2025 National Conference On-the-Record Livestreams

RUBENSTEIN: Wow, we have a great group here. OK. I’m David Rubenstein. And I have the honor and privilege of serving as chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations. And to all of our members, thank you very much for coming. We have—this is our thirtieth National Conference. And that means it was started in 1995. Now, who can remember the most important thing that happened in 1995? The O.J. Simpson trial. (Laughter.) So we’re expecting 460 participants over the course of this—of this conference, from about thirty-six different states and from ten different countries. So to all of you who’ve taken the time to come here, I appreciate your doing it. We think you’re going to learn a lot. We have an incredible group of panelists who’ve agreed to participate. And I think you’ll learn a lot.

And as I was thinking about it just a few moments ago, you know, I lived through, many of you did, the Vietnam War, and lived through the Iraq and the Afghanistan War, when American soldiers were being killed. And it was very nerve wracking to be an American, to be watching this happening. And now we don’t have any soldiers...

ALDEN: Good morning, everyone. Welcome to day two of the National Conference. As seems to be the case more mornings than not, there’s obviously a lot of news today—(laughter)—and I imagine we will get to it in the course of other discussions. For the panel this morning, however, we are going to focus on what is actually my favorite topic and I think in its own right an extremely important topic, which is the future of relations here in North America.

My name’s Ted Alden for those I don’t know. I’m a senior fellow here at CFR. I’ve been here almost two decades now. This one is actually a very personal topic for me. I’ve lived my life back and forth across the border between Canada and the United States, have family and friends in both countries. My professional work on immigration and trade has taken me to Mexico a lot. I confessed in our prep call that I find what’s going on these days rather heart-wrenching. It really, really hurts me in some deep ways.

I think many of us who witnessed the courageous decisions made by all three countries during the 1980s and 1990s expected that North American...

O’SULLIVAN: Thank you, Irina. Just wait a moment. Excellent.

Good morning, everyone. It’s still morning, although you’ve been up and at it for a while. It’s my pleasure to be here today and to be with a fantastic panel talking about a subject which may sound theoretical but has a lot of practical implications and that, of course, is the changing global order.

And, certainly, if we think about where we are in 2025 we unquestionably are in a very different global landscape where the global order that many of us became comfortable with over the last thirty years has changed in some fundamental ways.

If we look back at the last thirty years—the period since the collapse of the Soviet Union—think about the main qualities of that global order and they were very distinct and, unfortunately, as we look at them today we can think that maybe they were historically atypical.

This was a world where there was the real absence of great power conflict. This was a world where we were rapidly integrating the global economy, more integrated every single year, and this was a world of relative peace and prosperity, kind of looking at the historical arc.

CARUSO-CABRERA: Good morning, everyone. Thanks, Irina. It’s a pleasure to see you all here on this rainy Saturday morning in New York City. Thanks for being here.

As a reminder, this is “Power, Politics, and the Tech Industry.” This is on the record and being livestreamed.

Our panelists today: Chinmayi Arun is with Yale Law School. Janet Haven is with Data & Society. Adam Segal is probably a familiar face; he is with CFR. And Renée DiResta is with Georgetown University. Pleasure to have to all here.

The title is probably purposely broad: “Power, Politics, and the Tech Industry.” I think if we surveyed everyone here about what they think this will be about or should be about, it would be real Rorschach about how you see the world at the moment.

And so—(laughs)—we’re going to start with a broad question: Why this panel right now? What does this tech moment mean to you?

Janet, let me start with you.

HAVEN: Sure. Good morning, everyone. It’s great to see you all. Thanks for your—thanks for joining us.

So I would come at this question from two entrance points because it’s a—it is a really, really broad question. So one...

BRIMMER: It’s good to see everyone here, bright and early on a Saturday morning.

We have been talking about many regions of the world, and now we’ll head to the top of the globe.

One of the areas—regions that has benefitted greatly from the end of the Cold War has been the Arctic. Indeed, that the Arctic created new institutions and new interactions that were extremely important, but we’re also finding that the Arctic is the center and the confluence of multiple trends facing the world today.

Now, the Arctic in, I’d say, the past thirty years was probably characterized by a phrase that’s been attributed to the Norwegians, but you can tell me who originally said it: “High north, low tension.” Now we might say, high north, returning tensions.

Now, I believe we have a map, so I’d like to—if we could go ahead and put the map up to help us orient us to where we are. This is a map courtesy of the United States State Department, and so that you can see the Arctic and you will be able to refer to the area that we are discussing for convenience for both people in the room...