2025 College and University Educators Workshop

FASKIANOS: I am Irina Faskianos, the vice president of the National Program and Outreach here at CFR, and it’s a great joy to welcome you all here for the annual College and University Educators Workshop. I hope you enjoyed the reception and meeting with our departments about resources that CFR offers.

The purpose of this workshop and our Outreach initiative is to serve as a resource for all of you and the important work that you’re doing training the next generation of leaders in whatever field they may be in, and help them better understand the world and the foreign policy challenges facing the United States, and there are many.

So we are delighted to have all of you here with us in person. We have people from forty-three states and Washington, DC, so it’s very exciting. People came very from far and wide. We have an excellent lineup of panels over the next day covering topics from global flashpoints, the new tech era, and at the end of this we will do a feedback session because we really want to hear how you’re using CFR resources and what more we can do to help you in the work that you’re doing.

As a reminder, this workshop is on the record. It will be livestreamed and posted to CFR.org after the fact. We will only be taking questions in the room so we will not be taking any questions virtually.

Please silence your mobile devices—this is very important—and when you’re called upon, stand up and state your name and your educational affiliation and maybe your state, too.

So now I will turn the floor over to our opening panel on The United States: At Home and Abroad. Our distinguished president, Michael Froman, will be moderating the session and he will introduce our wonderful panel of CFR fellows.

So with that, over to you, Mike. Thanks so much.

FROMAN: Well, thanks very much, Irina. Great to see all of you. I’m Mike Froman. I’m president of the Council, and I’m delighted to kick off this year’s College and University Educators Workshop.

We’re delighted to have a full house here tonight, about a hundred educators from forty-four states and the District of Columbia. I’m not sure what’s wrong with the other six states but, yeah, we’re going to continue to try and get full representation year after year, and you all represent community, private, public colleges and universities. It’s great to have all of you here even in this rainy evening.

This evening’s discussion is titled The United States: At Home and Abroad. We were going to cancel it because there’s really nothing going on in the world. (Laughter.)

So I thought just we’d sit here in silence for a while. But, thankfully, some things are going on and we thought we pull together some of our experts.

We’ve got three very distinguished members of our Studies department, which is our think tank within the Council. As you all know, the Council is a think tank. It’s a publisher, it’s an educational organization, and it’s a membership organization. The think tank is run by Shannon O’Neil, our director of studies, who’s got a great background in Latin America, in trade, in supply chains, and then more generally U.S. foreign policy.

Liana Fix, who’s our fellow for Europe at the Council, she is a historian, a political scientist, expert in Germany and European foreign and security policy, transatlantic relations, Russia, Eastern Europe, European-China policy.

Anything you’re not an expert in, Liana?

FIX: Trade. (Laughter.)

FROMAN: Trade. That’s why we have Shannon.

And last but not least is Jacob Ware—you have the full bios there—who’s a research fellow here at the Council where he studies domestic and international terrorism and counterterrorism.

The way this evening is going to work we’re going to talk for about a half hour or so and then we’re going to open it up to questions, and we know you have a full day tomorrow with various panels and sessions touching on some of the touch points but we thought we’d just get started on some of these issues tonight.

Maybe let’s start with—let me start with Liana. Right now there’s a lot of conversation about the role of the U.S. in the world, and I would say our European friends are particularly verklempt. They’re sort of really kind of tied in knots trying to figure out what the U.S. is doing both on the economic and on the security front.

What’s your assessment of the current state of transatlantic relations and how you see this being managed, going forward?

FIX: Mmm hmm. Thanks so much, Mike. It’s wonderful to be here with you all tonight and to discuss nothing that’s going on in the world, especially not in Europe.

So just to start us off where Europeans are and how Europeans feel these days about—let me quote the now infamous Signal chat and the vice president who said in that Signal chat, “I just hate bailing out Europe again,” and I think that’s a good starting point to give you an answer to that question, Mike.

Why is there the strong feeling that the transatlantic relationship, which has been so strong after 1945, now consists, from the view of Washington, at least—consists of bailing out Europeans. Why do we have to bail out Europeans all the time? How justified is that?

And I would say, perhaps, a little bit controversially that there is actually a point to make. There is a point to make that the transatlantic relationship for a long time has been disbalanced, so for the whole period of the Cold War time, one can argue.

Well, this was a Cold War. We needed a strong U.S. following Europe. But the Cold War period is over for already over thirty-five years. So in that period after 1990 it took Europeans really—Europe benefited from the peace dividend after the end of the Cold War and it took a lot of attempts and a lot of persuasion from previous U.S. governments to move Europe into a position where they would take on more of their security.

So I would say some disruption in the transatlantic relationship is actually not too bad, because if you would ask officials from former U.S. administrations what they see now that Europe is investing the money, the loans that they are putting forward for their own defense investments, previous administrations would say, well, we tried that and it didn’t work.

Now it works with a little bit of disruption. But there is a point where too much disruption can turn into the other side and can be a break moment for the transatlantic relationship and I just want to draw all your attention to the NATO summit in the Hague at the end of June because I am concerned that this will be one of those moments where a little bit of helpful disruption can turn into too much disruption when it’s not anymore about incentivizing Europeans to spend more but when it becomes about, well, why don’t we just abandon Europe to themselves, which in a situation where Russia continues to be a threat would, obviously, be a very difficult situation to sustain and to survive before, especially the smaller European countries.

So I think at the moment we are still in a phase where I would say there can be mutual benefits coming out of that. But there is, especially with the NATO summit, a real tipping point that can happen with the relationship.

FROMAN: I mean, Europe is under pressure from Putin, on one side, from the East, in terms of a real security threat supported by China, Iran, North Korea—North Korean troops actually fighting in Russia against Ukrainians—and then now is under pressure from the West, from the United States, to say do more for your own defense. Get your act together economically. We’re going to slap tariffs on you as well.

We’re going to get to trade here a little bit later. But, you know, is this—the dual pressure, is this enough to force Europe to get its act together because of economic reform, and not just defense spending of how much they spend but what they spend it on? You know, can they get their defense industrial base organized the way it should be organized, going forward?

FIX: Yeah. So there is always this argument about the—Europe in general, that Europe works in crises, right? The bigger the crises, the more Europe works together after an initial moment of shock.

That is partly true, and actually there is some academic literature that I’m discussing with my students in my class at Georgetown where there are also examples where that has not been true in the past. So I would not wholly rely on this idea—fully rely on this idea that just a crisis can help the Europeans to move forward.

And the money is really not the problem here, right? I mean, Europe can—it’s a wealthy continent. They can organize money. We have seen that Germany has unleashed defense spending through debt financing. We have seen that the European Commission is more flexible.

But what worries me is the greater picture of a Europe where we have some bigger powers that are all similarly strong in terms of the power balance in Europe, and in the past we had the United States as a hegemon which kept everyone together and forced them to work together, not to let old rivalries reemerge, and now we will come into a new situation where the UK, France, and Germany suddenly all have to work together and to have some kind of cooperative leadership format without one of those three wanting to go along and to say, well, we are the leader now.

The French want to be the leader of the European Union. Do the Germans want the French to be the leader? Hell, no, right? (Laughter.)

FROMAN: They have a few hundred years of disagreements that—

FIX: And I’m not speaking for myself here as a German. But you see what I mean, right? I mean, you see all these kinds of rivalries which many believe have been bureaucratized with the European Union and the thousand committees we have in the European Union but which still are there. The war power politics still exists in Europe. And so beyond the money I think it’s really the question of how can powers in Europe work together without the United States as a hegemon.

FROMAN: Could you see Europe breaking apart further? I mean, you have Brexit already but could you see Europe breaking apart?

FIX: So going back further in history, I could see a situation where we returned to a kind of European system as we had under Bismarck so the late nineteenth century where basically different European countries—

FROMAN: Do we have any history professors here? (Laughter.)

FIX: Correct me if I’m talking nonsense here but where sort of different European countries were having different reassurance agreements, coalition agreements, treaties with each other. It was basically, like, a really confusing network.

I still remember studying this, right, where you have, like, different drawings of this one is allied with this one but if this one is allied with the other one it leads to this very complicated system that we had under Bismarck’s times could return where everyone just makes—tries to make a deal with each other instead of having a collective effort of European security and defense.

And I believe that that’s the more—that’s the less safe—the less safe version for Europe, not only because it has led back then to the First World War but because a system of alliances is much better than just a network of security guarantees.

FROMAN: Jacob, let’s pivot to another issue.

You have been studying terrorism and counterterrorism around the world for some time. You know, post-9/11 our entire security apparatus reorganized itself to focus, largely, on terrorism—the war on terror, counterterrorism—and that sort of over the years receded into the—in the background.

There’s a little known magazine called Foreign Affairs. I mean, some of you may have heard about it. I think there’s probably some examples outside. Just last year Graham Allison at Harvard, Mike Morell, who used to be director of the CIA, wrote a piece in that magazine called “The Terrorism Warning Lights Are Blinking Red Again.” Are we paying insufficient attention to the potential for terrorism around the world and what’s the risk here at the homeland?

WARE: Well, thank you so much, Dr. Froman, for having me. Thanks for being here, everybody.

The short answer is yes, we are paying insufficient attention but I think it’s important to contextualize that answer as well. The way I see it right now we have really five hotspots of terrorism, five hotspots in the counterterrorism space.

First, of course, is the Middle East, broadly conceptualized. I mean, in Yemen we now have been launching military strikes for almost a month. A lot of that was overlooked because of the Signal debacle.

Syria is led by a foreign terrorist organization now. We have collaborated with them against our shared enemy which, of course, is the Islamic State. So we’re sharing intelligence with a group that is until recently designated as a—still is designated until recently was wholly a foreign terrorist organization.

Gaza, of course, is another important zone where a ceasefire has ended, and the Israeli government appears to be going down the road of wholly connected counterterrorism, which hasn’t worked typically in the history of counterterrorism and counterinsurgency.

The second hotspot is Afghanistan, where al-Qaida is reemerging under the protection of their longtime protectors, the Taliban. But really the main concern is over an ISIS affiliate there called ISIS Khorasan Province, which appears to be trying to revive the old external operations model where they plan attacks in country and then send them out. Saw that in Russia. Saw that in Iran last year. In fact, there was an election day plot here in the U.S. that was interdicted as well with an Afghan national.

The third hotspot, probably the most important one, frankly, is Africa. Africa is now the epicenter of global terrorism. According to a recent report the Sahel, which is a region that’s kind of underneath the Sahara, is now facing and now, I think, in 2024 saw 47 percent of terrorism deaths globally, most of those in three countries—Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger. Meanwhile, al-Shabaab in the east is making gains in Somalia.

Most of my time here at CFR is spent looking at the fourth hotspot, which is the domestic front. We have seen a rise in far-right terrorism. That’s really mostly White supremacist terrorism over the past kind of fifteen years. Probably is the predominant threat to the homeland. But we’re also seeing rising militancy from the far left as well, and you’ve seen that, of course, in the very publicized Tesla attacks around the country.

The fifth front that I want to point out and we can discuss it very briefly is Mexico, and the reason why I say that is because the Trump administration, of course, has designated several cartels as foreign terrorist organizations and is now engaging in what they’re calling counterterrorism operations with El Salvador regarding deportations, which is quite a kind of sea change from what we’re used to and might be blurring the lines of what we typically understand to be terrorism threats, which is obviously political violence.

Across the board I think that’s why that great team of writers that you mentioned—Michael Morell and Graham Allison, an academic and a practitioner—warned that the warning lights are blinking red and, of course, they struck on New Year’s Day here in the United States with a homegrown violent extremist inspired by Salafi jihadist ideology.

Real quick, the reason why I think it’s important to conceptualize is, you know, most years the United States faces somewhere in the dozens of terrorism fatalities. At a certain point, as we shift towards China and Russia and climate and pandemics and all the other national security issues that we’re facing, we’re probably going to have to have some kind of soul searching conversation about what an acceptable number of losses from terrorism is, and I don’t know what that number is but we’re going to have to come to a consensus.

FROMAN: Have we learned whatever lessons there were to be drawn from our history of counterterrorism after 9/11 to, one, improve our intelligence capability, our ability to intercede and prevent these attacks from happening and to sort of take action where necessary domestically and internationally?

WARE: Sure. Yes, I think, to an extent. Can I point to another Foreign Affairs article which I think is excellent?

FROMAN: Sure. I think advertising as many Foreign Affairs articles as possible is welcome. (Laughter.)

WARE: Published by two great scholars down in DC, Hal Brands and Michael O’Hanlon, in August 2021. It was called “America Failed Its Way to Counterterrorism Success.”

Their basic argument was there had been twenty years in the war on terror and we’d overreached and then we under reached and we were looking for that kind of Goldilocks option and we found it in Syria where the Obama administration and the Trump administration identified a credible partner. That was the Syrian Democratic Forces, the Syrian Kurds in the north of the country. Provided them with intelligence, weapons, air power, but ultimately let them fight.

This is known in kind of military parlance as, like, by, with, and through or leading from behind. Let them fight. Let them take the casualties because they’re invested in the fight and it’s existential for them in a way that is not for us. That was, arguably, the main counterterrorism success of what you might call the war on terror years.

In my opinion, actually the Biden administration used that strategy as well in Ukraine. Obviously, not the air power side but weapons, intelligence, rhetorical support, but let the credible partner fight the fight for themselves, and it worked tremendously well, at least in the initial few years.

That would, obviously, clash with what the Trump administration is attempting to do now in Yemen, which is seemingly to bomb the country into submission. It certainly clashes with what Israel is attempting to do in Gaza which, again, is to bomb the country into submission. That has not been a strategy that has worked at any point in the war on terror years or, frankly, at any point in the history of counterterrorism/counterinsurgency.

FROMAN: Let me follow up on that because you mentioned Yemen, the Houthis, who, you know, sound like a ragtag group but they’re anything but. I mean, they’re really a pretty sophisticated military force. They make their own missiles. They buy advanced avionics from Iran and are able to really attack with shipping, Israel, elsewhere through their capabilities. If bombing them isn’t the right answer what is the right answer?

WARE: If I knew the answer to that question—(laughter)—

FROMAN: Because we’ve sort of failed to deter them.

WARE: Yes.

FROMAN: They’ve continued to manage to survive. There is a long history, of course, within Yemen of a civil war and their role in that but, clearly, we don’t want them to maintain their threat to shipping in the Red Sea or to their neighbors.

WARE: A couple of things. I mean, first of all, Yemen is effectively a failed state. It features a very confused and confusing mix of actors that are backed by various state powers. They are warring with each other. They are collaborating with each other.

It’s a mess but it’s somewhat similar, I think, to a situation like the Taliban in Afghanistan or certainly Hayat Tahrir al-Sham in Syria where a militant group or a terrorist organization, however you define it, has ingratiated themselves into the local population and is providing, you know, government—is the de facto government whether they are in power or not.

Yemen is the site of an absolutely catastrophic humanitarian disaster and bombing that country is going to make that situation worse. At some point you have to engage on the ground, economically, socially, and commit to it in the long term to try to counter the ability of a group like the Houthis to effectively keep Yemeni people hostage from freedom and from their ability to live successful, healthy lives.

It’s a very similar situation, I believe, to Hamas in the Gaza Strip where you have a terrorist organization that is keeping people that that has an interest in having civilians die in kind of—from Western bombs because they understand that is the only way that they can maintain their power.

Of course, the civilians are the ones who pay the price for that. So at a certain point you have to try to reach those people rather than happily let them be in the crosshairs.

FROMAN: Shannon, I’ve saved you for last in part to demonstrate that you don’t have to have a foreign accent to work here at the Council. (Laughter.)

FIX: We have an accent?

FROMAN: But also because there’s no more—

O’NEIL: Ohio doesn’t have an accent?

FROMAN: Yeah, a different kind of accent.

It’s 6:20 or so, so I haven’t looked at the news in probably forty-five minutes. What’s going on with the global economy—(laughter)—and what—how do you interpret the most recent moves on trade and tariffs and the potential implications for the global economic system?

O’NEIL: So the great thing about being up here with both of them but particularly Jacob is it’s been a heck of a week but I’m feeling better about what I look at than what he looks at. (Laughter.)

You know, we’ll all get our stuff. It’s just going to cost more in the grocery store.

FROMAN: It’s going to cost more, yeah.

O’NEIL: But to be serious about this, I do think what we have seen over these last two weeks is, you know, perhaps the—sort of the biggest fundamental paradigm shift in thinking about and in the direction of the global economy that we’ve had for decades. And even with the walk back at least or the delay of reciprocal tariffs, you know, the fact that the United States has put a 10 percent universal tariff on most every country in the world, they’ve put sectoral tariffs on, you know, autos, on steel, on aluminum and they’ve put, you know, exponential—over 100 percent tariffs on one of its biggest trading partners, China, the fact that this is just such a widespread and maximalist view I think is a fundamental break with the way we think about the global economy and at least the aspirations where for fifty, sixty years the rhetoric, if not the reality, was more opening and more trade and coming in and expanding.

And the way it plays not just in the global economy, it plays into global diplomacy, global political relationships, and other types of relations that we have beyond just the basics of trade, and I do think it is creating an incredible amount, whatever happens and whatever’s happened while we’ve been sitting up here. Even if we saw sort of the pullback of many of these tariffs, you know, you can’t put this toothpaste back in the tube, right?

This is just a fundamental change in the way businesses will think about investing and the way, you know, people think about hiring and placing of, you know, the kinds of manufacturing they do and the way they think about sourcing.

You know, we’ve heard a lot, rightly so, over the last number of years about global supply chains, international supply chains, companies are going to think about, you know, what geographies they touch upon, how they source from various things, how they—you know, their cost structures work. And other companies but other nations are going to step in and rejigger what they do and I think in many ways, you know, if we continue on the path we’re on try to leave the United States out, right?

Yes, they’ll serve the U.S. economy. It’s the biggest economy in the world. Yes, they’ll want to sell into, you know, U.S.—very prolific U.S. consumers. But for the other eight plus billion people who live out there how do you do things that don’t touch on the U.S., at least for some types of industries and sectors, so you don’t get caught up in these kinds of trade wars.

FROMAN: You’re one of the leading experts on Mexico, among other things. We’ve got this integrated North American economy that developed over several decades—NAFTA, USMCA, et cetera.

What does it mean for Mexico and Canada that thought they were part of a supply chain with autos or other products that they could rely on with the United States?

O’NEIL: Yeah. Well, the one silver lining of this last couple of weeks is Mexico and Canada got a bit more of a pass than any other nation. So what you saw—yes, you saw 10 percent universal tariffs. Yes, you saw reciprocal tariffs much higher on lots of different countries. But for goods that are coming in through USMCA, which is the free trade agreement between the three countries in North America, if they’re USMCA-compliant they have zero tariffs.

So you did get a pass for many industries. Not for autos, because that one was that Trump wants specifically to put on sectoral tariffs on autos though, again, there’s a little bit of a walk back there for our neighbors, which is that if the cars that are coming in from Mexico or Canada, any parts of those cars that were made in the United States.

So, you know, there’s a lot of cars that are assembled in Mexico but the engine, for instance, is made here in New York, right? There’s factories here that send the engines down there. The value that engine would get to be sort of, you know, deleted or minused out before you actually put the tariff on the others. So there’s sort of some benefit for keeping this integration.

And, interestingly, over the last five years one of the biggest industries that’s grown in Mexico has been electronics. And they—you know, more laptops that come into the United States today are made in Mexico than in China over this last year, and so that too is another industry that is mostly USMCA-compliant and so would come in.

But overall there’s also a question now about USMCA itself. It survived this first round of tariffs but it’s up for review and renegotiation over this next year and a real question about whether it survives that review.

You know, the Trump administration will come with specific asks. They’re going to care about things like corn that we sell into Mexico. They’re going to care about energy and they’re going to care about how Mexico and Canada face China and sort of China in the supply chains that are there, and what other kinds of things that the Trump administration wants.

You know, they want security, back to sort of Jacob’s point on many of the cartels being designated now not just, you know, transnational criminal organizations but terrorist organizations. That changes a little bit of the calculus for businesses that are operating there.

So there’s a lot of uncertainty. Though, I would say, you know, as you look around the countries around the world and thinking about Europe, you know, Mexico and Canada, there’s a little bit of a sigh of relief that everything wasn’t thrown out in the last couple of weeks.

FROMAN: You know, President Trump’s desire to reindustrialize America, bring more manufacturing to the U.S., has merits, has—conceivably has merits and, by the way, is not unique to President Trump. President Biden was also very focused on increasing manufacturing in the United States.

What are the prospects—when you talk to companies—we have a lot of corporate members here at the Council and you consult with a lot of companies. What are you hearing and what do you think the prospects are that they ultimately decided, in part because of the uncertainty, that the only certain thing if they want to avoid tariffs is to produce in the United States, and they open up factories and they hire more American workers and they do exactly what President Trump said they’re going to do?

O’NEIL: So I’d say two things on that. One is there’s so much uncertainty about what the rules are you’re not going to make that investment until you have a better sense of what the rules are and right now you don’t know. And, certain industries can move quickly and certain industries cannot move quickly.

So if you’re building a car you have already commissioned and contracted with your suppliers through, you know, 2028, 2029. So you’re not going to be able to move because you already have to pay those suppliers. You’ve already done—they do a lot of your research in development. You’re sort of the tier one, tier two system the way the cars are made.

So you’re not moving until that time and, you know, presumably after that time there will be a new president in the United States. It may not—you know, it may be this party, it may be that party, but it’s going to be a different party.

So you don’t know if you’re, you know, whether or not moving and investing billions of dollars and finding new suppliers if you’re actually—the rules are going to be the same and your cost structure that you’re thinking of today is going to be there.

Now, some supply chains and some products you can move more quickly, right? In apparel, you know, you’re making, you know, shirts in China. You can move to another country probably within six months, right, depending on where it is. You have shorter contracts and the like.

So some things you could move more quickly if you sort of—but still, again, you need certainty. So if you’re thinking of moving out of China because today it’s 125 percent tariff you say, OK, well, maybe I’m going to go to Vietnam. But Vietnam up until yesterday had 46 percent tariffs so that wouldn’t be the place to go. Maybe that’ll come back in ninety days, but maybe it won’t.

So there’s—one, there’s just this uncertainty. It’s very hard to decide even if you want to invest. And then, if you’re thinking of coming back here to the United States, you know, especially for, you know, like, athleisure that we all wear, we don’t make that kind of synthetic thread here, so we’re—so that’s unavailable. You’re going to have to import that from somewhere, and that’s going to be tariffed, and where are you going to import from. You know, we don’t make some of those things nor do we have some of the skills there. So there’s that sort of a challenge, right? How do you set up the sort of land and the labor and the permits and all the things that happen here?

But I would say, just stepping back, the bigger challenge there for lots of these companies is if you’re going to produce in the United States, one, you’re going to need to bring in inputs and that’s going to raise your cost. You can sell here. You know, you’ve put up tariff walls and, I mean, I’ve studied Latin America for many years. Latin America did this in spades through the 1970s and 1980s. They called it import substitution industrialization so you—

FROMAN: How did that work out?

O’NEIL: You know, the few bright spots are, like, Embraer, you know, the jet company that came out of Brazil, but most of the companies you’ve never heard of because they didn’t make it, right. And it cost consumers a lot more and it cost innovation because you were producing just for the Mexican market or just for the Peruvian market or the Argentine, and the like.

And, you know, the U.S. market is a big market, but if you raise the costs here you are going to only provide for the—you know, for U.S. consumers and you’re not going to be able to export to the rest of the world because your products are just going to be too expensive. Even without retaliatory tariffs they’re just going to be more expensive because of inputs that cost more because of tariffs and/or the production here that costs more.

And right now you’re going to have a lot of companies that are sort of caught in between. I’ll just give you one example so you can sort of think through how this works is, you know, so BMW—the biggest BMW plant in the world is here in the United States in Spartanburg, South Carolina.

They make cars for—you know, mostly SUVs and some coupes for the U.S. market but half of their cars go to other markets. So, you know, they don’t make SUVs in Europe for Europe. They send them from the United States, and SUVs for lots of other places.

Now, if we see retaliatory tariffs then they won’t be able to send those cars out. But they also won’t be bringing in sort of the lower, you know, 3 Series, I think it is, that they import because the margins on that are lower and they’re not going to make them in the United States.

So as U.S. consumers if you want to buy a BMW you’ll be able to buy BMWs because they make them here, but you’re only going to be able to buy SUVs and the expensive ones. You’re not going to be able to buy sort of the others.

So we’re going to get fewer options here and they’re going to be more expensive cars, which means you buy fewer of them. You take more time, which means demand is slower, which means that factory slows down, which means jobs are lost or furloughed, which means an overall sort of shrinking of the economy.

So, yes, BMW will keep making BMWs here for the United States market but they’re going to be fewer than before, both in just number but also quality. So these are sort of the dynamics I think we’re going to see. So, yes, will there be—will we see some manufacturing come back? Yes, but it’s going to be much more selective and lower.

And, like, the last thing I would say is there’s a different way to do this, right, and a different way to do it is really decide what you care about, what we really want to be made here in the United States, right?

Do we want socks to be made here? Maybe not. Do we want, you know, high-tech semiconductors? Do we want, you know—well, your socks maybe, right?

FROMAN: They’re strategic. Strategic socks. (Laughter.)

O’NEIL: Think about the industries that we really want to have here in the United States and we think will be a huge value added to, you know, the U.S. economy, and targeted tariffs and/or subsidies, sort of a package that then brings the beginning of that back to an industry that then can compete globally. That, I think, is a better model than just widespread tariffs on everything, then try to bring everything back.

FROMAN: I think one of the things your comments point out is that during—one of the issues around globalization was that the benefits of globalization were felt by everybody but were sort of invisible. You as a consumer went to stores and were able to get a wide variety of products at relatively low prices.

The costs of globalization were felt by relatively few but they were very visible and very acute—a steel factory closing down, an auto factory moving to Mexico, and that’s what we saw.

President Trump has an interesting challenge ahead because he’s flipped this now on its head, which is that the costs of his actions are going to be felt by everybody and are going to be quite visible, and if his theory is right the benefits are going to be felt by relatively few workers in relatively few sectors several years from now and so—and he’s been quite honest about this.

He says—he’s been saying to the American people this—we’re going through a transition. There’s going to be some pain, you know, but at the end of the day we’re going to have a golden era for America and I think what he’s trying to do is get the American public to be OK with, you’re going to suffer for four or five years but at the end of the day we’re going to have more manufacturing here.

As a political—I’m not a politician but it strikes me that is an interesting challenge to manage if everyone’s feeling pain for years and the benefits are felt or seen several years from now.

We’re going to open it up for questions in a minute but I want to make sure we end on not the most dour of notes and so I’m going to ask each of you to identify at least one bright spot in the world. (Laughter.)

What makes you—you wake up in the morning, you say, oh, thank goodness for—Jacob?

WARE: I’m going to need another minute. (Laughter.)

FROMAN: Oh, man, he’s checking.

Liana?

FIX: So thank goodness for Germany, my country, which is not a very obvious plug here, but it is one of the few good news stories. There’s a new government in Germany. As I said before, Germany has finally opened the tap on defense spending. And I say this not because it’s just relevant for Germany, but because it is relevant for the entirety of Europe, right?

I mean, I talked about political will, how these countries can work together, about defense spending. But the other part is you have now a Europe where you have twenty-seven different armies with a very weird constellation of tanks. I mean, what we sent to Ukraine is called the petting zoo of weaponries that Ukraine gets, right? (Laughter.)

So if there’s one bright spot that I do look forward and I think it’s good for Europe is that we will have some growth engine despite tariffs, despite the China challenge, for Europe coming from domestic defense industry and that—if that is really scaled both from Germany’s side but also working together with the other European partners, if we finally have bridges so that a tank can make its way from Germany to Poland without making the bridge collapse and so once—if finally all these structures in Europe are invested in infrastructure, defense infrastructure and so on, I think it will be a positive development there.

FROMAN: Jacob, back to you.

WARE: Yes, I think I’m ready. I think one of the major challenges that we’ve faced in the counterterrorism space but this is an intersectional issue is social media and the role that it plays.

Again, it’s an extremism problem but it’s also a child sexual abuse material problem. It’s a body disorder problem. It’s a disinformation problem, and that’s intersectional into, you know, climate change and pandemic prevention and great power competition.

Here in the United States, obviously, we are seeing kind of tech leaders emerging into major roles but you are seeing a pretty significant pushback, I think, in other countries that are kind of realizing that these companies and these technologies are not necessarily forces for good in every case, especially when it comes to young people.

Many of you will have probably watched the Netflix show Adolescence, which is kind of a phenomenon right now. That’s pointing to that issue of people waking up the effect that these technologies are having in their lives.

And just from the conversations that, you know, I’ve had over the past couple of years around town I do think—around DC, I do think there’s some energy to start pushing back on that now and, perhaps, frankly, Elon Musk is appearing, in some regards, to have overreached in terms of his political ambitions. I do think as he recedes there’s going to start to be energy to try to curtail some of these major, major forces in our society.

FROMAN: Shannon?

