselves as individual seekers of personal glory or as disciplined instruments of the public will and of the national interest, serving our interests and not necessarily their own. Given that choice, I pick Soldier.
Celia: It’s truly troubling. Drawing from that, then, what do you make about the concerns about the Pentagon that's using existing funding to cover salaries of military personnel without congressional approval during the government shutdown?
Prof. Biddle: Well, of course, under the U.S. constitutional system, it's the U.S. Congress that has the power of the purse. This is all being adjudicated in the courts as we speak. The ability of the executive, as opposed to the legislative, to determine how money will be is something that ultimately the Supreme Court is going to decide. Now these shutdowns often have very complicated mechanics. Who will get paid anyway? Who will have to work without getting paid? Who will get furloughed? What the President is trying to do at the moment is to funnel funds toward favored parts of the government and away from disfavored parts of the government regardless of law as realized by the legislative branch of the US government. Now, with respect to the armed forces, which President Trump would clearly like to privilege in this process, heaven knows they serve the public at great potential risk to themselves, and we ask tremendous sacrifice of them, for which we should all be grateful. But they are not the only employees of the US government that we ask much of, that we ask sacrifice of, and that we reasonably expect will be compensated for the labors and the efforts and the sacrifices they put out on our behalf. What about staff at the CDC? What about air traffic controllers? What about weather predictors? What about civilians in the Department of Defense on whose efforts the success of the uniformed military parts of the Department of Defense depend? These are all important national functions. These are all important national functions that the American people whose will is expressed through the Congress and the laws that have been passed have collectively decided that we want working on our behalf.
My own view is that if we're going to pay people during a shutdown, we should pay everyone that the American people through the Congress have decided they want working on their behalf. Not one group of people who we've decided we want working on our behalf, but not another group of people who we've decided that we want working on our behalf. If we don't want them working on our behalf, our elected representatives in the Congress should pass a law reflecting the collective political preference of the nation and change the employment structure of the US government. Short of that, I think we should be more even-handed in what we expect of our public servants and in how we compensate them for the labors and the sacrifices and the efforts that we expect of them.
Varun: That's definitely a fair point. It makes me think about whether there is any precedent in previous shutdowns about selective payment or giving some people payment during the shutdown and leaving other people to get their payment during back pay afterwards.
Prof. Biddle: Well, in past shutdowns, the norm has been that people will be paid retrospectively. At the end of the shutdown, you will be made whole for what you lost during the shutdown. The president has been suggesting that he doesn't intend to take that path this time. But again, the issue of his power to make those decisions unilaterally without an act of Congress will be adjudicated in the courts.
Varun: Gotcha.
Celia: Can the funding come from anywhere else? I've seen also a lot of banks making public statements for investments in the DOD.
Prof. Biddle: There are some mechanisms by which some parts of what you would think government does or should do can be privately funded. I give you, for example, the West Point football team. A significant fraction of the cost of fielding a football team at the US Military Academy at West Point is shouldered by private donors. If some wealthy private donor, you know who you are out there, decides that they want to fund the Department of Defense through their own bank account. I suppose some pathway could be identified through which they could do that. That said, the Department of Defense is a pretty pricey enterprise. Certainly Columbia isn't paying me enough for me to be able to pick up that bill, I don't know about you. I suspect that for the massive public project that is the U.S. government, expecting it to be funded by the charitable donations of individuals may not be the best approach to public finance in the long run.
Celia: Yeah, absolutely. Hopefully Varun can cover the bill.
Varun: I wish I could. I don't have the money if you don't have the money. Looking more into foreign affairs and our defense relations with other countries, last week there was an announcement by the Defense Department that Qatar would build an air force station, but then that was later changed and reclassified as a facility within an existing US base. What do you make of that statement and our increasingly stronger relations with Qatar, which is a non-NATO ally in the Middle East?
Prof. Biddle: Yeah, I think that announcement generated a lot of excitement that was mostly unjustified. I think what some people on the internet seem to have in mind is that there would be these foreign bases that foreign militaries would use that would be popping up all over America and would be used to take over the country. That’s rather exaggerated. As you pointed out, the Qataris are not going to have a base. They will be guests at a US facility and they're not the first or the only foreign military to do this. Many allied air forces train their pilots in their airplanes on US bases because we have a lot emptier real estate in the United States than they do in, say, Germany. In fact, for the longest time, it may still be true, if you walked up to a German in uniform, the best way to find out whether they were in the Army or the Air Force was by whether they spoke English in a Texan accent. If they had a Texas accent, they were Luftwaffe officers because they had all trained at US air bases in Texas, all of them, because there was a lot more usable airspace that wasn't chock-a-block with civilian airliners all the time where they could practice combat air maneuvers, the Brits train in the United States, the Dutch train in the United States, Italians, Turks, Singaporeans train in the United States.
