Former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Thomas Nides will speak at Duke University on Tuesday, Oct. 3.
The free public event takes place at 5:30 p.m. in the Karsh Alumni & Visitors Center, at the corner of Duke University Road and Chapel Drive on Duke’s West Campus. Parking is available in the Karsh lot. A public reception will precede the event at 4:45 p.m.
The conversation, hosted by David Schanzer, professor of the practice at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy, will focus on Nides’ most recent post in Israel, the current political situation, and U.S. foreign policy in the region. Duke’s Program”>https://ags.duke.edu/”>Program in American Grand Strategy and the Rudnick Lecture at the Duke”>https://jewishstudies.duke.edu/”>Duke Center for Jewish Studies will host the event.
Nides will also meet with a select group of students and faculty during his visit to Duke.
Nides was confirmed as ambassador in 2021 and stepped down this past July. Previously he was managing director and vice chairman of Morgan Stanley, where he also worked as chief administrative officer, chief operating officer and secretary of the board.
Thomas Nides
His government work also includes U.S. State Department’s deputy secretary of state for management and resources from 2010–2013.
Nides was also senior vice president of Fannie Mae in Washington from 1998–2001, chief of staff to former U.S. trade representative Micky Kantor, senior adviser to Speaker of the House Thomas S. Foley and senior adviser to House Majority Whip Tony Coelho.
He currently serves on the boards of the Partnership for Public Service, the International Rescue Committee, the Atlantic Council and the Urban Alliance Foundation. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the former chairman of board of the Woodrow Wilson Center, appointed by President Obama.
Nides received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Minnesota. He is the recipient of the Secretary of State’s Distinguished Service Award.
Schanzer is also director of the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security. He teaches courses, conducts research and engages in public dialogue on counterterrorism strategy, counterterrorism law and homeland security.
The Rudnick lecture at the Duke Center for Jewish Studies is made possible by the generosity of The Rudnick Endowment; this annual lecture is dedicated to the subject of Israel and world affairs, and has brought many distinguished guests to Duke, including Elie Wiesel, Shimon Peres, Robert Satloff, Ambassador Thomas Pickering, Yossi Klein Halevi, Ambassador Dennis Ross, and many others.
A conversation about sports, diplomacy and the U.S. role in the world takes place Thursday, Sept. 28, at Duke University and features Gen. (ret) Martin Dempsey, Sarah Hirshland (CEO of the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee), Coach Mike Krzyzewski and NBA Commissioner Adam Silver.
The Ambassador Dave and Kay Phillips Family International Lecture, presented by Duke’s Program”>http://ags.duke.edu/”>Program in American Grand Strategy, is open to the public and takes place from 5:30-6:45 p.m. in Page Auditorium on Duke’s West Campus. (The event was moved from Griffith Film Theater in the Bryan Student Center due to demand.)
https://careers.nba.com/executive/adam-silver/" target=”_blank”>Silver, ’84, was appointed NBA commissioner in 2014. He presides over a global sports and media organization built around five professional sports leagues: the NBA, WNBA, NBA G League, NBA 2K League and Basketball Africa League.
Duke political science professor Peter Feaver, director of the Program in American Grand Strategy, will moderate the discussion.
Two popular groups of online Duke non-credit courses are being made available – free – for students affected by the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine.
In addition, four courses in logic”>https://www.coursera.org/specializations/logic-critical-thinking-duke?u… and critical thinking – taught jointly by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, a Duke philosophy professor, and Ram Neta, a UNC-Chapel Hill philosophy professor, are being translated into both Kazakh and Russian, for use by students in Kazakhstan. (About 40 percent of Kazakh citizens speak Russian.)
The coding specialization is particularly popular; in one six-month span last year, about 30,000 people were enrolled in its first course.
“We are very proud of the course we created and privileged to join efforts from other universities in support of the Ukrainian people,” said Owen Astrachan, a Duke computer science professor who teaches the coding courses with three colleagues. “It’s a small contribution we are making, but we are so grateful that we can make it, and that Duke has supported us in making it.”
Duke is not alone in these efforts. In both cases, other universities provide online learning materials as well. For example, a Ukrainian non-governmental organization called Prometheus has also worked with Harvard University, University of Queensland in Australia and others to license digital course materials.
