Stephen Peter Rosen

Last updated

Stephen Peter Rosen is a Harvard College Professor and Beton Michael Kaneb Professor of National Security and Military Affairs in the Government Department in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University and is known as a neoconservative. In addition to his academic work, Rosen was also Master of Harvard College's Winthrop House from 2003 to 2009. He is also Senior Counsellor to the Long Term Strategy Group based in Washington D. C., a defense consulting firm.

Contents

Early life and education

Rosen was born in New York City and grew up on Long Island.[ citation needed ] He received his A.B. (in 1974 [1] ) and Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University. He was influenced by the teaching of Harvey Mansfield as an undergraduate. As a graduate student, Rosen roomed with Bill Kristol and Alan Keyes. His PhD dissertation entitled "Leadership in Foreign Policy" studied the ways in which Alexander Hamilton and Abraham Lincoln tried to moderate American public opinion that could negatively affect American foreign policy. As a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard he worked with Sam Huntington to create the Olin institute for Strategic Studies.

Career

His first book Winning the Next War: Innovation and the Modern Military was published by Cornell University Press in 1991, and received the 1992 Edgar S. Furniss Book Award for outstanding contribution to national security studies from the Ohio State University. The book demonstrates how the dynamics of officer promotion are the key to understanding military innovation in peacetime. Senior officers infrequently change their views, so the key to the military innovation lies in establishing new promotion pathways for younger officers. The book reviews all the major non-nuclear innovation of the 20th century. This book had been cited approximately 1000 times according to Google Scholar, and has been continuously in press since 1991.

His second book Societies and Military power: India and its Armies was published by Cornell University press in 1996 and studied the impact of social structures on military effectiveness. The book explains the strength and weakness of the Indian army during the Mughal, British, and post independent eras. The book shows how military effectiveness on the battlefield could only be achieved at the price of civil-military tensions.

His third book War and Human Nature was published by Princeton University press in 2005. The book connected the literature in biology to the literature in national security, and described the effect of biological mechanisms on stress, status competition, and fear and memory, as they affect national security behavior. The book pays special attention to the factors affecting the behaviors of tyrannies. It did path breaking work showing the connection between biological processes and time horizons. He has published widely in journals including International Security,The Wall Street JournalForeign Affairs, Journal of Strategic Studies, Joint forces Quarterly, The Washington Quarterly, Foreign Policy, and Diplomatic History. His Op-ed The emperor’s Nuclear Clothes was published in the Wall Street Journal criticizing the nuclear zero movement, arguing that the abolition of nuclear weapons was a utopian pipe dream.

For many years Rosen taught the popular undergraduate course War and Politics, as well as the introductory international relations course International Conflict and Cooperation, and a lecture course on The Ethics of the Conduct of War.

He has been recognized as an outstanding undergraduate teacher and has received all three major awards for excellence in undergraduate teaching from Harvard University: The Harvard College Professorship in 2002, the award from the Alpha and Iota Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa in 2003, and the Levenson Award from the Harvard Undergraduate Council in 2016. In addition, he was co-master of Winthrop House with his wife Mandana Sassanfar in 2003 to 2009, where he was responsible for the well being of over 350 resident undergraduates. He gave the address at the Harvard ROTC commission ceremony in 2007.

Rosen advised many graduate students, some of whom are now professors at Princeton University, MIT, University of Pennsylvania, Brown University, the University of Wisconsin, Northwestern University, The University of Texas at Austin, and the United States Military Academy.

Parallel to his career in academia, he worked for Herman Kahn at the Hudson Institute (1973 and 1974) and served in the United States government from 1981 to 1990. He worked in the Office of Net Assessment in the Office of the Secretary of Defense 1981-1984 where he was author of the first net assessment of the East Asian military balance. He was the Director of Political-Military Affairs on the staff of the National Security Council 1984-1985 where he was the author of NSDD 166, the strategy document for the American operations in Afghanistan. He taught in the Strategy and Policy Department at the Naval War College from 1986 to 1990. Rosen was associate director of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies (part of Harvard's Department of Government) from 1990 to 1996, and was Director from 1996 until 2008. Rosen was also a consultant for the President's Commission on Integrated Long-term Strategy. [1]