There is actually a German military installation in Reston, Virginia near Dulles Air Base. It's not technically a base, but it's a German military facility that the Germans used to coordinate the logistics of all this training that they do at various places in the United States. During the Cold War, the Luftwaffe used to fly a weekly 707 flight from Dulles Air Force Base to Kohn-Bahn Air Base in Germany. And it was one of the most, one of the strangest experiences of my early professional career. The German government had asked me to come to Germany to give a talk and they said, we’ll fly you over. And so, they put me on this Luftwaffe flight, a 707 with German iron crosses painted on the wings with uniformed German military personnel acting as stewards and stewardesses on board. And you checked in by going through a guard post that had uniformed, armed, German soldiers at it, would check your ID, then you'd go in, you'd be checked onto the flight, you get onto this German Air Force airplane with the iron crosses on the wings and take off over Northern Virginia or rolling countryside and think if World War II had come out differently, this is what I would be seeing. It was a very exciting experience. So, the idea that Qatar is training some F-15 pilots in Idaho is not as exotic as it sounds. Now the degree to which all of this reflects U.S. national interest is a more complicated question. Is this because it suits U.S. interests in any way or is it because Qatar has donated a 747 to the executive branch of the U.S. government? I defer on that to others. Suffice to say that the idea that there are foreign pilots flying military aircraft of their nation in the United States is not a first.
Celia: Speaking actually of exotic airspace and moving to international security, let's discuss a little bit the Ukraine-Russia conflict where the situation is worsening with many Europeans worried about Russian presence and violation of European airspace. To which many countries in Europe have responded with their intention to create a so-called drone wall. In a few sentences, how affected would that plan be and what would it look like and what would be, according to you, the best responses to Russian airspace violations?
Prof. Biddle: Wall is not the metaphor I would choose. It implies that there's going to be this large masonry object right at the border and all these drones will fly into it and go kerplop. And of course, that’s not what's going to happen. Air defense, especially with a big airspace and a long border, normally means you're going to try to intercept incoming aircraft after they've passed the border, but ideally before they reach the target, which could be well interior to the national border. And probably, given the size of the border we're talking about here, it's going to be a fairly porous defense that will not intercept every aircraft successfully that crosses that border, or else the cost will be stratospheric. Drone defense is made especially difficult by the fact that drones are so inexpensive that you can't afford expensive long-range air defense systems and have a favorable cost-exchange ratio against the incoming drone. You need cheap air defenses to counter cheap penetrating aircraft. That means the range will be short. That means you need to buy approximately 4.7 gazillion of them in order to cover that long border. So, my guess is that we'll see improved interception rates, but not perfect interception rates. And it will be expensive and the degree to which the improvement is real will be a function of how much money Europeans are willing to put into this project.
Now, that said, this has taken place in a larger context of escalation associated with the war in Ukraine. Both sides have been in a gradual escalatory process that has gone on ever since the Russian invasion and has already mounted many, many rungs on the escalatory ladder, both by the Russians and by Ukraine's allies. There's a view you sometimes hear in the debate over Ukraine that we shouldn't worry about Russian escalation because the Russians haven't escalated and therefore they won't. That tends to collapse the problem of escalation into a binary, conventional-nuclear, two-rung ladder and that's not the way escalation works in the real world. In fact, both sides have been walking up this ladder for a long, long time. The Russians walked up the ladder when they did an initial mobilization of an initial 300,000 soldiers. They walked up this ladder when they annexed four oblasts of Ukraine. They walked up this ladder when they began a strategic bombing campaign against Ukrainian energy targets. They walked up this ladder when they brought North Korean troops into the war. They walked up this ladder when they began espionage and targeting of European economic assets outside of Ukraine. The West started walking up this ladder when it provided tanks that initially said it wasn't going to. It walked up this ladder when it provided artillery that it said it wasn't going to. When it provided F-16s, both sides have been walking up. We're now in a situation in which we're talking about rungs of the escalatory ladder that involve penetration of non-Ukrainian airspace by Russian aircraft, sometimes drones, sometimes aircraft with human pilots in them.