The licensing of the computer programming specialty is the result of a partnership between Duke, Prometheus and the US Embassy in Ukraine. The free licensing of these courses will be a key component of humanitarian assistance the US government is proving to support the Ukrainian people, according to correspondence between the three partners.
Coursera was an early entrant into the Massive Open Online Course revolution, providing a broad platform for universities to contribute high-quality digital courses to reach new populations across the globe. Duke has partnered with Coursera for more than a decade and at any time has at least 40,000 people active in its courses on that platform, Ruiz-Esparza said. Courses are free, but students can pay a fee to receive a formal certificate upon completion.
“Coursera really provides Duke with a way to broaden access to education,” he said. “If a Duke school or academic unit has an idea for a self-paced course they’d like to launch, that showcases a faculty member’s expertise or meets an educational need in society, Coursera provides an option in a fairly low-cost and potentially high-impact way.”
On Nov. 15, 2021, Russia launched a direct-ascent anti-satellite missile that destroyed a Soviet-era satellite about 300 miles above the Earth, causing “more than 1,500 pieces of trackable orbital debris” to float in low-orbit space, according to U.S”>https://www.spacecom.mil/Newsroom/News/Article-Display/Article/2842957/…. Space Command.
The huge debris field endangered the International Space Station and will threaten future space activities for years, including space missions and satellites, the agency said.
Rogue behavior like this, along with the rise in privately funded trips to space and outdated treaties, pose a huge threat to keeping the peace in space, say experts at the nascent Duke”>https://sites.duke.edu/spacediplomacylab/”>Duke Space Diplomacy Lab.
The lab, launched in early 2022 as part of Duke’s Rethinking”>https://igs.duke.edu/series/rethinking-diplomacy”>Rethinking Diplomacy Program, is providing a forum – largely through webinars, collaborations and analysis — for scientists, policy experts, diplomats, academics, students, the media and others to develop policy proposals and solutions to mitigate risks and ensure a safe and sustainable future for humanity in space.
Giovanni Zanalda
A priority of the lab is to make sure science has a strong presence in space policy discussions – as must haves, not merely nice-to-haves, says lab co-chair Benjamin Schmitt, a joint senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy.
The recent emergence of space technology startups that turn low-earth orbit and beyond into a “global commercial necessity” while global military forces assess space as a potential warfighting domain bolster the need for space diplomacy, he contends.
“Given this dynamic, we can no longer view space as a novel foreign policy area,” Schmitt says. “In previous decades the space domain was considered a niche area of foreign policy. But it’s increasingly central to an array of diplomatic, commercial and national security issues worldwide. This includes the need for urgent diplomatic strategies to mitigate the risks associated with the outsized role that new commercial space technologies have played throughout Russia’s war against Ukraine.”
Benjamin Schmitt
A 20th century Outer Space Treaty was effective for the time when only Russia and the United States were the key players in outer space, Clare”>http://www.cfieseler.com/about”>Clare Fieseler,a science journalist and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution, said during a lab webinar last year. (Fieseler earned a master’s degree from Duke in 2010.)
“But now it’s the 21st century, and we have all sorts of actors in space, and we could pretend that that will go away, but it won’t. We could pretend war will not come to space, but I think it’s highly unlikely, and so I think, similar to what we’re doing with oceans, we could (do a treaty) for outer space … for similar reasons.”
“Science and diplomacy … have not yet learned how to talk to each other effectively,” Pearson said last year during a lab webinar. … “The core of what we’re trying to do is to marry science and diplomacy together as early as possible, and as far into the future as possible to address some of these issues.”
Professor Giovanni Zanalda, co-chair of the lab and director of the Rethinking Diplomacy Program, said the goal is to stay focused on developing policy ideas that involve science – two areas in which Duke has strong expertise.
“Space diplomacy is a very interesting field, because it’s a great example of where you need expertise — deep expertise. And at the same time, you need the policy and diplomatic side in order to make sure that certain treaties, agreements or even rules or behaviors are met,” said Zanalda, a professor of the practice in economics and history with the Social”>http://ssri.duke.edu/”>Social Science Research Institute at Duke.
The lab’s work is already paying off, he said.
“We are already in dialogue with government agencies, foundations, the media and research institutions interested in our work. Some of our recommendations have been included in reports and discussed in workshops and meetings in other institutions. Given the positive response from students, partners and agencies we are also developing training material that can be used in courses at Duke as well as on-demand training modules. We also started to include and collaborate with Duke students and faculty from different disciplines in space-related activities.”
