2024 College and University Educators Workshop

FASKIANOS: There we go.

Good evening, everybody. Thank you. Welcome. Thank you for joining us for the twelfth annual College and University Educators Workshop. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president for the National Program and Outreach. The Council on Foreign Relations Outreach Initiative is dedicated to being a resource for educators—all of you—to help students better understand the world, and the foreign policy choices facing the United States and other countries.

So we’re delighted to have you with us in person, representing forty-nine states and Washington, DC. I will not tell you which state we’re missing. (Laughter.) You can figure that out. You can look through the program with all your bios, and whoever gets a prize—might get—you know, guesses, may get a prize. And we are live-streaming this, so welcome to anybody who’s tuning in virtually.

Over the course of this workshop, we have a terrific lineup of panels that will focus on the conflict in the Middle East, societal implications of AI, climate change and implementation, as well as discussion groups on a variety of regional topics. And the purpose of this workshop is to give you the opportunity to explore the wide array of CFR and Foreign Affairs resources. You had an opportunity to speak with representatives during the reception—I hope you enjoyed that—participating in expert briefings, and share best practices with each other. So we hope you will take advantage of the networking.

And before I turn to tonight’s discussion on the role of the world—the U.S. in the world, I’d like to thank my colleagues, Sarah McMerty and Deanna Hines, for their work, and of course the whole National Program and Outreach team, as well as many people around the building that you can’t see, events, facilities, and many more. It takes a village, as somebody once said.

So with that, I invite my distinguished panel to join me on the stage: Zongyuan Zoe Liu, Farah Pandith, Nate Schenkkan. And Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, editor of Foreign Affairs magazine and host of The Foreign Affairs Interview podcast, will moderate tonight’s discussion. And then we can continue it amongst ourselves over dinner.

So with that, I’m going to turn it over to Dan—

KURTZ-PHELAN: All right.

FASKIANOS: —to take it away. (Applause.)

KURTZ-PHELAN: Thank you, Irina. A round of applause.

Good evening, all. It’s a pleasure to kick off what I am sure will be a fascinating and useful series of conversations over the next twenty-four hours or so for all of you. I’m Dan Kurtz-Phelan. I’m the editor of Foreign Affairs. We’ve got a fantastic lineup here for what should be a very wide-ranging discussion of the state of U.S. foreign policy, and the U.S. role in the world. We could spend probably a full hour on the topics that each of them will address, but we will try to have a fully—a rich, kind of ten minutes or so, as we start with each of them. And then I will go to all of you for questions. So please, keep those in mind as we talk.

Let me very briefly introduce the three of them, and then we’ll jump right into the discussion. Immediately to my left is Zoe Liu. She is a fellow for China studies here at the Council on Foreign Relations. She has done some really important and incisive work on the Chinese economy. Remind me the title of your book, which I should—I should have on hand?

LIU: I have two. Which one are we talking—(laughter)—

KURTZ-PHELAN: The most recent one. The new one. The new one.

LIU: It’s—the latest one is Sovereign Funds: How the Communist Party in China Finances Its Global Ambitions. Thank you.

KURTZ-PHELAN: Sovereign Funds, yes. So, we will talk a bit about the state of the Chinese economy, but also about the U.S.-China relationship more broadly.

And then to her left is Farah Pandith. She is also a senior fellow here at CFR. Her work now is on countering violent extremism, and her post at CFR focuses on that work. But she has had a distinguished career in the U.S. government before coming to CFR, including as the first-ever—did I get that right?—the first-ever special representative to Muslim communities in the Obama administration, but also worked in the George W. Bush administration on the National Security Council, and then at USAID earlier on in her career.

PANDITH: Yes.

KURTZ-PHELAN: So, covers a very wide variety of topics in those capacities, and in her current capacity.

And then last but not least, the only one of us who is not employed by CFR, Nate Schenkkan. (Laughter.)

SCHENKKAN: There’s still time.

KURTZ-PHELAN: That’s right. That’s right. We’re hiring an intern at Foreign Affairs, so—(laughter)—you can look at that.

He’s senior director of research at Freedom House, and he has done, I should say, great work for Foreign Affairs over the last few years, including a really path-breaking piece, which is still—we still go back to periodically, on transnational repression, which I think was the—certainly, the first place I read about that. But was a fascinating piece, and there were a slew of others.

So, I will try to resist the temptation to spend an hour with each one of them. And we’ll start with Nate, actually, and then work our way back in this direction.

You know, Freedom House, I think, is probably best known for the work that you all do, much of which you lead, on the state of global democracy, the Freedom in the World report. You have a new one out. As you look at both the most recent report, but also the trajectory of democracy globally over the last couple of decades, give us a sense of where we are, and where those trends are, but also why you think we’ve gotten to this point. To what extent is the change in the United States a driver? To what extent is the change in the United States a symptom? What’s the diagnosis, but also give us a sense of that trajectory.

SCHENKKAN: Sure.

So just for this audience, I know that this is an audience filled with many political scientists, but maybe some others who aren’t. Freedom House is an organization that does this annual index, Freedom in the World, that we’ve been doing since 1973. We cover political rights and civil liberties in every country and territory in the world, kind of an insane task that was set out fifty years ago, by someone before I was born.

So in this year’s survey, which we just released two weeks ago, what we have is the eighteenth year of consecutive net decline in global democracy, so more declines than improvements. Fifty-two declines against twenty-one improvements.

When we measure democracy and we talk about democracy—there’s obviously a lot of really rich debate about this topic globally, and in political science—we take a pretty thick version. So we look at this in a fairly thick, robust definition of how rights are experienced within a given territory, as opposed to some thinner definitions that could be based on purely yes/no questions, like elections, or presence of freedom of expression, et cetera.

So when we look at those declines, some of the key trends that are driving them, again, at the very macro level, globally: Electoral manipulation, so manipulation of elections and attempts to short-circuit electoral processes; armed conflict, including coups and civil wars, but also return of wars of conquest, which is obviously very relevant in the Russian invasion of Ukraine; and last, perhaps the most complicated—and we can talk about it amongst this group—the rejection of pluralism as a principle. So this is a trend that we can observe across many different, I would say, cultural heritages and regional variations, in which you have leaders and political movements that are rejecting the idea of pluralism, rejecting the idea that societies are made up of diversity of viewpoints, diversity of identities, and that those should be reconciled, or at least addressed through some kind of institutionalized political process that produces an outcome, essentially through a liberal democracy. So we see a kind of affirmative rejection of that idea, growing across. So those are the three trends I would highlight.

If we talk about these eighteen years of what many call the democratic recession, I think the first point of context I would emphasize, which is also consistent with other surveys, like Varieties of Democracy, is that this is a recession, not a depression. So when this started in 1973, 30 percent of the world’s countries were rated as free, in Freedom in the World. In the peak, 2002 to 2008 at this point, which comes at the end of what we now consider the third wave of democratization, that was 46 percent. The number now is 42 percent. So you have this kind of curve, right, of increasing freedom, and then a dip, which is where we are now. But it’s not a collapse. I do think that’s important. That’s consistently found by us, by other political scientists, and we have to keep that in mind, when we talk about what the recession consists of.

The second part, I would say, in terms of when we go into our data, and when we look at how we have studied it, the bulk of the attention is on the recession and the democracies. And that’s understandable. We’re all in democracies—or, you know, in this group, in this room, literally, we’re arguing about it. The bulk of the recession is actually in what we call not-free countries. So the average change among free and partly free countries in that eighteen-year recession is 1 percent decline. The average change in the not-free cohort is 24 percent.

So you have kind of a bottoming-out, really, at the bottom of the scale of authoritarian governance. And that’s very important to keep in mind. It’s important to think about from a policy perspective, of, you know, how—if you’re going to reverse the democratic recession, what are you really talking about reversing, right?

That said, it’s not to say there aren’t plenty of problems in free countries. We certainly see that as being an issue. In 2023, 18 percent of the free countries had declines. There’s a whole slew of concerns. Obviously, elections and election denialism, or a rejection of kind of peaceful transfers of power, is a major issue. Freedom of assembly issues, corruption, violence and physical security are major issues, increasingly in free countries, and attacks on judicial independence and due process.

The U.S. falls within all of that, I would say. And the U.S. decline has been nine points in the last decade, from ninety-three to eighty-two—or, sorry. From ninety-two to eighty-three, apologies—within the last decade. Which is by Freedom in the World standards, I guess I would say, medium-large, in terms of decline. You know, this isn’t at the top of our ten-year declines, but it’s not at the bottom. And, yeah. The major concerns in the U.S. that we've highlighted consistently are unequal treatment, in terms of the treatment of different citizens, or different persons on U.S. territory, and how they experience interactions with the justice system, or with the state, and their access to justice, or access to voting, access to rights. And then second, the intensifying gridlock and dysfunction in actual governance, which again, to go back to that beginning point about thickness, we consider that a part of how political rights and civil liberties are manifested on the ground for people. So when you have a system that is congealing or stagnating in gridlock, like we have in the United States right now, that is weighing down now on your ability to realize your rights.

KURTZ-PHELAN: And to what extent does your work, and Freedom House’s work, isolate causes of that recession? Can you—I mean—we can look at—you know, we can go back to the Iraq War, the rise of China, to social media—

SCHENKKAN: Mmm hmm. Right.

KURTZ-PHELAN: I mean, there are lots of possible causes over that period.

Are you able to isolate any of those when you look at your data?

SCHENKKAN: I think it’s very difficult to isolate it just from the data, because it’s all wrapped up with itself. Like, what are the exogenous and endogenous—how do you disentangle the exogenous and the endogenous within that equation?

I think we find it—when we look at the issue of—again, to look at it across a fifty-year timeframe, instead of just the eighteen-year, I think we would have to say that there is a kind of—there was a major shock that took place within the system. This is sort of Seva Gunitsky’s idea of the aftershocks, kind of theory about a hegemonic shock that took place with decolonization, later with the end of the Cold War, in that there was then a long process—or rapid, but also broad process of democratization that took place. And now, we see that actually rolling back in a number of areas, where maybe the grounds for steady democratization, or consolidation of democracy, were not as firm, in terms of the economic conditions, in terms of, perhaps, social conditions, or in terms of absence of war, absence of conflict, things that you kind of need in order to then settle.

At the same time, the shock was real, and the consolidation was real. So, like, a lot of—again, to go back, a lot of the gains out of that third wave are real, right? We have a number of countries all over the world that were not democratic in 1973, that are now democratic, and have remained that way for a long period of time.

So that’s more of a structural kind of explanation, I’d say. I think it’s very difficult, I think, then to go and dig into the things that we’re most anxious about in democracies, and tie them specifically into one thing. Although, we continue to be very anxious about them, if that makes sense. (Laughs.) Yeah.

KURTZ-PHELAN: That was a cheerier answer than I thought we would get on this entire panel. (Laughter.) So thank you for that.

Nate, let me ask you one more question before moving on to the other two. You know, so much—as we go back to that, the end of the Cold War, and look at the trajectory of American foreign policy over that period, in the Clinton administration through the George W. Bush administration, and really into the Obama administration, you had some form of democracy promotion, or democracy support, really as a centerpiece of American foreign policy. That’s taken very different forms across those administrations, but that was a throughline. I think we’re in a different paradigm now, and probably starting with Trump, but—I think you see Biden talks about democracy and authoritarianism a lot, but you don’t see particularly strong policies when it comes to democracy promotion in U.S. foreign policy today.

SCHENKKAN: Mmm hmm. Yeah.

KURTZ-PHELAN: I guess we can—we can debate that. Feel free to disagree with that.

SCHENKKAN: (Laughs.)

KURTZ-PHELAN: But that would—that would be my assessment.

Do you see, when you look at the American foreign policy debate now, we’re obviously just starting a general election—do you see an appetite for returning to some form of putting democracy at the center of American foreign policy? Or do you think that that is a kind of relic of a, you know, kind of unipolar era that we’re simply out of now?

SCHENKKAN: Yeah, I think it would—what I would say is that, I think we’re arriving at a place where when we talk about democracy at the center of foreign policy, we’re talking about it in a more holistic and concrete way, that is both more accurate and more applicable to what we’re really doing.

To make that specific, I mean, when we say democracy promotion, what do we really mean? We mean USAID doing democracy and governance work. We mean the National Endowment for Democracy, the other core institutes, organizations like Freedom House receiving grants to do programming. But that’s only one tiny piece of a democracy-centered foreign policy, and I think if we looked at U.S. foreign policy from that perspective, over a longer period of time that predates USAID, that predates NED, and all of this, we’d say, you know, some of the highwater marks here are of an internationalist U.S. foreign policy that really did think about democracy, both as something that we promote and support overseas, but also is very important to Americans at home.

And I do think that there is a kind of shift happening around making sure that Americans support an international role for America in the world, because it’s good for them. You know, it’s a very—I do think that’s a pragmatic reaction, as well, to Trump, and to the Trump administration’s successful critiques of neoliberalism, of deindustrialization. And you’re seeing a big swing back, you know—that’s continuous now, right? The rhetoric, sort of the heat around it is different, but if you look at the way this administration is pursuing essentially industrial policy on certain issues, is pursuing some forms of protectionism on certain issues, those are all in continuity with these conversations, that I think Trump kind of broke wide open, by shattering a previous consensus.

And so, I would put democracy as foreign policy within that context, rather than looking at it narrowly, within either the freedom agenda, or another version of kind of more narrow democracy promotion, per se.

KURTZ-PHELAN: Yeah, I mean, I think of the piece that Samantha Power wrote in Foreign Affairs, where she—you know, who—someone who had been at least associated with the kind of soaring rhetoric of the 1990s—

SCHENKKAN: Yeah.

KURTZ-PHELAN: —and then the first part of the Obama administration. And this piece was about supporting democracy, but it was very much about inequality—

SCHENKKAN: Right.

KURTZ-PHELAN: —and very, kind of, focused economic policy. It was a very different tone from what you would have gotten in 2009—

SCHENKKAN: Yeah.

KURTZ-PHELAN: —or in the 1990s.

Farah, let me—let me turn to you and ask you to do, I think, a version of what I asked Nate to do with your work. You have worked on extremism in various forms, in a variety of contexts. There was a time, probably fifteen years ago, when much of that was focused on violent extremism in the rest of the world. A lot of that has now become—come home in certain ways, that we’re seeing a lot of those challenges at home. Give us a sense of the trajectory of hate and extremism domestically as you track it, as I know you tracked it over recent years. And to what extent, as you reflect back on your work globally, in what ways is it similar? In what ways are there kind of tools that you would have deployed abroad that you now think are relevant at home? And to what extent is this kind of a sui generis development?

PANDITH: Such an important question. And good evening to everybody.

We’re going to give you some really difficult and sobering things to think about this evening, I think, and I think are very connected to what Nate has just talked about.

It is no surprise to any of you that there is a change in the way America feels, around us and them, around identity, around belonging, around trust. These are things that may be trends that we would have imagined to happen in other parts of the world because of difficult situations. But in earnest, we as people who have been looking at the threat of terrorists, or the threat of violent extremists, we really began that, in terms of a national conversation, on 9/11, obviously. And so, our pivot was overseas, something was happening really bad with some group called al-Qaeda. We didn’t know really that much about it, even though we had heard about it with the USS Cole, even though of course, they tried to attack the World Trade Center in 1993. But nobody had really understood that anything like that could be a wave that had hit America. We certainly could not comprehend, at that time, that we would have an ISIS, or things that happened afterwards.

So, I think our concentration on the threat level was obviously overseas. It was on stopping the growth of the funding for these organizations, the ability for them to get together. I mean, it was very old-school terrorism kind of thinking.

But there began to be a change in the way we began to look at these groups, around not just what they were doing on the ground, but the power that they had to radicalize. What was actually happening? How could they build their ideological soldiers? That shift really happened around 2003 or so, when we had sort of begun that establishment of going after al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, looking at what was happening in Iraq. In the Bush administration, the so-called war of ideas, is what it was called, the ideological dimension of the war, us versus them.

And to be honest with you, there was no conception that we were going to have a bleed of the ideology overseas coming to the United States, or vice versa. And I’m sorry to say to you, that in 2024, we have a situation where it is more dangerous than we could have ever imagined. It is not a fake imagination. It is real. Ideologies that are coming from other parts of the world are impacting Americans now, very—in every possible way, which I hope we’ll get into. But also, unfortunately, things that are homegrown, that are very American in their building and their construction, are now, guess what? Helping really horrific things happening overseas. So we have a back and forth that’s going.

So one of the things I’d say, really very importantly in terms of a shift, is one, the scope and the level of this, you know? This was not something that is contained in another part of the world. And frankly, Americans were not really that concerned, because it was on somebody else’s shore; it wasn’t going to come and hit home. 9/11, of course, changed all that, but then in the subsequent years, it wasn’t just the 7/7 in the UK; it wasn’t just the Madrid bombings. It wasn’t just thing after thing after thing that happened around the world. But we began to see a parallel structure in the United States, where Christian nationalism was rising, hate groups in the United States, from the violent far right, the violent far left today, we have every kind and flavor of hate that exists. It can be gender-based. It can be sexual-based. It can be around heritage and ethnicity. It can be around religion. Pick your thing; there is a way in which this is happening. And unfortunately, it isn’t just that it’s happening. It’s that it’s happening at a pace and a scale that we were not prepared for.

We have a situation where trust has eroded across America anyway, for a lot of different reasons, that plays into this issue of what people are hearing and feeling is real, in terms of what they see on their smart devices. So with the surge of social media, we obviously—and I know we’re going to get into a little bit more about that—but that’s part of the reason why the scale and the pace can be as profound as it is.

But there are two more elements to this that I think are important, that we didn’t think about. So 2003, we began to think of the war of ideas, the ideological component, all of the pieces. Another way of describing that is soft power, what’s happening ideologically, non-kinetic.

But here’s the thing. It is not contained to the demographic that we thought. We had false perceptions of who was going to be attracted to this kind of us versus them ideology. It isn’t just a bunch of men who look and might be a particular ethnicity or background. We’re talking about millennials. We’re talking about Gen Z. We’re talking about Gen Alpha, who are as young as seven and eight years old, who are being radicalized online, by groups like Atomwaffen, OK? So we have a spread demographically. It is not just a bunch of guys. We see women who are getting radicalized as well, women playing a very strong role in a radicalization effort that’s taking place.

And then the third thing that I’d say—and there are many more—but just in terms of how we think about this. There is a structure within the foreign policy land of how we approach state actors. We are not as robust in the nonstate actor component, and certainly around the ideology of hate and extremism. So we have been slow to the game. We have not put the money in, the way we need to. We don’t have—even though there’s so much change that’s happened in the years since 9/11, in terms of the organizational capacity globally to think about these things, we aren’t playing the best game that we could play, because we haven’t gone all in. And it isn’t just the United States. There’s no country on Earth that has gone all in. So we’re on our back foot, as the surge of hate is rising in our country, and around the world. And we are in a very tender position, because of the fact that radicalization happens both offline and online, and we can’t contain it.

KURTZ-PHELAN: And since the title of this panel is “The Role of the United States in the World,” say a bit more about the—about the export of extremism that is—that begins in America, or is developed in America, to the rest of the world, and the way that that is intersecting with other global developments that might come back to affect foreign policymakers here.

PANDITH: So there’s a cross-pollinization in the way in which people learn about how to be successful in radicalizing. The generation that is not anybody in this room, by the way, that are digital natives, who understand with fluidity how to manage the message, how to build a narrative that’s very compelling, to a sixteen-year-old girl, versus a sixteen-year-old guy, whether that person is in Oregon, or that person is in Malaysia. They know how to make bespoke messages that work perfectly for the moment and the time. They are using platforms across—you know, when you talk to U.S. policymakers on Capitol Hill, and you hear them speak about this, they’re talking about Facebook. We’re talking about things that are far—you know, you are laughing, because you know that your students do not use Facebook, right? (Laughter.) I mean, let’s get real.

So we are behind the game. So what are we doing? We’re seeing the way they share identity, what it means to be a Christian nationalist, what it means to be pure, what that identity means to them, how you use symbols. Symbols have transferred from the United States to other parts of the world and the other way back. You see memes and videos that are shared how you do things—what do you want to do. The messaging around purity, the messaging around, you know, making sure that you like certain countries—like Russia, for example—may start in parts of the United States and go to other parts of the world.

So we are—we’re seeing a back and forth that we I don’t think expected, to be honest with you, and at some point America is going to be, in my view, a state sponsor of terrorism because it will be so clear that what we did over here ended up in another part of the world, just the way in Norway when that horrific event happened and they had the killing at the summer camp—you guys will all remember this—how manifestos travel around the world and ignite passion.

Look at what happened in Christchurch, New Zealand. I will remind everybody that in 2006, and you will remember when I tell you of the Danish cartoon crisis. You remember that? OK. We never would have imagined in a million years that a character cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad would happen in Denmark and be transferred around the world so much so and become so dangerous that U.S. embassies had to be protected in a different way.

We didn’t understand what viral meant at that time. It was the first time we suddenly understood that something that happened in Copenhagen could have an effect on a life in Kabul. People lost their lives because of that cartoon.

Now, that’s simplistic compared to what we’re seeing today. So, when I say we are exporting or anything could happen at any moment—a video, a cartoon, a symbol, a manifesto—that could actually ignite passion and direction and focus for an individual in a part of the world we wouldn’t have imagined.

KURTZ-PHELAN: Let me ask you to put on your Middle East policy hat very quickly should this come up in questions as well, address the war in Gaza and the Middle East, more broadly. I think the Biden administration has a theory of what it hopes will happen in the Middle East.

It, you know, hopes to create a political horizon with the Palestinians to get back to normalization with the—between Israel and the rest of the region and to find some kind of sustainable end to the war in Gaza with—given the, you know, terrible humanitarian costs there.

Do you think that it’s likely to pull that off? Do you see a way forward for U.S. policy that could turn this into at least something of a new beginning both for Israel and the Palestinians, and for the region more broadly?

PANDITH: In the short term?

KURTZ-PHELAN: Let’s say in the medium term.

PANDITH: No, I don’t. There are too many—there are too many components to this that are uncertain.

How broad does this war get in the Middle East? Is Lebanon going to get pulled into it? How is aid going to be dispersed? How many more lives are going to be affected in the territory of Gaza? How bad is the hostage situation going to be? Will Hamas release the hostages? How far will Israel go?

There’s so many variables that we can’t control at this moment. But there are a couple of things that we know for sure, which are not trending in the right direction.

First of all, I think that the—one of the things that—and this is sort of the long-term thing and I’m saying this from the perspective of somebody who in the Obama administration was tasked in building bridges with Muslim communities around the world.

One-fourth of humanity is Muslim. Over a billion of that number are under the age of thirty. They are watching things in real time on their phones. There is nothing you can put past them. They are seeing things with their own eyes and they’re interpreting it the way people are messaging it to them from communities that are trusted, and that is an unknown for U.S. foreign policymakers because we have not spent time really understanding the nuances of Gen Z and Gen Alpha of Muslims around the world and that’s the piece that I think is a variable that really is going to matter over the short, medium, and long term.

KURTZ-PHELAN: We can follow up on that in the Q&A.

But let me get to Zoe to talk about what remains, I think, one of the central concerns for U.S. foreign policy and that is, of course, China and the U.S.-China relationship.

Let’s start with the economy. If we’d been having this conversation a few years ago we would have been talking about the continued high rates of economic growth in China and the challenges that a, you know, kind of seemingly ever rising China was going to pose to the United States.

There’s now been a turn in the debate for the last year or so as people have focused on the challenges to China’s growth, demographic, Xi Jinping’s policies, the other things that seem to be weighing down the Chinese economy.

You are someone who looks at this with a degree of rigor and empiricism that I think most people in this debate do not bring to it. Give us a sense of where—how you see the Chinese economy and how you see the trajectory, going forward.

Is the, you know, kind of peak China doomsayers do they have it closer to right or do you think we’ll see a return to something closer to maybe not, you know, 7 percent or 8 percent growth but the kind of healthy growth that characterized China over the last couple of decades?

LIU: Yeah. Thank you, Dan, for the question.

First of all, welcome to CFR. Thank you for sharing your evening and your time with us.

A long answer short to your question with regard to do I buy into the peak China theory I would say no and the reason I do not buy into the peak China theory is specifically for this very simple, perhaps, back of the envelope calculation.

We hear a lot about China’s upcoming demographic crisis but at least in the near term—at least in the near term the Chinese population is four times of that of the United States and in order for the Chinese economy in GDP terms to catch up with that of the United States it simply means that on a per capita GDP level China only need to reach that of the one-quarter of that of the U.S., and this is exactly the reason why I think there is still potential for the Chinese economy to reach to the level of that of the United States.

And if we think about it in terms of per capita level, right now, if today the Chinese economy reached that of the level of either Greece or Poland the Chinese economy in terms of GDP size would be bigger than that of the U.S., as simple as that.

But there is a difference between—you know, China has the potential versus it actually can get there. And this is where I think I would fall into the category of or the spectrum of, you know, I focus more on the structural challenges rather than, you know, one man, President Xi Jinping, or General Secretary Xi Jinping, himself.

And the reason is because that I tend to use this framework—I have written about it—which is the so-called four Ds. I use this framework to think about the Chinese economy, its trajectory, and how it can recover. The four D include—the first D is debt, the second D is demand, the third D is demographic, and then the fourth D is decoupling or derisking. So, a lot of these are both the cyclical and the structural.

And on the debt side now everybody is talking about the Chinese debt and local government debt, in particular the local government financing vehicle. But a lot of the issue can actually be dated all the way back to—a very important contributing factor would be the 2008-2009 during that time in terms of driving global growth in China due to the 4 trillion dollars stimulus policy, which creates a lot of overcapacity issue and they have been dealing with that ever since then.

The first time that the Chinese government clearly talked about the necessity of addressing overcapacity issue was back in 2015. They literally talk about we have to address overcapacity issue.

And at the 2016—the eighth round of U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue actually Secretary—at that time the—Secretary of Treasury Jack Lew went to China, talked with the Chinese counterpart, and talked about the need of U.S.-China jointly work together to address China’s overcapacity issues, specifically in the steel sector.

And what ended up happening was 2018 when Trump came in killed the Strategic and Economic Dialogue has paused any opportunities to cooperate on that. So, a lot of this debt problem can be traced back to the 4 trillion dollars stimuli and that is exactly why the Chinese government right now—people have living memories. They realize the need of correcting that bad policy mistake. Therefore, they are not dealing with that.

Now, there are—people can say that, well, you know, the property sector has a lot of debt and, yes, the property sector debt ties very, very neatly into local government debt problem; there’s no problem with that.

But the reason why, again, I do not think this—that moment, this—that issue at the property sector level is going to become China’s Lehman moment is for two reasons. The first reason is that, on the one hand, a lot of these troubled property developers, they are actually private property developers. If you look at it the ten largest property developers in China today both in terms of volume and value—sales—as well as in terms of land acquisition, so eight out of the ten largest one now are state owned.

And the second reason why I don’t think this is going to be China’s Lehman moment is also because of the fact that China actually had a playbook to address banking crisis and it just so happened that a lot of these troubled property—private property developers their share of debt in terms of bank loans is a tiny little bit in terms of the overall China’s bank loan sector, and if China were able to deal with and restructure the state-owned commercial banks back in early 2000s they had this ready-to-go playbook.

Therefore, this is not going to—they know how to deal with the looming banking crisis. This is not going to be China’s banking—Lehman crisis. But that is a problem in the sense that if the debt—the growth of debt is faster than the GDP growth then it becomes a problem and this is exactly the problem that China needs to deal with now, and there I tend to think that China now has a debt addiction problem in the sense that in order to retire existing stock of debt you have to literally issue new debt in order to address that problem and, on the other hand, China also is a country that addicted to industrial policies and the use of industrial policies very much in the nature of giving preferential or, in other word, discriminatory bank loans to prioritize a sector.

In other words, a lot of this problem is going to, again, lead to overcapacity. Previously, it was a property market and then it was steel, cement, and now you are talking about EVs, the solar panel, and the batteries.

So this is a problem that China literally needs to deal with, and if the economy—if the political will is there to sacrifice growth in order to achieve structural adjustment in exchange for a higher quality growth, I think the Chinese economy can still achieve its potential.

But this takes a lot of incentive alignment between local government and the central government as well as all these different SOEs, and I just do not see that happening. Now that’s debt.

The second part, in terms of demand, that comes from two aspects—international or export, and then the other part would be domestic demand. Now, I guess this is an audience that I do not have to explain that China’s trade with the West actually declined, right, although we talk a lot about declining Chinese exports to the United States and to the European—to the entire Europe.

But if you look at the numbers, by 2023 Chinese export to Europe and to United States added together is about $1.2 trillion and that is bigger than the economy of either Saudi Arabia or Netherlands. That’s just the share of trading. In other words, China is very much trade dependent and in particular trade dependent to the West.

Now, God forbid, if there is another Trump administration, you know, obviously, trade as share of contribution to Chinese GDP is going to shrink. But the bigger drag on the Chinese GDP growth, going forward, again, is domestic consumption.

The government has been talking about promoting domestic consumption, in particular household consumption, for a long period of time. And here, this—there is a statistical clarification I have to talk about.

When China talks about promoting domestic consumption, they literally include state-led investment as part of the bigger aggregated domestic consumption. But that’s not really the problem, right? It’s not the government’s investment that is not driving the economy. It’s the lack of household consumption.

At a global level, you know, on par household consumption as a percentage GDP is around 60 percent but for China it’s about 38 percent. So, it’s like a chronically under consuming economy. And now people talk about, well, why Chinese households don’t spend. Starting from December 2022 as well as last year the Chinese government put out a series of consumption promotion plans, but still Chinese households do not spend.

Well, part of the reason is because there is a lack of confidence and a part of the reason is because there is a lack of a social security net, and then, ultimately, there is—fundamentally job security is not there and a lot of this job security ties into derisking that I’m going to delve into.

But before I go there I wanted to talk about demographics. So the demographic challenge for the Chinese economy comes both in terms of near term and long term. We all know about the long term in terms of, oh, you know, shrinking labor premium and so on and so forth.

But in the near term, I think the real challenge is that lower family formation rate and lower—and a slower growing population simply means the demand for housing is going to decline and housing is about 30 percent of the GDP.

