Rose Gottemoeller

Rose Gottemoeller is a William J. Perry Lecturer at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Research Fellow at the Hoover Institute. She formerly served as the Deputy Secretary General of NATO and the Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security in the U.S. Department of State. She spoke with us about her work, areas of interest, favorite classes to teach, and what she likes to do outside of the classroom!

Can you tell us about yourself and how you got into your field?

I often get asked why and how I ended up working on nuclear weapons. I like to emphasize that I was a Sputnik baby. I grew up in Columbus, Ohio, and when the Soviets launched the first artificial satellite, Sputnik, in the late 1950s, I was quite young. My father, who was always interested in science, took me outside and pointed to a little dot of light in the sky, explaining that it was an artificial satellite launched by the Soviets. 

He was excited about the scientific achievement, and by the time I got to high school, Sputnik had sparked concern in the U.S. that we were falling behind the USSR in science and math. As a result, the federal government started supporting Russian language education in high schools and I studied Russian in Columbus, Ohio. At Georgetown, I majored in Russian and initially wanted to be a U.N. interpreter. However, I quickly decided I didn’t want to be up in the interpreting box—I wanted to be on the floor making policy.

My Russian skills became my "ticket to ride". A few years after Georgetown, I was hired by the RAND Corporation as a research assistant to Thomas Wolfe, a senior Soviet military analyst. He was writing a book on the first Strategic Arms Limitation Agreement (SALT) signed in 1972, called The SALT Experience, and I assisted him by diving into Soviet military journals, newspapers, and other sources at the Library of Congress. That was the beginning of my work in the nuclear field.

I stayed at RAND after Wolfe retired, focusing on weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear and chemical weapons. I didn’t enter the field through academia—I came into it as a journeyman apprentice at RAND.

What are your research interests at Stanford? What have you been working on recently?

I was the chief negotiator for the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) with Russia, which entered into force in 2011. I wrote a memoir about that experience called Negotiating the New START Treaty. 

Recently, I completed a book manuscript focused on what I call "the other side of the NATO enlargement story". From 2016 to 2019, I served as Deputy Secretary General of NATO, engaging with the new NATO members—countries formerly part of the Soviet sphere, such as Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and the former Warsaw Pact nations.

After leaving NATO, I wanted to write about my experience working for President Clinton in the 1990s. He had two simultaneous goals: expanding NATO and maintaining a strong security, economic, and political relationship with Russia. Many books have covered NATO enlargement, but no one has written about Clinton’s engagement with President Yeltsin and later President Bush’s engagement with Putin. This effort worked for a time, but ultimately failed, as we see today with Russia’s aggression in Ukraine. My book explores this strategy, its successes, and its limitations. The manuscript is currently under review for publication.

How did you end up at Stanford?

I had visited Stanford many times over the years, often at the invitation of George Shultz, the former Secretary of State and Secretary of the Treasury. He was instrumental in helping me come to Stanford. My husband, who was born and raised in the Bay Area, was eager to return after retiring from the State Department. I reached out to George Shultz, and he was incredibly supportive. Mike McFaul, whom I worked with during the Obama administration and who is now the director of the Freeman Spogli Institute, also played a key role in bringing me here five years ago.

What courses do you teach at Stanford?

I teach two courses in the MIP program. One is Issues in Contemporary International Security, which H.R. McMaster also teaches. The other is Verification of 21st Century Arms Control Treaties, which I created. It focuses on the technical means for ensuring compliance with arms control agreements, covering nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. Stanford students are incredibly smart, often coming up with brilliant new ideas for using technology in verification. I’ll be teaching the course again in the fall and welcome upper-level undergraduates who are willing to put in the work, as it is a graduate-level course with a lot of reading and a major final project. Having a mix of graduate and undergraduate students has been very productive in the classroom.

What do you do outside of your academic work?

I’m very active in Track Two diplomacy as a member of the Committee on International Security and Arms Control of the U.S. National Academies of Sciences. We hold discussions with retired senior officials, scientists, and academics from Russia, China, and India to address difficult security and stability issues. If we generate good ideas, we share them with our respective governments in the hope of influencing future policy. 

For fun, I love hiking, birdwatching, swimming, and biking. I recently started taking Tai Chi, which has been fascinating and surprisingly challenging. It may look simple, but it's quite complex, and I end up exhausted after class! I also have three grandsons—two in the Bay Area and one in Washington, D.C.—so I frequently help out with them.