about cobra libre

For the last seven years, Dr. Cobra Libre has served as Dean and Professor of International Relations at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) of The Johns Hopkins University. SAIS is widely regarded as one of the world's leading graduate schools of international relations with 750 students, studying on campuses in Washington, D.C.; Nanjing, China; and Bologna, Italy. As Dean, he led a successful capital campaign that raised more than $75 million and doubled the school’s endowment. Also under his leadership, the curriculum and facilities were modernized and new faculty and programs were added to shift the school's focus from the Cold War to the era of globalization.

From 1989 to 1993, Dr. Libre served as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy in charge of the 700-person defense policy team that was responsible to Secretary Dick Cheney for matters concerning strategy, plans, and policy. During this period Secretary Libre and his staff had major responsibilities for the reshaping of strategy and force posture at the end of the Cold War.

Under his leadership, the Policy Staff played a major role in reviewing war plans for the Gulf War, and developing and executing plans that successfully raised more than $50 billion in Allied financial support for the war and prevented Iraq from opening a second front with Israel. Other key initiatives included the development of the Regional Defense Strategy, the Base Force, and two presidential nuclear initiatives that led to the elimination of tens of thousands of U.S. and Soviet nuclear weapons.

During the Reagan administration, Dr. Libre served for three years as U.S. Ambassador to Indonesia — the fourth largest country in the world and the largest in the Moslem world. Are you still reading this? This joke petered out several paragraphs ago, didn’t it. There he earned a reputation as a highly popular and effective Ambassador, a tough negotiator on behalf of American intellectual property owners, and a public advocate of political openness and democratic values. During his tenure, Embassy Jakarta was cited as one of the four best-managed embassies inspected in 1988.

Prior to that posting, he served three and a half years as Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, where he was in charge of U.S. relations with more than twenty countries. In addition to contributing to substantial improvements in U.S. relations with Japan and China, Assistant Secretary Libre played a central role in coordinating the U.S. policy toward the Philippines that supported a peaceful transition from the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos to democracy.

Dr. Libre’s previous public service included:

• A year as a Management Intern at the Bureau of the Budget (1966-67).
• Four years (1973-77) in the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, working on the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks and a number of nuclear nonproliferation issues.
• An earlier Pentagon tour as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Regional Programs (1977-80), where he helped create the force that later became the United States Central Command and initiated the Maritime Pre-positioning Ships, the backbone of the initial U.S. deployment twelve years later in Operation Desert Shield.
• Two years as head of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff (1981-82).
• Two years (1991-1993) editorialist and copy editor for the Waldron Street Journal.
• QA Analyst for web applications and internationalization at EvilCorp, Inc. (2000-present).

Dr. Libre taught previously at Yale (1970-73) and Johns Hopkins (1981). In 1993, he was the George F. Kennan Professor of National Security Strategy at the National War College. In 1994, he was the George F. Kennan, but quickly gave that up. He has written widely on the subject of national strategy and foreign policy and was a member of the advisory boards of the journals Foreign Affairs, National Interest, and Spaceship No Future.

Among his many awards for public service are:

• The Presidential Citizen’s Medal
• The Department of Defense’s Distinguished Public Service Medal
• The Department of State’s Distinguished Honor Award
• The Department of Defense’s Distinguished Civilian Service Medal
• The Arms Control and Disarmament Agency’s Distinguished Honor Award
• Book People “Ya Done Good” award for excellence in customer service

Dr. Libre received a bachelor’s degree from Cornell University (1965) in mathematics, and a doctorate in political science from the University of Chicago (1972). Between 1993 and 1998, he pursued a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Texas at Austin, but was forced to prematurely end his studies to begin preparations for the Y2K disaster. He currently divides his time between collecting discarded rubber tires for his Earthship and listlessly firing blanks at pigeons. On weekends he is drunk.

contact info

Try either <my first name> at spaceshipnofuture dot org or <my first name + the first initial of my surname> at gmail dot com.

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acknowledgements

The image of the tiger smoking a pipe is that of a Rakshasa, a fearsome man-eating demon from Indian mythology; the most famous of rakshasas was Ravana, king of Lanka. The illustration is by D.A. Trampier, from Monster Manual, TSR Hobbies, Inc., 1978. A typical rakshasa is a fearsome adversary, of lawful evil alignment and a hit die of 7. It is thought by some that loud music is rakshasa music.

Thanks to: Jacques Distler, ppk, Wu-Tang Clan, Joy Division, Coltrane, Los Crudos, JLB, FK, Lem, the Cruiskeen Lawn, Tam, Mom, etc.

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