The Space Diplomacy Lab is among a handful of space-related activities at Duke, including a new course on space economy Zanalda will teach this fall in the Department of Economics.
Science and diplomacy … have not yet learned how to talk to each other effectively.
W. Robert Pearson
Jonathan Wiener, a professor of law, environmental policy and public policy at Duke, has taught courses on “Laws of Mars” and written about regulating “back contamination” — the risk of bringing microbial life from space back to Earth. Wiener also co-directs a new Duke”>https://climate.duke.edu/”>Duke Climate Commitment project titled “Planetary Engineering and Planetary Ethics,” which is based in the Duke”>https://scienceandsociety.duke.edu/research/center-on-risk/”>Duke Center on Risk.
“The project goal was to investigate the key issues that such a nascent society would have to navigate. In the near term this means addressing the science and engineering challenges of keeping our astronaut explorers alive — meaning both physically but also mentally healthy — in the face of the daunting challenges of inter-planetary space travel as well as living day-to-day on Mars,” says Bass team co-leader Tyler Felgenhauer, a research scientist with Pratt CEE, and director of Climate Research with the Duke Center on Risk.
That Bass program inspired a need for the now defunct Duke”>https://sites.duke.edu/space/”>Duke Space Initiative, which exposed students to a variety of space-related topics, says Ritika Saligram, a senior majoring in political science who was on the Bass-Mars team her sophomore year.
“A few of us working on that (Bass-Mars) project felt that Duke needed more opportunities for students to get involved with space issues, so we started the space initiative,” Saligram says.
The initiative gave her the opportunity to present a lecture on human exploration of space to a class at Duke’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute.
“I think it was just a great way to get deeper into something that’s been an intellectual guilty pleasure for me,” she says. “I grew up watching ‘Star Wars’ and thinking about going to space and it was really wonderful to return to those ideas in a more complex, academic fashion.”
Before coming to Duke, Wiener helped negotiate the first climate treaty – the Framework Convention on Climate Change – and he teaches courses on climate negotiations.
He says diplomacy is critical in today’s uncertain space age.
“Diplomatic efforts on space are essential to foster cooperation rather than conflict – avoiding space debris collisions in Earth orbit, preventing contamination of Earth and other planets by space missions, and managing ventures to mine resources and even settle humans on the Moon, Mars and beyond,” he said.
“The proliferation of multiple governments and private companies active in space makes cooperative diplomacy all the more complicated and urgent.”
The Duke Center for Jewish Studies, in cooperation with Jewish Life at Duke and The Program in American Grand Strategy, will host the event. Public policy professor Bruce Jentleson will moderate.
Bennett served as Israel’s 13th prime minister from 2021-2022, leading a significantly diverse government that included representatives from religious and secular communities, and, for the time in Israel’s history, Arab party officials in the coalition.
Naftali Bennett
The government under Bennett’s leadership is noted for bringing a relatively quiet year to Israel’s residents along the Gaza border and the Negev, overcoming a wave of terror, passing a reform-packed budget, successfully dealing with two waves of COVID, moving the conflict with Iran to its own soil, and reducing unemployment and the national deficit to record lows.
Following the historic Abraham Accords, Bennett became the first Israeli Prime Minister to visit the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.
Before moving into politics, Bennett enjoyed a successful career as a hi-tech entrepreneur. In 1999, he co-founded the information security company Cyota with three partners and served as CEO until the company was sold in 2005 to RSA for $145 million. In 2009, Bennett served as CEO of Soluto, a cloud computing start-up, which was later sold to Asurion for $130 million.
Throughout his decade in Israeli politics, Bennett served as minister of economy, minister of education and minister of defense. He is known for his innovations and bold reforms.
Bennett served as a combat soldier in Sayeret Matkal and as a company commander in the Maglan Special Forces Unit, where he commanded a series of operations in Lebanon behind enemy lines. During the Second Intifada in 2002, Bennett took a hiatus from his duties as Cyota CEO to join Operation Defensive Shield and in 2006 he commanded search and destroy missions during the Second Lebanon War.
Bennett and his wife, Gilat, live in Ra’anana with their four children.
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Bills in Congress that would ban TikTok, the Chinese social media platform, are raising concerns over the precedent they would set. But they have also prompted hopes for substantive, broader deliberations over data security and privacy.
