Hauser Symposium: The Axis of Autocracies

LINDSAY: Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations. I am Jim Lindsay, the Mary and David Boies distinguished senior fellow in U.S. foreign policy and director of Fellowship Affairs here at the Council.

It is my great pleasure and honor to open today’s Hauser Symposium on “The Axis of Autocracies.” It is a timely topic. For the past decade, but particularly since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, we have witnessed growing bilateral cooperation between China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. These countries are in some ways strange political bedfellows. China is a Marxist-Leninist state. Russia is a personalist dictatorship that positions itself as a defender of Orthodox Christianity. Iran is a militant Shia Islamic theocracy. North Korea is a family dynasty. But whatever their differences, those four countries appear to share a common goal of reducing U.S. global influence, which they see as a threat to their interests and an obstacle to their national ambitions. The challenge for U.S. foreign policy is to understand the nature of the cooperation among the members of what has been variously called the Axis of Autocracies, the Axis of Upheaval, and the Quartet of Chaos to assess its sustainability and potential for expansion, and to determine how best to respond.

To tackle these questions we have organized three one-hour-long panels. The first session will look at the rise of the axis; the second will look at the extent of the efforts by China, Russia, and North Korea to build support in the Global South; and the third will examine the options the United States has for responding to the Axis of Autocracies, and what risks and opportunities those choices pose. We will conclude the symposium at 4:45 p.m. Those of you who are here in New York are welcome to join us for an in-person reception.

Before we begin our substantive discussion, I have several people I want to thank.

First and foremost, I want to express my deep gratitude toward Rita Hauser. Rita’s up here in the front table. (Applause.) Rita’s generosity has made today’s symposium possible. Rita is a longtime member of the Council. Her guidance and support have left an indelible mark here at CFR. And I just want to say, Rita, we are forever in your debt. So thank you.

Rita established the Hauser Symposium nearly two decades ago. It was designed to enable the Council to focus each year on a major challenge and/or opportunity facing the United States. And I’m proud to say this is the seventeenth iteration of the Hauser Symposium and I’ve had the privilege to be involved with its planning over the past fifteen years, and I can say it has been an absolute delight to work with Rita.

I also want to thank the roughly one hundred Council members and guests here at Peterson Hall at CFR’s New York offices, as well as the more than two hundred members and their guests joining us virtually. Your support makes all that we do possible.

I also want to thank our incredible staff on our Meetings, Events, AV, and Membership teams. They have worked hard over the past several months on making today’s symposium possible.

I especially want to thank Teagan Judd. She has been the driving force making all this come together. Is Teagan in the room? (Applause.) Teagan has come out from behind the pillar. I’m not really sure why Teagan is behind a TV screen and a pillar. (Laughter.) But Teagan has been instrumental in making all of this happen.

And again, I also want to thank all of our distinguished speakers and presiders for joining us. The Council is very grateful to have them with us today sharing their perspectives and expertise.

Let me bring my introductory remarks back to where I started. The Council held its first Hauser Symposium back in 2006. That was a time of great optimism that the era of great-power competition and rivalry had given way to a new era of cooperation and prosperity. Nineteen years later, we know that turned out not to be the case. Great-power competition and rivalry have returned. That rivalry has the potential to undo the prosperity the world has enjoyed for more than three decades, and possibly even threaten the return of great-power war and the unthinkable consequences that would bring.

The challenge for U.S. policymakers is to fashion a foreign policy that avoids those two perils. Succeeding in that task requires correctly assessing trends in world affairs, neither exaggerating the threat nor underestimating it, and fashioning an appropriate response. The goal of today’s Hauser Symposium is to contribute to that effort. For that reason, all three sessions of the Hauser Symposium today are on the record.

Now, I’m going to break from the podium, I am going to go sit down, and we will actually get into the substance of why we’re here today.

(Pause.)

The title of this panel is, as you know, “The Rise of the Axis of Autocracies.” As I just mentioned, our focus over the next hour will be on the expanding ties among China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, and what that cooperation means for the United States as well as its friends, partners, and allies.

And it is my great pleasure to introduce the three individuals who are going to help us do that exploration. And I’m going to go sort of from my left all the way down to the right.

Immediately to my right is Jennifer Kavanagh. She is a senior fellow and director of military analysis at Defense Priorities. Jennifer previously worked at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and directed RAND’s Army Strategy Program. Jennifer’s many publications included a piece she coauthored in Foreign Policy called “The Axis of Evil is Overhyped.” Axis of Evil is another name—(laughter)—that’s been offered for this collaboration.

To Jennifer’s right physically—we’re not talking about politically—is Thomas Graham. Tom is a distinguished fellow here at the Council. He was special assistant to the president and senior director for Russia on the staff of the National Security Council from 2004 to 2007, and director for Russian affairs on the National Security staff from 2002 to 2004. His many publications include the book Getting Russia Right.

At the extreme right—again, geographically, not politically—(laughter)—is Chris Chivvis. Chris is a senior fellow and director of the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He has previously served as the U.S. national intelligence officer for Europe. He is the coauthor of the Carnegie Endowment paper Cooperation Between China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia: Current and Political Future Threats to America. And he’s also the author of the recent Foreign Affairs article “The Fragile Axis of Upheaval.”

So, again, thank you, Jennifer, Tom, and Chris, for joining me. Just to lay out what we’re going to do, I’m going to engage my three co-panelists in a conversation for about thirty minutes. At that point I want to bring the rest of the room as well as people who are joining us through the wonders of the internet into the conversation, so start getting your questions ready.

I’m going to begin—I’ll throw the first question, I guess, to Chris. I noted in my introductory remarks that cooperation has emerged between China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. It’s gotten lots of names. I want to put aside the question for now what the appropriate name is. What I’d like to do is really sort of focus on what kind of cooperation are we seeing between or among these countries. Chris?

CHIVVIS: So, great. Thanks very much. This is a good place to start. I mean, a couple of points, maybe, off the top.

It’s obviously—you know, the cooperation that we’re seeing among these powers is extremely complex. And there are different forms to it, so it’s difficult to summarize accurately, you know, what we’re actually seeing. But I think it’s clear, at least from my view, that while all four of these countries are adversaries of the United States capable of harming U.S. national interests—countries that we ought to be concerned about—the extent of their cooperation does tend to be, or at least over the course of the last couple of years has been, exaggerated. This is not a recreation of the Warsaw Pact. It’s not—certainly not anything that even begins to resemble the alliances that the United States has profited from and enjoyed over the course of the last seventy-five years.

What we really have here are a set of six bilateral relationships which existed—you know, have existed in various forms for decades, but which has really intensified as a consequence of Russia’s war on Ukraine. A lot of the reason why we are here today having the conversation that we’re having, the reason why the Council on Foreign Relations is holding an event on this subject, is because Russia needed help with its war on Ukraine and reached out to Iran, North Korea, and China for that help. So I would say that a large—to a large degree, this coalition/entente that we’ve seen, and which we should be concerned about, is rooted primarily in the war. And my expectation, therefore, is that if the war comes to an end they’re going to start running into some problems in their—in their cooperation.

LINDSAY: OK. I want to get to that eventually, but I guess, I mean, just sort of lay out for people what—sort of what exactly are these countries doing when they cooperate? Because, again, a lot of the debate has been over what to call it. And again, I have a list here of twenty different names that have been offered, I guess the sweepstakes—(laughter)—for naming rights. But I guess just briefly, I mean, pick out one of the bilateral relationships, Chris, and sort of tell me what’s actually happening.

CHIVVIS: Sure. Well, OK, so the key developments that have been most—of most concern to the United States and our allies are, obviously, Iran’s provision of drones and missiles to Russia, North Korea’s provision of troops and some types of weapons, and China’s provision of dual-use technologies, all of which have allowed Russia to prosecute its war on Ukraine with a much—much, much more effectively than it would have without that support.

LINDSAY: OK.

Jennifer, I want you to pick up on this. And I would like, if you could, talk a little bit about the significance—if it is significance—of the military exercises that have been carried out either bilaterally or jointly among some of these countries. I mean, Chris already has alluded to the fact that the North Koreas have provided the Russians with shells and people, so that’s in a—that’s actual combat. But I know, for example, that the Chinese and Russians have conducted military exercises. They entered Alaska’s air defense identification zone. I believe Russia, China, and Iran have conducted naval operations in the Gulf of Oman. Tell me a little bit about what’s sort of happening in terms of these military exercises and to what extent they’re significant.

KAVANAGH: Yeah. So I think the first thing to note is that these countries have conducted military exercises together for some time. So this is not a new development in the past few years, whereas our focus on this cooperation between these four countries is something that is new, partly because it has increased so much. And that what I think people are reacting to.

It’s also the case, however, that these countries, their exercises are becoming longer, more complex, more involved not just in what I would call, like, simultaneous play, where they’re doing things alongside each other, to where they’re actually working together to do certain types of activities. One thing that I think is particularly notable is the trilateral naval exercises between Iran, China, and Russia, because it’s one of the only examples where you actually break out of this bilateral pattern into something that that looks trilateral, which I think is notable—although not terribly alarming because it’s been going on for five or six years and these capabilities, especially for Russia and Iran, don’t really rival the U.S. Navy.

But I also think it’s important to put their growing cooperation on these exercises and entering the U.S. air defense zone or approaching U.S. shores in context of how much cooperation and exercises the United States does with its allies and partners, which is just on an order of magnitude higher—much more complex, many more partners, huge, lasts for weeks, and also sometimes approach into areas that are very sensitive to China and Russia and Iran intentionally as a signaling exercise.

So while this cooperation has increased and it’s something to keep an eye on, I don’t think it’s at the level right now where the could actually operate together in any type of real combat situation. It’s more exchanging of information and, again, signaling. They know this makes the U.S. nervous, and that’s why they’re doing it. But to me it’s not something that’s overly alarming because of the factors I mentioned, the sort of still pretty small scale. And they really have no intention, as far as I can tell, of taking it to the next level and acting in a contingency situation, where as the U.S. exercises largely with partners that it plans to fight with. The goal is to prepare for a wartime situation. So they are very different.

LINDSAY: What is happening, Jennifer, on the technology cooperation front? I ask because there’s been a lot of reporting that suggests that Russia, because it is at war with Ukraine and is running into very serious supply problems, has been willing to share military technology with North Korea, with Iran, with China that, my sense is, previously members of the U.S. intelligence community believed the Russians never would do. What do we know about what’s happening on that part of the equation?

KAVANAGH: Yeah. And I do think that is—the transfers out from Russia to Iran, North Korea, and China are some of the things that I do think are more concerning and are worth taking note of. When you’re looking at transfers from Russia to Iran and Russia to North Korea, I think the most notable thing in terms of military technology is the transfer of fourth-generation fighter jets, which are things that Iran and North Korea have wanted but didn’t have. And so that is a step up, a significant upgrade from the fighter jets that they had previously. However, it’s still well below the capabilities of the United States, as well as U.S. allies and partners who operate fourth-generation fighter jets that are more advanced or fifth-generation F-35s. And that’s true whether you’re talking about the Middle East or whether you’re talking about Asia. So, again, it’s important to put the upgrade in context of it’s not enough to really shift the balance of power, in my view.

I think the transfers from Russia to China are in a different category, because there I do think that this is, to me, the most concerning set of transfers among all the different bilateral things, which is the transfer of engine technology. Aircraft engines are actually quite difficult to make, and China has really struggled to make their own, so they have been reliant on Russia—and Ukraine, ironically—for aircraft engines for some time. And so the transfer of that technology will allow China to make better fighter jets that can rival U.S. capabilities.

And then there’s the submarine-quieting technology. And right now China’s submarines are much more—much noisier than U.S. submarines, which makes them much easier to track. And once they become quiet like U.S. submarines, like Russian submarines, they will be very difficult to track. They will be able to get into the open ocean, into the Pacific, and could potentially pose a threat to the U.S. homeland, which is really I think what we should be most concerned about.

So, to me, those are troubling aspects of the transfers away from Russia, especially between Russia and China.

The last thing I’ll say on technology is the other place where they’re cooperating that’s worth keeping an eye on is the cyber capabilities, because they are cooperating in cyberspace and sharing techniques and tactics for overcoming various types of firewalls the U.S. has. And that’s another area of vulnerability for the United States. You know, even North Korea, which really can’t challenge the U.S. militarily, can challenge the U.S. in cyberspace and cause significant harm, especially if they’re getting help from Russia or other members of this—of this group of four countries in terms of how to do it.

LINDSAY: So, just to be clear here, this technology, once given, the recipients get to keep, so the threat posed by it has a long shelf life.

KAVANAUGH: Yeah, that’s definitely true of the transfers from Russia to China. I’m not—Russia has given fighter jets to Iran and North Korea; my understanding is that those countries are capable enough that they can, like, reverse engineer, so now that they have the fighter jets they can also replicate the technology. But there is that extra step.

LINDSAY: OK.

Tom, I want to come to you and really ask you a two-part question. One is, to the extent you want to talk more about what your understanding is of what the Russians are giving to others, particularly on the ballistic-missile and nuclear program side of things. But also, tell us a little bit about what you see as Putin’s calculations in taking these steps. Again, it’s partly driven by circumstance, but as Chris pointed out sort of the emerging bilateral cooperation among these countries predated February 2022. So sort of walk me through what you’re seeing.

GRAHAM: Well, I think Jennifer has covered quite well what we’re seeing on the technology side, and I think she’s absolutely right that what should be of most concern to us is the technology cooperation between Russia and China. And that is something that has been building for many, many years, accelerated by the—by the conflict but not new and probably not qualitatively different from what it was before. You know, the Russians were sending the best air defense systems to China before the massive invasion. They were sending their best fighter jets. And they also began to build an early warning system with the Chinese before the conflict. That’s been ongoing. And I would argue from the standpoint of American national interest it’s the China-Russia entente that is of most concern.

Just by way of digression, I would have argued this should have been of concern to the United States a decade ago.

LINDSAY: OK.

GRAHAM: But it actually took the conflict for the United States to begin to focus on this as a—as a serious concern.

You know, from Putin’s standpoint, you know, a couple of things are worth—are worth underlining. First, you don’t hear any talk about an Axis of Evil when you’re sitting in Moscow or even of this as some sort of coalition that Russia has put together for whatever purposes. I mean, it is circumstantial. They are looking for the Iranians, the North Koreans for direct assistance in the military operation. The Chinese provide the type of assistance that is needed to keep the war effort, war production underway.

But from Putin’s standpoint, he’s much more interested in a broader coalition. The BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization are really things that the Russians and Putin talk about much more actively and much more energy—put more effort into, because they see that as a real alternative to this U.S.-led liberal international order. And so they focus on how these are expanding, the numbers of countries that are asking to join, and so forth, and they talk very little about this quartet as being anything significant for the foundations of their foreign policy going forward.

LINDSAY: So help me understand, then. To what extent is the emergence of this cooperation, in your view, Tom, driven by a sort of dislike for U.S. supremacy and a desire to cut the United States down to size, and how much of it, is it your view, a function of U.S. policy because sort of the flipside, which is that the United States has issues with each of these four countries? We have, essentially, layered all kinds of sanctions, tariffs, export control on the four countries. So what extent is this collaboration a function of, basically, the United States pushing countries together?

GRAHAM: Well, I mean, a lot of it is a function of the United States pushing countries together, particularly when you come to the sanctions regime. So they have a lot of exchange on how you evade sanctions and a lot they can do in helping. You know, my understanding is that the Iranians provided a great deal of advice on how you circumvent oil sanctions in particular from the United—from the United States.

LINDSAY: Particularly, you get ghost fleets, as I understand it.

GRAHAM: You know, but part of this is a broader effort by—in Putin’s mind to undermine what he sees as U.S. global hegemony to create space for Russia to assume its rightful role on the international stage.

You know, the other thing I think is worth considering—and I’m sure we’ll get into this in more detail—is there’s actually a lot of tension in this relationship as well. None of the countries are totally comfortable with where the other country is. If you look at Russia’s relationship with the North Koreans, getting not only ammunition but soldiers, not something that necessarily went down quite well in Beijing, who—you know, where they thought that they were the primary—

LINDSAY: Lips and teeth are how the Chinese talk about the relationship with North Korea.

GRAHAM: Right. And the other thing is where we are now in the U.S.-Russian relationship. And some suspicion in in Beijing as to what Putin is really up to, how far is this going. Sort of one of the interesting things that I hear from my Russian contacts is they’re quite pleased that every time they deal with the Chinese the first question is, well, how far is this relationship going to go with the United States? Are you still going to be as close to us going forward? And in a strange way, I’ll just throw out a wild idea at this point. We talk a lot in the United States when we look at the Trump administration about this reverse Nixon or reverse Kissinger. Well, we’re going to—

LINDSAY: You may want to explain to people who aren’t familiar with reverse Kissinger, what the reverse—it is not a dance move. (Laughter.) It is not an ice skating move either.