So now, you now realize, well, there is a reason why President Xi Jinping has strongly encouraged every Chinese couple, saying, no, no, no, one kid is not enough; you have to have three. (Laughter.) And that is, like, literally patriotic education, right, have to have three children.

But, again, without support for women, without support for the—for social security people simply won’t do that. And then you also have this sentiment—you know, Farah and Nate talking about sentiment and talking about the radicalization of women.

If women realize that they are in a system that is systematically disproportionately discriminated against both in terms of the family—family burden sharing in terms of labor market, they will not be incentivized to have children. And in particular, there is also this predominant—a growing sentiment among Chinese young couples thinking that, well, the world is so cruel, why am I going to have a kid and let my kid suffer.

And then this—now let me sort of relate it to these demographics and talk about a decoupling or derisking. Decoupling or derisking directly contributed to, you know, shrinking export. But then, on the other hand, people can make the argument to say, well, China is developing an alternative trading system; China now trade more with developing countries.

But I do not think China trade with the United States simply to make money. There is technology. There is expertise. There is, you know, a lot of the strategic aspect of there. But putting that aside, decoupling/derisking directly have a risk for the Chinese economy in the sense that, on the one hand, high-paying corporate jobs are not there and it creates a bigger incentive mismatch between college graduate highly-educated Chinese young people versus the job market.

They realize that, you know what, my parents told me to study harder so that I can eventually get a high-paying job and now it turns out that when I graduate not only the jobs are no longer there but I probably have to be—I have to take a pay cut and, on the other hand, the government is literally telling everybody you need to do vocational training and we want you to do advanced manufacturing jobs.

You know what? The youth are simply not going to buy it. So this is the framework that I think through, you know, the debt, demographics—debt, demand, demographics, and decoupling—and a lot of these four Ds generate a lot of deflationary pressure to the Chinese economy.

But I’m not saying that the Chinese economy is becoming Japan in the sense that, well, it has a lot of technical issues with the pork price, so in order to correctly understanding whether China is moving into deflationary territory or not, well, we have to track the cycles of pork price. (Laughs.)

KURTZ-PHELAN: Let me quickly just ask—pick up on your fourth D and get you to just give us a sense of where you think we are in the U.S.-China relationship.

November President Xi and President Biden met in San Francisco. That was widely taken to be—to reflect the acknowledgement on the parts of both governments that things had gotten too tense, that things were too unstable, and that there was a need to stabilize things, even if the ceiling on the relationship was much lower than it was.

Do you think we are truly in a kind of more stable framework now or is this merely a kind of lull in tensions that we’re likely to see blow up again in the months ahead?

LIU: Yeah, that’s a really nice way to put the question.

Honestly, I do not think the U.S.-China relationship is a stable relationship because anything could potentially blow up. It could be another spy balloon, it could be another cyberattack traced back to the Chinese Communist Party or state-sponsored activities, and it could be related to something like TikTok. (Laughs.) The Chinese government is literally putting out a strong voice against it.

But I do think that the Biden-Xi Jinping meeting in—on the sideline of San Francisco APEC is a reset to pre-Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan. That’s as good as I can give it. And all the colleague—all our professors here can rate whether that is a performance in terms of A, B, C, or F, but that’s—(laughter)—you know, as far as I can go, pre-Nancy Pelosi’s visit.

And the relationship is still very much fragile both in terms of economics, in terms of technology. And if you ask me the question with regard to whether promoting democracy should—is now a centerpiece of the—of U.S. foreign policy—and you know what? Viewing from China’s point of view, as long as the United States is not promoting democracy, as long as there is no perception of peaceful evolution, that’s good for China. But I do think the shift towards promoting industrial policies and, in particular, the active use of development financing institutions—such the Development Finance Corporation (DFC) and the alliance between DFC and the Japan Bank for International Cooperation, and the Korean Import-Export Bank—a lot of these seem to have this counter-China alliance, giving China, at least giving Chinese policymakers, a lot of word towards domestic audience in China to say, well, you see, America is waging a technology economic cold war against us.

KURTZ-PHELAN: You nicely set up the one question I want to ask all three of you before I go to questions from all of you. And that’s about TikTok. (Laughter.) All of you work on social media in one form or another, on the U.S.-China relationship. So let me just ask a very simple question: Do you think the legislation to either force the sale or ban TikTok in the United States is a good idea? Is it something the U.S. should do? Nate, I’ll start with you.

SCHENKKAN: I’m really glad you didn’t say yes or no. (Laughter.) Because a simple question. So I think there’s two things in this question—two things that have to be done. So there’s one thing that has to happen, which is that we have to understand that TikTok is an actual unique threat. I think that’s real. I think there’s—there are aspects of this conversation in the United States that have discounted that, and discounted the actual threat that comes from the possibility—which isn’t proven, and that’s where a lot of the debate has been—but the possibility that TikTok could be used to, in a crisis especially, to advance narratives in the United States.

KURTZ-PHELAN: So you’re worried about the algorithm not the data in that case, essentially.

SCHENKKAN: Well, that’s the second part. I want to get to that. But I think that—but yeah, to advance—so, say there’s a natural disaster. Or say there’s a war with Taiwan—between China and Taiwan. And all of a sudden we find out actually, oh, TikTok can be directed, right? This is not the time to find that out. You can’t afford to find that out then, to be frank. So I do think there’s an important element there.

The second part that I think is the other part that you’re speaking about is that, you know, social media itself is an issue that U.S. policymakers have not addressed broadly. We’re actually seeing more progress in the European Union, where they have lower stakes in terms of where their companies are housed, in terms of democratic policymaking around what would it look like to regulate social media platforms in a democratic way? There’s the Digital Services Act, which is the large package of bills that has been implemented and is now coming fully into force this year.

And we need these kinds of steps. We need data privacy legislation—comprehensive data privacy legislation. We need steps to force the platforms into transparency measures that they have done—sometimes done voluntarily, but now many of them have rolled back in terms of access to algorithms, access to the APIs, so that researchers can study how they’re doing these things. We need both sides of that. So I think in some ways—you know, this particular bill I won’t speak to. The divestment aspect of that, I think, is very difficult to imagine, for a lot of practical reasons. But at bottom, I think it’s real. I think we need a solution for TikTok. But we also need a solution for this larger issue that a lot of policy has not wanted to take up.

KURTZ-PHELAN: Farah.

PANDITH: Everything he said. (Laughter.) In addition, a couple of things. One, we’ve been lazy on hate across the board. I’ve just—I described to you what was taking place in some—in a tiny, little way—on what’s happening online. TikTok is one piece of that, but his second point about the algorithms, what’s actually taking place—the protection of young people, for goodness sake. I mean, we have been so slow, and I’d call it lazy, on getting serious about what really is taking place. There are a lot of reasons for that. But so I really think it’s part of a larger conversation we have to have about social media platforms, period.

I think the piece about foreign influence at a time of danger is a really exceptionally important one. And I’d go one step further. I think that we misunderstood the beginning of social media. We misunderstood how bad it could really be. I mean, we didn’t really imagine the worst. We all sweetly went into this thinking, oh, it’s going to bring the world together. Isn’t that sweet? And the CEOs of those companies said that, and we bought it line, hook, and sinker. And I don’t get it, because we’re not—we are sophisticated. We understand how technology works. We also understand how humans work. And if you give people an opportunity to get tribal, guess what? They become tribal.

To marry that with what you were saying about the decrease in pluralism, the democracy, all of those larger societal things, we have an obligation today to ask harder questions than we have ever asked before about the nature of society and who we want to be as humans on planet Earth. And it—I’m not being dramatic here—it is part of the larger question. So, I think it is really critical that we get serious about what we’re doing. What’s happening in Europe is that they’ve taken this in a serious way. They’ve been adults about the whole thing. It may not be the perfect answer. It will get better and better as the years go forward. But what are we doing in the United States? We’re kicking back and just waiting for somebody else to do this for us? I think it’s time to get real.

KURTZ-PHELAN: Zoe.

LIU: I think Farah and Nate speak from a philosophical point of view. And I would like, you know, lower level, I think, from an economic point of view. I do think social media platforms like TikTok, they do have an empowering function in terms of, like, empowering and to drive small businesses. So I think they’re, in theory—but that does not mean I think is all good. The part that I think we should—rather than focusing on one particular social media platform, what we really need to focus on is about a counter misinformation. And I do think that is a problem, especially now. It puts a lot of pressure, and perhaps a higher degree of requirement, perhaps, for university professors and educators.

Because, at least when I teach at Columbia, I do encounter the problem of some of my students have a hard time, especially the younger students who did not have work experience, they find it difficult to distinguish facts versus opinions. Therefore, in the spring semester, I dedicated thirty minutes at least to teach people, like, you know, this is how you need to separate the facts versus opinions. And you can write an essay full of, you know, opinions but, hey, my opinion doesn’t matter. Your opinion could matter. But—because I care about evaluation. (Laughter.) But you need to give me facts to support your opinions.

And if you wanted to use ChatGPT to write an essay, I can use ChatGPT to grade you. (Laughter.) So from that perspective, I do think, you know, a lot of this counter misinformation, campaigns, the government needs to do a lot, social media platform companies may need to do self-regulation. But, again, it puts a lot of responsibilities and requirements, and perhaps pressure, for educators as well. So hopefully, you know, you will bring—you will give this country—you will empower this country a newer generation of people who are better informed.

KURTZ-PHELAN: I’m tempted to go back to all of you for a yay or nay vote on the legislation. (Laughter.) But I will not—I will not do that.

We’ll go to questions from all of you. Let me just remind you to stand, there’s a microphone coming around, and state your name and affiliation as you’re asking a question. And if you would like to direct the question to anyone in particular, please do that. So we’ll start with this gentleman over here.

Q: Hi, I’m Michael Strmiska from SUNY Orange in New York State.

My question for Farah Pandith. When you spoke about the threat, the worldwide threat of violent extremism, at one point you mentioned that there’s a threat on the right and the left. And I have to say, I have trouble seeing where the violent extremist threat on the left is, because there seems to be so much more happening on the right. So could you enlighten me on that point? Thank you.

PANDITH: Thank you for the question. I will tell you that the Southern Poverty Law Center is an amazing place to go to actually learn about all the different types of extremist groups that exist in our country and around the world. And rather than giving you a lecture on the differences and the depth of some of these groups, I would urge you to take a look and see how they manifest. But I will answer your question. I’m not dodging you.

I do want to say, I was asked the question about how people learn from the United States and overseas. And I neglected to say that it isn’t just an extremist group, per se, but it also is conspiracy theories that motivate people to do things. So, for example, you will all remember QAnon. That is an American—you know, it came from here. It was developed here. It was a conspiracy that was—that took shape here. And you saw people marching in the streets in Japan who were adherents for this conspiracy. This opportunity for a generation to be connected to each other means that whether you are—whatever extremist group you belong to, whatever ideological function you take part in, you have the ability to inspire.

And so, I would say to you on this issue of the violent far left and the violent far right, that each of those tribes, each of those movements, each of those cohorts, have activated and inspired people all over the world and in all parts of our country to do violent things. In the post-October 7 moment that we found ourselves in, when Hamas did the horrific thing—I didn’t even talk about antisemitism and the growth of antisemitism in our country since October 7. It is horrendous. Six hundred—sorry—377 percent increase of antisemitism since October 7. Anti-Muslim hate has grown exponentially. During the COVID years, I’m telling the audience what you already know, the rise of AAPI hate was off the charts. One in two people from the AAPI community are afraid to go out because they’re—for fear of being attacked. Things have shifted. How those things are shifted means that groups have messaged, they have been out there. They’re not necessarily violent, not necessarily violent, but their inspiration and their ideology pushes people in a direction.

I will say to you finally, on the violent far left, people respond—you’re not the only person who’s responded this way when I say that. You suddenly feel, like, what is she saying? What is she talking about? But there are groups in the United States today, in the post-October 7 period of time, that have promoted violence because of their position on the attack of Hamas on Israel. And there have been violence. And it’s happened because of that. People have been hurt because of this. Synagogues have been attacked because of this. So I just—I want to—I don’t want to take over the conversation talking about the Hamas-Israel situation. But I want to say, let’s be clear-eyed about what’s happening in our nation on the violent far right, on the violent far left, things in the middle. (Laughs.) And a whole bunch of things that we don’t talk about every single day.

Go to the Southern Poverty Law Center for a place to learn more. Go to the Anti-Defamation—

Q: (Off mic.) (Laughter.)

PANDITH: OK. Go to the Anti-Defamation League to learn about ADL. Go to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue to learn about anti-Muslim hate, and anything else you want to learn about.

KURTZ-PHELAN: Nate, let me—let me just give you a chance to add anything, since you worked at the Southern Poverty Law Center a couple years ago.

SCHENKKAN: (Laughs.) I did, although, yeah, I’m not sure I can speak—I did work there, at the Intelligence Project—as deputy director of the Intelligence Project a couple of years ago. I don’t know that I have anything particular to add to what Farah has said, except that obviously violent extremism and extremist hate in the United States is a constellation. I mean, there are—and there are, I think, combinations of ideologies and combination—what we see as combinations, I guess, of ideologies. Antisemitism, you’ll see this in the way SPLC writes about antisemitism particularly. Antisemitism is kind of a foundational ideology across many different—foundational hate ideology, to be clear—across many different ways of—conspiratorial ways of thinking, and conspiratorial ways of approaching the world. And that can then manifest in many different directions. And without going far, far down that hole, I’d say that it’s a kind of a core ideology that many share, if not all.

KURTZ-PHELAN: There was a question. OK, we have three at this front table. (Laughter.) So we’ll start with the far left and we’ll make our way down. Yes.

Q: Oh, you wanted—OK. Hello, everyone. My name is Eunice Kang and I’m from Vanguard University of Southern California. Thank you so much for all your comments tonight. Very enlightening.

My question is to Nate. I taught a comparative politics class recently. We looked at, like, the quality of democratization, and really interested in Freedom House, like, how you measure democracy. One of the questions that my students asked, and I would love for you to answer it, is you have X number of factors that measure democracy. How many is it, real quick? Is it like—

SCHENKKAN: It depends on how you’re—you know, there’s sub-questions within the different—there’s, like, I guess, eight different categories, each of which have between four and six sub-questions, something like that.

Q: OK. All right. So approximately eight but maybe four different—32 factors or so.

SCHENKKAN: Right. (Laughter.)

Q: Do you rate them equally? I wanted to know about the weighting system. And if you do weight it equally, and my understanding is that is weighted equally, the factors—well, shouldn’t elections—shouldn’t competitive elections, shouldn’t freedom of speech or freedom of press be weighted more heavily than other factors? And I would love for you to comment a bit on the U.S. My understanding is that the U.S. is ranked thirty out of—or, around thirty out of, you know, two hundred countries. And other countries that have a shorter history of democracy than the United States are ranked higher than us. And so could you comment a bit on how, you know, the U.S. is ranked lower than other countries in terms of democracy, when we’re supposed to be, I guess, the beacon of democracy around the world, and the weighting system a bit? Thank you so much.

SCHENKKAN: Sure. Yeah. Great question. And I’m happy to speak about it. The methodology, for those who are interested, you know, there’s a lot of information online. There’s a very vigorous debate going on, including in the last twelve months in the political science and democracy studies community about measuring democracy, with some really interesting discussions at the American Political Science Association annual meeting, that one of my colleagues—who’s not here tonight, but she participated in.

We do weight equally. So, I mean, we have—the process that Freedom House does, just—I could go under the hood, if you guys want—(laughter)—

KURTZ-PHELAN: We may have to save that for the appendix part of this conversation. (Laughter.)

SCHENKKAN: Yeah, fair. Is that we basically look at each of these countries through its own review process. So we assess across the same set of indicators and scoring questions. Typically, it’s a zero to four scale for each question, each sub indicator. And that gives you this total number of points, a hundred points. There’s an additional question which can go into the negatives for forced ethnic change, but essentially that means that we do this kind of—it’s a dialogue process. It’s kind of an argumentative, discursive process within Freedom House, with outside experts who are incorporated into the process.

And, yes, they are equally weighted. I mean, it essentially comes down to making methodological choices, right, about if you want to weight something else, what are you going to—what are you going to put underweight? If you’re going to put something overweight, what are you going to put underweight? How are you going to justify that? I think there’s a lot of different valid ways to go about doing that. There are more minimal—as you raise the question of elections, there are more minimal definitions for doing this, right? Which is, is there a free and fair election? Great. Zero to one. There are some political scientists who will argue that’s all we need to do, right? Or will argue we need to just look at freedom of expression, freedom of the press. You know, are journalists in jail? Maybe that’s an easier way.

There was a very interesting debate about this in the last year. You know, is that just a faster, more accurate way to do this? From our perspective, the exercise is kind of the point. So, like, the discussion of it, the evaluation and the discussion is to produce this debate about which measures are valid and which parts are—you know, what does democracy consists of? So this—I get that’s a little meta, but, like, that’s kind of what we’re going for. Is we want to talk about these different factors and say: Yeah, we included, you know, unequal treatment of groups. And in the U.S.’s case, specifically the abuse of people who’ve tried to enter the United States without status, and the way that they’re treated in the immigration system. And we do include that within our measure of democracy. We think that’s important. And we did that for every country in the world, you know? And, yeah, sure, if we want to debate that and say that’s not a part of democracy, fine. Let’s debate it. But we think it is.

For the U.S., yeah. Ranking—I mean, we don’t explicitly rank. So we’re not—we’re not trying to say necessarily, like, thirtieth out of anything. But, yeah, I mean, it does produce a numeric outcome and you can do a comparison. I know, we’re frequently—I think right around the same area you’re going to get Poland, you’re going to get Romania. You know, and you’ll frequently see in the American press these kind of like, ugh, can’t believe America is in the same bracket as Poland, or Romania, or something. That seems kind of unfair to me to Poland and Romania. (Laughter.) Well, I just think it’s a little insulting. I mean, I think, you know, it’s kind of condescending, right?

I think that the issues in the United States are very serious. I mean, as I said at the beginning, I think the issues are very serious. We’ve seen very serious declines, nine points in the last decade. That nine points, by the way, you know, spanned across multiple presidential administrations and different, you know, rotations of Congress. So it’s been kind of underlying a large number of things. And I think that some of the things we’ve raised here, including the—kind of polarization is a shorthand. And I don’t always know if it’s the most accurate shorthand for what it is. But you can use it as a shorthand for a bigger societal process that’s been happening of sorting and of conflict within the society.

That is then presenting a bunch of very concrete political outcomes, like manifesting through the U.S. political system, particularly in the legislative system, and then the judicial system, and the kind of, like, you know, changes in the Supreme Court, as well as then that’s reflected in whether parts of society accept those changes, essentially, right, and see the rulings as valid. There’s a whole—it’s a whole big mess. And I do think it’s very serious. And again, to go to that point about free countries and partly free countries decline, this is an unusual decline. So I made this point about free and partly free countries have only declined by 1 percent on average. Obviously, you can do the math. It’s a 100-point scale. U.S. has gone down by nine. So that’s 9 percent. We’re an outlier in that—in this category, right? We’re driving that average down.

KURTZ-PHELAN: Let’s go with the middle of the front table.

Q: Hi, there. Thank you all. I’m Mark Rush. I’m from Washington and Lee University.

And I hope I can articulate this question well, because I thought everything was going just fine till the very end—(laughter)—when I thought I saw a disjunction. On the one hand, Nate, we’re talking about Freedom House says there’s a need to promote democracy, beat back authoritarianism, and whatnot. And if you think about authoritarianism, perhaps reduced, you know, centralized executive power, cut back on deliberative democracy, maybe constrain rights some, more than we’re accustomed to. OK, fine. Avoid that. But on the other hand, we finished up talking about we need to do something about TikTok, every punk with a server who can promote hate around the world, and so on and so forth.

And so, on the one hand, we need to promote democratization of power. On the other hand, to solve these global challenges we need to promote centralization of power, seemingly at the expense, perhaps, of private liberties. Who’s going to—Elon Musk could theoretically have shut down part of the war in Ukraine, according to the New Yorker, a while back. How do we go after the hatemongers living in their parents’ basements, hidden somewhere that we can’t even find them, right, without giving government a lot more power than it currently has? So it seems there’s a tension between the two. If you want to beat back the problems that the world seems to be suffering, maybe we need to centralize government power at the expense of a tremendously successful democratization of power over the last half century? I hope that’s reasonably coherent. Thank you all.

KURTZ-PHELAN: Farah, do you want to start—

PANDITH: I wrote an entire book—(laughter)—about that exact thing, How We Win. How do we do this? We have figured out ways of putting guardrails on all kinds of things, including how we manage the internet. If we didn’t have guardrails on, all you would see when you Google is pornography. We’ve made—it’s true. We’ve made choices. We make choices every single day on how to keep people safe, online and offline. We are capable of doing that here too. In no possible way can any government on Earth, whether it is the United States, Poland, France, China—they cannot control everything. In order for us to see a decrease in extremism and hate, it has to be every component of society that is activated.

You all have such an essential role to play in the way in which you’re teaching your students about how—digital literacy. How they understand, exactly what you were saying, what’s real, what isn’t. What democracy even is. We don’t teach civics anymore, you know? So I’m not being cute when I say that each—government should do more. There are things that we can do in terms of putting guardrails on. But society needs to do a whole lot more too. And I mean the private sector. I mean, the public—the not-for-profit sector. I mean, funders. There are things that we can do right now.

And the solutions are available and affordable as we speak right now. It’s just that we haven’t focused on the soft power aspects. We keep thinking that somebody else is going to do it. Well guess what? We have two generations since 9/11 who have been exposed to ideologies that we never thought they could be exposed to and reacted to it in this way. Did we ever imagine—and, by the way, sir, they’re not living in the basement of somebody’s mother—whatever that whole thing is. They’re down the street at Starbucks, or, you know, walking down the street on their phones. They are in—I mean, I’m just saying to you—

Q: No, no, I used a metaphor.

PANDITH: I understand. But it’s—but I’m saying to you it’s out in the open. And it’s people who are not hiding. They know what they’re doing. They’re making money. They’re getting power. And they are really successful at it. For us to be able to decrease and diminish hate and extremism in our country and around the world. It means that our citizens need to demand that our societies act differently. That we’re more compassionate, that we’re more civil. And I’m not—I’m not saying that as going to—the switch is going to be changed. But if you have a sixth grader who is willing to go online and take a look at Atomwaffen’s ideology about purity, and feel, like, hey, that connects to me and I’m going to go get my mom’s gun and I’m going to go do something about it, we have a problem. So at every level, influencers and cultural icons can make a difference, as well as parents in the home, as well as teachers, and so on.

KURTZ-PHELAN: Zoe, let me just go to you very quickly. Because that—I mean, you’d ask a very different version of that question if we were—if we were talking about Chinese regulation of technology and social media. Just give us a very quick sense of where the debate on these questions of regulation, centralization, fit into Chinese policy at the moment.

LIU: I think, first of all, the center of the conversation, I guess, is very different in the sense that, I guess, China—in the international space there is status-sponsored, so called, five cents party, or wumao. And the idea is there is state-employed forces that can provide a counter argument. And then on the other hand, as Farah was talking about, you need a society to demand it. And in the Chinese—in the Chinese case, the demand is really about, yes—you see this in Chinese TV shows—they understand the need, their societal demand, to say: You need to have a real name—real name internet censorship. It doesn’t matter who is regulating that. But Chinese people get very frustrated with the experience of the high frequency—perhaps it has a lot to do with the large number of population—but the high frequency of hatred, internet-generated hatred. That’s basically fit into what Farah was talking about, societal demand for regulation.

KURTZ-PHELAN: I think there was a question—let me go—let me go to the far back first, and then I’ll come back this way.

Q: Thank you for inviting me and for putting this on. I’m Barbara Logan. I’m from the University of Wyoming. This is a question for Dr. Liu, since you’re talking about censorship and sort of a state-recognized concept of benefit from this. Which is, just your personal analysis. What do you think the movers and shakers in China’s government believed that they would achieve with the conquest of Taiwan?

Is it—I mean, normally wars are expensive and not going to help your GDP much, especially since people see the saber rattling and they move into their own production—localized production of CPUs, and things like that? Versus is it really just about this—the capacity of soft power or propaganda to have a larger effect, and to sort of distract the population that potentially is younger and has all these difficulties moving into the workforce and getting married, and having your three children—(laughs)—now, and sort of doing what the government wants? Do you think it—that there’s some vision, in fact, of some kind of economic benefit? Or do you think it is something else entirely, that would be more motivating towards GDP?

LIU: Thank you for the question. I guess I’ll first start by answering that—by answering in reference to one of my four Ds, which is demographics. I think in order for the Chinese Communist Party to mobilize a war against the Taiwan militarily, it is going to be a hell of social mobilization. Another reason is because more than 80 percent of the PLA combat forces, they are the so-called one child generation. We can debate about a timeline there, the lack of—or the existence of it.

But the fact that they are—that the 80 percent—higher than 80 percent of the PLA composition is the so-called one child generation, simply means that, A, the grandmas, the great grandmas, and the parents are going to be very against the idea of sending their only child to go to war, whether it’s a son or a daughter. And then secondly, if you have this one-child generation, whether it is son or daughter, being the only person in the family line to carry it down the family generation, it is very difficult to mobilize. And then thirdly, it goes back to your GDP point of view, obviously risking losing the war not just accelerating the collapse of President Xi Jinping’s power, but also it is very detrimental to China’s GDP growth in the long term, right?

But fundamentally, you know, to what—I guess Party General Secretary Xi Jinping, and the whole Chinese Communist Party hierarchy, they learned two important things from Russia’s present—Putin’s war against Ukraine. The first one is they need to prepare the Chinese economy in order to do—the very important economic condition to wage a war against Taiwan, if the identity, or the assimilation part, the cultural assimilation fails. The first part they need to do, the economic condition, is that they need to sanction-proof the Chinese economy so that sanctioning China, Western collective sanction against China, is going to be at least equally costly to the sanctioners. And China has been developing an alternative trading system and alternative, renminbi-based financial system to do that.

Although we can argue that they did the system not for the purpose of—to dodge sanctions, but they have that possible function. And then the second part is he needs to prepare the PLA by anticorruption. And we have already seen that in action. But neither of—neither demographics, nor sanction-proof the Chinese economy, nor anticorruption—neither of these can be achieved anytime soon. And then I’ll conclude by saying that I’ve talked to many Chinese visitors, as well as policymakers, to ask them about the timeline of 2027. And none of them said, you know, concretely, like, there is any piece of concrete document to say that’s actually the war game plan.

KURTZ-PHELAN: I’m sorry to those we didn’t get to, but I know that at least a couple of the speakers will be at dinner. I’m sure they would not mind if you buttonhole them and ask any follow-up questions. Before dinner, let me remind you that you are due to arrive here at 8:30 tomorrow morning for breakfast. And please be sure to bring your lanyards and name tags so they don’t have to print them again. (Laughter.) And before dinner, please thank Nate, and Farah, and Zoe for rich conversations. Thank you. (Applause.)

(END)

FASKIANOS: Good morning, everybody. Welcome back to CFR. Hope you enjoyed last night. We are going to get started. So we have a great day planned for you, starting with this first panel, “Conflict in the Middle East.” Just a small topic. (Laughs.)

And I’m going to invite my colleagues onto the stage. Linda Robinson, senior fellow for the Women in Foreign Policy Program here at CFR will be moderating. She will introduce our distinguished panel. We’re livestreaming this event. And so welcome to everybody who’s tuning in virtually. And we look forward to spending the day with you. So thanks very much, and over to you, Linda, and the rest of the panel.

ROBINSON: Good morning, everyone. I’m Linda Robinson. I’m a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. And here I’m currently holding the portfolio for Women in Foreign Policy. But I wanted to explain, I have had a long career as a journalist in the Middle East, also nine years at RAND doing Middle East-related research, and directed our Middle East Center there, before rejoining the Council.

So I want to welcome you to this session on the Middle East. And, as you know, there are some very pressing issues now with the Israel-Hamas war. But we have a wide array of experts here. And the intent is to have a broader discussion, of course including that war, but we want to make sure we leave plenty of time for you to raise your specific questions. So I thought we would start with an overview.

I want to introduce briefly—you have the bios of all of our speakers in your packet—but I want to introduce them here briefly: Karim Sadjadpour is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and he’s also an adjunct professor at Georgetown University; Keren Yarhi-Milo is dean of the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs and the Adlai Stevenson professor of international relations—and you will correct my pronunciation. I apologize.

YARHI-MILO: No, that’s perfect. That’s great.

ROBINSON: And next we have Yousef Munayyer, head of the Palestine/Israel program, and senior fellow at the Arab Center in Washington, DC; and last but not least, we have our very own Steven Cook, who is the Mattei senior fellow for Middle East and Africa studies, and also director of the International Affairs Fellowship for international relations scholars here at CFR.

So without further ado, I’m going to launch the conversation starting with Karim here. I’d like to—since his specialty is Iran. I would like to ask you, Karim, to give us some assessment of the internal situation of Iran. They’ve just had elections. I think very high boycott numbers. But if you could describe perhaps for a few minutes the internal situation, and then mention what you consider the most important initiatives Iran has taken diplomatically. There have been some important developments that I’d like you to perhaps throw out for the audience.

SADJADPOUR: Sure. Thank you, Linda. And it’s great to see all of you.

Well, just for a bit of historic context, as probably most of you know in 1979 there was a revolution in Iran, which virtually overnight turned the country from a U.S.-allied monarchy—it was led by the shah of Iran, one of America’s closest partners—to a viscerally anti-American theocracy led by the Ayatollah Khomeini. And from 1979 to the present, forty-five years was the anniversary of the revolution last month, the country has only had two leaders. Ayatollah Khomeini ruled from 1979 to 1989. And from 1989 to the present, Iran has been ruled by one man, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

So I would argue that perhaps there’s been no country in the world which has had a more kind of consistent and determined grand strategy over the last several decades than Iran, by virtue of the fact that they’ve had arguably the longest serving autocrat in the world. And for me, there’s kind of three pillars of Iran’s ideology, its revolutionary ideology. There’s—to distill the essence of the revolution down to three things now. Its death to America, official slogan of the revolution. Opposition to the United States. Death to Israel. Its aspirations to replace Israel with Palestine. And third is the mandatory veiling of women, the hijab, which is kind of the flag of the theocracy in Iran.

