Twenty-Sixth Term Member Conference

BODURTHA: Good evening. I’m Nancy Bodurtha. I’m the vice president of meetings and membership here at the Council on Foreign Relations. And on behalf of our Board of Directors and our president, Richard Haass, it is an absolute honor to welcome the U.S. permanent—the U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations, Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, to the Council this evening for this Sorensen Distinguished Lecture on the United Nations. In just a bit, I will turn the program over to our presider, Marcus Mabry, who will properly introduce the ambassador and facilitate our conversation with her. But I do want to take a few moments to offer some words of welcome as well as some words of appreciation for those who made tonight possible. In addition to welcoming the ambassador, I want to welcome all of you. Our members have turned out in fine force tonight. We have five hundred members joining via Zoom. We have about a hundred members who are participating in person here in New York and about a hundred term members joining us from the Council’s venue in Washington, D.C. So this evening is, among other things, a bit of a sneak peek at what hybrid meetings...

SIMS: Thank you very much, and welcome to today’s Council on Foreign Relations 2021 Term Member Conference Plenary. This session will focus mainly on threats to democracy in the twenty-first century. I’m Calvin Sims. I’m the executive vice president for standards and practices at CNN and I’m pleased to be presiding over this session today.

So this session kicks off day number two of the Twenty-Sixth Annual Term Member Conference, and we’re so pleased and grateful to the Stephen M. Kellen Term Member Program, which has been generously supported by Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation and we are grateful to them.

So we will be talking to three experts today on what is the threat to democracy, democracy in peril, not just here at home in the United States but abroad. And we have three great panelists: Ellen Cushing, who’s the special projects editor at the Atlantic; Yaël Eisenstat, who’s the Future of Democracy Fellow at the Berggruen Institute; and Bruce Hoffman, who is the Shelby Cullom and Kathryn Davis Senior Fellow for counterterrorism and homeland security at the Council on Foreign Relations.

So I want to start by calling on each one of you to really determine, in...

EDELMAN: Good afternoon. Welcome back to the 2021 Term Member Conference. I’m David Edelman from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and I’ll be your presider for this on-the-record session: “Cybersecurity and Great Power Competition.”

We have over 170 members registered for today’s virtual meeting and we’ll do our best to get to as many questions as possible during the Q&A session in about thirty minutes. But first, we’re going to hear from our three distinguished panelists, a veritable dream team of what’s happening at the intersection of cyber affairs and national security. Their full bios are linked from the event page, but to introduce them briefly.

Mieke Eoyang was appointed deputy assistant secretary of defense for Cyber Policy at the Pentagon earlier this year after running the National Security Program at the think tank Third Way and, prior to that, a series of senior national security roles on Capitol Hill.

Vishaal Hariprasad, better known as V8, is the CEO and co-founder of Resilience, a cybersecurity firm, after stints in the Air Force, where he remains a reservist.

And Jackie Schneider is a Hoover fellow at the Hoover Institution, a nonresident fellow at the U.S. Naval War College.

Welcome all...

SCHIFRIN: Thank you very much, everyone. Welcome to “The Future of Global Governance in the Southern Hemisphere: How COVID-19 Changed the Rules.” I’m Nick Schifrin. I’m the foreign affairs and defense correspondent for PBS NewsHour. More importantly, I am or was, sadly, a term member. Apparently, I’m too old to be a term member, so I’m jealous of all of you to go to this conference, which is really the highlight of the term membership every year.

So joining me are people who are not too old to be term members. Paul Angelo, the fellow for Latin America studies at CFR and a current CFR term member. Abigail Bellows, who has recently become the deputy, policy of the Anti-Corruption Task Force at USAID, also former non-resident scholar of democracy, conflict and governance programs at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and a CFR term member. She is here in her personal capacity. And Amaka Anku, who is the practice head of Africa for Eurasia Group, also a CFR term member.

A reminder this is on the record, and so we’ll just jump right in.

So, Paul, let me start with you. Latin America historically seems to have been a place that...

VAITHEESWARAN: Thank you. I’m Vijay Vaitheeswaran. I’m the global energy and climate innovation editor at the Economist, and host of our new podcast on climate change called To a Lesser Degree. I invite you all to join us today for this fantastic session, “What is At Stake in Glasgow?” Could there be a more timely topic, and indeed a more important topic, than this, “The Fight Against Climate Change”? You will note that this is Plenary Four of the Term Member Conference. As a former term member myself, it’s a particular honor to be presiding over this session, as well as on the topic itself, I think, of the hour?

And I’m so pleased that we have such a distinguished group of experts, as well. We have Sarah Kapnick, who’s a senior climate scientist and sustainability strategist at JPMorgan Chase; Stewart Patrick, who is a senior fellow in global governance here at the Council on Foreign Relations; and Nargiza Salidjanova, who is director of China products at Rhodium Group. So let me welcome our panelists to this session. Thank you for bringing your wisdom and, hopefully, your wit as well to this—what will be a lively conversation. We will start...

BODURTHA: Thank you, Carrie. Good afternoon. Welcome back. Welcome back to the final session of the 2021 edition of the annual Conference of the Stephen M. Kellen Term Member Program.

I’m Nancy Bodurtha. I’m the vice president of meetings and membership here at the Council on Foreign Relations. I’d like to thank you for joining the conference. It kicked off last evening with Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield and continued throughout today with a very full agenda. We’ve spent the past several hours discussing at least some of the very pressing issues facing our nation and the world at this time, including climate change, global governance, the future of democracy, what the future may hold for Afghanistan, and also cyber threats and cybersecurity. I hope that the conference has sparked some thought-provoking conversations on these critical issues and more. I also hope that the conference has afforded you opportunities to connect and engage with one another.

Before we move on to the closing session, and at the risk of repeating myself particularly for those who were with us last evening, I do want to make a pitch for term member recruitment. We are continuing to grow the next generation of foreign policy...