GRAHAM: Well, again, I think there’s some people in the audience who actually remember all of this. But this was the Kissinger and Nixon effort to restore relations with China and to use that relationship to China to balance the relationship with the Soviet Union, in order to draw strategic benefit from the relationship with both of those capitals. And so the idea now is that—at least some speculation that somewhere in the Trump administration people are thinking about building a much closer relationship with Russia that would then pull it away from China and give us some strategic advantages in dealing with the Chinese. I think there’s an interesting argument to make that Putin wants to be Kissinger, and that he hopes that the relationship with the United States develops to the extent that he becomes less reliant on the Chinese, that he plays that balancing role. And people in Beijing, to a certain extent, are worried about that. And the Russians are quite happy to get a sense of that nervousness on the part of the Chinese.

LINDSAY: OK. Well, let’s pick up this question about the sustainability of this alignment. And, Chris, I’ll go to you. I’ll note that Deputy Secretary Kurt Campbell, last September talked about the emerging cooperation among these four countries as reflecting not a tactical alliance, but a fundamental alignment. You talk about it as a loose entente. So what is it that Kurt got wrong?

CHIVVIS: (Laughs.) Well, I don’t want to be too overt in my criticism of Kurt Campbell. But, look, I mean, if you take my interpretation of this, which is that the cooperation has greatly intensified as a consequence of Ukraine—notwithstanding the fact that there is obviously a history here, as there is a history to all things. You know, if you look at other coalitions that form during wartime, just from a historical perspective, it is very common for coalitions to fall apart once a war is over and, you know, punitive allies or partners discover again the things that divided them in the past. This is a recurring theme throughout history. In fact, many believed that NATO would fall apart after the end of the Cold War.

The reason why NATO did not fall apart, I think most people would include, is because it’s highly institutionalized. We haven’t seen any of that institutionalization, at least not anything that in any universe resembles the kind of institutional relationships that exist within NATO. We haven’t seen that in this coalition. And so, as a consequence, the kind of conflicts of interest that Tom was just referring to—and there are—there are other ones as well. I mean, you didn’t mention Central Asia, for example, which is a longstanding conflict—or, area of conflict between Russia and China. You did mention North Korea. Obviously, that’s a conflict between Russia and China as well.

And there’s also the fact that, at least in my view, you know, China doesn’t want to be the head of this coalition of misfits. China has higher aspirations than that. They want to be like the United States on the—on the world stage. They want to even potentially surpass the United States at some point. And so there are—there are things that—you know, that there are underlying conflicts here that I imagine, if the war ends, will probably come to the surface and make their ability to cooperate with one another much more difficult. Of course, to some extent it depends upon exactly what you were talking about, which is what is—what does U.S. policy look like?

And I was thinking, as you said that, you know, many in Washington are scratching their heads as much as the people in Beijing that you’re talking about, in terms of what it is that the current administration plans with Russia. But it is true that what the United States does with Russia and with Beijing will have an impact on the amount of cooperation that these countries are able to achieve.

LINDSAY: Let me draw you out a little more on this, Chris, because there is a big gulf between full-fledged NATO, Warsaw Pact-style cooperation or alliance, and being totally disconnected. There’s a lot of room that falls in between. And I wonder about your diagnosis, that should the war in Ukraine come to an end that there’d be a significant decrease in cooperation, for the following reason. One, as you note, the cooperation was beginning even before 2022. Tom would date it back at least a decade or longer. But beyond that, there seems, at least for China, and for Russia, North Korea, and Iran, a common dislike of American power in the world. That’s not going to go away once the war in Ukraine comes to an end. So couldn’t we have something that sort of continues? It may be a marriage of convenience, I take your point that there are lots of things these countries can squabble over, but marriages of convenience can last quite a long time.

CHIVVIS: Yeah, no, and I’m glad you asked—

LINDSAY: I’m not speaking from personal experience, just to make it clear. (Laughter.)

CHIVVIS: I’m glad you asked, Jim, because, you know, my argument is not that there’s no chance that their cooperation won’t deepen. I’m just saying that it’s not predetermined, and we shouldn’t be making linear projections based upon the intensification that we’ve seen as a consequence of Ukraine. And I actually think the United States has some agency here. I think our own policies do affect the extent to which these nations have been trying to cooperate with each other. So, you know, if we pursue the right—the right policies, I think we can reduce the prospects that this cooperation continues over time.

LINDSAY: Jennifer, I want to give you a chance to take a crack at this question of how sustainable this relationship is. And maybe I’ll ask sort of a question to it, which is: Do you see any potential for it to gain members? I mean, I’ve often heard talk about how maybe Cuba, or Nicaragua, or Venezuela would be interested. We’ve already heard discussion about Vladimir Putin’s desire to turn the BRICS into a counterweight against American dominance of the global system. Any chance here that this alignment could surprise us and grow?

KAVANAGH: Well, so one of my problems with the axis framing is that I’m not sure why we’re focused on these four countries. Like, why those are the four countries, that’s where the boundary falls? Because it certainly seems to me that there are potentially troublesome military technology transfers happening in other places. We know, you know, Venezuela has been close to Russia. There’s Belarus. So, you know, I struggle with the concept because I’m not sure why these four countries. The answer that has been given to me when I’ve asked is, well, these countries are revisionists. They want to change the global order. But to me, it seems like Venezuela and Belarus and Cuba also are revisionists, they just don’t have as much power.

So I think it’s possible that the alignment actually does endure beyond, at least for a while, at the end of the Ukraine war. Primarily because I don’t see Russia’s military needs going away immediately upon a ceasefire, or even, like, an enduring peace. Like, they need to rebuild their military. They’ve lost, like, at least one army’s worth of people and equipment. So, like, to me the desire to build up those military capabilities again is going to drive continued cooperation, at least for some time. I mean, that may attenuate. And I agree with Chris that certainly when the urgency and pressure of the war could allow some of the fissures in places like the Middle East and around North Korea and in Central Asia to potentially bubble up to the top.

But it’s also possible that the cooperation just takes new form. So maybe it doesn’t deepen, but it stays concerning and changes into different formats, trading different types of things. I mean, sanctions aren’t going to go away overnight. So I see this as having potentially a long tail. I do think there is one kind of institutional check on their—the depth of their cooperation, which is that none of these countries, in my assessment, are willing to carry—they’re willing to cooperate, as long as it’s win-win. But they’re not willing to carry the burdens of another country. They’re not willing to give more than they’re going to get back.

And one of the reasons why the NATO and the U.S.-led order has endured so long is because the United States was willing to play that role. They were willing to carry the burdens of other countries because they felt that the gains that they got in terms of being able to set the rules were worth it. But I don’t see China playing that role. I don’t see Russia having any interest in playing that role. And you see that playing out in the Red Sea right now, where it’s the United States who’s trying to reopen the sea lanes, whether or not you agree with that action, where China and Russia just paid their own way. They solved the problem for themselves, but nobody else.

And so I see that as a check, because I see that as limiting how far any one of these countries will lean into the relationship. And so it’s—like, it will never be able to reach the level of cooperation that we see among NATO countries, because you don’t have that, like, underwriter that the role the U.S. has played in its alliances.

LINDSAY: Well, let me draw you out on that, really, sort of in two respects, Jennifer. One, the issue of the long tail, that this could in fact be around and be a challenge for years to come. But also, you know, as you sort of think about this challenge, the reality is that U.S. policy sort of can play a role and shape which way it goes. So I’m left wondering at the end, looking at what you see and where you think trends might go, how do you judge this as a threat? How serious is it? How should we think about it?

KAVANAGH: Well, to me the way to answer that question is to really think about, like, where U.S. interests lie. A lot of the cooperation that’s happening in terms of transfers to Russia are aimed at aiding Russia in fighting in Ukraine. So how threatening you think that is is really determined by how many interests you think the U.S. has at stake in Ukraine. At this point, I would say that the U.S.—the U.S., strategic interests have been met. Russia was kept from taking over all of the country. It’s paid dearly for the gains that it did get. And that the best solution here is really to, you know, push for a peace, or at least push to get the U.S. out. I don’t see the U.S. having enduring interest in the future security of Ukraine. I know there are many people in D.C., and probably on this panel, that disagree with me. But so, you know, to me, that cooperation isn’t all that threatening. It’s more, but it’s not threatening.

So, you know, one way to think about U.S. policy towards these countries is to think about what we can do to break them up. Another is to think about where our interests actually lie, and where they’re under threat. Which is why I, you know, focused in on the submarine technologies, because that does pose a threat to the homeland. The U.S. has—definitely has strategic interest in Asia, but it might not be dominating the region. So maybe there’s some transfers that aren’t as concerning. We’re really focused in on the homeland. So in terms of thinking about, like, U.S., like, my focus would be on stabilizing relations with Russia and China so that these things seem less threatening, or pose less of a threat, and making our interests resilient to whatever cooperation they do so that we’re not so affected by every transfer they make. And that would mean investing in things like our own cyber capabilities, and missile defense, and thinking about how we invest more in our own hemisphere, make sure our interests our on our borders are secure. I mean, that’s a better approach than trying to control what these other countries are doing.

LINDSAY: Tom, let me ask you the same question, about how you judge the seriousness of this threat. And I want to ask the question against the backdrop of an observation Hal Brand has made about how this alignment creates a distraction dividend. And, again, taking Jennifer’s point, that they’re looking for win-win, not we’re going to take a blow for you. But that there is the opportunity that if one member is making trouble for the United States, the other can use that as an opportunity to create either additional trouble for the United States, or there’s space created where they can go off and do something because Washington is concentrated on what one member of that alignment is doing. So how do you think about that?

GRAHAM: It’s an interesting idea. I’m not sure how that works out in the real world. You know, certainly I think China benefits from the distraction that Russia is causing at the moment. If we get past the Ukraine conflict, I think you begin to see much more—the tensions in these relationships emerging. You know, particularly if we get past sanctions with Russia. Russia has a much broader set of geopolitical interests than simply Iran, China, and North Korea. And in fact, they are pushed together by the fact that there are very rigorous sanctions regime against particularly North Korea and Iran. But Russia’s interests in the Middle East don’t overlap entirely with Iran’s. Russia’s interests in Africa are, in some ways, competitive with those of China. We’ve already talked about possibilities in Central Asia.

So, you know, I think that what we begin to see are the tensions arising. Russia—we haven’t talked about India yet. India becomes a—is still an important partner for China. And there’s some military technology transfers going on in that relationship as well. So I see a much more complicated geopolitical situation opening up. Russia does think in terms of a multipolar world, as do the Chinese, as do the Indians. But they don’t see it—but they also see it as a world of great-power competition.

LINDSAY: And their visions of what that multipolar world will look like and who the winners and losers are don’t overlap.

GRAHAM: No, well—

LINDSAY: Or don’t align, necessarily.

GRAHAM: They don’t align. And China, to some extent—and you hear this more and more in Russia in the private conversations—China is actually a challenge for Russia over the long term. They have been historically. But given this asymmetry in power at this point in this emerging gap, if you’re sitting in Moscow the question you’re asking is how are you going to counterbalance against China in the future? India provides some margin in the present time, but the sort of difficult reality for Putin is the only real counterbalance is actually the United States. And so I see this becoming a much more competitive relationship. I don’t see this axis, if that that’s what we want to call it, really surviving as a—as a geopolitical entity, once we get past the Ukraine conflict.

LINDSAY: But you don’t think that Putin is going to give up on his vision of decentering the United States in world affairs.

GRAHAM: Sure, but, look, I mean, he doesn’t want the United States to disappear. He wants the United States to remain a pole. You know, from the longest time, and the Russian position—this actually goes back to the 1990s as well—you know the argument they would make is they want the United States back like a normal great power, right? Which means you have to take into account what other great powers think, and factor that into the way you behave on the global stage. They don’t want a global hegemon, but they want the United States be one among several great powers. And the only condition that is absolute for them is we be one of those great powers. That we’re prepared to sit down with you, the Chinese, the Indians, whoever else appears. But as long as we’re at the table, that’s fine. We just don’t want the United States to be the only person at the table.

LINDSAY: And Russia is a great power that belongs to the table because it has nuclear weapons? What else?

GRAHAM: Russia is a great power that belongs at the table because that is a fundamental core aspect of Russian national identity.

LINDSAY: But it’s not based on the Russian economy, or—

GRAHAM: The interesting thing about it is it is not based on what we would call an objective assessment of power capabilities. It’s in the psychology, it’s in the mindset. And it comes from, you know, historically grounded in the large role that they have played, but these vast resources. Nuclear weapons are part of it today, obviously. But, you know, Russia has never thought of itself as anything less than a great power over the past three centuries. And if you look at their actual power, that has ebbed and grown over the past 300 years. They’re actually at a low point in terms of actual power at this point, but no one in the Kremlin is going to tell you, we’re not a great power.

LINDSAY: So, Chris, how do you think about, sort of, the level of seriousness? Is this a ten—you know, five-alarm fire? Is this a nothingburger, a one or a two? I mean, how do you—

CHIVVIS: You mean, the coalition as a whole? (Laughter.)

LINDSAY: I’ll use your “a loose entente.”

CHIVVIS: Yeah. I think it’s important to distinguish between where we are right now, and where we could be in five or ten years. And this gets to your question about—Hal Brands’ point on cooperation. Maybe I can comment on that. But, I mean, I think we’re sort of at a three or four, but we could end up at an eight or a nine if we’re not careful. So it’s something that’s important that we monitor. And, again, the United States has agency here. I mean, you know, the policies that we adopt will have an impact on whether or not we see intensifying cooperation between these powers.

What we don’t want to do is to create a self-fulfilling prophecy, where we assume that they are much stronger and more coordinated than they actually are, we take actions in our own strategy that reinforce that cooperation, and we end up in a situation which is bad for American interests. And one of the ways in which it could be very bad for American interests is actually this—what did you say Hal called it?

LINDSAY: A distraction dividend.

CHIVVIS: OK, I haven’t heard that term before, but I think if I understand correctly, I agree with Hal about this one. I call it opportunistic coordination, which is that as time progresses and the relationships that we see right now, which again are only nascent, begin to develop and deepen, you could have a situation in which one of these, you know, adversaries of the United States does something aggressive militarily, creates a crisis for the United States, and in that situation another one of them, or potentially all three of them, take advantage of the situation in order to stretch the American military, to stretch our political resources, to stretch our diplomatic resources in ways that would be extremely difficult for us to handle. And that’s what we want to—that’s what we want to be avoiding.

LINDSAY: OK. At this time I would like to invite members and guests here in New York and those who are joining us on Zoom to offer up their own questions for our speakers. I’m required do this. As a reminder, this hybrid meeting is being recorded and is on the record. And if anyone has a—wants to ask the question, just raise a hand. Going to go back. I believe that is Scott Moore in the back. If you can stand up, Scott, identify yourself, and ask a question, we’d appreciate it.

Q: Sure. Thanks so much. Scott Moore, University of Pennsylvania.

Following from what I think what was really interesting last kind of sequence of comments on the panel, I’d be curious on views of the Arctic. A region that, you know, we haven’t kind of covered yet, but certainly very much in the news as a particular kind of wedge, pain point, for China-Russia relations.

LINDSAY: Who wants to talk about the Arctic?

CHIVVIS: I can give it a start, and then—because I’m an Arctic skeptic, actually—(laughter)—in terms of—I’m not—I’m not talking about climate change here. (Laughter.) But I’m talking about in terms of the significance that it has for the United States. Obviously, it’s significant. We’re a global power. It matters. But in my estimation, it matters far more to China. And so the question that I have about Russian-Chinese cooperation to try to open up the Arctic route is, if one of the consequences of Russian and Chinese cooperation is that China is alienated from European markets, OK—which is something that could happen. Certainly, China has become a lot less popular in Europe on account of its support to Russia. If that happens, how valuable is that Arctic route to China in the end, anyway? Because one of the main reasons, at least as I have understood it, that China is interested in opening that Arctic route, is so that it can ship goods from China to Europe.

LINDSAY: Anybody else want to weigh in on the Arctic? Tom.

GRAHAM: Yeah. I mean, but this gets back to the idea of distractions that we’ve talked about. You know, Russia has distracted the United States and Europe that actually, in a way, is not all that advantageous to China. If you’re focused only on Taiwan, maybe, but the European market that was a tremendous interest to the Chinese. And in fact, Russia has eroded China’s own ability to access that market, which makes the cooperation in the Arctic less valuable. Unless you can use that northern sea route to get to Europe, there’s no point in opening up the northern sea route.

So, again, I think this relationship is much more complicated. There’s a lot more tension. And there’s a tendency I think, here in the United States, to sort of simplify it, because we feel much more comfortable if we’ve got a bipolar—another pole out there around which we can rally ourselves, a real Axis of Evil. We feel comfortable in a world like that. Dealing with a genuinely multipolar world is something that, one, we’ve had very little experience with historically, and, two, we don’t feel quite comfortable because things become gray. And we really don’t like gray when it comes to international relations.

LINDSAY: Jennifer, you want to join?

KAVANAGH: So I also am an Arctic skeptic, so—but I do want to build off the last point. Which is, you know, I think one of the reasons why there was so much focus on this axis, especially under the Biden administration, was because it fit very well with their view of the world, which was democracies versus autocracies. And so it was a perfect sort of fit there. They wanted to tie the threats together. Their argument was we couldn’t prioritize. We couldn’t back away from Ukraine, or Europe, because it would send the wrong signal to China. Whereas, other people were arguing for prioritization.