O’NEIL: So let me—the glass half full is, you know, the sort of global economy—the United States isn’t being the most constructive actor. But I guess I’d look at the last sort of five or ten years.

There are a lot of other countries out there actually signing free trade agreements, finding ways to work together, binding their economies together in different ways, and we have seen, you know, incredible increases in productivity and use of technology and like that, you know, is providing greater prosperity for lots of people around the world.

So I think there are sort of good news and bad news stories. Some of the stuff of those last couple of weeks I think, you know, questions a bit of that. But this overlying trend is we actually are seeing a lot of growth and the United States economy has been one of the sort of fastest growing, productive, robust economies there and so I think there’s a sort of a lot to work with there.

And then the other, just to mirror a bit because where I was going to start before is, you know, it has not been a great number of years for global democracies, right? We see sort of Freedom House and others talking about sort of the receding of democracy but hasn’t been a great number of years for autocracies either, right?

There have been real challenges for a lot of these places. And so it’s not just one side that’s having challenges. It’s also, you know, sort of—you know, it’s not just democracies. It’s also the autocracies, whether that’s Russia or China or North Korea or Iran or other places.

And so, you know, as I look around at some of the more recent elections, you know, we’ve seen some countries sort of move to the center. So that pragmatic center, try to come back together.

Now, it remains to be seen if they can pull it together but they’re getting the chance, right, and I think we’ve seen that in a number of different countries, this sort of a center coming together and that—and in countries that are wealthy like Germany but also in countries that are middle income countries that are not—have, you know, sort of the prosperity of a European or U.S.

So I guess what I would say is sort of the small silver lining is, like, I don’t think democracy is over. I don’t think it’s given up the ghost and I think a lot of what you’re seeing is even in the face of real economic and other challenges lots of—millions, hundreds of millions of people around the world voting for it and trying to hold on to it and that’s a good—

FROMAN: Excellent.

Let’s open it up to questions. Just a few reminders. This is on the record and being live streamed. Be careful what you say. (Laughter.) When you get called upon please stand, wait for the mic. State your name and academic affiliation and try and make it a relatively brief question.

Yes, here. Mic right behind you.

Q: Thank you. Diana Bolsinger from the University of Texas at El Paso.

For decades we have heard from intelligence officers and managers that most of the U.S. counterterrorist achievements have been as a result of partnership with a foreign liaison. My question, especially for Jacob and also Liana but I welcome anybody else who has insights, is we know intelligence liaison rests on trust.

Can that trust survive the changes that are taking place in our international relationships, and if not what are the prospects for future U.S. counterterrorism?

WARE: Sure. I have two thoughts just quickly. One is there is a hollowing out of U.S. intelligence agencies, especially in counterterrorism. The good news, I guess, is that has been going on for years, actually, and so we haven’t been buffeted that badly.

I remember when the Afghan withdrawal was happening a lot of us in the counterterrorism space were extremely concerned about just the lost partnerships, the lost human intelligence, the lost projection of power. If there is going to be a significant kind of result of that, it hasn’t happened yet in the U.S. That’s the good news. But I do fear that a lot of these processes, a lot of this hollowing out, a lot of this kind of assault on talent, is going to take some years to come to fruition. So we’re going to have to wait and see.

The other thing that I will note, and I think it’s a really important point because your questions were largely about foreign intelligences, El Paso where you’re from, of course, is the site of the deadliest domestic terrorist incident in the U.S. since Oklahoma City, which is coming up next week of the anniversary—the white supremacist shooting in August 2019 that killed twenty-three people.

The predominant terrorism threat to the United States today is internal regardless of kind of the ideologies that you look at. I remember on New Year’s Day, right, there was a rumor at some point that went around that that individual had crossed the border at Eagle Pass. That wasn’t true, right? He was a convert to Islam, a U.S. Army veteran from Texas. And so we can worry about the foreign side and the intelligence partnerships. But the high likelihood in my view, my assessment, is the next terrorist attacks that come, whether they are probably most likely white supremacists but whether they are Salafi jihadists or far left or a single issue or a male supremacist, they’re going to be internal. They’re going to be homegrown threats. They’re going to be Americans attacking Americans, and that’s a different set of solutions.

The bad news then is, you know, the FBI is counterterrorism. Domestic counterterrorism units are being pushed aside as well and much of the prevention or countering violent extremism work that kind of comes through Department of Homeland Security is also being cut.

So that domestic counterterrorism capability is being taken away and that is a worry, especially for places like El Paso that have this very high profile target set, frankly.

Thank you.

FROMAN: This gentleman here in the middle.

Q: Sokol Celo, Suffolk University in Boston, Massachusetts.

My question is mostly for Shannon. Most of what we are seeing right now in terms of trade and tariffs is predicated on bringing manufacturing jobs back to the United States. Well, when I talk to my students about this topic in general I conduct, like, an informal survey.

I ask them to guess what percentage of all the jobs in United States is accounted for by manufacturing. I get the very wild range from 5 percent to 70 percent. Well, the right answer is less than 8 percent. So we are talking about less than 8 percent, first.

Second, manufacturing—there are two ways how to look at it. One is the number of jobs but the other is the output of the manufacturing, and I was reading the other day that whereas in historical scale the number of jobs has gone down the output has actually gone up, and the introduction of new technologies including artificial intelligence if anything is going to increase the output even further, which means we are going to need less people.

So given this, too, why is the argument of manufacturing jobs so prominent and working in many cases?

O’NEIL: That’s a great addendum, right? We have more manufacturing in terms of output than we did, you know, back in the golden years that we’re sort of harkening back to but we do have fewer jobs, right? It’s gone from, you know, 15, 20 percent to 8 percent as you say. And if and when factories come back they are not going to come back with jobs.

In fact, I was recently in Tokyo and talking to an industrial company there and they were thinking about putting a—they make switches. They’re going to make a switch factory. Was it going to be in Mexico or was it going to be in the United States? And they were thinking about the—you know, if there are going to be tariffs. At the time it was still if there are going to be tariffs. And how would that be in, you know, certain tariffs.

But they did say if they put it in the U.S. it’d be very capital intensive and it’ll be totally automated and there would be very few jobs and that, I think, is just repeated over and over again.

I mean, why—I will also say that when you look at the scale of pay and the like that actually high-end services, you know, often pay more. Export-oriented jobs pay more, that aren’t always in manufacturing because we lead in services. So there are other jobs. It’s not just that these are the best paying jobs today in the U.S. economy.

But, you know, I will defer. As, you know, Mike said, I am not a politician either. You know, I think there is sort of this glorified, you know, sort of union job of the 1970s or 1980s where you didn’t have to have a college education but you could have a—you know, a well-paid job. There’s lots of reasons why no matter what you do with tariffs that will never happen again here in the United States.

But those were also jobs that sometimes didn’t let lots of other kinds of people in there, and as you look at the, you know, what jobs in the United States pay well, they are—as you all know, they are tied to higher education, some sort of higher levels of education and probably increasingly ability to be educated throughout your life and sort of change the skill sets that you have throughout your life.

And so that seems to me a better path than just focusing on, you know, steel or aluminum or other types of industries.

FROMAN: Yeah. I think Shannon has laid out that argument very well. I think if President Trump were sitting here you’d probably hear something more along the lines that no country can be great without a strong manufacturing sector.

Manufacturing drives innovation. It has spillover effects into other parts of the economy. Look at our great history around autos, around aviation, around electronics, et cetera, and that we need some critical mass of manufacturing.

And economists can—and others can argue about whether we have that critical mass now or whether it—you know, whether we’re missing it. We need to build it—to build it further. I think you would also hear that—Shannon’s absolutely right. I mean, the highest paying jobs are knowledge-related jobs, jobs that educated people get that are, largely, in the services sector.

But it’s created this barbell of high-paid jobs of well-educated service workers on one end and quite low-paid jobs of not educated, less educated service workers at the other end, and I think there’s a great deal of concern that those aren’t the kind of jobs that lead to people achieving the American dream.

It may be nostalgia for the 1950s notion of what a job in a factory could lead to but it is that kind of vision of we want people to be able to make things, innovate things, invent things, and be able to support the American dream when they go home and, you know, you’re not going to be doing that if you’re just a health aide worker. That’ll be the critique that you’ll hear from that side of the argument.

The economists have very different views on that, and as we’ve seen even great countries that are seen as great manufacturing successes like Germany the percentage of work occurs in Germany that are in manufacturing isn’t that much higher than the percentage in the United States, and it’s gone down almost in parallel over the last thirty or forty years as automation has kicked in.

Right here in the front. That was just an editorial comment from your moderator. Sorry.

Q: Good evening. My name is Jessica De Alba. I’m from the University of Maine but originally from Mexico.

So I almost had a conniption when you mentioned, Jacob, Mexico is the fifth hotspot for terrorism. That concerns me a lot. So why would the United States be interested in keeping Mexico as a partner as we have been for the past, I don’t know, more than twenty years if Mexico is just really going down the drain?

It’s just becoming a very authoritarian country, destroying its democracy—I’m not as optimistic as you, Shannon, I’m sorry—and losing in this situation. So I know Canada does not really see Mexico as a partner.

O’NEIL: Yeah, I’m happy to say—no, look, I have my worries about Mexico for sure, right, and lots of the changes and sort of the checks and balances of, you know, the judicial branch. There’s a lot of changes that have happened that are making it less democratic and less open to those spaces.

I mean, why does the United States care? I mean, you know, for good or bad we’re together, right? The United States cares because we have an almost 2,000-mile border and yes, there’s lots of goods that come across and part of the U.S. economic competitiveness is tied. That’s the good part of it.

But the downside is so does the challenges that Mexico has, you know, and whether that is, you know, criminal organizations that make lots of their money here in the United States from moving of, you know, drugs or contraband or people or other things, right, there’s those sorts of ties.

You know, there’s sort of those things. What happens in Mexico won’t stay in Mexico. So the U.S. has to have—U.S. always has an interest in that sense.

In terms of this switch in the designation from a transnational criminal organization to a terrorist organization, you know, I think there were a lot of—there were some who felt like that was important to sort of raise the profile.

You know, I will say, having looked at the sort of drug issue and criminal issue in Mexico for many years, it was very hard at times. For instance, you know, one of the best ways to go after drug cartels is to follow the money, right?

And so all of that money gets in and out of the U.S. financial system if you can follow it. It’s easier to dismantle than finding, you know, individuals here and there. But it was always very hard.

Within the Treasury there’s an investigatory department called FinCEN. It was always very hard to get, you know, those investigators to go after drug cartels even though one could argue that, you know, almost a hundred thousand Americans die every year from synthetic drug overdoses, much of it fentanyl, much of it coming in from Mexico.

So you could say but, you know, you go to the people who are there or the National Security Council and you say, well, which of these investigators do you want us to take off of al-Qaida, right, or other terrorist groups, right? Even though, you know, knock on wood, they have not killed a hundred thousand Americans this last year, which fentanyl and other drugs have.

So I think designating them a terrorist organization—the charitable interpretation is it’s an ability to bring to bear more of the U.S. resources to dismantle these organizations so that they do not threaten U.S. lives and by extension, hopefully, Mexican lives, right? I think that’s the argument.

Now, there’s a lot of sort of side consequences or unintended consequences that are very real and I would imagine, you know, our friend from El Paso thinks about this a lot, right? If you are a U.S. corporation and you have a plant—you are GM or Ford or any other and you have a plant and you’re, you know, in land that’s in a border state or any state, frankly, do you know that your landlord is not affiliated with one of the cartels/now terrorist organizations?

Are you providing material aid to a terrorist because you’re paying your bills? Do you know that the cleaning service that comes in is not affiliated or owned by one of these organizations? You don’t actually know that.

Do you know the, you know, the company that does logistics for you is not somehow affiliated? You don’t know a lot of that in some of these areas where these are diversified conglomerates, right, even though they’re illegal organizations.

So I think there’s a lot of ramifications we have not thought through. I mean, even here in the United States if you or one of your students or your children, you know, take fentanyl and you pay someone for it, have you just materially aided and abetted a terrorist because you’ve given money to them? These are—you know, these are kind of legal issues that are out there that were not out there when they weren’t designated terrorist organizations.

WARE: And in the Islamic State case, just really quickly, material support of a foreign terrorist organization was defined super, super broadly. So travel, money, yourself, propaganda—all of those things. At one point, there was a hot chocolate case of somebody who’d sent hot chocolate to a child in Syria. That’s probably the biggest impact here.

Now, I would not have advocated for designating these cartels as foreign terrorist organizations because I don’t see them as necessarily political. They’re more economic or public health, perhaps, in my view. But we have kind of opened up a can of worms here that is going to play out, and we’ll see how that goes.

FROMAN: Let’s go to the back and then I’ll come back up here.

Q: Hello. Thank you all. Brian Alexander with Washington and Lee University and the W&L Washington Term.

Thinking of something that Shannon mentioned in terms of not being able to put the toothpaste back in the bottle and thinking how a lot of us who are sort of comfortable with globalization and U.S. leadership on economic, military, and diplomatic fronts or at least comfortable with working within those frameworks to solve the problems thereof and to look to the development of the world within that framework, if the toothpaste can’t be put back in the tube based on the actions of the Trump administration, who are the winners? Who—are we looking at a global realignment?

Who comes out ahead in this situation so that if in 2028, for instance, we have a president who is sort of mired in 1990s beliefs about the economy and democracy, what is that person looking at?

And I know we can’t predict what’s going to happen five minutes from now but I’m asking you maybe to give us some insights because I think the challenge is, like, what—I mean, do we just embrace this new world order that seems to be disrupting everything we know, or can we start to think, well, what are we going to be looking at when, perhaps, different minds are calling some of the shots?

Thank you.

O’NEIL: Well, I’ll say a few things and you probably have some thoughts on this, too.

So, you know, I guess what I would say, and leaving aside some of the personalities and the particular policies that we’ve seen and that, as you rightly mentioned, change quickly, yeah, I think one thing we’re seeing is that lots of the big, global kind of rules-based order institutions that we have depended on—you know, the WTO, the UN, the WHO, the World Bank, the IMF, name your institution—you know, many of these just don’t function well in a situation of rising great power competition, right?

And when some of them were formed in the Cold War, yes, you had great powers but they were really separate. Their economies were very separate, right? You had a bloc—the Soviet bloc and you had the sort of a Western bloc and that was separate.

But now we are back in a state of great power competition and many powers, perhaps, but at least, you know, two to three and they are intertwined. And so I think some of the breakdown and the challenges we’re talking about are not just, you know, personalities and predilections but are really this just stress for these institutions that were never designed to manage conflicts within.

And so that is—so that’s just a way, you know, so how do we get to who wins on the other side. I think it really depends on, you know, which of these visions of the worlds or paradigms that are put out there sort of comes out on the other side.

And there’s one that I can imagine, which is maybe the next, you know, three years as things shake out but maybe the—you know, the next sort of president of the United States and, like, where you do have a divide between sort of a more, you know, China and Russia and other based sort of, you know, economies and organizations and more Western where you sort of have an agglomeration of, you know, whether it’s Europe and the United States and many—lots of emerging economies and there are more ties you start seeing, you know, at least on the commercial side sort of a bit more of separate kind of production, you know, facilities of supply chains and the like that provide for these different markets, so there’s sort of a balance. You get a little bit of a divide back in there. I mean, I think another one that actually I was writing about earlier this week is that you get a little bit of the U.S. plus one. So people kind of come to the U.S., they produce for the U.S., they’re tied there, but the rest of the world kind of forms back around. And you’re starting to see that a little bit with at least the trading architecture between all of the free trade agreements that are either under negotiation, or signed, or already working, where they’re kind of without the United States. Like, a little bit of that.

But I would say, when you get past the economics—some of that shuffling is happening—when you get past the economic, you know, at least right now, you know, the U.S. is still the biggest defense power. The U.S. is still the biggest diplomatic the power. I do think the U.S. still plays a role. The U.S. is still a place, even with the challenges we have right now, that people around the world want to come to. So I think there’s a role for the U.S. to step back in. I don’t think all is—if this is not your—you know, the way your politics works today, or you have a different view of things, it’s not like this is sort of the end of history, right—to go back to that—(laughs)—you know? I think there is space for the back and forth.

And frankly, you look at U.S. history, we have gone through, you know, lots of ways between isolationism and more openness and not. And so, you know, we may also be going through this. But I do—as I started off, you know, I think there’s a fundamental break from some of these paradigms and rules that we have had for a long time, and something else will evolve afterward.

FROMAN: The gentleman here.

Q: Hi, everyone. My name is Drissa Kone, from HJ International Graduate School, twenty blocks away from here.

So my question is for Jacob. You mentioned about the Sahel region, which is basically a critical area right now. And those three countries—Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger—they have a narrative—and this is supported by, actually, a lot of social media people from there—that the terrorist group there actually came from Libya when Libya collapsed, actually, and then moved there. And then they actually are being supported, funded, and trained by NATO. That’s the narrative. And that’s why they actually kick out the French and all the international, you know, organizations there, so that they can actually fight better terrorism. What is your thought on this? (Laughs.) One of my students asked me this question, I couldn’t answer, so. (Laughter.)

WARE: So you decided to put me on the spot. I don’t know. It’s a really good question. Gosh, I have not heard that—you said NATO’s funding those organizations? Yeah. I have not heard that particular angle. I know that, you know, a lot of those movements in that region are, you’re quite right, made up of foreigners. It’s actually the same with the case of the ISIS Khorasan Group. It was the same with HTS in Syria. These are international groups that have kind of embedded themselves in the local population. My understanding, you know, of the region, of the violence there, is more so that there are governance issues. I think, you know, those three countries, or those three countries and the neighboring countries, have had something, like, six coups in the past three years. That is not a recipe for combating violence.

The other thing I will say is, in this particular conflict and in others—feel free to throw something at me if I get the econ wrong here—but in counterterrorism we’re dealing with both the supply and a demand problem. And we’ve lost the supply fight in a lot of different regions. We’ve lost the ability to deter organizations from taking hold of institutions. We need to think about demand as well. Why are young people in that region turning towards these organizations rather than a different option? That appears to be the case in a lot of conflicts, whether it’s Gaza, whether it’s, you know, the Taliban. We have failed to break that link all around the world. So I would point to that.

Last thing I’ll say, we have great fellows here working on these questions. Ebenezer Obadare, our senior fellow for Africa studies, is from the region as well. He’s great. And I’d pointed to Josh Kurlantzick’s work on this topic as well, who’s studying coups and military governance. And he has looked at this question as well. So I hope that’s helpful to your student. Thank you.

FROMAN: Am I missing anybody in the back here? Yes, gentleman there.

Q: My name is Kwaku Obosu-Mensah. I’m from Lorain County Community College, which is in Elyria, about twenty-five miles west of Cleveland, Ohio.

OK, this about European peace. We all know that the conflict, if I should call it this way, is between Western European countries and Russia. We also know that people who belong to the same team normally cooperate with each other. So has the European Union ever considered inviting Russia to join the Union?

FIX: (Laughs.)

FROMAN: Go ahead.

FIX: It’s a—it’s actually a very good question. They have considered something—it’s not an explicit invitation to the European Union—but the European Union, especially in the 2000s, has realized that, with the dissolution of the Soviet bloc, there’s suddenly many more countries in Central and Eastern Europe on its borders. And it has sort of expanded in multiple waves of EU integration, you know, integrating Poland, integrating Hungary, and so on. And they’ve built something which was called, in 2008, the Eastern Partnership. Because the European Union thought, OK, we can’t expand forever, right, further east. But we can create closer relationships with countries that are beyond our expansive reach right now—Ukraine, with Belarus. And we can try to negotiate, actually, free trade agreements with those countries. And that’s what the European Union offered to Ukraine, to Belarus, to Moldova, and then also to the South Caucasus countries of Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia.

And they also offered that to Russia. So they also told Russia, well, look, why can’t we have—don’t you want to be part of this Eastern Partnership? Why can’t we have this kind of special relationship? It has not worked at that time. And the reason is the same reason why the NATO-Russia relationship has also not worked, because Russia has never perceived itself as being part of an eastern region. It always wanted to be seen as at least an equal player. And there is this famous quote from the moment when George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin met. And Vladimir Putin asked, well, when can Russia join NATO? And George W. Bush said, well, there is a line, right? (Laughs.) There’s a queue of countries that want to join NATO.

And this is what was at that point, from the Russian side, unacceptable. They don’t want to be pooled with other countries. They don’t want to stand in line. As a great power, they have perceived them, at that time, as a power that is first in line, that makes first these privileged relationships. We had some other attempts of EU-Russia cooperation back then—modernization partnerships, and so on and so on—but very quickly Russia has turned the corner towards a more and more authoritarian system where all these kinds of cooperation have become very difficult. And I would say, the main country suffering from that failure of EU-Russia, NATO-Russia, West and Russia cooperation, after the 1990s, are the countries in between. And that’s in particular Ukraine, obviously, but also Georgia and Moldova, to some extent. Because they have been caught in between this. There’s little else to say about that.

FROMAN: I’ll take these last two questions here, and this gentleman had question. Let’s take them together, and then we’ll give the panel the last word.

Q: Hi. I’m Tom Dolan from UCF in Orlando.

So, Mike, I have a Europe question. So sometimes when I’ve looked at things by, like, people like Kris Lane that kind of endorse the U.S. pulling out of Europe I’ve kind of responded this feels almost like a recipe for Polish nuclear weapons. (Laughter.) And a couple weeks ago, Polish Prime Minister Tusk basically said maybe Poland should be interested in these things. Do you think there’s a realistic chance of that happening? And if a, shall we say, nuclear pierogi does come to exist—(laughter)—could that actually be stabilizing, since, you know, I think many people regard them as being able to credibly threaten to use them, at least in a deterrent sense?

FIX: That’s a great question.

FROMAN: Oh, let’s take one more. And we’ll give everyone the last word.

Q: Hi. My name is Brian Frehner. I’m from University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Like many Americans, my head is kind of spinning from all the recent changes, but I’ve sensed a tenor in each of the speakers, really, that in many ways perhaps some of the current changes may be good to kind of break free from common American assumptions, whether it’s foreign policy, trade, et cetera. And I’m just wondering how much of this—you know, the fact that the tariff on China continues to linger at 125 percent, you know, I’m wondering is the elephant in the room not that this is all about China? And that America’s security in all of these different areas is fundamentally linked to returning this situation on its head? Is that really not what ultimately the elephant in the room is?

FROMAN: All right. Yeah. Why don’t you answer the Europe one.

FIX: (Laughs.) Yeah. I’m happy to start with the Polish nuclear question.

FROMAN: The Polish pierogi, the nuclear pierogi.

FIX: The nuclear pierogi, I love it. (Laughter.) Actually, the Polish prime minister talked about nuclear capabilities in a very broad sense. And what he actually meant is that Poland, for a long time, wanted to get the nuclear weapons from Germany and the bomber stationed in Germany to Poland. So that has been a long-term demand. They always wanted to have that. Is there a situation—that would be the first choice that Poland would take. They want the bilateral nuclear reassurance thing that Germany has with the United States. Would they, at some point, take the step and develop their own nuclear weapons? In the line of countries that would go for that, I would place them probably below Japan, South Korea, and other countries who have an even more existential threat. But I would not fully exclude it.

What makes it more challenging, and actually the administration is quite open to this idea of friendly nuclear proliferation. I’m not sure if they really have thought this through fully, because the problem with European nuclear proliferation is that you will never have enough nukes to establish the kind of strategic stability deterrence effect that you had between the United States and Russia during the Cold War. It just doesn’t work with the proximity. It just doesn’t work with the amount of nuclear weapons. And you create a situation where suddenly each other European country is asking themselves—so would Germany accept France, UK, and Poland having nuclear weapons, without having their own nuclear weapons? Would other countries still be comfortable with Germany having nuclear weapons?

So the European theater, I believe the disadvantage is bigger than the advantage of having small-scale nuclear weapon deposits there. And I think you—I think countries will try to explore alternatives, sharing, French, UK sharing. But going for the full nuclear path would probably really only be an option if the U.S. very suddenly withdraws, not only conventional troops but also the nuclear umbrella, from Europe, which I do think is unlikely.

FROMAN: Shannon, is it all about China?

O’NEIL: Well, you know, it’s interesting the way you put it. And we have said, right, there is something about—you know, President Trump’s approach has gotten, you know, other countries, particularly allies, to do things that they had not done before, right? Liana talked about stepping up defense spending. We have lots of countries who are saying they’re going to, you know, unilaterally lower their tariffs, vis-à-vis whether it’s India or Vietnam or others that we haven’t been able to get them to do. So there are benefits to that. But I do think there’s something to your framing of is it all about China. And if it is all about China, you know, the challenges of China are both on the economic front that, you know, we have sort of the system of supposedly open trade, and they haven’t been playing by those rules. And so they have gained advantage. And how do you counter that?

Do you throw out all the rules and do something different? Maybe that’s a way. But I would say, I think we would find more advantage, as a U.S. economy, if we work with—if we do that new system, or address China together rather than alone. And to me, you know, a 10 percent universal tariff on every country around the world suggests that we’re not going to do it with others. We’re going to make—we’re either going to make a deal or not with China, right? There’s something happening there. But it’s not as if we’re bringing the Europeans in, or countries—you know, emerging markets or others into that. And they’re having similar challenges, right? You know, the overcapacity issue of China sending out, you know, a net trillion surplus worth of goods is—sure, there’s challenges to the U.S. economy, there’s challenges to European, but there are challenges to, you know, India, Brazil, all of Southeast Asia, Africa. Anybody else who has aspirations for an industrial base is going to have challenges there as well.

So I think, you know, yes, it is a big challenge on the global side. And then as you think about on the sort of more, you know, muscular side, you know, defense, diplomacy, and the like, lots of countries face challenges with China too, right? Ask all of their neighbors, you know, around the South China Sea. Ask those who, you know, have been subjected to some coercion in other places, where they want them to go along on UN votes or other things. And so I think there is a space here for the United States to join with others to push back successfully on some of those. But that’s much harder to do if you’ve isolated yourself.

FROMAN: In another recent Foreign Affairs article—(laughter)—I wrote—(laughter)—that we spent years trying to get China to become more like us. That was sort of the whole proposition of bringing them into the international system. And we lectured them about not being protectionist, not restricting foreign investment, and not subsidizing industries. And I’d say they sort of gave us the Heisman, and we made only modest progress. And as a result, we’re now protectionist, we’re now restricting foreign investment, and we’re now subsidizing industry. So rather than China becoming more like us, we have become more like China.

And I think the question is, can we compete as well, if not better, than China on their rules of the road, rather than the rules of the road that we set up after the Second World War, that Shannon just referred to, and the open rules-based system? And it goes to the previous question about where is this all heading? What kind of paradigm are we heading towards? I think that’s one of the fundamental questions to be addressed.

These are three of eighty fellows we have across the Council on Foreign Relations that cover literally every region, every functional—virtually, every functional area. You’re going to be seeing some of them tomorrow. And we hope you’ll view the Council as a resource, not only the written products out there but this incredible group of experts that cover that waterfront. We’re here in part to help support educators, to make sure that we’re providing the kind of materials and kind of input for you to help your students understand what it means to be an even better informed global citizen. So please join me in thanking this group. (Applause.)

You have dinner now. And I’m told to remind folks that tomorrow morning breakfast begins at 7:45, and then there’ll be a session—the first session is at 8:30 on some very important set of subjects. (Laughter.) Please be here on time and enjoy your evening.

O’NEIL: Thank you. (Applause.)

(END)

FASKIANOS: Good morning, everybody. Good morning. Welcome back. We are about to get started. So, I’m happy you all came back in the rain. Welcome to the second day of the College and University Educators Workshop. We have a full day planned for you, so drink lots of coffee.

And I’m very excited that our first panel is Global Flashpoints. And—I think they’re coming—and Reena Ninan, who’s a journalist and founder for Good Trouble Productions, will be moderating. So I’m going to invite our panel out now. And we have Jill Dougherty join joining us via videoconference, or Zoom. So, we will get started right now.

NINAN: All right. Well, good morning, everybody. Thank you so much for joining us. What a great, full, on-time crowd. I love it. Thank you for joining us for this conversation where we’re looking at the geopolitical landscape. We’re excited to talk to you all. There is so much shifting in the world today, so we’re going to get right to it. We’re seeing so many global implications, from a recalibration in the Middle East, to African countries navigating with global powers. And Jill, who is joining us on screen here—hey, Jill, good morning to you—we’re going to take a look at also Russia’s war in Ukraine and the situation out there.

So, I want to introduce, as you see here, Jill Dougherty is going to be joining us from Georgetown University, and well renowned and well known. Worked at CNN and the Bureau of Moscow for many, many years. Jill, so good to see you.

And right next to me is Zongyuan, Zoe as we’re going to call her, Liu. Thank you for joining us. She is the Maurice R. Greenberg senior fellow for China studies right here in the Council on Foreign Relations.

Next to Zoe is Mvemba Phezo Dizolele. Close enough? Did I get it? If I can’t get the name right, something’s wrong. (Laughter.) Also here joining us as the director and senior fellow of the Africa Program for the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

And a face you all probably know well, Steven Cook, who is the Eni Enrico Mattei senior fellow for Middle East and Africa studies here at the Council on Foreign Relations. Thank you guys so much.