The bills, which enjoy some rare bipartisan support among lawmakers, might prove difficult to enforce and wouldn’t get at privacy concerns related to American social media platforms, two Duke scholars said Thursday.
Duke’s Robyn Caplan and Phil Napoli, both of whom teach in the Sanford School of Public Policy, discussed these issues with reporters Thursday in a virtual media briefing.
On major concerns driving consideration of a TikTok ban
“There are intersecting concerns. One is obviously around user data privacy and security and the way user data could be used to track users who are important or influential, journalists for example, government officials for example, so there’s that part.”
“There’s also the way that can connect to issues around our longstanding concerns, at least post-2016 concerns, around foreign influence operations and the way digital platforms, social media platforms, can be used to engage in very data-driven, very targeted political influence operations.”
“Obviously, the highest profile example of this so far is what we have seen Russia do in relation to the 2016 election. But those sorts of actions have been ongoing and we saw continued work in that space by other countries as well, in the most recent midterms.”
On how to effectively regulate social media apps and data collection
“In the European Union, there’s much more expansive privacy protection than we see here. In the U.S., it’s this very reactionary approach. Our model of digital platform regulation has been, first and foremost, to do nothing. The politics of platform regulation have been so contentious, partisanship has been a key issue that has led to very little action even in the wake of what we’ve seen in 2016 and 2020. Even some very basic protections that were directed at foreign influence on digital platforms, like the <a href="Honest”>https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/1356″>Honest Ads Act, which would have required some disclosures on who is sponsoring actual advertisements, things like that, went nowhere.”
“This potential move is reactionary. It would be nice if guidelines and restrictions were in place before these platforms had reached this incredible degree of prominence. Then we’re to that adage: “Can you put the horse back in the barn? Can you put the genie back in the bottle?”
On how a broad, sweeping national TikTok ban would work
“For it to be a bona fide, blanket ban – and different from what we’re seeing in states where the bans are focused on government devices – this would have to be a very central enforcement process.”
On rare bipartisan support for a proposed ban
“This is what’s interesting about this particular context – it’s actually more bipartisan than most digital platform issues that have arisen in the past.”
“Maybe this is indicative of a larger trend. Privacy is one of those areas where there has always been some degree of bipartisanship. If you think about the related realm of foreign political influence … that has been a very partisan issue. There has not been bipartisan support for trying to limit foreign influence operations. So to the extent that this is part of the expressed concerns around TikTok, this is a change, an important change. It may lead to some actual action on this front. It may lead to action that ultimately we decide is kind of heavy-handed, but even something heavy-handed would be a huge change from the inaction we’ve seen across the spectrum of digital platform issues over the past few years.”
On whether universities and other institutions should take social media use more seriously
“It would be great if this sort of bipartisan concern that has zeroed in around TikTok were to genuinely prompt, finally, a more robust conversation about the nature of data gathering and the uses of this data that all these commercial platforms engage in. If institutions really started to ask themselves what are the full range of vulnerabilities they are subjecting themselves to when they allow their students their employees and students access to these platforms on their networks? What are the vulnerabilities that could be arising there?
On whether Americans understand what their devices reveal
“When people research how rigorously users inform themselves about the terms and conditions, about the apps or the devices they use, the answer, probably not surprisingly, is the norm is not to really be that well informed. Do these providers oftentimes make it difficult, and require you to do a lot of clicking through to a lot of places, to learn exactly what you’re agreeing to when you download an app, for example? Yes. It requires real work to be a well-informed consumer.”
Robyn Caplan, visiting public policy professor
On data privacy community’s concerns over potential TikTok ban
“The general consensus from what I’ve seen in the privacy community is that they reflect geopolitical tensions more than necessarily privacy risk.”
On why people should care about commercial surveillance
“This is a really important question. We need to think about the demographic of users that are on the TikTok app. These are mostly a younger generation of users, they’re a coveted generation of users. They’re ones that are concerned about commercial surveillance more generally. They may not have those kinds of feelings of trust around commercial surveillance towards U.S. apps either. So to the degree that TikTok can start a broader conversation about the nature of commercial surveillance and how we can be regulating that, I think this is an important step. But taking an action on TikTok alone does little to address the privacy and surveillance concerns coming from those major U.S. social media apps.”