The underlying dynamic here is that Putin is seeking to coerce Ukraine's outside allies into cutting off their assistance to Ukraine by threatening further walking up of the escalatory ladder and making it credible by executing parts of it as he goes. If this sounds like FISP, it's not an accident. The Western allies of Ukraine and Ukraine are trying to coerce Russia into accepting a negotiated settlement that Russia doesn't want to accept by threatening Russia with a long war via military support to the government in Ukraine. If that sounds like FISP, it's not an accident. So, there's a certain tendency to see this in kind of a micro-narrow context of one rung in the ladder at a time. The debate over the drone wall at the moment is all about if we don’t deter further airspace incursions, then there will be more airspace incursions. That may be true, but that's not the point. The point is the outcome of the war in Ukraine. The real coercive problem here is not the micro-coercive problem of how do we try and deter the next run on the latter, more drone incursions into Poland, for example. But how do we coerce a favorable termination of the war? That's what will end the escalatory process. Short of that, we're likely to see more rungs, probably on both sides, and all of the Clausewitzian concerns that good FISP students have front of mind about not allowing escalation to exceed in its cost the value of the stake should be increasingly front of mind for decision makers in the West, in Kiev, and in Moscow.
Varun: Certainly, important to keep Clausewitz in mind when we think.
Prof. Biddle: Always.
Varun: Any ongoing conflicts.
Prof. Biddle: Always.
Varun: I would look at the U.S. again, and its perspective on the conflict. ah Trump recently mentioned that he wants to meet with President Putin to figure out how to get, to find an end to the war. What do you think are some strategic avenues that the U.S. could look into? I'm sure it's not like a unilateral effort that the US could do to figure out how to end the war. What would your thoughts be on that?
Prof. Biddle: Well, I think the most important contribution the US could make to ending the war would be a high credibility promise to continue supporting Ukraine militarily until and unless there's a deal that the Ukrainians can live with. I mean, Putin's theory of victory at the moment almost certainly involves coercing the Ukrainians into accepting an unfavorable settlement by outlasting Ukrainians outside support. Putin presumably believes that either President Trump or President Trump and the Europeans will tire of this conflict and will cut off external aid to Ukraine. That would dramatically change bargaining leverage on the ground in the war in a way that would presumably, if not initially, then over time, persuade the Ukrainians to accept the deal that today Ukrainians are not willing to accept. So, part of Putin's logic for being willing to continue the war rather than accepting a settlement that would end it is his hope that outside aid to Ukraine can be stanched. Therefore, if the United States wants to get a deal that Ukraine can live with and that suits the national security interests of United States and our NATO allies as well for that matter, arguably the best thing he could do would be to persuade his pal Vlad that we're in this for the long term and we are not going to cut and run. Now there are all sorts of other things that the United States could do in the shorter term. We could provide Tomahawk missiles. We could redouble our supply of 155-millimeter artillery ammunition. There's a long list of things the Ukrainians would like to have that we could provide. I would argue that the most important thing we could provide would be credibility in our promise to them to continue assistance and in our threat to the Russians that we will continue that assistance.
Celia: What do you make, though, of the fact that both the Europeans and the Biden administration have been trying to build that narrative, credibly so, that we would not give up on Ukraine? What do you think was missing to that narrative at the time and also now with European leaders? And what could Trump add to the edifice, so to say?
Prof. Biddle: Well, I suspect there were several things that were missing, but one of the most important ones was the likely hope on Putin's part that Donald Trump would be elected president and would reverse Biden's policies towards Ukraine. And, you know, President Trump has flopped back and forth several times on all of this since Inauguration Day. So, it's a plausible surmise that Putin may continue to believe that Trump eventually will walk away. The hope that Trump would arrive and would carry out policies that are more Putin favorable than Biden was willing to do was surely part of Putin's willingness to stick this out as long as he has. Now there are other issues as well. Putin presumably believes that his political control over Russia is greater than Zelensky's political control over Ukraine and therefore he can continue to sacrifice soldiers and incur cost in a way that will eventually exhaust Ukraine's willingness. Presumably Putin thinks that the stakes for him are high enough that he can just outlast them even if the West continues to provide support. A big part of the war termination process here, as it always is, is shaping the two sides' expectations of future costs in a two-sided coercive war termination struggle that will eventually determine whether there's a bargaining space or not and if there is a bargaining space where within it does the deal eventually emerge. But anyway, a big part, surely, of Putin's calculation to date has been the expectation that an eventual Trump presidency would be congenial.
