“We’ve really seen an attempt to rewrite the fundamental rules of international society. I think we have had a world order since 1945—as imperfect as it was—that kept the world, to some extent, reasonably safe … But when you hear a nuclear power talking about the possibility of using nuclear weapons in 2022, when you hear a sitting head of state threatening other European nations … You can see that the rules we used to believe applied to everybody have really been stretched,” said clinical law professor Paolo Galizzi. 

In a Feb. 28 virtual panel moderated by law professors Jed Shugerman and Julie Suk, Galizzi joined Director of Fordham’s Center on National Security Karen J. Greenberg and Leitner Family Professor of International Law Thomas H. Lee to discuss America’s ability to de-escalate the international conflict and speculate how events could play out in the coming weeks. 

What Can the U.S. Legally Do? 

The three experts unanimously agreed that Russia had breached international law by invading Ukraine. 

Lee said that in response, the U.S. may take actions that comply with both international law and U.S. law. Under international law, U.S. use of armed force would be permitted because Ukraine invited military intervention from other countries, including specifically a no-fly zone. But U.S. law is a separate matter. Under U.S. law, the President can use armed force to rescue U.S. or allied persons in Ukraine, but Congress may have to authorize other uses of armed force in Ukraine. This includes enforcing a no-fly zone, which may involve U.S. warplanes shooting down Russian warplanes. Under U.S. law, the president can also implement economic sanctions and provide weapons to Ukraine, both of which have already occurred. 

Lee said that in theory, the U.S. may also conduct cyber operations that do not amount to “use of force.” There is a law called the covert-action statute that authorizes the President to make findings, report to some members of Congress, and take secret actions, including encouraging anti-Putin protests in Russia. However, the U.S. has likely not engaged in any covert operations to avoid escalating the dispute, said Lee. 

“And, just as important, what would happen if Putin were ousted? What’s going to happen next in Russia?” he added.

Meanwhile, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the sixth and current president of Ukraine, has been receiving positive attention, said Greenberg. 

“He has become a hero worldwide, particularly to the younger generations. His phraseology, his way of responding to the people themselves is extraordinary, and I think he’s getting a tremendous amount of credit for it,” she said, adding that Zelenskyy, a former actor and comedian, has shown the world lessons in leadership. 

A Shadow Over Historic Solidarity

Other countries have been stepping up in extraordinary ways, said the panelists. Lee noted that Germany, in an unprecedented move, recently announced that it would supply Ukraine with critical weapons. Galizzi said that he was positively surprised by the strong resolve of not only Germany, but normally neutral Switzerland and countries within the European Union and worldwide. 

“This conflict has really touched upon European sensitivity in a way that I haven’t seen in a long time,” Galizzi said. “I think European public opinion seems to believe that this conflict is different—that this conflict is very dangerous, that this conflict really poses an existential threat to the very survival of the European ideals of democracy and identity.” 

Panel moderator Julie Suk noted that Ukraine recently applied for membership in the European Union, which would give Ukraine more security. It’s a politically smart move, but it’s unlikely that Ukraine will soon receive admission, said Galizzi. The admission process usually requires years of negotiations and requires ratification by all 26 member states, he said. 

“The European Union has been doing all sorts of things, exceptionally. They might give them emergency admission, but I truly believe this is simply not a realistic option in the short term,” he said. 

In addition to requesting membership in the European Union, Ukraine’s desire for membership in  NATO has been growing for some time now, said Greenberg. However, an ongoing conflict between Russia and NATO—and Putin’s insistence that NATO not expand—complicates potential admission. For Putin, admission to NATO is seen as a line in the sand, challenging Russia’s own security, said Greenberg. 

“NATO forces have not been invoked yet in the way they may now be called upon—in other words, to interfere actively in defending member nations—although NATO stood at the ready after 9/11,” Greenberg said. “This is therefore a test of NATO, its purpose and its strength.” 

Economic Sanctions vs. World War III

In a Q&A with the audience, law professor James Kainen asked the panelists about Putin’s motivation behind the invasion of Ukraine. Greenberg said that the answer goes beyond territorial disputes. 