I think you’ve seen even just in the past few months, like, an attenuation of the focus, at least with the terminology of this Axis of Autocracies, coming from the new administration, because it doesn’t fit with their worldview. So while traditionally the United States has been very uncomfortable with a world that is more multipolar, I’m not sure that’s true of the current administration that is seeing the world in very transactional terms, and is willing to cut deals in a way that previous administrations haven’t. And maybe, actually quite comfortable in a multipolar world.

Now, that doesn’t mean that all the steps that they’ve made and all the deals they may broker are, like, the right choice for U.S. interests, but it does suggest that some of the ways in which the current administration is deviating from the status quo may actually be well suited to a multipolar world. And we shouldn’t dismiss the possibility that a different approach to foreign policy, in a world where power is more distributed, actually could advance U.S. interests.

LINDSAY: All three of you seem to be talking about an element of fluidity in global relations, that some of the relations we see today could shift depending on what happens. What I would also note is the relationship that Europe has with the United States and with other powers could also change. I mean, if the Trump administration continues with this purely transactional approach to Europe, I could imagine people in Europe deciding that maybe they should reconsider what it is that they are doing toward China, and the Chinese may decide that they want to reconsider what they’re doing toward Russia.

GRAHAM: Exactly, and that is one of the sort of critical questions of the current moment, is whether Europe will finally emerge as a genuine geopolitical actor in its own right that is somewhat separate from the United States. And how that will change the geopolitical setting, and what the implications are for the United States. You know, there are pluses and minuses to this depending on how we see our own interest.

LINDSAY: But you all describing essentially what could be an inflection point right in global politics.

GRAHAM: Right.

LINDSAY: All the way to the back, sir.

Q: Hi. Philip Ellison, a guest here today.

This maybe is a question for Jennifer. Given that the—at the time of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine they were spending something like 3 ½ percent of their GDP on defense. Now, after the invasion, it’s something like 6 percent. It’s a relatively small portion of their of their national wealth compared to what we spent, for example. It makes me wonder about these bilateral and trilateral alliances, how important they are, because—but also about the motivation for Russia to transfer technology to China, which, you know, as we did in the WTO, we’re actually just creating competitors for our own industries. So I just wonder what motivated them to do that, or motivates them today?

KAVANAGH: Well, this gets to the—you know, the question of how Putin views goals in Ukraine. And, you know, at this point for Putin I think that the outcome of the war in Ukraine is legacy defining. He can’t, you know, suffer a defeat. And it has been that way for some time. He’s doubled down on his support to Ukraine numerous times, and sacrificed interests elsewhere, including, like, their arms trade, which used to be a major role that Russia played in the world. It was, like, the number-two arms exporter. Like, that’s gone. It’s lost a lot of its sway in Africa and in the Middle East. Potentially at risk are its bases in Syria. So, you know, it has lost a lot. So at this point, I don’t think—you know, I do think that Putin sees this as, like, you know, not existential in the sense that the outcome will end—you know, that a loss would end Russia. But it’s sort of existential in the sense that it defines his legacy.

And so in that sense, I think the costs that he’s willing to pay are clearly very high. And given the amount that he’s—like, their strategy is one of attrition. So they need as much stuff that explodes as possible. And they can’t produce enough. Like, they’re even—you know, they can’t produce enough to keep up with that. So that’s why they need the munitions from North Korea. That’s why they need the cheap drones from Iran. They’re not good drones, but they explode and that’s basically all you need. And from China, it’s, like, a crucial—the dual-use goods are crucial, because they need those electronics that they’re not getting from the West, or they need, like, a route for that.

So these have been really fundamental to allowing Russia to continue its war in Ukraine, which is why I think they’ve been willing to pay these additional costs. With the side benefit that these transfers are, even if they do create potential competitors for Russia, cause the United States significantly more angst than they cause Putin. And so the side benefit is sort of poking the United States and the rest of the collective West of the eye.

GRAHAM Could I—

LINDSAY: I actually want to ask a question on this, because the question reminds me that the Russian and Chinese economies, in some way, are complementary. China produces stuff. Russia produces energy that China needs. But I’ve heard that China has not been as eager as many Russians had hoped to build new pipelines. And I would note that there’s a question of whether energy integration between Russia and China is good for either one, because it creates a vulnerability.

GRAHAM: Look, I mean, the Chinese hold the upper hand in this. And that’s part of the problem that Russia faces. And this is true of all sort of geopolitical, commercial, and economic deals. The Russians need to sell their oil and gas to China now, in part because of Western sanctions, part because they, on their own, collapsed their market in Europe. The Chinese would love to have discounted Russian oil and gas. And all the deals—commercial energy deals they are working on with the Russians, the sticking point usually is the price. And the Russian—and the Chinese want something lower. The Chinese have alternatives. You know, we’ve been talking about this Axis of Evil. One of the competitors when it comes to oil is Iran. And so the Chinese are more than happy to play the Iranians off against the Russians to get a good deal.

LINDSAY: So Moscow wants the United States to keep sanctions on Iranian oil. (Laughter.)

GRAHAM: Yeah, well, exactly, and lift them on Russia oil. But if you get to the technology transfers, again, the Russians need Chinese support more than the Chinese need to support the Russians. And so they’re good businessmen. They are extracting as high a price as they possibly can. That gets them the submarine technology. It gets them the jet propulsion. It gets them an early warning system. What’s not to like about that, if you’re in Beijing? So this conflict, from Chinese standpoint, actually is—helps them develop the types of capabilities they will need to compete against the United States over the long run. And, oh, by the way, to compete against the Russians over the long run. The Russians are short-term thinking. They want to survive the short term. And so they will provide this technology, even though it works against their long-term interests.

LINDSAY: Did you want to jump in here, Chris?

CHIVVIS: I was just going to say, I mean, what Tom is saying, and a couple of the things that Jennifer said, point to a big point here. Which is that China is so central to this coalition. You know, without China this is not a—this is not something we would be talking about.

LINDSAY: I believe we have a question coming from our Zoom audience.

OPERATOR: We’ll take the next question from Stephen Flanagan.

Q: Great. Thank you all very much.

I had a question, Tom—particularly, I think, for Tom. You raised the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. And it strikes me that, in looking at the long-term relationship, particularly between Russia and China, developments in Central Asia, in areas where they have obvious elements of cooperation but also intense competition, are going to continue. And seems as if they even formed the Shanghai group in 2001 as a part to manage that. And certainly, the Russians wanted to keep an eye on what the Chinese were up to in Central Asia. But there’s obviously been this effort to also expand it to include now recently Iran. And I wondered what you see as—in that area, of sort of a Russia-China cooperation beginning to become strained in Central Asia, but, you know, extending even into areas of the Middle East. You know, particularly once their cooperation on the war in Ukraine is over. So thank you.

GRAHAM: Right. I mean, you know, the two countries have managed to—have managed the competition in Central Asia, I think, quite well, up to this point. The Chinese extract commercial advantages. The Russians provides security. What’s not to like about that, if you’re sitting in Beijing? You know, I think there will be—there is potential competition in the Middle East, given that China is consumer of energy, Russia is an exporter of energy. Iran is interesting to the Chinese for the resources it can provide, in competition with the—with the Russians. So, you know, this Shanghai Cooperation Organization theoretically provides a forum in which you can work out some of that—some of those differences and perhaps decrease the tension that would arise otherwise. That’s one.

Two, I think, from the standpoint of Moscow, you know, part of what it’s trying to do with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is embed China in a web of relationships that in some way constrain what the Chinese can do on the global stage in areas that are important to Russia. So it is an effort to create a hedge against China in Eurasia. You know, the argument I would make is that is not going to be satisfactory, from Russia’s standpoint, over the long run, given, I think, Chinese capabilities and Chinese ambitions. If you’re sitting in Moscow, what you come up against is, again, it’s the United States that provides you the only reliable hedge. And you’ve got to figure out a way to normalize relations with the United States. I don’t think Putin is the guy who’s going to do it, but I know that there are a lot of younger Russians that are of that opinion, and are more likely to influence policy in a serious way ten to fifteen years from now than they are in the immediate future.

LINDSAY: Alexandra.

Q: Alexandra Starr, with International Crisis Group.

I was wondering if you could talk about the potential consequences of the approach President Trump has been taking to ending the war in Ukraine, both for the United States, and how it might be perceived by our European allies.

LINDSAY: Who would like to take that question first? (Laughter.)

GRAHAM: I mean, I’ll take that question first. You know, I think, one, that the Trump administration is right in wanting to try to bring this conflict to an end. I think where the administration has gone off track is trying to position itself as a mediator between Russia and Ukraine, as if we don’t have a preferred side in this conflict. You know, I do believe that the U.S.-Russia channel is critical resolving this conflict, but I would much prefer the United States position itself as a leader of the West in that conversation with Moscow, as opposed to a, as I said, a mediator.

You know, the leverage that we have with Russia comes from unity with the West, a demonstration that we can and are prepared to support Ukraine sufficiently so that Russia cannot win on the battlefield, at any respectable cost. It also—by developing European military capabilities and an ability to act independently of the United States from time to time, also poses a serious challenge the Russians going forward. And that would get some—give you some leverage in a negotiation. And finally, and perhaps somewhat counterintuitively, broadening the relationship with Russia to include things like talks about strategic stability and the Middle East also buys us some leverage with the Russians, because the relationship with the United States is psychologically extremely important for Putin.

We already talked about Russia thinking of itself as a great power, but the second part of that is that Russia wants to be recognized as a great power, respected by a great power. And the only country that really provides that validation is the United States. So Putin has an interest in maintaining this relationship. If we understand that, we can use that, I think, effectively to get Putin to back off his maximal demands on Ukraine, to come towards a resolution that is more in line of what I would argue are long-term U.S. national interests. Would also be satisfactory, from the standpoint of our European partners, and probably the best that Ukraine could hope for in the current circumstances. Which leaves open the opportunity for a future, prosperous, democratic Ukraine that’s integrated into Europe. So leader of the West, not mediator. If you just change that, I’d feel much more comfortable with where the administration is.

LINDSAY: Do either of you want to jump in here? Jennifer.

KAVANAGH: Yeah. So I’ll just say two things. So on the positive side, you know, Chris talked about how ending the Ukraine war might attenuate the cooperation. I think that that’s possible, but I think stabilizing the relations—the U.S. relationship with Russia is equally important. And those two things could happen in one sort of grand bargain, but they might not. They might happen separately. So I do see a value in having a bilateral channel. And I am supportive of the administration’s efforts to try to stabilize that relationship, even if it means making compromises that seem unpalatable. Like, any sort of stabilization of relationships with Russia and with China—both of which are important to attenuating the threat the U.S. perceives from this set of four countries—will require compromises that—you know, that wouldn’t be necessarily ideal. But we should work to try to find something that protects U.S. interest and moves us in the direction that we’d like to.

On the more negative side, I think one concern I have is that there’s clearly a real urgency and a desire to have a deal. That’s the goal. And my concern is that we end up with a deal that either isn’t in U.S. interests, that commits it to things long term that aren’t in its interest, like new security guarantees—the U.S. already has a lot of security guarantees and can barely meet the commitments it has, so I don’t think that in U.S. interests—or an imposed peace. Now, any peace that’s signed that forces Ukraine to give up territory is not going to be desirable, but there needs to be an agreement that at least Ukraine can sign on to and say, yes, like, we believe this will last, this will support our security.

It can’t be something that feels like a surrender, because in that case Ukraine has no incentive to stick to the deal. They will have every incentive to undermine it. And they have the capabilities to do it. They have their own defense industry. They’re capable of, you know, sending long-range drones and other types of things that could blow the deal up. And then I worry that the U.S. is kind of on the hook. Like, we forced the bad deal. There’s a feeling of accountability. And we get dragged into, like, even a longer conflict. So I think that while I’m supportive of the effort to stabilize relations with Russia, the imposed deal is sort of the worst possible outcome. It would be better for the U.S. to just walk away and let Ukraine, you know, continue to fight till it’s ready to settle, or have Europe take the lead, and then to impose a deal for the sake of a deal.

LINDSAY: I think we have one final question. We’re going to take it from Zoom.

OPERATOR: We’ll take the next question from Andrew Michta.

Q: Yeah, hi. Great panel. Thank you so much. Andrew here, from the Atlantic Council.

I’d like to move maybe to Chris and the rest of the panel, move us from the static assessment of where the balance is in Europe to what it’s likely to look like once the force posture review is completed. And what I’m anticipating is reductions in U.S. deployments in Europe. What does it mean for Putin? What does it mean for the Chinese determination to support him? And what does it mean for the future of the European balance of power? Thank you, over.

LINDSAY: You want to take that first, Chris?

CHIVVIS: Well, I’m not sure exactly which force posture changes you are referring to. I mean, my understanding is that there are different ones that are under discussion. I mean, the most obvious one would be to return to the posture that we had back in 2021, or maybe even the more aggressive version, return to the posture that we pre-2014. You know, my own estimation is that in the near term this doesn’t actually pose a major risk for Europe. I think our European allies are, you know, probably more capable than they realize in filling in that kind of a gap. You’re talking about moving two BCTs, if I remember correctly, off the—off the—

LINDSAY: BCTs are?

CHIVVIS: Brigade combat teams, the large U.S. Army units. I think the Europeans can fill that in. Certainly, they can fill it in in the amount of time, you know, that it would take for Russia, which has, you know, suffered a great—you know, has spent a great deal of resources on Ukraine to reconstitute and pose a significant threat to NATO Europe. Now, if you’re talking about going further than that, I think that’s where things start to get a little bit iffy. You know, talking about withdrawing U.S. ground forces from Germany, consolidating, you know, U.S. Air Forces in the U.K., those kinds of moves would be pretty destabilizing. And I hope that that’s not where we’re headed.

LINDSAY: Jennifer, you want to weigh in?

KAVANAGH: I mean, I mostly agree with Chris’s assessment. I would be really surprised if, in four years, we—the changes are more significant than, you know, going back to sort of where we were 2013, which was the low under President Obama. You know, I could see some consolidation of forces. I don’t necessarily think that would be a terrible thing. I think that there is some desire to reduce the presence—from the administration, to reduce the presence of forces in frontline countries that are bordering Russia—the Baltics, maybe Poland. At least when you’re talking about the Baltics, there aren’t that many U.S. forces. So that might send a signal, but it’s not that many forces. Again, I agree with Chris that those can be filled in.

LINDSAY: Do you see this as having any impact on the issue of this loose entente, or alignment among China, Russia, North Korean, and Iran?

KAVANAGH: Not really. I mean, I don’t—I think that Russia would like all U.S. forces out of Europe, but I don’t see that as something that’s going to happen in the next four years. I don’t necessarily see that as something that’s in U.S. interests. And I think even some of the, you know, most Euro-skeptic people in the administration, I think, would probably agree with that. But I don’t necessarily see the presence of forces in Europe as something that’s going to impact populations. I think Russia will continue to build up its—try to rebuild and refit its army for its own purposes. And I think China will continue to try to benefit as much as it can from this, with the goal of, you know, countering and balancing, or exceeding, U.S. force presence in Asia.

CHIVVIS: (Off mic.)

LINDSAY: You would think it would further strengthen the Europeans.

CHIVVIS: That would be my prediction.

KAVANAGH: We would hope it would further strengthen the European—

GRAHAM: It depends on the political will in Europe. That’s always been something that—

LINDSAY: Let’s not assume facts not in evidence. (Laughter.)

That has brought us to the end of our time. First, let me apologize to members here in joining us on Zoom that I didn’t get to all your questions. We try very hard to do so. You’re welcome, those people are in the room, to talk to our panelists after the session. But I just basically want to say, I want to thank everybody for joining us for this first session of the Hauser Symposium. I want to note that there’ll be a video and transcript of the entire symposium, including this panel, posted on CFR’s website, CFR.org, where you can find us. And now, for people here in the room and joining us via Zoom, we’re going to have a brief break. And our second session, which examines “The Axis of Autocracies and the Global South,” will begin at 2:30 sharp. Please join me in thanking my panelists for an excellent discussion. (Applause.)

(END)

This is an uncorrected transcript.

TREVELYAN: Hello, everybody. Welcome to this afternoon’s Council on Foreign Relations Hauser Symposium. It’s entitled “The Axis of Autocracies and the Global South.” My name is Laura Trevelyan. I’m a journalist. I’m the new chancellor of Cardiff University in the U.K.

And I would like to introduce you to our distinguished panelists. We have Tanvi Madan who’s here. She’s from the Center for Asia Policy Studies at Brookings Institution. The Council on Foreign Relations’ very own Ebenezer Obadare is here, Douglas Dillon fellow for Africa studies. And joining us remotely from Brazil is Feliciano de Sá Guimarães at the Brazilian Center for International Relations.

So the framing for our panel is about the Axis of Autocracies and how they seek to undermine the U.S. global interest through things like the BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, challenging the dominance of the dollar, and particularly the role of the Axis of Autocracies in trying to get at those so-called global swing states of Brazil, India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and South Africa. However, I think we do have to start our session by asking, if the Trump administration itself is redefining what the U.S. global interest is, which it’s busy doing, how does that then affect the Axis of Autocracies and their traditional methods of trying to undermine the U.S. global interests, and trying to court influence in the Global South?