Celia: Let’s shift now to the Middle East and Gaza, which was, of course, recently issued as a peace agreement or a ceasefire rather. So, in your course at SIPA, you teach about security policy and ethics and conduct of war. What's right to do? What's just to do during wartime? Given the war crimes committed on both sides during the Israel-Hamas war, do you believe that the 20 point plan adequately lays the ground for a peace that lasts between the two warring parties and how can we get to an ethical end to this war so that it will actually be a sustainable ceasefire?
Prof. Biddle: Well, the 20-point plan has a lot of very promising ideas on it, but it's underdeveloped. What we would normally expect of our Department of State and our negotiators is that they begin with conceptual outlines like the 20-point plan and then fill in all the critical details that determine whether it's a plan that actually gets reflected on the ground or it's just a plan on Twitter. I guess X these days. And a lot of those details just aren't there at the moment. The most salient example of the last few days is the document calls for an Israeli partial withdrawal and then release of hostages and release of prisoners and eventually Hamas’s replacement with some other form of government. But in the meantime, you’ve got a security vacuum in Gaza created by the withdrawal of the Israelis that were providing security and no arrival of any outside force to provide it in the Israelis absence. And the result of this security vacuum is that Hamas is returning. The degree to which Hamas will be willing to negotiate points beyond three and four in this 20-point plan will be shaped by Hamas's conception of its self-interest, and that's changing as we speak on the ground as they reestablish their control over large parts of the real estate and large parts of the population. One would have hoped that negotiators would work out a detailed plan by which security will be provided continuously as the IDF withdraws. Those details aren't there. That kind of intellectual infrastructure for making the concepts real hasn't been filled in. One of the reasons to spend two years and several trillion dollars in tuition at SIPA is to build the skills in working through these kinds of details so that high concepts eventually become facts on the ground. And I'm very concerned that the 20-point plan is heavy on the high concept, real light on details on the ground, in ways that significantly reduce the likelihood that it eventually produces the peace in Gaza that we all want and that the purpose of the negotiation was to bring about.
Celia: But now going back to the ethics aspects and the war crimes, how do you think that beyond the 20 point plans, what could have been added, what is missing there to help make amends between the warring parties of the war crimes that were committed on both sides for this fire to last?
Prof. Biddle: Well, let me say that I'm not an international lawyer, so I'm not prepared to declare crimes. As we noted for those who were there in our optional session on Gaza Tuesday night of this week, my own view is that the precepts of just war theory have been violated on both sides of this conflict. And we talked on Tuesday night in detail about the ways in which I thought those violations of the ethical precepts of just war theory had fallen short of what we've actually seen on the ground in this conflict. Now, one of the challenges of conflict resolution and war termination in these kinds of settings is how are you going to approach the problem of justice afterwards? When there's been an end to the fighting and people have laid down their arms, are there going to be war crimes trials? Are people going to be incarcerated for what they did in the war? Or are amnesties going to be worked out for them? And an issue that our coursework in ISD on reconciliation deals with directly is what are the trade-offs associated with issuing amnesties to people who did evil things, but in a way that will persuade them to stop shooting people. How does that trade off against the requirements of justice in which people who did evil things should be held accountable for the evil things they did if that creates an incentive on their part to keep shooting people and to cause the suffering to continue? A huge fraction of what SIPA is about is presenting trade-offs, illuminating the considerations on both sides of those trade-offs to help you folks when you leave this campus navigate those trades and cast these balances in a way that best serves the public interest. Rarely will that mean ignoring one side of the ledger. Rarely will that mean we are going to uh we are going to put in front of a firing squad everyone on the other side that we think did something wrong. Rarely will that mean we are issuing a blanket amnesty to everyone regardless of what they did. Ordinarily, the trade-off has to be cast in a more subtle way than that. And I will defer to others who specialize in the Israel-Palestine negotiation process. This has been a career field for many, given its long-standing nature, as to exactly how this particular trade-off should be resolved, other than saying there have been, in my view, violations of the precepts of just war theory on both sides of the conflict, which means that as is often the case, this is going to be a complicated process.
Varun: One last question on Gaza. You mentioned the security vacuum that's been created, which hasn't really been filled. The 20-point plan establishes a board of peace with international leaders as regulators and a multinational security force. I can't remember the exact termage of it. But what would you say are additional steps needed in the 20-point plan, elaborations on the 20-point plan to ensure that a transnational security force will work? Because there's been many times throughout history when the transnational security force from the UN or other international structures has not worked.