“One thing that really concerns me with this in particular, if we’re not addressing commercial surveillance at large, is that both Meta and Alphabet have developed competitors to TikTok, perhaps in preparation for this, perhaps because this is a very coveted user group that TikTok has cornered. Without effective U.S. privacy laws that impact similar data collection practices among U.S. companies, banning TikTok writ large is really not going to do much to assuage concerns about surveillance, particularly among this age group.”
On Tik Tok’s staying power
“The rate of adoption for Tik Tok has far exceeded most other apps. They crossed over a billion downloads last year. They became the most downloaded app within the App Store, surpassing all of the Facebook products. They really do seem to have cornered a particular type of market. They’re a younger generation of users but they don’t seem to be confined to that user group. They’re making pretty significant strides within other age groups as well, like the 30-50 age range.”
“We’ve seen this before, though. We’ve seen this with the apps of the major companies. Instagram was a hugely popular app that has been on the decline for some time. So we don’t really know the future of the popularity of these types of apps.”
On the data we give away every day on social media
“When we carry these phones around with us every single day, we are sharing data about ourselves at every single moment. We are sharing data about who we are with, who we are nearby. We are sharing data about what we are searching for, what we are buying.”
“It’s important to keep this in perspective, that our activities online are one source of data and information that we’re giving these companies. The videos we’re creating, the captions we are using, the tags we are using, the photos we are putting online, but there’s a whole host of other types of data we share on an ongoing basis as we go about our lives.”
On whether a TikTok ban would set a dangerous precedent
“That’s one of my major concerns. TikTok is not the only Chinese app that is popular in the U.S. WeChat is a hugely popular Chinese app. It’s one used by a lot of people who live in North America or Europe to communicate with their family in places like China. That’s a major concern.”
“Shein, as well, which is a fast fashion brand, briefly overtook Amazon in global downloads in 2022. So, there are a lot of other apps we would need to consider if we were making this decision just based on the fact that this company is Chinese owned.”
Participants
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Robyn Caplan
Visiting assistant professor at the Sanford School of Public Policy and a founding member of the Platform Governance Research Network. She studies social media and data platform governance and media policy.
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Phil Napoli
Professor of public policy at Sanford and director of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy at Duke, where he researches new ideas for social media regulation, news deserts and the contraction of news media.
The latest twist in the extraordinary career of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the Brazilian politician known simply as Lula, has seen him enter a runoff to become the country’s president once again.
“The life of Lula is very much a phoenix-like situation,” said John French, a professor of history at Duke and Lula biographer who has studied him for 40 years.
Lula, who was president of Brazil from 2002-2010, led the pack in the first round of voting in Brazil’s presidential election this week. On Oct. 30 he will contest a runoff to lead the world’s fourth-largest democracy against the staunchly conservative incumbent Jair Bolsonaro.
This scenario seemed unthinkable less than three years ago, when Lula was in prison after being convicted of corruption and money laundering. French said Lula’s belief the system would reveal the charges to be politically motivated, and his refusal to flee the country to avoid jail, combined to boost his subsequent rebound in popularity.
“He kept saying, ‘I’ve got faith the institutions will work properly, this is just a mistake by some judges, prosecutors and federal police, but in the end, I will be vindicated.’ And that’s pretty much what happened,” French said.
A subsequent political comeback still seemed unlikely. But the cases against Lula were dismissed, the Supreme Court restored his right to run for office and his reputation was not damaged by what came to be seen as a biased prosecution.
“Instead, he was reborn, even more popular than he had been before,” French said. “It’s really a remarkable story.”
The aggressive rhetoric of the current president, Jair Bolsonaro, has deeply divided Brazil. He upset predictions by gaining enough support in the first round of voting to force a runoff.
“He does represent a significant body of people, and they’re not going to disappear overnight,” French said. “On the other hand, the center-right, people that supported Bolsonaro in 2018, have moved away because he’s turned out to be a disaster for the country: politically incompetent on a monumental scale.”
Should Lula win the election, French said he will face very different challenges than in 2002, with a country recovering from a mismanaged pandemic and the public sector in disarray.
“It would be a tough return to power,” French said. “There’s been an enormous amount of institutional destruction, and there will be a lot of pent-up demand for services. It’s going to be a political challenge.”
French said Lula’s record of building consensus would be invaluable if he is reelected.