Well, I want to kick it off. So much is changing. I keep checking my phone to see what the latest is in the world by the minute. So, I thought we’d kick it off first and kind of look at what is one key driver in all of your regions that you’re seeing right now that has major global implications. Jill, I want to go ahead and start with you and Russia, if you don’t mind. But what are you seeing in that region?

DOUGHERTY: Well, there is—number one, it’s great to be able to talk to fellow educators. And, you know, I’m trying to get my thoughts for my students around this very question. So there’s no question that in the neighborhood that I look at former—I hate to say former Soviet Union, but there doesn’t seem to be much better way to describe it at this point. It’s Ukraine. It’s the war in Ukraine. As some would say, the war against Ukraine. And, you know, this morning, Reena, I sat down—and panel—I sat down and just thought, almost mapping it out, how this is connected to everything else.

And if you look at—number one, this is the biggest land war in Europe since World War II, right? Then you have just sheer numbers of people who are dead, wounded, et cetera—both military and civilian. Then you look at Europe transformed. You know, NATO has two new members. It’s much bigger than it’s ever been. Europe now is looking at—and this is kind of more a political, geopolitical question, will the United States be there to defend them if Russia decides, after this war, to attack more countries? So, you have this complete, you know, change in Europe that we can get into, Germany, rearming.

Then you have, I would say, you know, for young people, a generational effect. That this is a generation that’s going to be affected in, really, every country, certainly, in Europe—Russia, Ukraine, Europe, and, I would argue, even in the United States, by this. Then you have food prices. And this is where Africa comes in, the Global South—another term that I don’t particularly like, but let’s call it—you know, developing countries hit by increased food prices because of the war. Then, you know—(laughs)—I won’t go on forever—but you have Russia and its friends—China, Iran, North Korea, of all places. And North Korean forces fighting in Europe. I mean, it’s unthinkable a year ago, you know?

I would say regional fears. Central Asia is rapidly transforming, the Caucasus. I’ve been to the Republic of Georgia three times last year, I was there. Grave concern there. And then, the last thing that I would just put on the map is this developing rapprochement or reset with Russia with the Trump administration, which also is, you know, connected in direct and indirect ways to Ukraine, which could transform yet—(laughs)—the world even more. So, that’s my spin around the world.

NINAN: Absolutely. Thank you so much, Jill. I want to get more into the Trump administration in just a moment. But, Zoe, what are you looking at in China that you think is a big driver, that maybe people might not be thinking not be thinking about at this moment?

LIU: Yeah. Reena, first of all, thank you for agreeing to do this. And I also wanted to thank everyone here in the room for your commitment to America’s education and to educating the next generation. I understand how much commitment you have made, especially at this moment. So, thank you for your service. And also thank you for joining us here at CFR.

I think Jill did a very, very fantastic job laying out the map. What I wanted to do is I wanted to zoom in on China, as you suggested. And I wouldn’t say that what I’m going to say right now is going to—is going to be something, like, groundbreaking. It’s not going to be. And this is what I think the driver, not just inside China but also across Asia, across Eurasia, and across the global system, perhaps, is the transformation of the Chinese economy. And the reason I mention this is because—let’s sort of—let me take a step back by going to the first Trump administration.

In 2017, that was the first time America’s national security strategy defined China as a strategic competitor. For lack of better words, from there on, I think, you know, that has become the lens through which China views how the United States views the Chinese government and the Communist Party of China. And then, continuing forward, over the past few—over the past few years, a growing body of literature basically started talking about great-power competition, and in the context of strategic rivalry. But the fundamental change here is not necessarily how much the Chinese Communist Party has changed, or how much China geographically has changed. Nothing has changed.

But what has changed is the Chinese economy, not just in terms of its size but also in terms of its quality, and also in terms of what the Chinese leader wants China, or the Chinese economy, to be. And, associated how the leader has measured China’s progress towards national rejuvenation, no longer just in terms of pure GDP growth number but perhaps the fewer numbers that he cares about, such as rural rejuvenation, or technological development. So, in that particular context, a lot of this could be—could have direct implications for great-power competition. Not just in terms of economic competition, but also national security, but also in terms of technology.

And a lot of this has a lot to do not just with what we have seen in terms of China’s regulatory changes, what—the war in Ukraine, but also how China views its own vulnerability. China recognized that it benefited tremendously from joining the WTO in December 2001, and somehow, perhaps starting from the global financial crisis, kind of realized that, well, the more China get intertwined and integrated into the global economic and particularly financial system, the more likely it become collateral damage. And this is not just in terms of China, but also in terms of a lot of developing countries. Or, again, I agree with Jill, you know, the contested meaning of Global South, for lack of better word.

You started to see the rise of—or, the blocing, grouping of Global South, with the start of BRICS around the time of the global financial crisis. And people—folks started to realize that they do not want to be collateral damage anymore. Fast forward, COVID happened. COVID happened with the supply chain disruption. The reverse—the reverse image started in the rest—in developing economies in terms of, geez, what do we used to think, economy of scale is good for business, reduce costs, but now economy of scale becomes concentrated risk that cannot be diversified. Let’s fast forward, not just in terms of companies, but governments started to implement policies, fast track de-risking or decoupling.

So, this is sort of the world we are in now, with the transformation of the Chinese economy. Not only the content of great-power competition has changed, but how different levels activities—in terms of firms, in terms of government policies, and perhaps in terms of human resources going forward. And that’s the battle of education.

NINAN: And, Zoe, I want to get into the battle for education and also tariffs a little bit later, but when I get to our other two panelists here as well.

Mvemba, when you look at Africa, it really is a battleground for global power competition right now. What are you seeing that’s a driver right now that people might not be thinking about in Africa?

DIZOLELE: Thank you, Reena. And thank you, friends. Good morning. When it comes to Africa, I think the biggest problem is the state as a source of insecurity. In other words, it’s not fundament—anything fundamentally wrong with the Africans, but the model that became the state in Africa is the old colonial model. So, it’s not a model that was designed based on the social contract. It’s a model that was based on predation and exploitation. All roads led to Rome. You know, you visit any African countries, the roads don’t make any sense. The airport don’t make any sense. They don’t make any sense because they were not built to make sense. They were built to drive you to Hoboken, Belgium—not the one in New Jersey—(laughter)—for the refinery of copper from DRC. They were built to drive you to Liverpool for all the resources they were taking from the so-called commonwealth.

That state, sixty years later, has not changed. So, Africans have not had the time nor the space to sit down and say, what will work for us? There is no organic state in Africa, with a few exceptions. Everything was patched together for the interest of somebody else. That has become the basis of what we come to know as the predatory state. And it’s the only thing you could have, because the mother of that predatory state was another predatory state, led by gouverneur général who went to Sorbonne or Oxford, but was no Democrat. So today, we have the consequences of that with the militaries in a lot of these countries, based on one region, from one religion, or one tribe, and trying to promote—to promote security. They can’t.

We have demographic pressures with the youth demanding the real change, because the youth are technologically savvy. They know more about Kim Kardashian than we do. They’re very much into 50 Cent’s motto—get rich or die trying. (Laughter.) So, they expect change to come today. And we see this with mobilization. We see this with Y’en a Marre in Senegal, Balai Citoyen in Burkina Faso, LUCHA in DRC, #FeesMustFall in South Africa, and so on. The world is not responsive to that either. So, not only the world is not responsive, in as much as the world responds, as it happens in Europe, it responds with the rise of the extreme right. And the extreme right to this African youth is dangerous. They talk about replacement and so on.

So, the failure to read Africa properly continue leading us to that competitive—the field of competition from the rest of the world. There’s misreading of Africa in the U.S. There’s misreading of Africa in Europe. The rise of the extreme right in Europe, and also in the U.S., make it so that it’s even more difficult. I prefer talking about replenishment as opposed to replacement. With the median age of nineteen in Africa, and in many places fifteen years old, that’s the future of the world. That’s the future of Europe, which has the median age of forty-nine. So Europe, when it becomes a fortress with 30,000 feet walls, is not going to rejuvenate. So the survival of the very culture that Europeans want to save from the Africans, is going to be saved by Africans.

So, if you were to take France, the future of French as a language is in Africa. It’s not in Paris. We have spiced it a lot in Africa—(laughter)—but it’s still French. It’s Kinshasa that is the largest French speaking country. Is Zaire, DRC, that is the largest French speaking country. Not—so the French have not gotten the memo. (Laughter.) If you look at the music, and art—

COOK: They should. Have you seen the pictures of the French national soccer team?

DIZOLELE: I know! (Laughter.) So, you look at the comedians, all the musicians, the arts, Aya Nakamura, Master James, all those guys, they’re all in the first generation French or second generation. And during the World Cup, as Steve just said, as long as Nigeria is out, Senegal is out, and so—but if France is still playing, Africa is still playing. (Laughter.) So that’s—

NINAN: That’s wonderful.

LIU: Really good.

NINAN: Thank you so much, Mvemba. (Applause.)

Steven, you know, you have actually written about sort of the recalibration underway in the Middle East. And interesting, you know, Mvemba was talking about the younger population. The Middle East as a significant younger population as well. What are you watching and what are you seeing as drivers of change in the Middle East?

COOK: Yeah. Thanks very much for the question, Reena. And it’s nice to see all of you. Good morning. I’m sort of taken back to my days in the classroom because there’s a number—there’s a smattering of open seats here in the front. (Laughter.) Bring everybody forward. Don’t be afraid. (Laughter.)

You know, if this conversation was happening before September 15, 2024, I might have said a driver of change is the extraordinary transformation happening within Saudi society. I might have said, prior to then even, probably the prospects of normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Of course, everybody talks about the Middle East being very young, and they’re a youth bulge. Although the youth bulge is kind of the dog that never bites. We’re kind of waiting for that change and it never—it never really—it never really happens. I guess people wanted to connect it to the Arab uprisings, but it didn’t happen.

But what I would say now is—as of September 15, I would say the real driver of regional change is the force of Israeli arms. I picked that date specifically because that’s the date, I believe, because I was there at the time, when the Israelis kicked off their real war with Hezbollah, with the beeper attacks and then the next day the walkie-talkie attacks, and then a devastating six to eight weeks of conflict in which the Israelis basically—didn’t wipe out Hezbollah, but rendered Hezbollah incapable of doing the things that Iran and Hezbollah’s leadership had sought for Hezbollah to do. Which was, to be Iran’s second-strike capability that would devastate huge parts of Israel in the event of a major regional conflict.

That has had a number of domino effects, including the fall of the Assad regime. Hezbollah was the expeditionary force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that helped to save the Assad regime. So, when the Assad regime fell and Hezbollah is devastated, Iran has lost its access to the Mediterranean and its entire western front. Its entire forward position in the Middle East is now gone. Hamas has been greatly damaged, although it remains a potent fighting force. They fired ten rockets into Ashdod the other day. But there is a reordering of the region. Suddenly, you have a much better government in Lebanon. Like, oh my god, lightning struck twice. There are all kinds of possibilities and range of outcomes for Syria. But one, finally, that may—among those ranges may be better.

So there is a reordering of the region. It doesn’t seem that way, given the kind of devastating conflict in Gaza that has gone on for the last eighteen months. But in fact, Iran is far weaker, and its Axis of Resistance is far weaker. And I think everybody—leaders in the region, many, many people in the region—believe, and they believe strongly, that a region where Iran is—the Islamic Republic is either weakened or gone, and its proxies are defanged, paves the way for a much better region. The problem is, is that a lot of decisions, and really difficult decisions, have to be made in order to get there.

And there’s a debate in Washington right now about how to get there. Clearly, President Trump has decided that negotiation is the best way to get there. I will tell you, a lot of people in the Iranian opposition think this is the exact wrong way to get there, because it throws a lifeline to an Iranian regime that isn’t really serious about negotiating.

NINAN: Steven, I want to get to Iran, but can I ask you about Gaza? Sorry, do you have one more point you want to make?

COOK: No, no, no. Just to suggest—they’re all connected, of course. But just to suggest that this is a moment where decisions that are made now are going to have an effect on the regional order in the region. And it’s up for grabs. And that’s going to have an impact on the global order, because the Middle East, despite all the patter about withdrawal and it’s not important and so on and so on, is critically important to the United States, the status quo power in the global system, and China, the rising power in the region. And if I remember Robert Gilpin’s hegemonic stability theory—I’m talking to academics—(laughter)—you’re going to have conflict between China and the United States. It doesn’t have to be military conflict, but—and the Middle East is going to be a region where that jockeying is going to happen.

NINAN: Can I really quickly get your sense on Gaza?

COOK: Yes, Gaza.

NINAN: Just before, you know, I feel like—

COOK: For my sins?

NINAN: Everything else in the international order is sort of sucking up a lot of attention, but we haven’t heard a ton on Gaza. The president has said he wants to do a massive hostage release soon and talk to Iran. We’ll get to Iran in a moment. Where do you see that going with Gaza?

COOK: OK. Everybody take a deep breath. (Laughter.) Remove all sharp objects from the room. (Laughter.) I think that all of the discussion of Gaza for the last eighteen months is airy-fairy and detached from reality. And what is happening and what was bound to happen was an Israeli reoccupation of parts of, if not the entirety of, the Gaza Strip. Which, after kind of dancing around this issue, Israeli leaders are now—I mean, the Israeli defense minister and the Israeli chief of staff are talking about we are going to occupy large parts of the Gaza Strip. And that will be a prelude to an effort on the part of Israel’s radical right, which is now part of the government, and to some extent—to some extent holds the prime minister hostage—to resettle the Gaza Strip. No two-state solution, no international force, no revitalized Palestinian Authority. None of those things. Something closer to a status quo ante than anybody could have imagined after this horrifying, horrifying conflict. That’s what I think is most likely in the Gaza Strip.

NINAN: So, the Israelis go back into Gaza, is your assessment?

COOK: And there’s going to be an Israeli military occupation in the Gaza Strip, of at least parts of it. And then once that happens—it’s already happening; it’s happening prior to it—tremendous pressure from the Israeli right wing, which is relatively small but has a more potent political argument today than it did when Ariel Sharon withdrew Israel from the Gaza Strip in 2005. And that resonates with a larger group of Israelis after the horrors of October 7. That’s where we’re going.

NINAN: Yeah. OK. Jill, I want to turn to you, because you mentioned a little bit about how this is a massive change and different perspective with this administration on Russia. We’re now, what, two years-plus into this war. How do you interpret—oh, sorry. Excuse me. Three years. You’re correct. How do you interpret Putin’s endgame in Ukraine? Is there one? Where is this headed?

DOUGHERTY: Well, that’s a big debate right now. But I think very easy to say that if you look at what he wanted to do initially when he invaded, it is to essentially take over Ukraine and use it as kind of a buffer against the West, against NATO. And take over—initially, you know, three—more than three years ago, was you physically roll in there, you take over the capital, Kyiv. Maybe you kill Zelenskyy, or at least you force him from power. You put in kind of a puppet government that is friendly to Russia. And you rule it just the way they rule some of these, I would call them puppet republics that are in the eastern part of the country, controlled by Russia right now. So, that didn’t happen. So he is not—and I think this is significant—he was not able, with the Russian forces, to take over Ukraine. And Russia is a much bigger country. It is a richer country and a more powerful country. But Ukraine has been able to hold them off for three and a half years—more than three years. So that’s significant.

I think ultimately what he wants to do is, I think I’d use the word, neuter Ukraine. If he can’t completely take it over, and, you know, there’s a footnote to that. You can take over countries in many ways. You know, tanks. You can also bring in corruption, and buy off politicians, and create—with a hybrid approach, you can create a lot of chaos without really kinetic fighting. But I think what he wants to do is neuter it, maybe leave it as a country. He does not believe—literally does not believe that Ukraine is a sovereign country. But you neuter it so that on the map it looks like a country, but realistically it has very small military—this is a specific demand from Putin right now—very small military, no aid from the West, no Ukraine prospects in the future, and some type of control by Russia.

And why all of this? Well, that’s in the mind of Vladimir Putin. But I think he believes that he has to have this kind of belt, you know, the region where Russia influences the rest of the former Soviet Union, all that west of Russia area from the Baltics down to Moldova, to keep NATO out. And I think at this point, just one last thing, I believe that even though he didn’t—was not able to do this militarily in the beginning, he is willing to wait. He’s willing to wait for some type of deal with President Trump. And he’s willing to wait for the allies to fall apart and Europe to fall apart, so that he can do what he wants. So that’s, I guess, my best interpretation.

NINAN: So, Jill, it sounds like Putin is patient, going to wait a little bit on this, and thinks that there might be some sort of a deal with Trump that’ll be in his favor in all of this.

DOUGHERTY: Yes.

NINAN: Great. Zoe, I want to turn to you because—I don’t know what the latest is on tariffs. I think the last when I checked this morning was the Chinese have hit back with 125 percent tariff. But, I warn you, you may be watching this later, or in this very moment it could change. It’s that fluid. (Laughter.) What do you think, when people are talking about China’s approach with the economy, you’re talking about what a key driver that is right now, there has just been always a significant amount of capital flow into the United States. When it goes out of the stock market it tends to maybe flow into the bond market. People are saying this could be a key moment where you are seeing further investment by China into countries where, you know, what, the United States might be a little bit unreliable now, is what China might be saying to people, come on over. We’ll help you out here. Are you seeing a strategic reorder in China’s position in the economic landscape here?

LIU: Reena, that’s an excellent question. Even though a lot of this reordering of global trade system, global economic system, seemingly to have been driven by the United States or the user’s guide of—a user’s guide to how—A User’s Guide to Reorder (sic; Restructuring) the Global Trading System, by Stephen Miran, I do see a lot of initiatives coming from not just China, but Russia, India, South Africa, Brazil, and elsewhere. It’s just that the sheer size of China is big. And the Chinese has also laid out the infrastructure, not just in terms of, you know, road and airplanes and a physical asset, but also the renminbi-based global finance—the renminbi-based alternative global financial infrastructure, centered with the so-called Cross-border Interbank Payment System, combined with a digital renminbi.

You know, when we hear people talk a lot about central bank digital currencies, Chinese not only—has not only pioneered it, but also when President Xi Jinping visited Saudi Arabia he was telling folks in the region, saying that, you know, we wanted to—we wanted you guys to start using renminbi to price energy, natural gas in particular. And I also wanted folks to start collaborating on mBridge. I’m not exactly sure President Xi Jinping, sort of, he personally, has that much technical expertise on those issues. But the fact that he pointed it out there goes to show where he wanted the future collaboration to be.

Now, in terms of capital flow you talked about, it’s very interesting to see that in the—as the tariff tension come back and forth—I don’t want to use the word tariff war, as Secretary Bessent, at his press talk he said he does not want to use the war, signaling, I hope, intent to negotiate. But on the Chinese side, in order—I would say, they still have capital control. But they have been trying to have a broader and more internationalized version of the use of renminbi in international payment and in settlement. And in a lot of ways, I would have to say, perhaps, the Communist Party of China, under the leadership of Xi Jinping, he probably has spent a lot of time, if not his entire career, has been preparing for this exact moment. And starting from—not to just, you know—

NINAN: When you say “moment,” meaning that?

LIU: Meaning, as he often says, you know, we are in a moment when there are unseen—there are unseen changes in the global system for a hundred years. So this is the moment. It’s just that perhaps leaders in the White House have our war in Ukraine and the West sanction of the Russian banks accelerated how he views China’s vulnerability, hence how he should reduce China’s vulnerability, by providing an alternative payment and a settlement system such that in an extreme scenario, China can continue doing international transactions. After all, China is still an export-dependent economy. And about 30 percent of global manufacturing output is from China. Put this in context. It basically means China’s share in global manufacturing is bigger than the combined share of the U.S., Japan, Korea, Italy, France, and Germany. So, China relies upon the rest of the world. And it needs ways to continue business if it were under Western sanctions.

NINAN: I just want to turn to all of you—let you know, in a few minutes we’re going to turn to all of you for questions. So hope you might be ready with some thoughts to ask our great panelists here.

Mvemba, I want to ask you about—there’s just such an aid crunch right now. You know, a cut of aid. When you’re looking at a room of educators here, how can they look beyond, sort of, the aid dependency narratives we’ve talked about with students? Where do you see the best help in this situation of having, you know, drastic USAID cuts to Africa and throughout the world, where do you see that—how do you see that transforming the region?

DIZOLELE: I started by saying, Reena, that the state is the source of instability, not because people are mad. It’s just the structure that they inherited. Aid became a serious problem for Africa because it was not the kind of aid that augmented governance. It was the kind of aid that crippled governance and tried to substitute itself for the government. So, if you look at the public sector, public health sector, which is one very blatant sector, in case of, let’s say, PEPFAR in South Africa, or the entire eastern side and southern side that were heavily affected by HIV/AIDS, those countries, for the most part, did not build the capacity to provide the antiretroviral drugs and so on. They continue to depend on the U.S. and other donors for a good thirty years.

That is not acceptable. So in the words of former President Uhuru Kenyatta, this is somebody else’s money you were planning on. So, whether the Gates Foundations and others who come into the spaces, I, for one, always have problem with this kind of aid, because, again, it’s crippling the government. You cannot have the Norwegian and the Swedes come and fund all the girl-boy parity education in Uganda, or in Rwanda, and then allow them to attack their neighbors, right? Because every time you do this kind of funding you actually not pushing for better government.

And so, I think it’s actually—in French, we say quelque chose, le malheur est bon, sometimes bad things lead to good outcome. We hope this is a chance for African governments to go back to the drawing table and start wondering, what are we doing? Why is it we have to depend on Ukraine for grain, when Africa is home to most arable lands in the world? It makes no sense. Why are you eating wheat in the first place, when you have fonio, you have sorghum. Why don’t you develop that? Because the moment the Ukrainian and the Russians start fighting, you are suffering because of bread. So this is where I see the transformation.

NINAN: So, you think this will help these countries stand up on their own?

DIZOLELE: I hope it will help. Yes, I hope it will. But if the state is so broken because of the wrong model, I’m not as hopeful.

NINAN: OK. Steven—if you look at your tables there is a great article that you’ll see right there from Steven Cook, called “America’s Universities Could End Up Zombies”. What a headline, Steven. What a headline.

COOK: I don’t write headlines. (Laughter.)

NINAN: You’re looking sort of at U.S. higher education. It was the envy of the world, but with state interference it might not be for long. I know this is a topic that’s top of mind for universities. The administration has come in and cut, in some cases, hundreds of millions of dollars, or threatened to, I should say. What’s your outlook? Because there are many students being deported in universities. What are you picking up on the landscape in higher education right now?

COOK: (Laughs.) Well, I—these are the folks that—what are they picking up on in higher education? But this is sort of my statement on what’s been happening broadly at the universities. And let me just say that, if not for a chance meeting of someone at a gym in Washington, DC in, like, 1997, I would be on the other side here. I would not have been at the Council on Foreign Relations, because that chance meeting led to a chain of events that ultimately led to my coming to the Council on Foreign Relations, not long after defending my dissertation. I would have been very, very happy going off and teaching at, you know, like, my alma mater, Vassar, or someplace like that. It would have been great. Totally fun. Which is why, when I’ve had opportunities to adjunct, I’ve always—I’ve always jumped at it, despite the pay being, like, five bucks an hour. (Laughter.) In any event—which I haven’t made since I delivered newspapers in suburban Long Island in the early 1980s.

In any event, I have been disturbed by events on campus beginning with October 7. And I don’t need to go through the litany of horrors that have happened on campuses where university administrators and professors have basically lost control of their campus, some in cahoots with the chaos on these campuses. At the same time, I think what the Trump administration is trying to do to establish political control of the campuses risks destroying the crown jewel that is not just great for America, but it’s great for the world. Sure, there are departments and schools that have veered very far from what their missions are, but for the administration to try to dock universities hundreds of millions of dollars will impact cancer research, research into quantum computing, understanding AI, understanding things like de-democratization, understanding ancient civilizations, all of which enrich our lives and advance our lives and our civilization.

And the Middle East angle of this is, I went into the QS ratings of world universities. And I’ve lived for long periods in Egypt, Turkey, and Syria. And I looked at the flagship universities in those places, all of which are controlled by the government, or mass—I mean the mukhabarat—you can’t, you know, swing a dead cat in Cairo University and not hit a member of the mukhabarat posing as a student. And these crown jewels are ranked incredibly low in those global rankings. And it doesn’t matter, you know, what you think about these rankings. It’s clear that these universities are compromised.

And I don’t think Columbia is in danger of becoming Ain Shams University, ranked 592nd in the world. But I do think that more government interference undermines academic freedom and undermines research that really enriches all of our lives, saves lives, and helps us be more competitive. At the same time, the academic freedom is not something to hide behind and doesn’t shield people from legitimate criticism of things that are, I think, just inappropriate. I think the moral absolutism that has taken over some campuses, rather than investigating and examining the incredibly complex issues that face us in the Middle East, and elsewhere, is bad for—is bad for all of us.

NINAN: Zoe, I mean, part of the thinking on this from the Trump administration is we want to make America great again. We want American workers to be the AI experts around the world. We don’t want to import them from China. What’s the thinking when people—the mindset is, we don’t want to give people in other countries an opportunity that should be for American students? How does that backfire?

LIU: It backfires both in terms of short term and also in the long run. I think in the short term, we started to see not just U.S. students starting to wonder, is it just—could I still even get a job if I spend the time to study Mandarin, because it seems like China is no longer a good place to do business. And if I’m MBA student, I might as well—might as well do something else. And, by the way, artificial intelligence is going to help me understand a different language without having to study it, without—I can spend other time, do something else. So, that’s one side of it.

And you see with the right—this new round of U.S.-China trade tension, you’re starting to see Chinese parents and the Chinese government starting to ask the same thing. Literally, about one or two days ago Chinese authorities issued two warnings. One is a travel warning to the United States. The other is education, talking about if students are going to study in the United States, you ought to be aware of all the security risk.

NINAN: And that’s something they haven’t done before?

LIU: To my knowledge, I haven’t seen anything like that. And these are—the short-term turbulences might mean, well, you know, like, the good Chinese students are not coming. That basically means university labs might not necessarily get cheap but a good quality research assistant. (Laughs.) But in the long run, I think the damage is even bigger, because less Chinese students coming to the United States means, for the U.S., this is bad. Bad in the sense that for the future generation in China you are breeding people who do not understand the complex of how U.S. politics work, and vice versa. Less Chinese—less U.S. students going to China, it basically means less U.S. people going forward is not going to understand how complex the Chinese system works.

Imagine a future—wouldn’t this future be a better version? Imagine this future. You have a future Chinese leader who can speak English, who can understand a rap, or who can sing a Taylor Swift song, or whatever that generation’s Taylor Swift is. Or, even better, they can go to a baseball game together, they can go to a football game—American football—game together, and share some jokes. I think folks in that kind of scenario would be way much better than whatever situation we are in today.

NINAN: So, you’re saying it’s not just about brain drain or, you know, academics. It’s also about culture and understanding between two countries that might not have existed if they didn’t come and study in the United States, and likewise for our understanding here in the U.S. as well.

LIU: Exactly, Reena. And I really appreciate the question about people. And the reason is because when I was—I consider myself as, and people, like, in my generation, as the golden era of U.S.-China relationship. I was born and raised in China, become naturalized citizen here, and I still have friends, family back in China, and vice versa. A lot of my American friends, they now live in China. And both sides are frustrated by the situation we are in now. What saddens me on a day-to-day basis is that great-power competition at the state level, at the system level, renders individual, normal people, like us, as collateral damage. Renders a small business unable to do their work. It’s the great power of the United States, the great power of China is not necessarily all the gigantic bureaucracy in DC or in Beijing. It’s the individuals. It’s the people.

NINAN: Thank you. I want to open it up to the audience here, to all of you. We’ve got mics around. If you wouldn’t mind just identifying yourself, tell us who you are. I think we’ve got a question right here. If you could tell us who you are. And I’d just ask that you ask a quick and pointed question, so we can make our way around.

Q: Sokol Celo from Suffolk University in Boston.

Question for Jill. So for us, the common mortals outside the academics of foreign relations, we tend to describe the relationships between countries in dyads. So, country A and country B. So for change, I would like you to discuss a triad, namely, China, U.S., and Russia. Does the triangle make sense to you? If I would make a thought experiment and give you information about China-U.S. relations, and China-Russia relations, and tell you to predict the third side of the triangle, what would you say?

DOUGHERTY: You know, I think that is a really important point. If you look at the way Putin looks at the world, and probably the way Donald Trump looks at the world, they do tend to look at big countries. You know, big, sovereign countries—U.S., China, and then Russia, which, of course, is diminished but still sees itself as a major power. But I think, you know, based on the conversation that we’ve been having for half an hour, that is a very shortsighted view of what is going on in the world. I mean, I’ve gone to Central Asia quite a bit. And there is a lot of change there. Countries that used to be under the sway of Russia now are being influenced by China, but are kind of making their own way. So I think, yes, you could look at it as a triangle. But I really think that that is an outdated view of the world. Where is Africa? You know, where is Africa in that? I just think that that’s not the way the world functions. And especially for the young people that we’re teaching, we have to explain to them that it really matters that, you know, some kid in Kazakhstan is going to do something. That’s the way I look at it.