“He is very much living within a Cold War framework and a Cold War mindset, determined to not just necessarily rebuild what the Soviet Union’s empire was, but to really create this larger sense of the Soviet Union … When they write the history books about this, they’re going to go back through time and look at … the many times that Putin has tried to get away with something,” she said, noting Russia’s interference in U.S. elections and the 2014 Russian invasion that led to the annexation of Crimea. “He has been testing the international order … and Ukraine has been a central part of this story.” 

At the heart of the debate is a fundamental question about nationalism and how we define ourselves, Greenberg added.

“The idea of who the Russian people are and how you define the Russian people, ethnically and nationally, is very much at the heart of how this debate is playing out: between Putin and Ukraine, between Russians in Russia and Russian-speaking people like President Volodymyr Zelenskyy who are in Ukraine,” Greenberg said. “And this is a conversation that the world is having globally, not about Russia, but about nationalism and ethnicity—about how we define ourselves and who defines who we are.” 

Lee added, “He wants to make Russia great again—and to give the United States a black eye.”

Galizzi said that it is important for this war to not be seen as a conflict between the West and Russia, but rather as a conflict “between all law-abiding nations and a country that is violating all the basic tenets of international law.” (He referenced a recent resolution by the General Assembly of the United Nations, where 141 countries voted to condemn Russia’s invasion; there were only 35 abstentions and five votes against the resolution.)

The international community as a whole must continue to put pressure on Russia with legal strategies, said Galizzi. But he warned that the options are somewhat limited, considering that Russia has threatened nuclear warfare. 

“We’re only limited in what we can do,” Galizzi said. “I think Biden put it very nicely: insider sanctions or the third world war.”

But in an online forum hosted on Nov. 4 by Fordham’s Center on National Security (CNS), experts said that two of the biggest threats today—climate change and the rise of authoritarianism abetted by technology—pose enormous challenges for citizens of every country on the globe.

“America’s Global Role: Today’s Reality, Tomorrow’s Challenges,” a virtual discussion moderated by center director Karen J. Greenberg, featured John Brennan, FCRH ’77, former CIA Director and CNS distinguished fellow for global security, and Ben Rhodes, former deputy national security advisor of the United States and author of After the Fall: Being American in the World We’ve Made (Penguin/Random House, 2021)

Brennan said that a four-decade career in national security had trained him to always be alert for new threats, but that this is genuinely a novel time in human history. For starters, the notion that different country’s fates are now intertwined in ways they didn’t use to be has been made evident by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Technology has changed our world fundamentally, and the accelerated pace of technological developments is certainly enhancing military capabilities and concerns about the digital domain,” he said.

“I think we need to make sure this administration and future administrations focus not just on the headlines du jour, but on those more enduring, strategic issues such as climate change.”

Rhodes agreed and said that climate change has the potential to exacerbate other problems, such as migration. He is especially concerned about the future of democracy, which he said is being attacked in two ways with the aid of technology: the capacity to spread misinformation, and the capacity for mass surveillance.

“Twenty years ago, the number of people in this country who could believe that Donald Trump won the 2020 election, or that the world is governed by a cabal of sex traffickers, was inherently limited. Now you can have circumstances where like 45% of the country believes something that is just not true because they’re living in a particular information ecosystem enabled by social media and technology,” he said.

Meanwhile, the Chinese government’s clampdown on the Uyghur population region in the Xinjiang province illustrates how governments can use big data to monitor everything their citizens are doing, and use that to exert control over them.

“That’s new. Even the police states of old did not have that capacity,” Rhodes said.

Pressed to pick one area of the world that concerns him most, Brennan said China is definitely at the top.

“China has a global vision, and it’s very strategic in how it implemented its polices and aims,” he said.

The wide-ranging, hour-long conversation touched on everything from Afghanistan, to the Middle East, to the threats the United States faces internally—particularly from authoritarianism.

To watch the entire conversation, click below:

The panel, moderated by center director Karen Greenberg, included Gibney, best known for his Academy Award-winning 2007 documentary Taxi to the Dark Side; David Sanger, chief Washington correspondent for The New York Times; Robert Knake, the Whitney Shepardson senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations; and Marcus Baram, the senior news editor of Fast Company.

