Panelists preview potential foreign policy themes in President Joe Biden's State of the Union address, including immigration, trade, and conflict in the Middle East. ROBBINS: So welcome to today’s virtual media briefing on foreign policy in the State of the Union. We are joined today by three of my fabulous colleagues: CFR expert analyst Christopher Tuttle, who’s a senior fellow; Shannon O’Neil, who’s vice president of Studies; and my boss, Steven A. Cook, the Eni Enrico Mattei senior fellow for Middle East and Africa studies.  And I’m Carla Anne Robbins. I’m a senior fellow at the Council and I’m co-host of The World Next Week podcast.  As a reminder, this conversation is on the record, and a video and transcript will be posted online afterwards at CFR.org. We’re going to chat for about thirty minutes, and then we’re going to open it up to questions from everybody online. So welcome and let’s get started.  So, Chris, can we start with you? Foreign policy is rarely a major focus of these speeches, but this year lots of stuff going on out there. We have a war in Ukraine, the war in Gaza, threats by former President Trump to pull out of NATO. What are you going to be watching and listening for on foreign policy? And can Biden both use the speech to persuade the House to approve aid to Ukraine—which is, obviously, of great concern to him and to a lot of us—and at the same time persuade the American public that he’s the best steward of foreign policy with this speech?  TUTTLE: Yeah, so I think it’s very likely foreign policy’s not going to play—it’s not going to occupy a large amount of the speech. But I think, actually, from a messaging standpoint foreign policy presents a great opportunity for the president. I think one of the broad thematics—perhaps the most important broad thematic in this speech—is going to be sort of Republican chaos and the steadiness of Joe Biden. And foreign policy’s a great way to sort of encapsulate that.  You’ve got, you know, this emergency supplemental, national security supplemental, that is—you know, they’ve been attempting to move; $95 billion. Ukraine assistance is in there. There is broad agreement in both House and Senate to support Ukraine assistance, but what’s stopping it is, sort of what the president would argue, is Republican chaos. And I think that if you look at some of the fault lines within the Republican Party, that’s a big one. You know, if there’s an applause line when it comes to Ukraine assistance, it’s going to look a little strange because you’re going to get all the Democrats standing up and, you know, more than half of the Republicans. Similarly with Israel-Gaza, you know, there’s broad support for continued support for Israel and for additional humanitarian assistance for the Palestinians, and yet it can’t move because of—because of chaos. You know, similarly with the border, similarly with the $4 billion that’s in the supplemental for sort of Taiwan and sort of pushing back against China. Here are all these priorities where there is bipartisan agreement and things can’t happen because of the chaos, and I think that Republicans, particularly House Republicans, serve as a proxy for the presidential race that’s to come.  And we can get into some of the decorum questions later, but I think foreign policy offers perhaps the most potent way for the president to demonstrate what is going to be, I think, a critical question in this campaign, which is: Do you want a steady hand on the tiller or do you want what the president would describe as the chaos of sort of House Republicans?  ROBBINS: And not just the chaos. I mean, he really went pretty hard at former President Trump when the president quite proudly—former president quite proudly on the campaign trail said that he, you know, would invite Russia to potentially do whatever the hell it wanted with a—with a member of NATO that didn’t pay its dues. We all know that, of course, NATO doesn’t have dues. But one of the invited guests is the Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson, who—and Sweden is now just a member. Do you expect Biden to go directly after Trump on something like NATO? And that’s really sort of hard to imagine people not cheering NATO and not cheering a new member of NATO.  TUTTLE: No, I wouldn’t expect any direct attacks. I think that the—I think that the House—largely House Republicans, some of the Senate Republicans, that sort of proxy will work effectively, as sort of a mirror of Trump and the presidential campaign. You saw a little bit of this last year. You saw the president with certain lines that he knew, I think, in advance were going to incite some of the folks who may break the quorum and may stand up and look—and those are sound bites that are played over and over. I mean, 27 million Americans watched the State of the Union last year. That’s not a ton, but the sound bites or the video was played over and over of sort of this group of, you know, ruckus makers, you know, on the floor of the House of Representatives, you know, hollering at the president. And that’s not such a great look.   So I don’t think that he’ll go after the president directly. I think he’ll allow House Republicans to serve as that proxy, to do it for him. But I think he will offer a full-throated support—offer his full-throated support for NATO and for the Ukraine assistance, and how critical it is. And again, this is a—this is an issue that divides Republicans. And so, you know, again, if you have that applause line, you know, it’s going to be an interesting dynamic. So that’s what I would say.  ROBBINS: So, Shannon, after age, the border and migration seem to be driving the president’s declining approval numbers. And not just with Republicans, but with Democrats as well. Former President Trump is certainly out there fomenting fear and loathing about migrants everywhere he goes, What will you be listening for about the migration issue? And is this a potential area where he can leverage President Trump’s resistance to a bipartisan deal?  O’NEIL: Well, we saw last week on Thursday both Trump and Biden at the border in Texas. Two different cities. One—Biden was in Brownsville and Trump was in Eagle Pass. But they were both there presenting their views. And, right, Trump’s view was that there’s chaos at the border, and this is the Biden administration’s fault. And Biden’s view was that we had a deal. And back to Chris’s point about, you know, a house that that can’t come together. We had a deal that was going to help fix this. We had a deal that was going to bring in more judges. We had a deal that was going to allow this processing to go faster, that would slow the movement of people to the border, that would change, you know, who applied for asylum, and the like. And, you know, and Trump and the Republicans killed it.   So in some ways I think he was trying to put it off to last week and sort of handle it there. But we will see it tonight. Even if the President doesn’t talk at length during his speech, some of the guests—especially the Republican guests that have been invited—are focused on the border. So we see Republicans in Congress have invited New York police officers that dealt with migrants here. And one of them is leaving an open seat for a young woman who was killed by an illegal migrant. So they are definitely bringing it to the table here. And if and when Biden addresses it again—and tonight, it will be that. It will be that Americans want this done. We need to change the system so it works.  I mean, right now we have two, almost 2.5 million people that came to the border last year. We have over eight million people waiting for their asylum claims to be processed. And that will take years and years to work through. And so he will say, look, we need to come together on issues that Americans care about. This is one of them. And it’s not his fault. It’s their fault. I think if we hear anything, it’ll be that.  ROBBINS: There have been some talk that he was going to issue an executive order. Certainly, legislation can do a lot, but he can also take great political advantage about the fact that President Trump has told the Republicans not to—not to go ahead with legislation. Do you think there’s a chance he will come up with announcing an executive order during this speech to shut the border down?  O’NEIL: You know, we will see. The president has emitted, I think last count, 300 executive orders on immigration issues, on migration issues, to try to manage this process. And one of the challenges he has faced is that many of those have then gotten caught up in courts. So you have various, you know, if they seemed lenient towards migrants, various states or attorney generals who are less in line with opposition have tried to stop them in court and get injunctions, and vice versa when they have deemed too hard. So executive orders are a path and, you know, there has been talk about that, but the problem with executive orders is it’s not a solution. It’s not a solution because, one, those who are opposed to these kinds of orders and the kind of things in these orders take it to court and it gets caught up in there; and, two, this is not a long-term solution. It’s not a sustainable solution for the challenges of migration.  So, you know, I don’t know if we’ll see an announcement tonight. You know, my tendency is to think perhaps we won’t. But this isn’t a new thing. We’ve seen executive orders, and that hasn’t really resolved the problem that we’ve seen over the last three years grow.  ROBBINS: But Chris was also talking about, you know, these issues that divide Republicans. Migration’s also an issue that divides Democrats. And so do you expect the president to sort of take a stand and say I really care about this and move past it really quickly because he can’t talk that much about it? How much is he bound by the—by the limitations of his own—his own political party on this?  