NINAN: Thank you, Jill. Yes, right over here.

Q: Good morning. Jessica De Alba from the University of Maine.

I have two very—two quick questions. One for Steve. So, knowing that the two-state solution might not really become, or ever, so do you think that there is an opportunity for Saudi Arabia and Israeli normalization that would help, actually, the whole Middle East? And the other one is, I know that the process for decolonization between Africa and Latin America were very different, but I do feel that there is a common link. And having this mentality, do you think that our countries cannot just become developed countries because of how we think, as, you know, not the state, because the state is just a thing, but individuals who run those countries have a specific type of idiosyncrasy that does not allow for us to thrive?

COOK: Let me just underline the fact, used the word “might not,” the two-state solution might not happen. The two-state solution is not going to happen. And let me just quickly—I mean, I could go on for hours about this. But let me quickly offer you two reasons why. I’m not just saying that because that’s what now people have said. What you have—the most dynamic end of the Israeli political spectrum is the religious Zionist movement, the kind of right that I was talking about before. And the most dynamic end of the Palestinian political spectrum is Hamas. I mean, they’re not—neither are the most popular, but dynamic in the sense that they know what they want, they have a program to get there, and they have a world view that mobilizes people. Those are one staters against one staters, right?

Hamas attacked Israel on October 7 not because it wanted to liberate Gaza, not because it wanted to liberate the West Bank, but because it wanted to liberate all of historic Palestine, from Metula to Eilat, from the river to the sea. And the religious Zionist movement wants to establish sovereignty over the West Bank, and increasingly sees what’s unfolding in the Gaza Strip as an opportunity to resettle the Gaza Strip. Under what circumstances there are we thinking about a two-state solution? Then let’s play a thought experiment. Let’s imagine for a moment that we have a Palestinian Authority president who has some authority, and we have an Israeli prime minister wants to do—wants to have negotiations. Israel’s minimum requirements for peace are not anything any Palestinian Authority president, who even has authority, can provide. And it’s vice versa. The Israeli prime minister could not satisfy a Palestinian president’s minimum demands for peace. So, you get stalemate. And in that stalemate, you get more settlement, annexation, et cetera, et cetera. So there isn’t.

That’s where you get to now Saudi Arabia. On October 6, Saudi officials were—October 6, 2023, Saudi officials were saying it’s not a matter of if there’s normalization, it’s a question of when there’s normalization. Then this horrible war happened. And the price kept going up and up and up. At the most recent Shura Council meeting in Saudi Arabia—this is like the-the, Shura Council, right—Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler, future king, said: Our price for normalization is two states. It’s one thing for the foreign minister, Prince Farhan, to say that, but now the crown prince has said it. And once the crown prince says it, there’s no off ramp there. There’s no off ramp there.

So what will happen between Israel and Saudi Arabia as we get past this crisis—if we ever do, because we may really not if what I think’s going to happen in Gaza happens—is you’ll go back to some situation in which, you know, the Saudis and the Israelis have ongoing dialog in the basement of the Jordanian, you know, mukhabarat headquarters. Some Israeli businesspeople with third party—third country passports will get special visas to come in, because the two countries really do have things that they can do business on. And that’s what it'll be, without the normalization of relations between Saudi and Israel.

I will tell you this also, there’s—the number of Saudis who look favorably on normalization, low single digit. Low single. It was not high prior to October 7. It was also in the single digits, but it’s in the lower single digits now. Just as an anecdote, I recently messaged a friend in Saudi who—Mike and I were there with our term members in November. And I said, hey, there was a lot—people were really bullish on President Trump when we were there in November. It was not long after the election. So, you know, what’s the thinking now? And I’d read it to you but we’re in polite company here, about—you know, and a lot of that was there was an expectation that President Trump would change American policy on Gaza. And he has, but just not in the ways that I think a variety of Saudis believed and hoped he would.

NINAN: You know, it’s fascinating, Steven. I know you watch the region very closely, particularly Saudi Arabia, but twelve years ago Jill and I were with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Riyadh. And we checked into the Ritz Carlton. And Jill and I were insistent about going to workout at the gym. And they told us, no, no, no, you cannot go. And you should have seen Jill. She was not happy with that. (Laughter.) Very much not happy with that. You don’t know.

COOK: Love it. Love it.

NINAN: This was fascinating to me. And Jill insisted. We insisted. And finally, they agreed. They came back to us and said, you can work out at the gym. You have twenty minutes, from 5:00 a.m. to 5:20 a.m. (Laughter.) And we got there. We got our time. But so much has transformed in Saudi Arabia, Steven. I think it’s one of the hidden stories in the Middle East. I only know this having just gone back. I hadn’t gone back since Jill and I were there with Hillary Clinton. But I just went back in August. And the transformation for women, right, would you—for women being allowed—what the crown prince has done is—

COOK: Look, this is, obviously, not perfect. And Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is not a liberal. He is a top-down reformer. And the things that he has done has been an effort to create a vast reservoir of support of people between the age of eighteen and fifty, which are most Saudis and his age cohort, that to—so that they can enjoy lifestyles that, if some leader were to challenge him and try to take those away, there would be an uprising against that leader. It is absolutely extraordinary. And it is something that people have missed. And it’s what, you know, many of the, you know, most prominent critics in Washington, who haven’t been back to Saudi Arabia in ten years, are completely missing.

Now, it’s cynical, but it is a real change. And I have a hard time seeing how reversible it is. I went to Saudi Arabia for the first time twenty-three years ago. I did not see a woman for the first two days I was there. I had lived in the Middle East for a long period of time. Like, I did not expect a culture shock. And I completely culture shock. I didn’t see one. This was a country in black and white. You’d see these visages in black, like, darting from one place to the other, with their guardian, their driver, or their little son, escorting them. And then these guys in white. And now the country is sort of in color. It’s like what you’re wearing, Reena. I mean, you know, just women ever dressed every which way.

NINAN: And, by the way, just in the past week they said you can now wear whatever you want in Saudi—you don’t have to wear—yeah.

COOK: And they were doing that anyway. I mean, last April, not this most recent trip recent trip, a year ago I was in Saudi Arabia. I had dinner with a Saudi woman who I’m not related to. I’m not—I’m the little kid from Long Island. Not related to a Saudi. I went to dinner with her. Like, that’s completely unheard of kind of stuff. So—but it’s a political move. It is—and MBS has said this—MBS, not to be confused with MBF, Michael B. Froman—(laughter)—who’s a much more benevolent leader—is, I want this to be a normal country. And if you have Saudis who are in their twenties and thirties and forties, they want—and you want them to stay there, and you want to develop Saudi Arabia, and you want—you put the religious police in their place, you basically write out Wahhabism, you emphasize Saudi nationalism, and you give people this normal life. And, like I said, you create this vast reservoir of support for him.

The one thing—the one thing is when we were in Saudi Arabia I had a separate meeting over at the U.S. embassy with the embassy staff and the ambassador. And someone said to me, do you have any insight into, you know, the kind of bottom half of Saudi society? And I was, like, well, don’t you? And I don’t know. They don’t know. That’s one of the things that I think is a real open question, which was like Iran in the 1970s. Not saying it’s the same thing, but we don’t have any idea.

NINAN: Yeah. I think there’s a massive cultural revolution in Saudi Arabia. But I will say Riyadh, right, it’s largely—yeah, yeah. Yes, OK, I want—

DIZOLELE: The Africa question.

NINAN: Oh yes. Please.

COOK: Oh, yeah, sorry. I went off.

NINAN: Yes.

COOK: You dropped a quarter in me, I was, like, off.

NINAN: Oh, yes, thank you, Mvemba.

DIZOLELE: So, can they—is there mindset among the leadership or among the people for decolonization in the way? I think we saw this in the 1970s, where—at least on the African side—where country were thinking, and the leaders were thinking how to be themselves, right? So there were movements, like, with Anti-Cite, other movement, Négritude, for those of us who grew up there. In school you read primarily, especially in primary school, African writers, so you could be anchored into those realities. And this was across—at least in the Francophone world. There was literally an effort to shake off that system.

But I think that’s not enough. It’s no accident that you don’t read memoirs by African leaders. They are very rare because there was no Monticello to go to, right? In other words, you look at a country like the U.S., after—the U.S. went through a decolonization process, but they took their sweet time. You know, they meet in Philadelphia. They go back to wherever, Boston, to Farmington, back to Monticello, read Rousseau—(laughter)—and write letters to Adams—dear Adams, what do you think about this? And back and forth. That John Locke fellow. (Laughter.) You know, there was no such thing about African leaders.

If you are Lumumba, if you’re Kasa-Vubu, if you’re Kwame Nkrumah, the entire world is closing on you, right? The colonial never left. You want to undermine everything. You still want to take everything to Hoboken. The CIA is even there, the KGB. So, there was just no room to think. And that mentality has not changed, because in the space now is the Chinese, the MBS, you know, the Saudi, the Gulf Arab states. Everybody wants a piece of you. Look at Sudan, yeah, or DRC, you know? So all—and you have Africans who are willing to undermine other Africans for the crumbs. So, it’s not getting there.

And then the last piece to this is the West is not rethinking their engagement with Africa. So, everybody says it’s very important. In any given week, I have meetings with ambassadors, special envoys, people come to Washington. And everybody has an Africa strategy, except that Africa strategy doesn’t have Africa in the center, yeah, it has that country. So you talk to the Europeans. They still think of Africa as their backyard, which is totally retrograde, right, to use a nice word. So, how is Africa your backyard? You’re not even connected to it, right? There’s a big sea between that you don’t like them to cross.

And then you have—you talk, like, to the Spaniards will say, we really care about Africa because they are our neighbors. And they always say, just because you’re neighbors doesn’t mean you’re a good neighbor. We all know neighbors who block the roads, your kids cannot play, don’t go there for cookies, the mother is not nice. So, it’s a rethinking that needs to take place. So if France is a nuclear power, without uranium what does that mean? It means they source 35 percent of the uranium from Quebec, from Canada, and then they want to take everything else from Niger at below market price, at the same time telling Nigerian women not to have babies. And next thing we’re surprised why the Russians are there.

So it’s this mentality need to go both sides. And I think there’s a lot of that in Latin America as well. But for Africa, that’s what I say. So Africa needs to take the time to rethink. The U.S. rethought its way. That’s why the U.S. doesn’t look like Europe. We build things differently. Our military operates differently. The senators still think they’re House of Lords—(laughter)—but it’s still different, right? It’s a different system altogether. But the U.S. benefited from 6,000 miles of distance from Europe, and distance from Asia, from everybody else, so they could have this organic, genuine rethinking and build something that is new, that is long lasting.

I said, in Africa we still talk like British, talk like—you know, you go to Nigeria you hear words that the Brits have not even used for a century. They’re still using them in Nigeria, yeah? (Laughter.) So, that mindset need to be flushed out and get a new system, where that we are—you know, I drive from my home to the office. I always—I’m on Massachusetts in DC where all the embassies are. And I always pass the Embassy of Bolivia. And the Embassy of Bolivia says: This is the embassy of the plurinational state of Bolivia. That’s what African state should be—plurinational states. In Africa, we’re still thinking about one nation, one people, when in fact you have fifty, a hundred nations. How do you build a nation like that? That’s where we have to start.

NINAN: Good points. I want to reach out to the back. I don’t want to neglect our friends in the back. Yes, right over here, and then we’ll go right next to you after. Yeah.

Q: Thank you very much. Roni Kay O’Dell from Seton Hill University.

And I really appreciate everything that you’ve said about the various issues, changes, challenges, also successes of the regions that you all represent. And one of the things that often is not discussed when there are challenges in the world, like wars, et cetera, is sustainable development or environment. It gets kind of, like, shoved under the carpet, but is one of the most important issues of our day because it’s a looming crisis that needs to be faced, and needs to be addressed. And this is much more challenging when multilateralism is at stake. So, I wondered if you could—especially for us who teach environment politics, who teach about sustainable development—could you talk about the countries or regional leadership that is possible, or whether or not the changes right now that are happening in multilateral governance are good or negative for environmental politics or sustainable development. Thank you.

NINAN: Right. Anybody feel strongly about sustainable development?

LIU: I can—I can chime in. First of all, thank you very much for asking this question. And I wanted to give a shoutout for my colleagues here which we just launched a new initiative called the Climate Initiative, which is dear and near to my heart, and also under the leadership of President Mike Froman. And I hope that going forward you can use the Climate Initiative, the website, and the expert listed on the website as a teaching resource so that you under—so that you can let us know how we can better help you to provide educational resources for the community.

And on top of that, I’ll just stay within my region in terms of—in terms of Asia. So I teach this class called Asian Energy Security at Columbia University. And I do recognize, despite, you know, what happened here in the United States with this new administration, I’m surprised how much my students are committed to the idea of sustainability, and they genuinely want to be part of this movement. And I have six Saudi students this time, five of which—five of them are women. And they were all among the first generation of women who are allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia. And they were all petroleum engineers. And one of them participated in UN climate negotiations. And this week my student just finished the climate—mock climate negotiation. And all my Saudi students, they joined the group called Climate Activist.

So, you know, sort of, in my region, broadly speaking Eurasia, you on the one hand see China, especially the government, really wanting to be this green leader. And it’s not just BRI. It’s the green BRI. It’s not just the China-made steel, it’s green steel. It’s not just the technology the Chinese government wanted to promote consumption in the—household consumption in the context of a green transformation. So, we see that in China. But on the other hand, I do also see challenges. And the way that I see challenges to sustainability is also—is not necessarily how much state is at play, but it’s really about the lifestyle.

In the sense that as long as we are still wearing clothes, and a lot of these are synthetic fibers, that basically means we are going to have a very difficult relationship to break up or divorce with fast fashion. In a lot of ways, I think we talk a lot about sustainability. At least the approach that I in my teaching, in my research, I tend to focus the lifestyle aspect of it, so that people on a day-to-day basis, they genuinely feel that the need of how being sustainable being environmental awareness can make a difference.

DIZOLELE: Yeah. I think for Africa, everything we talk about, climate change and so on, Africa has an important role to play—from its forest, from its desert, for solar, and everything else. The problem is, for a set of reasons that I already referred to, Africans don’t bring as much power to the table through this summit that we hold, COPs particularly, where Europeans and the powerful countries pledge and pledge and pledge and pledge. Yeah. So, if you’re asking the DRC to protect its forest, the question is, you protect the forest for who? And what is the DRC getting out of this, when the pledges are not coming true? So, you end up with situations where the largest, the oldest national park in Africa, which is Virunga, in eastern DRC, is being opened up for oil extraction because the Congolese are saying, well, why do we save this? For whom? For the Norwegians? When the Norwegians are pumping more oil themselves in the North Sea?

But there is also an issue because in Africa, even though we have less conflict now than there was in the 1970s, one area, one driver of conflict, Reena, is climate. So, if you look at the expansion of the Sahara and the expansion of the area we call the Sahel, the friction between herdsmen who come all the way from Senegal, who used to go to Lake Chad and then they would turn back, there was always a level of friction between them and the farmers along the way. But now Lake Chad is pretty much dried up. So, they can no longer just stop at Lake Chad. They go all the way to northern DRC. And then you add the al-Qaida in Maghreb, you add everything else, these people are heavily armed, so there is serious conflict. Every time in Nigeria you open newspaper, there is something in Kaduna, something in Katsina, and all that stuff.

But then if you look at places like Mozambique, that’s where we fail in terms of climate. Insurgencies are sexy, right? PhD students want to work on insurgency because they get funding. If you are the State Department, you don’t want to be on the Botswana desk. You want to be on the Mozambique desk. That’s where things are. That’s where you’re going to brief the secretary and the president. So if you’re an arms dealer, it’s good. If you’re Rwanda, you say this—I’m going to showcase my capability to export security. And if you’re Total, and TotalEnergies, and Exxon, you want the natural gas and oil.

The problem is, we forget one key element that is a driver of conflict in northern Mozambique. It’s climate. Cabo Delgado is exactly at the impact point of cyclone, typhoon, and everything else you know. So one thing that is predictable, we know that in six to nine months there will be a cyclone. And that cyclone is going to hit exactly where the insurgency is, which will remind the population why they don’t like their government. Which will tell them, maybe al-Shabaab is right. So we’re not engaging that space. We’re engaging all the “sexy,” quote/unquote, stuff.

My view is it’s time to start thinking about climate-smart crops for those population, because we know they will be displaced and flooding will come. It’s time to bring in the Dutch. The Dutch have been living under sea level for a long time. And they don’t live in the most beautiful place. It’s not—in Europe the weather is very inclement all the time. And they’ve not had a calamity since the 1950s. So maybe we should bring them in, in our package, to say, how do these populations build more resilient houses and roads, so that—so it’s those kind of things that we’ve not considered.

And then I’ll close with Ethiopia. Ethiopia is very proud of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. And every time I’m in Ethiopia you see bumpers on the cars that says: It’s my dam! They’re proud of it. The problem is, it’s built on the Nile. The Sudanese are not happy, and the Egyptians are pissed. And they’re pissed because they afraid of what it’s going to do to the water flow that feeds farming in Egypt. The Ethiopians will say, we already accounted for that. The question is, you accounted for what, since we don’t know what’s going to happen in thirty years with the weather? So these are kinds of things that—so it’s a source of tremendous conflict. It's not blown up. We hope he does not. But this is how climate is affecting some of these areas.

NINAN: Good viewpoint, yeah.

COOK: Two very quick comments on this question. First, I immediately—when you asked the question, I immediately looked at my COP28 bracelet. If you have a girly girl who’s a teenager you have a stack like this, and you can’t take anything off. (Laughter.) I think that is over. And I think that was sort of a farce to begin with. I mean, you could say, oh, well, you know, the Trump administration, you can’t even mention climate change in official Washington these days. But I think these things were never real to begin with. The European countries and the United States, they commit, commit, and then they don’t ever do anything, and then they ask poor African countries to do stuff that they couldn’t possibly do. So I think that this was kind of nonsensical, and for—you know, performative, mostly.

But you would be surprised at a lower level, at a smaller level, across conflict zones, when water is at stake, people get real about what it is they need to do. So, very quietly there are conversations between Palestinians and Israelis about the aquifers in the West Bank. The Palestinians complain bitterly that the Israelis waste all this water and take all this water from them, but there’s still negotiations that go on. There’s constant talk between Jordan and Israel about water resources. I mean, you would be amazed, again, at the robustness of these types of conversations that happen, even across conflict lines. And even with the GERD, the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam and the Egyptians, it hasn’t—the problem there is that there is—there’s actually a technical solution to the problem—is that it took too long to get to that technical solution so nationalism on both sides became engaged, making it impossible to move.

But no one wants to go to war over this. So, there are opportunities. And this is where I think, when you can’t say climate crisis or climate change in Washington, that it becomes problematic. It’s at these lower levels, not these grand, you know, we’re going to do COP in some major oil-producing country. It’s that American—and a lot of these parties want American technical assistance to solve these water problems. And we’re not going to do that. So it’s not really a multilateralism thing. People are interested in it. They just need the help. And we’re not willing. Maybe the Europeans can step forward. Maybe, like, the Dutch, teach everybody how to live underwater.

NINAN: All right. I know—gentlemen the back, I know I told you you’d have a question.

Q: Hi, Joseph Roberts from Roger Williams University in Rhode Island.

And my question, I share your hope that the declining reliance on foreign assistance from the West might be a stimulant for African reform. But the flip side, I think, is we’re seeing when the U.S., particularly, pulls out, China is moving in, in particular. And I’m what—I’m wondering if that just substitutes one problem for another, and makes it in some ways worse, because China often has far more conditions on their assistance. And so I’m wondering if the hope may be misplaced because, you know, we’re now seeing sort of great-power politics kind of play out in this—in this aid space.

NINAN: Mvemba, what do you—yeah, no, I’d love you take, because had said initially that your hope is that now Africa would be able to stand—or try to stand up on its own.

DIZOLELE: So, a good question. First of all, China is not a humanitarian type of personality, if there was such thing. That’s not China. That’s, like, American bleeding heart, we’re going to save everyone, and all this. The U.S. is very unique in that way. Like, humanitarian thing is an important—it’s baked into the way the U.S. sees the world and in its role, its community is helping. China plays a different role. I don’t think at this point China is going to feel that gap that way. So, there won’t be PEPFARs, and PMI, those kind of things. China has already been playing a role. You know, we talked about demographic—China is building roads. China is building the stuff that Africans wanted to get—you know, if you’re going to stem, what do you call it, rural migration or urban migration—people are moving to the city because there are no opportunities on the farm, where you grow your maize but you cannot send it to Abuja—by building roads, China is already helping stem some of these demographic pressures.

During COVID China tried to jump in with its own thing, but overall, China is not in that space. China comes on the economic side. They want your minerals for this. It’s the barter system. Sometimes it works well, sometimes it doesn’t. But you land in Kampala, or you land in Entebbe, you’re going to Kampala, the entire road is built by Chinese. It’s a beautiful road, with tolls and everything else, right? It’s there. So, government is collecting revenues in a way that is very clear, that it did not do before. And you get from the city to the Entebbe airport without much problem. And you multiply this all over the continent. China is very present that way.

So it’s not that soft power in PEPFAR, in giving you Malarone and antiretroviral. It’s not there in that place. And I don’t think China is going to come there as strongly, because China has a very clear sense of what they’re trying to do. And this is not one of them. It is the U.S. that does that. So, I’m not afraid—worried that China is going to come trying to fill that. And plus, everything we’ve heard about tariffs and China is going to have to rethink its own things inside. So I don’t see China necessarily filling in that space. They will try here and there, but they don’t have that DNA.

NINAN: I, sadly, I’m sorry, I know you’ve got a question, and we’re sadly going to have to leave it there. There’s so much I want to talk about. Steve, we didn’t even get to Iran, which are potential talks the administration said they might have starting on Saturday. You never know what’s changing in the world.

I want to thank all of you—

COOK: Could be Monday.

NINAN: —all of you here today. I want to thank the Council on Foreign Relations. This institution is so important, especially in times like this. I want to thank all of you. I’m going to quote a great global thinker, my mother, who said: There are two things in life nobody can take away—your faith, your belief system, and your education. So, thank you all for what you are doing. I also want to remind you we’re going to take a brief break and then we’re going to kick it off back again at 10:00 o’clock with The New Tech Era. Thank you guys for joining us. Thank you to our panel. (Applause.)

(END)

 

FASKIANOS: If everybody could take their seats, please. If everybody could take their seats, please. Thank you very much. Oh, you’re—I love it, everybody coming to attention. Excited to have our next panel, The New Tech Era. And I’ll invite our panelists on the stage, and this session will be moderated by Calvin Sims.

(Pause.)

SIMS: Well, good morning, everyone.

I’m Calvin Sims, and I have been a reporter, a foreign correspondent, a number of things that journalists do, and I have just come in from the cold for a little while and it’s great to have you all here for this session.

So I wanted to start by introducing our two panelists: Adam Segal, who’s the Ira Lipman chair in emerging technologies and national security, and director of the Digital and Cyber Policy program at CFR; and we’re also very privileged to have Nicol Turner Lee, who’s the senior fellow in governance studies and director of the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution.

So I think we’re going to have a really good back and forth today and this really is always focused on new journeys for this institution, and so now we will be looking at places we haven’t before. That is the new tech era, and for this I’d like both Adam and Nicol to start us off by talking a little bit about how things have transitioned and transitioned so widely across not only the United States but the world.

So I’m going to start with Adam and you can kick this off. Thank you very much.

LEE: I’m so glad you got that first. (Laughter.)

SEGAL: Yeah. Yeah.

So I guess I would point to at least two things, two that I thought of already. So one, of course, is just the dramatic pace of change, right? I think it is a cliché but it is true that the pace of technological change has increased and we keep getting caught unaware by developments.

ChatGPT is the clearest example of that but then, you know, DeepSeek just a couple of months ago, and so I think we are struggling both intellectually and from a policy perspective on how do we keep up and how do we think about those technologies.

The second that I’ll just note is the convergence of all these technologies and the digital and the physical. So, again, AI is a great example of that—you know, the application of AI to biology and synthetic biology and all those places where there’s going to be huge breakthroughs.

So intellectually, you know, having a cyber and digital program over time makes less and less sense because it becomes part of every issue that we deal with and so that, I think, is a second.

I’ll just add the third, which is that, of course, as we’ve been talking about probably in all the other panels beforehand it is now a major focus of geopolitical competition, right? It is not the second or third or fourth issue that gets brought up but almost every way we think about competing, particularly with China but just across the board economically, militarily, through systems of governance, all express themselves through technology.

SIMS: Nicol?

LEE: Yes. So great to be here as well.

I would add off of the three points—I’ll stick to my three points, too, Calvin, right, as opposed to giving a fourth.

SIMS: OK.

LEE: I would first say that what we’re seeing in the tech era is this lack of agency as systems become much more autonomous, and we’re seeing more and more humans sort of displaced and moved out of the loop. I wrote a book about this. It’s called Digitally Invisible, right? (Laughs.) He’s like, that was really good, wasn’t it? (Laughter.)

SEGAL: That’s really fast, too.

LEE: It really was fast. (Laughter.) I said I was going to show it. There’s collateral out there. But I wrote this book right before the pandemic, Digitally Invisible: How the Internet Is Creating the New Underclass, through the Brookings Press and Rowman & Littlefield, which is available wherever books are sold.

But the book’s focus was really on people, right, who have been affected by this shift from very transactional, tactile machines and computers to what we see now, which is much more autonomous systems and I’ll talk a little bit about it—it’s my third point.

The digitally invisible they live in farming communities. They live here in New York City. They are people who are connected to the digital ecosystem but they do not have the wherewithal to be able to engage in equitable matters like everybody else, and you’d be surprised, despite the pandemic moving a majority of people online, there were already a lot of people who were offline.

I call them digitally invisible populations that we did not know about as researchers and we really did not understand just how disconnected they were from this shift of analog to more digital to now more autonomous systems. So that’ll be my first point.

My second point is we do have a concern as we look at artificial intelligence with regards to the lack of human agency that has evolved with these technologies also has consequential outputs on where they show up. And so at the Brookings Institution two years ago I started what we call the AI Equity Lab where workshopping issues like artificial intelligence and its impact on education, health care, criminal justice, financial services, but we’re doing it with the experts like many of you in this room sitting at the table because more and more as these autonomous systems develop, which is sort of the—sort of pivot point in this new tech era we’re seeing less humans in the loop or outside of the loop sort of guiding and advising and interrogating these systems.

And then I just want to pick up on that third point in terms of the geopolitical concern. We have traditionally seen tech sort of posed against our relationship or competition with China. I think now that has changed, particularly in the last couple of weeks and hours—I’m sorry, looking at some of the trade wars—but in particular we’re seeing technology much more collateralized around assets and the value chain.

So I do a lot of work in 5G technology and how that actually interacted with China and Africa. I’ve written on that as well. But my thing is what I’m seeing differently is that we’re seeing a lot more collateralization of Global South countries, African Union, others, and not sort of investments in this geopolitical conversation outside of Europe and, you know, other places which—and China, which tend to be predominant verticals when we talk about technology.

The space is so much bigger. In my book and in my writings the expansive use, for example, of technology in the African Union is beyond our wildest imagination, but yet we don’t see them as a competitive vendor or partner or ally in these conversations when we start to talk about the evolution of technology.

So a lot of this is the work that I do at Brookings but definitely part of the new tech era.

SIMS: For both of you, can you talk a little bit about the ethics of this new renaissance, if you were to call it that, and how do we start to engage this and in what way? It would be interesting to hear both of you, because this is mainly what you’re looking and reporting and thinking about, right?

LEE: So it’s Renaissance AI?

SIMS: Yes.

LEE: (Laughs.) Well, I’ll start. I mean artificial intelligence for me—I’m a PhD in sociology, not a computer scientist, so all of my work pretty much undergirds the same methodological approach, which is to look at the equitable distribution and access to these technologies.

So AI is different because, one, it doesn’t necessarily require that the people who are the subjects of the technology sit at the table and design and develop those technologies. So from an ethics standpoint it already starts with the absence of what I call many unhidden figures like educators and health practitioners and others who need to be sitting at the design phase of the modeling versus coming in and becoming more of the subjects of the technology.

So that’s one of the issues that we face. The other thing is artificial intelligence—and people tend to love this. I’m sure Adam has this little pet peeve as well. There are so many forms of it, right?

There is predictive AI, which tends to be based on what we think in terms of repetitive behavior of the machine learning algorithms, what’s going to happen as a result. There’s now, you know, generative AI, which is basically for a layperson. I call it eyes in the back of the head because it’s definitely sort of scraping what is already available text-wise, image-wise, voice-wise.

And now there’s agentic AI, right, which is pretty much autonomous in making decisions not just based on human behaviors but an agentic AI for people who are, like, where is this lady going. You know, it’s like your autonomous nurse or the person who might be a bill collector who is trying to actually walk you through the next stage of a payment plan.