So, Tanvi, what do you think? How has the last two months—and the absolute breakneck speed at which the Trump administration is conducting foreign policy—how has that changed the way that the Axis of Autocracies think about how to counter U.S. influence in the Global South?

MADAN: I think there are a couple of things, at least that you can think of in terms of the axis or the coalition. I think one is Xi Jinping often talks about changes unseen in a century. And he’s been saying this for a while. But I do think this is a significant moment of potential change. I think the last panel somebody mentioned a potential inflection point. And I don’t think we’ve seen this kind of moment since that ’89 to ’92 period. And so I think a couple of things are going to be going on here.

One is, I do think you will see the countries that we think about as the axis think about where they can—where they can use opportunities with several countries, where they think the U.S. might be either pulling back or upsetting countries. Or, frankly, that we’re not paying as much attention, because we are now looking at the Western Hemisphere, at the border, at the crises—or resolving the crises in the Middle East and Europe. I think the second thing that might be going on is our relationship with those countries is also in flux. You’ve had President Trump not just throw out the idea of talking to President Putin, he has proposed a U.S.-Russia-China sit down. What will that mean? So I think our relationship with those countries, we don’t know what’s happening.

And I think finally, in terms of if you—who counts as a swing state? If you’re sitting in Europe, you probably think the U.S. is a global swing state today. And so you might see, in terms of responding to—responding to competition in the Global South—you might actually see that a country—for example one that I work on, India—is not looking to compete with the Global South with the U.S. as much. It would like to. We might not be there to do it. They might work with Europe. They might work with Japan. They might work with Korea or Australia, if we are not getting down to that competition in large parts of the world.

TREVELYAN: Tanvi, it’s a brilliant analysis, the idea of the U.S. as a global swing state.

MADAN: Yeah. (Laughter.)

TREVELYAN: Ebenezer, you’re an expert on the African continent. The U.S. pulling back on the traditional soft power, through foreign aid, broadcasting, how does that look to Africa? And what does it mean for U.S. global influence and the opening up of other opportunities for the Axis of Autocracy?

OBADARE: OK. Thank you. So, not for the first time, I’m going to be trying to play both sides of the ball. So I’m going to play the offense and I’m going to play the defense, because that’s what we do in the NFL, right? Complementary football. (Laughter.) So this is complimentary diplomacy.

On the one side, things could not be more—worse than—(inaudible). One of the things that the United States has done excellently over the last—since the end of the Second World War, is to build this—to project this idea that it’s nonparallel, sui generis, it’s an exceptional country. And the very underpinning of American soft diplomacy is the very legitimacy of the American regime itself. That America is exceptional, hence superior. So to that extent, America has everything to lose from pulling back on soft power, right? And we’re saying this in the aftermath of the dismantling of USAID. So that’s the offense.

But the difference looks differently. And here, I’m going to encourage you to look at this from an African angle. And at the risk of plugging my own articles, I did a piece on this recently for Foreign Policy, which I’m going to encourage you to read. I did one earlier on for Wall Street Journal, which I’m also going to encourage you to read. And what I did in those two pieces was to encourage people to think about what’s going on, from an African point of view. Insofar as the retreat from soft power has been untidy, insofar as nobody will want USAID shuttered down, insofar as America has done tremendous good in all of those areas, especially with PEPFAR, it’s important to take on board some of the reservations that African scholars, African intelligentsia, members of NGOs, and ordinary Africans have historically expressed about the implications of African countries’ continue to rely on foreign aid and the idea—which is not crazy—that ultimately in several cases money meant for good cause helps propping up unpopular regimes across Africa.

So there’s an offense to this. There’s a defense to this. And I think both sides of the conversation deserve to be listened.

TREVELYAN: Well, we’ll try to have some of that today. And, Feliciano, how does it look from Brazil? Brazil is one of these swing states that the Axis of Autocracies want to swing their way, against the U.S. How’s it looking from Sao Paulo?

Guimarães: Thank you. Thank you, Laura, for the question, and thank you for the opportunity for being here.

So what I can say that, for example, in the case of BRICS, Brazil has a very positive view of it. So if you look at the history of BRICS since 2008—

TREVELYAN: Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, yeah.

Guimarães: Exactly, yeah. Since 2008-2009, for example, Brazil has been—is a member of BRICS. And if you look at what the trade composition, for example, of Brazil with the other BRICS members, and if you compare before BRICS and after BRICS, you’ll see the tremendous gain that BRICS is for Brazil. What I always tell my counterparts in Europe and the United States when they ask me about BRICS, or why BRICS, the main reason that Brazil was there was that at some point in history, Russia, India, and China came to Brazil and said: Look, we’re going to create this coalition to reform global governance. It will give you more voice. And we will also—in exchange of that, we’ll give you, Brazil, the political access at the highest level—president to president, prime minister to president—in a way that the West has never offered to you.

So in a in a swing state, as you mentioned, a country that is always balanced its position between the West and the rest, that was a unique opportunity. This year, 2025, we might sign one of the most—and Brazil might sign one of the most important defense and security agreement in Brazil’s history with India. And if you compare what used to be the relationship between Brazil and India, way before BRICS, Brazil and India had a diplomatic normal relationship. They were not very close. Fifteen years after that, Brazil and India are very close. So the political gains and the economic gains of being inside the BRICS today, they overpass the risks of being inside the BRICS. So Brazil is hosting the July summit of BRICS. The attention of the world will be on this conference in July, will be there. But in a general terms, having a closer relationship with Russia, India, and China is very positive for a swing state like Brazil.

TREVELYAN: Fascinating. And, Tanvi, what about India, and India’s role in BRICS? And how does India feel about the U.S. redefining its traditional global interest? And what are the opportunities for India?

MADAN: So a couple of things, yeah. I think, on BRICS, India, it is an important grouping for India. In part because of the reasons that it actually gives India a platform to engage with other developing countries. But you go back to why India joined BRICS, it wasn’t because of—in fact, the whole concept of BRICS was a Goldman Sachs idea. It’s a Western idea, in some senses, was an emerging markets group. But to India it was a non-West grouping. I think there are concerns in India about Russia and China trying to make it an anti-Western grouping. And what you saw at the end of the last BRICS summit, which was in Russia, which was Prime Minister Modi, in very indirect ways but you could hear his concerns about BRICS.

He said, look, we still stand for the two things that, you know, most BRICS countries agree on. And there are not many things that all of them agree on. One is that the existing international institution and the multilateral—or, the global stage isn’t representative of several countries. And for India, the most glaring example is the U.N. Security Council, in terms of permanent membership, but in a number of other ways. That the voices aren’t being heard of various developing countries. And the second place where—the second element where there is commonality or shared interests of concern is about sanctions, particularly non-U.N. sanctions. But I think you saw an India that says, we agree on that. This is a platform. But there are concerns about, A, making this an anti-Western organization. And you heard Modi also talk about we do not want to see this be divisive.

TREVELYAN: And he was first out of the bloc to go to Washington, wasn’t he?

MADAN: He was. And this is where—and this is partly—it’s that India, if you look at its relationships today, it is—if you look at India’s diversified portfolio of partners, the weight of the West is the—is the strongest. And so India is trying to diversify that with building relationships with the Middle East, et cetera. But for India, the U.S. is its closest partner across a range of items. But what you’re seeing for India is it’s saying, you know, Trump administration is there. But the one thing that we’ve seen, one relationship we’ve seen actually grow across the last six administrations, five or six administrations in the U.S., is the India relationship. Nonetheless, I think they are—they realize it’s going to be a much more transactional relationship. What are they going to put on the table? They’re looking at their old playbook from Trump 1.0. How can you adapt it?

They’ll continue to want to align with the U.S., but they’re going to do two other things. One, they’re going to adapt to today’s circumstances. They are going to want to insulate themselves from volatility. And that’s going to require them to diversify their relationships even further—their relations with Europe, relations with—maintaining a relationship with Russia, relations with Japan, with Australia, with the Mideast is all going to become very important. And finally, and another element, which is trying to keep the relationship with China stable. That is India’s primary adversary, which is another reason BRICS has got a little bit complicated for India. But trying to stabilize that, even if they don’t resolve their differences.

TREVELYAN: And, Ebenezer, what about South Africa, the key diplomatic power on the continent? What inroads can the Axis of Autocracies make in this moment?

OBADARE: Do you want me to speak as a Nigerian? (Laughter.)

TREVELYAN: Well, I would like you to speak as an Africanist about South Africa, with a Nigerian bent. (Laughter.)

MADAN: As a member of the Commonwealth.

TREVELYAN: Exactly. And don’t forget about Ghana, if you’re going to bring up Nigeria.

OBADARE: OK. OK. So South Africa’s role here is important because it’s actually one country that both China and Russia partner with. They’ve done a bunch of military exercises. They see the association with South Africa as a way to leverage influence, not just in southern Africa but in the rest of Africa. South Africa being one of the two economic—three, maybe—powerhouses on the continent. But the other thing is also the ideological affiliation between Russia and China and South Africa. In the case of Russia, the former Soviet Union, in this case, there was a lot of support for the ANC when the ANC was up in arms, rightly, against the Apartheid regime in South Africa. And if you if you think over the last twenty-five, you know, thirty years when, you know, ANC has been in power, it’s sort of leaned generally in that direction. So in that regard, it’s been a very—South Africa has been a low-hanging fruit for Russia.

China is sort of also in because it needs South Africa in order to do what it wants to do in the rest of the continent.

TREVELYAN: So the Belt and Road, and so on?

OBADARE: Yes, Belt and Road is just one part of it. The most important—the more important part, from the way I see it, is the political part. Which is China wants to create Africa in its own ideological image. And I hope I’m not putting it too strongly. So one of the things that it’s doing—so in the case of Russia, for instance, Russia has this, you know, what it calls Africa Institute. It’s basically an agency for dissemination. They give money to journalists, to influencers to defame the West and then to prop up Russia.

But China is actually very deliberative and much more strategic in this. Which is, all over the continent in different universities it’s got what is called the Confucius Institute. When you hear the Confucius Institute, the Confucius part makes you think of, you know, Confucianism. Everything’s going to be going nicely. We’re going to—no. It’s a very ideologically driven thing. And the whole idea is to give the impression that you don’t have to be a democracy in order to have development. You can have the Chinese model. And the American model of liberal democracy does not work. So in that sense, what China is up to is actually much more insidious.

TREVELYAN: Fascinating. And, Feliciano, if we could just talk a little bit about this idea of challenging the dollar’s dominance, which is one of the ideas behind BRICS. And now, thanks to the existence of the Mar-a-Lago accord, which some of you may have read, the infamous memo by a member of the Trump economic team which lays out in more detail the tariff strategy, but also actually the idea of devaluing the dollar. So could that potentially help BRICS, if that were to happen? And how serious do you think BRICS is about this idea of challenging the dominance of the dollar?

Guimarães: I think what’s going on in BRICS today is that BRICS countries are trying a number of different strategies to have trade using their own currency. So, for example, Brazil—if we can export to China, now some of Brazilian companies can use renminbi on these exports and the Chinese can use real on these exports. So that’s—but it’s a very small amount of the trade between Brazil and China. So there is no de-dollarization, per se, on the BRICS discussions. Where we see there is a number of different initiatives. And we should try to diversify the possibilities of trade, right?

But, look, before the American and European sanctions on the—because of the war in Ukraine, Brazil had 85 percent of its foreign reserves in U.S. dollars. The rest was pounds and euros. Now we have 5 percent on renminbi, because one of the unintended consequences of sanctions is that a country like Brazil that sees sanction acting against Russian foreign reserves is that we have to protect ourselves. That’s the first reaction of a country like Brazil. So that’s an unintended consequence of sanctions.

So going back to my previous comment, I think for a country like Brazil BRICS is a huge business economic opportunity. The GDP of BRICS today is higher than the G-7 in purchase power parity. Brazil exports today to Asia, without China, then we export to Europe or the United States. We export more to Bangladesh than Australia, New Zealand, and Switzerland combined. So BRICS, for us, it’s a huge business opportunity in Asia, right? So it’s almost impossible for us to exit BRICS, or to move away from BRICS. However, because of this Mar-a-Lago memo that you mentioned, that’s one of the reasons, I think, that the July summit of BRICS in Rio, July of this year, the discussions about de-dollarization are going to be toned down a little bit.

So Brazil is hosting two meetings to this year, which is the BRICS summit and the COP-30 in the Amazon. The government—the Brazilian government priority is the COP-30 in the Amazon. So BRICS is a—it’s not as important as COP-30. Brazil, instead of having this summit at the end of the year, we’re holding the summit in July. And also because of the new geopolitical scenario, the Trump administration, it becomes more complicated to openly speak of this type of policy of moving away from the U.S. dollars than before. So I think—but, however, despite the United States position, this is an ongoing process happening within BRICS that is very difficult for the United States to be able to stop.

TREVELYAN: And, Tanvi, what’s your feeling about BRICS, and de-dollarization, and how much enthusiasm there really is for it, especially given also how much U.S. government debt held by—(inaudible)?

MADAN: Well, I think, you know, one of the things is, if you look at this idea of a BRICS currency, which is how this conversation started a little bit, it was primarily a Russian idea. And then, you know, kind of China said, OK, we’ll consider this. India has been very clear. They had no interest in a BRICS currency because it would make them more dependent on the Chinese. And they’re trying to de-risk from the Chinese economy. So even in terms of, you know, you have a currency that is—or, a country that is not thinking about this in very open and transparent terms, in terms of how India is thinking about China. So it’s not interested in that.

Like Feliciano said, though, there is an interest in India in doing kind of payments in local currencies. Sometimes because a number of countries it trades with doesn’t have enough dollars. And so they don’t want to not trade for that reason. And I think you will see that trend. Another reason is sanctions. I think, you know, as Chris Chivvis was saying in the previous panel, we do have agency here. And I think U.S. and—the U.S. and Europe need to think about this unanticipated outcome of sanctions, which is we are driving countries to find these alternate routes. And they’re saying, we do not want to be entirely dependent on, you know, your good graces when you decide—you think about the BRICS, almost every one of those countries has been sanctioned at some point by the U.S. and Europe. So I think there is that aspect.

Now I will say, you know, as much as Russia talks about alternative currencies, when it was selling oil to India it was saying oil, incidentally, which India was refining and then either we or the Europeans were buying, but nonetheless the Russians said they wanted—what do they want? They didn’t want—you know, they wanted dollars. They wanted their—OK, they could also—(inaudible)—et cetera. And they said they didn’t want rupees. India offered to pay rupees. So even if you talk about these things within BRICS, there are a lot of these nuanced differences. And then Russia hosted the BRICS this past fall. And on their kind of page for those attending the summit they said, yes, you know we know technically we accept Chinese kind of online payments, et cetera, but frankly when you’re coming here the only thing we will accept is cash or dollars. (Laughter.)

TREVELYAN: Cash is king. So, Ebenezer, I want to move to a slightly different area with you, which is the United Nations. And we don’t yet know what the Trump administration’s plans are for the U.N., although it’s reported this afternoon, CBS are reporting that Elise Stefanik maybe on the brink of withdrawing her nomination. Her vote might be needed in the House. But let’s say there’s some withdrawal of funding from the U.N. Does it open up this whole question of the Global South? And does China become more influential in the United Nations? And what does that mean for Africa?

OBADARE: So, before I answer the question, let me quickly go back to the comment about BRICS, because I think it maybe pertains to this. And I think one of the best ways to understand the BRICS idea is to put it in a historical context. I think many of us in this room are old enough to remember the Non-Aligned Movement, the G-77, do you remember? So there’s a continuity here that it’s actually—it seems to me that it’s much more a political project than an economic project. And that even if BRICS were to go away, there will be a resurrection of something like that, insofar as it has this very long history that goes all the—back all the way to all this older movement.

TREVELYAN: OK, but if we go to the U.N. is there a chance for the Axis of Autocracies to undermine U.S. global interests, if the U.S. pulls back a little bit from its U.N. funding?

OBADARE: Can I play both sides of the ball? (Laughter.)

TREVELYAN: Absolutely.

OBADARE: OK. The answer is—the answer is, yes. Every time the United States steps back from its global obligations, it’s not a good idea for those of us who hold up the United States as a model and who say, look unto the U.S. as the author and finisher of your democratic project. So that’s one side. But on the other side, insofar as it opens up an opportunity for African countries to exercise agency, to look for new allies, to exercise autonomy—over the last decade or so the one thing, the one register that has sort of come out of African countries when they speak about their leaders is, you know, they talk about autonomy, sovereignty, autonomy, sovereignty. A pullback from the United States, regrettable as that might be, would actually give these countries an opportunity to exercise their sovereignty. And there could also be an—I mean, there’s a moral clarity that comes from a country that has been so influential over the last sixty years pulling back. It’s going to be an opportunity for not just, you know, the African countries to rethink the fundamentals of their own diplomacy. It's going to open up new opportunities, you know, in different parts of those relationships.