O’NEIL: I mean, that is his challenge, right? This is an election year, as we obviously all know. He’s trying to bring together a progressive side as well as a sort of centrist side and appeal to those in the center, appeal to the Nikki Haley voters who are now up for grabs, appeal for this broad range. And so it’s very hard to have an executive order that’s either very draconian or very open that will kind of thread that needle. So I think if I had to guess, I think he will—what he did at the border last Thursday, which is: Look, we had a deal. This needs to be legislation because that’s the way to actually have a sustainable solution. And the problem is not me, it’s not the Democrats; it’s the Republicans.  ROBBINS: So, Steven, President Biden’s criticism of Israel’s campaign in Gaza has become increasingly sharp in recent days, and this is really an issue in which multiple constituencies are going to be listening really closely tonight to what the president has to say from the progressive base of the Democratic Party to Israel’s leadership and—as well as to the Arab world. What do you expect to hear? What do you want him to say? And can anything that he says tonight change the dynamic on the ground in the region or the dynamic in Michigan?  COOK: Well, it’s really not a question of what I—what I want him to say; it’s more what he’s likely to say. And I think that what he’s likely to say is precisely what the administration has been saying over the course of recent weeks, is that it absolutely supports Israel’s right to defend itself; it absolutely supports the destruction of—Israel’s goal to destroy Hamas; but that the humanitarian situation in Gaza is more than dire, and that the Israelis must not move into Rafah until they have a credible plan to protect civilians in that city, and that the United States expects the Israelis to do a much, much better job in flowing aid into the Gaza Strip.  I think that much of this is at a rhetorical level. I don’t think that we are really seeing a shift in the president’s position with regard to Israel. I think we would see more dramatic steps if there really was a shift in policy, something along the lines that some of his allies have brought up in recent days about conditioning weapons to the Israelis should they proceed with a Rafah operation. One has to wonder whether this comes directly from the White House or not. If it’s a bluff, it’s a risk that it’s just a bluff. And if it isn’t, it does send the message to important constituencies both here in the United States as well as, importantly, abroad about an American commitment to an ally in the middle of a—in the middle of a conflict.  So this is the most complicated—other than immigration, I think this is the most complicated issue that the president has to tackle in this—in this State of the Union address. He’s likely not to make any of his core—any of the constituencies very happy about it. There are constituencies that don’t believe him regardless of what he—of what he says on this, in part because of miscalculations that he made at the beginning of this conflict in providing kind of maximum support for the Israelis while underestimating how they were going to frame the conflict in terms of an existential struggle, which means he has actually limited influence over them. So that will be the extent of it.  The big news, obviously, of the afternoon is that the United States is going to build some sort of offshore pier or port in order to flow aid into the Gaza Strip. That’s certainly superior than airdrops, which is not a good way of delivering aid—it’s limited amounts of aid; there’s little control over it. This is an idea that actually has been kicking around since the fall. I first heard about it from the Cypriot government. And there’s been some talk for some number of months now about aiding Gaza through—by sea. And it’s good news that the administration is taking this up, given the situation in the Gaza Strip. But I think the president is sort of hemmed in here by the politics of everything, both at home as well as abroad, so it’s not likely that he’s going to emerge from this in a way that people aren’t going to be unhappy about.  ROBBINS: So can we talk a little bit about the pier? Because we have been talking—there had been talk about corridors coming from—through Cyprus for a long time and all that. How much of a difference can this make? And I think the U.N. keeps talking about how people are starving in Gaza. Can this—can they get enough food in there? And will the—will the Israelis let enough food get in there to really make a difference in the humanitarian situation in Gaza with this, or is this another symbolic move?  COOK: Well, one would think that in light of Benny Gantz’s visit—unofficial visit to Washington this week, Benny Gantz being a member of the War Cabinet, in which he expressed, quote/unquote, “surprise” at the pointed criticism from senior American officials and others in Washington about Israel’s military operations, that the Israelis would want to be cooperative on the aid issue. After all, they are being beaten up by both their traditional allies and others over the aid situation. It would strike me that this would have to be coordinated with the IDF, though one would hope that others would take the lead in this, most importantly the United States. And in that way, I don’t think the Israelis can block what the United States wants to do.  It may be actually more advantageous for the Israelis because it does relieve them of a certain responsibility that the United States is now taking on, and that’s something that I think they would like to do. But of course, it does undermine their day—part of their day-after plan in the Gaza Strip, which is to rely on, quote/unquote, “local Gazans” and others who are non-Hamas-affiliated to take up some of the responsibilities in terms of humanitarian relief and administration of aid. We saw that did not go very well a week ago. And so that really is something that the international community is going to have to take up, and I think that the Israelis are going to have to step aside here. They will have a role in it, but I don’t think that they can say no to President Biden on this.  ROBBINS: So I have many more questions on all these topics, but I’m going to—we want to throw it open to the participants. But I have a jump-ball question, which is China. There was a time in which China was the number-one strategic competitor or the number-one strategic threat for this administration. It was the focus of their National Security Strategy. It was the focus of their National Defense Strategy. And nobody talks about—or, we’re barely talking about it these days. Do you think he’s going to talk about China tonight? And if he does, in what context? Is it going to be about trade? Is it going to be about the CHIPS Act? Is it going to be about how foreign policy actually has a positive effect on people’s, you know, home life or their—or our competitiveness? What do you think? Jump in.  COOK: Well, given that Chris and Shannon are taller than me, I’m going to bow out of this question. (Laughter.)  ROBBINS: Actually, Steven, I wanted you to answer this question. (Laughter.)  O’NEIL: I’ll start.  TUTTLE: Yeah—or I’m happy to. Whatever you like.  O’NEIL: You know, I think what he’ll do here, because this is—he’s tried to—the Biden administration in general has tried to take the temperature down on U.S.-China, so I don’t think we’re going to see sort of big rhetoric or sort of chest-beating—even though you’re in Congress, where there’s really bipartisan support for hardening the relationship between the two countries. So I think we will see that—you know, the sort of cooperate where we can, compete where we must sort of—sort of approach.  But this will give him the ability to turn to his domestic agenda and a lot of what he sees as his accomplishments. And if, you know, the theme of this speech is, you know, I need—I need another term because I need to finish the job, then that is where a lot of the China policy is, and particularly the economic policy. So I think he will tout the CHIPS Act and, you know, the hundreds of billions of dollars that are going into creating secure semiconductor supply chains. I think he will tout the Inflation Reduction Act and, you know, hundreds of billions of more dollars that are going into greening the economy and everything from electric-vehicle cars to solar panels to wind turbines to updating electricity grids to all of that that’s happening and sort of win the race for green technology, which is vis-à-vis China.  So I think what we will see is we’ll see a mention, probably, of China and, you know, the need to compete where we must, but really a pivot to what he sees as his accomplishments. That opens the door to all of these domestic policies. And then that gets to the kinds of things you hear in State of the Unions about the jobs that are being created and about the communities that are getting invested in and the growth that’s happening.  ROBBINS: Chris?  TUTTLE: Yeah, no, I agree. I think it’s going to be about—it’s not going to be necessarily about taking it to the Chinese; it’s going to be about making the United States more competitive, and industrial policy, and some of the things that Shannon mentioned, and also pointing out that he has worked on all of these different policies—CHIPS, Inflation Reduction Act, even the infrastructure bill—bipartisan infrastructure bill—as an example of, infrastructure and CHIPS at least, bipartisan successes to make the United States more competitive when it comes—when it comes to China. But I don’t—I agree with Shannon. I think that with the administration’s move to sort of take the temperature down a bit, we’ll see if that lasts through the campaign. I think that that probably is likely to be mention of it.  