So, for me, these technologies have advanced so quickly that we all have been sort of—not—I don’t want to say coerced but we have been in many ways using these technologies because of the convenience that they offer us without knowing what’s behind the black box, and as a result of not knowing what’s behind the Renaissance the work that I do is there are going to be decisions that are pretty innocuous.

Like, I love black jackets. I want the recommendations for that type of commerce purchase. But I also don’t want my child to be profiled or stereotyped in the classroom simply because AI told an educator to maximize their learning you need to put them in the front or the back or you need to use this stair stage to be able to do that.

So, for me, when we start getting into the renaissance, into consequential areas that improve quality of life or create wealth or have eligibility decisions then for me it becomes problematic and that’s where I find myself in this work because we just don’t do enough on the ethics of design, deployment, and interrogation.

We talk about ethics as this big umbrella but for me it’s what’s under the umbrella and what are we digging into, and how do we dig into those things in areas where there are truly some red boxes that we need to pay attention to.

SIMS: Adam?

SEGAL: Yeah. So I’m a political scientist so I’m focused on what the state is going to do both at the domestic and the international level. We are in a massive period of transition, right? The Biden administration had an approach that was essentially focused on trust and accountable systems. It tried to balance voluntary commitments from the firms, right?

So thirteen of the largest AI and tech firms agreed to voluntary commitments that the Biden administration—about safety and transparency and accountability, plus the role of the federal government.

So the executive order saying we’re going to use these systems and we’re going to make sure, again, that they have certain levels of accountability and transparency there, and then at the international level let’s build these discussions around safety and accountability so through what became kind of the Hiroshima process that then went to London and then to Seoul and a little bit through the UN and the OECD and some other international organizations.

Now, the Trump administration essentially said this was the wrong balance that focused too much on the costs and the risks and that they were slowing the U.S. down and in particular, you know, we’re going to lose the race to China so overturned the executive order. Basically, told Kratsios, who’s the new head of the science and technology policy in the White House, go as fast as you can.

Vice President Vance went to the AI summit in Paris and basically is like, I’m not here to talk about the risks; I’m here to talk about the opportunities. Oh, and by the way, America is going to dominate this space. If you want to, you know, come along with us that’s OK but we’re going to dominate.

So the messaging is no longer really about how do we regulate or control. It’s about how do we race faster. You know, the Europeans, I think, are still focused on regulation—the European EU AI Act—but there’s been some hesitation, right?

They slowed down the rolling out of part of the accountability act around AI because they are also worried about getting caught behind and the firms, clearly, are embracing race faster.

There was an article in the FT today that said OpenAI has cut the amount of time that they give outside analysts to do safety testing of new models. So they’re feeling the pressure and they’re moving there.

We’re seeing a lot at the state level. So California, you know, got pretty close to an AI regulation act. Connecticut and others—Maryland—are thinking about it. Firms, clearly, don’t want that, right? They don’t want fifty separate AI legislation but that’s where we are there, I think, on the control.

SIMS: Talk a little bit about access and who gets the access and under what, you know, plateau or whatever that we want to talk about it. How does that actually play out over a period of time?

LEE: Mmm hmm. Well, I’d love to pick up on what Adam also talked about, too. I mean, the right space framework also assumed that we were also going to democratize technology in many respects and we were going to find ways to sort of invest in, you know, more R&D, more conversations on accountability, more red teaming, and to test out and weed out the vulnerabilities.

With the new change in administration, obviously, that’s not the focus. It’s not necessarily on the socio technical side or the safety side or the human side. So what does that mean in terms of access?

If you go back to my original dialog, we are all subjects of AI, right? Is there anybody in this room that owns a copyright or trademark on any AI product?

Well, guess what? Like my mother used to tell me, if you’re not in the kitchen you’re on the menu. So we’re all on the menu. Just letting you know, right? (Laughter.)

We are part of the menu of services that AI will actually bring. So in my opinion—and I’ve been struggling with this, right? It’s not necessarily an either/or. It’s a both/and, right? And so you can have accelerated artificial intelligence tools integrated into health care.

I’ve seen some tremendous applications of AI in certain spaces where it’s helping us with diagnosing disease quicker. It’s helping us with tracking and monitoring. And you also have to be able to understand the limitations of AI. So in my work, for example, Black women are underrepresented in clinical trials.

So there may be great AI when it comes to, you know, looking at breast cancer but if people aren’t fully represented it’s inadequate. So for me that’s an accessibility question, right? What does the data look like?

How is it represented among the various people that we want to be in this sample so that we create better AI or AI at least that is much more sufficient towards people? That’s one.

Two, we know that with this new, burgeoning AI, right, Adam, that it’s going to take a lot more energy, a lot more data centers, and that seems to be the particular conversation. Just recently on Capitol Hill there were two hearings in the matter of two weeks. One was on AI data centers and energy and the one that just happened this week, I believe it was, was with Eric Schmidt and others on AI and how it’s actually going to be part of our international competitiveness.

Again, based on where you frame it accessibility can be defined by a larger global norm where if we do the right things we’re going to be able to empower not just AI but the future of quantum, in all honesty. So we’ll have the system—the systemic—the system’s infrastructure in place.

But if you are a kid that lives in the Bronx and you are a teacher who wants to use AI, accessibility will look very different. So when I speak with educators, for example, who are so excited about using AI-enabled education products I say, well, where are you from?

And if you say you live in a rural community I say, well, you’re digitally invisible. You probably don’t even have basic internet access, right, if you’re a local college, et cetera. Or if you’re in pockets within big urban areas you may not also have the infrastructure to empower your ability to do AI-enabled products and services.

So we have somewhat of a mismatch, I think, when it comes to trying to solve the supply and demand, and we’re behind. Under the Biden administration—I’ll just say this last—we did put—and I reference this in my book.

My book is about the digital divide but more so about digital competitiveness. But I go through the six administrations starting with Clinton and Gore, who actually defined the digital divide. But what I say is we’ve never solved it and what we’ve done is we’ve thrown a lot of money at it.

So under the Biden-Harris administration we put in the $65 billion to start—went up to trillions—in terms of infrastructure. Those projects are not done and they were only to provide basic connectivity in communities via our states that didn’t have it.

So when you start talking about AI systems, Calvin, it sort of exponentially changes the nature of the game and how advanced we’re going to be if we’re going to actually run many of the products and services.

And I think you’re so right. That’s why we’re hearing more of the tech companies say, give us more data centers. Give us more energy. You know, give us the ability to move fast in communities because we need to actually be able to empower these systems like ChatGPT-4 to do this stuff.

Although I did hear a professor once say the energy of ChatGPT-4 you actually use more energy eating a hamburger. It was some kind of—I had to find this professor. I had to go up to him and say, OK, are you sure this is right?

But it was the way that he explained it. It may be an exaggerated conversation in terms of the amount of energy that these tech companies are demanding. (Laughs.)

SEGAL: So I’ll shift it up again. So to the international level, you know, Nicol mentioned 5G. So I spent fourteen months inside the State Department working at the Cyber and Digital Bureau and our big focus was we were not going to get Huawei-ed again, right?

So Huawei means, you know, here we have a Chinese telecommunications manufacturer that is producing and deploying 5G in most of the developing world and the main reason is because the U.S. has no product, right?

We stopped producing telecommunications equipment for a lot of reasons but we stopped doing it. We tried to convince those countries that, you know, the security was bad and they were going to get spied on and they—you know, they shouldn’t use a Chinese product. But that was not a particularly powerful argument, right?

Most of those countries are, as Nicol said, worried about the digital divide and getting their population online and their assumption is, I’m going to get spied on by the Chinese and the U.S. no matter what I do so I might as well at least put in cheap product and get it there as quickly as possible.

So while I was in the department we were trying to always think of, well, how can we provide access to technology that is secure but also addresses their sustainable development goals and economic development.

We came up with a strategy that was built around this idea of digital solidarity so the argument being that we were actually made stronger by other countries having their own tech capabilities, right?

If we’re not beating up the Europeans because they’re beating us up because they have to rely on us for cloud, if we can kind of get that out of the way then we can concentrate on getting shared values and other things and competing with the Chinese and other places there.

Heavily reliant on USAID and other tools to build out that capacity in those places. You know, right now the Chinese are doing a pretty good job at being able to paint the United States as saying because of the use of export controls and other tools to say, we’re trying to control that technology, right?

We’re using it for ourselves. Everybody else is going to be cut off from it. China can use its usual rhetoric of win-win and all boats are going to be lifted. I don’t think that’s necessarily true, but it is pretty attractive to all of those developing economies and how they can think about access.

Now, of course, digital solidarity is not going to survive. The Trump administration is going to have a different focus on that. But what we’re seeing is lots of countries talking about AI sovereignty, right? They want to have their own models and their own languages, and so there’s going to be a massive kind of differentiation based on capacity.

You know, Singapore is going to probably do a pretty good job of developing ASEAN language models. India will probably have some pockets of success. Brazil might do OK. But given all the resources and energy and everything else you’re going to do we’re, clearly, going to see a divide on AI capabilities as well.

LEE: I was going to say we just recently published a writing series. One of the fellows that we have in our department is focused on the Global South so she’s been trying to figure out ways to bring in voices, and we’ve leveraged the Paris AI summit and the conversation around safety and we just actually published people from Oceana region, African Union, Southeast Asia, India. They all published indigenously where they thought, you know, they could be part of this conversation.

You’re so right. I think some of the inadequacies that we see in many of the large language models, for example, is the insistence to train on big language versus micro language and so you lose some of the diversity that comes with, you know, linguistic adaptations or challenges.

That’s actually also the case in the United States, right? It tends to train on traditional language where you lose some of the other nuances and cultural capacities of other languages. So to your point, we’re seeing a lot of that as well and I think our writing series, which is also available at Brookings on our Center for Technology webpage, but it gives you a nice look at what you’re talking about, that there is going to be this upshoot of people wanting to define how they want to exist within this space as well.

SIMS: One more question before we turn it over to the audience. The ethics of this and who determines what is right, what is wrong, who saves people who need to actually have access to it—are we that far away from it or, you know, how long will it take us to actually get there?

LEE: You start. (Laughter.)

SEGAL: We’re pretty far away, I think it’s safe to say. Again, so I think—let me just start on the international level. Like, there—it’s clear that technology is racing faster than any international agreement is going to get there.

You know, we had all of these models that were floated around briefly. Should we have an IAEA for AI? Should we have Atoms for Peace for AI? None of those are going to happen, right?

And as, you know, Nicol pointed out, AI is not one thing. It’s numerous, numerous systems, and so the idea that we’re going to get one international agreement strikes me as being very, very unlikely, just having done in the last fifteen years in cyber where we really have—we have agreed upon state norms that were—that everyone for the most part ignores, right?

So we don’t have a lot of agreement on that space. I think we will see kind of regional agreements, you know, the EU, clearly, being one. China has a very well-developed AI system. It may not be the one that we like but it’s, you know, extremely regulatory, sophisticated, and they keep rolling out things there.

So I think we’ll see regional kind of discussions about that emerge and we may—you know, we’ll see some broad agreements, for example, around AI and military use. That has happened at the UN I think we’re up to over sixty countries have signed that agreement.

But it’s pretty broad, right? It’s about, you know, some very broad guidelines about how we might do that.

At the national level—I think we’re going to see it at the states. I don’t actually think we’re ever going to get anything in Congress just given that, you know, the difference between the Republicans and the Democrats on big tech and anti-monopoly versus—how content moderation has become an issue for the right more than it has been for the left. And so I would be very surprised if we get any agreement there. There may be a default to basically saying, look, we have regulations already in place; just they’re sectoral and let’s just apply them as they already exist. But I would expect to see something, you know, from California or Maryland or some other of those leaders first.

LEE: Yeah, and I would just sort of tag onto this.

So I think at the international level I do believe we’re going to continue to have conversations with EU and the U.S. will continue to dominate what does safety look like, et cetera, in the competition with China and Russia, and I do believe the military will probably be the only area where we can actually find some common ground in terms of where we want to deploy AI.

I do, again, want to echo that I’m seeing in my research just a groundswell of participation of countries. The recent summit was held in Rwanda, right, and we’re just seeing a lot more Global South countries come to the table to sort of assert, I think, their value principles in this which I think is going to actually continue, particularly since the 5G debate where we’re now seeing more of those countries figure out ways to have some independence on the—of the supply chain.

I think on the federal level we are going to see some type of AI movement. I mean, let’s not be confused. If we are seeing a lot of the tech companies sort of at the White House more, obviously, there’s going to be some self-interest in trying to ensure that they can have the investments reliability from the U.S. to be able to engineer new R&D.

I think in those spaces we’ll see that, and I think we’ll have some normalization, and something just came out, for example, on AI use by federal agencies, which was actually started during the first Trump presidency. So I think that conversation is there.

The thing to actually throw into the mix, however, is with the federal layoffs, for example, in the obvious movement of government towards privatization we’re going to see more AI use in government, which I think will be quite interesting. I’ve written on this.

Because what that means is that if you have a digital divide there will be constituents that will not get access to that AI-enabled process when it comes to government, but more importantly it may also bypass some of the traditional procurement and compliance, and safety and security measures that we’ve had with government when it comes to technology, which is an area that I’m particularly interested in and the degree to which we see a lot more embedded AI without even knowing that it’s being embedded into government systems.

And then I think on the state level I would actually offer that I think the states will come out with their patchwork of enforcement activities. Texas—I was sitting in Texas and I heard a legislator say something to the effect that he is pushing for more agency among people, more disclosures, more appeal capacity.

I tell you, I was in Texas. I had to go find his staffer and say, am I in Texas in a red state? (Laughter.) I mean, is he really saying that on stage? He said, yes, and I think we’re going to see more of that, right?

I think we’re going to see state legislators because of their ability to interact closely with their attorney generals sort of think about ways in which they can enforce some of the sectoral issues when it comes to compliance with fair housing and fair credit and other areas—disclosure of AI-generated decisions, and they’re going to be watching this, right, because they’re going to be accountable to their constituents at the state and local level.

So I think in the absence of any type of federal movement on rights we’ll probably see a lot of that actually shift to the states and New York is another example. And it’s going to be by sector. Here in New York they are shifting away from a hiring-based AI.

So we’re going to see more of that come out, which is going to create some challenges for those of us who cross borders because that means that there will be different requirements for each.

I want to just put this out there as well. I’d be remiss in terms of where we are as well. You know, AI is also being used in many respects, regardless of how you voted, to sort of normalize and homogenize our communities here and our democracy, and so that’s another area that I think as a sociologist I’m particularly interested in how this looks because we’re using AI to weed out words and weed out processes and policies.

I mean, there’s a whole list of triggers that AI has that is now defunding colleges and universities and, you know, making it very difficult for people to engage in free speech. So I think we’re going to see AI in this type of weaponization, potentially, where we won’t feel the effects of those until, like, the next five to ten years. We’ll actually know what really happened with many of those data sets that are no longer publicly available or constrained or have been stripped down.

And so I want to put that in there as well because I think that’s another area of the democratic conversation that we need to have as well in terms of artificial intelligence.

SIMS: So we would like to have the audience engage as well, and so I’m going to bounce around but I’d like to start with you, and someone will bring you a mic.

Yeah. Please identify yourself. Yeah.

Q: Hello, all. So I’m Kelley Littlepage and I’m from the University of Houston, and what I wanted to ask is—I love that you said we’re all on the menu and this is what provoked this thought.

But what is the future with AI and this new emergent technology in concerns for fundamental rights like privacy, which is already under attack from many other fronts than just technology? But I wanted to know what you thought the future with this new technology and privacy would be both domestically and internationally, please.

LEE: I mean, the problem we’ve had and the reason we continue to have these conversations is because the U.S. has no national federal privacy legislation. We’ve been talking about federal privacy legislation.

Cam Kerry, who is the brother of John Kerry, I’ve known him since he was on the Obama administration. He has been talking about privacy for at least twenty years since he was at Commerce and we still don’t have it, right? He works on our team at Brookings.

Part of the reason why is because we can’t agree on just some fundamental principles on what we should be protecting and how we should be protecting it and how we enforce those protections, and it always goes back to—two things of disagreement is, you know, private right of action—if people have the collective right to sue—and most importantly, like, how are you protected, and I think Adam suggested this innovation phase of technology while still allowing for some protections by consumers.

That is probably our biggest issue. I’ll let Adam talk about all the privacy legislation that’s happening outside of the United States. But had we solved that issue I think the conversations around responsible AI would have been different, and because it’s not been solved, again, more data is available. And you’d be surprised. It’s not just, you know, data that you expect.

I mean, AI is very unique from the standpoint that it does not need particular data to actually empower it. It can do proxies, inferential data. It can figure out—you know, there’s a study that we actually have completed that aligns with Latanya Sweeney at Harvard University that in the employment space it is the sounding of your name that triggers whether or not you’re going to get a pre-hire screening or not, and there’s some AI that you give a video capture and the AI checks to see if you’re looking in the camera, if you’re looking away, how many times you smile, which then determines whether or not you’re a suitable candidate for a job.

So it’s so embedded without privacy protection we basically have no agency over these technologies.

SEGAL: Yeah. So I—look, it’s around privacy and who controls and has access to the data. You know, we’ve been jerry rigging this approach with the Europeans for the last fifteen years where we say, OK, we promise we’re not going to do this stuff with the data and then European courts say OK and then Max Schrems sues and then we go back to square one.

So Max Schrems, for those who don’t know, is a German privacy activist and he has won at least three cases in the European Court of Justice that basically says U.S. standards are not appropriate for European data control and until that’s in place you can’t send data over to the—from Europe to the United States because of GDPR and privacy controls there.

We have an agreement in place now, but one of the things that President Trump has done is not appoint replacements to the privacy—PCLOB?

LEE: C. He took them all off. (Laughs.)

SEGAL: He took them all—right. So there’s a—there is a bureau that’s supposed to inspect—kind of account for those agreements because Europeans are allowed to basically say, I think you’ve collected data on me that’s inappropriate and I want to push back against that.

Without this thing having anybody on staff then there’s no way for that to happen. So it’s very likely that that agreement will also collapse. We’ll be back to square one. Usually it’s OK for the big firms. It’s not great for the little firms. Big firms manage to figure it out through other types of contracting but small startups have a much more difficult time.

So, you know, it’s still going to be just a huge issue that is going to really get—once we get—once—if we get through the tariffs problem, if we get through antitrust, if we get through content regulation with the Europeans then the privacy thing is also still hanging out there and I don’t see any easy resolutions.

LEE: It gets kicked to the bottom every time. (Laughter.) Starts here at the beginning of a session and then it lands down here.

SIMS: We’re going to try to get a couple more questions before we—let’s go back here. You have in green a question. Is that—

Q: Good morning. My name is Sandeep Mertia. I’m a professor of technology and society at Stevens across the river here. Thank you so much for these insights.

As an anthropologist of computing I’m wondering how much good faith are we giving—showing the tech industry by continuing to use their own language? Because a lot of powerful criticism of these technologies from the likes of Dr. Alondra Nelson, Dr. Timnit Gebrum, and various other historians of computing has been that what is this word AI that we use and why are we buying into their hype cycle discourse, which loves projecting these superhuman technologies, which are basically, if I may use a research term by Dr. Ilana Gershon, who’s a linguistic anthropologist, that these are bullshit generators. (Laughter.)

LEE: You said that, not me.

Q: Oh, it’s a published article. (Laughter.) I’m just quoting. So while I understand that there are very important privacy concerns, geopolitical concerns, harms to address, by buying into their language are we not helping them project their power? Thank you.

LEE: So, I mean, I think that—and the people you mentioned we just actually acknowledged them as part of “Unhidden Figures: Women Leaders in AI” as part of Women History Month.

So I think you’re right, right? So let’s just start with the internet. OK. So the internet, essentially, in the United States started as something that grew out of deregulation and, you know, this shift from analog to digitization was, obviously, part of the Clinton era. It was actually under two bipartisan FCC—Federal Communications Commission—chairs, Michael Powell and Bill Kennard.

But the goal is that the internet was this thing that we didn’t know about. It was very far beyond the rotary telephone and the telegraph, and it actually did a really great thing. It actually created the smart phone, right? And out of the smart phone came ridesharing services and out of ridesharing services came much more interest in 5G.

I’m an internet historian so, like, when I think about where we are with AI I’m a little bit baffled, right, because out of the deregulation of the internet basically has brought us to where we are today, and we were sort of anticipating a lot of this with the net neutrality debate in terms of who owns the internet. And power has always been coalesced around the internet because the information of this now fabricated privately-run town square is essentially determining how we actually govern ourselves.

I mean, I’m, like, I have to be on X to find out what happened in Capitol Hill, right, you know, where decisions are being made. It’s a whole different—I mean, Reed Hundt, who was a former FCC chair, used to say the internet is the new town square. It’s, like, way beyond that because now we have these advanced capabilities that create these algorithmic filters and amplification and all this other stuff.

So to your point, it’s very much determined by power and what we have found is that whereas most people who are internet users—and I can give this great example for my book. When I went around and talked to people from farming communities to cities in the book I would say, what is your opinion of the internet? And many people would say, oh, I don’t trust the internet. I hate the internet. I don’t use the internet.

And then I would say, how do you get money from your customers? And they say, Cash App—(laughs)—or they say the internet was the Facebook.

So we as a country, as a world, really don’t know what the internet has become and we’ve allowed power to sort of shape what that narrative is for us and I think at this point, as the technology has become much more advanced, much more integrated as the business case, not just by tech companies but by banks and school, ed tech—the big area as well—we’re in this state where, to Adam’s point, we either assert more regulation and prescription or we allow it to continue to grow.

The difference is whereas other internet technologies we had a one-to-one relationship with—we kind of have a relationship with our phone. We had a relationship with what’s on there. This is one in which we’re sort of passive adapters of this technology in ways I think that is sort of outside of our control and it’s making decisions based on our ability to live.

And that’s the conversation I would urge all of you as educators who are working in spaces with the inquiry of your students to have them have a conversation around the history of the internet and to understand where this fits in this wide spance of how technology has shifted from consumer base to something that is way beyond—you know, consumer enterprise based to something that is much more democratically rooted.

That’s my long story answer. That is, like, my second book I want to write. You just gave me—I’m not going to name it that expletive, though. (Laughs.) But it’s an interesting question I have found myself in a lot lately in terms of bringing it back to the internet.

SIMS: Yeah. I want to get a couple more—

LEE: I’m sorry. I’ll get off my soapbox on that one, Calvin.

SIMS: Right here.

Q: My name is John Scianimanico. I’m with New York University here locally.

My question is actually about AI in education that you brought up, Nicol. I’m sure you saw that China starting in the fall is making AI education compulsory for its primary and secondary students—

LEE: Yes. Yes.

Q: —and I was wondering if you could comment on how the United States should be thinking about AI literacy in our schools. Of course, we all know that our students in higher education use it but I sometimes worry that it’s too late by the time that they come to us for us to start teaching them about how to use it responsibly.

Do you feel like this should be something that should be taught in schools, and with a shuttered U.S. Department of Education are states prepared today with the resources and expertise and energy to be able to inform schools and district leaders on how to do this well?

SIMS: Do you want to start, Adam?

LEE: You want to start on that one, Adam?

SEGAL: No, I think it’s for you. (Laughter.)

LEE: I’ll take that one, right?

So I do think AI literacy should be embedded in a K-20 pipeline, right, because I think you’re correct, the students that go into college they’re basically familiar with it but the difference is they’re familiar with it based on the school district they came out of.

So I’m sure many of us in this room hear the same thing I hear often which is we can’t let certain students use AI because they’re cheating, and so this debate actually resonates through a lot of conversations because we look at where AI starts normally for higher income school districts on the K-12 side.

Those kids are learning how to use it for prompt building, critical inquiry skills, research, so that when they get to college they’re ready, right? They know how to—my daughter is in a Fairfax County school. She runs all her stuff through an AI authenticator to make sure it does not replicate that. She has those skills.

Some kids who live, you know, in the Bronx or other parts of Washington Square Park they may not have those same skills introduced to them in K-12. So I do think that we need to have a K-20 but here’s the problem. We tried to integrate media literacy in 2010 when the Knight Foundation came out with a commission on what an information democracy should look like and we were unsuccessful in getting digital citizenship embedded into our schools.

And so I do agree now we need to have that conversation. There’s so many groups—and I would love to talk to you offline—that are actually thinking about ways to embolden AI literacy. But what I would say to the—(inaudible)—and to colleges is this conversation I’ve been having with all of you, is your school should be thinking about your guidance principles and your practices, and you should start creating some parameters for how you want AI integrated into your content.

So I’ll give you a great example I just talked about with some college professors. Your syllabus—how many hours of this should be AI related? How many of the hours should be based on non-AI-related research, and sort of indicating that in your syllabus that this is an AI activity that’s acceptable, this is not.

So we have to change the way we as educators also sort of present this to students to give them the same framework of literacy that they can also take back. So we got to start somewhere and we can start with us.

Q: Hello. Catherine Odari. I’m a professor of history at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia.

Mine is more of an international. So I recently watched a documentary. It was a BBC documentary about how tech companies have outsourced the job of moderating the content of AI to African countries. So in this particular one it was Kenya, and the people who were tasked with the job of moderating this content they worked long hours and not paid, and if paid at all it was very little. But the impact of what they had to watch for those long hours was tremendous in terms of their mental health. And so my question is, how do we as a society—a global society—ensure that it is not these countries who, again, are bearing the brunt of something that is benefiting the developed world at the detriment of these societies?

SEGAL: Yeah. I mean, we saw this with social media content moderation—the first wave of it, right? A lot of it was offshored to people that then had to watch terrible, terrible things for hours and hours again.

I think what only had an effect was—quite honestly, was transparency so the companies were embarrassed and were forced to spend more money and pay more and do some of it. But, you know, clearly, other firms are going to rise and take advantage of that as well.

So there’s not a lot of regulatory tools I see in place and I would suspect it’s mostly going to come from embarrassing the firms and pulling them out. I think we’re also going to have the issue about language expertise and people on the ground that are—you know, the most well-known example was in Myanmar—in Burma, right.

Facebook had one or two people that could actually speak the local language and so could not track the genocide as it was developing. I’m sure we’re going to see something similar to that again, given that the firms are going to find the cheapest people to do it.

Q: Hello. I’m Kue at Idaho State University.

So I know internationally there’s a lot of push for digital government and also digital inclusion, but also I think other countries also kind of emphasize the interoperability of different ministry works. And I know in Idaho one of the things that we see is that there’s kind of a disconnect of what’s going on in the world versus what’s happening in the local government. Systems are not integrated and much more difficult to find relevant information. So I’m wondering how do you guys see this divide, how do you see movements from international spheres as they struggle or kind of push for interoperability for efficiency and effectiveness purposes but also at the same time struggling with the fact that iCloud data servers are probably not in their country, right, and so in other countries that’s oftentimes outside their jurisdiction. So, thank you.

LEE: So your question is actually pretty relevant, right. We see—I go to the Mobile World Congress every year and, you know, countries, like—other countries are doing digital twins. They’re figuring out how to do smarter cities and to rely more on compute power to be able to integrate government services, consumer services, et cetera. That conference is amazing, by the way, because you get to see how cities are thinking about public safety or, you know, online enrollment.

Idaho, you got a little bit of work to do, right, you know, partly because of the broadband concern. On the infrastructure side we know that rural communities, for example, just have a lack of facilities. I call it more cows than people because there are more cows than people.

But we can’t discount that because there are farmers that want to be productive that have the ability—we have—I visited a five-room school with twenty-five students who were all Amish during my travels and they were the top robotics team in the state of Maryland even though they couldn’t actually play with robotics at home.

But the idea was that they would be more productive if they knew these skills for their families, who were actually entrepreneurs and independent factory makers.

My point is—you know, the best way I can explain it is we talk about China. When I go to China and I go to some of the smaller markets I pull out money. They pull out a QR code. And until we have, I think, the political will to sort of see how we use integrated technology to do some really amazing things that make us much more smarter, much more mobile, much more efficient, for me it’s the lack of political will to do it in a bipartisan fashion that keeps us in the same space of being much more innovative.

SEGAL: Yeah. I always like to point out the Chinese complain about this too, though, right. There’s plenty of writing in the Chinese press—

LEE: It’s true. It’s true.

SEGAL: —about, like, data islands and this agency won’t share data with that agency and everything else. So it is a kind of structural problem that anybody that has data generally doesn’t like to share it.

LEE: Right.

SEGAL: But, you know, look, we’re Americans. We’re not going to learn from the rest of the world. (Laughter.)

LEE: You think? (Laughter.)

SEGAL: But there are great examples, right? I mean, Estonia and Singapore and other places have extremely well-developed systems that protect user privacy, that integrate—you know, you have your ID and you can vote online, you can open your business in twelve hours, and you can do all these other things.

Now, we don’t have the structures in place to do that but that I—you know, there’s lots of great models out there that one could think about building and, again, at the local level there are probably, you know, mayors and governors who are thinking, you know, how do we build on that.

LEE: Yeah. But you also have to be careful of greater surveillance, right? So when I do go to those conferences, Estonia being an example I think it was—maybe it wasn’t Estonia. It was another conference. It was one of the years I was there.

