Former deputy White House chief of staff Karl Rove visited the University of Pittsburgh campus on Monday, March, 3, 2008 (media coverage here, here, here, here, and here). During his stay, Rove attended a meeting of Cold War rhetoric, my advanced undergraduate course offered by the Department of Communication.

Students prepared for Rove’s visit by breaking into six research groups that developed and videotaped questions for him, modeling the pedagogical approach pioneered by the U.S. State Department’s Ben Franklin Transatlantic Fellows Initiative.

Although Rove declined to be recorded, he watched each of the six student video questions carefully and agreed to have his answers evaluated as an optional part of the course’s midterm examination. To view the students’ video questions and their reflections on Rove’s answers (in comments):

• Group A’s question on NSC 68 and the war on terror.
• Group D’s question on Cold War rhetoric.
• Group B’s question on the spread of nuclear knowledge.
• Group E’s question concerning negotiations with Iran.
• Group F’s question on Iran’s nuclear program.
• Group C’s question about the Bush library.

To determine the order in which the questions were asked, students applied in advance a standardized evaluation rubric that assessed the degree to which each question was clear, interesting, demanding, and sophisticated:

Although Rove declined general media availability, he said “It was very exciting for me to listen and talk to these young people.” While the students’ reaction is still unfolding in comments over at our Chalk Talk corner, an early post from one student suggests that the feeling was mutual:

Overall, I thought that this rare question and answer session was a valuable opportunity to gain insight into the outlook of the leadership in our own society, even if I was unconvinced of the correctness of the policies. Rove is a current, important, and influential force in determining the course of our country as established by the present administration. Our class was fortunate to have been able to interview him personally.

Shortly after release of the unclassified summary of the new Iran NIE last December, commentators such as former Israeli defense minister Ephraim Sneh speculated that the report would sap political will for tough diplomacy aimed at putting a lid on Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions. ArmsControlWonk’s Andy Grotto takes a look at recent comments coming out of Russia and sees an opposite trend:

The NIE’s headline finding that Iran abandoned nuclear warhead and weaponization R&D in the fall of 2003 has eliminated the possibility of U.S. military action against Iran’s nuclear facilities for the foreseeable future. This frees up Russia and other countries to toe a harder line against Iran without worrying about legitimating U.S. military action. If this interpretation is true, it means that the litany of pundits and commentators complaining that the NIE plays right into Iran’s hands have it exactly backwards: by effectively taking U.S. military action off the table for now, the NIE makes it easier, not harder, for countries like Russia to send Iran a stronger signal about its enrichment program. After all, Russia (and China, for that matter) do not want Iran to develop the capability to deploy nuclear weapons; until the Iran NIE however, this concern was counterbalanced by a worry that the United States might launch another war in the Middle East.