Gibney began the discussion with an introduction to Zero Days, a film he conceived after developing an interest in the Stuxnet malware attack on Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility in 2010. Though widely regarded as a joint project of the United States and Israel, the exact origin of the Stuxnet virus remains to this day a mystery.

“It seemed like a very interesting technical story about a new invention,” said Gibney. “[It was] a piece of malware that crossed the barrier from the cyber world to the physical world…What I didn’t fully appreciate when I started was how much it would get into the realm of the world of espionage, the world of the CIA, the world of Mossad, and also the problems of international law.”

Gibney found that competitive cybersecurity among powerful nation-states has compelled the landscape of electronic warfare to develop largely outside the grasp of public scrutiny. So secretive, in fact, are government cyber warfare programs that officials from the Department of Homeland Security, discovering the impact of Stuxnet on their own, did not realize that what they were seeing was a program that had been secretly launched by their colleagues in U.S. intelligence agencies.

The panel took this secrecy into account in its discussion of allegations of Russian tampering in the U.S. presidential election, a case in which some panelists believed the Russians had intentionally tipped their hand.

“In the Russia hack, the Russians were not particularly unhappy about being caught,” said Sanger. “They’d done some ritual denials, but the tradecraft was not especially artful, compared to the ways the Americans and the Israelis hid their tracks in the course of Stuxnet.”

Knake, who served as director for cybersecurity policy on Obama’s National Security Council from 2011 to 2015, speculated on the administration’s rationale in responding to the attacks. “I think what the Obama Administration is trying to do is create a situation in which this does not happen in 2020,” he said. “And the message being sent quietly to the Trump team coming in is, ‘Look, this could be you guys next time.’”

Both Sanger and Knake addressed the president-elect’s contentious relationship with the intelligence community; Sanger quipped that the evidence suggesting Russian involvement in the release of hacked emails prior to the election was so strong that “out of a population of 300 million I’ve only actually met one person who seems to doubt [this evidence]strongly.”

“I’m going to make a prediction here,” said Knake, “which is that Trump is going to love the NSA. He’s going to be amazed and he’s going to wish that he had this kind of information while he was doing business. These are very, very powerful tools that he will have at his disposal.”

The power of these tools is precisely what demands their discussion in the public realm, Gibney said: “[This is] a whole new realm of weaponry that we really haven’t reckoned with at all, that can be extremely dangerous, and does routinely cross over into the physical realm, but is utterly ungoverned by the rules of the road. Worse than that, we can’t talk about it because everything related to this subject is shrouded in secrecy.”

—Shane Danaher

“It’s a game changer in terms of the issues that will be bruited in the presidential election campaign,” said Steven Simon, a visiting lecturer at Dartmouth College.

Otherwise, it will likely spur only the usual reexamination of possible security weaknesses that typically follows these kinds of attacks, he said, referring to such efforts in New York City in particular.

“Everything’s a game-changer,” he said. “Everything’s a wake-up call, everything’s somebody’s 9/11. God knows after 1941 how many things were somebody’s Pearl Harbor. So I’m not inclined to think in those terms.”

He appeared with Jonathan Stevenson, professor of strategic studies at the U.S. Naval War College, to discuss the recent Foreign Affairs article they coauthored, “The End of Pax Americana: Why Washington’s Middle East Pullback Makes Sense.” The Nov. 18 event was hosted by Fordham Law’s Center on National Security and moderated by its director, Karen Greenberg, PhD.

Both men served in the Obama administration— Stevenson as the U.S. National Security Council staff’s director for post-military affairs for the Middle East and North Africa from 2011 to 2013, and Simon as director for Middle Eastern and North African affairs at the White House from 2011 through 2012.

Stevenson agreed the attacks can change things in the “limited context” of presidential politics.

Conservatives, for example, might argue that if “we’d gone into Syria harder … then we could have done more to bog down ISIS and distract its attention from out-of-area attacks,” he said.

But he offered an easy counterargument: “If we’d done that, and weakened them there, it would have been all the more reason to undertake operationally less challenging terrorist attacks … in loosely defended Western cities.”