ROBBINS: So, Monica, can we invite our participants to ask questions to grill our panelists?  OPERATOR: (Gives queuing instructions.)  ROBBINS: We only have one hand up here so far. So I suppose I will call on the one hand that’s up here. If you could identify yourself—if you could identify yourself, and ask a very brief question. Khushboo Razdan.  Q: Can you hear me?  ROBBINS: Yes.  Q: Hi. This is Kushboo from the South China Morning Post, about the China angle that you were talking about.  You know, you mentioned the CHIPS and Science Act. Can we also expect some kind of funding announcements? We’ve only seen three so far. Not much coming out in terms of money when it comes to the CHIPS and Science Act. Can we expect President Biden to make some big announcements. We’re hearing there could be something about TSMC and Intel getting some big funding tonight? What are your thoughts on that?  O’NEIL: Well, we have seen the CHIPS and Science Act in a whole host of things, right? We’ve seen some with Global Foundries here in New York, which is where I’m based. We’ve seen Intel. It looks like the Columbus plan—or outside of Columbus plan in Ohio that they’re going forward may benefit from that. We’re seeing TSMC and others in Arizona. So I think there are parts here. And the question is, does it come from CHIPS—the CHIPS Act, or does it come from other aspects here?  But I do think, you know, whether it’s a big announcement of here’s yet another, you know, layer that’s coming out tonight, I do think we are starting to see the dispersion of that money and the support that goes with it. Because it’s not just the actual money. It’s not—it’s also sort of the whole infrastructure that goes around here. And I do think we will see—as I said before, I do think we’re going to see touting of these various—especially the bipartisan bills, which CHIPS and, as Chris said, the infrastructure act—is part of it. And in some places, those are working in tandem in terms of the investment.  TUTTLE: I would also add, it’s hard to imagine a State of the Union where there aren’t some major announcements like that. It’s great to sort of bring news to the—for a president to bring news to the table.  ROBBINS: They do like to—certainly love to give away money. It’s, you know, come on down! (Laughs.)  The next question is from Jim Zirin.  Q: There we go. I’m sorry. I tuned in a little late, so I may have missed this.  But there’s a shocking statistic out there from Gallup that only 3 percent of those polled nationally think democracy is a very important issue in the United States today, and that care about the future of our democracy. And isn’t this a great opportunity for Biden to rally the country that you have a national presidential candidate who wants to be a dictator, who wants to deport naturalized citizens born elsewhere, and who has made a number of wild statements which are about dealing with his political enemies and weaponizing the Justice Department, that are undermining the very fabric of democracy? And isn’t this a great platform for him to take on this issue, which I would think is the major issue in the campaign?  TUTTLE: Yeah, I think that definitely will factor in. I said earlier, Jim, that I don’t think that he’ll take on Trump directly on this question. He may. But I think that references to the future of democracy is at stake, that type of—those type of types of rhetorical devices I think will be employed possibly throughout the speech, as something that is—you know, of the gravity of the situation and what’s at stake. We didn’t really get into that question because we were earlier talking—again, if you missed the first part—talking about foreign policy. But I think that’s definitely going to be peppered throughout the speech.  ROBBINS: So my old friend Tracy Wilkinson, from the L.A. Times.   Q: Hi. Hi, Carla. Thank you.  ROBBINS: Hi, Tracy.  Q: (Laughs.) Long time no see. I also came in a little late, so forgive me.  But, Shannon, I mention, to yours and my chagrin, Latin America won’t figure in the speech tonight. But I thought it might come up—the one way it might come up is in the context of immigration, and whether Biden might or might not talk about the cooperation—entrecomias (ph), you know, the so-called cooperation he’s getting from some Latin American countries, like Mexico, like El Salvador, and—you know, for—with all that that, you know, implies. If you might talk about that at all—appraise it, when we all know there are a lot of issues involved. Just curious if you think that might come up that way. Thanks.  O’NEIL: Yeah, no, thanks, Tracy. Nice to hear your voice. There’s a possibility there, right? Is that, you know, one, I don’t think he really wants to talk about migration for a long time because it’s a very—obviously, we were talking about, it’s one of the most difficult issues for his administration. But that idea that, look, we were trying to get this bill passed, and there was bipartisan support, and the Republicans killed it. So we can’t go that path. But that he is approaching this in a broader context, in a multilateral context, and working with other governments. And that this is a bigger problem around the world. It’s a bigger problem, and that they are taking steps on there.   And they have taken some steps in that sense. As you point out, right, working with these governments. They’re slowly—and I would say slowly—starting to roll out, you know, various offices in these countries so people don’t have to come to the border to apply for asylum and the like. That’s been pretty slow to roll out. So I think we will see some of that. And, you know, more broadly, you know, I think, a difference that he—you know, he puts forward, some of it’s this bipartisanship but another part is this sort of multilateralism, right? And that’s his approach to the world.   So if we get—where we might get something on foreign policy is that. So we see, you know, the Sweden’s prime minister being invited, because NATO. So kind of nodding to NATO and then the multilateralism there. I think if we—when we hear about the Ukraine, we hear about these, we’ll also see sort of the multilateral side there. And perhaps, you know, the nod on immigration that like, look, we’re working with other countries here too, because it is a broader—a broader Western Hemisphere problem.  ROBBINS: So, Elise Labott—hi, Elise—of Zivvy News, formerly of CNN.  Q: Hi, guys. How are you?   TUTTLE: Hey, Elise.  Q: I was a little bit—I was a little bit late as well. Sorry, everybody. Kind of just ducked on late. But—and, Steve, I caught the tail end of your remarks.  And I was wondering, I’m sorry if I missed this, but how do you think Biden is going to just kind of thread the needle between those who, you know, want this kind of unconditional support for Israel with the growing wing of the Democratic Party that is becoming, you know, so disillusioned with his policy?  COOK: Yeah. Well, I mentioned that this was the biggest challenge that he has in this speech, which is his own worldview and his own kind of pro-Israel proclivities. I mean, this is—I mean, we’ve discussed this before privately, Elise. He can’t talk about Israel without mentioning Golda Meir. And it’s an Israel that he remembers, that doesn’t really exist any longer. But I think what he’s going to do is he is going to repeat his, you know, heartfelt and support for Israel, and everything that he has done for the State of Israel since October 7th. He is hosting at this State of the Union families of hostages. And he will point to them, as—and will lay out his pro-Israel bona fides.   But also say, that with that he has responsibilities, and that the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip is unbearable, and that it is important, and that it is American responsibility and, quite frankly, in Israel’s interest, for the United States and the international community to flow aid into the Gaza Strip. And to think clearly about a day after and a process in which two states can live side by side in peace. That’s probably the best that he’s going to be able to do.   My sense is that it’s really not going to move anybody. As you alluded to, there are large constituencies that after five months do not give much credence to what the president says about humanitarian aid to the Palestinians because the United States has, kind of in an unfettered way, provided the weaponry to the Israelis that have made it possible for the suffering of the Palestinian people; and that there is very little likelihood that—despite all the discussion within the Democratic Party about the possibility of conditioning aid, it seems unlikely that the president is going to support that.   At the same time there’s another large constituency that is going to be—that has become increasingly suspect about the language that the administration has been using and suspect of the—what they perceive to be the growing influence of the progressive left on the president and the White House’s thinking.   So it’s really a lose-lose situation for the president. It’ll have to be entirely up to him and his political people to decide which constituency he wants to upset more. But that is an issue of politics, not policy, and that’s not anywhere that I’m prepared to go right now.   ROBBINS: Steven, how much of a problem does Biden have within his own congressional constituency? Do you think that he’s going to—there’s going to be a demonstration on the floor of Congress tonight about Gaza or the sort of things that we see with people—you know, we’ve seen somewhat in the primaries? We’ve certainly seen demonstrations, you know, out in the street. Or do you think that they’re going to hold it together because it is an election year?   COOK: Carla, as you know, I do policy, not politics. This is—but people feel very strongly about this issue and I don’t consider myself a, you know, expert Congress watcher.  