And many of you probably saw these dramatic images from Iran last year, the protests—the Women, Life, Freedom protests in Iran after the killing of a twenty-two-year-old woman, Mahsa Amini, for showing too much hair. And what I’d say about Iran is that—I would argue there’s probably no country in the world with a greater gap between its government and its society than Iran. In that you have a regime which essentially aspires to be like North Korea and a society which essentially aspires to be like South Korea.

And this status quo is only sustainable with repression. And I would argue at this point the regime has perhaps 15 to 20 percent popular support. But 15 to 20 percent who are united, highly armed, organized, willing to kill en masse, can, I think, continue to prevail over a society which is unarmed, unorganized, leaderless, and not prepared to die en masse. So that’s why I think that despite the Iranian government’s unpopularity—and eventually it’s going to implode, in my view, like the Soviet Union. I don’t think that we can make any imminent predictions about that.

ROBINSON: Thank you. Could you just say a quick word about the opening with Saudi Arabia? I think that is one of the consequential regional developments, perhaps at least for the longer term.

SADJADPOUR: Yeah. So basically, some of the neighboring governments to Iran—whether that’s Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates—they recognize that they don’t want to be in a fight with Iran. Because I think about there’s two kinds of countries in the Middle East—two kinds of governments. There’s governments that are trying to build things, like Saudi Arabia, UAE. And then there’s countries like Iran, which are in the business of destroying, not building. So, if you’re Mohammed bin Salman, and you have ambitions to, for example, build the most expensive city in the world—Neom, trillion dollars—well, Iran can come by in an afternoon and destroy that with its precision rockets, missiles, and drones.

So, if you’re Saudi Arabia and you also are cognizant of the fact that you can no longer count on the U.S. to have your back. The United States—both Republicans and Democrats—have essentially telegraphed that we’re no longer going to be in the business of conflicts in the Middle East. And for that reason, these governments—like Saudi Arabia and UAE—have done the side deals with Iran. But I don’t think it’s at all a reflection of their views towards Iran having changed. I think that they are simply trying to defuse potential—

ROBINSON: Tactical, mmhmm.

SADJADPOUR: Exactly. While they’re trying to build up things.

ROBINSON: Thank you. Let me leapfrog over for a minute and turn to Steven. And I know, Steven, you will be on your book tour in a couple of short months. But I thought you could give this audience a preview of some of the work you have been doing to look at U.S. policy in the region, writ large. How do you see U.S. interests changing? And how do you see U.S. policy adapting?

COOK: Well, thanks, Linda. And thanks for the plug on the book. I believe there are book cards somewhere floating around here, so I won’t be too obnoxious about the whole thing. I just—first, thanks, Linda. It’s great to be on the panel with all of you. And it’s really nice to see all of you. I understand we have representatives here from every state in the union except for Maine, which is super cool. Like Hawaii and Alaska, that—I mean, New York is really an attraction, I guess.

Anyway, I think Karim hinted at this in his answer to you about the Iran-Saudi relationship, and that for the Saudis it’s quite tactical. They believe that there is a coming clash between them and the Iranians, and that they cannot rely on the United States any longer. That Americans have now elected three presidents in a row that, in their own way, have said that they would deemphasize the Middle East. President Obama was very clear that he thought that the invasion of Iraq and the sort of robust effort to transform the region was stupid. President Trump agreed with him 100 percent, in his own way. He said that the United States spent $7 trillion on rebuilding the Middle East when—on the Middle East, when we could rebuild the country, the United States, three times over. And President Biden and his team had been very clear that their intention had been to deemphasize the Middle East.

And this has been the kind of the quality of the policy debate in Washington. The post-Iraq, post-freedom agenda debate about what is America’s proper role in the region, if any. The foreign policy community, which I am broadly a part of, has been engaged in the debate. But the weight of that debate has been towards withdrawal, retrenchment, offshore balancing, and so on and so forth. And the book that Linda was nice enough to mention really takes on these arguments and tries to understand, one, where they’re coming—one, where our policy was. How our policy at one time in the Middle East was actually, by the way in which policymakers defined their goals, was quite successful. How we became quite unsuccessful. And what we do now. And it’s engaged in all of these debates about what the American approach is.

And essentially—and people make fun of this—I come down in an area where I call for essentially a Goldilocks policy.1991 to, arguably, 2008 or 2009 was too much United States. Perhaps the last few years have been too little United States. But, of course, now we’re pulled back into this horrific conflict between Hamas and Israel that has metastasized into essentially a regional conflict. And we’re still having these debates about what the proper role is. Should we be doing what we’re doing in the Red Sea? And I think that some of the opposition to it is really overlearning some of the lessons of the invasion of Iraq and the freedom agenda, and losing sight of what is genuinely important to the United States. For example, freedom of navigation, which is a core global interest of the United States, not just the Red Sea.

So, this is what these debates that have been roiling the foreign policy community in Washington over the better part of the last decade. And it’s being picked up by partners in the region. So you see the Saudis doing things—hedging with the Chinese, for example, hedging with the Russians. The Emiratis doing the same thing. The Egyptians buying more weaponry from Russia than they had since the early 1970s. Even the Israelis drawing closer to the Russians. At the same time, the Chinese providing investment, technology, projects. The Chinese are heavily involved in building Neom, this trillion-dollar city, that the Saudis are building. Whether that is a waste of money or not, it demonstrates that the region is changing, that the United States—that period where the United States stood alone in the region no longer exists.

And the book tries to answer what is the proper role for the United States in the region. I’m not going to give it away. You’re going to have to read it and assign it. Hopefully review at some place, nicely. (Laughter.) But even not nicely is okay too.

ROBINSON: Thank—

SADJADPOUR: You don’t have to read it. You just have to buy it. (Laughter.)

COOK: Well, that’s actually true. I have a daughter who will be starting college in August. So I’m always happy—that $5 royalty, always happy.

ROBINSON: Thank you. Thank you, Steven. And I do think that this, for many of you with your various areas of expertise, this is a great opportunity to think about this broad foreign policy debate we’re having in a year of election here about internationalism versus isolationism, as the two poles are sometimes described. But I think it’s fascinating to see how this administration has attempted to make a pivot away, only to find itself deeply engaged once again. And I think that’s been one of the perennial dilemmas for policymakers.

So I would like to turn to the dean now and ask you, Keren, if you would talk about your scholarship broadly about leadership decision-making calculi, and how you see that applying in the Middle East right now. And I know we will be getting more deeply in the next round of questions into some of the specifics of the Israel-Hamas war right now, but I would just welcome your thoughts as you wish to put them out looking at the Middle East and seeing how divided and driven in opposite directions many of the leaders are.

YARHI-MILO: Yes. So, first of all, thank you. It’s great to be with you. Thank you for having me.

I want to pick up something that Steve said. We’re talking about, yes, the region, but let’s even zoom out a little bit further, and say what this moment is about. I just came back recently from the Munich Security Conference. And that gets into the issue of leadership. How are countries perceiving and thinking about the United States at this moment? What is this moment about? And it’s very much an inflection point. And you hear this from many countries, from many leaders around the world, looking at the United States and asking: Is there leadership there? Is there a credibility issue? Are there problems that we’re seeing in the world that United States is not leading enough on Ukraine, not leading enough in the Middle East? And what happens in this vacuum? And what are the implications for authoritarian regimes, like Putin, like Xi Jinping, like the Iranian leaders? And what inferences they are drawing from what the United States—decisions the United States is making and how it leads in the world?

And that was very much as you can imagine, in the Munich Security Conference, two days after Trump came out with his statements about NATO, about Ukraine, and so on. So there’s real—I wouldn’t say fear, but there are lots of questions that are being asked. And some of them in the context of the Middle East, as Steven said, it’s kind of as a result of a vacuum that you saw in terms of U.S. leadership in the region for a long time. That forced some of the leaders, the regional leaders, to figure out what they can do on their own. And now with this war, we are seeing all of—against this backdrop of mistrust a little bit, of not clarity, whether a new administration, if we had one coming November—January, I would say, what are the implications for continuity? And given that there are big questions around that, what are the—what’s the best the dominant strategies for the actors are right now? And you see this in Europe, and you see this in the Middle East. And we’ll get to how it feeds into the calculations of even Israeli—the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, or others. So that’s a kind of a—in the larger scheme of things, it’s an inflection point. There’s a lot of questions about U.S. credibility, about U.S. leadership, and the transformation.

Now look, I mean, as we’re looking at the leadership even in the region, you have multiple actors. And they have domestic audiences that they have to think about. And then there is this kind of public stand that they have to take. And there is the backstage and what happens behind closed doors in terms of negotiations, bargaining, calculations. And there’s a lot that is going on that we’re not aware of, right, I mean, even between Israel and Saudi Arabia for years. Part of—we have to remember, part of the timing of October 7 was in reaction to developments—real developments in the region and the idea, the perception, that Israel and Saudi Arabia were on the verge of a historic peace agreement that really didn’t take into account the Palestinians, so—the Palestinian problem. And from that moment on, you would see during the bargaining and even in this war what some of those Arab regimes are saying publicly and what they’re saying privately are not always the same.

And so what we’re now—even if you look at where we are, we are very much stuck on debating the hostage deal, and so on. But there are other discussions that are happening still about the day after, about a Saudi deal, and so on. So from the perspective of leaders, I think that there are two main things that you would see the leadership now in different countries. Is how to think about the interplay between what’s happening backstage, and what are their public positions, and how they need to navigate this. Because it’s very, very hard for all the leaders. Even in the United States you would see that. And the other part is also how much you really care about perception of your credibility and reputation for resolve, that leads you to maybe be more hawkish and more aggressive, versus how much of it you really think about how you get to solutions and to a day after that you can actually move on past this war. So those are different—these are things that those leaders are wrestling with constantly. And it’s in the region, and it’s in the United States.

ROBINSON: Thank you, Dean. And I think it’s worth noting just how much time this has sucked up of the principals of the U.S. administration.

YARHI-MILO: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

ROBINSON: Obviously, Secretary of State Blinken, but also Bill Burns has been on his own shuttle diplomacy. And this was for an administration that really planned to do very little in the region except fostering normalization accords and keeping some kind of light counterterrorism footprint to ensure things like ISIS didn’t come back to life. So we’re seeing how things are driven by events.

I’d like to turn now, because I do think it’s important to give the experts here before you a chance to put out some of their main thoughts about the current crisis gripping the region. And I do want to make sure we’re going to give ample time for all of you to raise your questions and have a dialogue with our speakers. So, Yousef, I’d like to turn to you now to sort of open us up into the Israel-Palestine situation, and give us an overview, if you would, just what you think are the major muscle movements of the situation on the ground. We’re trying to rise above the daily turn of the news, but if you could just talk a little bit about the situation on the ground for those that may want to hear a little bit about that. And the difficulties of coalition politics—I think applies to both sides. If you could make a few comments about how you see the inner workings on both the Israeli and Palestinian side at this juncture.

MUNAYYER: Sure. And thank you all. It’s wonderful to be in a room of educators.

I want to start by just picking up on where you left off a moment ago, on this issue of bandwidth, and how much has been taken up with of this administration’s bandwidth. And ask us to remember what the national security adviser was talking about, about two weeks prior to October 7. And for those of you who were not familiar, he was giving some comments and talking about how the Middle East today—and I’m paraphrasing here, but it’s more or less along these lines—the Middle East today is more stable than at any point. And I have to spend less time on it than any of my predecessors since perhaps September 11, okay?

COOK: Yousef, I don’t mean to interrupt. September/October issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, published by the Council on Foreign Relations. (Laughter.) Please, continue.

MUNAYYER: Yeah, and I was actually going to get right to that. Because the interesting thing about the submission there is that it was submitted, of course, before the seventh of October, and then revised. And I think some of those—(laughter)—some of those revisions are telling.

But the reason I raise this is because I think it really underscores the extent to which our perception of the region in terms of American foreign policy was deeply, deeply flawed prior to October 7. There was an assumption—and it’s not unique to this administration; I think it’s been there for some time—that the salience of the issue Palestine in the region was no longer what it once was. That it no longer had the capacity not just to be a destabilizing issue between Israelis and Palestinians, but regionally. Of course, what we’ve seen after the seventh is not only is it destabilizing between Israelis and Palestinians, and regionally, but it has global impacts as well that simply cannot be ignored.

And prior to the seventh, of course, we were in a place where the primary conversation that we were having as it relates to the Middle East was being on the cusp of this Saudi-Israeli deal. Which was premised on the idea that you can have an Israeli-Arab normalization without fully addressing the Palestine issue. This was really, really wrong. And I think many of us who’ve been studying and watching this region for a long time have been talking about why this is wrong, even though there are ways to interpret decisions, the statements, the behavior of leaders in the region and think otherwise. But a deep reading of the region, where publics are—and I know many folks in this room have done public opinion work on the region—understood that this was—this was not the case, right?

And so, I think one of the big questions that needs to be addressed is, what is the day after look like for American policy towards the region on this issue? Do we go back to an October 6 mentality, where we say we can ignore this issue? Or do we seriously grapple with the fact that the previous policy has failed, we need to address the situation and put it at the forefront, and take a different approach than the one that we have taken previously? To me, I think this is—this is one of the key issues facing American foreign policy in the aftermath of October 7, and hopefully in the aftermath of this war. And hopefully, that comes sooner rather than later.

The one thing I would say in terms of sort of America’s presence in the region, and this moving forward, moving backwards that we’re discussing, is we have relationships with regime, states in the region that are—that these states are entirely dependent on. And until we—whether we’re talking about a troop presence or other American interests in the region, until those relationships change in some way, we are always going to find ourselves deeply tied into this region. Whether we want to be there or not, we’re going to find ourselves pulled back in.

And in terms of coalitions, obviously, you know, this is—both on the—within Israeli politics and Palestinian politics, one of the key issues. Prior, of course, to October 7, Israeli politics was in a major moment of crisis. A total stalemate in the political process that has gone on for years around the issues surrounding the prime minister. And before the seventh, for about a year before the seventh, Israeli politics was stuck in a major crisis around the identity of the state, at least for Jewish Israelis, and the balance of power, and its political system, and checks and balances, and so on.

And so, I think one of the questions moving forward for Israel is, does this moment lead to some sort of unlocking of the political system that can create change? Which I don’t think is clear right now. And on the Palestinian end, we have, from the United States’s perspective, largely pursued a policy with the Palestinians and their representatives that differs in a significant way from the way that we’ve pursued our relationship with Israel and their representatives. In the bilateral relationship with Israel, we recognize a sovereign government, we recognize—although this week’s been an interesting one—we recognize that their leaders are elected, and we deal with their government, whoever it is, right?

On the Palestinian end, we don’t deal with their elected leaders, whoever they are. And we seek to kind of shape the Palestinian partner in a way that suits American interests, suits Israeli interests, particularly Israeli security interests, but doesn’t necessarily suit or reflect Palestinian interests. And this puts us in a situation where we’re asking the Palestinian leaders that we work with to do things that they simply cannot deliver, because they need to have the legitimacy or the support of the public that is required to do the kind of things that we would like them to do in any serious and lasting way. So, I’ll leave it at that. I’m sure we’ll dig into it more.

ROBINSON: Thank you. Yes, there are many directions we could go. But let first come to Keren and talk about your views in the Israeli side of the equation. What are the options that you perceive as possible?

YARHI-MILO: Yeah. (Laughs.) Yeah, right. Yes. So, I just returned from Israel last week. And, look, Israel right now—if you look at Israeli society, they’re very much still in a state of trauma. And you see a lot of—you feel the despair. And you feel the paralysis. There is a huge—the paralysis inside the government cannot be overstated. The Israeli government is one that is the most right-wing, nationalist, hawkish in the history, right, of Israel. It’s a government that doesn’t have popularity right now. If you look at the polls, Benjamin Netanyahu for the first time is really a not popular prime minister.

And yet, because Israel is in the midst of a war, there is a kind of—from the Israeli public at the moment—still the idea that there should not be massive protests against Benjamin Netanyahu to step down. But we’re seeing the beginning of break. You know, this is not going to stay like this forever. We actually see early signs that the Israeli public is willing to mobilize and maybe go back to the streets to try to put pressure on Benjamin Netanyahu to step down, given that his own coalition is very narrow, unstable. And within the War Cabinet, what you have is a bunch of key leaders who don’t trust each other, never really liked each other. And they need to make some critical decisions now about Rafah, potentially about a Saudi deal maybe in the future. Obviously, the most pressing one is the hostage deal, right?

And all of those decisions, they are not—there is paralysis within the Israeli government, within the War Cabinet. There’s a lot of mistrust. And that creates—beginning to see mistakes that are being done for a long time. We can talk about the mistakes that were done, but even now decisions that they should be making, they’re not making. So you have a public also that for many, many years, despite having multiple election campaigns for—five or six in the last couple of years—they’ve never really been about the Arab-Israeli conflict, right? Since Camp David or maybe when Ehud Olmert was prime minister, the public in Israel did not really think about the two-state solution or the future of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The idea for many years was that the status quo is sustainable, that there’s no need to really talk about this.

And things were okay. They were manageable. You can—Hamas can be appeased and contained, and the Palestinian Authority can—so, for the first time, right now, after October 7, some will come to—from the United States perspective, let’s talk about the day after. But for Israelis it’s like, what are you envisioning in the day after? This has not been part of any conversation, serious conversations, for years. So there’s going to be—and there is a vacuum in the leadership, because nobody is really picking this up. And everything in Israel right now is about the now, the immediate decisions about the hostages, and maybe a decision about whether or not to go to Rafah. Which is not really a decision the public is making, but the leadership is going to make.

So there’s no real discussion or conversation, any meaningful one—publicly, at least—about a day after, about what it would—what Gaza should look like, what two-state solution we’re talking about, what would Israel—what are the concessions and the gains from a potential Saudi deal. So that’s not part of the conversation. And that’s a problem. It’s a problem not just because those are critical decisions, and it’s not clear that this government and this prime minister has the legitimacy to really make those decisions, given how unpopular the government is.

But it’s a problem because you have to think about the domestic politics and the timelines that are in terms of the elections here, and how that’s going to affect decisions in Israel, and the strategy of the prime minister. So overall, there’s a paralysis. And it’s unfortunate, because those discussions about the future of the two states, and thinking about a diplomatic solution to this, are necessary more than ever.

ROBINSON: Thank you. That’s a pretty stark characterization of the degree to which people are not thinking about the big things that will, perforce, need to be dealt with. It’s quite an extraordinary moment.

I’d like to pull you in, Karim, to this. And ask you, because I think there have been some really unusual things regarding Iran’s activity, or not activity. A lot of the questions, what it might have done and hasn’t done. Its, if you will, semi-proxies or clients—Hezbollah, Hamas. Can you shed some light on how you see the interaction and what Iran’s approach to capitalizing or not on this moment for its own interests?

SADJADPOUR: Sure. So I would argue Iran is the most powerful country in today’s Middle East and that they dominate four or five failing states—Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, Gaza, the Palestinian territories. They’re more effective than any other country at filling power vacuums. Partly power vacuums we created with the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq and removing Saddam Hussein from power, partly the Arab uprisings of 2011 which created power vacuums. And the model they use is of Lebanese Hezbollah, which was a byproduct of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. And I call it the McDonaldization of Hezbollah. You sort of franchise in Lebanon, then you expand that franchise elsewhere.

And so, picking up on a couple of things that Yousef said. One is that, as I said, Iran thrives where there’s chaos, carnage, and instability. So, I have a difficult time seeing how we emerge from the conflict in Gaza with something better than what was the case on October 6. And I hope I’m wrong, but I’ve seen this—we’ve seen this movie before, whereby there’s efforts to destroy Hezbollah, and two years later Hezbollah emerges stronger. So that’s point one.

Point two, as Keren mentioned, the timing of October 7, in my view, also had a lot to do with the fact that there looked to be this imminent rapprochement, normalization between Saudi Arabia and Israel. And October 7 sabotaged that. And I think the calculation of Iran’s leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, is that for most people in the Middle East their heart still beats for Palestine. It doesn’t beat for peace with Israel. And unfortunately, I think that in the West—in the U.S., we like to say, well, violence doesn’t solve anything. And there’s no military solutions to political conflicts.

Well, unfortunately, Iran didn’t get that memo. Iran’s supreme leader didn’t get that memo. And what he’s seen over the last couple of decades is that Iranian-backed violence has prevailed in Iraq, in Syria, in Lebanon, in Yemen. And hopefully, we’re wrong here, but that those same kinds of forces of darkness could prevail on the day after.

ROBINSON: Karim, thank you. I want to turn now to Steven. And we will go immediately after Steven’s remarks to open up to all of your questions. Tell us what you think the road ahead looks like. And if not American diplomacy, and if not two-state solution, what then?

COOK: Okay. Linda is asking this question of me because I’m sort of the hanging judge in Washington on the two-state solution. I think, just to pick up on a couple of these remarks, the way in which we see the Middle East is—and the way in which policy on the Middle East is made—is very different from the objective realities of the Middle East. Some of that comes from the region itself. I remember a number of years ago I wrote a rather lengthy piece in Foreign Policy magazine talking about all the interlocking problems in the Middle East. And I was mostly attacked by people in the Gulf for saying that these were kind of a—this region was kind of teetering on the hopelessness. So some of it is a function of who our interlocutors are. But some of it is also a function of the way in which we go into the region with a sense—policymakers approach the region with a group of really faulty assumptions about the region.

What the Biden administration is proposing for a day after, what the Biden administration is proposing in terms of the longer-term diplomacy, the establishment of two states living side by side, seems to be far from reality. Further from reality than it was even on October 6. And the fundamental structure of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians hasn’t actually changed, which is that Israel’s minimum demands for peace cannot be satisfied by the Palestinians and the Palestinians’ minimum demand for peace cannot be satisfied by the Israelis. And those demands are actually mirror images of each other. So it makes it extremely difficult for policymakers to overcome these things, to change the incentives and constraints on Israeli politicians, who—and Palestinian politicians—who they have to deal with.

Never mind the fact all these kind of other problems that compound these issues—issues of historical memory, national identity, religion, land—all of these things that go into this make it extremely, extremely difficult to imagine how diplomats can unwind this and establish two states living side by side in peace. The other, I think, kind of odd thing about the way in which we look at this is that, despite all of our efforts to find on both sides those leaders who are going to take these steps, the politics of Israel and the politics of Palestinians defy this. Benny Gantz, a member of the War Cabinet, was just in Washington. And I think that the American officials who met with him were somewhat surprised to find that, despite the fact that he hates Benjamin Netanyahu, you know, generally a universal feeling—there’s really very little daylight between Benny Gantz and the prime minister on Rafah, on destroying Hamas, on Lebanon. In fact, in the last election—the last two election cycles in Israel, Benny Gantz ran to the right of Netanyahu on Gaza.

So we tend to—in Washington, tend to kind of take our own assumptions, bad assumptions about the region and people, and graph them onto them, and only to be surprised when they do totally different things. It is possible—and I think that not enough attention is given to this—is that this is a conflict that defies resolution. And that we have to think in terms of other than the two-state solution. Now, I have a very hard time imagining a single state. Very, very hard time. And I think that that kind of middle possibility, where we return to some version—some really ugly, disturbing, violent version of the status quo—is the outcome of this terrible, terrible conflict. Unless, and this is something else, unless the politics of this really genuinely changes.

And I don’t see the politics. People made a big deal, you know, the president is shifting his rhetoric. Chuck Schumer’s speech yesterday is supposed to be this big—I don’t see that really moving the needle. These are, as many people would—who understand more about this—would say these things are just really words at this point. I would bet that if you put it to the Congress now about if they were to unlock security assistance to Israel, it would get huge majorities of votes in the Congress to do this. That’s not to say that the politics of Israel is not changing in the United States. I think it’s very, very clearly changing, but over a longer period of time.

So, I don’t see how we can approach this in a way that is going to ultimately resolve the conflict. That’s not to suggest that we should wash our hands of it. This is too terrible a conflict. And it’s actually impinging upon U.S. national interests in the region. But I think that the idea that we can forge a two-state solution, essentially between two populations and the leadership that can’t get there, is, once again, putting ourselves down this road of endless negotiation.

ROBINSON: Thank you, Steven. I promise we’ll open up, but I know that there’ll be—and you will have opportunities to add your thoughts. I want to just—the rest of this session is yours. I’m now the traffic cop, and my goal is to get as many of you as possible into the conversation. Could I have a show of hands just to see how much? Yes, we’re going to have to manage our time. So, what I’d like to ask you, if you wouldn’t mind, please, when the mic comes to you, please do state your name and affiliation. And if you have a specific person here you would like to address your question, let’s try to triage in that fashion. But we’ll get everybody into the conversation. So again, show of hands, please. Can we start here right in the front and we’ll work our way around.

Q: Thank you. My name is Kiki Edozie. I’m affiliated with UMass Boston.

My question, though, is for all of you. I wanted to get my question in early so that you could perhaps take a second round of questions. But UN relations with both the U.S. and Israel, you haven’t talked about that. Clearly, all of us have been following the politics of the Security Council, the ceasefire resolutions, and the veto of those ceasefires. But I was wondering what you felt about Israel’s and the U.S.’s image in the world, vis-à-vis this conflict. Could you talk a little bit about it? Thank you.

ROBINSON: Good. Yes. Thank you. So, we have both the role of the UN and the image of Israel and the U.S. Just lightning round, then we’ll go down the row here. Karim, do you—

SADJADPOUR: I’d defer to Keren and Yousef. Yeah.

ROBINSON: You want to pass? Okay, Keren.

YARHI-MILO: Well, I will say that from—obviously, from the perspective of Israel, the United Nation has always been a body that—an international organization that they see as highly biased against Israel. That’s historically and it’s true of this case. In terms of the image, I think that that’s what’s at stake for Israel. I mean, the support of Israel from October 7 to now, if you look anywhere, public opinions in almost any country—and you see this also generationally—has gone down—has decreased significantly. And so, when the United States is coming and saying to Israel, to Bibi: This is not something you can just continue. There are real costs for Israel support. I mean, I see this all on campus as well. This is something that I think more and more Israelis are seeing. They’re puzzled by it. They don’t really understand it. But they have come to understand, this is a significant cost to them. Yeah.

MUNAYYER: And I would add to this too that when you look at—not just in Israel and the United States, but really in the Global South, people are looking at the situation around the world and saying: What good is international law? What good are these institutions? Why do they even exist if they cannot operate to prevent these kinds of horrific things that we are seeing? And at a moment where the American administration is trying to rally international support behind the defense of these kinds of principles—in Ukraine, the rules based order, against the aggression against territory, and so on—many people around the world are looking at American support for Israel, and what it’s doing in Gaza right now, and wondering how on Earth can you not see the hypocrisy?

So, I think, this is a big question that’s going to come out of this moment. What is the role of these institutions? And this crisis is a major one around the world, but it’s not the only one. The Ukraine crisis is another one. And I think many people are wondering in this moment where the role of the United States seems to be shifting, Russia’s and China’s role seems to be shifting, is whether or not this order that was established in the post-war era is still one that holds the water that it used to? Or do we need to start imagining or thinking about something better, something different?

ROBINSON: Thank you, Yousef. Steven, please.

COOK: Look, I think the UN Security Council is an anachronism of a global order that is not—if it’s not dead, is dying. And we don’t know what the new order is going to look like, to sound really Gramscian about the whole thing. And so I think the answer to your question is self-evident. The UN is unable to do anything. You know, neither the United States nor Israel have been particularly popular in the past. However, we don’t yet see countries actually actively moving away from the United States. We don’t see—we haven’t seen a country break diplomatic relations with either Israel or the United States. There have been ambassador recalls. These are problems. But, look, it is certainly a problem, but it has not compromised the ability of the United States to exercise its power in the world.

ROBINSON: All right. We’re going to go back. There was a question here. Please. Would you identify yourself and your affiliation?

Q: Yes. My name is Bozena Welborne and I’m at Smith College.

And, first of all, I wanted to wish anybody who’s celebrating Ramadan Kareem. But I also wanted to discuss the elephant in the room, and that’s basically 30,000-plus Palestinians dead, right? And I would definitely like to hear some comments on that. That’s not my question. My question is actually about the recent—South Africa taking to—Israel to the ICJ, like, for genocide, right? And that there have been recent discussions about further looking into whether there should be additional measures imposed on Israel to further prevent genocide because of the starvation of the Gaza population. So, I’m very curious about what everybody’s take on that is. But, in particular, I’d like to hear from Dr. Yousef Munayyer. And maybe if you could give us a little bit of a Palestinian angle on this? I know I’m taking a lot of questions here, but, also, what exactly does a one-state solution look like for Palestinians? Thanks a lot.

ROBINSON: All right. We’ll let Yousef. And then, Steven, do you want to get the one-state solution?

MUNAYYER: Yeah, there’s a lot. I mean, on the one-state thing, I would just say I’ve written a piece in Foreign Affairs a couple years ago that actually goes into this perspective in detail. And I would encourage folks to check that out.

You know, the situation on the ground right now is absolutely horrific in Gaza. Thirty thousand-plus are dead. Those are the ones that we know about. There’s massive destruction of infrastructure, countless more bodies beneath the rubble. The number of injured is significantly higher. There’s more than a million and a half people displaced. And you have mass starvation setting because of the siege and the failure to deliver humanitarian aid to people. It’s hard to look at this and not understand that the calculation here was to make Gaza unlivable. And the estimates that I’ve seen recently just to clear the rubble in Gaza now would take eight years. So, when you think about the kind of long-term impact this is going to have on the people who live in the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip, it’s beyond even what we can imagine in this moment.

I want to tell you about a nine-year-old Palestinian child from Khan Younis. He witnessed his uncle being killed in front of him by Israeli soldiers. This was in 1956. He grew up to be one of the cofounders of Hamas. Three hundred people were killed in Khan Younis then in the 1950s. Thirty thousand have been killed already in Gaza. How many children like that are going to be growing up with the lasting impact of the trauma that they saw? And how is that going to shape the way that they relate with Israel? And so, when I hear the idea that this is an Israeli effort to combat Hamas, and to make themselves more secure, and to prevent terrorism, and so on and so forth, I think about that. And I wonder how that math works.

I don’t think that this is how we get to security. And, on the issue of law—and on the issue of international law and accountability, the only way in my view—and this is the lesson that comes from us from the ancient Greeks, that you break the cycle of retribution—is through the application of law, is through the application of justice. And so, I think this needs to be sort of the guiding direction to resolving these issues. But we have to allow that to happen. And too often our government, I believe, has stood in the way of allowing that to happen, and ensuring impunity.

