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.

“We’ve administered a policy analogous to the same policy we’ve had towards Cuba, both attitudinally and in effect, of not talking and of basically refusing to deal on a respectful basis,” the head of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government told Iowa Independent.  “Isolating a potential foe .is in many circumstances counterproductive.  Just as we should be having more civil relations as much as we disagree with Castro, I think if we had more civil relations with Iran we’d be in much better circumstances to achieve a diplomatic outcome.”

“It’s the most awesomely awkward issue in the world in many regards,” Leach said.  “To the United States a nuclear Iran is exceptionally difficult.  To intervene militarily, on the other hand, could be a calamity for all sides, including the United States.”

In his Iowa Independent interview, Leach also discussed some of the presidential candidates.Leach said Iran’s agenda includes both power and respect.  “They want to make it clear to the world that they have an old civilization and a sophisticated society that needs to be factored into any regional discussion, he said.”  The country also wants to play a larger role in regional affairs: 

They want to project power in the region and around the world, and they are particularly concerned that the United States wants to play an interventionist role in their country specifically but in other parts of the Middle East.  As far as Iranian security is concerned, possession of a weapon of mass destruction is a reminder to the United States that they can act out.  They in effect become the first country in the world with the opposite ends of strategy, one strategy being a potential nuclear weapon, the other strategy being total anarchy through Hezbollah type activities.  This would be novel to world affairs.  That is one of the reasons why Iran is currently so dangerous.

Leach said it’s not clear to the West, or even to the Iranians themselves, where the real power in the country lies.  “Five years ago it was certainly very clear that the ayatollahs held more power than (then-president) Hatami, that Hatami was the political government,” he said.  “Today, one has the sense that the political arm is gaining increasing authority, but probably still doesn’t match the ayatollahs.  They have a lot of power but it’s hard to know if it’s total power.”

Leach described current president Mahmoud Ahmedinijad as “a classic kind of political demagogue” and said his anti-Israel rhetoric is in part for domestic consumption but should also be taken seriously.  “He’s in a very powerful position within his country and increasingly within the Muslim world,” he said.  “Ahmedinijad himself is a classic kind of political demagogue who is tapping into some of the fears and aspirations of some of the Iranian population”. 

Leach described a meeting he had five years ago with Sen. Arlen Specter and the Iranian Ambassador to the United Nations.

This was under the prior government of Hatami.  Hatami would be considered in Iranian terms a moderate, Ahmedinijad a radical.  The discussions that Sen. Specter and I had related to how the United States and Iran can get along better in the world, and I suggested it would be very difficult for any American administration to proceed in a forthcoming way with Iran as long as they were funding Hezbollah activities and other anti-Israeli insurgencies.  To which the ambassador responded Iran would be perfectly content to cease such activities once an Israeli-Palestinian settlement was reached which had the support of the Palestinian people.  In a way that was an optimistic thing to say, in a way it was a very threatening thing to say.  The optimism being once a settlement occurred perhaps Iran would shift gears; the threatening aspect being they wouldn’t shift gears unless and until an agreement was reached. 

In any regard, whether or not that was the real position of the Iranian government four or five years ago, you have a different government today with Ahmedinijad being of a very different psychological ilk than Hatami.

The Islamic world understands that any American admin has to be completely committed to the viability of the state of Israel.  That doesn’t mean that on every issue there is total agreement, but on the basic issue of the viability of the state there is.  The role of the United States should be to help try to help precipitate a modus vivendi that is stable, if that is possible.  These issues involve timing; they involve leadership of various parties, and lots of imponderables and uncertainties.  But the United States certainly should make it clear that it’s always on the side of trying to reach a credible resolution that is acceptable to all sides.

Leach said Iran might not be the only country trying to fill a void once U.S. forces leave Iraq.

There could be problems on more than one border.  You’ve got the possibility that Turkey will attempt to expand influence in the northwest, partly in response to certain actions that the Kurds have undertaken against Turkey and also potentially for other reasons.  On the eastern border, certainly, Iran has some possible influence that it wants to expand and we all understand that the Shia population particularly in the south of Iraq has some kind of religious kinds of ties to Iran that are not slight.  By the same token, there is an Iraqi nationalism as there is an Iranian nationalism.  A shared religion is important but it’s not the only thing.  And so some suspect that Iran is going to try to play the same role in Iraq as Syria is in Lebanon, but I don’t think it’s likely to be quite as dominant or influential as Syria is in Lebanon.

We’re in a world that anything is possible.  We all understand that when American troops leave fully Iraq, whether it be in one year or 20 years, they’re be destabilizing implications for the country of Iraq.  We also understand that Iraqis are perhaps unable to reach certain compromises if they can rely on American troops being there, and American troops presence can be considered offensive in and of itself.  And so what we might see as stabilizing, someone else might perceive as destabilizing.

Leach has been at Harvard since September.  He spent the earlier part of 2007 at his alma mater, Princeton, in the Woodrow Wilson School of Government, following his 2006 defeat for re-election.

James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, praised the foreign policy skills of candidates Barack Obama and Bill Richardson while talking with Iowa Independent and several audience members following an Iowa City talk today.

“Obama has an incredible understanding of the issues,” Zogby said.  “This is just an incredibly smart guy.”

Zogby was less positive when asked about Hillary Clinton’s statement that the United States is more secure now than before the Iraq War.  “It’s not a sellout so much as what they think passes as smart politics,” he said.  “It’s a bad calculation based more on the politics of convenience, and I don’t trust that instinct.”

Zogby didn’t offer these observations in his address to a crowd of 125, many of whom munched on free pizza, and the Arab American Institute does not make endorsements.

Zogby told Iowa Independent he’s had no contact with Republican candidates — “I’m a Democrat and that’s known”– but others in the organization have talked with the Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson campaigns.  He said the Arab-American community used to lean  3 to 4 percent Democratic, but since 2002 has shifted to roughly a 44 percent Democratic to 28 percent GOP margin.

Zogby was making his second Iowa City appearance of the year.  He was overshadowed on the Middle East front when he visited in April — the same week as former president Jimmy Carter.

Zogby also cited the influence of the Israel lobby on Middle East policy debate, differentiating the coalition of neoconservatives and evangelicals from the mainstream of Jewish-American opinion  In a question-and-answer session, Zogby said “Partly ignorance, partly fear” prevents discussion.  He said it’s not the Jewish community that stifles discussion, “It’s the perception of fear about it, more than it,”  likening the lobby to the Wizard of Oz, an ultimately powerless “man behind the curtain” cultivating fear.  “It’s anti-Semitism on the part of politcians who think the Israel lobby is a monolithic thing — I used to call them anti-Semites for Israel,” he said, noting that both Arab Americans and Jewish Americans want peace and hold similar views.More from Zogby’s talk, liveblog format:

The introductory DVD outlines the work of AAI.  Founded in 1985, they got a Palestinian rights report to the Democratic convention floor in `88 — didn’t go further, but put the issue on the table.  And putting the issue, and the Arab-American community, on the table is what this visit is about, after all we are Iowa.

Zogby leads with the bullet points.