I would think that members of the Democratic caucus would not want to embarrass the president at the State of the Union in the way that some of his opponents have tried to do in previous addresses. But, like I said, people feel very strongly about this issue.   TUTTLE: Yeah, and I would just add I think Steven’s right about a floor demonstration and with regard to the political calculation that may be going on in the White House I think the—their balancing of the assistance to Israel with the humanitarian assistance is critical and anything that moves I think you’re going to see that in terms of the House.  The question is if you are an Arab-American voter in Dearborn, Michigan, when it comes down to a binary choice are you going to stay home in November when you know that a Trump policy is likely to be much closer to what the Netanyahu government would prefer and there are a number of other—you know, Trump has a history on sort of the Arab-American side. That’s the political calculation they’re going to have to make and how much this actually—this issue is actually suppressive of votes that they’re going to need in order to get through—to get over the line in November.   ROBBINS: How central do you think—there’s Ukraine and then there’s sort of—then there’s Russia and Putin, and Biden came in and he was going to make the—democracy versus autocracy was going to be his central theme for his presidency and he seemed to always seem very sort of academic almost to me, and particularly the word existentialist threat is overly used there but I understood that he saw the world as a fight between darkness and light and, certainly, there is a fight between darkness and light going on there and Putin is a very strong example of that.   You know, Navalny’s widow decided not to come. I don’t think that was a diss of him. I think she’s genuinely worn out.   Do you think—and who knows what he’s going to do—do you think he needs to keep Russia a central focus for this speech or shouldn’t he take a very strong stance on it because it seems like a lot of people who don’t want to support aid to Ukraine seem to be sloughing off the threat from Russia.   TUTTLE: Yeah. I don’t think it—again, I don’t think foreign policy is going to occupy a large amount of space in this speech but it does offer some potent opportunity for Joe Biden. I think that, you know, foreign policy is seldom an issue that really moves the needle during elections. You’ve seen that tick up a little bit.   There was a poll—an AP poll along with the University of Chicago that showed that foreign policy is taking on a larger and larger role. That may be because people are particularly interested in the Israel question. They may be particularly interested in the Ukraine question.  I think, by and large, voters just know that we’re in a world that is tumultuous, that’s chaotic, where there are lots of problems and that they’re getting more and more concerned about these issues that, you know, there’s—that bring with them huge gravity.   So I think that he’s not going to spend a ton of time on Ukraine, to answer your question, but I think that it does factor into voters thinking that he is actually getting—that he’s a responsible actor who’s trying to push back against not necessarily autocrats but enemies of the United States—adversaries of the United States—and that Putin is one of them.   And I agree with you that the rhetoric on sort of democracy versus autocracy doesn’t get much purchase with voters. I don’t think that gets you very far. I think the question is can you paint Russia as the threat—successfully as the threat that it actually is and then persuade people that if we are going to push back on this even though it is expensive this is a way to do it on the relatively cheap. You know, that every day that the Russians aren’t—have not won in Ukraine they’re losing and we’re degrading—their capabilities are being degraded by our proxy support. So I hope that answers your question.   ROBBINS: It does.   So, finally, running out of time here and I just wanted to go around and ask you all, you know, there is a long tradition in White Houses of calling in experts and asking for advice before these speeches are written, much to the dismay of speech writers because it’s not like they don’t have a thousand people lobbying them.   But my initiative into this speech, you know, cast it this way. Were you to be called in—I’m not going to ask whether you’ve actually been called in for your advice—for the good of the nation what would you like to hear in the speech tonight?   Steven, you want to go first?   COOK: Well, let me just say I was not called in probably because I would have told the president’s speech writers that whatever they’re talking about in terms of their day after plans in the Gaza Strip they’re unlikely to work.   But I think—again, I, you know, approach this question with a little bit of trepidation because I don’t want to get into politics. But for the good of the country, I think I would go—talk about two things.  One, a domestic politics issue, and that is the importance of democracy, back to Jim Zirin’s question, and that this is a system that has not always delivered but it really has created this extraordinary country—which is not perfect, but is—can be; we can all strive together to make it better, and that democracy is the way to do that, and that it can deliver. And I don’t want to get into the specifics how he—I think he might do that but I do think that any emphasis on the importance of democratic practices and the rule of law are called for at this moment.  And on foreign policy, oddly, I would spend—I would make a clarion call for support for Ukraine. Europe prosperous, whole, and free is a core global interest of the United States and this sort of—the sense that has come over people, a sort of defeatist sense about Ukraine and accepting the situation as it is, will not serve us and serve that core interest quite well and this is a problem in this country.   It’s something that actually I’m writing about now is that, you know, in a way sometimes in foreign policy things are too hard. We overthink the escalatory spirals and the possibility of wider wars and the problems pile up and pile up and then when we are forced to confront them the problem is bigger than it was.  ROBBINS: Chris?  TUTTLE: Sure. Well, it’s very unlikely that I will be called over within the next hour or two because I am a lifelong conservative Republican with a lot of Republican presidents, having worked for a lot of Republican presidents and Hill members of Congress.   I would say that I would focus on exactly what I said sort of at the outset, which is the contrast between the steadiness of Joe Biden, in his words, and the chaos of the Republicans on the Hill and by proxy Donald Trump. I would make that central to my messaging. And I would also use, as I said before also, the foreign policy issues as encapsulating that sort of steadiness versus chaos, and the immense gravity of these issues. You can talk about economic issues. You can talk about accomplishments. You can talk about how you’re making people’s lives better.   But there is a real advantage, I think, on foreign policy because I think people, even though they don’t necessarily pay attention to foreign policy issues, they understand how critically important they are. And they do sense a world that is, again, in real tumult. And for him to make that point, I think is a good one. And it points up some of the issues—you know, some of the questions, do you want the steadiness of, you know, this administration, even though you might not like everything we’re doing? Or do you want—even if, you know, a president who you may agree with more ideologically, but it’s going to be chaos once again. That would be the point I would make.  ROBBINS: Shannon.  O’NEIL: Well, I agree with both of my colleagues. I thought it was great on policy and on the politics. So I’m sorry that there wasn’t a phone call to either of them. (Laughs.) But I guess what—I guess what I would add, and just sort of augment a little bit, is, you know, I think one of Biden’s strengths, and I think as, you know, polling for people in the United States and the like if you’re trying to sell this, is that, you know, he is good at reaching out. He’s known for his bipartisan approach. It always has—you know, it always hasn’t taken, and we know it’s very polarized. But there is something there. And so I’d leaned into that if I was him. You know, he’s trying to do these things.   And whether that’s on the domestic side, but also taking that to the foreign policy, to the international side, right? This is a man who, as we look at the future, will be reaching out to allies will be thinking about working with NATO, working with Europe, working with various countries, you know, in the Western Hemisphere, in Asia. You know, we have all of these initiatives that are going on right now, trying to build that core of supporters, and building a network around the world that’s going to be helpful to the United States. And I think that is something that would make sense to lean into.   And, you know, he wouldn’t take this advice, but as he talks about all of his domestic accomplishments, on industrial policy in the like, I would—I would ask or I would—I would suggest that we shouldn’t just make it just domestic—just about domestic jobs, or about domestic growth. But to really do that right, to really have secure supply chains, to really have economic security along with national security, and U.S. growth, it’s got to be international as well. And so thinking about the foreign policy on that side as well.  ROBBINS: Well, if they called me in, and this is me as the former editorial writer—(laughs)—I’m going to take the prerogative here. Biden had what I thought was an extraordinary line about Russia, just that we can have back after President Trump’s line about whatever the hell they want. He said: No other president in our history has ever bowed down to a Russian dictator. Well, let me say this as clearly as I can, I never will. I think that’s a hell of an applause line. So I’m going to be listening tonight to see whether he repeats that one. Whoever wrote that one should be lobbying very hard to get it into this speech, as far as I’m concerned. (Laughs.)  Well, I wanted to thank Shannon O’Neil, Chris Tuttle, and Steven Cook for an extraordinary conversation. I want to thank everybody who joined us. And just as a reminder—I have to get my notes back up here, because I have to make sure that I do everything right or they won’t invite me back here—this has been on the record. Please visit CFR.org for additional resources and a transcript for this. And thank you all for joining us. And we’ll all be watching.   (END) 