The speakers said that the Obama administration’s pullback from the Middle East makes sense in light of “what’s going on there” as opposed to “what’s going on in Washington,” in Stevenson’s words.

Simonson said the Middle East’s civil wars “have taken on a decidedly sectarian character,” making it unlikely the United States would heed its allies’ pleas to get involved.

The conflict in Syria is a case in point.

“It would be awkward, to say the least, for us to get integrally involved, say, with some kind of ground deployment in what is at its core a sectarian war,” said Stevenson, “and very difficult for us to extricate ourselves from it once we were there.”

“It seems to me we learned this lesson with arguably an even simpler scenario, and a less complicated one, in Iraq.”

Simon noted other constraints on American action in the Middle East, like the eventual costs—on the order of $4 trillion—of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the need to prepare for China’s rising military influence.

“The Chinese are spending like there’s no tomorrow, and they’re allocating their money to technologies and capabilities that are designed specifically to impede U.S. maritime operations in the Western Pacific,” he said. “The United States needs to do a lot of investment in that domain.

“You’ve got this global picture and you’ve got this budgetary situation that have sort of bumped up against political dynamics internal to the Middle East, [and]that have made gains from intervention [there]really rather low,” he said. “I mean, vanishingly low, at this stage.”

“I think that [wind of public opinion]has blown us to a place where fear and mistrust of law enforcement is getting in the way of reasoned conversation about what we do, why we do it and why it matters,” he said, speaking on Nov. 3 at “Today’s Terrorism: Today’s Counterterrorism,” a daylong conference sponsored by the school’s Center on National Security and the Ari Halberstam Memorial Fund.

Referencing recent announcements that the tech giants Google and Apple will make encryption the default setting of their operating systems, Comey said he was worried about “going dark” on the tracking of criminal suspects.

“I do not want some sneaky back door. I do not want some side door. I want us as the people, to find some way with transparency, regularity, and discipline for us to be able to access the information to be able to do our work,” he said.

Comey’s talk, which was followed by a lengthy Q&A session, was the keynote address of a day-long conference, which attracted some 500 members of the media, academia, and the security industries.

Comey, who was appointed FBI director in September 2013, said the framework of the current “security versus freedom” debate is wrong because, ideally, security should enable freedom. He gave as an example the deployment of New York City police officers into city parks to disrupt drug dealers who have taken over the spaces from law-abiding citizens.

And the threats to the United States are indeed real, thanks to two developments: The surge of offspring of Al Qaeda, including ISIL, which Comey said is extremely adept at broadcasting its propaganda; and the rise of the home-grown extremists such as Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, the gunman responsible storming the Canadian Parliament in Ottawa and killing a soldier last month.

The first issue is challenging because the number of travelers going to Syria to fight on ISIL’s behalf has blossomed, and these people could return to the United States, Comey said.

“All of us in the counterterrorism business can remember a terrorist diaspora after the war with the Soviets in Afghanistan,” he said. “We can trace a line from that diaspora to the events of 9/11, and we’re determined not to allow a future terrorist diaspora—especially out of Syria—connect to future tragedies.”

“We have enough humility to constantly ask ourselves ‘Who might we be missing who is looking to travel?’ or ‘Who has traveled?’ and the challenge is obvious: In this great big free country of ours, there are literally thousands of ways to get from the United States to Syria, and the same number of ways to return.”

The phenomenon of the home-grown extremist is even more challenging, he said, because voluminous online propaganda means that an extremist need never meet a member of Al Qaeda, or the Al Nusra Front to learn how to commmit an act of violence in the United States.

“In away, we banked on the core Al Qaeda culture being one in which, [a terrorist act]needed to be big,” he said. “Today, it’s simply, kill.”