“He’s perfectly fine with conflict and with the idea that people should stand up and fight for themselves in an organized fashion,” he said. “At the same time, he’s confident that if we can get people in the same room, and they’re willing to be reasonable, we should all be able to agree on something that would be good for the Brazilian people and for all of the interests at the table.”
Lula’s return to the presidential ballot was but one more sharp turn in a career dotted with surprises.
An automobile worker who didn’t learn to read until he was 10, Lula joined the labor movement as a young man. It was his audacity in leading industrial strikes under a military dictatorship that caught French’s interest as a graduate student in 1980, when the story hit The New York Times.
“This young trade union leader, 33 years of age, is on the front page of The New York Times, leading strikes against giant auto companies under a military dictatorship,” French recalled. “It was unusual. There’s been nothing like that anywhere else in the Americas.”
That first strike was soundly defeated, but Lula was undeterred.
“For every reason, you would imagine this would end his career as a union leader or as an influential figure,” French said. “And yet it did not. Instead he built a radical trade union movement and a political party out of that.”
Lula became president of Brazil at the fourth attempt, in 2002. He served two terms, then helped elect (and re-elect) Dilma Rouseff, his chosen successor, before corruption allegations forced her resignation and sent Lula to prison.
And yet, like so many times before, Lula’s work ethic, passion, his interest in people and his political nous have brought him back. French likens Lula to one of the country’s most beloved figures: The beloved soccer maestro who brought home three of Brazil’s World Cups.
“Without a doubt, he is a phenomenon,” French said. “I like to say he’s the Pelé of world presidenti al electoral politics, because he’s the only one. There’s no one quite like him.”
Mikhail Gorbachev was a talented politician who helped end the Cold War but could not control the forces that triggered the collapse of the Soviet Union, said Duke experts who were involved in and studied his legacy. The former Russian premier died Tuesday at age 91.
Cooperating with Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, Gorbachev “negotiated an end to the Cold War and tamed a dangerous arms race,” Jack Matlock said Tuesday. “He then liberated the Soviet Union from its communist dictatorship, freeing its people to build a democratic future.”
Matlock, who graduated from Duke in 1950, was a key adviser to President Reagan in the run-up to a crucial 1985 summit in Switzerland. He would later become Reagan’s ambassador to the Soviet Union.
“Gorbachev should be remembered for his achievements and not for the failures of his successors,” Matlock said.
A former Rubenstein Fellow at Duke and still a visiting scholar, Matlock donated his voluminous collection of historical papers to Duke Libraries in 2019.
Simon Miles, an assistant professor in the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke, is the author of “Engaging the Evil Empire,” an account of how Washington and Moscow ended the Cold War.
“Coming from a peasant background, Gorbachev led the Soviet Union through a period of unprecedented reform – democratizing life and liberalizing the economy – and ultimately its downfall,” Miles said. “Not even a talented and far-thinking politician like Gorbachev could control the forces which he unleashed in Soviet society which brought down the Soviet Union and put an end to the Cold War. Because of Gorbachev’s choices, this remaking of the international order was remarkably peaceful, for which he won a Nobel Prize.”
Life after the fall of communism was not kind to Gorbachev, Miles said.
“His passion project, the Gorbachev Foundation, saw its budget slashed by the state time and again; he was reduced to filming commercials for Pizza Hut and Louis Vuitton to make payroll and rent,” Miles said. “His attempt to return to politics in the 1996 Russian elections ended in humiliation, with barely 1 percent of the popular vote. And the erosion of democracy under Vladimir Putin has undone the democratic reforms he ushered in, just as the decline in relations between Putin and the West has undone many of Gorbachev’s foreign policy achievements.”
Gorbachev did not intend for the Soviet Union to collapse, but allowed it to happen, Miles said.
“He saw both his dreams and his nightmares for Russia come to fruition,” Miles said. “He gave Russia a chance to remake itself, one which many Russians seized; but today, to the extent to which he is remembered in Russia, it will by and large not be fondly.”
Lula, who was president of Brazil from 2002-2010, led the pack in the first round of voting in Brazil’s presidential election this week. On Oct. 30 he will contest a runoff to lead the world’s fourth-largest democracy against the staunchly conservative incumbent Jair Bolsonaro.
Matlock, who graduated from Duke in 1950, was a key adviser to President Reagan in the run-up to a crucial 1985 summit in Switzerland. He would later become Reagan’s ambassador to the Soviet Union.