They said, we have these smart bridges and then we can also see when people are walking on the bridge and they’re standing there for a long time, and then we send the police out. (Laughter.) And I said, well, why do you send the police out? Well, we don’t want them to hurt themselves.

They also have to be careful of surveillance, right, because those added layers of surveillance when people get this bug can also be detrimental to our individual freedoms here of what we expect.

SIMS: Go back—farther in the back. Yeah.

Q: Thank you. Ginta Palubinskas, West Virginia State University.

One of the things that we don’t hear much about is the impact of AI on the environment or environmental concerns. And I wonder if you could address the compatibility of the rising use of AI and its impact on the environment in terms of energy use, water, and global warming. Thank you.

SEGAL: Yeah. So, I mean, the energy issue is going to be huge—

LEE: It’s real.

SEGAL: —even if it’s more than eating a hamburger or less than eating a hamburger.

LEE: (Laughs.) Yeah, it was—I got to figure out the analogy. (Inaudible.)

SEGAL: So it’s going to be huge. I mean, that’s why, you know, people like Altman and Schmidt are all investing in modular—small modular reactors. Water is a huge issue, especially on—for the chips and production of the chips. You know, I was out at TSMC in Arizona three weeks ago—last month and, I mean, just always remember—they’re, like, water is not going to be a problem. I was just reminded it’s a desert but they insist that water is not going to be a problem, that they’ve figured it all out.

So I think people are paying attention of it. But, of course, you know, the tech companies say that, you know, we’re going to solve the problem with nukes or other spaces there. There were some—there was an interesting study out of Duke two months ago or three months ago that basically said actually energy is not going to be as big a demand as we thought it was going to be, that you can meet a lot of the demands with the grid we have now which was, I think, pretty surprising but about rebalancing and other things there.

But I would say that, yes, there is a fairly large focus on it, at least in how do we provide it. Now, again, the response on the climate change and the pollution and environmental and urban degradation I suspect will be local as opposed to at the national level, considering that the administration has essentially signaled that, you know, the most important thing is to go as fast as possible.

LEE: And I would just say too, I mean, I think that was—and this is an area that I know you’ve been working in, Adam—that’s where it was interesting when China came out with the DeepSeek model and sort of suggested that they could do the same type of high-capacity processing with less energy and less infrastructure.

It sort of challenged many of the investment models, and it goes back to this gentleman’s question in the back about power that many of the companies had suggested it was going to take to be able to run their models.

I’ve had the opportunity to see one of the chips. It’s about my height, and the key thing is the cooling of those spaces. And I live in northern Virginia where we’re opening a lot of, for example, data centers where we need these to be running a long time.

I think the environmental question is one but we should also be looking at the workforce question, too. You know, as we’re building these data centers in actuality it takes less workers to actually man them because they’re pretty much self-sufficient. And we also have to think about—and this is an area I have to admit that we’ve not gotten a lot of climate change experts to sort of chime in yet because of the larger conversations of recommissioning nuclear sites.

We don’t know where some of these places are going to go, right, at this point and we’re not sure, again, how they’re going to interact with the local community. We’re hearing bits and pieces. But I think, again, in the next two to three years we’ll probably hear more of the climate implications or the community implications on water systems and others later.

SIMS: Yes?

Q: My question is, all the rest equal, what will be the effect of AI on inequality both internationally and also within United States from state to state, and as educator even more so in light of the shrinkage of the Department of Education and the trend to leave more and more responsibilities for education to the states?

LEE: States, yes.

Q: Full disclosure, I just asked AI the same question. (Laughter.)

SEGAL: What did it say?

LEE: And what did it say?

Q: It will exacerbate.

LEE: Inequality, yeah. Well, they got that right. (Laughter.) It depends on which one you’re using.

So, you know, this is my space, right? I mean, again, I try not to sit in the Debbie Downer space so I try to think of the and—the both/and. I’m very conscious of doing that because I still think, again, AI can be very helpful in stair-stepping some more personalized learning.

Invisible assessments is an area I’ve been looking into recently where a kid doesn’t have to be put in the back of the classroom to do an assessment. They can actually do it through AI where it’s actually scaffolding their learning in ways that they are prompting them for different research questions.

So it can actually present itself as inequality. Again, going back to my first point, educators are not sitting at the table when these technologies are designed and they don’t necessarily have a vested interest in these technologies helping us to advance educational achievement.

Think about it, folks. I mean, our procurement in the education space of a lot of shiny objects over the years tend to be on what is sold as something that’s going to just make our jobs easier.

Now, if you talked to the Department of Education maybe three years ago this is what they would have said because I was on a panel with them and they said, listen, we’re working on ways in which we do responsible, equitable AI and that’s what they did, right?

They wrote many manuals over the course of the Department of Education and the Biden-Harris administration on how to use it responsibly within school districts, how to think about the integration into the classroom.

With all that being gone, I am afraid that we’re going to lose some of that repository of learning and best practice because, to your point, states are going to decide where they want to put more or less AI and how they want to use it, and it’s not necessarily going to be presumptive of me to say that in areas where there are probably low-performing schools that they may move away from AI and go back to some basic cognitive abilities.

But you ought to be honest, too. Across the country we have a resistance to technology. Shut off your phone. Don’t use it for this and that, which is also potentially a mistake because everything that kids are learning today is technologically based.

Our challenge when it comes to inequality—and I’ll say this to all of you as educators and I will sound like Dr. Martin Luther King—it is in your hands as educators to come up with good guidance, professional development practices on how it’s going to work within your university, and to develop cross collaborations on what that looks like.

I just spoke to the California Community Colleges, their association of 750 people. They’re starting to have these conversations among their association—how do we want to use it so we do not replicate inequality and what does that look like.

Arizona State University is another really great example. They’ve developed a student and faculty advisory to work with the tech companies to ensure that the tech companies are not just bringing their products and then creating different disparities within their student population, which tend to be commuters or tend to be bilingual.

So you have that agency to really have these conversations in a very deliberate and intentional way, knowing that if we don’t do this at these sectoral levels the AI will run wild and will enhance the—I don’t think it’s going to create. It’ll just enhance the inequalities that we have.

SEGAL: I’m sorry. I’ll answer that question.

SIMS: No, please. Go ahead.

SEGAL: I thought we had to end at 11:00.

So I don’t think we know yet what the diffusion of AI is going to look like, right? If it’s a general purpose technology that looks eventually like electricity then its impact on kind of imbalances of power, I think, will be less than if it is something that’s tightly controlled and only used by some states.

And I don’t think we know yet, right? I think it’s very—we’re kind of—there’s a strong argument to be made that it doesn’t matter as much as if you innovate in the space as it is if you diffuse it, right. So that means lots of countries could be fast followers and apply it in interesting, creative ways and so that doesn’t matter so much that they don’t have the one or two companies that do the breakthroughs.

That said, short term I think it totally exacerbates inequality.

Q: Thank you so much. My name is Mindy Haas. I’m from the University of Pittsburgh. I study intelligence and international security.

My question is about what implications do you see for AI in international security technology, right? Nicol, you had mentioned, you know. I suspect that states will be able to find some military common ground with regard to AI. Is that going to look like autonomous weapons? Is that going to look like targeting systems? Is that going to look like Cambridge Analytica intervention, right? Sort of what do you see on the horizon for AI and security?

SEGAL: Yeah. So I think there will be some broad—nothing on social media or information warfare or intelligence. All of that will be, you know, every state for themselves. On military applications there will be a kind of continued discussion about application of international law and how that should guide it.

You know, I think we’re already past the man or human-in-the-loop conversations. Like, most people now believe that that will be not possible because the decision making is just going to happen so fast.

So then you have to have something that’s human-on-the-loop kind of, but then really it starts—it puts the responsibility on designing the system itself to make the decisions based on international law and other provisions there.

So we will probably get some broad agreement among likeminded about that, but the others will probably refuse to go along in those discussions and not have a lot of agreement on this space.

So, look, in cyber all we have are these state norms which, again, are not really followed and I suspect AI will be the same thing. Will not be binding treaties. There’ll be a difference about countries arguing about the application of international law.

So we’ll still say, you know, no, we expect proportionality. We expect distinction. We expect neutrality, and other countries will resist and say, no, no, we need a whole new international treaty and that means going to the UN which means, really, no progress.

So that’s where I would expect. So kind of like minded, a similar view about that, and then the others.

SIMS: In the back, yes.

Q: Good morning. Laine Munir, Arizona State University.

LEE: Yes. So Lev Gonick. Yeah. Yeah.

Q: Yes, thank you.

So I have a very praxis-oriented question, if we could look at AI use in universities from the ground up.

At ASU, we have been given four verbatim paragraphs that we can choose from to put into our syllabus. The first is no AI use permitted, period. The next one is limited AI use under these conditions with permission. The third is use AI as you wish and the fourth is you must use AI in order to complete this course.

For example, with the idea at our law school that a graduate who uses AI will always outperform a graduate who doesn’t use AI, so when we’re talking about social inequality and diversification and democracy within AI use, what strategies might we as individual educators implement in our daily work to help ensure that we are teaching our students to use AI as allies of democratizing ChatGPT and making it more inclusive.

So one thing that we are always worried about is at this point I’m wondering what can I do in my daily work to help us get to a place where AI is inclusive and democratized?

LEE: You know, I would say on that, I mean, obviously, there’s an institutional piece. So Arizona I know that university. I know Lev really well so I’ve been part of this, like, advisory that they’ve put together.

But, again, on the institutional level your institutions should be deciding how you interact with the AI companies and what products actually make it onto your campus, and how it’s actually sensitive to the linguistic diversity of the students—the learning diversity of the students.

And then on top of that—and some universities have already done that—you have some type of infrastructure that allows students to use the—access the resource whether on campus or off campus to address digital divide concerns.

When I was at Spelman, you know, there is actually an AI-based course that is actually introduced to the students at Spelman College where they go through, you know, this very—it’s almost like a competency for students, and the reason I know that they know that stuff is because they asked really hard questions when it was related to AI and these were some of the computer science students, the math students, and the social science students.

So I think as an individual educator, first and foremost, I love the four bullets. We have to come to some agreement at the university level where are we allowing and permitting the technology to be used.

We have the same type of policies at Brookings. It should be the same thing across universities, just a really outright transparent disclosure of where AI is assessed in the students’ use for you as well as the educator to be able to know here’s where it’s an acceptable norm for my classroom.

But then, two, I think it’s really important for you as individual educators to check your values, norms, and assumptions at the door, OK, because there is the assumption that everybody who uses AI that may be a low performer in the classroom may be using it to cheat. I want to keep going back to this.

Listen, you know when a student is cheating if the topic was on, you know, the Alaskan wildlife and they’re talking about Greenland—(laughs)—because they didn’t check the AI that they actually pulled it from. I’ve seen those. I, you know, teach. I’ve seen them in college essays. I’ve seen it in scholarship applications where the student has not checked the fact that they pulled a prompt and it has nothing to do with the question. So that’s obvious.

But I think we need to also figure out what type of grace we give it. This goes back to the question of AI literacy. What kind of grace do we give students as educators to say, where’d you get that prompt from? Is that something that you’re interested in? Is that comfortable? It’s a different way of teaching.

We did an education in AI workshop at Brookings over the summer. We had educators at the college level. We had Khan Academy there. We had college professors. We had Google and technology companies, and what we realized is that the educators are the most disserviced because they don’t know what their job description is.

So starting there, to your point, really helps us to frame how we teach, how we interpret, how we interrogate, and how we actually get our students to learn from the technology because it is going to be part of the workforce, going forward.

SEGAL: So I teach adjunct at SIPA once—like, one class a year, and so we had the bullet points but we had three bullet points, but the second one was if you use it tell me how you used it, what the prompts were, why you used it.

And so out of a class of twenty-five I only had two students that chose two, which I was—that prompt, the—which I was surprised by. But then I was confronted with—so I, you know, read the essay and I was, like, oh, this is a pretty good essay. And then I got to the back and I saw all the prompts and I was, like, oh. (Laughter.)

And then I realized that they had just clipped and pasted the responses and I was, like, that’s not what I—that couldn’t be what I meant, right, just clipping and pasting the responses.

But I hadn’t explicitly said that. So I was kind of stuck. And then I realized, you know, at SIPA the default thing you do when you have a problem is you give the student an A-minus. (Laughter.)

That was a graduate seminar, and I realized that the student had wrote the prompt that said answer the question as if I’m a 90 percent student, and I was, like, why did they choose that? Like, why did they go for 90 percent?

LEE: Because that’s the inequality.

SEGAL: So, you know, I’m a political scientist so plural of—you know, data is a plural anecdote. So I guess my only response is that it’s a learning iterative process so I’m not going to change the policy next year but I’m certainly going to be more explicit. You can’t just clip and paste the answers.

Like, you at least have to reshape and rewrite the wording so I saw that you engaged with it. But you still have to show me all the work. I’m still not completely comfortable with it, quite honestly.

LEE: And can I—I know we’re short on time but it goes back to, like, the question of the internet, right? So I’m going to date myself. I know I look a lot younger.

But, like, I remember I used to hand write all my research papers, right, and then a typewriter came out with the white-out function, and then I used to type my papers, right, and I used to feel so accomplished when I handed it to my teacher and said, here’s my typed paper.

And I realized some of my peers in my—I went to school in New Rochelle, New York, not too far from here—they didn’t have a typewriter, right? And so I felt that I would get more credit if I typed it, and I spent a lot of time ripping the paper out and putting it back in because I thought that was going to allow me to be on par with students who had that resource.

My point is we’re too premature in our settings in education to make that a level-up tool for our kids, right—for our students. So we have to actually explain the culture in which we want this tool to be used, and when you explain the culture, over time we’ll get more young people to see that this is a transferable skill that has its benefits. It has its drawbacks.

But, most importantly, it will help us move a little bit beyond some of the conversations that I tend to be in the middle on where we’ve got to get rid of all the technology because it’s just blasting the critical inquiry skills of our students.

It’s actually very helpful, you know, at times and we as adults use it all the time with that presumption that we’re writing—I mean, employers are writing performance reviews using ChatGPT, believe it or not.

People are using it for research and talking points. We didn’t do our talking points. Maybe Calvin’s questions were AI-generated. We don’t know, right? (Laughs.) We need some journalists here. But we got to figure out how to use it in a way that—

SIMS: Journalists being—(inaudible). There you go. Yes. (Laughter.)

LEE: I had to put that out there. I was on a panel where somebody said, I did all my responses from ChatGPT. I was, like, well, you cheated here, right? (Laughs.) All of us. (Laughs.)

SIMS: Well, I want to thank both Adam and Nicol and everyone here today, and we hope to see this again, you know, in another, say, months or a year from now to see where we are.

But thank you all for coming and participating. (Applause.)

(END)

FASKIANOS: (In progress)—our next session, on the Future of Global Governance. This session, in your program it says it’s—the sessions being moderated by Charlotte Howard. She had an emergency, so our very own Carla Anne Robbins has stepped in to moderate.

Carla Anne Robbins is senior fellow here at CFR. She’s the Marxe faculty director of the master of international affairs program and clinical professor of national security studies at the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs at Baruch College. So with that, I’m going to invite them on the stage. And Carla will introduce our distinguished panel.

ROBBINS: Hey, there. Sorry that I’m not the Economist. But I used to be the New York Times, and that’s even better. (Laughter.) What can I tell you? We had a daily rather than a weekly, what can I tell you? So, has it been a great conference so far?

AUDIENCE: Yes.

ROBBINS: Hmm. I know it’s tough out here in academia. I can tell you that. (Laughs.) But global governance, yay. So, Varun, thank you for doing this too. My master’s program, we have an unofficial slogan. And that is, global solutions for global challenges. And I still want to believe that’s possible. So, you all have to restore my faith today. Try hard, OK? (Laughter.)

BRIMMER: It’s a tall order.

ROBBINS: I know it’s a tall order, particularly in these days. So, welcome to our discussion on the future of global governance. You have my colleagues’ bios, so I’m just going to give you some quick hits. Thomas Bollyky is the Bloomberg chair in global health, senior fellow for international economics, law, and development, and director of CFR’s Global Health Program. And if you aren’t signed up for Think Global Health, you should be. So I recommend that as well. Esther Brimmer is the James H. Binger senior fellow in global governance. And what should they be signing up for you?

BRIMMER: They could be signing up actually for our Council of Councils newsletter as well.

ROBBINS: OK. I’m sure there’s a list in there. And on Zoom, Varun Sivaram, is the senior fellow for energy and climate and the director of CFR’s Climate Realism Initiative. And there’s a climate realism email now as well, because I just signed up for it. So, I want to thank everyone for being here. And just a very quick word on format. Our discussion is on the record. And Esther, Tom, Varun, and I will chat for about thirty minutes, and then open our conversation up to your questions.

So, Tom, let’s start with you. Since taking office, President Trump has pulled the U.S. out of the World Health Organization again, shut down USAID, ending billions in U.S. funded bilateral and multilateral health programs. And in your recent article in Foreign Affairs—which is really great, I recommend it. I must admit, I only read it today on the train, but I did read it. It was fabulous—you wrote about the critical and outsized role the U.S. has played fighting diseases that poor countries cannot fight alone.

And the data—I mean, the numbers are pretty extraordinary. In 2023, we spent just 0.3 percent of the budget on global health, but that $20.6 billion translated into nearly three quarters of international development assistance for HIV/AIDS, 40 percent of malaria aid, more than a third of global funding to combat tuberculosis. We were also the biggest provider of vaccines to the COVID-19 Vaccine Initiative, and the main player in the World Bank’s Pandemic Fund.

So, if we’re out of the business of doing this, is anyone out there going to fill the gap? And if we want to be utterly selfish about it, which seems to be our way these days, are we going to be in a lot more risk because of this? Are we not going to see the next pandemic coming?

BOLLYKY: Right. Well, first of all, thank you for the opportunity to speak to this group. I am a huge fan of—Irina runs a number of networks. I think they’re among the best parts of the Council. It’s really a great opportunity to be able to speak with all of you.

So, as was rightly pointed out, this has been a period of enormous disruption. Over the last nearly three months, we have dismantled a system of global health governance that the U.S. largely proposed, designed, to a great extent directed, and funded over the last twenty-five years. Really comes in three buckets, that were mentioned before. Disruption to the U.S. support for the World Health Organization, where the U.S. was also the largest funder, responsible for 16 percent of its budget, disproportionately focusing on global health emergencies and polio. We saw enormous disruption to the bilateral programs that the U.S. operates through the USAID. We’ve canceled 90 percent of the grants that the U.S. Agency for International Development funds. And we have reduced the staff from USAID from roughly 10,000 individuals to fifteen, that are now being folded into the State Department. We’ve also seen a disruption of funding for global health initiatives like the Global Vaccine Alliance, called Gavi, and a number of other programs.

Much of the initial response to this disruption that occurred in the U.S. is, well, this is going to open the door to U.S. adversaries, in particular China, to come and take over these programs and take advantage of this disruption. And I’m here to tell you that, I’m sorry to say, the reality is much worse than that. The worst thing that can happen to Americans is not that China would assume U.S.-funded global health programs. It’s that no one will. And the reality is that there will be some competition or some efforts, from China in particular, to take advantage of the disruption in a few countries—Southeast Asia in particular. And they are already trying to take advantage of these programs. But those programs in Southeast Asia represent a very small proportion of what we funded with U.S. global health assistance. The vast majority of that funding was in Africa. And no one is coming to assume the responsibility of those programs.

The cuts that have occurred in U.S. development assistance for health, that gap is not going to be filled by China which, by and large, does not fund multilateral initiatives and has shifted away from funding programs in Africa, for the most part. We can talk about some of the exceptions later. It will not be filled by European actors, who are in the midst of their own cuts in international development assistance in part for the need to shift funding to defense under the perception that traditional military alliances are not what they once were. So you may have seen the UK government is winding down its development assistance from representing .05 (sic; .5) percent of its GDP to just .3 percent. Germany is also exploring cuts. France is exploring a 40 percent cut. So it’s not going to come from our traditional allies.

And it’s not going to come, at least initially, from a lot of the countries that were aid recipients. The average government in sub-Saharan Africa spends $92 per person on health, which is one-fifth of what is spent on the less—the region that spends the second-least on health. Because of demographic property projections of population growth, that spending in sub-Saharan Africa by governments was projected to go down not up over the next twenty years, because it would not keep up with population growth. So, these will—this will not be an easy burden to assume. And unfortunately, it will not be our adversaries’. It will not be, really, anyone that assumes many of these programs.

ROBBINS: So did we learn any lessons from COVID? I mean, are we—at least do we have a system, an early warning system out there? Is that all going to fall apart without money? Next big pandemic, and we’re just not going to see it, is that the lesson here?

BOLLYKY: We learned the wrong lessons from COVID. We certainly learned some lessons from COVID. And I think other countries did as well. You know, I think there was a perception that a lot of global health programs weren’t as effective in keeping Americans safe as they might. That runs counter to the fact that global vaccination programs are estimated have saved millions of lives in the pandemic, but there’s a perception that they didn’t keep this devastating disease from U.S. shores, so therefore it may not be as effective. I think other countries learned during the pandemic, and they’re learning anew, that they can’t rely on other nations for their own safety. So, sadly, many countries had to wait a significant period of time before getting vaccines in the pandemic, which I think makes them less trustworthy. And then this sudden disruption of USAID programs in countries now will make them less likely to rely on multilateral initiatives moving forward.

This is a shame, of course, because our safety from global health threats depends on other nations taking actions to contain outbreaks when they occur, and us doing the same when we have our own outbreaks. But ideally, the system around global health security is about keeping diseases contained where they arise, and that’s going to be harder to do in this environment. So, we still have some surveillance programs. We’ll see how much they are adopted, but a lot of that depends on the WHO and other multilateral initiatives. And there’s still much to be sorted out, but there’s reason to be fearful about what proceeds from here.

ROBBINS: I want to move on to Esther, but just one very short question here. Is there a delay process in the withdrawal from the WHO? So, are we still going to meetings? Or are we out?

BOLLYKY: We are haunting meetings. (Laughter.) We go as an observer, but we do not participate. The way the withdrawal occurred, for those of you that saw the executive order issued on the first day the president re-entered office, it was actually written in a way that what it did was withdraw the letter issued by President Biden to stop the U.S.’s previously announced withdrawal from the World Health Organization. This is significant because the legislation that exists in the U.S. around the U.S. entering into membership with the World Health Organization requires one year’s notice. So, we did not—we did not withdraw again. We reinstituted a previous withdrawal so that it could be effective immediately, so we don’t have to wait one year. So, that’s happening. That’s happened now. So we are still observers in some meetings, like around flu and the recent executive board meetings. But we have withdrawn from active participation.

ROBBINS: OK. (Laughs.) Esther—and, Varun, and I apologize, I’m turned away from you. This is not—it’s not the greatest setup there. I can see you over there. So, you work on two domains. There was that movie that said it in space no one can hear you scream, or something like that. (Laughter.) OK, you work on two domains that are sorely in need of governance, space and the Arctic. Very simple question, are we moving into two new cold wars in both spaces?

BRIMMER: It could be very chilly. (Laughter.) So, first, welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations. I too am a fan of the—and appreciate the importance of education. And I train the next generation—I spent half my career, obviously, at universities as well. And I’m just so glad that you’ve taken the time to be here. I’m looking forward to our conversation and discussion, because I know we’ll all learn a lot. And it’s great to be here with my colleagues. I apologize, I’ve been at three conferences this week, so I’m very hoarse. (Laughs.) But that said, it is—I’m delighted to be here and look forward to our conversation.

And, indeed, what I work on is actually areas beyond national jurisdiction because, in a sense, everything old is new again. We are back to an era where great powers are competing in global spaces. Yes, that includes oceans, that includes the Arctic, Antarctic, and, most significantly, outer space. And a conference I was just at this week was actually about outer space. And so I’ll just touch on both of those. So, first, one example is the Arctic. Now, you will have seen the little issue about Greenland, but that’s just the latest version of a return to great-power attention to the Arctic. And indeed, it is where you see—in these areas of global commons, you see intersections of multiple phenomena.

The most significant, of course, is climate change, and therefore the impact on the Arctic, as you know, is happening three to four times faster. And so you have, again, the possibility of navigation in ways that were not thinkable before. Therefore, you also have the return of great powers running their coast guards through there. Also what’s interesting is most of these areas are usually either global commons or areas where we have to put up with our adversaries. So, the United States and the Russian Federation have to talk to each other because we are responsible for the straits. It’s international waterways. We’re the coastal countries. So, for maritime traffic coming through there, we do have to communicate on search and rescue and other areas. Then, of course, you have the important environmental issues. You have key minerals issues. And you have, as I say, great-power competition issues happening in the Arctic.

It’s also interesting, because it’s a global issue. It’s also a domestic issue. There are very few of those. But, of course, the state of Alaska, our longest coastline, is—we’re an Arctic country because of Alaska. And so there’s a very interesting dynamic on the important needs of our fellow Americans in Alaska, and the multiple issues and challenges that they face. So it’s interesting on multiple levels. And, yes, CFR did do a report in 2017 on the Arctic, had a chance to work.

But I’ll focus on space, largely because space is actually crucial to modern life. We’re all saying hi to Varun because, you know, we have satellites that are making sure we can see you. You all have your phones and, you know, were checking, you know, how long it’s going to take us to get, you know, to the train station. And, you know, if you take Uber, yeah, Uber—you know, satellites tell Uber where to pick you up. It’s also at times telling you how to make sure you can withdraw cash—remember cash—from the bank, for example. Or tap with your credit card. There are all sorts of ways in which space is absolutely vital to modern life.

It’s also vital to national security and, increasingly, an important economic carrier. Some of the most dramatic changes happening off planet include the national security challenges. We can talk about that, possible return of great-power competition in this area, and concern about whether, one, at least one, adversary may be considering introducing a nuclear component, we’re not sure exactly what it is, into space. But then also we have the enormous growth of the space economy, and so that there are now companies—some of them are out of the aerospace area, some are out of the pharmaceutical area, for example—that see space as an important place for future economic growth.

But it’s also the zone of competition. At the moment five countries—five countries and two companies have landed on the moon. And we’re seeing the return, I say, of competition. What’s interesting will be to see how—to what extent partnerships grow as states lead the Artemis Accord partnership, and to what extent we see—we see rivalries. But yet again, space is a place where we will have to talk with other countries. Most importantly, if you read the Task Force Report—it talks about a lot of things, but I think one of the most important things it talks important things it talks about is search and rescue. You think about the course of international law, one of the oldest principles going back 500 years is rescue. If there’s a sailor in the water, you’re supposed to fish them out, right? You know you can, then—you might imprison them, but at least you’re supposed to fish them out.

All major spacefaring countries have signed the Rescue and Return Treaty, which says that, you know, your capsule comes down, Chinese coast guard picks you up, they’ll return you and your capsule back to the United States. The idea—one of the places where we have to decide now about how we want to go into space, do we want to go as one nationality, or do we go as human beings? If we go as human beings, then we need to work on search and rescue. We need to make the engineering choices now so that all of—so that you have interoperability to allow you to rescue each other. We are going in space where we’ll continue to send more people in space, including more civilians as our space economy grows. We’ll actually have to figure out how to work with our adversaries in order to make it a success.

ROBBINS: So, you mentioned—thank you. You mentioned the Task Force Report on space. And the recommendations are both unilateral and multilateral, in your report. You note that the United States has more strategic and intelligence assets in space than any other country, which makes us hugely vulnerable to attack by China and Russia, potentially, which takes for granted that—basically, that space is inevitably going to become a militarized domain. At the same time, you also talk about the other danger, which is traffic accidents. It’s getting really, really crowded up there. And you talk about the need for multilateral negotiations, for building on old treaties there.

So, first of all, have we just given up? Have we accepted that space is going to become a militarized domain? That this whole notion of the Conference on Disarmament, I remember all that stuff from the old days. I’m an old—an old arms control nerd. Have we just given up on that? Or can we potentially build on the notion of we all have this very strong economic interest to deconflict, and maybe we could move back into potentially negotiating lessening the potential for military competition as well?

BRIMMER: So, indeed, this is the crucial question on national security issues. And just to take a moment to draw a picture for you. That if you’re thinking about—if you think about the Earth, then there are at least three bands. There’s low-earth orbit. And much of what we’re discussing is focused on low-earth orbit. Within low-earth orbit is where we have the International Space Station. So, people have—you know, live in this area. There’s medium-earth orbit. And then there is the geosynchronous orbit. The geosynchronous orbit, very, very high up, about 22,000 miles up. And they—and what has been traditionally the case is that the United States intelligence and other satellites are at the very high altitudes. And for years, you know, decades, you know, they were beyond—you know, no one else could get up there, and they could be a threat.

But with the—with changes in threats, there’s also now a greater proliferation of satellites, military satellites, at lower levels. And they’re not just intelligence satellites. They’re also satellites for communications, so that the breakthrough of the Gulf War was the United States was able to give commands via satellite. That is much more developed now. So, one of the key—the two key concepts are militarization versus weaponization. And as you can imagine, there’s a discussion. You could argue that space is already militarized. That, yes, there are military uses of space, one of—a larger which is communications, and observation—Earth observation. We actually monitor our arms control agreements from space. And so all that says that, yes, those are military uses. Those are people, militaries, who are doing that.