Aditi Bagchi,

associate professor of law, LAW,

“ESPN Accused in Dish Case of Giving Comcast Better Terms,” Bloomberg, February 11

Tom Beaudoin, Ph.D.,

associate professor of practical theology, GRE,

“Woodford and the Quest for Meaning,” ABC Radio, February 16

Mary Bly, Ph.D.,

professor of English, A&S,

“How do Bestselling Novelists Court Cupid on Valentine’s Day?,” Washington Post, February 14

James Brudney,

professor of law, LAW,

“Nutter Seeks High Court’s OK to Impose His Terms on City Workers,” Philly.com, March 1

Charles C. Camosy, Ph.D.,

assistant professor of theology, A&S,

“Drone Warfare Faces Barrage of Moral Questions,” Catholic San Francisco, February 20

Colin M. Cathcart, M.F.A.,

associate professor of architecture, A&S,

“New York City Traffic Ranked the Worst Among the Nation: Study,” AM New York, February 6

Saul Cornell, Ph.D.,

The Paul and Diane Guenther Chair in American History, A&S,

“After Newtown: Guns in America,” WNET-TV, February 19

Carole Cox, Ph.D.,

professor of social service, GSS,

“Boomer Stress,” Norwich Bulletin, February 19

George Demacopoulos, Ph.D.,

associate professor of theology, A&S,

“Pope Resignation,” ABC, World News Now, February 28

Christopher Dietrich, Ph.D.,

assistant professor of history, A&S,

“Bad Precedent: Obama’s Drone Doctrine is Nixon’s Cambodia Doctrine (Dietrich),” Informed Comment, February 11

John Entelis, Ph.D.,

professor of political science, A&S,

“John Brennan,” BBC Radio, February 9

Howard Erichson,

professor of law, LAW,

“High-Stakes Trial Begins for 2010 Gulf Oil Spill,” Amarillo Globe-News, February 25

Laura Gonzalez, Ph.D.,

assistant professor of finance, BUS,

“Recortes al Presupuesto Podrían Afectar el Seguro Social y Medicare,” Mundo Fox, February 8

Albert Greco, Ph.D.,

professor of marketing, BUS,

“Why Would Anyone Want to Buy a Bookstore?,” Marketplace, February 25

Karen J. Greenberg, Ph.D.,

director of the Center on National Security, LAW,

“Alleged Sept. 11 Plotters in Court, but Lawyers Do the Talking,” National Public Radio, February 11

Stephen R. Grimm, Ph.D.,

associate professor of philosophy, A&S,

“Grants from Foundations and Corporations of More Than $100,000 in 2013,” Chronicle of Philanthropy, February 28

Tanya Hernandez, Ph.D.,
professor of law, LAW,

“Brazil’s Affirmative Action Law Offers a Huge Hand Up,” Christian Science Monitor, February 12

J. Patrick Hornbeck, Ph.D.,

assistant professor of theology, A&S,

“Vatican Conclave,” Huffington Post, March 4

Robert Hume, Ph.D.,

associate professor of political science, A&S,

“USA: Supreme Court Case Update – DOMA/Prop 8 Briefs Streaming In,” Gay Marriage Watch, February 28

Clare Huntington,

associate professor of law, LAW,

“Sunday Dialogue: How to Give Families a Path Out of Poverty,” The New York Times, February 9

Nicholas Johnson,

professor of law, LAW,

“Neil Heslin, Father of Newtown Victim, Testifies at Senate Assault Weapons Ban Hearing,”Huffington Post, February 27

Michael E. Lee, Ph.D.,

associate professor of theology, A&S,

“Tiempo: Watch this Week’s Show,” WABC 7, February 17

Joseph T. Lienhard, S.J.,

professor of theology, A&S,

“Remembering Benedict — the Teacher, the Traditionalist,” The Saratogian, March 1

Dawn B. Lerman, Ph.D.,

director of the Center for Positive Marketing, marketing area chair, and professor of marketing, BUS,

“Study: Google, Facebook, Walmart Fill Consumer Needs,” Tech Investor News, February 12

Paul Levinson, Ph.D.,

professor of communication and media studies, A&S,

“Will Oscar Host Seth MacFarlane Be Asked Back? Probably Not,” Yahoo! News via Christian Science Monitor, February 26

Hector Lindo-Fuentes, Ph.D.,

professor of history and director of Latin American and Latino Studies, A&S,

“Escaping Gang Violence, Growing Number of Teens Cross Border,” WNYC, December 28