ROBINSON: Thank you. Steven.

COOK: Well, it’s nice to hear from a Smithy. I’m a Vassar grad.

Look, I think it’s self-evident. I think anybody really objectively looking at the situation understands the grave humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip. And that it’s unlikely to get much better anytime soon. It is a tragedy, built on top of tragedies, on top of tragedies. As far as a one-state solution goes, there is a one state reality right now. My view is—and Keren and I studied with the same mentor who has written—who is really the author of this idea, of the one state reality, Ian Lustick from the University of Pennsylvania, who believes that over a longer period of time political opportunities will emerge in which Palestinians and Israelis will find a way to live together within this one state in a more open, and just, and democratic society. I agree with the Ian 100 percent that there is a one-state reality, in which there are different regimes for Israelis and Palestinians. But I don’t think—and this is the darker view—I don’t see those political opportunities emerging that lead to a one state in which people live together side by side in democratic politics.

It goes back to what I was saying, to the original question that I fielded, which is it’s not just about the incentive structures and constraints that American politicians, leaders, have been unable to shift among Palestinians and Israelis. It is also bound up—these incentives and constraints are bound up in these questions of historical memory, identity, religion, nationalism, land, et cetera, et cetera. Those are really difficult things for diplomats to pull apart and establish new incentive structures and constraints on the political actors there. So that’s why—not because I support it. Obviously, a two-state solution would be some measure of justice, although not entirely given that Palestinians are essentially negotiating over 20 percent of historic Palestine. I just don’t see the politics—that a two-state is politics that either society can bear right now, or in the foreseeable future, or beyond that.

YARHI-MILO: Yeah. So, I would say, look, the two states is obviously—it’s something that proved itself in the past that it’s almost impossible to get to. I agree with Steven about the realities on the ground. But I think that the two—the three options is a binational state, apartheid state, or two states. And of all those three, I think that the experiment now—or at least how American decision makers are thinking about it—is the two new factors that you didn’t have, the two variables you didn’t have before, is the possibility of a Saudi deal that you didn’t have during the Oslo process. And what does it do to the incentive structure of the players to make more concessions or something like that? And we don’t know the answer to it.

And the second thing is the idea of the realization in Israeli public, maybe not right now but soon enough, that that there is almost an existential threat that’s coming from six fronts. And that the cost for Israel’s national security, the economic burden, is going to be much more significant in a post October 7. So those are the two kind of new variables that came after October 7. And we don’t know then—but for that, to be able to kind of penetrate into the Israeli public and create this desire to really restart those discussions and negotiations, is—I agree, I mean, we’re not there yet. We’re very, very far—

COOK: I wouldn’t count on the Saudi bank shot.

YARHI-MILO: Yeah. So that’s the—

ROBINSON: And the leadership to come—and the leadership to take that forward.

YARHI-MILO: The leadership. And then you need leadership to really bring it.

ROBINSON: Let me see—pardon me—let me see, again, the show of hands, because I do want—

YARHI-MILO: Wow.

ROBINSON: Yes. We’ll have to, I think, resort to a few lightning rounds. If I could take the two questions in the back, and then we’ll come forward and pick up three. I want to really make sure we get—we have twenty minutes, so we should be able to get to all of you. The mic—is the mic in the right place Thank you.

Q: Mojubaolu Olufunke Okome. I teach political science at Brooklyn College.

And, you know, I think other people have asked, but I really want to know what’s the relevance of this idea of the rule-based international order, and then the U.S. role within it? And I’m also wondering about whether the U.S. cares about perceptions of favoritism and the disparity between the policy of the country on Ukraine compared with Palestine. Plus, the reputational damage that the U.S. is suffering and what effects all this is going to have on the 2024 elections?

ROBINSON: Thank you. That’s a big list there. (Laughter.) And I’ll take the other question in the back, please. And please, if you could direct it to one of our speakers, that would be ideal.

Q: Yes. Thank you so much for the talk so far. My name is Eunice Kang from Vanguard University of Southern California.

My question is geared towards someone who can talk a bit about American public opinion and where do you think social media is? Is it skewing in favor of one side or the other in terms of, like, general trends that you may see? And is it different from the narratives being shown on traditional forms of mass media, whether it’s print or TV broadband? My second really quick question is, in terms of the presidential elections, the intersection of what’s going on in foreign affairs and our elections that are going to go on this year, do you think there is a pivoting of the Jewish voting bloc or funding and lobbying from one party to another? And also, even for the Arab-Muslim Americans, do you think they will stay committed to their party or continue to vote uncommitted?

ROBINSON: Thank you. If I might ask, Yousef, would you like to take some of that polling issue on, if you’re looking at polls? And, Keren, are you also interested in weighing in on the question of whether the American electorate?

MUNAYYER: Yeah. I mean, I think this is going to end up being an important issue in the election. And the unfortunate reality is that in our system elections are often decided by very, very tiny margins in one or two states. And when you have a hundred thousand people in Michigan, or perhaps in other places, for whom this is a key issue, and that’s been demonstrated in a number of these primary elections, you cannot ignore the reality that this will likely have some sort of impact. Will it have an impact enough to shift the outcome? I don’t know. But when margins are as small as they are, I think it’s irresponsible to ignore these numbers.

And I would also point out that what we have seen in terms of the numbers and public opinion on this issue, this is not simply an Arab American, Palestinian American, Muslim American issue of concern. The shifts that we are seeing in opinion on this issue are demographic, but they’re demographic across a wide range of constituencies, including many different people of color and including younger demographics, in particular. All of which are crucial, right, in the Democratic coalition, and a Democratic coalition that would deliver a victory for the current administration in their reelection campaign. So I think it’s really, really important.

I did just want to say one thing on the rules-based order piece. Karim talked about the gaps—the gaps across the region that are being exploited by Iran. One of the important gaps is a gap between the regimes in the region and where their publics are on this issue. Which is massive. And it’s a gap that Iran has exploited very, very significantly. Another gap is the gap between what the United States says and what the United States does. Which is another gap that not only, I think, have actors in the region exploited, but also actors globally have exploited.

And we need to think seriously about our credibility, and our leverage, and our commitments when our words don’t line up with our actions. Especially when we are preaching so hard about a rules-based order in one place and doing something quite different elsewhere.

ROBINSON: Yes, Karim, you want to come in?

SADJADPOUR: I mean, I’d just say one thing. Which is I think social media and public opinion are two different things. And social media passion oftentimes isn’t a reflection of public opinion. And I think, frankly, it’s going to be a big experiment. We’re going to see how this plays out in 2024. A colleague of mine told me he recently met with the staff of Senator Fetterman of Pennsylvania, who has probably been the most outspokenly supportive—supportive of Israel—among Senate Democrats. And he asked him about this. We see online there’s a lot of social media activism against him. And he asked the staff member about how that’s been impacting him. And he said, our polling numbers are actually up as a result of—since October 7. So I’m not sure.

I grew up in Michigan. So I speak to my friends back home. And obviously I hear that enormous disappointment with President Biden. But I don’t think that the social—the tweets are oftentimes an accurate reflection of public opinion. The only other thing I’d say is that I have been teaching a class at Georgetown on U.S. strategy toward the Middle East for many years. And each week we assign students a different country. And one of them is meant to be briefing the leader of whatever country we’re dealing with, and the other is meant to be briefing the U.S. national security adviser.

So whenever we come to Syria, for example, these students would just—the ones that were having to brief the U.S. national security adviser and how to manage Syria, were just tearing their hairs out. And I would say, listen, you’re not expected to resolve this issue. (Laughter.) You’re taking a conflict which is a ten and you’re trying to make it an eight. And there’s no other regions in the world where we have this ten-out-of-ten conflicts than the Middle East—in the world than the Middle East. And if there’s anything, in my view, that we should be left with today, there’s really no facile solutions to these tragic challenges we’re facing in the region. And we have so many ten-out-of-ten challenges and just we’re trying to make them an eight.

ROBINSON: Crisis management. Keren and then Steven. Let’s try to be brief.

YARHI-MILO: Very quickly, on Biden. I would say the next—it’s still early, but the next couple of—the next two months are going to be critical. And given what I think we will be seeing coming out of the region, and so that can shift things. On the Democrat—and look, Trump, we know the foreign policy is going to be much more isolationist in terms of Ukraine and in terms of Europe and in the rest of the world. And in terms of the Middle East. It’s not clear that for those voters who are unhappy with Biden they will see a better foreign policy coming out of Trump that they would like better.

On the younger generation, I teach a class at Columbia, at my school. Four hundred students. I teach it with Secretary Clinton, Hillary Clinton. And so it’s about crisis decision making. And what we’ve seen during the semester, and that when we brought up the issue of—after October 7, when we talked about Oslo, and we talked about the peace process, when we talk—the students, most of them were puzzled. They didn’t know anything about the history, right? We have not been teaching about the Arab-Israeli conflict. We really have not been offering classes. I know, we know all—I mean, you are all educators, like me. We know the problems of who would want to teach this, right? And then how do you—(laughter)—but we also—and we should talk.

But we also see the consequences of that, right? And the discussion becomes very shallow. It’s very emotional. And the students have strong opinions. But they’re not really based on understanding of context, history, complexity. And we really had to do a lot of work at SIPA, at Columbia, in the class, she and I, to just try to get to a point to where we can have a real conversation and real disagreement. And that’s what I hope that we will continue to do. I think it’s critical. And for this audience, I’m happy to talk more about this. And I can share with you what I’ve done that I found to be successful and where I think we can go. But we cannot leave this like this for much longer. There is a vacuum that we created that’s been taken over by social media narratives that are not helpful for our students to really engage with the world.

ROBINSON: Thank you for that offer. Steven.

COOK: Just three quick points. First, let me just preface this by saying I do policy not politics. But I will say that probably for the first time since Kennedy’s Statler Hotel speech, the Statler Hotel, which was the Pennsylvania hotel which was torn down recently, American Jews are in play. They may vote for Joe Biden in large numbers. They may stay home. But certainly, Jews in the United States may be voting more down ballot for Republicans, if they can find ones that aren’t MAGA-affiliated Republicans. This is all anecdotal, but there is clearly a rethinking within the American Jewish community about allies, about discourse, about public discourse, and what’s good for them, and what’s not for them. Even if 76 percent of American Jews or higher voted for Joe Biden in 2020 and only 66 percent or 69 percent, it’s a big movement for the American Jewish community.

To pick up one quickly on something that Keren said, those who may be looking to Trump actually don’t understand the fact that he’s the one who broke the Carter doctrine and the Reagan corollary in the Middle East. In the long summer of 2019, the Iranians and their proxies were attacking shipping in the Gulf, shooting down American drones, and culminated in the attack on Saudi Arabia two major oil processing facilities. The President shrugged. And that was one moment of bipartisan comedy in Washington, where we basically threw out forty years of declared U.S. policy, which goes back to my point about hedging.

And finally, on this question of double standards, it’s undoubtedly the case that the United States has double standards. You talk to senior policymakers, and they say it’s virtually impossible not to have double standards. I will point you to one of my favorite articles written by Jeane Kirkpatrick in the November 1979 Commentary magazine called “Dictatorships and Double Standards.” But I do have to say that I think that your point, professor, about the double standards between Ukraine and Israel and Palestine, I don’t think it holds. And I think you can only make that argument if you erase what happened on October 7. And I think senior policymakers have seen the footage from October 7. Raise your hand if you’ve seen the footage from October 7, the hour-and-a-half footage from October 7.

I think that in the discourse and in the devastation of Gaza, we have forgotten the fact of what happened on October 7. Now, certainly the 30,000-plus more Palestinians who have been killed in Gaza is an enormous, enormous number. But there were 1,200 people who were butchered on the morning of October 7. And that’s why the administration looks at this in a very different way than what you’re suggesting. And I think that that’s—and that’s the way in which they have proceeded, even as they have changed—even as they have changed their discourse somewhat in recent weeks.

ROBINSON: So, I’m going to take three, now we have four. We have so many questions. I am mindful of our time. Could the mic start here? And let’s take—I’m sorry, I think we can only really manage three. We’ll end up with this gentleman here.

Q: Mark Diamond, Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.

My question is for Kere and Yousef. Keren, are you seeing in Israel quiet talk of Israelis saying we’ve had enough, it’s time to leave? High tech entrepreneurs certainly could go most anywhere in the world. Are you beginning to see talk of an exodus? Yousef, in Palestinian territories, for those who are able to get out, are you seeing people saying: Enough of this conflict. It’s not going to end. I need to do everything possible to get out of the region?

ROBINSON: Thank you. And in front here. Yes. Please direct your question if you could.

Q: Yeah. Hi, my name is Jack Weinstein.

I’m not sure exactly who to direct this to, but it’s an extension of—the I’m at the University of North Dakota—of the conversation you just had. And the question I have is, is it even possible to have a real, honest, mainstream conversation about the Israel-Palestine debate when so many people are virtue signaling and not just performing their politics, but are pressured to perform their politics? How much—is it even possible to have a conversation that isn’t in a very controlled, very academic, very specialized environment?

ROBINSON: Excellent. And let’s come up here for our last question. The gentleman in the blue shirt.

Q: I’m Mark Tessler from University of Michigan. And I teach a course on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict where we go into great detail. And I’d be happy to share my syllabus if anybody wants it.

If there were more time, I’d want to kind of add—talk a little bit more about the Israeli public, because we’ve been talking mostly about leaders, and there have been some references to the public. I think it’s the case that people outside don’t really understand how traumatic this was for Israel. And that’s just—everything is different now, from the Israeli point of view. Nevertheless, it’s puzzling to me that they can’t see what’s happening in Gaza and understand how it’s going to look to people outside, including many in the U.S. Seems sort of blind to that, in some sense. And it’s partly understandable, but it’s tragic and maybe not entirely understandable.

Also, on the Israeli public, the peace camp has disappeared. Meretz didn’t even get a seat in the last election. When Israelis think about territorial compromise, and fewer and fewer of them do for now, they’re not thinking about the Palestinians. They’re thinking of unilateral disengagement, some sort of a process where it’s not based on negotiations with the Palestinians, working out something that makes sense for both sides. Maybe that will change, but I think it’s not only leaders, and the coalition problems, and Netanyahu’s do anything to keep the war going on so that he doesn’t have to go to jail. I think we—there’s some real problems with respect to the public. And that’s what I put on the table as an additional factor that supports the general argument that others are making.

ROBINSON: Thank you very much. I think we’ll start with Steven and just come down the line with each having a final few minutes. But please be as succinct as possible.

COOK: Just to Mark Tessler’s last point, I think the Israeli public is only—they’re paralyzed, and I think they’re somewhat unaware. I was on the phone with an Israeli the other day who told me they’re just now starting to understand what is the devastation in Gaza, because their sons and daughters are coming back from it, and that the news is starting to show it. But that did not shift that we must destroy Hamas and maybe even turn our attention to Hezbollah.

Someone who is genuinely a hero in Israel, but someone who is of what I guess remains of the center or the left, one of the—one of the pilots who took part in the Osirak attack in 1981, has recently said: We’d rather be pariahs than dead. And I think that that is a really mainstream thinking in Israel right now. And I don’t think people have really grasped the depth of that. I mean, Keren’s been there. I plan to go. That’s very profound, that that there’s a larger—one second.

I just want to get to this question about mainstream conversations. I actually think it’s easier to have mainstream conversations about the Arab-Israeli conflict among people than it is to have conversations about it on university campuses.

ROBINSON: Thank you. Yousef.

MUNAYYER: You know, I see it differently. I mean, with my own experiences in having these conversations, speaking on many campuses, doing a class on this myself, I haven’t seen it that way. And I think a lot of times some of the incidents that that do happen on college campuses get magnified and blown way out of proportion and end up creating this chilling effect that prevents us from having the important conversations and doing the education.

COOK: Well, that’s part of the problem.

MUNAYYER: It’s a critical thing to teach. And the fact that so many people are apprehensive or afraid to teach it is really tragic.

In terms of your question on Palestinians wanting to leave, few things are stronger among Palestinians than a generational trauma of being forced from your land. And I think Palestinians have been living under extremely difficult conditions for a very long time, while maintaining the absolute need to remain on their land as long as they possibly can, despite these conditions. Obviously, for many in Gaza today this is simply not possible, right? And there are—there are many who, if they have the opportunity to leave Gaza, of course, they are doing that, because they want to survive.

The other point that I would make in regard to October 7, of course, is when it comes to the double standards question, history didn’t start on October 7, right? The world understands that and the world has been seeing American double standards on the issue of Israel-Palestine for much before October 7, let alone after it. So I think this is one of the reasons why that is so important.

COOK: I disagree.

ROBINSON: Thank you.

MUNAYYER: And the last thing I would just say about Israeli society, because you raise the important point, and I think you’re absolutely right, that they’re still living in the trauma of October 7. I would argue this is—as painful as it is emotionally—politically, it’s a more comfortable place for Israel and Israelis to be than having to confront the questions of what comes after. Why did the state fail? This is a crucial debate that has to happen in Israel. Why did the government fail? What is the future of our relationship with these people?

ROBINSON: Yousef—

MUNAYYER: Why—sorry. OK, go ahead. (Laughter.)

ROBINSON: Thank you. I—

MUNAYYER: There’s a long list of other questions, by the way.

ROBINSON: I’m sorry. I know. And I thank you all to understand my obligation to keep us on time. Keren, could you briefly sum up? And I do want to give Karim a last word as well.

YARHI-MILO: So, very quickly, I heard more Israelis talking about leaving during the protests around the judicial reform. That was the time that a lot of them were saying, enough. We don’t believe in what’s going on. After October 7, actually a lot of them—it’s a kind of rally around the flag and feeling that this is an existential threat, and they matter, and they need to serve, and they need to—so we don’t know. But I think that if you won an election and you’re going to get another right-wing, religious government, and the really the ultraorthodox will continue not to serve in the military, or—then you will see a lot of the secular high-tech people definitely will leave or will start talking about it.

Discourse, it’s hard, but we’re trying. And, again, and I can tell you under what conditions I think it’s more likely to succeed to have those conversations on campus than others. But that’s a different conversation. On the public, absolutely. Look, there is a narrative out there in Israel that we tried Camp David, they say, right? We got this set—we didn’t get an agreement even though it was a generous offer. There was Intifada that came afterwards. Ariel Sharon withdrew from Gaza, and you get October 7. We tried appeasing Hamas with money, and it didn’t work. So, there is a kind of a—for the Israeli public, they’re asking themselves, so how—where’s the guarantee that there’s actually not going to be another October 7, or worse, if we’re doing—so that’s the narrative that a leadership has to come in and change.

ROBINSON: Can you—can you have a final word for how—

Q: (Off mic.)

ROBINSON: Excuse me, I’m sorry, I’m just trying to wrap here. I appreciate your understanding. A final word of how to teach this important issue.

SADJADPOUR: Sure. I’m standing between all of you and coffee break, so one final point. (Laughter.) Which is, I think, as you’ve heard today, everyone feels like they are the victim in today’s Middle East. The Palestinians are David against the Israeli Goliath. Israel is David against the Arab and Muslim Goliath. Iranians, Shiites feel they’re the victims of Sunnis. Sunnis feel the victim of Shiites, Kurds, Christians, et cetera. And when you feel you’re the victim, it can justify almost any action, because you’re saying we need it to survive. And we don’t—we have leaders whose primary goal is to stay in power. They’re not primarily focused on the wellbeing of their citizens, and they’re appealing to these victimization complexes. And I don’t think we’re going to see any positive change absent a sea change in a lot of the leaders of these nations.

ROBINSON: Thank you very much. I hope you will sacrifice these few minutes of your coffee break. They do want to begin as on your schedule. Thank you all so very much. (Applause.)

(END)

FASKIANOS: All right, everybody. We are going to get started, so we can keep the day moving along. So if I could have your attention, please. OK. Everybody make their way in, and we are going to get started.

I’m going to turn it over now to Steven Cook. So please, if we could have your attention.

COOK: Hey, come on in. Come to the front. I feel like a professor. You have to sit in the front.

Oh, that’s great, Irina. I should have done that. I should have done that. I’m sorry.

Hey, it’s great to be back here, and not talking about the Middle East. And you can see that, actually, my sunny disposition matches who I am, rather than the disconnect between my sunny disposition and my subject matter.

I’m not here to talk to you about the Middle East. I’m here to tell you about a fellowship offering we have at the Council on Foreign Relations called the International Affairs Fellowship for Tenured International Relations Scholars. Now, that is a mouthful. We’ve been searching for different names for this, but we can’t come up with one, so we call it the IAF-TIRS, which is even more of a mouthful.

What the International Affairs Fellowship for Tenured International Relations Scholars does is it invites people who are more senior—though not necessarily in age, but age is not a problem either—to, on their sabbatical year, with the help of the Council on Foreign Relations, to find a position in the U.S. government, whether the executive branch, on Capitol Hill, or with international organizations, to spend a year essentially getting your hands dirty in the policymaking world.

The Council will cover half of a sabbatical year salary, up to $80,000. And like I said, we will help you get a position, in line with your interests, in the government. This fellowship’s been on offer since 2016. I took it over a number of years ago, and have worked really hard to grow it, and make it an institutionalized thing, like our traditional International Affairs Fellowship, which is actually older than me.

So it’s a—it’s fantastic for those of you who teach about American foreign policy, who are interested in American foreign policy. It’s really just a wonderful opportunity to spend a year. What’s great about it is, when you are trying to match up with a government agency or on Capitol Hill, you can say that you are free labor. And I tell you, in Washington, DC, people love free labor. (Laughter.) As long as they can create the position for you—and people are hungry. People within the bureaucracy are hungry for people who have expertise.

Let me just underline the fact that even though it’s called the International Affairs Fellowship for Tenured International Relations Scholars, we define international relations really rather broadly. You do not need to be a political scientist. I’m a political scientist; why would you want to be a political scientist? You don’t have to be a historian. We really, across fields—I see an IAF-TIRS alum here. Raise your hand, Samer Shehata. Woo! He had a great experience at the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, a year or so ago. So he can tell you offline what a—what a great experience it was.

And you know, very quickly, before I run to my next Amtrak hell experience, do you have any questions about the IAF-TIRS? Please apply.

Sir.

Q: What sort of things are you looking—

COOK: Oh, wait for the mic.

Q: Sorry.

COOK: I could hear him. I could hear him.

Q: I was in the Army, so I learned how to project my voice.

COOK: Oh, I was not. (Laughs.) Steve was not.

Q: Stephen Quackenbush, University of Missouri.

What sort of things are you looking for, in terms of an application, and so forth?

COOK: We’re—and you know, we’re not—

Q: To be competitive.

COOK: We’re not looking for anything specific. We are looking for people who are interested in, as I said, getting their hands dirty working at the State Department, Defense Department, Treasury, Senate Foreign Relations Committee, World Bank, IMF. If those things are of interest to you—you know, we’ve placed people in all kinds of places. NASA. We have someone who is going to work in the State Department’s Bureau of Cultural Affairs. So like I said, it’s really broadly defined. And I think people have gotten a lot out of it.

We are right now in the process of reapplying for the fellowship. So we won’t be recruiting this spring. We’ll start—assuming we get the grant again, we’ll have a very quick recruitment in late summer, early fall, once we—once we start up, assuming we get—the grant is renewed.

Other questions? My Smith friend. Go Seven Sisters.

Q: Yeah. There we go.

This may be a little bit of a strange question, but do you offer childcare or even childcare services in conjunction with this?

COOK: No, we don’t offer childcare services. But if, for example, you were—

Q: Is that—I mean—

COOK: —if you were to get a position at the State Department, your child, if they are of the age, may be able to get a spot at Diplotots, which is the State Department’s childcare place. You’d be surprised how many federal agencies actually have their own childcare things.

Just as an aside, in the DC office of the Council on Foreign Relations, there’s a building next to us. And we all call it the—it’s the FDIC’s and USTR and someone else’s childcare. And we call it the baby zoo, because there’s big windows, and you get to walk by, and see all the toddlers and babies. (Laughter.) Then if you’re having—if you’re like, something really, really awful happened in the Middle East, which is, like, daily, I go down there, and I look at the little kids. (Laughter.) The baby zoo.

Back there.

So, get a position at, like FDIC. Baby zoo.

Q: Hi. My name is Gbemisola Abiola. I’m from Harvard University.

I’m just going to say this off the limb. Is it just for tenured professors, or people en route to tenure? Or just people starting out?

COOK: It is—this particular—

Q: What’s the option for people like me?

COOK: This particular fellowship offering is strictly for tenured professors. But if you’re not tenured, there’s also the International Affairs Fellowship, which is related to the fellowship that I run, which is open to people who are not yet tenured.

I had—there was a question that he’s writing. Sir, you had a question?

Q: Yeah.

COOK: Wait for the mic. Wait for the mic. Otherwise, Irina will get mad at me. (Laughter.) And you.

Q: Oh, OK.

My name is Vijay Shah, and I am from West Virginia University at Parkersburg.

I just wanted to check how many positions you’re looking for in this? It’s just one, or?

COOK: We place anywhere from five to seven per cycle. So we have—our funding cycle is in three years. We place two classes; we renew, and then we have two classes. So we’re committed to placing twelve, thirteen people, as the funding exists.

Microphone, microphone, microphone.

Q: OK.

Are there any specific policy focus areas you are looking for—

COOK: Nope.

Q: Like technology, economics, et cetera?

COOK: Nope. Nope.

Q: Anything for foreign policy.

COOK: Things that interest you, in the application it’s important in the five hundred words we give you, which is really not a lot. (Laughs.) How did I get into graduate school on five hundred words? I have no idea.

But the—in that five hundred words, to connect what your interests are to three agencies you might want to look for—work at, and why you would benefit, and why they would benefit. It’s, you know, pretty straightforward. But we are not saying—the Council doesn’t say, we are looking for three people who work on AI, two people who work on whatever. No. Apply. We have a committee that looks at these and makes these decisions.

In the back, sir. How much time do I have, Irina?

Q: (Off mic)—Raisinghani.

COOK: I have good subway karma today.

Go.

Q: Hi. my name’s Mahesh Raisinghani, Texas Woman’s University.

Just a quick question, and I think it was also shared by some of the people on the table. For tenured faculty, how does this—in terms of taking them away from their institution, how does that work in terms of the duration? And then, I guess, could this be tied in with a sabbatical, if—

COOK: That’s what it’s exactly for. During your sabbatical year, and that would be twelve months of your sabbatical year. And like I said, the Council would cover 50 percent of your sabbatical salary, up to $80,000.

There is relocation funds. So if you are going to work at USAID in Washington, DC, we have funds available to each fellow that’s been selected to help with relocation. Obviously, we have placed people at OECD in Europe; those funds don’t go as far. But we do have increasingly generous, but not too generous, relocation funds.

Irina is telling me—oh, one more question. One more, and then I can go. But wait for the mic.

Q: This is really practical, but how does the Council on Foreign Relations handle, for example, people’s health insurance and other kinds of—

COOK: So you stay on the university’s—your university’s health insurance, OK?

OK. If you’re interested, I look forward to hearing from you. Email, call, happy to talk more about it. Like I said, we are reapplying for funds. Knock—I don’t know if this is real wood—but knock on wood that we get it.

And it was wonderful to see all of you, and not talk about the Middle East for five minutes. (Laughter.)

Thanks so much. Take care. (Applause.)

NETCHVOLODOFF: I invariably have the privilege of following the very charismatic Steven Cook. So—(laughs)—I’m used to this by now. But wonderful to hear from him.

Welcome. I’m Caroline Netchvolodoff, vice president for Education at the Council. And I look forward to very briefly giving you an overview of our work, and how we hope to support you as you navigate this particularly challenging time for us all.

There is little doubt, I would say, that the headlines today generate more questions than they do answers. How many of you have students who have come to you with a fact that they’ve learned online, that you either know to be false, or presume to be false? Give me a—yeah. I don’t think any of us are unaware that this is happening at an increasing rate. And of course, it’s one thing if the fact relates to something like the release of a golden sneaker, or something about Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift. But unfortunately, more and more students are learning online mis- and disinformation about global affairs issues. And they both want and need to be able to separate fact from fiction amidst the deluge of daily news. They need to know how to find, evaluate, and use trustworthy information.

There is an acute need to strengthen what we at the Council on Foreign Relations refer to as global literacy. Global literacy comprises the knowledge, the skills, and the perspective required to engage effectively as a citizen. Sadly—and I think we all know this as well—a significant gap exists in students’ understanding of the world around them today.

So, just what does it look like when a student is globally literate? Let’s consider the following scenario. A student is on TikTok, surprise, surprise. Although maybe not for much longer; we’ll see. (Laughter.) And sees a post about the war in Ukraine that says Russia had the right to invade Ukraine, because it was provoked by NATO. A globally literate student would, at the very least, understand that Ukraine is a sovereign nation. They would possess the knowledge and critical thinking skills to understand that Russia’s invasion went against international law. And they would understand that what they’ve encountered online is not an accurate portrayal of the facts.

CFR Education has created a vast repository of open educational resources to do—among other important things—link the global to the local, and the local to the global; inform citizens so that they can advocate for effective policies, and vote for public officials who support those policies; and obviously, most important, strengthen democracy and national security by curbing dis- and misinformation and polarization.

CFR Education aims to help close the global literacy gap in our country by providing educators like you with what we call the three As: accurate, accessible, and authoritative global affairs resources. Guided by both curricular and accessibility considerations, our materials include companion teaching resources that have been created specifically for you, to help you with your teaching.

Educators cannot and should not be experts on every global issue, especially at the rate our world is changing today. So, I just—I’m going to quickly highlight two of our products today, before turning to a panel discussion. I’m speaking a little bit faster than I usually do, because I’m super eager to hear from a—from all of you in the audience, but a couple of our—what I call—super users.

World101 is a collection of open educational multimedia resources on the fundamentals of international relations and foreign policy. Designed to help students understand the essential issues, forces, and actors that shape global affairs, World101 supports educators with its videos, maps, graphs, charts, essays, timelines, and teaching resources—importantly, teaching resources that can easily be added to any—or, any part of a syllabi. And I would just direct you—given, in light of our last conversation, or our conversation this morning, there’s a timeline on—an Israeli-Palestinian timeline available on World101, that I highly recommend, to help you provide context and a sense of history in your classes.