TREVELYAN: Much is changing. And, Feliciano, if I could ask you first about this idea of the reverse Kissinger, which we were hearing about. The idea that the United States is trying to peel Russia away from China. How does that look from Brazil’s perspective? And what does it mean for Brazil’s status as a swing state that the Axis of Autocracies want to influence?

Guimarães: Well, I think Brazil’s longstanding priority when comes to foreign policy is to build a multipolar order, right? No matter what government you look at Brazil, whether it’s a right-wing government or a left-wing government, there word “multipolarity” is always there one way or another, right? So for example, in this current administration, President Lula administration, Brazil condemned the Russian invasion, in one hand. But in the other hand the government truly believes that a full defeat of Russia, which would lead to a civil war in Russia, is against—is against the stability of world order. And, as I said, also against the stability of a multiple order, because Russia is a necessary state to build this multipolar order.

So any movement in the world in which you increase the number of great powers, in which each great power has some room of maneuver to be able to avoid either a bipolarity or a unipolarity will be in Brazil’s interest, OK? So I would—I could speculate, I think, that in Brazil’s interest—Brazil’s view, a Russia dependent on China would not be the best scenario. So a Russia that will be a little bit more independent on China will be—will be easier to not only negotiate with China and the Russians, but also have this idea of a multipolarity. And why multipolarity? Because Brazil wants to be in the future one of these poles of a multipolarity, a regional power that has global leverage and has some global influence. So unipolarity and bipolarity are usually against Brazil’s long-term interest.

TREVELYAN: And, Tanvi, what’s your analysis of the reverse Kissinger, and how China feels about it, and whether it helps China with its aim of, you know, courting the Global South and undermining U.S. interests or whether, as we were hearing from the first panel, China is a bit rattled?

MADAN: I think, you know, we—I’m sure China would not like that. I think in an ideal world, they would like to see a Russia that’s closer to China than it is to the U.S. It’s going to be an interesting question to see how they react to the idea of a U.S.-China-Russia—you know, President Trump’s proposal of that. You know, the thing that they don’t talk about—I think the Russia-China relationship is somewhere between a no limits partnership and, you know, about to fall apart. None of that is true. And this is also where I think sometimes when we talk about a reverse Nixon or Kissinger, we overestimate American agency. We didn’t create a split between those countries. It existed. The Sino-Soviet split existed. And the Nixon administration took advantage of it. They had clashes amongst each other.

So I don’t think we’re at that moment. I think the thing that we could do, and that countries—and, incidentally, this is not a new thing. France, Japan, and India had actually suggested this to the Biden administration back in, you know, pre-Russian invasion of Ukraine. That you actually should—even if you can’t create a wedge between Russia and China, could you create a ceiling of how—you know, how much they cooperate? So I think if you’re China, you’re trying to think about how do you convey to Russia that, yes, you know, it actually muddies the water if you do more with the U.S. But at the same time, you want to ensure—and China has ways of it, because Russia is dependent on China—to convey that if Russia crosses certain lines or gets too deep, that they have ways of putting pressure on Russia too.

And they will remind, perhaps, Russia, subtly, that who knows what happens after President Trump, what the U.S. will do, or what others might do. So I think there is a closeness there that they might not even have to say it. I’m sure President Putin would like a little bit of space. But if you’re Xi Jinping, you’re probably not—you know, you have chips that you can use to ensure that it doesn’t go in a direction. And the Xi Jinping, I think, Putin relationship in particular, means that you’re not going to see it go that far.

TREVELYAN: Interesting. Just the last question to Ebenezer before I throw it over to all of you. Which is, Ebenezer, how do you see the Russian influence in Africa at this moment? Putin was very keen on Wagner, and, of course, Wagner got embroiled in Ukraine. So how do you see that happening at this moment, that there’s also a new coziness between U.S.?

OBADARE: So it fills me with a lot of foreboding. And to start with reverse Kissinger, or reverse Nixon, I think it’s important to keep in mind that long before Trump 2.0 President Trump had already expressed some degree of affection for President Putin. So it’s not entirely surprising that the United States has pivoted towards Russia. But I think it’s important to keep in mind that that’s not on the only thing President Trump has done. That he’s also expressed fascination with dictators. And at every opportunity he’s spurned, he’s repudiated any attempt—he’s been very comfortable, let’s say, in the company of autocrats. And I think it’s worth—

TREVELYAN: Well, transactional, but he’s democratically elected.

OBADARE: No, no, I’m not disputing that. And I’m not saying the United States is Russia, or I think it is China. But I think this whole reverse Kissinger thing has to be put in a broader context. We may be misreading the sickness, is what I’m saying. But in the case of Russia and Africa, I think Russia has—you know, so I mentioned this earlier. So there are three main things.

One is the security arrangement. Used to be Wagner. Now Africa Corps, which is all about propping up, you know, military regimes, unpopular regimes, Russia-allied regimes. Then there is the—what you might call the political part, which is the Africa Initiative. And then the economic part. Russia has supported, you know, nuclear power plants. I think he just signed a $30 billion thing with Egypt. And then, you know, he keeps giving money, you know, to different—keep making investments in oil and gas. So I think Russia is indeed in Africa for the foreseeable future. But if you compare Russia with China, I think China seems to be much more focused in the long term than Russia.

TREVELYAN: Thank you so much. And at this point, I would like to invite members and guests here in New York and on Zoom to join our conversation with their questions. Just a reminder that this meeting is on the record. And we’ll take our first question from here in New York. Ma’am.

Q: Can you hear me?

TREVELYAN: Yes.

Q: Maryum Saifee, State Department.

My question is for Ebenezer. When you were talking about through the offense and defense, and you brought up USAID and foreign assistance. And I wonder, you know, with the sort of realignment of foreign assistance work and the U.S. kind of maybe retreat, let’s say, is there an opportunity or silver lining for, like, Africa led, Africa powered sort of engines around development, that might have been stifled when there was such a dependency and reliance on foreign assistance, even if it was well meaning?

OBADARE: Yeah—

TREVELYAN: I think this is Ebenezer’s recent CFR post.

Q: Oh, and I need to read it. So I apologize.

OBADARE: So I made the argument in my Wall Street Journal piece and in my Foreign Policy piece. Absolutely. The answer is, yes. And that’s not to say that I would have supported dismantling USAID, or that if I thought something needed to be done that I would have done it differently—I would have done it this way. As a matter of fact, I don’t—I think we could have done away with some of the name calling, right? That being said, there’s a tremendous opportunity for African countries here, who have long complained anyway about the impact that foreign aid is having on local economies, on local creativity, on NGOs, on community-based organizations. There’s a whole distortionary effect that African countries, African scholars have been speaking about. This is by no means an ideal situation to have that conversation, but you couldn’t have a better situation than right now to be having that conversation.

TREVELYAN: Thank you. There.

Q: Hi. Bodhi from TIAA.

I have a question for Dr. Madan. So during my last trip to India there seemed to be a lot of concern that Russia and China are becoming so close. And now that these discussions are happening, where Russia is moving closer to the U.S. and their reliance on China might actually diminish, do you have a sense of how the Indians feel about it? Do they see this as positive? Or does it at all play into their calculus? Thank you.

MADAN: So India has long—India’s been—we have started watching Russia-China relations again more recently. India has been thinking about it since the 1950s, because it has been significant for them, the state of that relationship, for good and bad. And so for them, as they have long made an argument to the West that you should stabilize relations with Russia to keep it from getting close to China. One of the things—there was a brief phase where President Macron and Prime Minister Abe actually had a similar view, and were all three making the case, Prime Minister Modi and the two of them, that that is what the West should be doing.

If you remember, President Biden actually when he first came that summer did actually reach out to President Putin. And there were some discussions. Obviously, the Russian invasion threw that off track. And so while India doesn’t put it this way, one of the reasons they were not happy about the Russian invasion is that they knew it was going to make Russia more dependent on China, and more beholden to it. Why does it matter to them? They’re diversifying away in terms of their defense supplies from Russia, but nonetheless you still have a lot of existing military equipment that is coming from Russia. And so for them, the idea that you have a country on which they are dependent for military supplies, which is in turn dependent on their primary adversary, at a time India and China were in the midst of still a serious border crisis, was a nightmare.

And so for them, the question—a lot of why they have maintained those ties with Russia, and are hoping for a more stable U.S.-Russia relationship, is that they think that at the very least it keeps Russia neutral between India and China. The Russia-India relationship was based in a balancing China motivation. Today you have a Russia that, when it’s asked, you know, India and China are at loggerheads, they will not say they will take India’s side. They say, we’re going to stay out of it. India will take that. What they don’t want is Russia moving to China’s side, because that affects their ability to even resist the Chinese. And so they would like that.

But I think they also understand that today you’re not going to—even if you see a more stable U.S.-Russia relationship, you’re going to see an environment where China—Russia will still remain very dependent on China. We’ve talked a lot about the defense and technology side. Look at the economic relationship and where Russia’s trade is. It is significant—I mean, the Russia-China trade relationship is really, really significant. And even India can’t match that, for all you know, the oil it’s bought. It’s a very kind of one-dimensional economic relationship so far. So I think they will hope for a Russia-U.S. reset of some sort, but they’re not going to think that that will automatically mean a Sino-Russian split, as such.

TREVELYAN: Very good. Sir.

Q: Hi. I’m Jeff Nuechterlein with Nue Capital.

Dr. Madan, I’ve noticed that you concentrated on the Quad. And I’m interested in what India’s view is of the future of the Quad now.

MADAN: So, you know, it’s interesting. When we were talking about the earlier panel on Axis of Autocracies, and how it’s different from alliances, I actually think we are now in an era of minilaterals, and these likeminded coalitions. And so I think about, you know, Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, on some issues you could perhaps throw other countries in, these are more like—actually, like the Quad. Not an alliance. Likeminded for very specific purposes. And don’t always work together. So I think India—in some ways, for India the Quad is a much more likeminded operational grouping than BRICS. And much more focused. And you even see that in terms of, you know, Prime Minister Modi went to the BRICS summit, but he left and went to Europe before the BRICS+ meeting. Whereas the Quad, India wants to host a summit this year. There was a Quad ministerial. India would like to see the Trump administration continue with the Quad. They are hoping that the fact that this was revived during the previous Trump administration will make sure that it sustains.

I think they will also make the case that actually these are all partners and allies of the U.S. that have stood up and said, we want to burden share. We are burden sharing. It requires no additional commitments on the U.S. side. And in fact, it is one way to actually do things in the region, for a number of countries that would be considered including part of the Global South, that the Quad actually can deliver without the U.S. necessarily putting a lot more on the table. It will probably be willing to adapt, as I think the other Quad members will, if the Trump administration wants to emphasize things like maritime security more, or economic security issues more, rather than—India often describes the Quad as a force for public good. I somehow don’t see the Trump administration necessarily wanting to describe it that way. And I think there will be other areas. There was a lot of work being done on climate resilience, on climate change, which is what the Pacific Islands—that’s what they want from something like the Quad.

I think that will move—for those things, we’ll move into India, Australia, and Japan picking up the slack there, or working with other partners, rather than focusing on the Quad. So I expect that not just the Quad, but I think a lot of minilaterals will proliferate. Some of them will involve our adversaries. Some of them will involve our allies and partners, and not involve us. And some of them will involve us. And I think the Quad will be one of them.

TREVELYAN: Thank you. And we have a question on Zoom now. Go ahead.

OPERATOR: We’ll take our next question from Beatrice Rangel.

Q: Thank you so much. I am Beatrice Rangel. I’m in Miami. I’m in consulting.

I wanted to ask all the panelists, there is—there are some experts that believe that what we are facing right now is the making on a new geopolitical order, whereby Europe is going to pivot with China, whereas Russia is going to pivot with the United States. How do you see the Global South behaving in response to that reality? Thank you.

TREVELYAN: Feliciano.

Guimarães: Thank you. Thank you for the question. That’s a difficult question. I can only speculate. (Laughter.) Well, from a Brazilian point of view, what I can say is that my first impression is that this new global order with Trump administration, and the new reality that we are seeing today, is going to become even more transactional, right? For a country like ourselves, what we have to do—and I argue in favor of that in a Foreign Affairs article—is that we have to truly play a hedging strategy. That we have to diversify and protect ourselves against the unforeseeable future, whatever we cannot predict in the future. But the other hand, as the—if there is a scenario in which the great powers increase their rivalry—whether it’s U.S.-China, or Russia against China, or whatever—from a Brazilian point of view we have to see how this plays out in our region, in South America.

And so Brazil’s number-one priority is to avoid extra-regional powers, and includes the United States, to approach South America from a strategic point of view. The crisis of Venezuela, for example, is symptomatic of how the United States, Russia, and China operate in a neighboring country in which we should be able to have an influence, and we are not able to do so. So, I mean, from South America, I think the more we have a region in which we can count on in the future, Brazil will be better off. But the region now is very fragmented. So on one hand you have to play this hedging strategy in which you have to protect, but on the other hand you have to increase your regional coalitions to protect yourself as well. And that, in South America specifically, is becoming increasingly more difficult.

So and next year in Brazil, 2026, we will have an election, right? President Lula is going to run for re-election. We don’t know what’s going to happen. And just see how the world is very different from where you are sitting. I was at the Munich Security Conference two months ago. And the last meeting, when they put together all the think tanks, a lot of the Europeans were talking about Russian interference in their elections. So when it came to me, I said, look, we are not worried about Russian interference in the Brazilian elections. We are very much worried about American interference in the 2026 elections. So depending on where you are in the world, your view on what is the biggest threat that you have changes a lot.

TREVELYAN: Can I just ask you, Ebenezer, the questioner was asking are we seeing a world where Europe aligns with China and the U.S. more with Russia? How do you see that?

OBADARE: Yeah, I think it’s an interesting question because it actually brings me back to the basic principle of this conversation, which is the very instability of the notion of the Global South itself, right? China will tell you that it’s part of the Global South, right? And what it’s trying to do is to galvanize other—fellow Global Southerners against the almighty United States. So you have China saying it’s a Global South country. You have Haiti. You have Brazil. You have South Africa. You have you have Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso. So the very—the inchoateness of the term itself, I think, is what immediately comes to mind.

And for me, it’s a—it’s a reminder of how—especially when you look at China—how with specific—in other specific circumstances different countries can rally behind different slogans to achieve, you know, some political objectives. And I when I think about Russia, for instance. You know, Russia, would say, oh, yeah, those are the Global Southern countries. Russia postures as a country of the Global South, right? Because it wants to be able to say, that’s a new colonial power as opposed to us, who are fighting against colonial power.

TREVELYAN: All right. Back to the room. Madam.

Q: Thank you. Elmira Bayrasli. I’m with Bard College.

The one area of the world that is missing from this conversation and the one before is the Middle East. And the Gulf has really emerged as prominent, particularly under the Trump administration. Saudi Arabia has been hosting peace negotiations on behalf of Russia and Ukraine. Obviously, Qatar has been involved in discussions with Israel and with Hamas. So I would love to hear about how does the Gulf play into the power of the BRICS? And where do they come in on this?

TREVELYAN: Tanvi, let’s start with you.

MADAN: UAE is actually a member of the BRICS+. And I think, you know, it’s actually reflective—I think what’s happening with a number of countries in the Middle East is what’s going to happen globally. Which is, everybody is going to be diversifying. So I actually don’t think we’re going to be in a to be in a world where the U.S. is just with Russia and Europe will go to China. There were eleven European foreign ministers in India last week. And that was following a major visit by Ursula von der Leyen and a number of EU commissioners. Why? Because, yes, they have questions about the U.S. But that doesn’t mean they’re going to go to China. I think they are going to try other things.

Similar with the Middle East. I think you’re seeing—and this is part of an effort that actually precedes President Trump. It actually had to do with judgments in the Middle East, especially in the oil exporting countries, that we were starting to import less. They were already starting to look at Asia as a market, which meant they were looking at China, India, and Japan in a fundamentally different way. And not just economically, but strategically as well, as they thought about these are not countries who are going to comment on our forms of governance. That these are going to be much more pragmatic relationships. So I think you’re seeing a lot of interesting things going on.

The UAE and Saudi Arabia, I track India-Mideast ties—have become not just energy—you know, countries selling oil and, in Qatar’s case, natural gas to India. Their sovereign wealth funds are investing in India, not just in the downstream sectors they used to, energy, but in Indian tech companies. Because they think, this is one way for them to diversify their revenue sources as they look down the line and see kind of a post—even if not a post-oil world, but as they think about their oil revenues potentially falling. So I think this is very reflective.

And the other thing is they are not just—you know, just kind of very vast Global South, which is extremely diverse. But the UAE, for instance, has now become a source of infrastructure investment in Africa. So India and the UAE are talking about doing connectivity projects in Africa, just like India and Japan used to talk about these things. There’s also sometimes negative dimensions to them. You know, countries—the UAE, for instance, fueling or funding different parts of conflicts.

So I think this is going to be a world where they are the kind of—yes, there are the great powers. There are a lot of middle powers, which include a number of countries in the Middle East who have the financing, the resources to be able to, if not be global swing states, I think be regionally pretty prominent in ways that aren’t just in the Middle East, but in that entire kind of area around, you know, the Indian Ocean, Africa, and South Asia as well.