However, the question is, are there weapons in space? And this is where there’s a real question as to who is doing what. And you will recall a year ago that there was quite a lot of public discussion in the Capital and elsewhere, saying—arguing that the Russians were actually in the process of introducing possible weapons back into space. There’s also a question whether you use the term “nuclear,” because there are—one idea, of course, is for nuclear energy to be used to power those—

ROBBINS: For propulsion, yeah.

BRIMMER: Yeah, because not everyone can be powered by solar energy. So, there’s a real—there are debates about terms, but there are more fundamental issues about to what extent do we think that the Outer Space Treaty, one of the most—the foundational document for use in space—to what extent that can exclude the use of weaponization of space. And so those are live issues—really current issues now, about what that means. And that’s all before you get to this latest golden dome issue. So, indeed, the taskforce was concerned particularly about the possibility of, particularly, the Russian Federation moving to change the norms in space. There also is important competition with China as well. And there’s also important possibilities of partnership. So it’s a complex, complex relationship.

ROBBINS: Lots there. That’s great. We are going to get to questions. We can all nerd out together soon. So I want to move on to Varun, so I’m going to—I apologize—(inaudible)—back to you.

So, Varun, lovely to meet you. You’re the one person I haven’t met before.

SIVARAM: Great to meet you.

ROBBINS: So, I read your April 7 article on CFR.org, which I found both compelling and, frankly, disturbing, since it seems to jettison nearly all hope for global governance in the climate space. So forgive me, I’m going to quickly set the stage. And I may get it somewhat wrong, and you can correct me. But you argue first that the Paris targets are unachievable. And you write that even if multilateral climate agreements were possible, that a global transition to clean energy would degrade U.S. economic and security interests while bolstering China’s, since the U.S. is the world’s largest oil and gas producer and one of its largest exporters, while China has emerged as by far the dominant producer of clean energy technologies.

So, this climate realism argument that you’re making, which is really quite compelling, what should the U.S. be doing? You know, we just can’t sit back and deny. You paint a pretty terrifying image of the coming climate disasters. And you also write that we have a strong interest in other countries’ climate policies, since by the end of the century the U.S. is expected to account for only about 5 percent of the global greenhouse gasses. So, can you give us an argument? How much—is there any room for multilateral action in this? Or is it basically every country for itself?

SIVARAM: Great, great questions. First of all, I’m so honored to do this. I’m sorry I couldn’t be there with you, but this is a great event.

You know, ordinarily I’d go to an event like this and I’d say, climate is the threat that should scare all of us in the room the most. But of course, I’m up here on the screen with Tom and Esther. Tom’s got the specter of a civilization wiping out—wiped out by a pandemic, and Esther’s got the specter of a civilization being wiped out by some space threat. So, I want to be clear that climate is, in my opinion, a top tier—(laughter)—and I don’t think it’s been considered one. I don’t think we take it as seriously in our foreign policy as great-power competition with China, or Iran’s nuclear weapons, or North Korea, or Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Frankly, climate scares me much more than any of the latter do.

What should we do about it is your question. Let me first say we should all agree that all-out war is about as scary as climate change at the three degrees of average global warming level. That is an extraordinarily scary level of climate change. It is one of the greatest threats to the American homeland. And I think from there, the disagreement becomes violent. Because there’s been this convenient narrative historically that, well, if we all agree that we’re super scared about the climate threat to the homeland, then naturally the obvious thing we should do is get together as a global community and agree on emissions reductions.

And the amount of scientific consensus on how scary climate is, and the amount of consensus from so many people working the climate field that the obvious solution is to get together 192 countries in the United Nations conventions and try and solve the problem, is incorrectly parallel. It is, in fact, the case that climate is a serious threat. But for this forum of educators, as we educate the next generation of international relations and foreign policy talent, we should be blunt. It is not at all obvious that this problem is solvable through multilateral cooperation.

And in fact, three decades of that approach have demonstrated that multilateral cooperation just has not worked very well. I say this with the scars of having been a climate negotiator myself, right? I was a negotiator at the Glasgow summit in the UK, after that at Sharm El-Sheikh in Egypt. We’ve made—we’ve made progress. Look, I worked for maybe one of the master negotiators and diplomats of all time, Secretary John Kerry. I think the world is farther along thanks to his remarkable efforts. But we have also seen the limits of diplomacy. If Secretary Kerry can’t get the entire world to agree to two degrees Celsius, there is no human on this planet who can.

So, what should the United States do? I still think there are three constructive things that we can do. The first is United States needs to prepare, far more urgently than we have, for a world that is at least three degrees warmer. That world is going to implicate, for example, some of the things that Esther was talking about. As the Arctic melts, for example, the race for geopolitical advantage, the race for critical minerals in that region will intensify. It’s incumbent upon America to say, it is in our interest to look to where the puck—to skate to where the puck is headed. I’ve just used an ice analogy for an ice sheet that’s about to melt, so forgive me.

But that requires the United States to make clear and decisive decisions. I’m not saying we should annex Greenland. I am saying that we should plan for far more of the ice sheet to turn into water over the rest of the century. And at home, of course, we need to increase our investments in adaptation and resilience a hundred- or a thousandfold. We should be prepared to evacuate large cities and states. This is very scary, folks.

The second thing that America should do is to invest in our own competitiveness in the emerging clean energy transition. You know, I was looking at a chart yesterday. There are two ways of looking at clean energy. In the electric power sector around the world, clean energy has achieved a 40 percent market share. That’s good news. If you look at the curve, the market share of clean energy has risen over time and in 2024 hit 40 percent, a world record. The bad way of looking at the chart is if you look at the actual quantities, the actual quantities of fossil fuels have gone up, just more slowly, and the actual quantities of clean energy have gone up just more quickly. We are actually not living through a clean energy transition right now. We’re living through a clean energy and dirty energy addition—everything is growing.

And as a result, greenhouse gas emissions are growing. You know, you mentioned at the top of your question—you said, hey, Varun has written that an energy transition is not in America’s interest. What I wrote in that article, just to be clear, is an energy transition is not currently in our interest because China dominates electric vehicles, solar panels, and battery manufacturing. But it could be. It could be in our interest, if America develops globally competitive industries where we can actually compete with China and other countries in technologies where we are good. Those technologies include areas of comparative advantage such as solid-state next generation batteries. It’s American companies that have invented these technologies.

Next-generation geothermal energy. Advanced nuclear, where we once had a large lead but ceded it to China and Russia. And digital technologies for the smart grid of the future. These are all areas where the United States can go toe to toe with China, but only if we invest in innovation and the next generation. I have been publicly critical of the Biden administration, for which I worked, for spending far too much money on existing technologies—technologies China has already won. So I think it can be in our interest. And I think if America develops the next generation of technologies, we actually help the entire world out because India, Indonesia, South Africa, everybody gets to use American technologies and drive down their emissions if they are cheaper and better. And we have the capability to make technologies cheaper and better.

And then the third thing we should do is we should urgently find ways, through limited multilateral cooperation, through American leadership, and, yes, to your point, through coercion, to limit catastrophic climate change beyond some of the planetary tipping point, extinction-level events that could actually happen. Again, ordinarily I would scare everyone in this audience but I’m just I’m just watching Tom’s reaction, because every time I say something about extinction Tom can probably come back with something else related to a pandemic. (Laughter.) So I want to be modest in what the harms of climate can be, but let me be clear.

Four, five, six, seven degrees of warming will have extraordinary impacts on the globe. It’ll threaten American society as we know it. And they will have knock-on health effects. That will be one of the principal vectors through which climate affects human well-being, is through global health. Given this, the United States has a couple avenues to go. We can invest in this highly speculative concept of solar radiation management, or geoengineering, just to be ready in case we need to spew aerosols into the atmosphere. Some have said, let’s actually be much more intelligent about it. Don’t save it as a break glass option. Invest in it and start doing it at small scales right now.

There are lots of questions of moral hazards and perverse incentives, but given a civilization threatening threat like this one, we should—we should consider every option on the table. And then, of course, I did mention in that essay that nearly 90 percent of greenhouse gas emissions for the rest of the century will come from outside advanced economies. China and emerging economies will drive them. That means we’ve got to do everything we can to reduce the emissions in those economies.

One very odd and unintended consequence of the trade war with China may very well be that by the Western world erecting barriers to Chinese production, Chinese overcapacity in solar panels and electric vehicles, wind turbines, will spill over in a very cheap way to emerging economies. That could actually be very good for emissions. This is paradoxical, that by China being the exporter of choice to the to emerging economies—Pakistan, for example, already imported 22 gigawatts of solar last year from China—there really is a chance for some good to be done.

Let me just pause there. Those are three constructive avenues the United States can take, both to protect our interests, selfishly, but I also believe to help the world achieve a better outcome than we’re currently on track for.

ROBBINS: So, can we talk a little bit about how we get—if 85 to 90 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions are going to come from developing economies? Originally, the notion was we broke it, and it was unfair, and we were—we were the ones who were going to have to fix it. But, you know, physics isn’t fair. And the reality of it is you’re not going to solve the problem of greenhouse gas emissions by being fair. If you don’t get China and India to restrain their emissions of greenhouse gasses, not going to happen. So that’s why, you know, Paris seemed to be the important change here. The difference between Paris and Kyoto was you couldn’t do it in a fair way anymore. How are you going to get these countries to not do what we did, which was to base their development on burning dirty fuel? You used the word “coercion.” Can you talk about that? Are we going to bully them? Are we going to threaten them militarily into not developing at a pace that we developed at?

SIVARAM: Yes. Excellent question. Let me first say, I want to reiterate, the work of diplomats like John Kerry, the work of the Paris agreement, made progress. We probably got countries to increase the awareness in their domestic publics, thanks to the fanfare of the Paris agreement, of action on climate change, created domestic pressure groups. And every one of these countries have probably reduced the counterfactual emissions compared to a world in which Paris never existed. I want to make that point first. In India, for example—I used to live and work in India. I care deeply about India’s development. I was the chief technology officer of India’s biggest renewable company. And India has actually been a dramatically successful country in terms of its renewable energy adoption, compared to the rest of the emerging economies.

Nevertheless, I think there’s so much more room for them to invest in clean energy and shut down coal, and meet their development objectives. But now I want to answer your hard-edge question, which is the correct question. It is fundamentally unfair. It is historically unfair that emerging economies did not get the century or more—century and a half of development of fossil fuels that advanced economies did. It is unfair that now, as you said, physics doesn’t lie, and 85 to 90 percent of emissions are coming from China and emerging economies. That’s where we have to reduce them.

But let me say one more thing, physics, of course, does not—does not think about morality. Realpolitik and realist foreign policy also probably has a limited place for purely morally sound policies. It would likely be morally sound, under many philosophers’ conception of the world, for rich countries to simply pay reparations and pay for the clean energy transitions of poorer countries. That is not what’s going to happen. And after thirty years, it’s important for the world to recognize that will not happen. Our domestic public won’t let us do it. The United States voter, on average, is not going to support a several trillion-dollar transfer payment to multiple emerging economies.

Given this reality, what can we do? What I have shared in the essay is what some might consider odious, a policy of coercion. For example, you might apply all the tariff leverage that we’ve just applied for the purpose of supporting emission reductions. Imagine if Vietnam faced a 50-plus percent tariff, but the goal for Vietnam was not to fix the trade surplus with the United States, it was instead to reduce its carbon emissions. Vietnam may very well comply. And there are multiple tools the United States has at its disposal, alongside its advanced economy allies, which collectively will account for less than 15 percent of future emissions, whether that’s trade, economic statecraft, diplomacy, and, yes, military tools.

The question is, is this so odious that we should not be talking about that today? Open question. But I can commit to you that in twenty years or thirty years, everybody will talk about it. And I would prefer to have that conversation today, decades before we absolutely have to, than at the point where there’s a world war fought over the disasters that threaten borders and that threatened the existence of societies.

ROBBINS: Well, you guys have really failed at my request to cheer me up. (Laughter.) But very compelling arguments. At this point I want to turn it over to the group to ask questions, and maybe you’ll get—persuade them to give us a little bit more hope than I’ve been able to do. Thank you. These are all compelling. Raise your hands, stand, wait for the mic, and then state your name and your academic affiliation. So who is first? And I always call on women. It’s a reminder. It’s a Council thing. So, yeah, right there. (Laughs.) I call on men too.

Q: Hi. Thank you so much for your presentations. My name is Ashley Valanzola, Middle Tennessee State University.

And what I’ve been thinking in trying to solve and tackle some of these problems you’ve laid out before us is that you’re simultaneously combating so much misinformation, what’s circulating on social media. And so I wonder if you have thoughts on that, and also about messaging and in terms of this larger policy conversation.

BRIMMER: I will pick up on messaging, because part of it’s explaining to the public what’s important to them. And I will say, one of the—one of the expanding, space economies is challenging, but one of the exciting things is that it is uplifting. It is exciting to think about return—you know, return to the moon. It’s exciting to think about some of the possibilities. And why was interested, and where I think some of our fields overlap, was that one of—one of the industries that is interested in manufacturing in the in orbit is, of course, pharmaceuticals, because of the ability to actually work on certain compounds without gravity. And so there are various companies—so just yesterday I was sitting in this conference in Colorado, you know, with all our people, foreign policy people and national security people.

But I was in the space economy session. And to hear people at companies who are positive. They’re saying, we can see how we can actually produce products that that’ll be good for people. You know, I hadn’t realized that there’s even some companies who say, you know, we can even take some elements of automotive manufacture and take them to space, again, keeping costs down and seeing new ways of producing products that will actually benefit people back on Earth. And so I’d say that some of that, I think, is helpful in terms of—and the messaging is that it’s by cooperating that we actually can do this, that keeps costs down, which means more people would have access to certain medicines, because we work together on this. But it has to be together.

BOLLYKY: I’ll just say a little bit on the messaging issue. So, of course, in public health, particularly after COVID-19, this is an important topic. It’s not just in the United States that you’ve seen vaccination rates drop. You’ve seen it in other countries as well. There is absolutely a tie both to misinformation and, state sponsored in many cases, disinformation as a driver of that. There is a good amount of research going on about what we might do. I’m sure you’re probably familiar with some of this around pre-bunking or other ideas of what we might do to try to defang that phenomenon of misinformation and disinformation.

We’ve, here at the Council, worked a lot on the issue of trust and the role that it played in the pandemic, both in explaining differences on how countries perform but also differences between how U.S. states performed. Even when you control for all the relevant biological factors, in the United States there was a fourfold difference between the best performing U.S. states, which performed like countries in Scandinavia, and the worst performing states, which performed akin to the worst performing countries in the world. And the role of trust has a big function in that.

Misinformation, disinformation is a part of that, but one idea that we’ve put forward and we’ve been developing a lot is, for the purposes of preparedness, instead of having an agenda of how do we rebuild trust in societies and make ourselves more cohesive, because it is primarily social trust, the way we feel about one another, that’s a driver—we should take the world as the dysfunctional place that it is and assume we’re going to remain low trust in some capacities. And from that standpoint, have more ongoing monitoring and strategies that target cooperation in low-trust societies. Because there is good research on that, on what we might do. And some of that might fold into this notion of misinformation and disinformation as well. Instead of assuming for our purposes of preparedness that we are heading towards a better world, that we take the world as it is and start to be more proactive about designing strategies that account for those changes.

ROBBINS: I want to ask Varun a question about that, but I want to ask the group a question about climate for a minute. How many of your students have given up on climate? Do you find this? Or how many of your students are really engaged on climate issues? Not an overwhelming number. I mean, I find my students three years ago overwhelmingly wanted to write about climate, study climate. And it’s not that they aren’t aware that it’s a disaster. They seem to be—it’s not that they’re burned out on it. They feel—if anything, they feel helpless, which I find extraordinary for a group of students who really want to fix the world. But not—they feel like they can’t on climate. So, Varun, how do we—whether it’s going to be a question of using tariffs, or whether it’s going to be—whatever it is they’re going to do, how do we get people to feel that it’s not just an overwhelming threat but it’s also something that it has to be acted upon?

SIVARAM: Well, first of all, I think there is a hopeful story here. There’s a hopeful way that we avoid the grim future where there is war between nations or necessary coercion. But we do ourselves a disservice by offering very unrealistic avenues for solving this problem. I think that for educators in this room, telling your students about the real limits of cooperation internationally is important. Your students should know that international cooperation actually has been fantastic in getting the scientists of the world together and the countries of the world to agree that climate change is catastrophic. But it’s been abysmal at getting the countries of the world to actually overhaul their economies to the tune of $10 trillion of investment every year that’s necessary to achieve net zero emissions. And that’s not surprising.

International cooperation has its limits. The vast majority of investments are done through national policies, not through international policies. The places where international cooperation has, in fact, succeeded, in addition to the scientific consensus, are areas like bilateral cooperation. For example, the United States and Canada have a very integrated electricity grid, and we’re able to import clean energy from Canada. Europe has an integrated electricity market, and they’re able to use wind power from the north and use it in the south. This is all manageable, achievable international cooperation. Our students need to come out learning what is realistic and not what is unrealistic.

But what’s the hopeful future? How do you get people excited? For me, it comes down to technology, technology, technology. Some will call me naive about being a techno-optimist, but I see no other solution here. Because what’s really exciting and optimistic for me is that clean technologies are inherently thermodynamically better in many cases. I wrote a book in 2018 on the future of solar power, called Taming the Sun. Back then nobody really thought that solar was going to be a big deal. And I said solar will produce a majority of humanity’s energy in the second half of the century. There’s only one prominent person out there who said a similar thing to me, and you don’t think of him today as a constructive force. His name is Elon Musk.

I believe that solar is inherently a superior energy source to many of the sources we have today, if we can find ways to buffer its unreliability. I think that nuclear fusion, harnessing the power of the sun, is actually a source that’s within our grasp in the coming decades, but well before that, nuclear fission already is within our grasp and demonstrated. There are so many clean energy sources that truly are achievable, but only with much more technology innovation. Innovation, for example, to make that iPhone in your pocket last five days, not one. Or to make an electric vehicle charge in the same amount of time as it takes to fill up gas at a gas station, and work at negative 30 degrees.

We can do that. That optimistic future, where the world doesn’t have to painfully tradeoff between its existing fossil fuel infrastructure and inferior clean energy and expensive infrastructure, but rather it just gets to move to superior technologies, that’s a world we can all believe in, and one that avoids a lot of the grim conflicts. So let’s teach our kids—our students the limits of international cooperation, and to be realistic. And, second, let’s emphasize that if you want to make a meaningful career in this space, technology innovation may be your best first port of call.

ROBBINS: The gentleman right here. Yeah.

Q: Hi. Thank you all. Brian Alexander with Washington and Lee University.

Particularly on climate and global health, one way to characterize the problem is a collective action problem, right? All of us would be better off if we coordinated in the long run, possibly in the short run, but none of us are individually incentivized to do so. And sort of, Carla Anne, to your point on whether our students are engaged or not, the challenge I see for students is kind of where is the agency? What can they do? What’s in it for me? They’re both planning their careers, but they’re also just looking at, even in the most idealistic senses, what can I actually do to engage this?

With the withdrawal of the U.S. from a lot of the climate efforts, and, of course, from the global health efforts, it becomes even more difficult to have this conversation, because you don’t have the state sort of involved in providing what the state does, which is solutions to collective action problems. Where, in both climate and health, and if it applies to space, sorry, can—what role should the state be playing in, let’s say, economic innovation on this technology, or other types of innovation? Because we do need to have this conversation, particularly as the United States is retreating and doing whatever it’s doing. At some point, hopefully the grown-ups are going to arrive and say, OK, we know we can’t go back to the past, but we have to do things looking toward the future.

I like the idea of technology innovation and technology investment, but is that coming from the private sector? Is that coming from the state? In that individual level of what’s in it for me, for our students, right, what role should, let’s say, the state, play? Thanks.

ROBBINS: Jump in.

BRIMMER: I had to start, because you challenged me to say, what about space? So, indeed, of course, the federal government remains the major source of funding for space issues. And some of that—some of that’s continuing. So, obviously, we’re all concerned about what’s happening on federal funding. But that said, there’s still a special role for NASA. We’ll see what actually happens. We have watched the appropriations this year, but there is at least—you know, all of the administrations at this point, of both parties, do think that space is important, for different reasons. But I think that there is a key role that remains, and will continue to remain, an important role for the federal government in direct, straight research. Because we think about the division of space into civil, commercial, and military uses, civil, of course, the first part of that, is scientific research. And that will be a federal issue.

That said, there’s much more international cooperation in this as well. Many more types of joint products and projects. So the U.S. doesn’t have to, you know, bear this all. There are many other countries that have an important contribution to the scientific area. The other thing is to say, in terms of jobs, what I’ve been interested is to see the number of young people, you know, at thirty and under—to me, not very young—who are looking at space as places for careers, because of the expansion of the companies. And then some companies are very small. Some are very large. But you have the legacy, you know, aerospace companies. And you have these new upstarts who are looking for talented people. And in these days, to be able to sit down and talk to people who are excited and felt they were actually going to have a career and people who wanted to invest in them is interesting. I think that’s, again, a ray of hope on the—we’ll see where the jobs go, but there are some jobs.

ROBBINS: Tom, can I sort of put this—a little converse side of this? Which is how much of the dismantling of the government, whether it’s support for university research, NIH, and all the other structures, can that be recovered? How much has already been lost? And how much more is going to be lost?

BOLLYKY: Great. So I’ll try to weave these two in together. I think on—I’ll start with yours first, on how—there is permanent damage that’s been done. I think from donor governments and populations, states that gave money before, the fact that aid has been characterized either as charity instead of investment, corrupt, ideologically driven—I think one of the lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic is it is hard, particularly once those types of narratives have been associated with a particular political party—or political identity, is probably a better way of describing it—it is hard to reverse that. That probably sticks. On the aid recipient side, for governments the loss of trust of these programs collapsing overnight, both in terms of patient populations and those governments, it’s hard to see how that trust could be easily rebuilt. So all that is a challenge moving forward.

Very briefly, on the collective action issues, I would think of it as three sets of issues in global health. There are some issues you can absolutely deal with locally, whether public health systems, or sanitation, some treatment programs. Countries can and will—some of them will deal on their own. The challenge we have for many aid recipient countries is this happened extremely abruptly. Particularly post COVID-19, many of them have very limited fiscal space, high levels of national debt. And the ability to reprogram budgets to the health sector overnight to assume responsibility for some of these programs is going to be a challenge. Some governments will do it. And, frankly, more efficiently than aid-driven programs did. Some other governments will use the disruption to point to external actors as being at fault for why those programs aren’t being met.

Then, there’s the set of things that can only be done efficiently at scale, at least regionally. So a lot of the manufacturing, the supply chains, the distribution, many of these are very small-value markets. They may have a lot of people in them, but the amount of money involved is very small. Hard to do it just on a country-by-country basis. Many vaccines have a lot of components. It doesn’t make sense to make them in just one country. You need to see that more distributed. Can we, coming out of this, have like-minded countries work together at least regionally on some of these challenges?

The last set of issues are problems that can only be dealt multilaterally, nationally. And surveillance really falls in this camp, as does some standard setting activities. Can we still find a way to work together on those challenges that really require countries being able to see what’s emerging around sharing on samples, on influenza, emerging trends, so that they can inform their own policies and product developments? Can we still find a way to work together? And on that last one, I think, is the one where really the jury is still out. Can more sober minds emerge? There was some notion—or, some reports that the Trump administration might still participate in the WHO Coordinated Influenza Surveillance Network. We should encourage those kinds of initiatives to at least keep us in that third band of working together, because it’s not replicable through other means.

ROBBINS: Varun, where is the innovation going to come for technology if the Trump administration seems more focused on drill, baby, drill than anything else?

SIVARAM: Well, I’ll first say that under Trump one he was also—is that any better? Yeah, the network isn’t great. In Trump one, R&D funding for clean energy technologies increased year on year every single year, even though President Trump aimed to zero them out. In Trump two, this current term, I continue to believe that there’s bipartisan support for clean energy technology funding. We may have to call it something else, like emerging energy technologies, but there is bipartisan support for that kind of funding. I also believe that there’s a lot of funding for basic scientific innovation that has spillovers for clean energy technologies and non-clean energy technologies. And that funding, through the NSF, through the DOE—the DOD and the DOE is very important to continue.

So, there is a lot that we can do to hurt ourselves if we cut them. And there are danger signs. But none of them directly oppose the president’s push for drill, baby, drill, or for energy independence, or for energy dominance, et cetera. They are largely technocratic and bipartisan and non-threatening. The other thing I’ll say is the question was just terrific. By the way, I loved your bow tie. The question was, this is a collective action problem. All three of us, Tom, Esther, and I, we all deal in collective actions. What hope is there for our students?

And I’d say, look, in climate, three things at least that they should be excited about. If you’re going to go into the private sector, you have a chance to develop technologies that the rest of the world can use. You go into the public sector, there are two options. Option number one is you can work on enabling American innovators. And I think that’s what the NSF, and the DOD, and the DOE do. And option number two is American foreign policy makers occupy a different and privileged role to almost—for policy makers of almost any other country on Earth. We may not be the single world hegemon, but we are in a world where the United States and China have outsized leverage, particularly the United States with our alliances which we really should be careful about.

Being an American foreign policy maker gives you an outsized role in international leadership and cooperation. So, yes, this is a vicious and ruthless prisoner’s dilemma game. It is a collective action problem. But as we discussed earlier, if there’s any country that has a chance to hasten the net zero transition through its unilateral actions or its ability to corral allies, it is the United States. I think, not all is—not all hope is lost if you’re an American foreign policy maker.

ROBBINS: This side of the room. Gentleman, there.

Q: OK. My name is Kwaku Obosu-Mensah, Lorain County Community College in Elyria, near Cleveland, Ohio.

And I think this question is for Varun. My understanding is that the developing countries are using dirty energy. Let me use it this way. And it is not good for anybody. So, in fact, I know that the argument from the developing countries is that the developed countries developed by using dirty energy. So, let us also use dirty energy to develop to your level. Then we go to the clean energy. You say, and I agree with you, that is disastrous for the word. And you said they should be coerced, in a way they should be forced to use clean energy. Don’t you think the developed countries should rather meet them halfway through incentives or, let’s say, to entice them, instead of being coerced to use dirty energy—I mean, clean energy? Thank you.

SIVARAM: The question is whether you’re asking me, sir, as a philosopher, or a student of ethics, or as a foreign policy practitioner beholden to the wishes of the American voter. I am afraid that if your answer is the latter, we’ve tried this experiment and failed. We cannot raise American will to send trillions of dollars abroad. Just not going to happen. And so I’m so sorry that there’s a divergence between what is morally right and what is actually going to happen. A difference between “should” and “will.” And the Climate Realism Initiative lives largely in the in the realm of “will.” But, again, technology breaks that Gordian knot. If America makes technologies that are cheap and superior, America has a chance to enable emerging economies to grow and to decarbonize at the same time. Thanks.

ROBBINS: OK, right here. And then go back to that side.

Q: Hi. I have a two-part question.

ROBBINS: Can you stand up and tell us you are?

Q: Two-part question. Sokol Celo, Suffolk University in Boston.

Part one. All three panelists talked about multilateral collaborations or organizations. There is one way to—very rough way to categorize those, into the so-called one country one vote organizations versus one dollar one vote organizations. And in my view, it seems as if the current government has some sort of an allergy against the one country, one vote organizations—be it in healthcare, in climate change, or UN. However, we have the other part, the one dollar one vote. And I’m talking more specifically about World Bank and IMF. Is there any hope that this type of organizations might actually pick up the tab, and feel a little bit the void left by what we did, from USAID? Whether there is any hope or not.

Second question. All three panelists—

ROBBINS: Let’s just—let’s deal with that one, OK? I mean, it’s a great question. And certainly, during the pandemic, there was all this talk that the bank was going to pick up, and, you know, have a COVID initiative. And even the Fund was talking a little bit about that, when the Fund sort of gets a little bit of envy for the bank and wants people to like it. So, Tom, and then Esther?

BOLLYKY: So, I think international financial institutions do play an important role on health, the World Bank in particular in funding health system resilience. The Bank, as you know, World Bank, has an arm that works with the private sector on making investments. That’s an important function moving forward. Whether or not the distinction that you’re making between international institutions where the U.S. is the shareholder versus where it’s a member-state driven organization matters to this administration, I do not know. There is a widespread perception that there will be a more—a broader multilateral institution—or, a broader review of the U.S. government’s international commitments and how it works with other institutions. People at the Bank are expecting it. Other institutions in Washington are expecting it. I don’t know what that will do, and in what form those changes might come. But I think it’s too soon to know whether or not the administration is making the distinction you’re making. But certainly those types of institutions play an important role on health.