Shortly after the September 11 attacks, Rosen signed an open letter from the Project for the New American Century to President George W. Bush [2] that advocated war in Afghanistan and "a large increase in defense spending." Rosen also signed the PNAC's Statement of Principles and its controversial 90-page report entitled Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategies, Forces and Resources for a New Century (2000), advocating the redeployment of U.S. troops in permanent bases in strategic locations throughout the world where they can be ready to act to protect U.S. interests abroad. [3]

In 2007, Rosen was named as a member of foreign policy advisory team of Republican Party presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani. [4] [5]

Rosen holds the view that U.S. military supremacy is not guaranteed into the future, remarking on it that, "we [Americans] have grown up and become accustomed to a world in which we can exercise force majeure and we just can’t do that. And this is not a matter of ideology. This is not a matter of ethics. This is a matter of a change in the character of power and the distribution of power." [6] As of 2015, Rosen did not, however, believe that American power was in decline, telling former roommate Bill Kristol:

We can’t play the same kind of dominant role, but we can and should play a role in creating this new world order in which people in those regions take more responsibility for defending themselves, but where we play a crucial role. And if we don’t do that we are more at risk of losing our republican liberties than if we undertake the tasks that are associated with this more forward posturing. [7]

Rosen currently serves on the advisory board for Washington, DC–based non-profit America Abroad Media. [8]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bush Doctrine</span> Foreign policy principles of US President George W. Bush

The Bush Doctrine refers to multiple interrelated foreign policy principles of the 43rd President of the United States, George W. Bush. These principles include unilateralism, preemptive war, and regime change.

The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) was a neoconservative think tank based in Washington, D.C., that focused on United States foreign policy. It was established as a non-profit educational organization in 1997, and founded by William Kristol and Robert Kagan. PNAC's stated goal was "to promote American global leadership". The organization stated that "American leadership is good both for America and for the world", and sought to build support for "a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bill Kristol</span> American political writer (born 1952)

William Kristol is an American neoconservative writer. A frequent commentator on several networks including CNN, he was the founder and editor-at-large of the political magazine The Weekly Standard. Kristol is now editor-at-large of the center-right publication The Bulwark and has been the host of Conversations with Bill Kristol, an interview web program, since 2014.

Neoconservatism is a political movement which began in the United States during the 1960s among liberal hawks who became disenchanted with the increasingly pacifist Democratic Party along with the growing New Left and counterculture of the 1960s amidst the Vietnam War. Neoconservatives typically advocate the unilateral promotion of democracy and interventionism in international relations together with a militaristic and realist philosophy of "peace through strength". They are known for espousing opposition to communism and radical politics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Edward Luttwak</span> Romanian–American military strategist (born 1942)

Edward Nicolae Luttwak is an American author known for his works on grand strategy, military strategy, geoeconomics, military history, and international relations. He is best known for being the author of Coup d'État: A Practical Handbook. His book Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace, also published in Chinese, Russian and ten other languages, is widely used at war colleges around the world. His books are currently published in 29 languages besides English.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Center for Strategic and International Studies</span> American think tank in Washington, D.C.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) is an American think tank based in Washington, D.C. From its founding in 1962 until 1987, it was an affiliate of Georgetown University, initially named the Center for Strategic and International Studies of Georgetown University. The center conducts policy studies and strategic analyses of political, economic and security issues throughout the world, with a focus on issues concerning international relations, trade, technology, finance, energy and geostrategy.

A preventive war is an armed conflict "initiated in the belief that military conflict, while not imminent, is inevitable, and that to delay would involve greater risk." The party which is being attacked has a latent threat capability or it has shown that it intends to attack in the future, based on its past actions and posturing. A preventive war aims to forestall a shift in the balance of power by strategically attacking before the balance of power has had a chance to shift in the favor of the targeted party. Preventive war is distinct from preemptive strike, which is the first strike when an attack is imminent. Preventive uses of force "seek to stop another state. .. from developing a military capability before it becomes threatening or to hobble or destroy it thereafter, whereas [p]reemptive uses of force come against a backdrop of tactical intelligence or warning indicating imminent military action by an adversary."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Frederick Kagan</span> Academic and think tank scholar

Frederick W. Kagan is an American resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and a former professor of military history at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ash Carter</span> American government official (1954–2022)

Ashton Baldwin Carter was an American government official and academic who served as the 25th United States secretary of defense from February 2015 to January 2017. He later served as director of the Belfer Center for Science & International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Feaver</span> American political scientist

Peter Douglas Feaver is an American political scientist. He is currently a professor of political science and public policy at Duke University and a civil-military relations scholar.

