When your specialty is U.S. foreign policy, the world is your laboratory.
“The United States is a big experiment &ndash and in a sense a microcosm of the world’s big experiment &ndash on how people can live with each other without killing one another, even though they disagree,” says Seyom Brown, the John Goodwin Tower Chair in International Politics and National Security in SMU’s Tower Center for Political Studies of Dedman College.
In his national security seminars, Brown helps students identify not only what changes, but what has not changed &ndash whether they talk about counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, the volatile relationship between Russia and Georgia, or China’s growing influence in Africa.
Professor Seyom Brown
Brown uses the Cold War – the struggle for world dominance between the United States and the old Soviet Union after World War II – as a prime example of how issues that sprang up in its wake continue to influence the world students face today. “What has happened is that the new world order [created after the
collapse of the Soviet Union] is really a world of disorder, in which your friend on one issue is your enemy on another. Today’s partner can be tomorrow’s opponent,” he says.
He calls this complex and shifting pattern of alliances a
“polyarchy,” and uses President Bush’s pre-Olympics visit to China as an example. “We need the Chinese to ensure that North Korea doesn’t keep nuclear weapons. We also need them to bring pressure on the genocidal regime in the Sudan, because they’re big Sudan oil consumers,” Brown says. “So Bush visited the Chinese for the opening ceremonies of the Olympics and said nice things about them while he was there. But later, from Thailand, he harshly criticized China’s human rights situation.”
Brown’s main field of research is U.S. foreign policy – a specialty that has led him to and from government service, think tanks and university teaching and research. During his five-decade career in national security, he has held positions in the field, including as a senior policy analyst at the RAND Corporation, the Brookings Institution and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. In addition, he has served as a special assistant in the U.S. Department of Defense and Department of State. Brown also has taught at numerous universities.
His research activities focus on military factors in world politics, including arms control, terrorism and conflicts between homeland security and human rights, among other areas. “I’ve had one foot in the policy community and one foot in academia my whole life,” Brown says. One of his current goals is to help build the Tower Center as a national leader in public policy thought and theory, he says. “I like that challenge, because it fits with my own definition of what I do.” To enhance the Tower Center’s interactions with the policy world, Brown has established a Tower Center office in Washington, D.C.
“The United States has been operating under what I call a double-O fallacy: omnipotence and omniscience. Behaving as a nation as if we’re all-powerful and all-knowing just rubs other people the wrong way. We need to show that we do believe in cultural diversity.”
At SMU, Brown says he has found students who hope to confront the difficult issues head on. “This is a generation that has been bombarded by the complexities. A good many want to continue in the international relations field – not just earn their Ph.D.s, but engage in practical solutions. The Tower Center can be of good counsel to them, as well as provide opportunities.”
Those opportunities include a new program on national security and defense presented in November in a Tower Center forum on “The Future of Conflict: Military Roles and Conflict.”
Brown discusses important issues for students and citizens, as well as for practitioners of the political arts, in his upcoming book, Higher Realism: A New Foreign Policy for the United States. The book explores urgent challenges requiring international cooperation such as global warming, the spread of weapons of mass destruction, poverty, disease, human rights and the declining health of vital ecologies such as oceans and forests.
“The United States has been operating under what I call a double-O fallacy: omnipotence and omniscience,” Brown says. “Behaving as a nation as if we’re all-powerful and all-knowing just rubs other people the wrong way. We need to show that we do believe in cultural diversity. We’re so inextricably intertwined with the rest of the world that we have to be interested in what happens out there – not simply out of the goodness of our hearts, but because those problems can bounce back and hit us.”
– Kathleen Tibbettss