Timothy Malefyt, Ph.D.,

visiting associate professor of marketing, BUS,

“On TV, an Everyday Muslim as Everyday American,” The New York Times, February 8

Elizabeth Maresca,

clinical associate professor of law, LAW,

“Poll: 87 Percent Say Never OK to Cheat on Taxes,” KWQC, February 26

Carlos McCray, Ed.D.,

associate professor of education leadership, GRE,

“Cops Nab 5-Year-Old for Wearing Wrong Color Shoes to School,” Take Part, January 18

Micki McGee, Ph.D.,

assistant professor of sociology, A&S,

“Do Self-Help Books Work?,” Chicago Sun Times, February 21

Mark Naison, Ph.D.,

professor of African and African American Studies and history, and principal investigator of the Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP), A&S,

“Professor: Why Teach For America Can’t Recruit in my Classroom,” Washington Post, February 18

Costas Panagopoulos, Ph.D.,

associate professor of political science, A&S,

“Analysis: Obama to Republicans – Can We Just Move On?,” WHTC 1450, February 13

Kimani Paul-Emile,

associate professor of law, LAW,

“Some Patients Won’t See Nurses of Different Race,” Cleveland Plain Dealer via AP, February 22

Michael Peppard, Ph.D.,

assistant professor of theology, A&S,

“Big Man on Campus isn’t on Campus,” Commonweal, February 20

Francis Petit, Ed.D.,

associate dean and director of Executive Programs, BUS,

“Marissa Mayer Takes Flak for Gathering Her Troops,” E-Commerce Times, March 1

Rose Perez, Ph.D.,

assistant professor of social work, GSS,

“Education Segment,” Mundo Fox, January 21

Wullianallur “R.P.” Raghupathi, Ph.D.,

professor of information systems, BUS,

“¿Qué Tiene Silicon Valley para Producir ‘Frutos’ Como Steve Jobs?,” CNN, February 24

Joel Reidenberg, Ph.D.,

Stanley D. and Nikki Waxberg Chair and professor of law and founding academic director of the Center on Law and Information Policy, LAW,

“Google App Store Policy Raises Privacy Concerns,” Reuters, February 14

Erick Rengifo-Minaya, Ph.D.,

associate professor of economics, BUS,

“Noticias MundoFOX 10PM Parte II,” Mundo Fox Noticias, February 8

Patrick J. Ryan, S.J.,

The Laurence J. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society, A&S,

“Pope Resignation,” WNBC, Sunday “Today in NY,” March 13

Susan Scafidi,

professor of law, LAW,

“Diamonds: How $60B Industry Thrives on Symbolism,” CBS This Morning, February 21

Christine Janssen-Selvadurai, Ph.D.,director of the entrepreneurship program at the Gabelli School of Business and co-director of both Fordham’s Center for Entrepreneurship and the Fordham Foundry, BUS,

“NYC Embraces Silicon Valley’s Appetite for Risk,” Crain’s New York Business, February 6

Ellen Silber, Ph.D.,

director of Mentoring Latinas, GSS,

“Mentoring Program Serves Young Latinas Aiming Higher in New York City,” Fox News Latino, February 25

Janet Sternberg, Ph.D.,assistant professor of communication and media studies, A&S,

“What are You Supposed to Do When You Have, Like, 106,926 Unread Emails?,” Huffington Post, February 25

Maureen A. Tilley, Ph.D.,professor of theology, A&S,

“Pope Resignation: Interview with Maureen Tilley of Fordham University,” WPIX, February 17

Terrence W. Tilley, Ph.D.,

Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J., Professor of Catholic Theology and chair of the department, A&S,

“As Conclave to Select New Pope Begins, English-Speaking Cardinals Lead Charge to Reform Vatican,” Daily News, March 4

Peter Vaughan, Ph.D.,dean of the Graduate School of Social Service, GSS,

“Ceremony Held for NASW Foundation Award Recipients,” Social Work Blog, February 28

More features in this issue:

People

In Focus: Faculty and Research

Back to Inside Fordham home page

Copyright © 2013, Fordham University.