BRIMMER: I would just add that there’s another way of slicing international organizations, and that is the division between our political organizations and our functional organizations. Because there’s a whole set of international organizations. The most obvious of them is the International Civil Aviation Organization headquartered in Montreal. Everybody’s a party. Everybody is a member. Even, you know, Taiwan appears. It gets renamed different things, you know, but obviously for civil aviation to function everybody has to be part of the same system. And so it is a United Nations agency. It was part of the Bureau of International Organizations. And it will be part of looking at some of the rules for—you know, from ground to the edge of national airspace. Then there’s a gap. And then there’s, you know, actual space.

But one of the things we talk about in our report is to what extent can we introduce some of the space governance issues through existing mechanisms? It would be great to start a whole new international organization. Not going to happen. So, the idea is to look at what do you do? What do you borrow from the International Maritime Organization? We’ve seen there was just a recent agreement there, on a particular issue. What do you borrow from the meteorological organization? The whole set of organizations that are basically considered apolitical, extremely important to national governments functioning, and important to commercial function as well.

The most visible, of course, is the International Telecommunications Union, one of our oldest. Goes back to being the Telegraph Union. Their next meeting will be in 2027. And one of the big issues is, yes, they’re going to be doing the issue of time and communications on the moon. Everybody cares about that, because the companies care about it. And so, there’s this whole set of international organizations that if we, like, don’t call them international organizations but would, say, recognize that global business needs those to function, there might be some surprising allies and support for working through some of these issues.

ROBBINS: Varun—I would love at some point to talk about time on the moon, but not today. (Laughter.) Varun, the Bank and the Fund on climate, do they have a role to play in this?

SIVARAM: So, yeah. First of all, it’s a really good question about the distinction between one—you know, one country one vote, and one dollar one vote. Nevertheless, you know, I have long been skeptical that the Bank and the Fund can marshal the funds, even at their extraordinary scale, to overhaul the global economy. Again, I want to make a distinction here. When we talk about climate change as a collective action problem, compared with almost any other collective action problem, climate change is maybe the thorniest. Again, my copanelists on stage may push back on me on this one, but it’s because we have to fundamentally change the way our societies are structured. Every element of our GDP, every cent, comes down in some way or another to using units of energy. And if you have to change those underlying units of energy that underpin every single economy, there aren’t enough trillions that the bank or the fund control to do that.

Ultimately, it comes down to reordering society. That’s why this is so fundamentally difficult, and why there hasn’t been a quick fix. You know, there’s been a lot of Bank presidents and a lot of Fund presidents who will come and say, hey, we will mobilize capital for the developing world. We’ll get solar projects and wind projects and manufacturing projects. And they’ve absolutely—they’ve done a marvelous job. When I served not only did the international financial institutions do things, but we ourselves, the United States, sent, for example, $500 million to build a solar panel manufacturing facility in India.

It is a drop in the bucket compared to reordering an entire economy. Now I can walk you through the list of things that you can do to enable India to run off of clean energy and not dirty energy. Most of these things, by the way, would be highly salutary for India—widespread deregulation of their electricity markets and liberalization, for example. It would be great for the country. There are entrenched political obstacles, however. And beyond that, the series of things that have to happen are national, domestic policies, not international policies, and likely not things that international aid is going to particularly be helpful with. These are fundamental domestic regulatory reform initiatives. And they have to be undertaken either with domestic political will, external inducement or coercion, or some combination of the two.

ROBBINS: Here. Another woman, please?

Q: Thank you. My name is Daniel Banini. I’m from Providence College.

Now, when it comes to the climate change literature, one of the things out there is that climate change will have a lopsided effect on societies. And the literature out there indicate that developing countries are going to be at the receiving end of the climate change. So, they’re going to be much more impacted. So my question is, do you agree with that statement? Because one of the things that has also been mentioned is the role of technology. And you have alluded to technology as a very important intervening mechanism when it comes to climate change and how it impacts societies. Now when we talk about technology, we understand that developed countries do have technology. So that might even be one of the reasons why we may not have that level of agency that they have to have to act.

Now, if—another part of my question is in terms of climate change, which we all understand is going to have a lopsided effect on developing countries, then there have been a lot of studies looking at the relationship between climate change, conflicts, food production systems, and all of that. Now, when it comes to the developed countries, we don’t see the impact—the direct impact how climate change will manifest locally, and how climate change will affect people. This is the kind of conversation that we don’t normally see or have. In your opinion, how do you see climate change manifesting locally in the U.S., if nothing is done in the next ten, twenty years?

SIVARAM: These are great questions. First of all, I agree with your initial premise. Climate change will have lopsided impacts, for two reasons. One is that a country like Bangladesh is just very vulnerable to flooding, for example, from sea level rise. And, two, is that a country, like Bangladesh—I’m just picking a particular country—may not have the adaptation or resilience resources available to it, may not have the fiscal space available to it, to protect its economic development from the ravages of climate change. So to answer your question first, yes. The developing world will face far more brutal impacts of climate change.

Your second question is correct as well, which is climate—as my friend Sherri Goodman has argued—is what’s called a threat multiplier. You know, you can’t attribute 100 percent of a conflict to climate change, but you can attribute some portion to the fact that the higher number of heat wave days, degraded resources caused droughts, created scarcities of resources, and therefore contributed to a conflict breaking out, or contributed to a wave of migration. By 2050 we could see hundreds of millions of climate migrants around the world. All of these are very true.

Your third question was, what are the effects that the United States will see in the next twenty years? So that means between now and the year 2045. And I have kind of a good news/bad news part of this. The good news is the effects in the next twenty years are going to be manageable by the United States. That’s a prediction. It’s not a fact. They could very well be unmanageable. We’ve already seen an LA wildfire this year that felt like a tactical nuclear weapon had fallen on the city of Los Angeles, or on the communities of Palisades. But, however, in these next two decades I anticipate that the rate of climate disaster increases is going to be—you know, it’s going to be bad. It’s going to cause billions, if not hundreds of billions, of economic damage. But the United States will survive.

The bad news is what to come after. The second half of this century, when global temperatures breach an average rise of two degrees Celsius, two and a half degrees Celsius, and reach three degrees, that’s when we’ll start to see the requirement to evacuate whole cities. That’s when much of Florida and its coastline will be underwater. So the time delay here is meaningful. At our launch of Climate Realism, Secretary Ernie Moniz, the former secretary of energy under President Obama, said: We all love our children, and we love our grandchildren, just not enough—or, not as much as we love ourselves. Now, that’s very true. The impacts to those of us in this room are going to be more manageable than the impacts to, for example, my fifteen-month-old son in his life. And that divergence, that asymmetry of interests, is going to lead those of us in power, those of us who are voters and policymakers, to make suboptimal choices compared to what would be optimal for our children. It’s a sad but true reality.

ROBBINS: Well, with that happy thought—(laughter)—I want to thank Varun.

SIVARAM: I’m so sorry!

ROBBINS: I want to thank Varun. I want to thank Tom. I want to thank Esther. All extraordinary insights. And you have a fifteen-minute break. And after that, you have the CFR Education Presentation. And I’m sure that if they haven’t already shared the links to their stuff they’ll share it with you later. (Applause.) Thanks.

(END)

 

 

FASKIANOS: Going to get started with the next session on CFR Education. And these materials are really important. Everybody make their way in. Fantastic. Thank you so much.

So, this next session is a CFR Education Presentation. And it will be led by my colleague, Caroline Netchvolodoff, who’s the vice president for Education here at CFR. So I’m going to invite her and the panel on the stage and let her take it from there.

NETCHVOLODOFF: Hi, everyone. Welcome. I think I’ve met almost all of you. And I apologize to those who have not shaken the hand of. But I’ve also had some great conversations with some of you too. So I look forward to connecting with the rest of you after this. But as Irina said, I’m Caroline Netchvolodoff. I’m the vice president of Education here at the Council. And I look forward to very briefly sharing with you an overview of CFR Education’s work, and how we hope to support you as you navigate this very challenging time we’re in, to say the least. After highlighting our work, I’m going to invite a couple of faculty up onto the stage who are going to participate in a panel discussion—sorry about this—in a panel discussion where they’ll share how they use CFR resources in their classroom. Can you hear me? Is this—I think it’s not working. Or on and off, yeah? OK, good. Great.

So, let’s start with a question. How many of you have students who have come to you with what they believe—something they’ve learned online that they believe to—that you either know is false, or assume to be false? (Laughter.) Right? I think almost everybody. I think we’re all aware that this is happening at an increasing rate. And of course, it’s one thing if the fact relates to a trend, like a color of the year, or a new pair of sneakers, or even some gossip about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. But unfortunately, more and more young people are getting mis- and disinformation about important global affairs issues online. They want and they need to be able to separate fact from fiction amidst the deluge of daily news. And they need to know how to find, evaluate, and use trustworthy information.

So, there is an acute need to strengthen what we, at the Council on Foreign Relations, refer to as global literacy. I think some of you were in a workshop earlier where we discussed global literacy, but for those of you who weren’t and for those of you who have not heard this, global literacy comprises the knowledge, the skills, and the perspective that are required to effectively engage as a citizen. Sadly, a significant gap exists today in students’ understanding of the world around them. So, just what does it look like when a student is globally literate? Let’s consider the following scenario.

A student is on TikTok, surprise, surprise, and sees a post about the war in Ukraine that says Russia had the right to invade Ukraine because it was provoked by NATO. A globally literate student would, number one, know that Ukraine is a sovereign nation. Two, possess the knowledge and critical thinking skills to understand that Russia’s invasion was against international law. Three, they would understand that what they’ve encountered online is not an accurate portrayal of the facts. There were other things that might mark them as globally literate, but just those would be a good start.

So, CFR Education, as you may have heard earlier during your time here, is the educational arm of the Council on Foreign Relations. And we provide content and programming to help strengthen global literacy. We know that educators like you cannot and should not be expected to be experts on every global issue, especially at the rate that our world is changing. That’s really our job. So, with over 700 free multimedia, nonpartisan learning resources, CFR Education supplemental materials help students gain the knowledge, the skills, and the perspective—again, global literacy—needed to navigate today’s complicated, connected world. We offer readings, videos, charts, maps, timelines, and more.

And we offer them on—I think most of you—on topics that align with what most of you are teaching. We also have simulations that invite you and your students to step into the roles of decisionmakers on the UN Security Council and the U.S. National Security Council. And as you know, simulations, which are a project-based learning tool, help students develop the skills that were just mentioned—critical thinking, persuasive speaking and writing, and collaboration skills, while giving them hands-on experience grappling with the challenges associated with addressing today’s most pressing global issues. And I think maybe the most important thing is that they support the development of productive civic discourse. I don’t think anybody would disagree that that is critically important today.

CFR Education can serve as a starting point for how to structure your classes, whether with essay and discussion questions, activities, sample syllabi, or other. We also offer webinars and events throughout the academic year to support your work, including an upcoming workshop on building a syllabus, which I encourage you to register for. So finally, on the breaking news front, we’re excited to announce that CFR Education now offers a comprehensive library of nonpartisan multimedia teaching and learning resources on climate change and its implications for global affairs.

We’ve leveraged these supplemental resources to create a free three-course specialization on Coursera called Climate Change and Global Affairs: Navigating a Warming World. It’s going to be available next week, in time for Earth Day. It’s a self-guided series. And it’s available to learners inside and outside of formal classroom settings. So all of you are—of course, we encourage you to look at this specialization. And we encourage you to sign up for it, particularly if you are interested in earning a certification in climate literacy from the Council on Foreign Relations.

But enough from me. I’m happy to welcome two CFR Education ambassadors to the stage to talk about their experiences using CFR Education resources. Come on up, Joseph and Roni Kay. And while they’re making their way here—(applause)—just a brief mention. The CFR Education Ambassador Program is a nine-month engagement that connects educators from across the country with resources, professional development activities, and a network of likeminded professionals committed to global literacy. We’ll be opening up applications next month. And I encourage you to send in an application.

You may have already noticed there are some participants who have a red dot on their name tag. They are CFR Education ambassadors. I’m sure they would be happy—including these two—they would be happy to answer any questions you might have. There’s some education staff, I see, who have crept into the room. Also happy to answer your questions. But welcome both. Hopefully this mic is now going to work. Or, maybe it’s not. And you’re just—great. Sounds like it is working. Thank you.

Welcome to you both. Before we dive in, it would be great if you could introduce yourselves and tell the audience a little bit about what you teach and where you teach.

O’DELL: Yeah, I would love to. So hello, everyone. Great to be here. I’m Roni Kay O’Dell. And I’m from Seton Hill University. I’m the coordinator of their political science global studies department, and professor there. And I teach a wide gambit of classes, as many of you do. So, I’ll show them in a minute on a slide, but I teach American foreign policy, international relations, U.S. government, political science, intro to political science, intro to global studies. So I teach a lot. When I get the chance, I get to teach on sustainable development and environmental governance, which is my specialty, or one of my expertise. But it’s a pleasure to be able to teach all these classes and to be able to tell you a little bit more, in a minute, about how I use CFR Education resources. So, thank you.

ROBERTS: Hi. I’m Joseph Roberts. I’m a professor and chair of politics and international relations at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island. Like Roni Kay, I teach a little bit of everything. I teach diplomacy. I teach international negotiations. My specialty is Middle East politics, so I do a lot of Middle East politics, suicide terrorism, political violence, social movements. My newest thing is I teach a class using games to teach political science. So that’s a very popular one, because students think they’re going to play all the time and it—(laughter)—so—but it allows me to use some of these kinds of resources in a lot of different ways.

NETCHVOLODOFF: Great. And just so you know, we are going to be developing games as part of CFR Education in the coming year too, so keep your eyes and ears open about that too, because we recognize how popular games are and how much students like to play them. And any way we can engage them we are interested in doing so. So, why don’t we start out by having—Joseph, why don’t you tell us a little bit about how you have learned—excuse me—how you have used CFR Education resources in your classroom.

ROBERTS: So I think I use it in a couple of different ways. One of the things that I try to do is use the resources in terms of there’s a lot of highly curated readings that provide great information. They’re well-written. They’re accessible. They’re also relatively short. And as we have talked about a little bit at various points today and yesterday, reading is not fundamental anymore. (Laughter.)

NETCHVOLODOFF: What a quote. (Laughter.) It’s, like.

ROBERTS: And so I think being able to pull very good, high-quality information to get students to engage is important. This is a particular screenshot from one of the CFR readings—or CFR Education readings on what is inequality. And it’s a great article, but it’s even better as a source of data. The data is available in a CSV format so you can pull it down, you can give it to students to manipulate and do things with. And more and more data literacy is important. So allowing verified data that they can play with is important. And the CFR Education resources provide a really good source of that.

The other thing that I have used quite extensively, and we’ll talk simulations later, but I like the learning journeys. This particular one is on energy security. But, again, it can replace and supplement readings. So I teach a class on—it’s part of our general education. It’s capstone. And it’s about sustainability and our global—and humans global—or, place in the global environment. And so, thinking about energy security is important. And this is good because it’s multimedia. It plays to some of their sensibilities in terms of watching YouTube, and watching TikTok, and watching all of the other things.

And so it’s very good. Because it’s vetted information they’re not getting the bad stuff. And again, it’s also data rich, so you can link the CSV data from one thing to another thing and get them to work with multiple sources of data. And it’s really helpful. Students like playing with data that they know is verified and they don’t have to go find it on the World Bank site or, you know, the IMF site, which can be difficult to navigate.

NETCHVOLODOFF: Great. Going to turn to you, Roni Kay. How have you leveraged CFR Education resources for active learning in your classes?

O’DELL: Yes. Thank you for the question. I’m really excited to talk about the way I’ve used CFR Education resources, very similar to the way Joseph has done, but using pedagogy. So, active learning and learner-centered teaching are the pedagogies that I use in the classroom. And I’ve developed them over the years. I was telling a group earlier that I began my career by making a lot of mistakes, really. (Laughs.) And then, learning how to actually engage students. So, one of the things that I encourage you all to do is look up active learning and learner-centered teaching.

Active learning is about getting students from passively sitting in a classroom and expecting to just get information from us and then regurgitate it, to turning that classroom into a place where they are involved, they are engaged, they are doing things. So that’s active learning. Learner-centered teaching is where it goes a step further and asks them to take responsibility for their own learning. Now this is where the CFR resources really come in handy, because asking a student to take responsibility for their own learning is difficult. It’s a lot more work for you. It’s a lot more work for the students. But in the end, I think it really pays off.

So, I’ve given you a list of the courses where I’ve used active learning, learner-centered teaching, and CFR Education resources. The materials that I’m seeing—I’m listing here on the slide. And let me just give you a couple of examples. So, comparative politics. I’ve taught that several times. I’ve used the simulations of the National Security Council in that course. And what I’ve done is start out with the United States. We learn about the Security Council. We use the CFR Education resources, which are amazing on these simulations. They give you all of the readings so the students don’t have to go figure out who the secretary of state is, or what the secretary of state does. That that information is there. Videos are connected to it.

And it guides the students through. You can have them do it on their own, or actually inside the classroom, where you actually work through the materials together to prepare yourself for the simulation. And then you get to that simulation and ask the students to take responsibility for it. Then what I’ve done is used that example of the NSC simulation and gone to another country. So India, and what did they do? How do they make foreign policy? And that takes a little bit more work, because that’s not quite developed by CFR Education. But they don’t mind if you take their resources and use it how you need it in the classroom.

NETCHVOLODOFF: We love it when you do that, for sure. Yeah. (Laughter.)

O’DELL: And I’ll just say a couple more things. One is that on the last slide I do have a Substack that if you’re interested I talk a little bit more about this, so you can get a little bit more insight into using active learning and learner-centered teaching. And on the next slide, I just wanted to show you this example. This is an example of the UN Security Council. So the CFR Education resources also have this. This is my last iteration of it. The students are actively involved in creating the simulation. And that’s what I wanted to encourage you to do.

CFR Education resources really help with that because they are giving the responsibility to the student. The students take responsibility. You see in this picture they’re putting up the flag, they’re getting the room ready, and then we get into character. And that just asks the students to be responsible, to engage, to be excited. And they really become that. If you ask them to, they will do it. And it’s very exciting to have CFR Education resources to help with that kind of thing.

NETCHVOLODOFF: That’s great. Joseph, I know you’ve used simulations extensively too. So share a little bit about how you have done that.

ROBERTS: I do as well. I have to say, I’m very jealous of the blue tablecloths. (Laughter.) I have the flag. I don’t have the blue tablecloths. I’m going back and I’m ordering blue tablecloths. (Laughter.)

So I use a lot of the mini simulations. They’re wonderful because they’re single class—either fifty or eighty minute sessions. They’re very issue focused. Require very minimal setup. Often, if you’ve done a little prep beforehand, you know, sort of either in, you know, with a little mini lecture or a video that you’ve posted, you know, to your LMS, something like that, it gets them in the space. And then you can come in and simulate. I think I’ve done several that are on the NSC, the National Security Council. And they’re really well done.

But I think the thing for me that makes them most valuable is because I teach so many different classes I see the same students over and over and over again. And I can’t necessarily use a simulation of the NSC in one class, in the next class, in the next class. They’ve seen it before and they can kind of game the system, if you will, even if they get different roles. And the beauty of the CFR Education mini-sims in particular is they’re very adaptable.

So, I did one on reforming the UN Security Council. And rather than doing it, focused on the NSC, I took the same basic arguments that people were making about reforming the NSC and I shifted it, and made it individual countries that might want additional seats, or they want—maybe want veto power. And so they could take the same basic framework and use it in a different way or in a different context. And CFR Education simulations are really good about having that flexibility built in.

NETCHVOLODOFF: Great. Yeah, please.

O’DELL: Just to add on that, with the adaptability—the videos, the short sort of essays or blog posts, or even the CFR resources themselves, like the briefings, those are so useful to use in the classroom, outside of the classroom. And, as we’ve been talking about students have a hard time reading, well, connected to the videos, connected with the timelines, it makes it exciting and come alive for them. And so it’s a really great alternative to encourage them to get back into reading.

NETCHVOLODOFF: That’s great. I mean, I was going to save this for the end, but I will say that, you know, it’s so exciting for us to hear about these real applications, these classroom applications. And we can’t do what we do in CFR Education without understanding from you what your needs are. We’re so excited to have you here to—I’ve spoken to a lot of you, the team has spoken to a lot of you. But we really encourage you to share these sorts of stories with us and with each other. And to that end, we have a CFR ambassador group that I’m going to ask each of you to share a little bit about what the ambassador experience has meant to you. And then I know a little bit later we’re going to break into some more workshop-type activities, where you can give us feedback, and where we are eager to have it from you. So, you want to tell us a little bit about your experience with the Ambassador Program?

O’DELL: Yes, absolutely. So I was very excited to be accepted as an ambassador this year. And I think that the thing that has meant the most to me is connecting with people who are in the classroom—other people who are in the classroom. So often we are in our classroom, we’re engaged with the students. Maybe we have colleagues at our university that do the same thing as us, maybe not. But we, you know, talk to them a little bit. But sometimes, we feel a little bit alone in the classroom. And it’s amazing to connect with this group of ambassadors. As Caroline mentioned, fourteen of them are here.

But what we do is meet monthly, essentially. And I have to say, Logan, and Rania, and several of the other people—I’m forgetting your names—but they are amazing at putting together these meetings. They’re on Zoom. But we get to see each other. We get to break out into small groups and talk about just some of the things that Joseph and I have been talking about, which is how do we deal with issues in the classroom? If we’re going to teach climate change, what does that look like? How do we teach sustainable development, and what are the practices there? And knowing that you’re not alone, and then also being able to share and exchange those resources and network with people for possible articles on pedagogy, which I think might happen for me, is really exciting. So it’s a wonderful experience.

NETCHVOLODOFF: Yeah, it’s great. And I—you know, I have to say that it’s exciting for us to listen and watch you interact with each other. It’s also, selfishly, wonderful for us to gather feedback. So the ambassador group is a continuous feedback link for us. And to, you know, the point about simulations, we have a new landing page that’s launching next week. And we encourage you to access the landing page, but also give us your feedback. Did we get it right? Are there more things that we can do? Are there iterations that would roll the ball a couple of revolutions more? So, please do give us feedback about that and more. And, Joseph, would love to hear about your experience, too.

ROBERTS: So I think much of the same thing that Roni Kay said is true. For me, my most valuable experiences as a political scientist are in pedagogy environments, doing the kind of thing—I teach a lot of classes. I’m passionate about teaching. It’s what I like to do most about my job. And conferences are expensive. Doing the CFR Education Ambassador Program allows me to have that engagement and that contact with others who are around the country, around the world, who are doing the same kinds of things that I’m doing. And I think of myself as a very good teacher. I don’t know everything. I learn all the time.

And being in these Zoom calls, I can, you know, hear things and, like, oh, I hadn’t thought of that. Take my notes, and then go try it the next week. And maybe it doesn’t work as well as I had hoped, but I also have a resource. I can email that person and say, OK, I tried it. It didn’t work. I can come back and they can help me walk through. And so it’s more than just networking. The group of people are very, very open to sharing and collaborating in really meaningful ways, both in the classroom and, I think, on, you know, the scholarship of teaching and learning. And as a former journal editor for the Journal of Political Science Education, that’s where a lot of that work is so valuable because—and, you know, there’s not enough of it. They really, really want more and more pedagogy pieces to come out. And it’s going to come out of these kinds of collaborations.

NETCHVOLODOFF: That’s great. If you don’t mind, if the twelve other people who are out in the audience who have the red dot on your tag, who are ambassadors, could stand up, that would be great. And then the folks in the room can see who you are and maybe talk to you after the workshop in a little bit. But also thank you. (Applause.) And thank you so much for all the work that you’ve done this academic year, with each other and with us. We’ve really—we’ve very much enjoyed it. And it’s not over yet, so I think we have at least one more session.

I think at this point it would be great to open the floor up for some questions. Anybody? Great.

Q: Is this on? Peter Erickson, I’m at Colorado State University.

And I recently became the director of the International Studies Program there. And my question actually was about—you know, talking to people over the past couple days, lots of universities have international studies, global studies programs, concentrations. And I was wondering if CFR Education had ventured into this question of programming and, you know, tracks. And there’s, you know, thematic concentrations. So there’s a lot of stuff like that. And I was just curious what you’ve been up to.

NETCHVOLODOFF: I’m not sure if this gets exactly at your question, but coincidentally, we are in the process—as I mentioned during my earlier comments, we’re releasing a course on Coursera on climate change and global affairs. Shortly thereafter, I guess about four or five months from now, we are going to be releasing what’s called a specialization. So it’s three courses on introduction to global affairs. We are also working with Arizona State University. We’re launching a course in collaboration with them in late May.

Now, getting course credit through the ASU is eminently possible. It’s certainly possible through Coursera as well. We, the Council on Foreign Relations, will be issuing a certification in global literacy. We won’t be giving course credit, per se, but course credit is achievable. And students and dual enrollments—high school and college—can get course credit for both high school and college, as well as certificates that they can upload to their application to graduate school, to college, and they can put it on their LinkedIn profile. So we are moving in that direction slowly. These are pilots for us. But it’s exciting. And we think we’re going to learn a lot, and hopefully hone that process. So, to answer your question, yes, we’re on the path. And we are—we are in a learning mode.

Yeah.

Q: Sokol Celo, Suffolk University.

I have a question for both panelists. Have you seen any difference in terms of graduate versus undergraduate students, what tools work best for each of those groups?

O’DELL: That’s a good question. I can answer that by saying that I have used these tools mostly in undergraduate classes. But then, I also have taught sections of graduate courses online. And I have used the CFR Education materials in a couple of those, sort of in my Canvas pages. And that means, you know, I’ve created a Canvas page, and then I’ve put a link to the resources, and then I’ve asked students to go to them. And I would say that they—both undergraduate and graduate—I think that they’re perfectly applicable for that. And it’s just a matter of how you ask the students to engage with the material and at what level.

And so, you know, one thing I’ve done definitely with my undergraduate students is, along with introducing them to some of these easily accessible materials, like the videos or the short essays, et cetera, I will ask them to—I’ll introduce them to what’s called active reading. So, you know, reading this kind of stuff is not like reading a fiction book, right? And we actually need to tell them that and help them through that, because they need to know how to actively read. So I’ll have an assignment on active reading, and then I’ll ask them to go to it. And how was the active reading? How did the active reading assignment go? And then, what did you learn? With a graduate student, it’s a little bit, you know, higher level, but I think that they both work out well.

How about you, Joseph?

ROBERTS: So I’m at an exclusively undergraduate institution. So for me, I only get to practice on undergrads. That is going to change next year, because we’re finally getting back an MPA program that—for all kinds of university reasons—moved out. And so I think there will be some opportunity to do some things in that program moving forward. That being said, I have a lot of friends who teach in, you know, programs with graduate programs, both master’s and doctoral level, that use the same kinds of simulations, in particular, in those classes, and are finding very similar results. That it increases engagement, it increases critical thinking, it increases an engagement with the material in different ways than just simply reading it.

And it doesn’t replace—you know, in a graduate class, it doesn’t replace reading journal articles, and, you know, doing lit reviews, and things of that nature. But it supplements and gets them to think about different ways that they can approach information. And ultimately, I think it prepares them for when they finish graduate school, particularly in doctoral programs. They’re going to take it and then use it in their own classrooms down the road, which the evidence in the SOTL literature says that active learning does have an impact.

NETCHVOLODOFF: Yeah.

Q: Hello, everybody. Thank you for the panelists. Actually, my name is Jane Kani Edward from Fordham University in New York City.

So my question is—I learned a lot actually from your presentation. So, my question is about the active learning with CFR Education extended simulation. I like that, because all of us actually wanted our students to be engaged in the class discussion. My question is, what is the size of your classroom? Like, the classroom itself, and then the number of students in that classroom? And what size is the best for this kind of active learning? Because I teach sometimes thirty-five students, and our classes are—I don’t know how to organize it. So I just want to know the class size in terms of size of the classroom, and the number of students.

O’DELL: Yes. Thank you very much. So I can say that I have taught this—the types of simulations that I have described, I was describing earlier, with the NSC, with the UNSC, and just other sort of mini simulations, at that level of either twenty students to thirty-five students, and then down to about ten students, right? So I’ve taught at all those different levels. And you could do this with a hundred students. I haven’t quite done it with a hundred students, but it’s a different kind of simulation. And that’s what I love about the CFR Education materials, is that they actually help you think through it. So, there’s instructor guides on the website that kind of say, here’s maybe a suggestion for how you go through each part of preparing your students for the simulation. So, you can look at those and say to yourself, is this going to work with fifteen students? How will I modify it, if I have a hundred students? And that looks quite different.

NETCHVOLODOFF: Well, yeah, well, I mean, I think if you do have a hundred students, you assign multiple students to a single role. And we do walk you through how to do that. But there—you know, any questions you have, please send us. We are happy to answer that. But they are intended to be adaptable and flexible, and we want to make them more so. So I also think that I’ve gotten the signal that we’re out of time, as much as I want to hear from more of you. And I will circulate. And I know we’re about to break into groups, where we will get some more feedback from you. So, I just can’t thank you enough for being here, for your participation. It’s wonderful to see all of you and look forward to talking to you in the next hour. (Applause.) Thank you.

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