TREVELYAN: Well, Ebenezer, perhaps you’d like to pick up with that, because there have been these various failed attempts at peacemaking in Africa recently.

OBADARE: Absolutely. It’s interesting that when we think about competition for supremacy in Africa, we think about the United States, naturally. We think about its Western allies. We think about Russia and China. And then we draw a line. And then we seem to omit this whole range of middle-level actors who are having a tremendous influence on politics, economy, conflict, you know, natural resource extraction in the continent. So you’re talking Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, United Arab Emirates. These are countries that have invested tremendously, not always for good, you know, in different parts of Africa. And one of the wonders, you know, maybe the eighth wonder of the modern world is the way in which they are always—almost always fly under the radar. We look at what the U.S. is doing. We look at what Russia is doing, China is doing. But arguably these other countries are actually much more effective in terms of what they do.

TREVELYAN: And we have another question on Zoom now. Thank you.

OPERATOR: We will take our next question from Hani Findakly. Please remember to state your affiliation.

Q: Thank you very much. I’m Hani Findakly. I’m an investment banker. Thanks for a very good discussion.

Earlier this month there was an announcement by the People’s Bank of China that its cross-border digital RMB is now fully operational, and it’s been fully connected to the ten ASEAN countries as well as six or seven Middle Eastern countries. And my question to you is, if this system is fully functional it will probably draw away about 38 to 40 percent of global trade away from SWIFT, and the dollar-denominated system. What is the implication of that for global trade and for U.S. dominance, especially the use of the dollar as a—as a means of exchange for trade?

TREVELYAN: Well, who would like to take that one? Who feels—(inaudible)? I think—

Guimarães: Can I jump in on the—

TREVELYAN: Feliciano.

Guimarães: Yeah, I’ll try that one. Actually, I’ll try to answer two questions in one. On the power of the Gulf states, or Middle East in general inside the BRICS, we actually don’t know yet. It’s a new expansion. The members are joining in. For example, Saudi Arabia initially wanted to join. They did not join. Now they want to join. Then they didn’t want to join. So we don’t know exactly how it’s going on. Of course, once you have Egypt, Iran, and UAE inside BRICS, it changes the dynamics of the negotiation. Brazil was initially against the expansion, in public said so, because it diluted Brazil’s influence within the BRICS. They had this political axis that I was talking about, only to the five original members. Now we have way more. But on the other hand, Brazil was very much in favor of Indonesia, for example, that was recently announced as a full member of BRICS, just like the other ones.

TREVELYAN: But to this question, Feliciano.

Guimarães: So I consider these countries—(inaudible).

Yeah, on the issue of SWIFT, we—at CEBRI, we talked to SWIFT company in Brazil a couple of times. They were very much concerned with all the discussion about the de-dollarization, and such. What they wanted to always say is that actually many other countries, especially Russian banks, are still using SWIFT system. But you can tell that they are very much afraid of an alternative to their own system, right? That’s their number-one concern. What I try to tell them that I think this is unavoidable. This is—the Western sanctions against Russia just to sped up this process. And now as much—it’s a country like China, for example, that was just mentioned, is going to come up with an alternative—an alternative system.

From a Brazilian point of view, having an alternative system is positive, right, because now we’ll have two payment system that we can play with, and then we can actually use whatever is better, or the movement depending on the moment. It goes back to my initial argument of this transactional world that we’re going to see if there is an increased competition among great powers. And for a country that needs to diversify, the possibility of having alternative payment system is perceived as positive. So this is yet to be seen. We’ll see. Thank you.

TREVELYAN: Yeah, thank you. And we have a question from the back.

Q: Thank you very much. My name is Jonathan Brewer. I’m down in the program as part of the U.N. I just want to say for the record that I’m no longer part of the U.N. (Laughter.) I’m here in a private capacity.

So thank you to the panel for some very interesting comments. I wanted to ask about the China Belt and Road program, and to what extent the panel feels that it was or is an effective program in terms of promoting China’s interests in the Global South. For example, in terms of support to the U.N. or support to the position on Taiwan. Thank you.

TREVELYAN: I think it’d be great if you could all answer that.

Ebenezer.

OBADARE: The answer is, absolutely. What China is doing is having agreements with, in the context of Africa, various African leaders. From the point of view of China, that’s fantastic. Because it doesn’t have to do what the United States does, which I think is the right thing. The United States attaches conditionalities to it. It says, if I’m going to give you $2, you’re going to have to do ABC. China does not do that. China goes to an African leader, popular, unpopular. It says, you want me to build a kilometer of road? Sign here. I’m going to bring all the equipment. I’m going to bring all the workers. Everything is going to be fine. From a Chinese point of view, that’s fantastic. In terms of the long-term interest of those of us who care about popular representation, the social contract, political liberties, democracy, human rights, that’s not necessarily a good thing.

TREVELYAN: Tanvi.

MADAN: I think they have been quite systematic about saying, if you look at—and I can’t remember who, it’ll come to me—somebody did a map on what various countries around the world’s position on Taiwan is today. China has very systematically gone and started injecting language that essentially also, in certain countries, suggest that they would be OK with reunification by any means necessary, and endorsement for that. And I think you don’t get that unless, A, you have significant influence—whether it’s through the Belt and Road, or you do things outside the Belt and Road that that particular country or regime thinks useful. But they have been much more systematic about it. Those are the conditions it attaches, as opposed to saying, you know, you have to have effective governance, open, you know, transparency, et cetera.

It is talking—and before Taiwan, we saw this on the South China Sea. Why does Afghanistan, which is a landlocked country, endorse China’s position on the South China Sea? Because they systematically, that is the priority. They have—you know, they are using the U.N. system, as you would know, not—you know, this is where they—as much as we think of them as revisionist, they’ve used the existing system, sometimes far more effectively than before. To me, the open question is—the first Trump administration actually did realize that they were competing with China at the U.N. and so you saw Secretary Pompeo get very involved in trying to bring together coalitions to defeat candidates for membership in the world International Intellectual Property Organization, Biden administration within the Telecommunications Union. So the open question for me, on a lot of these issues in terms of how we respond, is I don’t know that we have an answer on how the Trump administration is going to approach China, particularly how President Trump is thinking about China. Perhaps CFR’s Rush Doshi can tell us. But I think that is an open question, including in how we will respond to the Global South.

TREVELYAN: So many big questions. Feliciano, do you want to just briefly address the question of Belt and Road? And then we’ll take one final question.

Guimarães: Yeah. Well, right after the beginning of President Lula’s administration he went to visit Xi Jinping. He made a state visit in China. And China, again, proposed for Brazil to join the BRI. When there was a Xi Jinping visit on the G-20 summit of last year, again, they were pushing for BRI. And on both occasions Brazil said, no. There was a long debate here in Brazil of why we should join the BRI or not. In my opinion, I think the Chinese authorities didn’t do a very good job in Brazil to sell their projects. But at the end of the day, the final decision of the Brazilian government to decide whether they’re going to join BRI or not was in relation to the overdependence of China, right?

Because they offered the BRI was there. It was that, oh, we already have a very good relationship with the Chinese. A lot of investments, our main trade partner. Are we going to increase that even further? That was the discussion in the Brazilian government. There was no other alternative coming from the West. There is the Gateway Project from the European Union, but we don’t have access to that. And the Americans don’t have anything else to offer. So and that was the one of the discussions we had in Brazil. So we have to only balance the decision based on if the BRI is very good, more or less, or good. We have no other alternative that we can move from there. So if you have a scenario like this, BRI will eventually win most of the time. Chinese will be able to convince other governments to join the BRI, no matter—even if the BRI has problems in itself. So just lack of alternative—

TREVELYAN: Thank you, Feliciano. We have time for—sorry to cut you off. But we just need to wrap up. We have time for one last question from the floor. Who would like to ask that question? No? No more questions? Well, in that case I would like to say, on behalf of all of our members here and on Zoom, thank you so much to our panelists for such a terrific discussion. Please note that the video and the transcript for this symposium will be posted on the CFR’s website. And please join us for session three, which begins in fifteen minutes, which is The Four-Power Problem: How Should the U.S. Respond to the Rise of the Axis of Autocracies? Thank you all for being here. (Applause.)

(END)

This is an uncorrected transcript.

NOSSEL: (Off mic)—Suzanne Nossel. I’m delighted to be here. I’m presiding over this discussion with Heather Conley and Ivo Daalder. We’re going to bring home this fascinating seminar that’s been taking place this afternoon.

Just to kick it off for both of you, do you think this notion of a kind of quadrangle of authoritarian powers—China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea—is that a useful framing or not? There’s been a lot of debate about that this afternoon. And where do you guys come down?

DAALDER: Go ahead.

CONLEY: I think it is useful. You know, there are so many names for it. I think it’s useful for us to understand an alignment of America’s adversaries, how they interact, and what the evolution of their objectives will become. I think it’s valid. I think you can’t throw too much on it, but I think it’s a worthwhile framework.

DAALDER: So I thought it was a useful framework until January 2025, when the United States decided to join the Axis of Autocracies. (Laughter.)

NOSSEL: We are going to have so much fun. (Laughter.)

DAALDER: And I’m quite serious about this. I actually do think the United States looks at its role in the world in a very different way than the framing of the Axis of Autocracies started out with, which was this idea that we have adversaries who either collectively or individually between them were trying to support each other, probably more bilateral rather than multilateral among the four, and it was a pretty useful framework. In fact, Jim Lindsay and I started a working group at the Council to sort of figure out how the U.S. should respond to it.

But the U.S.—I think this U.S. today does not necessarily look at these three, four countries in the same way. It regards two of them, China and Russia, as peer powers as opposed to maybe potential adversaries but not necessarily adversaries. I don’t think anybody’s been talking about North Korea for a long time, at least not for the last eight, nine weeks. And Iran is actually a very interesting conversation one can have. But it’s just a very different framework for the way that this administration is approaching their role in the world, so.

NOSSEL: Well, one of the points that was made in an earlier discussion was that the Biden administration’s framing of democracies versus autocracies, you know, itself was kind of the imposition of a worldview, and the Trump administration has a different worldview. It’s much more transactional. It’s less values-oriented. It has less affinity for governments that have similar systems and democratic norms—that this is part of a move toward a much more multipolar, kind of less value-laden system—less black and white; less, perhaps, polarized. And I wonder if you give any credence to that notion.

CONLEY: (Laughs.) Flip you for it. (Laughs.)

DAALDER: So I do—I mean, I don’t think we have to put any values one versus the other. I do think that the—this administration and this president in particular no longer looks at the internal characteristics of states as a defining element in their foreign policy—i.e., they’re not liberal in the true small-L sense of the word liberal. And that is a huge—it’s one of the big departures of American foreign policy since, you know, the 1940s, which we have pursued for over eighty years.

And it’s fully legitimate to me. And I come from Chicago, and at the University of Chicago we have people like Jon Mearsheimer who have been arguing that the world should be thought about in terms of the relative distribution of power among big states and not about the internal characteristics of states. That’s perfectly fine as a framework, and I don’t have any problem with the Trump administration trying to frame its foreign policy in that way. Not sure it’s pursuing it in the way that I would pursue it even if I believed in this framework, which I don’t. I don’t think they’re doing a particularly good job at projecting power, or husbanding it, or keeping it. But that’s a—that’s a separate—as an analytical framework, arguing that we should look at the world according to the distribution of power as opposed to the internal makeup of states I think is perfectly legitimate as a way to think of it, and one way in which Biden—and the thirteen other presidents who came before him—and this president may be slightly different.

NOSSEL: I mean, how would you put succinctly—because I do—I do quickly see sort of the conversation about this morphing. And even in today’s discussion, there’s much more kind of acceptance of this alternative paradigm than there would have been even a few months ago. How would you, Ivo, put most succinctly, you know, why it is that you think the shift to this paradigm, though perfectly sort of defensible, perhaps—you know, as a matter of logic or theory, why it poses risks for U.S. interests?

DAALDER: Well, most succinctly it’s because it misunderstands power. It looks at power as a resource, and sort of adds up all the resources and says, if I got more than you I got more power than you, which means I can tell you what to do and you will do what I—what I tell you to do in a Thucydian way. But as even Athens learned over time, it just doesn’t work that way. Power is not just a resource; it’s a relationship. You only exercise power over someone else. And that someone else has not only resources; it has agency. And they may—and they may exercise that agency in a way that is contrary to the power relationship that you would think.

So if you look at Canada, just to take a(n) example out of—out of thin air, it is—it should be submitting to the United States, which has almost ten times its population, probably five or six times its—seven times its economy, as President Trump likes to say has been providing for its security for hundreds of years—not quite sure whether we were the ones providing for the security of Canada, but that’s nevertheless—and so it should be able to tell the Canadians what to do. And it turns out the Canadians say, no, we won’t do it, and in fact the political situation in Canada has fundamentally changed, and its ability to—for it to submit to the United States has changed. And so when you look at power as a resource, you don’t understand this outcome. But that’s how, you know, real estate agents who are not particularly good at negotiating deals look at the world.

NOSSEL: Heather, what do you say? Do you have sort of more time for this paradigm shift? And do you believe the autocracies versus democracies remains the right frame?

CONLEY: So I definitely have more time for it because the international system has been in flux for about fifteen years. We’re in a period of transition where the eighty-year-old structures were not being able to be sustained in a way—the economic system, the lack of reform in international organizations. So this system, sticky and strong for all those important values, were starting to give way because the system wasn’t reforming.

So I think this is why we are all grasping. We don’t quite know whether we’re going back to nineteenth-century balance of power/sphere of influence. That may be the system we’re evolving to. It may be a hybrid mashup. But you know, this is why I think we have to take these frames really seriously, because we are experiencing a transition of which we don’t know how this is going to work. And as Ivo said, the Trump administration is clearly having a dramatic rethink on the international economic system, of which we’ve just seen over the last few years; the international security system, whether the United States will play the role it has played for the last eighty years. I think it will pull back.

So, yeah, that’s why—that’s why we’re having this conversation, because other powers will either seize opportunity, middle powers in particular—they’ll be flexible, they’ll be nimble, they will achieve their aims—while we may have a great-power constellation. And I think this is why watching the U.S.-Russian agreement over Ukraine to me will tell us volumes about how this system may potentially shift.

I never thought the autocracy-democracy was the right framing. I think we have to speak in language that is open to all, understanding to all. And so—but I think we have to prepare the American people, for this is a massive transition. Some of it we’re fueling. Some of it’s already been undertaken. And what do they want? What are they willing to pay for? What are they willing to defend? And we may be surprised at some of those answers.

NOSSEL: Yeah. Look, I mean, I think there’s no question we’re not going back to some kind of status quo ante. This is—

CONLEY: No, we’re not going back.

NOSSEL: You know, the clock is not going to unwind. And you know, in some ways you could see the discussion today as an extension of Tony Blinken’s variable geometry, where we’re talking about minilateralism and all—and everyone—every country hedging their bets with all sorts of relationships.

But I want to pick up on your point about the U.S. and Russia. There’s been a lot of talk this afternoon about whether this is what people are calling a reverse Kissinger or a reverse Nixon to China. Is this Trump engaging with Russia ultimately as a hedge against China and something that, you know, both the United States and the Russians ultimately have an interest in, given China’s power, you know, over—you know, over both countries?

CONLEY: I’ll answer quickly and then turn to Ivo.

I think it’s not—we’re using terms that I don’t think people understand. So, you know, a reverse Nixon or Kissinger, what do you—

NOSSEL: Only at the Council on Foreign Relations.

CONLEY: Well, and I love that. But I’m just saying, but—to note we have got to speak more accessibly to allow people to come into this conversation. So just as a—for all of us as a good reminder.

No, this is strongmanism. This is an admiration for a power structure. And so—and this has been an anathema to the United States for those eighty-plus years, although we imperfectly have flexed out own muscles, whether that’s Iraq and, you know, in more modern times. But this is an attraction to control and power and seizing what you want. And what we don’t know is how far we have to go.

I mean, I follow the Arctic very, very closely. I am watching a conversation on Greenland that speaks to that great powers seize what they want for their own needs. That’s Mr. Putin’s view of, obviously, Ukraine. That is Beijing’s view of—more complicated—for Taiwan. If that’s the world we’re going towards, which we may be flexing that, we have to be prepared for those consequences. Or we may not.

NOSSEL: Well, let me just challenge you for a second and say, you know, maybe the motivation is the sort of bromance, but could the consequence be, you know, a more stable kind of trilateral situation where they’re—you know, both China and the United States have a—have a stronger relationship with Russia? And you know, part of the discussion earlier was that, you know, while Putin may never buy into this, sort of the next generation of Russians may be looking this way as a hedge against Beijing.

CONLEY: Well, let’s—Ivo, jump in here.

DAALDER: Yeah. I mean, so, one, I agree we should speak in English. Nixon was a friend of mine—no, he wasn’t. (Laughter.) I’ll just say this, that Donald Trump is no Richard Nixon. (Laughter.) And so the idea that this is a grand strategic, you know, thing by—remember, Richard Nixon wrote this idea first in Foreign Affairs, by the way. The idea that Donald Trump would write anything in Foreign Affairs in and of itself, an interesting concept.