Our essay and discussion questions were created in collaboration with higher ed instructors like you, and specifically for use in a variety—a large variety of college classrooms. They can serve as a starting point, no matter how you stretch your classes.

Model Diplomacy is a free simulation program that invites educators and their students to step into the roles of decision-makers on either the National Security Council or the UN Security Council. Our many and full-length simulations help students develop critical thinking skills, persuasive speaking, and writing, collaboration skills. And it gives them hands-on experience grappling with some of today’s most complicated global issues. The mini simulations, which we’re going to be doubling down on creating much more of—are short case studies on historical and current events, that can be run with less time and preparation than required for a full case.

Those of you who already receive the CFR Education newsletter know that it delivers a rich selection of resources directly to your inbox every Sunday. The content in the newsletter is curated from World101, Model Diplomacy, and across the organization, including Foreign Affairs articles. And it’s accompanied by instructor resources to help you teach the topics in your syllabi, in addition to the latest foreign policy news. If you haven’t already signed up, you can scan the QR code—it’s at the end of the presentation—to ensure that you get the newsletter, including exciting updates about programming like this, and announcements. For instance, we’re releasing a totally new CFR Education site in about eight weeks, and so you’ll have information about that, as well.

So enough from me. I promised to be quick. Happy to welcome two CFR Education ambassadors to the stage, to talk about their experience using our resources. Again, they’re super users. And come on up, Rudy and Jean. Thanks. (Applause.)

I should say, also, that the CFR ambassador program is a nine-month engagement, that connects educators across the world with resources, professional development activities, and a network of likeminded professionals who are committed to global literacy. So, welcome both. Before we dive in, if you could both just briefly introduce yourselves, tell us where you’re from, and the classes that you teach, that would be great.

Jean.

ABSHIRE: Yeah.

I’m Jean Abshire. I’m from Indiana University Southeast. I’m in political science and the interdisciplinary international studies. I am a forced generalist—(laughs)—because I am now in a department of one on the international side. So, jack of all trades, sadly maybe master of none anymore—(laughs)—which is maybe why I rely on CFR so much. (Laughs.)

NETCHVOLODOFF: Rudy.

NOVAK: Hi. I’m Rudy Novak. I teach political science at the U.S. Air Force Academy, which is a federal institution service academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Just real quick about that, we’re about four thousand students, all undergraduates. My teaching is primarily three courses. Number one—which I’ll talk about here in my presentation—in the fall, I taught an American government and national security course. It was a kind of blend of American government, civ-mil relations, and national security. This semester, I teach an international security course, which is like an intro to international relations. And then I also teach a European organizations course.

NETCHVOLODOFF: Great. Well, let’s dive right in. Jean, how have you used World101 in your classes?

ABSHIRE: I’ve used it a lot. (Laughter.) One of the things I really appreciate about World101—I always want to say World War I—(laughs)—it never comes out right. So if I misspeak, just translate for me. (Laughs.)

NETCHVOLODOFF: I had the same problem. And I started saying the First World War, to fight against this impulse. (Laughter.)

ABSHIRE: That’s—oh, I’ll—maybe I should do that. (Laughs.)

NETCHVOLODOFF: It’s a tongue twister.

ABSHIRE: It is. (Laughs.) When you spend half your life talking about one thing, and then suddenly, another.

But one of the things I really love is the flexibility of the world war—(laughter)—World101—(laughs)—learning materials. I have used both entire modules, give it to the students, have them prepare, talk about elements in class. I will say that the instructor resources are a great thing, as a—as a basis for discussions and in-class activities. I like to do a lot of active learning in my classes, and a lot of them are very active learning-oriented.

But also, one of the things I really appreciate is that it’s really easy to pick out just one page out of a unit—(laughs)—and give that to the students in class. Preparation can vary. I will often just give them a page, and then have an activity based off of it. I think we’ve got a couple up here.

And just depending on time, it varies what I do. Sometimes, I’ll just put them into groups, and have them use the resources on the topic page, and have them report out from their groups, after they’ve explored it. Other times, I will use it as a foundation for having them do some additional research, and then report out in their groups, so we can kind of broaden out the topics. The flexibility is wonderful.

NETCHVOLODOFF: Great.

Rudy, I’d love to hear a little bit from you. And I know these folks would too.

NOVAK: Yeah.

So, I use a very similar manner, but I’ll talk about some other ways I use it. So number one, for the World101 thing, so I would just throw in the European organizations class this semester—which I’m sure a lot of you can relate; we have to teach a class that maybe you don’t have the expertise in. And it was very helpful to—once I designed my syllabus, to kind of go through and be like, OK, I didn’t forget anything. Like, there was—there’s no big events during the Cold War that I need—that I forgot to talk about when I’m explaining the history of NATO, for example.

Also, the videos. So, the videos have been very helpful. We all know our students learn in different manners. So common examples of how I use this.

So, in my fall class, the American government and national security course, we primarily talk about American government, but we start introducing international security. In my class, I had a student, like, Sir, why are we in Ukraine? Right? And for the record, I—my students are just like any of your students. They just happen to be at a service academy. But they don’t know, as—maybe a little bit more about what’s going on. But their knowledge is fairly low in these type of situations.

So I said, well—oh, let me clarify one thing. The things that I say are my opinion alone, things I do in the classroom, not that of the United States Air Force—(laughter)—or the U.S. Air Force Academy.

So, I repeated the—we are in Ukraine to support the liberal world order. OK, well, what’s that? OK, well, I just now went off on a side track of, I think we were talking about, like, the different positions, and the National Security Council. And like, OK, really briefly, by the way, I’m going to send you this video. And what was—doesn’t always happen, for the record—they actually watched the video. (Laughter.) Yeah. Yeah, exactly. They actually watched the video. And then the next class, we came together, and they—oh, yeah, Sir—and then just talked about things that they learned in that video. And that’s that liberal world order. So, just an extra thing to supplement your material, when you don’t have time in class.

This other one on the right, how to collect intelligence. So in my course I’m teaching right now, I’m going through the instruments of power, talking about the informational tool. I divide that up into intelligence and influence. So really quickly, set the baseline for what intelligence is, was using this video. So three or four minutes in class, and then we can move on with other things and go into a little more depth in topic.

ABSHIRE: So Rudy, one other difference between your students and mine, at least, is that they call you Sir. (Laughter.)

NOVAK: That is true.

ABSHIRE: Rather than, hey, or uh. (Laughter.)

NOVAK: Fair.

ABSHIRE: That’s—that must be nice. (Laughs.)

NETCHVOLODOFF: That’s so great.

What about Model Diplomacy? Jean, can you share a little bit about your experience with the simulation program?

ABSHIRE: Yeah, I’ve done more of the pop-up or mini cases, mini simulations, than I have of the full simulations. So—although I did do one full one asynchronously online. And I do want to talk a little bit about that.

The mini simulations, I really like, also, because of flexibility. There’s a very simple one-page handout that you can give to students, assign them in advance, with some links on it for additional support, so they can prepare, come into class. Again, kind of depending on time, I’ve put them into groups, and have—had them come up with the—what they think is the best of the policy options. Alternatively, I have had them in their groups, actually perform the roles of national security members, and discuss it from those different perspectives, again, just depending on time.

I’ve done the Ukraine—one of the Ukraine simulations, defending Ukraine, departure from Afghanistan, and the repression of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang. So those have been great.

I did a—(laughs)—converted the full simulation, collapse of Venezuela, onto a fully asynchronous class, and ended up moving it to Canvas, our learning management system, to keep it simplified, so the students didn’t have to learn a new system. That was some work, but it worked really well.

And one thing that I—that is really important to know about doing that, is—and I’ve got a list here of skills that I don’t want to miss any on—I wanted to give my asynchronous students the same kind of experience that I give my students in classes, face to face, where I do a lot of simulations, and to learn those same skills. The research on simulations indicates that there are higher levels of learning and engagement when using simulations—(laughs)—so I lean so heavily into those. And the skills that I think students gain from those include problem-solving, critical thinking, writing, argumentation, negotiation—specifically with Model Diplomacy—crisis responsiveness, managing multi-faceted problems, empathy, perspective-taking, collaboration, responsibility to a group, responsiveness to deadlines, and more. And these are valuable skills throughout their lives—college, work, the whole thing.

So—

NETCHVOLODOFF: Did you mention common—I’m looking at the slide. But common sense. This is enough of an argument right there—

ABSHIRE: Oh, my—

NETCHVOLODOFF: —for using simulations, right? I mean—

ABSHIRE: Yes, I mean—(laughs). That seems to be an increasingly scarce thing.

NETCHVOLODOFF: Unbelievable. (Laughter.) I want to take that home for my dinner table, so yeah.

ABSHIRE: There you go—I know. (Laughs.)

NETCHVOLODOFF: That’s just great. I mean, really wonderful that you used it asynchronously, successfully. And I know it probably took a little bit of work. We have a new website that's coming, and I think there will be less work required to do something like that, with this new site. So, really interesting.

Rudy, what about model simulation—

NOVAK: Yeah.

NETCHVOLODOFF: Model Diplomacy—yeah.

NOVAK: I was fortunate to take some pictures, my last—in the fall. So there—we’ll talk about that.

So, in my American government and national security class in the fall, the capstone event is a crisis simulation. And how we do this is we actually use the Model Diplomacy module. I chose, for this past semester, the North Korean scenario. And how we did this was I assigned—we’re very fortunate, at the Air Force Academy, smaller classes. So my section—or one of my sections is about twenty-two students. So what I did was I divided the class in half, assigned it some—OK, we’re doing the North Korean scenario. Go in, log in, get some backgrounder on the situation. And oh, by the way, this is your position. Which they have no idea, what—why is the—why is the secretary of the treasury on the National Security Council when we’re talking about North Korea?

OK, so, we then go into the class period, where they—the national security adviser, one of the students—cadets, as we call them—is in charge of the meeting. And they brainstorm what they think the correct course of action should do. During that time, I bring them out into the hallway, position by position, and give them—in the Air Force, we call them injects, white-force injects—but like, trying to—changing the situation a little bit, to make them think critically. More intelligence came in. Mr. Secretary of Treasury, you—your department has identified some accounts for some influential leaders in the Kim Jong-Un regime, right? So, kind of get them thinking, like, oh, accounts, maybe that’s sanctions. They have no idea what sanctions are, for the record, at that point. (Laughter.)

OK, so then they go home. They then write a position paper based on their individual position, giving at least two courses of action, submitted to me. Also, by the way, outside the class, they have to work together as a group to come up with a presentation to present to me, as the president of the United States. (Laughter.) So, you can see me there in the—actually, the same blue suit, actually—(laughter)—with my president of the United States cufflinks, of course. We wear uniforms all the time, but that was kind of like a little treat. I couldn’t get the cadets to wear civilian clothes.

NETCHVOLODOFF: I know, that’s—yeah, so disappointing. But yeah. (Laughter.)

NOVAK: Yeah. But, so they have the placards. They then presented to me their course of action, like we would have at an—at a National Security Council meeting. I ask them questions, kind of probe their knowledge and their position. And then at the end, they recommended to me a position, and then I chose a position. And then we debriefed it all.

And that was kind of just using these materials to actually understand the different positions within the National Security Council, the different positions of American government, especially in security. Because while our cadets—I’m talking a lot; I apologize—while our cadets know a lot about military stuff, again, the Treasury. They have no idea what the secretary of treasury does, or commerce, or name the other positions on the security council that’s not the DOD.

NETCHVOLODOFF: Well, I think that’s the case—you know, I don’t think most Americans understand that on the National Security Council, everybody comes with a different agenda, and a different perspective. The secretary of defense has a very different agenda than the secretary of the Treasury.

So, it is Model Diplomacy in that sense. It’s diplomacy around the table, amongst, actually, U.S. citizens, who are forming policy.

The other thing that I wanted to just quickly mention about Model Diplomacy is that it—there’s—there are no winners. This is—this is the process and understanding that making a policy decision—whether you choose one, two, three, or eighteen—there are always trade-offs. There are pluses and minuses. It’s very gray. There’s not a black-and-white answer to any given decision. And it’s very complicated. So I do think, in that sense, that Model Diplomacy and simulations in general really do help build these critical thinking skills, that I think we all are really determined that our students build.

ABSHIRE: Yeah.

NETCHVOLODOFF: So thank you so much for your insights on our programming and our content. It’s super helpful to have the feedback.

We want feedback from all of you about our content and programming. We can’t do what we’re doing without it. We can’t improve what we’re putting online. We can’t improve our teaching resources, et cetera. So please, the good, the bad, the ugly. We had some great recommendations and suggestions. We had a breakfast this morning with our ambassador group, which is—it’s much bigger than the representation here today. But if you could stand up, if you’re one of our Higher Ed Ambassadors. We—just so folks in the room can see who you are. First of all, thank you for your—for your help.

NOVAK: Hey. (Applause.)

NETCHVOLODOFF: And to the extent you’re interested in learning more about our ambassador program, and throwing your hat into the ring for next year, the application will be online, I guess, about early summer.

So I’d love, with the remaining time we have left, to throw the floor open to questions, and let’s do that now.

Great. I see someone in the back there, who—I see two people in the back, who got some questions.

Q: Thank you very much. I’ve actually used the Model Diplomacy site. And I think I used it for the Boko Haram—

NETCHVOLODOFF: Mmm hmm.

Q: You know, model.

NETCHVOLODOFF: Yeah.

Q: And also for, I think it’s something about Latin America. But you know, I wonder, would you put more stuff there that’s kind of like a UN, you know, Security Council situation? Because the U.S. foreign policy, you know, perspective is not always appropriate for all classes—for many classes, actually—in international relations. So if it was—if there was more UN models, I would find it more useful, and would even use it for my, like, international development courses.

But when I do the simulation, I have my students take the role of president, and then, you know, I assign more than one person per role.

NETCHVOLODOFF: Yes.

Q: And I have them work together to create a position. And I use it also to teach students about—no, bureaucratic politics, that where you sit—I mean, where you stand depends on where you sit.

NETCHVOLODOFF: Yeah.

Q: And that, you know, you don’t—there’s a lot of argumentation on the struggle for resources and for relevance within the cabinet. And so, it’s—students enjoy it so much. They get into it, and—(laughs)—you know, when the president makes a decision, it is so momentous, because there’s a lot of research. And things begin to mean more to them, in terms of the concrete relevance of what we are studying. It’s not just about books. And they think—you know, so when they come for the final presentation, everybody dresses up. They have their name in front, and you know. It’s really very wonderful.

NETCHVOLODOFF: Well, I would say a couple of things. One, we very much intend to create more UN Security Council simulations. I would say that we’re leaning into the mini simulations, at this point. However, we will create some more full cases. But for sure. We started out with the UN Security Council because we wanted to—we wanted to be sure that students in this country—or at least, try to have students in this country—understand how foreign policy is made here, before we started branching out. And so the UN Security Council simulations were a later edition, and something that we do plan to double down on.

With this new site, the registration wall, some of the encumbrances to using Model Diplomacy, are being removed. And so I do—I do—I would be shocked if you didn’t find the overall simulations experience offered by the Council much more user-friendly and easy. But for sure, we will be creating more UN Security Council mini simulations, and probably some full cases at some point too.

ABSHIRE: But there are some, though.

NETCHVOLODOFF: But thank you for your—yeah.

ABSHIRE: Some of the—some of those—

NETCHVOLODOFF: No, there are UN Security Council simulations. Yeah. We just—we just simply haven’t had the time, nor the staffing resources. But we do now. And we’ll be—we’ll be creating more of those. So thank you for your question.

Right here, yeah.

Q: Whenever I get together with other—(laughter)—whenever I get together with other educators, it’s always wonderful to hear about strategies and tools for teaching. But often, what I really want to know is the horrific failures you have had with any particular method. (Laughter.)

NETCHVOLODOFF: Oh, boy. (Laughs.)

Q: Because I find those stories very instructive.

And I’ll give a quick example of my own, of what your activities are reminding me of.

NETCHVOLODOFF: Yes.

Q: Something I’ve introduced as a debate activity, where I give students purposely extreme and absurd positions, and tell them they have to argue it and make the best case they can. And one recent topic was basically, for and against isolationism. And to my horror, most of the students were most passionate about arguing a pro-isolationist position.

NETCHVOLODOFF: Uh-oh.

Q: And I realized my teaching had been a total failure. (Laughter.) So I’d like to hear if you’ve had similar experiences. Thank you. (Laughter.)

NETCHVOLODOFF: Well, I’m not a classroom teacher, so I’m going to throw this to Rudy and Jean.

NOVAK: I’ll just, real quick, just an anecdote, because we’re all—we’re all educators here. So I recently, this past summer, was at the American Political Science Association annual conference, and I’m sure some of you were there as well. And part of my role at the Air Force Academy is cadet development, which includes recruiting more political science majors, all right? And by the way, all our cadets, our students, get a bachelor’s in science. So they have to take physics, astronautical engineering, history, and this major’s—this course about American government—ugh, God—or the other courses that I—that I teach.

But one thing that was brought up in that conference—and we are actually seeing it at the Air Force Academy, so it’s not unique to the Air Force Academy on that point—is a decrease in interest in political science-y/international relations. And that was brought up at that conference—a bunch of department heads around the country—for reasons, right? But we also are seeing it at the Air Force Academy. So the generation—if it’s international relations, for military, for most of us in this room, or you studied security, it’s 9/11, right, is like the big driving factor making these students interested in 9/11. While the students we have now, they don’t remember that. And some of them weren’t even alive.

ABSHIRE: That’s right.

NOVAK: So, that—it’s hard to connect them. We’re seeing it too at the Air Force Academy, where—I mean, maybe not so much the isolationist position—although we have that. Just simply because they don’t understand what it means for the—America to be engaged in the world. But we see that—we see that too. And other institutions, I’m sure—I see nodding heads—are seeing that, as well.

ABSHIRE: I can offer specific failures. (Laughs.)

NOVAK: Yeah. (Laughter.)

ABSHIRE: Never a shortage. (Laughs.) I have had students say, well, these—this happens kind of a lot—you know, these three options, for the, you know, the mini simulations or the full cases, even, are great. But I don’t agree with any of them. I want this. I just had somebody advocating really loudly for just, like, blockading Kaliningrad. And just backing Russia into a corner with that, and. (Laughter.) That’s sure to be successful. (Laughter.) So you know, trying to rein in the crazy is—(laughs)—always an issue. And it sometimes seems like there’s more of it. Also, you know, just the—decided not to prepare today, this week, this semester. (Laughter.) Whenever. (Laughs.) So you know, it’s always hard when they come in underprepared. And I’m always willing to let them feel a little pain on that, frankly. Like, I mean, you know. No shaming. But also, like, well, you’re underprepared. Like, this is—this is what happens. Things don’t go well, when you don’t prepare.

So, that’s kind of a lot of it. I mean, certainly, the materials are great. And if the students don’t succeed, it’s generally because of lack of preparation, or you know, coming up with kind of extreme ideas. And then we can talk about, like, why that’s not a good idea.

Q: So I get it. The CFR materials are foolproof, unless the students are fools. (Laughter.)

ABSHIRE: No. (Laughs.) You know. No, I wouldn’t say that.

I mean, I think they’re good.

NETCHVOLODOFF: They are not foolproof. (Laughter.)

ABSHIRE: They are not foolproof.

NETCHVOLODOFF: No.

ABSHIRE: I don’t think anything’s foolproof. (Laughs.)

I mean, again, like, there are always—like, with the mini simulations, the—you know, there’s three options spelled out. Well, in this world, there are many, many options—(laughs)—right? There’s always going to be more than three. So, when students say, well, what—you know, I have a different idea—

NETCHVOLODOFF: That’s great.

ABSHIRE: Yes, it’s—

NETCHVOLODOFF: That means that they’re thinking.

ABSHIRE: Yes.

NETCHVOLODOFF: And I would say that our three options are just suggestions.

And what we’ve tried to do is avoid any extreme options, like let’s drop an atomic bomb. That is not—you know, I mean, we don’t—we don’t encourage you to ever sort of allow your conversation to go in that direction.

ABSHIRE: Yeah.

NETCHVOLODOFF: So—

ABSHIRE: And—so—yes. And I always say—and my response to that is, OK, good, you tell me why these three options—and I mean, they’re generally fairly basic options too. Like there’s not necessarily, you know—

NETCHVOLODOFF: And I don’t think there’s an obvious one.

ABSHIRE: No.

NETCHVOLODOFF: We try not to have an obvious one.

ABSHIRE: Yeah. But you know, tell me why these aren’t good. And then give me your better one. Absolutely. I mean, we—

NETCHVOLODOFF: Yeah.

ABSHIRE: —creative thinking.

NETCHVOLODOFF: And I would say that one of the things—to respond to the earlier comment about assigning—or somebody made this comment, assigning students a role that they may not feel comfortable with, or like, or—one of the things that we’d love to be able to do sooner rather than later—there’s something called distributed simulations. There are some time-zone challenges with them. But picture having a class in—of Chinese students taking the U.S. point of view, and a—and a class of American students taking the Chinese.

But I mean, this is really how you get—this is how you build perspective. It doesn’t have to be that extreme. But that’s an extreme goal that I have with the simulation program, is that you would have classes in different parts of the world—how about different parts of the United States, to begin with? We could have something about, you know, the refugee crisis at the southern border. We could have students in the southwest United States debating—to your point, debating and deliberating about this very complicated issue, where, you know, they take a position they don’t necessarily feel comfortable with, or agree with. But it does cause some—it inspires some evolution of thinking on students’ parts. So I’d—I encourage you to do more of that, because of course, all of you are going to be using our simulations by the end of the school year, and next year.

But no, I mean, there’s so much room to go beyond what we’ve recommended. What we—what we offer in the way of teaching resources, for both World101 and Model Diplomacy, are—they’re just suggestions. They’re food for thought. We’re very interested in gathering recommendations, so we have—you know, we have discussion questions, essay questions. We want to include your ideas about those questions. We want to include syllabi. We’re going to be doing more and more of that as we—as we move forward. So please send them in.

And I think—I’m trying to follow the rules of the Council, and end on time. Do we—we have maybe time for one more question. How about this gentleman in the center of the room, right there?

Q: John Francis from the University of Utah. So actually, mine is more of a plea. Oh, sorry.

NETCHVOLODOFF: OK.

Q: Mine is more of a plea—

NETCHVOLODOFF: Yes.

Q: —that I have simulations of the European Union decision-making, and then teams of students go up to UW—in fact, the Air Force Academy had a very good team that they sent—

NOVAK: Thank you.

Q: —for that every year. And I wonder if you are doing more in that area, particularly for our European focus, to do simulations, particularly when you can—the Monnet Center sponsors these around the country. It’s a good way of rewarding students.

NETCHVOLODOFF: It’s a—it’s a great—to be honest, we do not have that planned. But my Model Diplomacy guru back in the corner there, Charlie Hopkins, who is our director of teaching and learning, I hope you heard that question, and the plea. We will—we will definitely give that serious consideration. So thank you for bringing that to our attention.

And when there are organized activities like that, where there’s a theme or a topic, you know, it’s something that we’d like to know about. So send them to us. We can’t always do everything that everybody would like us to, but we certainly are—we want to.

ABSHIRE: There’s a middle—sorry, Midwest Model EU that Indiana University runs.

NETCHVOLODOFF: So good recommendation. And we will definitely put it into the hopper, and into our pipeline. Thank you.

I think we’re out of time. I think everybody might want to have a coffee and a muffin. But I would love to—please, let’s carry on the conversation once we’re off the stage. I met probably, I don’t know, 40 percent of you, or 50 percent of you last night. And I really would like to meet the other 50 percent. So if I haven’t gotten to you, please come to me. And I’d love to chat with you, and hear about your teaching experiences, and your ideas for how we can improve what it is we’re doing.

So thank you very much. (Applause.)

(END)

DUFFY: Good morning, everyone. How are you all doing?

I guess it’s—well, it’s—you’ve had some coffee so you’re doing all right? OK.

I am horribly addicted to caffeine and so I always start these sessions by saying if anyone feels the need to get up and caffeinate please do so. Please don’t—you know, don’t feel like you’re stuck at your table. If you need to stand up or move around or get coffee please, please do so on my behalf.

I am delighted to invite you all here today. I welcome you all here today to our panel on the societal implications of AI.

My name is Kat Duffy. I’m a senior fellow for digital and cyberspace policy here at the Council on Foreign Relations.

We have three incredible panelists here to speak with us today and I’m going to let them introduce themselves in a moment but first I wanted to take the temperature of the room. When you hear societal implications of AI who in the room feels a sense of excitement? Raise your hand.

OK. Who in the room feels a sense of sort of perturbed anxiety?

OK. Who in the room feels a sense of abject dread? (Laughter.)

And, finally, who in the room just starts chain smoking in their soul? (Laughter.)

Like, if any of you or—just you hear AI or generative AI and in your brain you’re just, like, then I just—we’re here for you today.

My goal for you here today is really that when we leave this discussion we will have taken you on a bit of a journey, from where as educators sort of the information environment that you all are operating in and that your students and your colleagues are all operating in, and from there we’re going to go into a discussion about what the implications of AI might be for educational institutions and for educational professionals, and how we think about education in the coming years.

And from there we’re going to take it up a notch, take it to a sort of a higher plane in terms of, because we’re the Council on Foreign Relations, how the implications of AI are also playing out in the geopolitical space and how they are reshaping the way that we’re thinking about governance, and I’ll be very interested in your thoughts on the amount of PTSD from other arguments that is now coming into the AI debate as well.

And then we will have a little bit of a discussion and then we’ll open it up to questions for all of you. OK. And so that’s where we’re going to go and my hope is that at the end of this panel those of you who feel rather expert in AI will walk away having heard something new or having thought about a different lens, and those of you who are feeling somewhere between anxiety and abject dread will also be able to walk away with some additional sense of curiosity or maybe optimism about where things could go.

So I hope we land there. We’ll see if we can—we’ll see if we can do it.

With that, I would like to start by just asking each of my panelists to briefly introduce themselves and explain why they’re excited to engage with this particular amazing group of educators.

KRISHNAN: Want me to go first? OK.

DUFFY: Please.

KRISHNAN: Good morning, everybody. I’m Ramayya Krishnan, long-time faculty member at Carnegie Mellon. I’m the dean of the Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy which is a co-location of both the public policy school and the information systems school at CMU.

On the policy front I serve on the National AI Advisory Committee to President Biden and the White House Office of AI Initiatives. Much of the work that I do is at the nexus of technology and policy with a focus on AI.

I’m delighted to be here with you and hear from you about abject dread, opportunities, risks, and everything. So delighted to be here. Thank you again for the opportunity.

DUFFY: Thank you. Yaël?

EISENSTAT: Hi. I’m Yaël Eisenstat. The term I call myself these days never was a professional term twenty years ago but I consider myself a democracy activist. I am currently a senior fellow at Cybersecurity for Democracy out of NYU, where we really work on trying to figure out translating research into policy solutions for how technology, AI-driven algorithms, all the scary things you’ve heard about AI, really affect political discourse and democracy.

I recently just left the Anti-Defamation League where I was the vice president heading the Center for Technology and Society working on how technology affects online hate and extremism and trying to build an accountability for that, and actually worked at Facebook for a short while heading their elections integrity work but left after six months.

That’s a whole another story. And before that was in the national security world for about fourteen years as a CIA officer and then a diplomat. And so sort of a wide range.

BREMMER: I think you can’t be held responsible for anything you’ve done for less than six months. I think that’s fair.

EISENSTAT: Thank you. I appreciate that. (Laughter.)

BREMMER: I’m Ian Bremmer. I’m a political scientist. I am president of Eurasia Group, which is a global research firm that I started back twenty-six years ago. I teach at Columbia and I think that AI is having a more transformative impact on geopolitics more greatly and more quickly than any phenomenon I have encountered in my career and that’s why I’m excited about it.

DUFFY: Fantastic. And so with that let’s start our journey, shall we?

So, Yaël, we’re going to start with you. You have spent so long now looking at sort of how information environments are changing, how different emerging technologies are impacting that.

When you look at the information environment in which students, for example, are operating, particularly in a heightened election year in the United States and in a moment of arguably increasing polarization, how—what do you see? How are you thinking about navigating it? What do you think this audience should be thinking about and where do you see both challenges and opportunities? In five minutes.

EISENSTAT: So—

DUFFY: Five minutes.

EISENSTAT: I was going to say—

DUFFY: Five minutes.

EISENSTAT: —I can stand about ninety minutes answering—

DUFFY: It’s a tiny topic.

EISENSTAT: So I’m going to start with a few quick definitions because I think it’s really important.

When I talk about AI in the context of online information systems I’m talking about things like AI-powered algorithms, like how social media determines what information it is delivering to you, how it decides what it’s going to recommend to you, what it’s surfacing.

When I talk about generative AI I’m talking about systems or tools that actually generate content itself. This is where you—you know, ChatGPT or deep fakes or these fake audio robocalls, these things. That’s generative AI.

And so these are two different things and there’s a million other applications for AI. Those are the two that I’m going to be talking about. I’m not going to help you understand how to know if your students are using ChatGPT to write their essays but—sorry, I saw someone go like that in the back. (Laughter.)

But listen, what I have been looking at for a very long time, and we haven’t solved yet so I’m going to talk about what I’ve been talking about for a very long time, it’s how we—how our online world right now and mostly social media and mostly mainstream social media companies what an outsize role they play in how we consume information, how we understand information, how we understand each other and that, obviously, plays out on campuses.

I got into this in about 2015 when I wrote this piece saying how it had become harder for me to speak to my fellow Americans about hot button political issues than it had been for me to sit down face to face with suspected extremists and terrorists along the Somalia border and what on earth did that mean if I can no longer talk to my fellow Americans about things that were really hot button issues.

And this—I know polarization is an easy word that’s thrown around a lot but how technology is helping drive this more and more absolutist polarized everybody’s an expert, everyone has to chime in, and everybody has to have a really strong opinion.

And where AI plays into all of that is how social media companies decide what you see and I’ll just do one quick example here because otherwise I’m going to go on forever. We did a big piece of work when I was at ADL testing out recommendation systems across YouTube, X formerly Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, and we set up dozens of fake personas and had them just start to follow a few different terms.