Jenny Lee, vice president for Arizona International, dean of international education, and professor of educational policy studies and practice at the University of Arizona, leads the conversation on U.S. international academic collaboration and how U.S.-China tensions are affecting higher education. FASKIANOS: Welcome to CFR’s Higher Education Webinar Series. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach here at CFR. Today’s discussion is on the record and the video and transcript will be available on our website, CFR.org/academic. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. We’re delighted to have Jenny Lee with us to discuss U.S. international academic collaboration. Dr. Lee is vice president for Arizona International, dean of international education, and professor of educational policy studies and practice at the University of Arizona. She is also a fellow of the American Educational Research Association. Dr. Lee formerly served as a senior fellow of NAFSA, the Association of International Educators, as chair for the Council of International Higher Education, and as a board member for the Association for the Study of Higher Education. And she has also served as a U.S. Fulbright scholar to South Africa, as a distinguished global professor at Korea University, and as an international visiting scholar at the City University of London, the University of Pretoria, and the University of Cape Town in South Africa. So, Dr. Lee, thank you very much for being with us for today’s topic. I thought you could begin by giving us an overview of current trends in U.S. international academic collaboration, especially looking at what’s happening with our relations with China. LEE: Sounds great. Well, thank you for the opportunity, Irina. It’s a pleasure to be here and to speak with you and all those listening right now. I’ll speak for about ten or so minutes, and then open it up and engage with the audience. Hopefully, you all have some good questions that will come up during my remarks. So, clearly, we’re entering a very interesting and somewhat uncertain chapter in how we understand the role of higher education globally. So I will begin with some general observation so all our viewers are on the same page. Now, first and foremost, the U.S. is mostly at the top when it comes to the higher education sector. Most of us already know that the United States houses the most highly ranked institutions. And this allows the country to be the largest host of international students and scholars from around the world. According to the latest IIE Open Doors report published a couple of weeks ago, the U.S. attracted over a million students from all over the world. And we’re almost back to pre-pandemic levels. We also host over 90,000 scholars. And the primary purpose for them being here is research, for about two-thirds to 75 percent of them. These international scholars, as well as international graduate students, contribute significantly to the U.S. scientific enterprise. The U.S. is also among the leading countries in scientific output and impact, and the largest international collaborator in the world. In other words, the U.S. is highly sought because of its prestigious institutions, drawing top faculty and students from around the world. And with that comes the ability to generate cutting-edge scientific breakthroughs which further secures the U.S.’ global position in academia. At the same time, of course, we’ve seen China’s economy rise significantly as the country surpassed the United States in scientific output, and more recently in impact as measured by publication citations, and is outpacing the U.S. in the extent of R&D investment. Chinese institutions have also made noticeable jumps in various global rankings, which is a pretty big feat considering the fierce competition among the world’s top universities. What we’re witnessing as well are geopolitical tensions between the two countries that have impacted the higher education sector. While these two countries, the U.S. and China, are the biggest global collaborators—and they collaborate more with each other than any other country—they’re also rival superpowers. As global adversaries, what we are witnessing as well is increased security concerns regarding intellectual theft and espionage. I’m going to spend some time summarizing my work for those who are not familiar to provide some further context. I and my colleagues, John Haupt and Xiaojie Li, also at the University of Arizona, have conducted numerous studies about U.S.-China scientific collaboration. And what we’re observing across these studies is how the scientific pursuit of knowledge, which is fundamentally borderless, is becoming bordered in the current geopolitical environment. International collaboration, long valued as positive-sum, is being treated as zero-sum. Besides the rise of China and the accompanying political rhetoric that posed China as a so-called threat, tensions also grew among accusations, as you may recall, about the origins of SARS-CoV-2 and a corresponding sharp increase in anti-Asian hate crimes in the United States. Public opinions about China were not favorable, and thus there was not a whole lot of public resistance when the FBI’s China Initiative was launched in 2018. This initiative basically signaled that anyone of Chinese descent was a potential enemy of the state, including possible Chinese Communist Party spies in our own universities, even though there was no pervasive empirical or later judicial cases that proved such a damaging assumption. Nevertheless, world-renowned Chinese scientists were falsely accused of academic espionage and their careers and personal finances ruined. In my research that followed with Xiaojie Li, with support from the Committee of 100, we surveyed about 2,000 scientists in the U.S.’ top research universities during the China Initiative. And we found that one in two Chinese scientists were afraid that they were being racially profiled by the FBI. We also observed that consequently scientists, especially those with Chinese descent, were less inclined to collaborate with China, less inclined to pursue federal grants, less inclined to even stay in the United States but rather to take their expertise to another country where they felt safer to pursue their research, including in China. In sum, the federal government’s attempts to weed out possible Chinese spies was highly criticized as a damaging form of racial profiling affecting even U.S. citizens and, in the end, undermined the U.S.’ ability to compete with China. Especially now, as we continue to observe Chinese scientists leaving the U.S. and taking their skills and talents elsewhere. With John Haupt and two academics at Tsinghua University in China, Doctors Wen Wen and Die Hu, we asked about two hundred co-collaborators in China and in the United States how were they able to overcome such geopolitical tensions and the challenges associated with COVID-19 during the pandemic? And we did learn something somewhat unexpected, and I hope valuable. Basically, we found that mutual trust between international collaborators helped overcome such perceived hurdles, including risks of being unfairly targeted. What this tells us is that a chilling effect is certainly real and remains possible, but in the end scientists have tremendous agency on what they study, where they study, and whether or not they seek funds, or where they seek funds. Regardless of the host or home country, international collaboration is important to all countries’ scientific enterprise. Coauthors from different countries improve the knowledge being produced, its applicability, enlarges global audiences, and thereby increases the impact of the work. So considering the value, yet risks, where do we begin? Firstly, federal and institutional policies, of course, matter, for better or for worse. But policies do not manufacture trust. The formation of an academic tie does not suddenly occur over a cold call in the middle of a global meltdown, as often portrayed in Hollywood. Rather, this is a gradual process. And the longevity of the relationship helps strengthen that trust over time. According to our research, these collaborative relationships begin as graduate students, postdocs, visiting researchers. They occur at academic conferences and other in-person opportunities. Cutting short-term fellowships, for example, will impact the potential of a future scientific relationship, but its effects may not be felt for years. Same with denied visas and opportunities for travel. Fewer graduate students from particular countries or fields also means a different shape when it comes to global science. U.S. for instance, was not too long ago Russia’s biggest foreign scientific collaborator, with the war in Ukraine, those research relationships, as well as much—with much of the Western world, have ceased. All of this, and my related empirical research, was conducted when I was a professor at my home institution. And since July, I’ve been