Prof. Biddle: Your important question is a subset of the general problematique of war termination. Wars only terminate when both sides prefer the termination terms to continued shooting. That then implies that you're not going to get an end to the shooting unless Hamas's surviving fighters and leaders decide they prefer the terms to continued ammunition expenditure. At the moment that looks like it may very well not be the case. A properly negotiated settlement will involve some future for Hamas's survivors that looks better to them than continuing the war. And that then gives them an incentive not to shoot the international peacekeepers when they show up because they know that this would blow up the deal that they want. If they want the deal, they won't shoot the peacekeepers or at least the majority of them won't. Spoilers are another problem in these kinds of war termination settings and that’s yet another potential topic of conversation but what you want is an environment in which the majority of the fighters want the deal enough that they don't kill people that they could kill if they so chose. And that's also important to get the peacekeepers to show up. Most peacekeepers aren’t particularly thrilled about walking into an ongoing war. They want some peace to keep. And, you know, the central insight of the war termination unit in FISP, of course, is that this is all about a course of bargaining. If both sides don't think the bargain is better, the war doesn't end. And a corollary to that is the foreign peacekeepers won't show up.
Varun: Thanks for all the advice and information on Gaza and the ongoing negotiations, that’s very timely. One of our students brought up a question in a survey that we sent out about the ongoing situation in Mali. There is an Al-Qaeda link terror group, abbreviated as JNIM, which has imposed a fuel blockade on Western and Southern Mali, which has impacted fuel prices and shuttered a lot of small businesses. The essential question is, how effective are economic blockades on the effectiveness of military opponents, especially in low-income countries and land-locked countries that rely on fuel coming in from other places like Mali?
Prof. Biddle:Well, I think that the first step towards sound policy in Mali is of course Clausewitz. I think anyone thinking about Mali is presumably immediately thinking Clausewitz is going to guide me here. So, Clausewitz would tell us that an economic blockade is not an end in itself. It's a means to some political end. So, this then becomes a subset of the general problem of coercion theory. The radicals want to bring about a political change and are using an economic blockade as a means to the end of political change through the way of coercion. This sounds vaguely familiar from the course, call me crazy. And the general problem in this particular case is, as we know from coercion theory generally, the ability of the means to bring about the end is a function of the stakes that the end represents and how highly valued those are. If you're seeking existential stakes, regime change for example in the government, only very severe coercive threats, means that are really painful, will be sufficient if the stake is valued that highly. Generally speaking, economic means for coercive purposes rarely are capable of inflicting a pain level that's sufficient to cause targets to give up existential stakes. Economic coercion, whether it be in the form of sanctions or in the form of blockades, which is basically just a more severe version of economic sanctions, are potentially valuable tools for stakes whose value is low enough that the pain level associated with the tool is sufficient to persuade the target to yield the stake rather than suffer the pain. That usually doesn't work very well for regime change, as the stake is too highly valued and the pain level isn't sufficient. If you're using economic sanctions for lower stakes, often for example economic stakes, if you're trying to extract a concession and a tariff negotiation for example, economic threats are often sufficient and are widely used for this purpose. In the case of Mali, it would appear that the coercive demand, implicit though it may be, is something approximately existential for the incumbent government of Mali, and thus I would be skeptical that economic coercive means will be sufficient to bring about an end that is valued that highly by the target.
Celia: We also received some questions about your sabbatical last spring and a lot of people are actually wondering how it was being away from SIPA and what did you get up to? What were you working on?
Prof. Biddle: Well, I was thinking this morning, you know, the single most important issue for SIPA students is my sabbatical. But I recommend sabbaticals, I found this one quite helpful. It was the first sabbatical I've had in a very long time. There were several things I wanted to accomplish with it. I had three articles in various forms of draft and I wanted to get those drafts completed and these articles off to journals for publication so future generations of students could suffer through them as assigned readings. So the mission accomplished on that score.
Celia: Congratulations.
Prof. Biddle: Thank you. Thank you. All three papers, the drafts are complete. Two of them are off to journals. One of them has been accepted by International Security, the other is under review in International Organization, the third, the draft is largely complete, but one of my co-authors had some health issues and so we're waiting on him to finish some appendices before we send if off - send the thing out. But mission accomplished. The three articles got pretty much where I wanted them to be. My daughter also got engaged during my sabbatical. That, of course, was, I'm sure, why she timed it the way she did. And I regret to report that she now lives in Scotland, which is very far away. And the weather is bad and they have very funny accents. I find it difficult to figure out. But one of the great advantages of the sabbatical is I was able to travel to Scotland to see the surprise engagement that my future son-in-law uh manufactured for her to the intense dislike of all his male friends who now believe that the bar has been raised for them. So, the ability to travel to Edinburgh to see my daughter get engaged was another wonderful thing that the sabbatical enabled. So, sabbaticals are great. You should all go get one.
