2025 Cyril Foster Lecture - Interview with Dan Leaf

Join us for our 2025 Cyril Foster Lecture – Oxford’s annual distinguished lecture in the field of International Relations.

Title: How to End Wars: Pragmatic Approaches to Peacebuilding

Speakers: Christine Ahn, Fellow, Institute for Policy Studies and Founder, Women Cross DMZ and Lt Gen (Ret) Dan Leaf, US Air Force.

Date: Thursday 8 May 

Venue: Oxford Examination School.

Time: 17:00

The 2025 Cyril Foster Lecture brings together two leading, internationally renowned speakers on peace activism and peacekeeping. 

Dan “Fig” Leaf is the Managing Director of Phase Minus 1, LLC (PM1), a company he formed in 2017. His focus areas include peace on the Korean Peninsula, the US-Viet Nam relationship, conflict resolution, effective governance, and strategic leadership. He provides independent consulting services on cyber security solutions, adaptive learning systems, and AI-enabled planning tools. A decorated combat fighter pilot, Fig has more than 3,600 flight hours, including F-15 and F-16 combat missions during a 33-year USAF career that culminated in duties as the Deputy Commander of U.S. Pacific Command (PACOM) 2005-2008. 

This year’s Cyril Foster lecture focuses on How to End Wars: Pragmatic Approaches to Peacebuilding.

Dan, why is this such an important topic and what is its relevance to us today?

North Korea has the nuclear weapons, delivery means, and first-use doctrine that make an accidental or intentional genuine possibility. Kim Jong-un has seen US policy since the failed summitry with President Trump as wholly hostile and therefore ceased all official contact with the U.S. government.  We know that the risk of nuclear war with Korea is real; the suffering of ordinary North Koreans is also real; the policies of the last 30+ years have failed to reduce risk or alleviate suffering, and we must find an alternate approach; one option is to address the pre-existing condition, the state of war existent since the war started in 1950 and not ended by the Armistice Agreement.

You have travelled the Indo-Asia Pacific region extensively researching areas of conflict resolution governance, strategic leadership, and Women, Peace and Security – as well as a long military career – how has this experience impacted your research?

I have learnt that: 

• Fighter pilots are necessarily pragmatic – they care about what works. Everything else can kill you.
• Service in Korea (two tours, four years), Japan (four years) and Hawaii (two tours, four years) made the standoff with North Korea a central element in my military service.
• My experience in air and land combat led me to reflect deeply about the morality of war, and the need to ensure that in all cases, armed conflict is the last resort.
• Serving as the Director of the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies for five years gave me the opportunity to turn that reflection into active advocacy for a different approach to reducing the risk on the Korean Peninsula.

Your research talks about a need for a “comprehensive, federated strategy which addresses the various threads independently to establish a lasting peace on the peninsula” – can you tell us a little more about this and why this approach is important? 

For years, all US policy has been focused on denuclearization, with other areas dependent upon progress in that regard before addressing human rights, sanctions, and humanitarian assistance. Our policy should be more comprehensive in the sense that all areas (big and small) where progress can be made should be considered. The lines of effort should be federated rather than allowing progress without insisting that the most important strategic goal, denuclearization of North Korea, be reached first.