serving, as Irina mentioned, as the dean and vice president of international affairs at my own institution. And I’ve been thinking a lot of, what does this mean for institutional practice? For those in university leadership positions, as mine, you know this is a tough challenge. Especially as domestic demand and state funding for higher education is generally declining. And at the same time, internationalization is increasingly central to senior leadership strategies. Universities are continuing vying to attract the world’s students, even despite a decline of interest from China. And at the same time, research universities in particular are quite dependent on federal grants. We have our own research security offices that need to ensure our universities have good reputations and relations with our large federal funding agencies and taking every precaution to not be seen as a vulnerable site of intellectual theft. These units tend not to operate within international affairs. And I’m very well aware that in my role of trying to attract as many students from China and develop international partnerships, all of them can be suddenly erased if a Chinese University partner does not pass visual compliance or there is a sudden presidential executive order, as we experienced under the Trump administration. I’m also very well aware that of senior leaders have to choose between my educational offerings and partnerships in China versus risking a major grant from a federal agency, I will lose. We witnessed that with the shutting down of over 100 Confucius Institutes in the U.S., despite a lack of evidence of systematic espionage occurring through these centers. Public perceptions, informed or not, strongly affect the nature of our international work, as in the case of Florida. Such negative perceptions are not one country-sided, of course. A key concern for Chinese and other international students and their parents relate to safety. Gun violence, including on our own college campuses, anti-Asian hate crimes in surrounding neighborhoods, and unfavorable political environment in which studies might be interrupted as in the case of Proclamation 10043, or visa non-renewals are all contributing factors for the decline of interest from China, and uncertain future student exchange as well. In closing, when it comes to China these days no practices are guaranteed. However, I can recommend some while also keeping in mind geopolitical conditions can suddenly change for worse, or perhaps better. I mentioned earlier the value of mutual trust. At my university, we have long-standing relationships with university leaders at Chinese institutions. We’ve set up dual degree programs in China. Actually, about 40 percent of our international student enrollment are through such partner relationships throughout the world, in which we go to where they are. Hiring staff who speak the language and know the culture are also essential. And, like any relationship, these arrangements have developed over time. They are not built overnight. It takes intention. It takes effort. But in my experience, as trust is established the numbers have grown, and the positive impact is still being felt. Thank you. FASKIANOS: Thank you very much for that. That was terrific. Let’s go now to all of you for your questions, comments. You can use this to share best practices and what you’re doing to your universities or institutions. Please click the raise hand icon on your screen to ask a question. On your iPad or tablet, you can click the “more” button to access the raise hand feature. And when you’re called upon, please accept the unmute prompts, state your name and affiliation, followed by your question. You can also submit a written question, they’ve already started coming in, by the Q&A icon. And if you can also include your affiliation there, I would appreciate it, although we will try to make sure we identify you correctly. So let’s see. I’m looking for—no raised hands yet, but we do have questions written. So first question from Denis Simon, who’s a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: Many U.S. universities have curtailed their exchanges and cooperation with China. You referenced that. Officials at these universities are worried that if they appear too friendly toward China they will lose all sorts of federal funding. Are these concerns justified? Are there any regulations or legislation that actually says federal funding can be removed assuming these universities are in compliance with the export controls, et cetera? LEE: All right. Well, thanks, Denis, for your question. I know there—when I saw the list of those who signed up, I know there are many here who can speak to this directly. So I encourage those to also raise their hands and provide input in the Q&A, maybe in the form of an A instead of a Q. But in any case, going to that question, you know, it’s a tough environment. And so much in my role, but what I even experienced in my research, is about that perception, that overinterpretation. So maybe signaling that we have this exchange program might draw attention in ways that might lead to suspicions that, oh, well is this, you know, somehow creating an opportunity for us to disclose military secrets? I mean, that’s where we take it. A friendly exchange or visit is oftentimes now having to be scrutinized and ensuring that there is no remote violation of export controls, even in educational delivery in a non-STEM field. And what we’re seeing is that this—we have our highly sensitive fields, but that kind of scrutiny we’re also seeing applied to the institution more broadly. So these seemingly benign programs about language or culture, about fields that are enhanced or help promote so-called American values, are also being watched. So I believe as an institutional leader, again, as I mentioned earlier, having to deal with the possibility of unwanted or unwarranted attention versus not having that program, I think some, as Denis has pointed out, are leaning towards being more cautious. Unfortunately, China—any work with China is considered a risk, even if there is no reason for risk, as we’ve witnessed under—or, observed under the China Initiative. I don’t know if I’ve fully answered that question, but please follow up if I haven’t. And I know others can probably say more to that issue. FASKIANOS: Great. I’ll take the next question from Peter—I don’t know how to pronounce— LEE: Peter Becskehazy. Hi, Peter. (Laughs.) FASKIANOS: There you go. Thank you very much. LEE: I know Peter. FASKIANOS: All right. Good. Well, I’d love if Peter asked his question directly, if he can. Oh, good. From Pima Community College. Go ahead, Peter. Q: Hello, Jenny. Nice to see you. LEE: Hi, Peter. Q: Now my question is, the University of Arizona and other universities have had an inflow of dozens of countries, adding up to the million that you mentioned. Are other countries trying to fill in slots left vacant by Chinese students and scholars? LEE: Yeah. Great question, Peter. And I think you can also share what you’ve observed at Pima in terms of the patterns you’ve witnessed. But for us, and as we are seeing nationally, we’re seeing India rise. Not at the—not at higher numbers in many institutions, compared to China, but the rate is rising. It’s not so simple, though, because we also have relations in India, and trying to set up agreements, and bring students. The competition in India is intense. So even though there’s a relatively so-called large market, and the U.S. has been quite successful in attracting Indian students, that is perhaps where the attention is as a more, I would say—I hate to use the word “market,”—but a stable student market. There’s a lot more interest in graduate-level education globally, as we’ve observed. These countries that formerly didn’t have capacity now do have capacity. They have online offerings. They have branch campuses, dual degrees, lots of other options. And so the niche for the U.S., whereas before we didn’t really have to think about a niche, is really in graduate education. Now, of course, that’s not good news for Pima, that’s thinking about a community college and other kinds of educational offerings. But for us, we’re thinking about India a lot. Southeast Asia, of course, has always been an important partner to us. Africa continues to be a challenge. We know that when we think about population growth, Africa is the future. There’s still challenges and trying to identify places where there is capacity. But also the affordability of a U.S. education is a huge challenge. So it’s a great question. And, again, I’m curious to know other places in the world people recommend. Of course, Latin America, given our location, is a key strategic partner. But again, affordability becomes an issue. And again, I’m just talking about the traditional international student who would choose to come to Arizona. Not talking about research collaboration, which is less bound by affordability issues. Irina, you’re muted. FASKIANOS: How long have I been doing this? OK. (Laughs.) I’m going to take the next written question from Allison Davis-White Eyes, who is vice president for diversity, equity, and inclusion at Fielding Graduate University: We have tried to work on collaborations with European universities and African universities, and met with much difficulty. What trends are you seeing in these regions? And what are emerging global markets beyond China? LEE: Great question, Allison. I mean, if you could leave the question in the future, so because I am visually looking at the question at the same time. FASKIANOS: Oh, great. Sorry. LEE: So, Allison, I’m not sure if you’re referring to academic or research. Of course, within Europe, where the government does highly subsidized tuition, it’s just becomes financially a bad deal, I suppose—(laughs)—for a student in the world who would normally get a free or highly