Some could be considered gateway terms like World Economic Forum. Why is that a gateway term? Because it takes about one click before you’re into a full antisemitic conspiracy theory. And the point to this was were people seeking out hateful extreme rhetoric or mis- or disinformation or was it being fed to them, and our experiment showed that it was very much being fed to them through the recommendation engines, and this is important for you to understand that when your students are getting incredibly caught up in emotionally-driven heated rhetoric and are engaging a lot online they need to be helped to understand how they’re being manipulated.

No one wants to be told you’re wrong—you have fallen for disinformation. But when people understand how they’re being manipulated by these systems and how the AI-powered algorithms are following you around the internet, understand what your vulnerabilities are, understand what you’re predisposed to want to engage with more, and it’s feeding you that content, it makes it more and more difficult to have well-rounded conversations with multiple viewpoints and that’s what a college campus is supposed to be about, right?

So this is just one tiny piece. And then now we have generative AI enters the picture and this is where, of course, you can get more and more realistic audio, video, and even if the technology is not perfect it seems to be doing well enough that even when people were engaging on Israel and Gaza they’re falling for a lot of fake images that are being spread even if that image is originally watermarked.

Once it hits social media and it spreads like wildfire and you’re emotional and caught up and you see that image that reconfirms what you’re already emotional about, this is an environment where it makes people actually trust even less in what they’re seeing because they know that they might be fooled by these fake images and audios, and my concern is what do people believe when they feel they can’t believe anything anymore.

I know that was, like, a whirlwind tour. I tried to get a five-minute intro there.

DUFFY: That’s great. No, that’s great. And I think it’s—speaking of sort of terms, right, you may hear a lot or increasingly this year the phrase the liar’s dividend. And the concept of the liar’s dividend is that if everything can be fake, nothing can be true.

And so you will see, for example, I think just a couple of days ago some video came out of former President Trump making a speech in which—I mean, he didn’t sound too great or he paused or something and then he said this was—the Biden campaign faked this with AI, and that was his statement about that particular sort of poor performance at the microphone.

And you’ve seen, like—so we will see that increasingly, I think, this year. It’s an important phrase. I think it’s going to be a key thing for this year.

EISENSTAT: So one of the things there too, like, I have always advocated for a healthy skepticism in the information you consume, but now I’m concerned where does healthy skepticism go too far to the point where you don’t believe anything and the liar’s dividend is the perfect example.

Actually, a number of years ago before these tools really hit the mainstream there was a certain British prince who got caught in a photo with his hands a little too close to a young woman. Just leave it at that. And immediately he said, that wasn’t me—that photo is doctored. And this was a number of years ago, and I thought right there that’s going to become the problem because now anyone can say, that wasn’t me—that photo is doctored. That video is doctored.

And unless every single one of us are going to spend all of this time doing all these reverse image searches and being our own forensic detectives, at some point my bigger fear is that everyone just throws their hands up and says everything is fake—I don’t believe anything—and what does that mean for political discourse?

DUFFY: Yeah. That’s a great segue, too, and so much to unpack there. That’s a great segue for you, Ramayya.

So what is the role of educators in this moment and sort of—and how do we think about what we teach, how we teach? How are you thinking about the role of educational institutions where we need innovation, right, where there are opportunities to be seized and where you also, I suspect, will probably commune with many colleagues in the room regarding some challenges.

KRISHNAN: Yeah, that’s a really good question and thank you, Yaël, for setting this up.

So if you—a couple of things. I mean, first, AI is not new. It’s been around since 1956. However, the arrival of generative AI, ChatGPT in the late—in 2022 certainly has changed the landscape in a very fundamental way, both in terms of policy, and I mean big P policy as in how the governments are thinking about it, but also small p policy as in how universities are thinking about it.

So if I might start by saying, you know, what might be the kinds of questions that universities are contending with. Many of us are educators here and you’re all in various universities. I think—first and foremost, I think the question that comes up is how does this change the nature of how we teach and then potentially what we should be teaching because universities are about—education and research are the two cornerstones of what universities are—you know, see as really important parts of their mission.

And I think both those elements, I think, began as being, like, the key issues that universities wanted to contend with and I’ll give you some examples of how different universities through our work with the AAU have been thinking about this. In the question and answer period it would be great to hear about your experiences with it.

DUFFY: I’m sorry. What is the AAU? Because while I suspect all of you know it those online may not.

KRISHNAN: The Association of American Universities.

DUFFY: Perfect. Thank you.

KRISHNAN: It’s one grouping of the universities. There are others like APLU for land grant universities. So this is just one group of research-intensive universities.

The second thing has been a focus on how do we do and how could we be more inclusive in who we bring to our campuses and be more effective in delivering education to them. I’m thinking of Pell Grant fellows, I’m thinking of students from disadvantaged communities, where they come to campus and you want to have high persistence and retention of those students. How can AI be an adjunct to a human instructor, and help her or him deliver education in ways that might actually help students in every decile of their ability distribution, thereby allowing them to achieve learning outcomes at a—in a more cost-effective and equitable manner? I think that’s a second category.

And then I think a third has to do with not just the students we have right now but, you know, increasingly you’re going to get AI-first—like we say, digital-first or mobile-first students. I mean, looking ahead, you might see students coming to our campuses who are already AI ready, if you will.

What does that mean for—but that’s not an immediate issue. So I think about what is immediate it’s, like, what do we—how do we change what we teach, how we teach now.

The second is how do we do better persistence and retention of our student population, particularly wanting to be more inclusive and equitable, and then looking ahead the question is how do we think about preparing ourselves—how do we prepare our faculty and our staff for a world which is being transformed by AI.

And on the outside there’s a question of are there new audiences that need to be reached who are out in the workforce already who need new education, and do universities have a role to play there or will we lose that to the private sector?

So that’s sort of a system’s view of the problem, right? So and in the time that I have let me just sort of highlight a few of these and then we can come to more details in the Q&A.

With regard to how to teach, what to teach, I think the initial reaction from many of my faculty colleagues was this is going to be a huge academic integrity problem, and I’m sure—in the conversations I was having over dinner last night there was a question of how can we identify plagiarism, how can we identify essays that were written with Gemini or ChatGPT or things of that nature.

And I think that is the initial reaction, and within six months or so I think there was a change in the view that we want very much as an institution to ensure students learn what we deem to be really important—critical thinking skills, the capacity to make arguments, the capacity to formulate problems, the capacity to actually, to Yaël’s point, be able to work and be good active listeners, be good at engaging with others who don’t share your opinion.

You know, there’s a whole collection of things that we want to impart by way of an education to our students. That said, these technologies are also going to be very useful for them and so can we impart and achieve the first set of objectives.

So, for instance, if you’re a communications instructor, and just use that as an example, we want to get you to learn how to ideate, how to do rough drafting, how to do editing, to create content without the use of technology so that you learn how to critique what the technology produces when you do get augmented with the use of the technology.

Without the first part you can’t do the second part right. So I think what we are now seeing is through a set of experiments our faculty are creating new modalities and new ways of reconstructing their curricula, and I think we need to give time and space for our faculty to be able to rethink how to do this, to learn the technology.

So I think deans and provosts on our campus—and I think I see this at other universities—I’d love to hear what’s going on in yours—we are—we have both expert working groups like faculty helping other faculty based on who’s got expertise, but also seed grants to faculty to recreate curricula to learn from not just what’s going on within our own campus but elsewhere.

So that’s the issue of transforming the how to teach part. The what to teach part is interesting because I think it’ll raise some really interesting questions about, you know, teaching students how to interrogate content. Content provenance is a really important issue. In fact, there’s technology related to content provenance standards that are coming up. But there’s a large amount of content that’s available on the net, as you know, for which there are no—there is something called the C2PA Alliance which is a content provenance alliance that’s working towards establishing content watermarking so that you’re able to interrogate content, but teaching students not to accept everything they see online as truth but to interrogate that. That has to start much earlier. It’s like—almost like civics for AI type education that has to begin in kindergarten onwards, if you will.

But given where we’re at we try to impart that. So there are new courses that have been created relating to the kind of topic we’re talking about—the societal implications of AI, the workforce implications of AI—for which there’s a tremendous amount of interest on campus.

So this is the how and the what. And then I’ll just say a word about inclusive and equitable approaches to retaining disadvantaged students. We’ve created a set of technologies called cognitive tutors. The idea of a cognitive tutor is that it could be used as a support—a copilot, if you will, to use a common phrase now—with a human instructor and this could be in coursework ranging from writing and history to algebra and math to programming, and the idea is that—and if you’ve seen—how many of you have seen the Khan Academy Khanmigo? Have you seen that?

It’s a—if you haven’t check it out. Many of you probably know Khan Academy. How many of you know Khan Academy, the videos on YouTube? OK.

So Khan Academy—

DUFFY: My kids.

KRISHNAN: —Khanmigo is the use of GPT-4 with Khan Academy where as you do your work, it doesn’t give you the answer but it reviews the answers you’re providing and diagnoses what the conceptual flaw is in your understanding and gives you new prompts and new hints and new problems for you to solve so that you can really understand the basic concepts so that you can really understand this.

So the cognitive tutor idea is to achieve better learning outcomes through a process of—and this has been super effective for these students that are in every decile of the ability distribution.

So we find that students who come in who don’t quite have the preparation with AP courses and the like that more privileged students have we are able to support them, and so much so that as of last year our year one/year two persistence rates were comparable. They were 98 percent—98.2 percent—the same—this is for Pell Grant awardees and disadvantaged students—the same as for our—for the regular admitted students.

So let me pause there. I think these are some of the ideas. We can go deeper into, you know, the new kinds of things going on both within campuses but also what’s happening to address new student populations outside of the full time student population that we think about, as well as how do we think about addressing younger students in terms of getting them ready for college in a world that’s being transformed.

Thank you.

DUFFY: And I think—and I want to get as well to the role of universities in actually driving research in artificial intelligence.

KRISHNAN: Which I’ll get to—

DUFFY: We’ll get to it. We’ll get to it.

KRISHNAN: Yeah. I was out of my five minutes, so I didn’t talk about research.

DUFFY: Yes. No, a hundred percent. We’re also going to get to that.

KRISHNAN: Yeah.

DUFFY: So, you know, you started out by saying AI is not new, right? And you know, my first paid gig in the tech policy space was helping to draft Goldman Sachs’ Y2K due-diligence record.

EISENSTAT: I did that too.

DUFFY: So I sometimes joke that I was part of the original hype cycle. And what’s been fascinating to me, especially in the basically year and a half since ChatGPT launched, is I have—in twenty-plus years of working in sort of technology and governance, Ian, I agree, I’ve never seen any technological innovation hit governments or governance discussions in the way that AI has. It feels fundamentally transformative in the way that we are having those conversations and having that dialogue including in these questions of inclusion and equity with a lot of countries who are very worried that they will be left behind.

And so I’d love to hear how you are seeing that shift and that shape and how you are thinking about America’s role within that space as a foreign policy leader but also where, though AI is not new, these spaces and this discourse is a refresh opportunity.

So how do you think about moments to seize as well?

BREMMER: So to answer that bit two things that are really relevant in terms of America’s role in the world and AI. The first and, obviously, a very big positive is that in the AI space the United States is utterly dominant in terms of the capital available, in terms of the companies that are driving it, as well as in terms of the talent available in the U.S. and what’s coming in from around the world. No other country is remotely close.

China is number two but the Chinese are deeply concerned about the implications of AI on their society and on political control, which means they have a much stronger regulatory environment that is constraining technological growth and also the United States has export controls that are deeply problematic for China’s semiconductor industry.

They are investing very heavily in it. But that is a matter of at least five or ten years and in AI development terms five to ten years is a very, very long time, an almost unfathomable time, in this environment. So that’s the upside.

The U.S.—whether or not the U.S. is setting all the rules, if the technology is outstripping the rules, and it is, then the U.S. will be the dominant player. That really matters and it’s a reason why a lot of developing countries around the world are very deeply concerned because a lot of this isn’t going to be created for them, right? That’s the good side.

The bad side is that in 1989 when I started my PhD and the Wall came down the United States was the principal exporter of democracy in the world. Now, I mean, frequently, inconsistently, and hypocritically, and we can all—that’s not the debate we’re having today. But still it was number one.

Thirty-five years later, the United States is the principal exporter of tools that destroy democracy in the world. Not intentionally but algorithmically, and that is the knock-on effect of what is happening with a small number of technology companies with monopoly platforms that determine and disintermediate civic engagements for their own business model purposes.

So, do you feel lucky? Because on the one hand you have something that’s driving much greater power of the United States on the global stage to get outcomes that the U.S. wants and, on the other hand, you have a political model that the U.S. has really benefited from for a long time that is existentially in crisis and that may not be compatible with three more generations of AI.

I don’t actually know whether AI and democracy can work together. I don’t know. None of us know, and it’s important for us to understand this. So when I think about global governance in the last year and a half government officials went from not talking about AI—and I’m talking certainly about the heads of G20 countries that the presidents, the prime ministers, and cabinet officials—to it being a priority topic of conversation with almost every one of those leaders I engage with every time.

We’ve never seen anything like that before, and they—and we are now seeing the EU AI act and we’re seeing the American executive order and we’re seeing some global governance with this UN panel and a lot of things are happening.

DUFFY: I think the Council of Europe today, right?

BREMMER: Yeah. A lot of things are happening.

DUFFY: I think the—it’s all been very fast.

BREMMER: But I want to be clear that the technology is moving a lot faster than the governance and that will continue to be true almost certainly for the next several years.

So I see us moving from a world that has been bipolar and unipolar and people say, what’s the next polar world going to be? Is it multipolar? Is it, you know, going to be U.S. and China?

No. It’s increasingly technopolar because in the digital space technology companies are actually making the decisions that are fundamentally important for national security and the future of the economy and also are the nature of our political systems.

And so if you made me make a bet in three to five years’ time of what governance of AI looks like, I would probably say that—and I’m pulling these numbers completely out of my ass—that let’s say 70 percent of it comes from the nature of the technology as it develops, 25 percent of it comes from the nature of the business models of the companies that happen to dominate the space that are the winners, and 5 percent of it comes from the governance models being determined and rolled out by the United States, Europe, and the world and with China potentially being a significant exception but not in front.

I don’t think we’re ready for that, and I want to—just before I throw it back to you—

DUFFY: Sure.

BREMMER: —because five minutes is not much long.

DUFFY: Oh, no. No. No. Go ahead.

BREMMER: But I would throw this idea to you. I would argue that the difference in governance between Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk over Twitter and X and the implications of those governance models for society are significantly more different than the difference in governance models between, say, Biden and Trump over the United States.

Now, who really cares because we’re just talking about social media, Twitter and X.

EISENSTAT: I care. (Laughter.)

BREMMER: No, because they’re—no, I mean, if you’re on it all the time you would care but for the rest of the world it’s, like, whatever. Now take that and multiply it by a thousand, right, because that’s what we’re talking about when we go from social media to AI, when we talk about AI models that are going to be training on your individual data.

So it’s not like we all use the same ChatGPT but instead we have helpmates that are on constantly. More relevantly our students have these things that are on constantly that are changing them as human beings. They’re no longer homo sapiens. They are hybrid beings because they are—not because they’ve implanted anything but because they are continually engaging with this thing that is incredible that is trained on their data, and also they are engaging with virtual beings that are unlimited patience, unlimited focus, unlimited engagement, a lot more engaging than a lot of the people they engage with, right, because they are programmed to do that because that drives the business model.

So if we don’t understand the difference then we all—the Council on Foreign Relations is full of people that spend a lot of time trying to understand the difference between communist, authoritarian China and democratic, you know, capitalist United States, and social democratic, actual social contract that works Europe, right? We have those discussions. We know the difference between a developing country and a developed country and a failed state. How much time do we spend thinking about the social and national security implications of Microsoft versus Meta, right? We don’t.

Now, part of the reason we don’t is because a lot of them give money to a lot of the programs that help facilitate this stuff and they might not like it if we started doing that. But it has—you’re not responsible. Only six months.

EISENSTAT: I was going to say I do that all the time but I’m the exception. (Laughs.)

BREMMER: But you left. You weren’t responsible for that. I know. But for the rest of us, right, we really need to start thinking in those terms because they are going to be geopolitical actors of consequence for this stuff that we are talking about today.

DUFFY: Yeah. And, you know, what’s really—what’s been really fascinating in looking—we’re in a year of, you know, the largest global electoral field in our generation. We have almost eighty countries doing—around eighty countries having national-level elections this year. It’s basically half of the global population is in countries where there’s going to be a national-level election, and what’s been really fascinating as we’ve been watching the implications of AI merging through those elections is how much the AI that is being used is being powered by American companies, how inadequate the policies of those companies are to the different use cases in those different countries because the companies are not designed to be monitoring what’s happening in Bangladesh or be monitoring what’s happening in, you know, in Pakistan or in Indonesia.

And all of those I think are a—they’re interesting use cases for how we might also see the use of AI in our electoral year as well because one of the challenges is also that we both have these platforms that are carrying a lot of information but there is parody, there is satire, right, and there’s also really malevolent disinformation.

So there are a lot of forms of expression we want to protect and that societally we would value very much, and then there are a lot of forms of expression that are happening as well that feel deeply concerning and that can scale. And so it’s going to be, I think—you know, Ian, to your point about, you know, we have no idea what it’s going to look like in five or ten years. I also think in many ways we don’t actually know what this year is going to look like because there’s going to be such different and creative uses of the technology.

And so I want to push a little bit on this point about how much power is controlled right now in a select and few small companies because I also think that it goes to a real challenge that we’ve heard from universities in AI in this space right now as well, which is that they are unable to retain the talent. They don’t have access to the computing that they would need.

And so we are not driving research in universities so much as we are driving universities and private companies that have their own business models and their own incentives. Whereas universities can engage in this in a way that’s much more societally focused, that is much more pure research focused, and where there are clear ethical standards around how—what that engagement looks like and those standards are more transparent.

And so—and then in addition to that, you know, Yaël, you have had such experience in independent research that’s not coming from universities but that is coming from civil society actors, that is coming from at-risk groups from marginalized communities and how powerful that has been.

And, Ian, you’re also seeing on that front as well the amount of our soft power that rests in our ability to recruit in top talent, right, and to power innovation and to bring in people who do want to build businesses in America and want to lead research.

And so I wanted to cast this over to you all to discuss a little bit as well as responding to anything you heard. But how are you thinking about driving AI research and innovation in the future and what the role of our universities, of publicly-funded work, should be of civil society work versus these companies, right, that have really co-opted, like, the resources that are needed to drive a lot of this research right now? It’s very limited to a small select few.

So I might start with you in terms of how you think about, you know, the National Artificial Intelligence Research Initiative and where you think we need to be going.

KRISHNAN: So I think, first, a few comments to what Ian said.

He’s absolutely right about the fact that there’s a small number of companies—they’re all American companies—that are—you know, the OpenAIs, the Googles, the Anthropics, the Microsofts, Amazon of the world that are dominant.

But an important aspect here that we do need to take into account is open source and the emergence of small language models—not just large language models but small language models that are demonstrating capability at the 90 percent, 95 percent, level from many players, again, American.

Meta was the first to release what’s called Llama 2 which is the—an open access model, not—they’re not open source. They’re not truly open source. They don’t quite tell you all the data they were trained on. But they do make available their models and the weights of the neural network so that you can actually build downstream applications.

So it’s important for all of you who are not technologists to understand the distinction between model development and model deployment. So when you talk about model development we are talking about the creators of these large language models. That’s where the barrier to entry is for which you need people and talent, compute, and data. Those are the three big inputs that are required to create these large language models like GPT-4, like Gemini, and—

DUFFY: And when we say compute we’re just saying pure processing power, just—

KRISHNAN: GPUs, and they’re—you know, it’s of the order of $150 million to create a GPU cluster to train these models. So when you think about the arc of innovation in the U.S. the fact that universities have been involved has democratized innovation—more than universities, even small and medium-sized enterprises being involved has democratized innovation.

What’s been challenging this time around about large language models is that a small number of companies have the resources, more resources than many countries have, to actually create the computing clusters and the data resources to train these models.

However, deployment, which is what comes downstream, can be done with CPUs. You don’t need GPUs. You could make do with a lot less compute and a lot less data resources. So as long as you have domain specific and application data and you have compute resources of the sort that’s more widely available you can take a model that is a GPT-4 and fine tune it, as it’s called, or use something called RAG which is a way of actually querying the model with specific data that you have to create downstream applications.

And now if you don’t want to use closed source models—these are the open AIs and the Googles—you could use the Llamas of the world but, interestingly, there are two new entrants in open source. One is from France, Mistral, and the other is from Abu Dhabi. It’s from Technology Innovation Institute. It’s called the Falcon 40B parameter model.

So from a geopolitical standpoint it’s interesting to see that the majority of the closed source models are U.S. The leading close open access model is Meta—is U.S., and then you have one French model and one model from Abu Dhabi. All of them are well resourced enough and, interestingly, Microsoft has partnered with Mistral as well as it has with open AI. So it’s an interesting sets of investments that Satya Nadella has made.

I think the question is how do we more broadly democratize innovation and this is where the National AI Research Resource, which is one of the recommendations from our committee, is really important. NSF intends to fund this so that people who are—don’t have access— universities, small and medium-sized enterprises—can get access to these compute resources.

Now, data will still be a constraint. But NSF has not been funded. It’s at $9.5 billion is the current—in the president’s budget it’s at $9.5 billion. It should probably be twice that in terms of budget. So the NAIRR has not been funded at the level of even one of those data centers that I was talking about.

So I think while it’s a great start it needs to be funded at a much higher level to allow for universities and for small and medium-sized enterprises to get access to these capabilities so that we have more democratized innovation, which in the long run is going to help us.

It’s great that we have these U.S. companies in the lead but I think it’s important that we have more inclusive participation in innovation.

DUFFY: Thank you. And, Yaël, can I take it over to you then to think about especially the power of having research that is driven and built by a diversity of communities?

EISENSTAT: Sure. I’m going to try to make three quick points. One will be democracy, one on research, and one on open source.

I don’t have much to add to how Ian described the challenge to democracy right now. You know, it’s funny. A number of years ago—I hate saying this because I find it very snooty to mention a TED talk—but my TED talk was actually titled “Dear Facebook, this is how you’re breaking democracy” and ran through—the point to that talk was these are things they know are happening. It’s not just, oh, the algorithm did this. Every algorithm, at the end of the day, is coded by a human with a goal in mind and it’s not just the unintended consequences. There are many things that these companies know they could do to protect things other than their bottom line and they’re not incentivized to, and I admit that I put a lot of that blame on our government. They’re not incentivized to protect us over there.

So Ian talked about the business model. I want to double click on that. It is one of the biggest challenges. But short of upending how our current unfettered capitalist system works I don’t—I will continue to push for certain ways to regulate that business model but I don’t think that’s going to happen in the time that we need it.

So let’s go to research. What’s really interesting here that I don’t know if people fully recognize how much research to these issues is under threat right now. So you have sort of this multi-front assault on those who research things like disinformation, like foreign intervention in our elections via online systems, like how some of these companies—what they are or are not doing.

We have from members of our own government subpoenaing disinformation researchers including the researchers who contributed to the commission in 2016 investigating how Russia interfered in that election and they—and these are researchers at universities. They are getting drowned in legal fees and subpoenas and things that some of their universities are helping support them and some universities are not.

And then you have civil society researchers, which is where I fall. I’m more of a policy person but my team—you have folks like Elon Musk threatening to sue civil society organizations who are the ones who are watchdogs for what is happening on those platforms. And trust me, going up against Elon Musk in a lawsuit is not a small thing. Like, that is silencing a lot of civil society researchers.

And then you have the courts and you have a case right now even trying to make sure that government does not cooperate with social media companies on things like disinformation and election information.

And, yes, jawboning is a real problem, but this is a multi-front assault on those who are trying to research, understand whether it’s the power dynamics, whether it’s how information flows, whether it’s disinformation campaigns, and it is very hard to punch back against that. And I—and so—

DUFFY: There will be oral arguments on Monday at the Supreme Court actually—

EISENSTAT: Right.

DUFFY: —in one of these major cases. So expect to hear a lot about this in the news next week.

EISENSTAT: And, I mean, I will say I have personally been on the receiving end of the richest man in the world threatening to sue.

BREMMER: Number two now.

EISENSTAT: Oh, he’s number two?

BREMMER: Yeah. Let’s not give him, you know—

EISENSTAT: Wonderful. Great. (Laughter.) Thank you. The second-richest man in the world.(Laughter.)

So and also Ian had brought up an incredibly important point as well. So much of the research is, at the end of the day, funded by companies themselves and in sometimes not the most clear-cut ways.

There are some major institutions, including ones who have brought in people like me and friends of mine to interview for roles, who will not even let us sit at the table because Facebook or Meta will not let us sit at the table and then Meta gives $500 million to that university.

These are subtle. These are—I mean, we used to call this soft power but this is not soft power. This is major money. But it’s that more subtle campaign to silence some research. And I don’t know exactly how to say all educators should tackle that, but the influence out there on what research looks like is real and it’s a really important challenge.

And then the third part on open source models and democratization or whatever word we want to use, the reality is, unfortunately, bad actors will always be the first to adopt new technologies. It just—it is a reality, and I am not in any way saying this is what you said but there are many people who believe that if everything is just open sourced it’s all going to work out just fine because then the best stuff wins.

If everything is just open source then all the bad actors also have access to those tools in an environment where we have no guardrails. We have no strong guardrails around the digital world, around AI.

So I understand that there’s some real benefits to the idea of open source and democratizing these tools but with no actual guardrails in place it’s the bad actors who are also going to use these tools and by bad actors I mean whether it is a foreign power trying to sow discord in our elections, whether it is a child predator trying to figure out how to connect children and predators.

I mean, you name it. Whether it’s fraud these folks also will have access to this open source tool. So this is where guardrails still matter.

DUFFY: Ian, over to you.

BREMMER: Yeah, a few quick points.

One is this is a place where we need crises to drive governance. I mean, Sam Altman—we haven’t mentioned him yet but he sort of looms large—one thing that he said that I agree with is that we need crises early as opposed to late, because if they come late AI will be too powerful and it’ll be very hard to respond.

You know, we are not going to get the ability to deal with a lot of these extant challenges to democracy, to existing, to the integrity of financial systems, you name it, until something happens and then the resources will come.

So most of the nascent governance efforts right now I don’t see as putting governance in place; rather, I see as building capabilities and awareness so that when the crisis happens you actually at least have a group of people that are empowered to do things. Then we’ll have money, then we’ll have urgency, and then we’ll set something up to stop those things from happening a second time. That’s what I think the geopolitical space is going to look like.

Now, from a how does the research universities fit, if you’re trying to drive AI research that is problematic to the business models of the corporations it’s not going to happen in universities for the reasons that Yaël said.

That will happen because it is funded by wealthy actors who have a problem, in some cases a political ax, with some of the CEOs in the space. So it’ll be Soros against Elon and you’ll see movement there. That’s what’s going to happen there.

But that doesn’t mean there’s no space for universities. Where the space for the universities are in all of the areas that just aren’t—that the tech companies couldn’t be bothered to invest in because they don’t see the immediate business model for it, and there’s so much of that because, I mean, let’s face it, it’s not like we’re actually heading to artificial general intelligence right now.

We might get there but that’s not what’s presently being invested in. What’s presently being invested in is incredibly large language models with huge amounts of compute to do incredible amount of data aggregation and then predictive analytics on the basis of what would come next.

Why? Because that drives an enormous amount of money that people understand how to monetize. But when I was reading Ray Kurzweil and, you know, his whole idea of this exponential growth—you know, what was it called, The Age of Spiritual Machines—like, he thought that we’d be much faster down the road of reverse engineering the human brain.

We’re still not even there for an earthworm and the reason for that mostly is because—not because the tech doesn’t exist or couldn’t exist. It’s because the business models aren’t yet obvious, driving the private equity funding into what you would do with that.

Those are short—those need to be short-term responses that drive the excitement of a VC. So, I mean, that’s where the universities need to be is in places where there are really interesting things both intellectually and for humankind that businesses don’t yet see a model for.

That’s such a rich space. That’s what the Global South is going to do. That’s what the UN is trying to find. All of that kind of stuff. Not to mention the creation of data sets that help to deal with the intrinsic bias of only studying, for example, the developed world and therefore wealthy people and therefore mostly white people and therefore mostly men—I mean, all of that. Rich places for universities to be involved.

Final point for me. The structural problem I see here is that we are all, all of us, great capitalists when it comes to profits and we’re fantastic socialists when it comes to losses, and that is as true of us in this room as it is of Elon and this was what got us into trouble with globalization.

Incredible driver of human development for generations and, unfortunately, also massive amounts of carbon and methane into the atmosphere which drove climate change. Easy to distribute the profits from the industrialization, the globalization. Nobody wants to pay from the negative externalities.

When we talk about AI the profits and the negative externalities are coming at the same time, really, really fast, and we need the companies—we don’t want to—I don’t think we want to break up the companies. I don’t think we want to destroy the companies. I’m not in that camp. I’m a real believer in how AI is going to unlock human potential and human capital around the world. I think it will drive another wave of globalization. I’m truly excited about it.

But I also know that the companies that are profiting from it have zero interest in taking responsibility for the negative externalities that will come, and the role of governments and the role of educators is to ensure that people understand what those negative externalities are and force the debate so that these deep pockets allowing them to profit as much as they can have to take accountability of those costs, because otherwise we will pay for them and our kids will pay for them. That is our principal responsibility.

DUFFY: And our Earth will pay for them as well because the environmental impacts of these models are also not to be discounted and it—

BREMMER: Without question. Yeah.

DUFFY: Yeah. And I think, you know, Yaël, to your point it also just comes down to this fact that we haven’t—we, as voters, right, and as a society haven’t made it the companies’ jobs, right?

The companies are operating against a corporate governance model. That’s their governance model and corporate governance is designed to manage investor risk. It’s not managed—it’s not designed to manage societal risk. Governments are designed to manage societal risk.

And so to me at least one of the critical failings right now is that our government has not caught up with shifting our corporate governance models so that they more reflect the societal risks that they are creating; like, pour one out for the—you know, a past in which we could have had a data privacy law, right, about fifteen, twenty years ago.

