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Symposium

Future of American Strategy Initiative Launch

Al Drago/Reuters

Event date



In-Person: The Future of American Power

Speakers

  • Elissa Slotkin
    U.S. Senator from Michigan (D); Member, Senate Armed Services Committee; Member, Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee 
  • Tim Sheehy
    U.S. Senator from Montana (R), Member; Senate Armed Services Committee; Member, Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee

Presider

  • Dasha Burns
    White House Bureau Chief and Host, The Conversation Podcast, Politico; Host, Ceasefire, C-SPAN

Introductory Remarks

  • Rebecca LissnerCFR Expert
    Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy and Director of the Future of American Strategy Initiative, Council on Foreign Relations

Transcript

FROMAN: How about that? There we go. Good afternoon. Thanks for coming to this very special event, the launch of our Future of American Strategy Initiative. We know it’s special because we’ve never seen this room quite so full. And we actually have a spillover room up on the eighth floor, so it’s fantastic that you all are here. We have another 250-or-so people online as well.
I’d like to start by thanking, first and foremost, Rebecca Lissner. She’s been the driving force behind this initiative since joining the Council about a year ago. We’re incredibly lucky to have her. And we’re very grateful to her for all the work that came together to put together this event. So thank you, Rebecca. (Applause.)
LISSNER: Thank you.
FROMAN: I’d also like to recognize some individuals who helped bring this initiative to life—Kim Davis, Henry Cornell, Farooq Kathwari, Howard Cox, and an anonymous donor, who’ve all stepped forward with their support to make sure that we got this initiative off the ground and got us started. We’re really deeply grateful for their commitment.
In a moment we’re going to play a short video about the initiative, but first...

Virtual: Charting a New Course for U.S. Foreign Policy

Transcript

FROMAN: All right. Good evening, everybody. I am not Aaron McLean. (Laughter.) Our moderator is stuck on a train in Wilmington, Delaware, someplace, but I will try and substitute for him the best I can. And I’m delighted to have these two guests with us today.
We’ve got Victoria Coates, who’s vice president of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at the Heritage Foundation. She served as several roles in the—in the White House: as special assistant to the president, as deputy assistant to the president, and deputy national security advisor for the Middle East and North Africa, overseeing the maximum pressure campaign against Iran and the negotiations of the Abraham Accords.
And we have Jon Finer, who is a distinguished senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and also at SIPA, aren’t you, up in Columbia?
FINER: Yeah.
FROMAN: Yeah. OK. And he was also a deputy national security advisor, under President Joe Biden from 2021 to 2025. And before that he was global head of geopolitical and policy affairs at Warburg Pincus.
Now, if our chairman, David Rubenstein, was here, he’d say that that was...