But I do think the strongman is very much the framework that he has, this idea that there are three powers who truly matter. I think Donald Trump way overestimates Russian power. I mean, I think he regards Russian power as more powerful than Vladimir Putin does, which is dangerous, which is why he’s accommodating him in all kinds of ways. But he does believe that Putin’s Russia, Xi’s China, and Trump’s America—and when I say “America,” I mean America; not the United States of America, of Trump’s America—are three equal powers who should have their own sphere of influence within which they would pretty much do whatever they want. And I think that—

CONLEY: It’s the new Yalta.

DAALDER: In that sense it’s the new Yalta. I’ve been asking my kids, because I don’t understand AI, can I—can we do a picture of the famous Yalta but then—(laughter)—replace it with Trump, Xi, and Putin? We’re actually probably going to get this on May 9 on Red Square—

CONLEY: That’s my prediction.

DAALDER: —which is when I think the three of them will be there because Trump will be so desperate to have this conversation with Xi that Xi’s not willing to have with him that he’ll actually fly to Moscow to do it. That was a parenthetical in there.

The question is, is it stable? And the answer to that is, highly unlikely, for two fundamental reasons. One, it’s not at all clear to me that the Chinese are buying into the idea that their sphere of influence is somehow limited in the geographical way that we would like it to be limited. Which, by the way, we have not said how. Does the sphere include Taiwan? Probably. Does it include Japan? I don’t know. And it probably is a good idea that we have some agreements where the sphere goes. I think it includes, on the U.S. side, Guam and Hawaii. But I’m not really sure about that either. So that one is part of it.

But the more important one is that the Chinese have extraordinary influence in both the European sphere and the American sphere. And they’re not going to give it up. In fact, the more the United States—this United States plays the game we’re playing, say, with Mexico and Canada, and with other parts of Central and South America, the more influential the Chinese are going to be in this part of the world—the one that, quote, “we own.” So that’s the problem.

The same is true in Europe. And Heather and I could talk for the next three hours about how it’s never going to work in Europe because the Ukrainians aren’t even willing to live with the Russians. We really think that the Europeans are going to be part of a Russian sphere of influence? Not in—not in Steve Witkoff’s wildest dreams would that come up. So I just don’t see it as stable. That’s the problem I have with this policy, because it won’t work. And it certainly won’t work for the United States.

NOSSEL: What about the Europeans, who are now trying to pivot in response to these rapidly shifting alignments? How do you see them ultimately playing their cards here? Is it just—you know, do they move toward at least kind of a two-way hedging with China and the United States?

CONELY: Well, it’s interesting. Commissioner Dombrovskis is in Beijing right now, having come to Washington to try to understand the tariff negotiation, and now going—of course, the Chinese diplomacy, it gets so easy. We’re here to be stable. We’re the stable power. And I want to talk a little bit about that, because that’s the evolution that we could see. Europe right now, and with our Indo-Pacific allies, are sort of holding hands and trying to hold the eighty-year-old system that they’ve understood and benefited from, and which kept, you know, the peace and stability for them. The question is, can they do it alone? And I don’t know the answer to that.

I think what we’re seeing—and today, and President Macron, and the European reassurance force for Europe—you’re seeing an attempt. Will it be sustained? Do they have the defense and military capabilities without the United States? I don’t think they can sustain it. Are they economically strong enough to endure it? I don’t know. But I think that’s the role they’re playing. Can they hold on long enough, until either we experiment with something and we decide, hmm, I don’t want to, or we start shifting the system? And then I do think, Ivo, then it grows more difficult, and Europe is fragmented.

Northern and Eastern Europe have clarity on security and defense. Southern Europe is much more focused on economic competitiveness. And there is some contestation about the Chinese, whether that’s Spain, whether that—you know, so I think this is—you already have, you know, Hungary as an absolute, you know, outpost of Chinese investment in Europe. So it’s going to be very, very dynamic.

NOSSEL: Do you think, Heather, we were talking a few minutes ago about the imperative of kind of adapting to these new circumstances, and looking for the silver linings, and demonstrating resilience. Do you think the Europeans, and perhaps Japan and South Korea, are too fixated on trying to prop up the old system? Is there a way for them to get ahead of whatever’s next? Or are they sort of inevitably in receive mode, just to see how things work out between the three bigger powers?

CONLEY: I think right now they’re in cope mode. Trying to cope, trying to manage, trying to see if they can mitigate the damage that we’re causing to them and we’re causing to ourselves, particularly with the tariffs. I think that’s right now front and center. I think what will be interesting over time, and this is—again, we’re starting to see there will be cost to this, because our nationalism is creating their nationalism and protectionism, and keeping the United States out of future European defense capabilities.

This terrible rumor—and it is a rumor—there’s no kill switch. But it’s starting, like, I can’t trust you anymore. And I wish someone would do a great study calibrating the cost of the lack of trust, because that meter is moving minute by minute. And that is the number I want to give to the American people, and their jobs, and the connectivity, because we can’t rebuild it. It’s like my father said, you know, when you drop a vase you can glue it back together, but it’s never as strong. It’s got cracks. It’ll always be fragile. You can’t drop it again. It’ll leak. That’s our future of rebuilding our credibility.

My silver lining is, look, there were a lot of inefficiencies in our system that rebuilding properly and very focused on our national priorities will benefit us enormously. It’s just going to be very painful to get there. Our European partners and allies—the tragedy for them and for us is that it took this. It took this. And now they are very serious. The Swedes are going to spend 3.5 percent on GDP on defense spending. Denmark just announced 3.2 percent. Polls report—yes. But we have a timeline problem because this has to happen now, and it needed to start at ten years ago, to be able to prepare for the instability that is coming. And I think that’s the rub here. Will they be able to meet that timeline? And how much will they stand up without the United States? And then the cost of that in the future? Unknowable.

NOSSEL: Ivo.

DAALDER: No, I mean, that’s exactly right. I mean, I’m a Euro optimist on this. I actually think that the last six weeks have been the most important, enlightening parts for Europe. Started on the 12^th of February with the phone call that the president had with Vladimir Putin, went to Pete Hegseth’s speech at NATO, through the Munich Security Conference, and thereafter. They now know that the vase is broken.

CONLEY: That’s clear.

NOSSEL: It’s clear.

DAALDER: It’s done. And no one believes it anymore. There is not a single person who thinks that you can go back to the status quo. I don’t think that’s true in Asia yet. Though Pete Hegseth is in Japan as we speak. So you’ll soon—we will find out. I think—I got to look at my Signal to see what it says. (Laughter.) But we will soon find out how we—how that relationship is treated. So on the European side, I agree that the glue is actually what Brussels now talks about, which is the twin threat. The twin threat used to be Russia and China. The twin threat is now Russia and the United States. Very seriously.

The piece that will splinter it is the point you make, which is China. If the Chinese play their cards well, and unfortunately they have a tendency to do that particularly when their cards are so easily handed over to them by the president of the United States, they can split the Europeans, because the Europeans are in a security crisis with Russia, and pending economic crisis with the United States. And if they then also have an economic competition, not just de-risking but a real competition, with the Chinese, they may find themselves—those are three things that are a little too big to chew. And so some will say—and I think you’re right, some of the southern countries, or some of the East European countries—will say, no. We can’t afford to fight three. We just need to do two. So that’s one part.

The second part is when—and I think it’s a question of when—Japan and Australia understand, to some extent South Korea. It’s a hard—they have a harder just geographic position—to understand that actually they need to see the world the same way that Canada and Europeans do now, which I think may happen in the next few weeks. There is a question that I raise—that I have in my own mind. Can you actually have Canada, the European Union writ large, including Britain and others, and the strong East Asian allies work together, not to preserve the old order, because the old order is a U.S.-run order, but at least among themselves create an order that upholds some critical values that—Jim and I wrote a piece in 2018, called it the committee to save the free world—to talk about that these countries should do this until the end of the Trump administration. Never thought we’d be able to do it forever. But that’s actually where we might need to go.

And it gets back to this question of values. There’s still plenty of liberal countries that believe at their core that security depends on the internal structures of your neighbors. And these countries may find ways to cooperate. The Canadians are moving very hard to try to see, is there a trade deal to be had between the EU and CPTPP? And if you’re Japan or Canada, and you’re in the EU—by the way, the EU has a deal with Japan. It has a deal with Canada. It’s about to sign a deal with Australia. And, oh, India. There is this alternative power structure on the economic side that’s kind of interesting. And if the Chinese overplay their hand, that makes it more likely.

CONLEY: Which they tend to do.

DAALDER: By the way, that’s the world that I’d like to be part of, that one.

CONELY: And I would say even, just to—that is one of the really important—if we can, not right now, is a great U.S. response to this adversarial alignment. You just outlined it. It is creating new bridges between the Euro-Atlantic and the Indo-Pacific that you—and this is—we’ve been trying to do it, but not well. And maybe this will force us to do it, because we have our Indo-Pacific Quads, and we have our transatlantic quads. And we need—and, you know, the G-20s and things. We need that global alliance. It’s not a NATO, but it’s a global alliance for managing a very fluid and transitional international system. And we’ve got to do a better job of thinking about how to flex into that and how to create it.

NOSSEL: Yeah, the U.N. we used to call that the WEOG, the Western Europe and Other Group. But it was, you know, all the like-minded.

CONELY: Yeah. It needs a better acronym.

NOSSEL: Yeah. I mean, I’m not sure the free world can be saved by committee, but we may—we may find out. (Laughter.)

You know, just to go to the question of sort of regime type, though, look, democracy has been in decline for, I think it’s now, nineteen consecutive years globally. The world is witnessing American democracy, which was always the paradigm, now succumbing to corruption, and self-dealing, and a lack of accountability, and the disabling of, you know, one to two branches of our government. So how does it withstand—how does the idea—

DAALDER: We only have three.

NOSSEL: Right. (Laughs.) So how does—how does the idea endure, survive that? You know, this notion that this is the best system?

CONLEY: Well, I think things—I guess, we are going to test a lot of assumptions. And we’re going to painfully learn what tariffs mean. And I hope people then have an understanding of what that means, and make their choices. We’re going to have, I fear—you know, we are having a real understanding of loss of independence of our branches of government and the weakening of those institutions, to a point. The people are going to have to decide if that is what they want. These are all going to be tested. They’ve been tested for very long. As we started down this sliding path I always felt—and, Suzanne, you’ve been involved in this—a lot of international programs for rule of law, anticorruption, transparency, I never felt—and this is a silver—this is a silver lining thing. So just be with me. I’m just trying to think positive thoughts here. That we never were successful when we wagged our finger. We always were more successful to say, we struggle with this. We’re imperfect. We have—man, we haven’t gotten this right. Let’s work on this together. Let’s fight this together, if you come to that conclusion.

But you’re right. It’s utterly depressing that we’re flaunting golden visas when we worked so closely with the Cypriots and others to say, no, that is just floodgates of corruption and malign influence. Please don’t do that. It’s completely disheartening. But this is—this is what we were talking about. You know, you can you curse your darkness, or you can start rolling out your blueprint. Well, what do we want to build, because this is coming down here? So what’s the international system that we want? What are the values? What’s worth this? And this is where I feel we have to connect back to the American people. We’ve disconnected. They have to understand what’s important, what they’re willing to invest in. And we have to continue to have a conversation with them. But if they don’t see the linkages now between their jobs and tariffs and security and, you know, cyberattacks and malign actors, we just have a ton of work to do.

DAALDER: Let me put it slightly different, while completely agreeing in the end at this. Which is, and to your question, I do think that the United States, as the longest constitutional democracy in history, has—and because of the way it has conducted itself since December 7, 1941—has had an outsized role in reminding people of the importance of democracy, basic ideas about the rule of law, and how central it is to economic and political progress. And the proof, if I can make it personal, lies in people like me. I’m an immigrant. I came to this country because it was a beacon of hope. I came from Europe. So it’s hardly—I came from—it’s not that I came from a place that was that was in despair. To the contrary. But if you had to think in Europe in the 1960s about where would you want to go, you would want to go to American universities. You want to go to the place where there was the opportunity for you.

Many of the German politicians today came here as exchange students, to high school and other places. Certainly people of my age. I came here to go to university with the very specific intent to want to stay. Yes, I know, I had a Fulbright Scholarship. Needed to do all kinds of visa things that probably will now get me deported. But there was a certain sense of what this country was about, and attractiveness. What Joe Nye used to call soft power. That’s real. It’s fundamental. And we’re doing an amazing job of just destroying it all, in every single way. Anybody who—I mean, how could you have missed—but if you didn’t see the video of a Fulbright scholar at Tufts University being picked up by a bunch of hooligans in balaclavas who happened to be, apparently, federal agents, and revoked her visa.

This is not the country that I wanted to become a part of. And so our ability as a country to set an example, to be that, as Joschka Fischer just said the other day, great Green politician, to be that shining city on a hill that Ronald Reagan, one of the great speeches, his farewell speech, talked about in depth. That’s a big deal. And so when you think about do we really want to live in a world where the relative power of countries—by the way, defined in military, population, and economic terms—is determinative, as opposed to who we are to our own people and to the people who are in our country? You know what? I opt for the latter. I just think it’s a better place. At least it’s the one that that I came to, wanted to be part of. And, you know, if it’s not the place, then people start asking is this the place we want to be? But that’s the different—

NOSSEL: I mean, Americans are starting to ask that, American scientists and scholars.

DAALDER: Yes. Well, I am an American. I am an American. And, in fact, that’s what America is, a nation of immigrants that came here for different circumstances to believe in the land of opportunity. And some came last week, and some came on the Mayflower, but they all came for the same reason. And, oh, by the way, some of them were here already for a long time. So I don’t want to forget those. But that’s what it means to be an American. And if now it means to be an American is that if you say something that the government doesn’t like that you can be—you know, and you have a green card—you can be picked up—and, by the way soon a naturalized American citizen, I’m not kidding—because you say things that are not like them? That’s a different country.

NOSSEL: All right. On that poignant note, I’m going to open it up to our group here in New York.

DAALDER: I knew I was going to be uplifting. It’s kind of my nature. (Laughter.)

NOSSEL: Question in the back there, yes, in the red. Thank you.

Q: Thank you for this. My name is Viviana Mazza. I’m the U.S. correspondent for Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera.

I wanted to ask a question about Europe, because, you know, the Signal chat that you referenced several times showed us this way of talking about Europe, right? And it’s not just Pete Hegseth. It’s also, to some extent, Mike Waltz, when he says, you know, this exceptionalism view of the U.S., it’s the only country that can help, but also they have to pay. You know, so it’s everybody, basically, in that group, to some extent. But I want to know, you know, to what extent do you think Americans, and the—you know, of course, you don’t share that view, but this is—this talking like this about Europe, I don’t think it’s going to damage them politically. And there is a reason probably for that. So, I mean, people in this country, have they come to view these wars abroad and somehow Europe in negative terms, in your opinion? And the second part of the question is, being Italian, I would like to ask you what suggestions would you give to our prime minister, who is viewed as a bridge, or a possible bridge, between the U.S. and Europe, who is probably about, at some point, to come to visit Donald Trump? Thank you.

NOSSEL: Thank you.

DAALDER: Let me talk about public opinion. The Chicago Council of Global Affairs, which I’ve had the privilege to run for last twelve years, has been publishing public opinion data for the last fifty years. And although there’s—in the last few years, really started under Trump one, a growing partisan divide on certain issues—including on issues like NATO and just put out a poll on Ukraine—overall, the majority of America retain a view of America’s role in the world that is quite consistent with the dominant view of America’s role in the world for the last eighty years. They are pro-alliances. They’re pro-NATO. They think, like every American, that Europeans need to pay more for defense. By the way, that is not a unique view. It started with Harry Truman. Ever heard of him? Who actually, in 1952, said that 60 percent of the divisions that NATO needed—needed—to be provided by the Europeans. Never happened. And I spent four years really hitting my head against the table on demanding more money from the Europeans. So it’s not unique to Donald Trump. And Americans fundamentally believe in burden sharing.

What they don’t believe in is that the best way to get Europeans to pay more—and we’ve actually asked this question repeatedly—is by threatening to withhold security guarantee. What do they do? They believe in diplomacy and persuasion. They don’t believe in threats. And so—now that may change because public opinion is in some ways fickle, and in some ways can be led. And there’s no doubt that Republican opinion has changed quite fundamentally over the last ten years. And the reason is because the president of the United States has had a different view. And he can lead his own public opinion. And, indeed, Democrats are more pro NATO than they’ve ever been in history, which is also related to the fact that Donald Trump is more anti-NATO than any president in the last seventy-six years.

So I think that’s how to look at it. Ultimately, what matters, I think, is not what public opinion thinks about these issues, but what their leaders tell them about these issues. And in that regard, the Signal chat is atrocious. It’s horrific, because it basically says that we, the United States, will help other countries if you pay us. I don’t know anybody who joins the U.S. military—Navy, Air Force, Marine, Coast Guard or Army—to become a military for hire. It’s not why you joined the military. It’s not why you joined public service. You don’t do it for other countries. You do it for yourself and for your own country. And so I find it deeply, deeply disturbing. In many ways, I think what we read from how people thought about that was in some ways worse than the thing that everybody is talking about, in terms of classified or not, war plan or not. Which is terrible in and of itself.