We have been speaking a lot and I want to turn this over to you all. Before I go to Q&A I just want to see a raise—a show of hands. Who here has played with, like, a generative AI tool—with a chatbot, with a—so—OK, so a lot of you.

How many of you have played with image creation? OK.

How many of you have—are really working with students or working with, you know, colleagues to think about the incorporation of these tools into how you’re approaching things? OK.

So it still kind of jury is out a little bit maybe on when and how these tools should be used.

BREMMER: Can we take a timeout for just one quick second?

DUFFY: Sure. Yeah.

BREMMER: Because, like, I came here for free to do this because I think this is important. There were a number of you—over ten, over fifteen—that did not raise your hand when she said how many of you have tried to engage with a chatbot. Stop that. OK. Please, I won’t do this again if people don’t raise their hand.

This is the most transformative technology of our lifetimes affecting our students. You are abdicating your responsibility if some of you are not engaging. OK. Maybe you didn’t hear the question. It’s possible, right, or just—(laughter)—or just don’t like to raise your hand. But please promise us that you will do this, OK? Please.

KRISHNAN: I thought everybody did, actually. (Laughs.)

DUFFY: They’re actually—and it’s actually quite fun and quite remarkable. I’ve been working on it with my kids. I have a nine-year-old boy and he is a big fan. I let him—like, we sit and play together and he just likes to generate different types of poetry about poop from the perspective of a sea otter. (Laughter.)

But it’s a great way to talk about, well, this is a sonnet and this is a haiku and—you know, and this is blank verse and this is an iambic pentameter. You know, we can have all sorts of poetry discussions but it’s always from the perspective of the sea otter and always about poop. He probably doesn’t want me to say that in something that’s going to be online.

OK. So with that, I want to turn it over to Q&A. What I’ll probably do is take, like, two or three questions at a time, kind of batch them, turn them over, and then do another run.

So I guess—yes, like, here. Maybe we’ll start in the front and then we’ll go to the middle. So you, ma’am, and you and you.

Q: Thank you. Am I good? OK. Hi.

Look, I want to play Devil’s advocate. You know, I did not raise my hand significantly because I’m here to learn about AI and, you know, I’m just curious. And so I was struck, Ian, by, you know, the forcefulness of, you know, your thesis.

I think that AI sort of drives anti-democracy and not pro-democracy and I, you know, thought about—about fifteen years ago I was writing about celebrating social media’s facilitation of Arab Spring democracy movements. So where have we—you know, what’s the threat with AI against democracy and why are we banning TikTok?

I just thought, you know—I mean, AI is revolutionary, absolutely. But, you know, we—trafficking our or we sell off our organs, you know, and so the ethical response has been ethical regulation and why—you know, that we give ethical regulation a chance to regulate AI.

I mean, I just think that there are a lot of positive dimensions of AI but we just need to regulate it and, you know, what’s the threat? Why are we so sort of anti-AI?

DUFFY: And then over here.

Q: Hi there. Jonah Ralston from University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.

I was one that did raise my hand to abject dread and part of that was driven by the fact that if we look at, say, tobacco companies, which were known to be putting out a harmful product but they were actually venerated for many years, right, for putting out a product people wanted and that was useful, and they were able to successfully fight regulation for many years and, in fact, in the 1990s they were still sitting in Congress saying their product was not addictive.

When you look at fossil fuel companies, right, venerated for bringing electricity to the masses and for all that they did to provide economic development, they were able to fight regulation for many years and in fact created a playbook that was based on the tobacco companies, right, of funding misinformation, things like this.

So when I hear something about regulation and effective regulation of this technology I’m just utterly concerned because I wonder what the actual prospects are for that given our past history of regulating risky technologies. It’s abysmal, honestly. We do very poorly at that. We’re incredibly reactive, not proactive, and this is far quicker in terms of how its impact is going to be felt and other things like that, and these companies are very well funded, very powerful.

So I just have a question related to that. And what would be this crisis, Ian, that you talked about? What could actually prompt the regulation? Because climate change was discovered and was, clearly, a crisis. I mean, it’s still a crisis that we’re in. But it didn’t prompt immediate change. It didn’t prompt immediate, effective regulation.

Thanks.

DUFFY: And then over here to you, sir.

Q: Thank you. Shadi Abouzeid, Georgetown University.

A quick question related to also you said China versus the U.S., that U.S. is at the top and China is further away. So this is maybe from coding aspect, but we also know that the chips for them to double speed, they need eighteen months. For us to train generative AI we need four-and-a-half months. So we’re having a bottleneck when it comes to the processing power.

But when quantum computing becomes live, again, we don’t know when and this is, I think, the major fight between the China and the U.S.—who’s going to get to the quantum computing level faster than the other, and this is going to be a totally different discussion at that point in time.

So how do you see this happening? How do you see the quantum computing contributing to the gap and to this technology as we move forward?

DUFFY: Fantastic. Thank you.

I love the interplay of, like, why can’t we just regulate this and, like, oh, my God, we never regulate. (Laughter.) But I think everyone can feel comfortable and confident with Congress’ functionality right now, right? And we know—no concerns in the U.S.

So, well, I want to just open it up to you all for thoughts and responses and I also particularly love with quantum this question as well of how do we get ahead of the curve in thinking about something that we know is coming when historically we have been so bad at doing that from a governance standpoint when we think about emerging technologies.

So any thoughts, comments? Let me—Yaël, I’ll start with you and then over to Ian and then to you, Ramayya.

EISENSTAT: So I’m going to start with these two questions because they really played off each other. I do want to start with I am not anti-AI, and I know that might not be exactly what you meant but I heard you use the term anti-AI. I was with you. I was one of those people who also celebrated how social media helped empower so many voices during the Arab Spring.

I mean, I was in government at the time. I was working on Africa and the Middle East at the time. It was so exciting.

I think there’s—without trying to unpack all of Congress’ failings right now I think one of the problems too is we’re trying to find the end-all be-all solution that solves everything even though we don’t know what the everything is yet at the expense of some very clear incremental potential legislation that we could be passing and we’re not.

And, you know, if you—Senator Schumer did a series of AI insight forums recently on the Hill and he brought in both industry and academics and civil society and it was actually—I was one of the people who spoke and it was the most interesting time I’ve seen actual industry and critics in the same space.

And there are very real pieces of legislation that could pass that does not solve whatever the entire threat is but for some reason we are so hamstrung that we can’t—you brought up privacy legislation. People might not understand why that matters so much. In addition to all the reasons privacy legislation matters it also plays at the heart of the business model.

DUFFY: It is the business model. The lack of it is the business model.

EISENSTAT: It plays at the heart of the business model and you ask—I’m not going to give the whole how social media harms democracy. I literally wrote a whole talk on it if you’re that interested and I don’t have that much time here.

But what I also find interesting that we don’t talk about enough is our Congress, at the end of the day, is somewhat reflective of who we are as a society. Our Congress has gotten more polarized at the same time as society has gotten more polarized. I am not saying social media is the only thing to blame for that.

But what was really interesting when you look at some of the leaked Facebook files two years ago, I think, at this point one of the studies that didn’t get enough press attention was that in Europe Facebook researchers themselves showed that the amount of politicians who admit that they had to start campaigning on more and more extreme platforms in order for their content to get the algorithmic boost online, which then when they got elected made them feel that they had to then pass more and more extreme legislation or advocate for more and more extreme stances because that’s what they did in the campaigns.

This is all an interplay. I’m not exactly answering how do you legislate. I could give an hour speech on that. There are some actual—the fact that we can’t even pass a law on what should the rules around political advertising on social media be that should be really clear cut. It’s not all—you don’t need the end-all be-all quantum computing engineer genius to figure out what some of these rules should be.

But there is so much money and power at stake in governing the internet in the online world that that is part of what is making it so difficult. I will not stop fighting to try to get smart regulation in place so that we can protect against the externalities while fostering the innovation we’re all excited about.

DUFFY: Ian, over to you.

BREMMER: So I’m going to leave the quantum computing to our technologist. (Laughter.) That seems like the smart thing to do. I think you all should just fight it out over lunch because that would be entertaining, I think, for all of us.

But no, I really appreciated the back and forth and I think there are two things that I want to say. The first, we often talk about how technologies can be used by good actors and by bad actors and the technology itself is neutral. I find that that is a problematic concept because different technologies by nature of what they are have different impacts on society irrespective of how they’re deployed.

So we had a communications revolution. The internet was created, open source, and suddenly people all over the world had access to information, access that a lot of authoritarian governments didn’t want them to have.

It was a democratizing and decentralizing technology and it facilitated the Arab Spring, Tunisia, Egypt. It facilitated the colored revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia and the Kyrgyz Republic—the only time I’ll mention them—other places like that, right? Incredible.

The technology changes. We go from the communications revolution to the data revolution. The data revolution is a surveillance-based consolidating technology that allows governments and corporations to take all of your individual data and to use it. Drives a lot of profit.

The first time I saw that play out geopolitically was in Syria when Assad had a whole bunch of coders that came in from Russia and was able to figure out who were all the people that were, like, moderates inside Syria that wanted to demonstrate against the horribly oppressive Assad regime.

He found them, he rooted them out, he terrorized them, and Assad is still there as a consequence. Different technology. The first one empowered democracies and open communication. The second one empowered large corporations, monopoly platforms, and authoritarian states. Bad and good actors still exist in the same general numbers in the world but one technology is actually more problematic geopolitically. It’s more destabilizing. That’s just the reality. So when I say that we’ve got problems in this space that’s what I’m talking about.

Now, if the blockchain were to become a dominant technology we might end up with a new shift to a decentralizing technology that destroys the monopoly platforms and that would be a very different geopolitical order. We are not there right now.

Right now we’re in an environment where a small number of monopoly platforms are not only able to dominate, like, everyone that’s on their space but also can identify new companies as they come up can find out which one of them are going to be valuable and can either buy them really cheap or can throttle them—stop them from developing the scale.

So, I mean, we don’t have a free market competitive economy in this environment. We have an oligopoly of a small number of anti-competitive monopoly actors that also have access to lots of cash to buy off political actors. That’s really important because we’ve seen that happened with tobacco and oil and food, you name it. There’s a whole bunch of—that’s happened, right?

Now, the other thing you asked about TikTok. I think TikTok is interesting, right, because we’ve known that TikTok is a security problem for a while but it didn’t really drive an outcome until after October 7, because after October 7 suddenly you had very large numbers of people in the United States concerned about all of the antisemitic tropes that were being promoted on TikTok and just how much more pro-Palestinian and pro-Arab sentiment there was there.

They first tried to get to the CEO, tried to squeeze him. Didn’t work, and so then went to work on Congress, and in a short period of time you had both the China national security people and the pro-Israel lobby together saying we’ve got to destroy TikTok, got to get them out of China’s hands, and that’s actually moved the needle.

So that’s kind of where we are right now. It’s really interesting. But, you know, my view on TikTok, at the end of the day, is that—look, it’s like when I was growing up in Catholic school, right? I mean, like, it’s one thing if your parents discipline you. It’s another thing if the teachers discipline you, right? Like, we don’t—it’s OK—like, I can spank my kid but you can’t spank my kid.

That’s the way we feel about TikTok. Like, we can destroy our kids but the Chinese can’t destroy our kids. (Laughter.) That’s not OK. We got to make sure that if we’re going to destroy the children it needs to be American corporations and—(laughter)—and I think that’s something we can all agree on.

DUFFY: Ramayya, over to you.

KRISHNAN: So I think they’re over-indexing on AI and social media. AI is not social media. We’ve given examples of education and health care and pharmaceuticals and all sorts of other society beneficial things that AI could be used for.

So if there’s one thing I’d like for you to leave us with is not to think about AI as social media. So that’s the first thing. Certainly, is there a problem with the—that the AI could cause on account of social media having the distributive power that it has? Yes, but that’s tied into an alignment problem that exists with social media.

I mean, click-through rate was the objective function that all social media uses because it’s easy to measure, easy to monetize. But it creates all sorts of consequences tied to engagement, which is the reason why when you’re on YouTube or TikTok or any of these you’re constantly fed more and more content and the content that you’re fed is tied to what you’ve consumed, which then means that you’re put into filter bubbles that allows you to basically not get the full scope of information that’s out there.

It’s a known issue figuring out what the incentive should be to get the firms who run social media platforms. And it’s not just TikTok. It’s Facebook, it’s Insta, it’s all of those—all those platforms. It’s not like there haven’t been proposals made but is it incentive compatible with the business model, as Ian has mentioned, is actually the—is a key issue.

Now, I think you also asked the question about TikTok. I don’t know whether TikTok per se should be—there are 150 million people on TikTok. A very large number of them are thirty years old and younger. There is—it skews demographically towards a population that has had the kind of content creation that Ian spoke about.

They all have Section 230 protection. It’s not that TikTok is telling people to create this content, OK, just to be clear. They’re a platform. They, certainly, run the algorithms that sort of recommend content to you but content is user generated.

Could there be potential use of bots to create user-generated content? Absolutely. Could there be ways in which technology could be created to spoof content? Yes. But all these social media platforms basically use the Section 230 to basically say that they’re just carrying content. They are not responsible for who creates it.

Now, if it’s child pornography and other things it’s very clear that they can act and they will act. Misinformation—your misinformation is my good information. So that flies in—it creates a problem of freedom of speech because one part of society really gets upset with social media platforms. If you take my content out I’m really upset.

But other people feel like what I’m putting out there or what somebody else is putting out there is really bad information, right? So it’s a hugely challenging problem because classifying misinformation and disinformation is nontrivial. Now—

DUFFY: Ramayya, one minute on quantum, quickly, because we’re almost out of time.

KRISHNAN: Now, with deep fakes there’s more of a concern there, I think, with regard to elections. The one counter example I’d like to offer is with the elections in Pakistan where Imran Khan, who was the former prime minister, was in jail. His party used AI to create, quote/unquote, “a deep fake” with his permission to canvass on his behalf.

So there are deep fakes being used maliciously, deep fakes being used with permission, if you will.

DUFFY: He was passing notes to his lawyers from jail and they were using AI to generate audio of him giving speeches of those notes.

KRISHNAN: And they did rather well, actually. Now, with regard to quantum, quantum is a potential game changer along with AI and I say potential because it’s not entirely clear how it’s going to play out.

If it does play out like some would expect it to then it fundamentally changes not only the classical model of computing, it changes all our security protocols that we have in place, including blockchain, because they’re all based on a very well-known cryptographic hashing algorithm that is not resilient to quantum and that’s why I think there’s a lot of funding from NSF and from DARPA and from DOE, which actually goes to a point I wanted to make to Ian’s earlier remark about not all the funding for research is from companies.

I think there’s a lot of—and I—he’s right about the fact when there’s market failure is really what—you want government funding to really fund things to really get faculty and researchers engaged on that type of topic.

So there’s a lot of work in government funded by these government agencies to try and produce tools that would be resilient if quantum became what they expect it to become.

Now, are the firms investing in quantum? Absolutely. So that’s not a yes/no answer because it’s still not clear exactly how it would play out.

DUFFY: And so with that, we are between you all and lunch. I’m so sorry.

I at least will stand at the front if anybody wants to ask a couple of questions. I don’t know if any of our panelists can hang for a couple of minutes.

So I just want to wrap up quickly by saying in, like, one sentence each, no semicolons, what is the thing you’re most excited about or optimistic about as you look to the future?

Ian, I’m going to start with you. One sentence.

BREMMER: Over a billion people in short order that will have access to world-class intelligence and the education and health care and everything else that that will mean for them. It’s extraordinary.

DUFFY: Mmm hmm. Yaël?

EISENSTAT: The younger generation understanding these tools better and using them in really important, smart, and powerful ways.

DUFFY: Fantastic. Ramayya?

KRISHNAN: So, I mean, I think what Ian said. Education and health is going to be transformative worldwide. The thing that we didn’t get to talk about I think there’s going to be a new industry stood up much like the GAAP-created auditing as a new industry.

GAAP is generally accepted accounting principles of financial statements that created a whole auditing and accounting industry. I think there’s an opportunity to do that for AI safety, and so that might happen and, hopefully, we’ll be the leaders in it.

DUFFY: Mmm hmm, especially the students.

And I would say that I am most optimistic because all of you are here today and we are so lucky to have you. You are so engaged and thoughtful and I am so grateful that this collection of leaders is going out and building our new generation of thinkers.

So thank you all so much for participating. We appreciate you. Go have lunch. (Applause.)

(END)

KISSANE: Okay, hi, everyone. Good afternoon. A very happy Friday to all of you. I know this is the last panel of the day. CFR does so many great panels, so I don’t want to say saving the best for last, but you are in for a really special treat, and it’s such a real, deep privilege and pleasure to have the opportunity to moderate today’s panel on climate policy and implementation. Delighted to have three really fantastic speakers joining us.

And before I introduce the—before I introduce the panelists, well, I should say my name is Carolyn Kissane. I’m the associate dean at the NYU Center for Global Affairs, and I founded the NYU Energy, Climate Justice and Sustainability Lab.

But what we had talked about is we would love to find out—because I know many of you in the room teach courses on foreign policy, international relations, issues around security, so we’re curious to get a sense of who in the room right now teaches or integrates climate change into your course work. Wow! Thank you.

Alice, really a fantastic number of hands went up, so we are really, really delighted to see that so many of you are teaching about and thinking about, in your coursework and in your research. And again, as you have found out over the course of today and last night—and hopefully all of you are using or will use CFR’s resources. They really are fantastic. I have found them to be very useful for me in the classroom, so—

But I know you’re not here to hear me talk. You are here to learn from our fantastic panelists.

So let me go ahead and introduce Selwin Charles Hart. Selwin is a special advisor to the secretary-general on climate action and assistant secretary-general for the climate action team at the United Nations. Selwin, thank you so much for joining us.

Jonathan Goldberg, founder and chief executive officer at Carbon Direct. Jonathan, thank you.

And Alice Hill, who is joining us here virtually, is the David Rubenstein senior fellow for energy and environment at the Council on Foreign Relations. And I think you will also see Alice has written some really spectacular pieces in Foreign Affairs on climate, and some of that we’ll be talking about today.

So we’re really lucky in terms of the three panelists that we have. We have the United Nations represented, we have the private sector, looking at what is really exciting space in terms of what is happening to reduce and—to both reduce and to eliminate carbon. And then of course Alice in terms of her research in terms of looking at climate change, security resilience, a lot of work on infrastructure.

So we’re going to get started here first with Selwin, with the first question. So Selwin, you were in the United Arab Emirates in November, and I’m sure many of you in your classes were talking about COP28—Conference of Parties, number 28. Can you share with us what you took away in terms of wins that came out of COP28?

HART: Thank you so much, Carolyn, and it is a pleasure to be here with all of you. And COP28 occurred at a pivotal moment in the global fight against the climate crisis. The Paris Agreement is eight years old. It’s the first multilateral agreement on climate which calls for action to be taken by all countries, by all parties. The COP also occurred at a time when, as you all know, the world is bitterly divided. We have these geopolitical tensions—significant geopolitical tensions, yet close to 200 countries were able to agree on a set of outcomes that provide us with a very clear roadmap for the next two years.

So going into the COP, the secretary-general had three major priorities: first, this was a COP to conclude the first global stocktake of the Paris Agreement. The global stocktake is an important element of the Paris Agreement architecture. It is a moment of collective reflection on what has been achieved and what needs to be done to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement, and it is to set the stage for countries to prepare their next—and I’ll use an inside baseball term—their new nationally determined contributions, which are national climate plans which provide clarity on what each party would do to reduce emissions and build resilience.

So it was absolutely important for the first global stocktake—for this first global stocktake to provide very clear guidance to parties on the ambition level and the quality of the national climate plans that they will work on over the course of the next two years and submit well ahead of COP30.

And we got a good outcome. They agreed that the next round of nationally determined contributions—the NDCs—should be economy-wide, covering all sectors and categories, and covering all greenhouse gases. And more importantly—or equally importantly, they should be aligned with the 1.5-degree goal of the Paris Agreement. So very clear guidance.

Now countries over the course of the next two years now need to do their homework and prepare credible 1.5-aligned, high-quality, nationally determined contributions that really show how they are going to ban significantly—ban the emissions curve and provide the signals that the private sector desperately needs to scale up the investments in emission-reduction technologies.

The second, I would say, area of progress was on the energy transition. The famous paragraph eight—and I know that you will get to that soon—really provided some forward-leaning elements to guide countries on their respective energy transition pathways, call for a global tripling of renewable energy capacity, a doubling of energy efficiency, and the famous transition away from fossil fuels, which I know that we will get to later, right? How these are integrated into the NDCs will be absolutely critical, and it will be one of the great tests and battles over the course of the next two years.

The third priority of the secretary-general going into the COP was around climate justice. We know that impacts are worsening around the world with the most vulnerable—the developing countries, the low-income countries, small island developing states—bearing the highest burden as it relates to the climate crisis. Unfortunately, we did not see the level of progress that we would have wanted on the climate justice front. Yes, the new Loss and Damage Fund was approved. You may recall that this has been a constant request from the vulnerable countries for over thirty years. It is finally approved with contributions totaling close to $800 million, but placing that in context: $800 million for about 130 countries when conventional estimates on the loss and damage requirements of vulnerable developing countries is in the region of a hundred billion dollars a year. But it’s a start.

There was also some outcomes around adaptation, but quite frankly, on the climate justice front, we really can’t chalk that up as a win. And it will be critical in the next few years for us to define more concrete and ambitious ways and objectives and goals towards addressing the worsening impacts and preparing communities, peoples, and countries to address what we are seeing and likely to see as global temperatures increase.

KISSANE: Thank you, Selwin—maybe a very quick follow up because you are from Barbados, and you have represented Barbados in climate conferences in the past. What was the—was there a degree of satisfaction from the small island states which are, as you pointed out, the most vulnerable?

HART: Well, I believe it was a mix. At the end of the COP they were not happy, and most of you or many of you would have heard the intervention by the delegate from Samoa—and a very good friend—who expressed some concerns that the outcomes of the COP were not the game-changing outcomes that the small islands would have liked. The reality is, despite the progress that was made, we are on a 2.4 to 2.8 Celsius—degrees Celsius increase in global average temperature, right? That’s the trajectory. When the Paris Agreement was finalized, it was—we were heading towards 4 degrees Celsius, so it has made some difference. But the pace is not fast enough. We’re still not on a safe pathway. We’re not on that 1.5-degree pathway, we’re not on a 2-degree pathway. We still have a lot of work to do.

And on the adaptation and loss and damage front, it still remains the neglected half of the global climate equation at a time when we know these impacts are worsening, and we’re seeing it in this country. We’re seeing it around the world. Vulnerable countries see it most. The IPCC has identified Africa, South and Central America, and parts of Asia, and the small island developing states as the global hot spots for the climate crisis. And morality from climate is multiple times that of other regions. So these countries are seeing these impacts in real time, and their needs, quite frankly, are not being met.

KISSANE: Thank you. It’s kind of perfect segue to Alice, and I’m going to very strongly recommend, as an educator myself—I used this actual piece as required reading for my students, her August 2023 Foreign Affairs piece, “The Age of Climate Disaster is Here.”

So Alice, you present a very sobering picture of the devastation caused by climate change and the challenge to our current infrastructure. And Selwin just went into the challenges of adaptation.

So how do you think about the very sort of—the massive infrastructural challenges, not just here in the United States, but worldwide, and how can governments and the private sector better cooperate to address these challenges?

HILL: Well, thank you, Carolyn, and it’s really my honor to be on this panel. Selwin has done a great job of describing some of the challenges that climate change is already revealing. Ahead there will be more damaging impacts—droughts, wildfires, extreme precipitation, flooding—and we are on the globe heating up quickly. NOAA has just concluded that 2023 temperatures were 1.35 degrees above Celsius. That was the warmest year ever recorded, and it looks like 2024 may even beat that.

So to put this in perspective from what the scientists are telling us, a child born in 2023 may look back on that year as the warmest year she experienced—could be, but certainly—oh, excuse me, the coolest year she experienced. It certainly will be among the coolest. And what does that mean? That means that all this infrastructure investments that humans have been making for the thousands of years when temperatures have been stable are not proving up to the challenge in an unstable climate, and that’s why you are seeing massive failures. We’re seeing it in less developed countries, but we’re also seeing it in the developed world.

The infrastructure—virtually all of our infrastructure was built for a climate that no longer exists, and so it is vulnerable to more water, less water, wildfires. We have also huge investments along our coastlines. In the United States, 40 percent of the population lives in a coastal county, but that only makes up 10 percent of our land mass, so we have very large investments in areas that are highly vulnerable.

It also affects major ecosystems that we rely on for water—fresh water—but also for transportation. Just think about the Mississippi River. That carries 90 percent of our agricultural exports, and that river shuts down when there is too much water, which occurs as well as during drought with major implications for supply chains as well as food security.

So we know we are in a bad way. Last year we had twenty-eight separate $1 billion events causing damages of $1 billion or more, and if you look back forty years ago, on average we had just one of those every four months. Now, adjusting to 2022 dollars, we are having one every three weeks. Our infrastructure just isn’t up for these new extremes.

So, as a result—I’m sure some of you have experienced this in some of your states—the insurance industry is beginning to pull back in certain geographic areas, notably California with regard to wildfire, and then in our coastal Gulf states with regard to wind insurance because of big storms. In the 1960s, we saw a pullback of insurance—private insurers—for flooding. The private insurers looked around at some floods that had occurred and said, you know, we really don’t like that risk; we just don’t want to insure on it anymore. So Congress stepped in and created a national flood insurance program. That has not gone well. That is basically $20 billion in the red, and it can’t get to a point where it charges what are called actuarily sound rates—rates that really reflect the risk—because the rates are too high. And when rates become high, people make choices not to buy insurance unless they are required to do so which they are required if they have a federally backed mortgage.

But with these Texas wildfires, there is very recent reporting that about 25 percent of the population that lived in the rural areas that burned had no homeowners insurance. That has profound impacts for the local economy, that makes it much harder for families to get back on their feet. They have to rely on federal or state aid, or their friends and family. But if you have one geographic area that’s deeply hit, those funds may be in short supply.

The question you asked, Carolyn, is what can we do. Oh, there’s so much we can do, but we find that there is a lot of pushback for the choices that need to be made. We need to focus on where and how we build, and that means that there are some areas that are just too dangerous to build in anymore, but we have more people, as I’ve said, in the coastal regions, and more added every day, even those purchasing in known flood plains. We are very confident that those floodplains will see even more floods in the future.

We also need to change how we build. Our building codes are backwards. Sixty-five percent of counties in the United States do not have a modern building code in place, and by the way, these modern building codes only look to historic risk; they don’t look to future risk. But we have 65 percent of our counties that don’t even do that, so they are—folks that are building in those areas are building structures that will fail.

So it’s a massive overhaul of our investments. We have to derisk some of these investments to invite private capital. But I also think there is a more fundamental challenge. And I was delighted to hear that there were so many people in the audience teaching climate change. We need a workforce that can deal with this. We do not have that workforce. We don’t have it in the federal government, and we don’t have it in the private sector. In fact, I was surprised to learn, as far as I know—and I hope that maybe someone in the audience can correct me—there is only one school in the entire United States that requires education on climate change. That’s the University of California at San Diego.

So that means a young person can graduate from our fine higher education institutions and avoid learning about climate change. That leaves us very ill prepared for the scope of the challenge that is ahead. So it’s all doable but we need to get started, and that will begin with having people who understand what the challenge is and have the tools that they can find the solutions for those challenges.

KISSANE: Thank you, Alice. I see lots of head shaking, and I see people very much acknowledging what you said. So I am confident that those educators in the room that will be going back with even sort of more motivation to the work they need to do in and out of the classroom with students.

I’m going to move to Jonathan. So Jonathan, you are the founder and CEO of Carbon Direct. By the way, I really encourage you to look at the website for Carbon Direct—really fantastic to understand thinking about carbon. And one of things that Carbon Direct is focused on is reduction and removal of carbon.

And a question that I have for you, Jonathan, is that by 2030 the world needs to remove 1.2 billion tons of carbon annually. And based on what you are doing at Carbon Direct, how is it that you think about going about achieving that level of reduction, and what are some of the—kind of more of the innovative ways that you see, you’re thinking about, and companies and governments are thinking about carbon removal and reduction?

GOLDBERG: Yeah, I mean, I think within both carbon reduction we’ll help our partners, and also in the physical removal of CO2, so both dealing with the flow of CO2 that goes into the atmosphere every year and also the residual stock of CO2. It’s not just one or the other. We’ve already emitted over a trillion tons of CO2 that’s sticking in the atmosphere, it’s long lasting. There’s ways to deal with that, and we need to both address that stock and also the flow.

We’re working with companies and technology providers on both of these things across a range of solutions, and I mean, I guess I’d say there is good news and there is bad news. There is a lot of technology innovation, and it’s always really exciting to see whether it’s in new forms of lower carbon fuels—we’re working with companies that are literally taking CO2 as a feedstock and converting it into syngas and then fuel. You can actually burn fuel with no incumbent CO2, lowers contrail emissions, it’s really, really positive. But they’re early, right, and they’re very much at—maybe not the lab stage but that early project phase.

And what we have right now is this big gap, if you will, both in policy—which is sort of getting there—and also in the capital stack to take these promising technologies and get them to scale. We use a hundred billion gallons a year of fuel, and it’s just miniscule what’s actually produced for lower carbon fuels. So the good news is we have some technologies, we have some planned mandates, like in Europe. But we’re really missing that middle. We’re really missing that implementation factor to go from small to large.

I couldn’t agree more with Alice in terms of the people skills are super important. Some of that’s just physical sciences, so the work that people in this room are doing. I’d also say it’s training or retraining. We work with a lot of sort of engineering staff that’s come from oil and gas industry because you need to take some of that same skillset and drive these other things. So there’s this wide range of technologies, but are we close in sort of the physical element of delivering a billion tons of removal by 2030 or the equivalent amount of reduction by 2030? No. It’s very, very far from that.

KISSANE: Maybe a quick follow-up question—carbon capture storage, direct air capture, those are—and those were recognized in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which is sort of recognized as the United States’ most ambitious climate legislation. How do you see those two specific types of technologies playing a role?

