What if you could do one-stop shopping for all your global peace and security policy analysis needs?

Nuclear proliferation and disarmament; United Nations strategy and planning; Middle East and Asian security; emergent powers; U.S. security; all of it. Ready for download and available from one policy research think-tank that is nonpartisan and stresses a multilateral approach to issues.

And what if this public policy resource with a worldwide reach was an independent foundation located not in the D.C. beltway but in the eastern Iowa river-town of Muscatine?The Stanley Foundation (TSF), Muscatine’s internationally focused think-tank, stresses a multilateral approach to its research. For over 50 years, the group has been envisioning a peaceful future through realistic parameters and wide-ranging voices. Even more importantly, they are committed to promoting education of both the public through media outreach as well as the policymakers through conferences, collaboration and advising.

The foundation has been located in Muscatine, Ia. since 1956, when it was founded by engineer C. Maxwell Stanley and his wife, Elizabeth. They don’t offer grants and subsist entirely on an endowment fund that provides an annual budget of about $5.5 million.

Stanley’s son, Richard, has run the foundation since his father’s death in 1984. The Stanley family runs several other foundations and was in the news recently when David Stanley, a former state legislator, was accused of raiding E & M Charities to the tune of $24 million to fund his New Hope Foundation. A lawsuit brought by other Stanley family members was settled out of court in January.

Describing their mission as active global citizenship and TSF has influenced foreign policy decision-making through media production and collaboration with a range of groups.

TSF director of policy analysis and dialog Dr. Michael R. Kraig was in Iowa City last week to moderate a panel on “Civil Society and Terrorism” at the University of Iowa Provost’s Forum on International Affairs. He sat down for a video interview with the Iowa Independent where he explained his views on three different types of terrorism: local, state-sponsored, and transnational.

Kraig believes there’s a gap between “what the public believes our foreign policy should look like in broad terms and the specifics of what our legislators are doing on Capitol Hill.”

He also talked about the some of the foundation’s programming and mission:

From 1980 to 2004, TSF produced “Common Ground,” a radio program that aired on over 200 NPR stations. They still produce radio documentaries, but have also started to do multimedia work.

A radio documentary called “Brazil Rising” will be released in June as part of their project “Rising Powers: The New Global Reality.”

According to Keith Porter, who is TSF’s director of communication and outreach, “Rising Powers” is designed to “spark discussion among Americans about the way the world order is changing and what it means for the United States.” TSF partners with KQED on radio projects. They will launch a “Rising Powers” Web site that will grow as more countries are profiled. India and Turkey are in line for coverage after Brazil.

Last year, TSF’s series of dialogues called “Bridging the Foreign Policy Divide” brought together emergent liberal and conservative thinkers. In one pairing, unpaid advisers for Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama co-wrote “The Next Intervention,” an editorial in the Washington Post. A longer version of their collaboration, “America and the Use of Force: Sources of Legitimacy,” was collected with nine other liberal/conservative conversations in a book. The series was described as “an alternative to the distortions and oversimplifications of today’s polarizing political environment” and largely succeeded in painting otherwise polemical arguments into workable solutions.

Porter said that the detailed policy work usually comes first and is followed by public outreach and a media campaign. Currently, the foundation is conducting a U.S. nuclear policy review to be ready for the next president’s administration. When the policy plan and report is complete, TSF will produce information to be disseminated through media channels, public speakers, citizen groups and other communications.

Another project will form a basis for a northeast Asian security group where none currently exists. Porter said, “There is no permanent security alliance like ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations).” So TSF will “take what happening in the Six-Party Talks and turn that into a regional association like ASEAN.” He said this project is typical of the TSF mission of “trying to get countries to talk to each other [through] multilateral solutions.”

Porter said he’d like to see:

“American leaders and American media take our global connections more seriously. People who work on foreign policy issues all the time can look at Main Street in Anytown, U.S.A. and find a dozen connections between that and the rest of the world …  that doesn’t get reflected very often in what our political leaders tell us. It doesn’t get reflected very often in what we see in the media and I think, regardless of that, it’s starting to make an impression on average Americans.

People are beginning to see how their fates are connected to the rest of the world … there is a direct one-to-one connection between U.S. national security and global security … we ought to be doing everything we can around the world to promote security, stability, better lives for people and, beyond being just the right thing to do, it will have good, positive influence and effects on us.

I do see recognition of that among people. I don’t see it necessarily among political leaders. I don’t necessarily see it among the media but it’s an idea that the public just grasps immediately. I find that encouraging.”

He summarized the Stanley Foundation mission: “We really believe that both the policy community and the public have to be engaged in these issues to bring about the change that we want in the world.”

TSF distributes a monthly e-mail newsletter, “think.” about their current program work. They also publish a quarterly magazine “Courier” that has TSF papers and policy analysis. Both are available at the Stanley Foundation Web site.