Richard Kevin Betts is an American political scientist and international relations scholar who centers on U.S. foreign policy. He is the Leo A. Shifrin Professor of War and Peace Studies Emeritus in the Department of Political Science, former director of the International Security Policy Program in the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, and former director of the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jack Keane</span> Retired United States general (born 1943)

John M. "Jack" Keane is a former American general who served as vice chief of staff of the United States Army from 1999 to 2003. He is a national security analyst, primarily on Fox News, and serves as chairman of the Institute for the Study of War and as chairman of AM General.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Andrew Krepinevich</span> American defense policy analyst

Andrew Francis Krepinevich Jr. is a defense policy analyst who is a distinguished senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

Clark Murdock is a senior adviser at Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington, D.C.-based foreign policy think tank. Murdock specializes in strategic planning, defense policy, and national security affairs. He also serves as the Director of the Project on Nuclear Issues, a collection of nuclear experts from government, academia, the national laboratories, the military, and the private sector.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kori Schake</span> American international relations scholar

Kori N. Schake is an American international relations scholar currently serving as the Director of Foreign and Defense Policy at the American Enterprise Institute. She has held several high positions in the U.S. Defense and State Departments and on the National Security Council. She was a foreign-policy adviser to the McCain-Palin 2008 presidential campaign. Schake is a contributing writer at The Atlantic. She serves on the board of advisors of the Foreign Policy Research Institute and the Alexander Hamilton Society. Schake is a member of the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">William C. Martel</span> American political scientist

William C. Martel was a scholar who specialized in studying the leadership and policymaking processes in organizations, strategic planning, cyberwarfare and militarisation of space, and technology innovation. He taught at the U.S. Air War College and U.S. Naval War College, and performed research for DARPA and the RAND Corporation. He later become Associate Professor of International Security Studies at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, a position he held until his death in 2015.

Dr. William H. Overholt is a senior research fellow at John F. Kennedy School of Government's Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at Harvard University and principal of AsiaStrat LLC, a consulting firm.

The Fletcher School's International Security Studies Program is a center for the study of international security studies and security policy development. It was established in 1971 at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University. ISSP conducts its academic activity through courses, simulations, conferences, and research. It also has a military fellows program for midcareer U.S. officers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Matthew Kroenig</span> American professor, foreign policy advisor, and former CIA officer

Matthew Kroenig is an American political scientist and national security strategist currently serving as vice president of the Atlantic Council and professor in the Department of Government and the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Kroenig is known for his research on international security and nuclear weapons.

Paul Young Hammond was an American foreign policy and security studies scholar. He was Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public and International Affairs from 1983 on; before that he was the Edward R. Weidlein Professor of environmental and public policy studies beginning in 1976 at the University of Pittsburgh. Before that he was senior social scientist at the RAND Corporation from 1964–76, including being head of the social science department and also being program director for strategic studies and Asian studies during 1973-76. His career earlier saw stints at the Washington Center of Foreign Policy Research at Johns Hopkins University, Yale University, Columbia University, and the United States Naval Academy among other places. Hammond also often worked as a consultant to various departments of the United States Government.

References

  1. 1 2 "Rosen is First Kaneb Professor". Archived from the original on 2007-08-16. Retrieved 2007-06-27.
  2. ↑ Kristol, William (September 20, 2001). "Bush letter". Project for the New American Century. Archived from the original on October 18, 2013. Retrieved January 10, 2023.
  3. ↑ Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategies, Forces and Resources for a New Century Archived September 23, 2002, at the Wayback Machine , Project for the New American Century, September 2000, accessed May 14, 2007.
  4. ↑ "Rudy Giuliani Announces Foreign Policy Team Members". JoinRudy2008.com. 2007-07-09. Archived from the original on 2007-12-03. Retrieved 2007-11-15.
  5. ↑ "Giuliani names 3 more Jews as advisers". Jewish Telegraphic Agency jta.org. 2007-10-12. Archived from the original on 2007-11-14. Retrieved 2007-11-15.
  6. ↑ "Stephen Rosen on Conversations with Bill Kristol".
  7. ↑ "Stephen Rosen Transcript - Conversations with Bill Kristol".
  8. ↑ "Stephen P. Rosen | AMERICA ABROAD MEDIA". Archived from the original on 2013-01-25. Retrieved 2014-06-16.

Further reading

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.