CONLEY: I’ll answer the Prime Minister Meloni question, since—

DAALDER: Yeah, I wanted to leave that to you. (Laughter.)

CONLEY: Yeah. I think this is—you know, the humble advice that Americans should offer our European colleagues right now. I mean, every step must be designed to strengthen Italy, strengthen Europe. So that’s every decision. And that’s increasing defense spending now, absolutely. Increasing economic competitiveness, absolutely. That that must be done.

I think the tensions that are playing out—and this—I would say this is President Macron of France versus Prime Minister Meloni—whether the view is we must do this by ourselves. This is Europe alone, strategic autonomy. Or this is, we have to make sure we give space to allow a continuation of the transatlantic relationship, even if that door is closed. I think that is where she is strong to keep that open. I hope we don’t slam the door ourselves. I hope there is a path back. It will be a different path than what we’ve been, but a path back. I mean, Mr. Trump has a very specific worldview, he’s had it for decades, that allies are a drain. And this comes back from his, if I—if you are winning, I am losing. And that’s just a worldview—and his Cabinet reflects that worldview, and tries to outdo each other in how they explain that.

But I’m going to go back to—and I’m so glad you noted the public opinion. I think we have a bit of a disconnect here. We have people that understand liberty and values. They understand Ukraine, and that’s, you know, protecting freedom. They understand that it doesn’t feel good when the U.S. doesn’t have friends and partners with us, and that we are showing that leadership. And then, break, break—(laughs)—there is this ecosystem, this media ecosystem that has filled their ears with all the bad. That the allies are a drain, and we need to be paid back, and all that. If we don’t penetrate that, it doesn’t matter what these public opinion polls are necessarily, until they mobilize and galvanize.

And that’s why I said—I’m sorry, I’m a total broken record—until we reconnect the American people with our foreign policy, that they believe in it, that they support, and that they understand, and they want some skin in that game, and they know what’s right, and they feel it is part of helping themselves, we’re going to keep doing this over and over and over again, I fear. We’ve got to attack it.

NOSSEL: Yeah. I mean, it’s a very tall order, though. It’s one thing to use social media to rile people up against an enemy and say they’re freeloaders. It’s another to say, no, this is a rational policy that makes sense and will serve us over a period of decades. I don’t think anyone has squared that circle.

CONLEY: They haven’t. Absolutely not.

NOSSEL: And so, you know, I don’t disagree with you. It’s—

DAALDER: Well, first thing, to point out that when the vice president of the United States says that he hates bailing out Europe again, and when the secretary of defense says that Europe is, quote, “pathetic”—

NOSSEL: In capitals.

DAALDER: And the—in capitals. And the national security advisor, who can’t spell, not only doesn’t know how to spell “principles,” but just doesn’t know how to spell—apparently, thinks there’s a whole list of “horribles” of what the Europeans have, to point out that actually the Europeans have a navy capability in the Red Sea that is designed to help, and has just been extended for another year. That is designed to protect shipping in the Red Sea. That have—that many of them have participated in direct military confrontations against the Houthis. And that no one asked the United States to open up the sea lines of communication, which, by the way, are no longer being used because most of the companies that are actually shipping this stuff have already decided it’s easier and cheaper and quicker to go around the Cape of Good Hope rather than to go through the Suez Canal.

And so the degree of disdain that was—that was in these—in the—but more importantly, the self-importance—the self-importance. We are the only ones who can do that. Well, you know, we’re still bombing, and it ain’t working. So we’re actually not the ones who can do that. And it is remarkable. And what it does, you’re from Italy so you know, and you—I haven’t read the Corriere della Sera in the last couple of days—but if I were, I can be guaranteed that this kind of stuff is frontpage news, and it is driving Europeans just to say, no mas, in a very good Spanish part of the world. Non più, to put it in those terms. And start to have a response that is going to be bad for the United States, because we need allies and we need partners. Which we used to think we understood.

NOSSEL: Rita Hauser.

Q: Thank you very much for your participation.

It’s remarkable to me that at nearing the end of three hours there hasn’t been a single mention, not one, of immigration, of the borders. I don’t think I heard—no, you are an immigrant, but, I mean, about the immigration problem. What does that do, both for our partners and allies and us? Where does this all circle in, in how public opinion is formed? You know, the Europeans, all of them now, are engaged in, no more. We’re not taking in anybody else. So what the hell happens between everybody in dealing with this issue, as part of the world we live in, and how we relate to our neighbors and friends? I mean, even the Canadians, who took in gazillions of people, no more, you know. Everybody’s going to spend on their own defense, against what? Against Russia? I mean, what do we do to deal with our own in that? And the second problem, with no mention at all here, great America, et cetera, about the change in race relations that are coming. So that America will not be this always glorious country that everybody emulates. I can’t compute all these problems together, is my problem. And something terrible is going to happen on one of them that’s going to explode.

CONLEY: I think on immigration—on immigration, it is certainly—certainly in the transatlantic space—has caused enormous concerns, security concerns. It has also fueled the rise of far-right groups, for sure, both—I mean, I think we both have a similarity there. And it has certainly fed this view of, you know, we need strong leaders, broad category, to take control of our borders to ensure sovereignty and territorial integrity. At the same time, the economics of this are so interesting because as advanced democracies, their demographic pictures shift dramatically, they need highly skilled immigration to employ and to build those factories, as we try to reshore. And this is where there’s going to be such a competition for talent and skills.

And so exactly as Ivo was talking about, you know, the United States has enormous power—attractive power, and universities, and research. But if we no longer are an attractive power—I just was at a dinner last evening with some senior German colleagues. They’ve seen an uptick at 25 percent in skilled immigration to Germany. There’s going to be a real competition for that great talent. And that is—that is our economic future. So we have to be very careful. While I’m a strong proponent of strong national security, is making sure we know who comes into our borders, that we have control over that, but we also can’t lose sight of that—the wonderful talents that we need to do—to make us thrive as an economy has to be part of it. And we’re losing—we’ve lost, I think, that ability.

But until this sort of burns out one way or the other, it’s absolutely a shaping feature in all advanced democracies, particularly as demographic pictures change so dramatically and populations shift. Even the United States, the population shifts will continue to shape the politics of the United States for some time. So it’s affecting all advanced democracies. I don’t know if anyone has a great answer for it. But it certainly is a shaping feature, and will be a shaping feature of the international system.

NOSSEL: And a big challenge to liberalism as well.

CONLEY: Of course.

DAALDER: Yeah. I mean, just the only way this is going to end is badly, because the only answer to this problem that we have is through immigration. It’s that simple. We know that immigration, that the constant change in bringing in other people, is what makes all of—has made, for the last seventy, eighty years—in the United States’ case really for the last 150 years—the country who we are. But it’s true for Germany. It’s true for every country in the world. And at some point, the rubber will hit the road. The Germans will not be able to spend a trillion euros, which is what they’re going to do, unless they figure out how they’re going to get more people to work.

And the only place where you’re going to get people to work is not in Germany. Is going to come from somewhere else. That’s how they rebuilt themselves in the ’50s, with the Turks and others. It’s how the Dutch did it. And it will—it will have to be that case. And if you don’t, you’re just going to be a faltering economy. And you will have problems that way. That’s how it’s going to be resolved. The question is, how big is the crisis? How quickly is it going to come? And how quickly is going to be the response to deal with it? And wouldn’t it be good if we actually understood it we don’t have to do any of it. We could have a normal immigration policy which, by the way, we had for most of our history.

CONLEY: But didn’t reform it.

DAALDER: Well, we didn’t reform it because we politicized it, right? And, you know, who was—who was the most pro-immigration president and in the last a hundred years? His name is Ronald Wilson Reagan. And wish the Republicans would remember that. Their great hero—at least, he used to be their great hero. Should be their great hero.

NOSSEL: Elise.

Q: Thank you for this great discussion, and to the Council, and to Rita and the Hauser Foundation for such a wonderful symposium.

I want to go back to some—the idea of autocracies versus democracies that we were talking about earlier. And the idea that around the world, like polls—there are some polls that show that people are turning away from democracy. And so, you know, President Biden used to say we have to show—you know, the whole idea was democracy versus autocracy. We have to show that democracies deliver. But I’m not sure that that promise has been—not just by President Biden, I mean over time—that democracy does deliver. And so you’re looking at people in countries that are saying, OK, we don’t love a strongman, but, you know, this is someone that could get stuff done. And how do you fight that narrative that democracies don’t deliver, and it’s not worth it if we can just get a strongman that can just get the job done? And I think that’s the narrative that President Trump certainly is pushing in his agenda. Thank you.

DAALDER: Well, the good news is we’ll soon find out whether his word—whether he is going to be able to deliver or not. But no, no. But so, no, the point is well taken. But I’d make two fundamental observations. One in contesting it, or, say, reminding us, and the other sort of buying into it. If you look at who are the wealthiest, most prosperous countries in the world, happiest, most law abiding, least—most accountable, least impunity—I’ve been working with David Miliband for years on an impunity atlas to demonstrate how much impunity there is—they’re democracies. Particularly northern democracies, which are more capitalist, by the way, than the United States economy. But that’s different—a of conversation for another time. Oceania. It’s the advanced industrial democracies. That’s where people are happiest, they live longest, they are more prosperous, wealthier than they are in any other place.

So that’s the answer. Democracy has demonstrated. It has a record. Yes, the Chinese have grown faster than any other country, but their baseline was zero. And therefore it can—and there are still 450-500 million people in poverty. We have too many people in poverty, it isn’t—it isn’t the same thing. But, and here’s the but, anyone under the age of forty in the United States hasn’t had the same experience in the way that the grand history of the last hundred years has happened. And that’s our problem. You know, I look at my kids, who are in their late twenties. Their experience is 9/11, and the and the response to 9/11, the financial crisis, Donald Trump, and Donald Trump. And it’s not—and COVID and Donald Trump. That’s their—that’s their experience.

I mean, my experience was my parents were liberated, you know, one surviving the Holocaust, the other one from an occupation by the Germans. And my experience was—you know, my first real big thing was circling the moon. You know, John Glenn in space. You know, this was—that was my experience. So that’s the problem. The problem is that in the last twenty to thirty years we haven’t delivered enough. But we still delivered a hell of a lot more than anybody else. And so part of it is to remind people that delivery needs to improve, and that we have to address the problem. And that remind them that the way some people are proposing to do that.

I mean, the idea that the car industry—that that our future economy depends on having more cars being built in the United States, it’s, like, really? Particularly when they’re all combustion engine. When the Chinese are building them for, like, $8,000 a buck, you know, because, after all, of car these days is not a combustion engine. It’s a chip, four tires, and a battery. That’s what a car is. It’s pretty simple to build. And so if you think you want to compete in that traditional way, you’re going to lose. Not only to the Chinese, but you lose the idea that democracy can still provide for the future. That’s the challenge that we have. And I think Biden tried to address it, not particularly well. I think Trump is trying to address it, and we’ll find out how it ends up.

NOSSEL: Heather.

CONLEY: Yeah, no, I think Ivo did a great job.

NOSSEL: OK. I think I can take one or two more. In the back there, please.

Q: It was really just a follow-up question to Elise. Yeah. (Laughs.) I am Jeff. I’m Jeff Mower with S&P Global plats.

You know, it was a very good answer, but I’m curious what you think about the expansion of executive power. Like, it seems to me like, like kind of following along what Elise was saying, like people—every time their person gets in office, they’re OK with that power being expanded. And it’s been going on for decades. And I’m not sure what the—what’s the pitch now. Like when you talk about values, what’s the—what’s the argument? It seems like only, like—you know, the Libertarian Party, which polls what, you know, 2 percent or something, is the only one that would be serious about limiting executive power. Anyway.

NOSSEL: And maybe just to build on that a little bit, the—you know, the crisis of confidence is coming from the left and the right in terms of how government has functioned. And we have—we have DOGE on the one side, and then we have the abundance agenda on the other, which says regulation is what has sunk us and, you know, tied us down. And so—

DAALDER: I wouldn’t want to say that Ezra Klein is the future of the Democratic Party. (Laughter.) I like Ezra, but that’s—(laughs)—

NOSSEL: Yeah, but it’s—I think it’s resonating with people.

CONLEY: So I think, if I can take a—it’s a great question. And, again, this problem just didn’t arrive. We’ve been working on this one for thirty-plus years. I would argue, some of that post-Cold War sort of allowed us to expand. And I think this was the political cost of our own political polarization. So in some ways, when we vote, the American people always wanted—those houses, the Senate and the House, to be very equally divided, and political parties didn’t want the party in charge to achieve success, so they just filibustered themselves. They wouldn’t move things. They wouldn’t reform important institutions, and immigration. And so what happened is the executive said, all right, I got to get something moving here. Here’s my executive order. Here’s my executive order.

The problem is, it wasn’t legislated and it didn’t have permanence. And it didn’t have bipartisanship. And so when the next party comes in, what do they do? They wipe everything out, and then they do their thing. And I would say—I’m going to just pull this to foreign policy, because I want to—but I love just this observation. Every time I’m on a foreign policy panel, Ivo—I don’t know if you have this experience—we end up having a really important conversation about ourselves. And I think that is the most important conversation to have, but it’s—this is about the system that we want, and the values that we want to project. So just a commentary on that.

But the executive orders also impact foreign policy because we lost bipartisanship on foreign policy too. And so when this happens we get these wild swings. And our allies can’t follow us anymore, because we sign on to Kyoto and the Paris climate change, and then we’re out. And then we do this, and then we’re out. But we can’t advance as a nation either, based on a bipartisan vision of where we want to be, because we keep doing these wild swings. So this executive order-itis, which I understand the frustration. We must be able to have a vision to move on—until we create a bipartisanship, until our leaders cross the aisle and say, I’m doing this one for the country not for the party or for the win—we’re just—we’ve lost that ability. And I don’t know what national emergency it needs to slap us out of this, but I feel like we’re rolling towards one.

Maybe this is the ultimate silver lining in this. But that is my frustration. And both parties are guilty of it. And the system and Congress is guilty of it. And in some ways the American people are a little guilty of it too. You wanted this half and half, but now we got something that we can’t agree on.

DAALDER: I’ll add two things, because I completely agree.

CONLEY: This is not the conversation I thought we’d have on our four adversaries. (Laughter.)

DAALDER: Well—

NOSSEL: As you say, it turns inevitably to ourselves, yeah.

DAALDER: It’s because we’re part of the—I mean, one, I think you’re exactly right. I think the growth of executive power is the most dangerous thing, mainly for the reasons that I think Heather has really well articulated. I think its underlying core and cause is our democracy is deeply broken, in a very fundamental way. In part because of a series of decisions that have been made, mainly by the Supreme Court. Citizens United will be regarded as one of the worst decisions any Supreme Court has ever—maybe constitutionally legal, but the political consequences of the amount of money that is making itself into this system, extraordinary.

I mean, the only reason that Elon Musk is sitting where he’s sitting now is because of Citizens United. For no other reason. Wouldn’t have happened if we had normal ways of doing business. And, by the way, it was Barack Obama who walked away from government funding of presidential elections, when he decided that he didn’t want matching. He could raise more than, you know. So in that sense, it’s totally bipartisan. So that’s number one.

Number two is we don’t have a competitive democracy anymore. We have the reelection of incumbents, many of whom are actually running unopposed because the only thing that matters in their districts is whether they can head off a primary from somebody further to the right or the left. And so you don’t have competitive democracies. The gerrymandering, which is now, by the way, the Supreme Court has said, legal, as long as it’s political—remarkable statement, think about it—has destroyed our competitive democracy. Which therefore leads to the kind of polarization where the only thing that matters is winning, not to govern, but to win.

And that leads to executives then to say, well, I can’t govern with the legislature, therefore I have to do it by myself. So we have a broken—deeply broken political system, that has very little to do with the election of Donald Trump. I’m not even mentioning the Electoral College, which I think is a completely different issue. And if you didn’t have a broken political system, you wouldn’t have to deal with that issue. But nobody’s talking about it. We’re not talking about Supreme Court reform. We’re not talking about the fact that the United States House of Representatives has had 435 members since, Jim, correct me, 1909? 1909, when we were a third the size we are today. Stunning.

So the only way I know, and what—how we can—let me end with this—can save our democracy is to bring in the ten provinces from Canada into the United States—(laughter)—and then have the Canadians insist that they will only come in if they adopt—if we adopt their political system. (Laughter.)

NOSSEL: Well, I wow, we can all fantasize. (Laughter.) But I want to—

DAALDER: Or, if not that, how about some of us join Canada? (Laughs.)

NOSSEL: How about each become a state? Each province becomes a state? That could work.

I don’t know when this event was first conceived—you know, if it was before or after the advent of the Trump administration. But I think what it has shown is how important it is for us to come together to distill and digest what we are witnessing, what we are living through, to begin to think about how we manage and respond. And I think the Council is really the perfect place for people of all sorts of backgrounds to converge for those discussions. And so I felt a certain urgency in the room and on the stage this afternoon. And I want to thank Ivo and Heather for being here, and Rita Hauser, and the Council, and all the staff who worked on this extraordinary event. (Applause.)

(END)

This is an uncorrected transcript.