National Security

Steven Weber
Professor of political science and professor at the School of Information

Expertise:
International relations, national security, international business and the information economy.

Contact:
(510) 642-8739; cell (510) 928-0657
E-mail: steve_weber@berkeley.edu

Additional contacts:
Yasmin Anwar, Media Relations:(510) 643-7944, yanwar@berkeley.edu
Roxanne Makasdjian, broadcast: (510) 642-6051, roxannem@berkeley.edu

Background:
Weber has held academic fellowships with the Council on Foreign Relations, served as special consultant to the president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in London, and worked with the U.S. State Department and other government agencies on foreign policy issues, risk analysis and forecasting. In 2000, he was a consultant to the U.S. Commission on National Security in the 21st Century, which issued a blue ribbon report to Congress shortly before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and he was in Manhattan the day of the attack. Weber is a long time consultant on global political economy issues for Global Business Network (www.gbn.com), a member of the Monitor Group.

He has done local, state and national interviews, including broadcast. On whether Americans are safer today than on Sept. 11, 2001, he’s offered powerful quotes such as these: "Make no mistake though: we're dealing with an adversary that adapts and is entirely capable of designing around everything that we do. The risk is that we have become very good at protecting ourselves against yesterday's threat, and are unaware of tomorrow's. If we've improved the security of 10,000 soft targets in this country, there exist another 20,000 or more that remain shockingly vulnerable."

"The core reality of homeland security is that we can't protect everything, we can't protect everyone, and we can't protect everyone equally. Which means that we are at the very early stages of a longer game, a game in which the attacker has an advantage over the defender because the attacker can pick the time and place to strike. The way to win in this game is through intelligence, not security per se. And our intelligence operations are barely better than they were on September 10, 2001. In the medium and long term, that is where our effort needs to go."

Weber's major publications include "The Success of Open Source," "Cooperation and Discord in U.S.-Soviet Arms Control," and the edited book "Globalization and the European Political Economy." He also co-authored "The End of Arrogance: America in the Global Competition of Ideas" (2010).