GOLDBERG: Yeah, I mean, I think even more than in the U.S.—and the U.S. is supporting both carbon capture and carbon removal, and these are distinct things. One is stopping CO2 from going into the atmosphere by essentially capping—capturing, excuse me—from flue gas of cement or steel. You stop the CO2—you can stop about 95 percent or more of the CO2 from going into the atmosphere, and then store it, store it underneath the ground. Or you can remove CO2 from the atmosphere through things like direct air capture, biomass with carbon capture—there are some other technologies—and of course nature-based solutions using forests, and soils, and oceans, and the like.

So the U.S. is supporting these things through tax code—that’s sort of generally how we do climate policy, through something called 45Q, which pays money in the form of federal tax credit for both capture and removal. And recently in the EU, within their industrial policy—and these are binding commitments—there’s about 400 to 500 million tons of both CCS and also carbon removal embedded in the 2040 plan. These are massive, massive, massive numbers. The industry is a fraction of that—we’re talking hundredfold increases by 2030 and then doing that again by 2040.

So all of the above are quite important. There is a variety of different taxes on this one, though.

KISSANE: Excellent. If I could just share a quick anecdote, over the summer I worked with ten high school students from two Brooklyn high schools that worked with Air Company and Air Company is a—

GOLDBERG: I’m on the board of Air Company—

KISSANE: Oh, you’re on the board? I didn’t even know this.

GOLDBERG: —so yes, I know it well. (Laughs.)

KISSANE: We didn’t set this up. But what was great was what Air Company does is they convert carbon, and they originally started—and Jonathan, you could probably give a better picture, but they started converting carbon to alcohol—vodka, I think, was the first—and then they moved—

GOLDBERG: It’s the only cool company I’ve ever invested in. (Laughter.)

KISSANE: —and then they moved to hand sanitizer during COVID, and now they’re doing sustainable aviation fuel. But what was really wonderful in my—in terms of how I was working with them is that they were helping—working with two high schools to bring an understanding of carbon capture, looking at it in the context of environmental and climate justice, and bringing it in at the high school level with the hopes that those students would then want to go and work in the climate change space.

So, anyhow, thank you so much. I’m a big fan.

So I’m going to go to Selwin, and this is again, kind of a perfect next question after Jonathan. One of the big things, I think, that came out of COP28—and there was a lot of, of course, attention in advance because COP28 was in the United Arab Emirates, and the chair of COP28 was their Sultan al-Jaber, who is also the president of ADNOC, which is the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. And one thing that was kind of considered a win from the COP28 was the language in the final document of the transition away from fossil fuels.

So I’m kind of curious—because it’s also hard because we see, year on year, increases in the amount of fossil fuels that the world is using, whether it’s natural gas, oil or coal. So can you just sort of shed some light on, one, that was a big win to get there because it was kind of hard to believe; it was the first time that fossil fuels were directly sort of in the agreement, and what your sort of take was afterwards?

HART: Thanks—really tough question.

KISSANE: (Laughs.) Sorry.

HART: No, no, but to you, it’s pretty absurd that, after thirty years of climate negotiations that the culprit behind the climate crisis was acknowledged. But that is where we are. And I agree: it really was a positive step forward. But this positive step forward now needs to be translated into concrete actions, and it needs to be transmitted directly into the policies and regulations of countries.

We’re absolutely clear—and the secretary-general has said this repeatedly—the transition is inevitable, right? We’ve never seen renewable energy deployment at the pace and scale that we’re currently seeing—record levels of renewable energy deployment—and in most countries, renewables-class storage is cheaper than fossil fuels, in most advanced economies.

But there are three really big questions that must be addressed over the course of the coming years—first, will it be fast enough? Will this transition be fast enough? The reality is that many countries have pledged net zero by 2050, but it’s this critical decade that really matters. We need to rapidly reduce emissions this decade to stand a fighting chance to meet or to achieve our long-term climate goals. The IPCC and the IEA both estimate that global emissions need to decrease by over 40 percent over the course of the next few years, and we are not on pace to do that. Global emissions continue to increase. So we’re not on pace.

So the speed of the transition will be absolutely critical, and the reality is that those with the capacity and the capability will need to move first and will need to move fastest. It means countries like the U.S., like the G-7, those countries who have the capacity and capability, they need to move first and they need to move fastest.

Unfortunately, we’re not seeing that leadership in some quarters. When you look at the expansion of oil and gas—oil and gas expansion, right, it’s primarily in the global north, right, and that is a problem. That is a major problem. So the speed of the transition is the first challenge.

The second is fairness. Will this transition exacerbate inequalities within and between nations? One of the outcomes at the COP was the acknowledgment that pathways towards transition need to be consistent with the development needs of countries, and it needs to be a recognition that the development imperatives of developing countries must be respected.

But we also know that most of the global demand for energy is in the developing world, and most of it will be in the Asia-Pacific region. So we massively need to scale up international cooperation to ensure that this new energy demand is met from renewable energy sources, they have access to the technologies and the finance that they desperately need in order to accelerate the pace of their transition. And we also have countries who have vast resources—energy resources—but still lack access to energy.

Let’s take the example of Africa. Thirty percent of the critical energy transition minerals are in Africa; 60 percent of the global solar capacity is in Africa. Yet it attracts a mere 2 percent of global clean energy investments as 600 million Africans still lack access to basic energy services and electricity. So the fairness element of this transition must also be seriously addressed, and we know what the challenges are in these countries. Yes, they need to create direct domestic policy environment, but we also need to address some of the systemic injustices in the global economic and financial system where perceptions of risk, where these countries—where the perception of risk negatively impacts on many of these countries.

Let’s take, for example, solar, all right—same investments—sorry—same technology. The costs of—when one looks at debt or equity, in Germany it’s about 2 to 4 percent, cost of capital. In Nigeria, it’s 19 to 20 percent. Even in Kenya it’s about 15 percent, right, so addressing these challenges—these systemic challenges, you know, must be priority number one.

And finally, will it be funded? Will it be funded? Ninety percent of the clean energy installations last year to renewable energy installations last year occurred in China and the advanced economies—90 percent in China and the advanced economies. The rest of the world is being left behind, and a lot of it is due, as I said earlier, to the financing issue. Absolutely key will be getting—key stakeholders in the global financial architecture working better—much better—together. And as you know, many of us have been championing this notion of reform of the international financial architecture, including the multilateral development banks. These institutions, they sit at the intersection between public and private finance. They have tools, they have instruments that can be deployed to help these countries accelerate the pace of the transition.

I believe that the World Bank is moving in a very positive direction under new leadership, but these institutions need the support of their shareholders, the governments—primarily governments of the West—to make them bigger and bolder. And I think a bigger, bolder MDB system will be critical to ensure that the funding—that the third F is addressed.

KISSANE: Excellent. Well, Alice, this is—again, this is a nice opportunity to have you jump in here. In terms of one thinking about what Selwin has so eloquently spoken about in terms of the need for better, more effective, I think, more targeted climate finance, but how do you think about balancing the demands that are required to address mitigation, and as you have—as you have shown us in your own work in terms of the need for really putting a lot of funds into adaptation.

So how do we get that? Is there a way to balance funding for these two critical parts of addressing climate change?

HILL: Well, it’s an excellent question. Definitely the funding so far is very imbalanced, and that’s despite the fact that the Paris Agreement—eight years ago to which virtually all of the nations agreed—states that financial resources should aim to achieve a balance between adaptation and mitigation. But adaptation, for a host of reasons, doesn’t get its fair share. Among the reasons is it’s very context specific. It’s not as sexy probably as some technological solution to cutting emissions or pulling them out of the atmosphere. It requires a lot more—if we think it’s tough to get mitigation agreed to, and it requires really a lot more buy-in within the community, and so it takes time, and it raises—as Selwin has said—huge issues of equity.

But because we’re not investing in adaptation, as I’ve said, we’re seeing the damage side of the equation continue to mount. And we simply are way, way behind. We’re certainly very behind on mitigation, but we’re even further behind on adaptation. The adaptation needs estimated by the UN Environment Programme say that it will be somewhere up to 300 billion per year by 2030 and 500 billion per year by 2050. But if we continue to have the failures of existing infrastructure that we have, I think there is a risk that there is even greater damages and need. And that raises the question, in my mind, will the failure to adapt affect our willingness to invest in mitigation. There are so many demands for the money, but if people are suffering, they’re homeless, they don’t have enough food to eat, they are going to be on the move. There are many global and national security implications to these impacts. What will that do to the will to do what we know we need to do to cut emissions?

So we are seeing a struggle here. It’s played out at virtually every COP. It has been very painful to watch. The developed world has not come forward with the amount of funding, as Selwin has said, that they promised, and that they should be coming up with. So it’s not a happy picture.

KISSANE: Right. Alice, thank you. And I think very much in terms of—given our audience—in terms of thinking about the national security, the private migration issues, the 2022 U.S. National Security Strategy had climate change sixty-four times in it, right, so I think very important in terms of what we are talking about.

So one more question for Jonathan, then we’re going to be opening it up to all of you, so please think about the questions that you’d like to ask.

So Jonathan, it’s been pretty dramatic—I mean, I’ve been working, kind of teaching in the climate and energy space for now about twenty years, and carbon has really been a change in the way that we think about it—the idea of the business of carbon, the idea of many more companies and technologies that are out there sort of addressing the carbon problem.

What do you see as the—where do you see the appetite in the private sector, both at the—for the innovative startups, but also sort of the larger funds that are in positions to help sort of fund new technologies and what is a technology that you’re really excited about? Four or five questions there. (Laughter.)

GOLDBERG: So, I mean, I think in the private sector it’s obviously quite diverse in how it thinks through these things. One, I think that for most large corporations, they are looking probably more or less for the first time over the last five, ten years as—carbon also as a liability, right—either a regulated liability through CSRD and other things in Europe. The SEC has some quite modest but starting proposals for disclosure for publicly traded companies here—California a little bit more stringent than that.

So companies are sort of getting it; that they’re going to have to at least say what their overall exposure is in one form or another, and then their actions to sort of counterbalance that have come from a variety of internal stakeholder pressure, shareholder pressure to some extent, a variety of different private market initiatives to make commitments of one form or another, and in some cases, regulatory pressure. It’s nowhere near as cohesive, I think, as anybody would like. It makes companies deal with all sorts of different reporting requirements, and they don’t always speak to one another, but at least it’s a start. So I think that’s the sort of liability side, if you will.

In the private sector, if you look at carbon management—broadly right—so for the first time, there is an economic model. So if you take carbon capture and carbon removal, nobody pays you for that CO2 through a tax credit or otherwise. There is no model for it, right? And if you look at something like our friends in Brooklyn, zero carbon fuel—and this is literally CO2, single step into fuel, it’s far more expensive than normal petroleum fuel. Airlines have tight margins as it is; they’re only purchasing that fuel if they get some type of government incentive. And then over time the companies are able to drive down that sort of “green premium,” otherwise it doesn’t work. Companies won’t make that move.

So I think, funds—both sort of venture and growth funds—are really looking for what are the technologies that are going to accelerate growth into that area. And then there is a lot of capital—insurance companies, sovereigns, et cetera—that are looking for later-stage project development. The challenge is, right now, that only really works for late-stage removal on solar, and as is well pointed out, only in certain geographies, right, so these tend to be quite risk-averse investors. And they are totally fine taking a sort of de-risk 3 percent returning asset in a stable environment, and they’re good with that, right? But that only fits for a small amount of the investments needed. And it also only fits—again, to tack on to the previous comment—a small number of geographies. And that’s really where this scale-up challenge is problematic, right, and that’s what we’re focused on.

KISSANE: All right. So we are going to open it up for questions. Since you are all professors, I know that you will have lots of questions. So please stand, wait for the mic, and please state you name and affiliation. We’ll go right there, yes, with the second table. And then there in back.

Q: Mojubaolu Olufunke Okome. I am concerned—oh, I teach at Brooklyn College. I teach political science.

I’m concerned about the justice aspect of it, and I spent last year on sabbatical in Nigeria at a policy institute where climate change was really the agenda—figuring out what the Nigerian position should be. And Africa is producing like 3.4 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, I think, and has 17 percent of the world population. But it’s suffering tremendous effects of climate change.

And then, when there’s talk about the mitigation and all the things that need to be done so that we move into the future successfully, the cost for those countries is also tremendous. And there are many Africans who are arguing that, look, we need to develop so that we can feed the population so people can live their lives in dignity, and the developed countries are creating most of these emissions, and they historically have been the villains. So why are we being asked to do more?

And then a lot of the—I like the arrangements about the trade—cap and trade, but it doesn’t seem to be working very well yet. So where is the justice in this? How do we move into the future together successfully, and then equity is part of the actual experience of people?

KISSANE: Thank you, great question. Selwin, do you want to—

HART: Thanks. There are number of facets to your question, and you are absolutely right, right? There is currently no justice or little justice in the global response to the climate crisis, and I highlighted the case of Africa—2 percent of global clean energy investments, facing the high cost of capital. Many countries don’t have fiscal space.

So this is why issues related to reform of the international financial architecture are absolutely critical. Justice needs to be at the heart of this. The response also needs to recognize that the timeframe for transition for these countries will need to be longer. We all have a common destination—net zero by 2050 to keep 1.5 (degrees) within reach. And one of the key acts of the secretary-general to the advanced economies is you need to truly lead, and true leadership means decarbonizing your economies faster to provide some space to meet the development needs of the developing world.

But the absolute reality is that all countries must take action, and Africa is warming faster than the global average. So ultimately it is not in the interest of African countries and other developing countries to continue in a fossil-fuel-based global economy. That’s the reality. And while many countries might have the resource—and I ultimately believe that the international community will need to find some way to compensate countries who have the resource to keep it in the ground. That ultimately has to happen, right, where there is some way of compensating these countries who will need to forego use of some of these resources.

But the trends are clear, and one of the very worrying trends is that some of these countries are being encouraged to exploit these resources to satisfy markets in Europe and elsewhere, locking in potentially stranded assets for many decades to come. And again, this is another example of the level of unfairness that we are seeing.

So I think moving forward there needs to be a much greater discussion of what justice means for the developing world, what justice means for Africa, what justice means for other developing countries. But we need leadership, and unfortunately, we’re not seeing that leadership in some of the key places and geographies that we need to see that leadership. So I agree with everything that you said, ma’am, but quite frankly, Africa will not be able to develop in a two-degree global average world because it will be—given that Africa is warming faster than the global average, it will face—it’s already facing insurmountable challenges associated with the climate crisis.

KISSANE: Thank you. We have a question here, then we’ll go there, and then we’ll go there. Thank you.

Q: Thank you very much to the panelists. And my name is Jon DiCicco. I’m from Middle Tennessee State University.

I’m looking for reasons for optimism here, and one reason for optimism, I think, is Selwin’s observation about agreement on the need for adaptations and so forth that are economy wide and that go across all forms of greenhouse gases.

So I want to ask about two sectors that are both essential to human survival in various ways, and ask maybe if the panelists could comment on one of those. The two sectors I have in mind are large-scale agribusiness, and the other sector is the military sector. These are both big emitters, and they—it strikes me as these are areas for potential dynamic strides forward, but also that will be, I think, large challenges. So thank you very much.

KISSANE: Thank you. Another excellent question. I think, Jonathan, do you want to do agriculture, and maybe Alice, can you take military—yeah.

HILL: Sure.

GOLDBERG: Sure, I mean, I think there’s a lot going on with agriculture broadly. I don’t know that there is one magic wand. There has been a lot of talk about an overly broad word in regenerative agriculture, but the reality is there are ways to change agricultural practices through a different type of crop rotations and other areas. There is also a lot of work in fertilizers—an amazing, amazing thing. It’s also very carbon intensive, and there are lower carbon ways of making ammonia and ultimately fertilizer. There is actually quite a lot of innovation going on in these areas.

I’d have a sort of comparable comment as to some of the other sectors. The innovations and the technologies are quite good; the challenge is scaling it up and also doing it in a way that doesn’t impose too much cost, right, so, we mentioned the EU industrial 2040 policy. The one area where that has really not moved forward is in the agricultural sector, right? And there is a huge amount of pushback on things that either in reality or in perception, would add cost to farmers, so we need to be very, very sensitive about that.

I am excited about—we do a lot of work with Deere, we do a lot of work with other companies at big agricultural supply chains. There is good stuff going on. I would still put it in the scale area.

Alice will talk about the military, but I would point, Airco’s first customer is the Department of Defense, and DOD broadly has done a lot historically on direct procurement. They can buy a lot of fuel and have the ability to do this. It’s small as a percentage of overall emissions, but they have been a first customer to actually a whole bunch of our companies. I’m sure Alice has more texture.

KISSANE: Thank you. Alice?

HILL: Sure, I think it’s an excellent point. The U.S. military is responsible for a large share of emissions. I think it’s important to remember that they have a warfighting mission and that that will be paramount in their decisions about how they cut their emissions. But there is certainly, among military personnel—and I recently was on a panel with somebody from the Navy, as well as somebody from the Army, as well as somebody who was in the Department of Defense in charge of installations. And all of them said there is a growing recognition that it’s in the self-interest of that warfighting mission to reduce the dependence on fossil fuels. Certainly, enough deaths occur in war zones as fossil fuel is taken to fuel vehicles and other equipment for there to be a recognition that if we have clean energy that’s on site, solar or some other form, we can reduce the deaths of our own personnel.

But they were also quick to point out that, if you have a six-ton vehicle, it’s probably not going to be—twenty-ton, I don’t know—huge vehicle that the Army is using, it’s not going to run on an EV battery at this point. So there are challenges there.

They also recognized that there were challenges in having the Department of Defense incorporate climate change in its acquisition policy, and that’s both sides. That’s equipment and other assets that are energy efficient or using green energy, but also assets like a jet that can fly in greater heat. Those kinds of choices, everything the military will do will be affected by climate change, and there’s an appreciation that this will be a major effort going forward.

And they were already suffering deeply. I’m sure you may have read about Hurricane Michael. We had some F-22 fighters—over a hundred million dollars each, these jets—and the military has never come clean on how many were lost, but they couldn’t evacuate those—get those planes out all in time, and so they were left in Florida, and the base was heavily damaged.

These atmospheric rivers that are occurring in the American West, the person for the Navy said that they suffered $60 million worth of damage to their roads on their bases—inland bases—for the U.S. Navy. So this is on their radar, but just as every other institution, they are working their way through it, and they also still lack a fully trained workforce that can make these decisions everywhere from on the ground to at the highest levels, and that is a challenge they also acknowledged.

KISSANE: Thank you. Yes?

Q: Hello, my name is Eunice Kang from Vanguard University of Southern California. My question is actually directed to Selwin. I’m excited that you are here as a UN representative.

I was kind of curious about the Nord Stream gas pipeline. I feel like the explosion that happened in 2022—this is where the four gas lines that transfers Russian natural gas to Germany and to the rest of Europe, that was—there was an explosion and then a whole bunch of methane was released into the air and, Jonathan, correct me if I’m wrong, but some articles say that methane is a more potent chemical—I mean, greenhouse gas than even carbon dioxide. And I read that it’s one of the most—the biggest sort of manmade environmental disaster, especially with the Swedes that say they think—with their investigation, they think it was a state actor.

We know what Putin thinks about it. We know who Putin thinks is the culprit. They blame—I mean, he blames the United States, our CIA. Obviously, Washington, our political elites, deny it.

My question is, is the UN investigating who is the culprit behind the explosion? And then, if there is an investigation, why or why not? And is it fruitful or is it futile to kind of investigate, if there is a culprit, to try to keep that culprit accountable for this manmade disaster?

KISSANE: Thank you. Thanks for that question. Selwin, do you want to—maybe?

HART: I’ll have to check. (Laughter.) I don’t know. (Laughs.)

GOLDBERG: I didn’t do it, so—(laughter).

KISSANE: Maybe it is under investigation, yeah. So whether or not, accountability I think will probably be hard. But, I mean, I don’t want to—

We have more questions here. We’re going to go here and then we’re going to go to the back. Thank you for questions from the back.

Q: Hi. I’m Laura Kuhl from Northeastern University.

And wanted to pick up on a theme that I think, Selwin, you were raising very diplomatically throughout your remarks and kind of pose this to the panel. Given that we’re here at the Council on Foreign Relations, I’d be really curious what your thoughts would be on what would you see as kind of the key sort of top priorities for U.S. foreign policy in this climate space? I feel like that’s kind of an elephant in the room that hasn’t quite come out in the surface in this discussion yet. And I mean, I’ll just sort of point to a couple of the areas where it’s been mentioned as one, particularly on climate finance and the lack of follow through on the hundred billion commitment, the role that the U.S. has played in, I think, delaying or perhaps blocking progress on loss and damage over time. And, yes, we now have a fund, but then we’ve seen since the COP failure to elect representatives for a while. So I don’t know, I just think there’s a lot there to unpack, and I’d be curious what you think might be the most productive areas for U.S. foreign policy.

HART: (Laughs.) Really good question. I hope I don’t get in trouble with my friends in the U.S. But—(laughter)—

KISSANE: You’re amongst friends. It’s okay.

HART: (Laughs.) U.S. leadership across the board is absolutely indispensable for accelerating the pace of the transition, for ensuring that issues of fairness are dealt with, and also for ensuring that finance moves at the pace and scale that the world desperately needs. So the simple answer is we need U.S. leadership across the board—leadership by example in accelerating the pace of the transition domestically with very clear policies and regulations underpinning whatever international commitments they make. The IRA was a good start. We need a lot more in terms of concrete policies. And I will say this to my colleagues and friends in the administration. So concrete policies and regulations, really, to accelerate the pace of the transition.

We also need them internationally to do more on climate finance. Yes, the hundred billion is one aspect, but they also control—they are the majority shareholder in most of the multilateral development banks, right? As I said earlier, the new leadership of the World Bank, the leadership of the IDB—Ilan and his team—they are taking these institutions definitely in the right direction. But we need these institutions to be much bigger and we need them to be much bolder, doing a lot of the work that will help to drive investments to places like Africa, both on the mitigation but also on the adaptation side. And we need the U.S. both domestically and as a shareholder in these institutions to also have a very strong focus on adaptation and loss and damage. If there’s one criticism—and colleagues might disagree with me when they see this—they’ve not always been as forward-leaning as we would want them to be on the adaptation-related issues.

And finally, on the international cooperation front, I’ll say something very controversial. We—and it shouldn’t be controversial. We need all of the major economies to work together to solve some of the more difficult issues related to the transition, be it on critical energy transition minerals, be it on technologies like storage, be it on channeling the trillions of dollars towards clean energy and resilience-building activities in the developing world. The U.S.-China relationship on climate has delivered very concrete results. We know these countries will not agree on everything, and I don’t agree with everything that Carolyn says.

KISSANE: You don’t? (Laughter.) This is the first time I’m hearing this. Okay. (Laughter.)

HART: But can climate be one of those issues where these two major powers work cooperatively together on? And can businesses, can mayors and governors, academics from these countries work together cooperatively and collaboratively to solve some of these challenges, including some of the issues related to having a trained workforce, global and national workforce, to accelerate climate action?

So U.S. leadership is absolutely indispensable. It is needed across the board in multiple areas. And we have seen that leadership over the course of the last four years. But we need a lot more of it, and we really need it to accelerate the pace of the transition but also to deliver results on the adaptation and resilience-building front.

KISSANE: Okay. Thank you.

And I will say something maybe—so, since we don’t always agree. (Laughter.) So it’s actually interesting, when you look at U.S. and China, I think we oftentimes—ideally we want the U.S. and China to cooperate because they’re the two largest emitters. However, there is also kind of another side, that if each country really sort of commits to its pledges and moves its pledges forward, that they don’t have to cooperate as long as they are reducing their emissions, and then collectively that will have significant global benefits; that if each country, even if they’re racing in a competitive kind of a way, that that can be advantageous. And then I want to go to—

HART: I don’t—yeah. I don’t agree with you, but—(laughter)—so, sorry. I don’t disagree with you, but, sorry, sorry. (Laughter.)

But cooperation and collaboration can happen in a competitive environment, right? And I think when we’ve had moments of U.S.-China collaboration, it delivered the Paris Agreement. It led to major breakthroughs at every critical milestone in the climate process. So we can still have rabid competition. I love competition. But you can really also foster a spirit of collaboration and cooperation.

KISSANE: Thank you.

HART: So we agree, right? (Laughter.)

KISSANE: We agree. We agree.

We have a question in the back.

Q: It’s actually not a question. I presented to this group—

KISSANE: Oh, hi, Caroline.

Q: Hey. How are you?

I presented to this group earlier today on the Council’s efforts to build global literacy, and what I didn’t tell you is that with Carolyn and Alice’s help we are actually creating a really large library of both learning and teaching resources on the fundamentals of climate change. So climate literacy is imminent and will be available before the new school year, so keep your eyes out if you’re looking for resources to fold into your curriculum, your syllabi. Just give us a little more time and we will have those ready for you. But I would say that we will be—we do touch on every single topic that has been raised here today and then some, so we’ve very excited about this. And I just didn’t want you to leave without knowing about that, so.

KISSANE: Thank you, Caroline. And thanks for all the great work that you and your team are doing.

OK. Yes, another question in the back there? Thank you.

Q: Hi. Rudy Novak from the U.S. Air Force Academy.

So two questions. Number one is—it’s for the whole panel, I suppose—what’s the status of hydrogen, the water engine? And we’re not really—we don’t seem to be talking about it as much as all the other sustainable alternatives for fossil fuels. And the second question is, can you speak to the oil lobby in the United States, their influence in this conversation?

KISSANE: Thank you. Really good questions.

Alice, Jonathan, do you want to take one? Alice, go ahead.

HILL: Well, as I recall, there’s money in the IRA for hydrogen. And I do not follow closely where that’s—what has been given out or what is planned to be given out.

I would note—and this is separate—I sit on the board of the Environmental Defense Fund, and their scientists have done some really interesting work. They actually drove some of the work on methane, which, as we have stated, a molecule of methane up in the atmosphere causes about eighty times the heating of a carbon molecule, but it will be gone or dissipate in just a decade’s time versus hundreds of years for carbon. So it has grown as a focus in our UN negotiations, the Global Methane Pledge. And EDF just put up a satellite for methane, first time an NGO had done that, to measure methane, to capture the leaks that we’ve heard about and document them, so to put a little pressure on the—or, substantial pressure on fossil fuel companies that are extracting oil and releasing this methane.

I bring that up because those same scientists are now attempting to alert the world with some dangers of hydrogen. Apparently, hydrogen is very difficult to detect if it leaks, but it’s similar to methane and nitrous oxide in that it can cause a great deal of heating, as far as I understand. So it’s a little more controversial than we’d like, but if we can do it in a way that’s safe, certainly that’s an alternative that the U.S. government has identified as a sound approach going forward.

KISSANE: Thank you, Alice.

Jonathan, anything you’d like to add?

GOLDBERG: Yeah. I mean, hydrogen use right now is quite low as a percentage of overall electricity or energy demand. And then a subset of that, which is what you were referring to, is sort of green hydrogen, which comes from electrolyzers, which takes water—you split H2O, you get hydrogen. That’s even smaller.

There is something called 45V within the IRA that supports hydrogen use. They’re still working the rules out, which has sort of slowed development. And the big debate is on sort of annual electricity matching versus monthly versus attributional matching. So, basically, what that means is if you’re running hydrogen and you’re making hydrogen but you’re using—for an extreme example—coal, the LCA on that is terrible, right? You actually end up emitting more than the alternative. But if you use green energy, it’s much better. But it’s more complicated than that further because it has to be incremental green energy, right? So if you’re taking green energy that was being used for one thing and then you shift it over to hydrogen, the additionality isn’t that good.

EDF does fantastic work. I don’t think the hydrogen work is an example of that.

HILL: (Laughs.)

GOLDBERG: Hydrogen is quite safe to manage. Leakage is extremely low. I think the problem with hydrogen is actually none of what the good scientists at EDF say and it’s much more around cost. It’s expensive. So, the thing that’s slowing it is green hydrogen right now is three to four times the cost of fossil hydrogen, and that’s holding things back.

Methane, totally agree, and it’s great to see the MethaneSAT satellite go up.

KISSANE: Excellent. I love the fact that we’re a very healthy panel that can agree to disagree. (Laughter.)

We have time for one more, one more question. Right there.

Q: Yeah. This is for Jonathan.

The things I’ve heard in the past about carbon capture and carbon reduction have always included a lot of skepticism, with one of the points being the concern that this could mislead the public into thinking there’s a nice, easy technological fix for carbon emissions. And I’ve also heard concerns that, in fact, carbon companies are investing in carbon reduction because it may decrease the public demand for a reduction in the use of carbon fuels. And I looked into your background and I see that you used to work as a commodities trader for Goldman Sachs, which I assume would have had some relation to the carbon industry. So I’d ask you’d put my concerns to rest.

GOLDBERG: No, I don’t think I would put them to rest. (Laughter.) So, carbon capture done badly and explained badly is not good. So if one were to say, for example, don’t worry about cutting oil production, direct-air capture is just going to remove all the CO2 from the atmosphere, they’d be crazy and that would be really negative for climate progress. I don’t think that’s actually what anybody says, although certainly there are advocates on all sides that you can do.

I think that the—in all IPCC scenarios, it’s quite clear there’s quite a significant need for carbon capture and carbon removal. And again, these are different things. I do think that there’s a lot of use cases—potential use cases for carbon capture that make no sense. Coal is a good example. Coal’s too much condensed CO2; it doesn’t make sense anyway. There’s all sorts of other non-CO2. So it’s not just carbon, right? There’s all sorts of other things, including air pollution, associated with those that are just bad and shouldn’t be supported. I think carbon capture and carbon removal are rightfully considered part of a holistic approach to decarbonization and then net zero. So I think that those concerns are often overstated, but not completely overstated.

KISSANE: Thank you.

Well, first, I want to extend on behalf of the panel our thanks to all of you for being a great audience. Many thanks to Alice, Jonathan, and Selwin for all of your really exceptional insight. (Applause.)

Many thanks to all the organizers from the Council on Foreign Relations who made today and last night happen.

It really is so fantastic to see all of you here. And for all of the work that you’re all doing back in your classrooms and the work that you’re doing with students. I think this is really critical. I see at NYU that we, as a university, we’ve changed so much in the last couple of years in terms of emphasis on climate. We’re really hearing it from students. Students really have the demand, so we need to respond.

I want to wish you all a great weekend. If you’re staying in New York, enjoy it. It’s supposed to be a sunny one. And thank you so much for your attention. (Applause.)

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