Celia: Fantastic. Sorry to hear you didn't miss SIPA that much.
Professor Biddle: Well, I did. I like to teach. I came back to teaching from a career in think tanks, not because I needed a job, but because I love to teach. I came to Columbia from George Washington University where I'd been teaching, but I went to GW from the Council on Foreign Relations. I was a full-time senior fellow at CFR for six years. It was a great job. I loved it. But it did not afford the ability to teach, at least in any systematic way. And sabbaticals are nice to recharge your batteries, get your draft papers out, see your daughters get engaged and all those good things. But at the end of the day, I'm happy to be back. I'm happy to be back in the classroom. I'm happy to be working with bright, talented, idealistic students who are trying to make a difference in the world. What's not to like about that?
Celia: Yeah, I think that definitely shows in class we can all tell how much you love to be there, so thank you for that.
Varun: We're glad you had a great sabbatical and glad that you're still showing strong interest in being here at SIPA.
Celia: Definitely.
Varun: I guess our final question from students, if you could teach any other course at Columbia, even if not in security policy, what would that course be?
Prof. Biddle: I have long thought that a course on war and human experience would be fun to teach. As some students know, my undergraduate education was in art history. So, I didn't expect to do it for a living, but I did study it for four years. And a course that presented the phenomenon of war through all the different lenses that human experience permits would, I think, be a really fun course to teach. A unit on war in painting. A unit on war in literature. A unit on war in poetry, war in music, war in dance, war in philosophy, going beyond just war theory, and course war in political science and war in strategy, but that tried to integrate all these different threads of the human experience of this cataclysmic phenomenon that's been with us as a species for millennia and has been looked at, experienced, and thought about by an enormously wide range of human thinkers through an enormously diverse range of lenses and conceptual approaches and it would be fun to just kind of think through how all of those integrate. What they uniquely tell us, how they're influenced by each other, how they've changed over time. We do a tiny little bit of this at ISD in our now annual tradition of going to the Lincoln Center for a performance of the Paul Taylor Dance Company, where, several years ago, the company whose artistic director is a Columbia grad, I might add, was putting on an anti-war ballet called the Green Table. And since the artistic director was Columbia grad, he called up then Dean of SIPA, Merit Janow, and asked, is there somebody at Columbia who knows something about war and anti-war politics and might be willing to come and give an after-performance panel talk about this ballet? And Merit sent him to me. And since then, every year, we’ve been organizing an evening for ISD students. This will be happening again this November, in which we get together, watch a performance of some wonderful modern dance in about as New York a setting as it gets: Modern dance at the Lincoln Center in New York City. And then afterwards we all get together and we talk about the role of the arts in foreign policy because there's an interaction there. So, it would be interesting to do that in a broader gauge, more systematic way, and just look at war through all these different forms of human experience. I don't think I'll be teaching that of course, anytime soon, kind of a big prep. But it would be fun to do.
Varun: Any last questions or any last messages for our listeners both past, prospective and current students?
Prof. Biddle: My main message for your listeners is one you've heard from me before but I'll say it again. Thanks for being here and doing important work. Public service and the public interest matters. And to do it right requires expertise and skills and knowledge that are hard to acquire. And they require work and effort and sacrifice that you are all putting in. That is the difference between policies that sound good on Twitter and policies that work on the ground in real life to improve people's lives and to create more secure, more prosperous societies in which we can all work and live and raise families. And the fact that you're all putting in that work and making that investment and building those skills to do something that matters to make this world a better place than you found it is something I admire and for which I'm grateful. So, thanks to you all.
Celia: Thank you so much, Professor. And you heard him, stay away from Twitter, kids. This is the Morningside Pod and many thanks to our guest, Professor Biddle for his time and contribution today. We're your hosts. Varun and Celia, and stay tuned for upcoming episodes on Spotify. Let us know what you think by checking out our website at www.morningsidepost.com, or by emailing us at morningsidepost@columbia.edu. This episode was produced by Celia Saada, Varun Thotli, Jean-Claude Lane, and Sidney Poor.