reduced tuition to pay full price at our institution. So that kind of exchange of partnership, especially when it’s about—when it’s financially based, becomes almost impossible from my experience. But thinking about research collaboration, it depends on the level. So if it’s an institutional agreement, you know, it’s—often, these MOUs tend to just be on paper. It takes quite a bit of—it’s very ceremonial. You need to get legal involved. It’s a whole process to get an MOU. We really don’t need these non-binding MOUs for research agreements. Some countries like it, just to display that they have an MOU with a U.S. institution. But essentially, it doesn’t stop me as a professor to reach out to another professor at the University of Oslo, and say, hey, let’s do a study. Which we actually are doing. So, yeah, feel free to be more specific, or if you want to raise your hand or speak on—and elaborate on that question. So, again, for educational exchange, it is difficult because we are—there’s already a process within the EU that makes it very affordable and highly supported within the EU, or if you’re part of that bigger program. Africa, again, my challenge from my role as an institutional leader is identifying places where there is already enough mass education up through high school where one would be able to consider, first of all, being admitted to a U.S. institution, but secondly, to be able to pay the cost. FASKIANOS: Allison, do you want to expand a little bit? Q: Oh, sorry. (Laughs.) FASKIANOS: There you go. There you go. Q: Right. Dr. Lee, thank you for your response. I think it was helpful, especially regarding the subsidizing of education in Europe. We’ve been working on some research partnerships. And we have just—you know, really, it has just been extremely difficult with European universities. And I do think part of it has to do with the way things are subsidized in Europe. I was just wondering if there were new and different ways to do it. I do appreciate your comment about the MOUs being largely ceremonial. I agree. And would like to see something with a little more substance. And that will take some creativity and a lot of partnership and work. As for Africa, we have tried to create partnerships with South Africa. I think there’s some potential there. Certainly, some excitement. We’ve had a few students from Nigeria, extremely bright and motivated. I just would—you know, would like to hear, maybe from some other colleagues as well on the call, if there are creative ways in working with these students as well. So, thank you. LEE: Yeah, no. And just to follow up quickly, and, again, opportunities for others to share, academic collaboration, as I mentioned during my remarks, is largely built upon mutual trust. And not to say it can’t happen from top down, but really does—is most successful from bottom up. And I don’t mean to refer to professors at the bottom, but meaning those that are actually engaged with that work. And so just some considerations is rather than a top-down initiative or strategy, is to identify those that are visiting scholars, already from that country, have networks within that country. What’s interesting, as I learned in my current role, is how little my predecessors worked with professors in these area’s studies programs, because they’re oftentimes treated as a separate or having different interests in mind when actually there is a lot of overlap to identify those that are actually there. Allison, by the way, I lived in South Africa for eight years. And I know it actually takes a long time. My Fulbright started off as a one year, and I had to extend it because even getting the data while I was on the ground takes time. And I’ll be honest, I think part of it was taking some time just to build trust the intentions of my work, what was I going to do with that data, how is that going to be used? Was it actually going to be ways to empower them? You know, for those who study international collaboration, know this north and south divide, and I think there are places in the world that are—maybe have some guardrails up from those—not saying this is what’s happening in your institution—but someone that they don’t know coming from the Global North to study someone else in the Global South. And so how do we create or initiate a collaboration that is clearly, expressly mutual at the onset? And, again, this is where trust can be operationalized lots of different ways, but that even begins with that initial message. I mean, I remember when I started my work, nobody responded to me. They’re like, who are you? And I don’t care who you are or what your CV says. And it takes time. You know, building that relationship, and that person introducing me to that other person. Like, you know, this is how scientific networks form. And I think, to some extent, this is also how institutional collaborative relationships also form. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to go next to David Moore, who has a raised hand. Q: OK, thank you. I just got unmuted. FASKIANOS: Great. Q: Lee, I appreciate your comments. And I heard your reference to Florida earlier. I don’t know if we have colleagues on this call from Florida, but I think they’ll know what I’m about to say. I’m the dean of international education at Broward College in Fort Lauderdale. And as of tomorrow, December 1, Florida has to—all institutions in Florida, public institutions, colleges and universities, must be completely devoid of any partnerships in China. And not just China. There are seven countries of concern. And you probably can cite them, most of you would know the other six. But of the seven countries, Broward had four partnerships in China alone, none in the other countries that were active. And so we are now officially done, have to be. And I’ve had to notify the partners as well as our accrediting body, because these were international centers of Broward where they literally offer—we offered associate degrees, two-year degrees. And students could then transfer to an institution in the United States. Now, this didn’t catch us too much by surprise because two and a half years ago our Florida legislature started in on this, really probably before that, where they isolated universities in Florida and said: You cannot do research—sensitive research, whatever, you know, engineering, computer science, et cetera—any research without notifying the state. And there’s an elaborate process that had to be—you know, they had to go through to do this. But now it’s not just research institutions. Now it’s not just those kinds of collaborations. It is, in fact, all partnerships of any kind. We had to end our agent agreements where we were recruiting students from China that were—where the companies were based in China. And in course our programs were not research. They’re just general education, two-year associate’s degree, maybe some business. But we’ve been informed now it’s completely done. And so I’m actually looking for institutions outside of Florida who might be willing to take over the role that we’ve had in transcripting students who later want to come to the United States. At least for the first two years in China, and then transferring to the upper division to the U.S. So I’m not sure. You’re probably quite familiar with this. I don’t know if you know the details of how it was worked out in practice. We were the only community college in the state that had any partnerships. So we were the ones that had to desist. So I want to—there are probably people on the call that are familiar with this, but there might be many others. And I just wanted to say that I’m looking to, you know, open that door to other institutions outside of Florida that might be willing in, yes, take a risk to go into China, but to—I’ve always felt that these kinds of programs were very good to build relationships, partnerships, communication. Ambassadors really. Where we feel like we were representing American education, whatever, you know, we call American values, democracy, you know, community. We thought we were doing good. But we found out we were—we were not. We were—we were doing something that went opposed to the prevailing political climate, at least in Florida. So that’s my comment. I think people should know about it. And thank you for letting me speak to it a bit. Maybe someone will speak up and say they’re interested in they can get in touch with me, David Moore at Broward College, Fort Lauderdale, Florida. LEE: David, thank you for sharing what you did. This is a really important example of where other states could very well head. And what’s interesting, as David noted, we’re talking about a community college. When we normally think about cutting ties, it’s usually around the concerns about national security. Now, how this translates to a two-year degree that is solely educational based is a pretty far stretch, and yet is being impacted quite severely. So I think we should continue to follow this example—unfortunate example. And, David, yeah, your partners have reached out to my office, and I’m sure to others. But thank you for being available. Q: You’re welcome. We have partners—we are also working with your Jakarta, Indonesia center there. So we have that connection. Thank you. LEE: Mmm hmm. Thanks. FASKIANOS: And if anybody wants to share contact information in the Q&A box, you can certainly do that. That would be great. There is a written question from Tutaleni Asino at Oklahoma State University: There was an article today in SEMAFOR highlighting that there are currently 350 U.S. students studying in China compared to 11,000 in 2019. Comparatively, there are 300,000 Chinese students in the United States. Is this a one-way problem, where the U.S. is not investing in international engagements as a result of being more inward looking and other countries having more options of who to collaborate with? LEE: Yeah. Tutaleni, that’s—I think your question is an answer. And I think it’s—I agree with your observation. So we are seeing that as there’s state and public disinvestment in higher education, and including scrutiny about international higher education, we’re also seeing a decline and cutting of foreign language programs in the United States. So here we are, a monolingual country whose students mostly go to Europe or other English-speaking countries to study abroad. A very limited number of international—U.S. students who pursue undergraduate degrees in a foreign country. And knowing that the future is global and international, at least in my opinion, does not set the U.S. up well to be globally competitive, even though much of its international policy is around this rhetoric of we need to compete with China. And so you raise a good point. How is this possible if U.S. citizens don’t speak Chinese, or have no interest in learning about Chinese culture, or there’s reduced opportunities even in our own institutions, I think is something to think about and ask more questions about. FASKIANOS: I’m going to take the next question from Zhen Zhu, chair and professor of marketing, director of faculty excellence, and director for international engagement at Suffolk University: How do you see the trend of U.S. students’ interest in study abroad to China? LEE: There is actually growing interest. As many of you know, China—offering Chinese language in high schools is not as unusual as it used to be. There is growing interest as students are thinking about employability in global markets in multinational or international organizations or corporations. It would be fundamental, in fact, for someone who has any interest in international work to pick up the language if they can, and at your own institution. FASKIANOS: Great. Let’s see. From—I’m going to take the next question from Jeff Riedinger: Is there a role for universities to play in knowledge diplomacy to sustain international relationships and collaborations in addressing global problems such as climate change and pandemics when national governments may be at odds with each other? LEE: Thanks, Jeff. And hi, Jeff. I’m just going to read over that question so I can kind of digest it a bit. Is there a role for institutions to play in knowledge diplomacy, such as climate change, pandemics, when national governments may be at odds with each other? Absolutely, 200 percent. It is occurring—knowledge diplomacy, science diplomacy. That one individual going on a Fulbright or coming to study here for some extended visit, having these collaborations and, ultimately, you know, science—knowledge production—I mean, there’s no bounds. And when we think about the kind of research that may not occur because of these national governments are at odds when it comes to addressing climate change or other global issues, you know, the world is paying somewhat of a price when it comes to that in—when there are overarching concerns about national security. So, you know, my issue has always been with policy you overlook nuance, and with sweeping policies that overlook the disciplinary distinctions and contributions, what is lost in the pursuit of trying to stay ahead of another country in fields and areas that really have no economic or military value, right? But yet, have an important cultural value, or maybe will address something bigger, such as COVID-19. So as I mentioned, the work that I referenced earlier about U.S.-Chinese scientists coming together during COVID-19, were actually scientists who studied COVID-19 together. And again, this was not—this was fraught with risks. They were very well aware that there was a lot of scrutiny about any research about COVID-19 coming from China. There was scrutiny about, you know, where the data was held, who was analyzing it, who was funding it. And yet, these scientists took these risks in order to address how does the world deal with the pandemic. And this was based on interviews of those studies that were actually successful and published. This is where that mutual trust, as I’ve mentioned earlier, is so important. And without that mutual trust, these studies, I’m pretty certain, would never have been published, because it was not an easy path when it comes to that particular geopolitical climate during the pandemic. FASKIANOS: Jenny, I’m just going to ask a question. President Biden and President Xi met during APEC. Did anything come out of that meeting that could affect U.S.-China academic collaboration? LEE: Yeah. You know, this is tough. I mean, how do you analyze political statements? What do they really mean? And what is really going to change? I think what’s clear is that there’s an acknowledgment that we’re interdependent, but we’re also adversaries. Almost a love/hate codependent, in a relationship that we can’t just easily separate but we do need each other. But the form that it takes, I think there’s an understanding it needs to be more specific. And I don’t think that has been clarified yet. I realize I missed part of Jeff’s question on what can institutions do? That’s such a good question. And I got more into the topic than the actual to-do. What can institutions do? Honestly—(laughs)—I’ll just speak as a researcher, to back off a bit, right? To let scientists do what they want to do. Yes, we need to follow disclosures. We need to make sure there’s no conflicts of interest. We need to follow all of these procedures. But what I also found during the China Initiative, there was also this chilling climate in which there’s an overinterpretation that may put institutions at risk. And to my knowledge, institutions were not at risk to the extent to which their scientists, especially those of Chinese descent, felt scrutinized. FASKIANOS: Thank you. We have a raised hand from Dan Whitman. Q: OK, I think I’m unmuted. Thank you, Irina. And thanks, Professor Lee, for mentioning the Great Wall that that prevents us from dealing with even Europeans who have subsidized education or Africans who have no money. And just an anecdote, since you have welcomed anecdotes, I am an adjunct at George Washington University. But totally unrelated to that, just for free and just for fun, pro bono, nobody pays, nobody gets paid. A course that I’m giving by webinar, it’s zero cost. The topic is crisis management, but it could be any topic. And in that group, which there are about eighty people who tune in twice a week, fifteen Kenyans, twenty-five Ukrainians, and forty Kazakhs. I mean, I don’t know if there’s ever been exchange between Kazakhstan and Kenya. Anyway, my point is things can be done. We share it for free. What motivates the students? A certificate. It’s so easy to give them a certificate. And in many countries, they very highly value that, even though it’s not a—there’s no formality, there’s no formal academic credit. But the students are very motivated. And possibly, there may be universities in the U.S. that could—that might want to give a professor a small stipendium to do an informal webinar course, which would create connections, which would be zero cost, basically, and would bridge that gap of funding that you’ve alluded to. Thank you. LEE: Yeah. Dan, thank you for that. And I think this leads to a kind of a spin-off comment about certificates. Absolutely. Micro-credentials or alternative forms of education, where there’s maybe not a full-fledged undergraduate degree but some certificate, I think, is important niche, especially for returning adults or communities where they’re not able to afford to take time off. So that flexibility, and obviously now with online education, just becomes so much more accessible and very low cost. Something else to keep in mind, though, is that, depending on the institution you’re from, that will make a difference in certificates. I mean, an institution like George Washington University offering a certificate may have some symbolic or perceived value that may be higher than an institution that is lower or are not ranked at all. So this is where, unfortunately—I’m a big critic of global rankings. But unfortunately, it does play a role in how that certificate is being perceived and the attractiveness of that certificate. But absolutely, this is definitely a way to open access especially for places in the world that just cannot physically move or have the funds to support their studies. FASKIANOS: Great. There are two comments/questions in the Q&A that I wanted to give you a chance to respond to about Africa, from Tutaleni Asino and Fodei Batty. Dr. Asino talks about English is the language of instruction and governments in Africa where they’re funding education to a higher degree, and thinks that there are opportunities there, but it sounds like all fifty-four countries are grouped together. And Dr. Batty talks a little bit about there are a lot of students from African countries pursuing graduate education in the United States. But South Africa is usually an exception to the higher education American norm in Africa. Most South Africans don’t like to travel, especially travel to America. I thought maybe you could just clarify some—respond to those comments. LEE: Yeah. Absolutely. Thank you for sharing those comments. There’s a book I edited called Intra-Africa Student Mobility. And I agree with the comments. And one of the things I didn’t mention that I think is important to help us understand the broader global context is that there’s actually considerable international activity within the continent. And there’s actually considerable intra-Africa mobility within the continent. South Africa is the most important country player in Sub-Saharan Africa. It is globally ranked—has more globally ranked institutions than any other African country. And so South Africa then becomes an important hub. And, yes, as an English-speaking, among many other languages, country, that does attract African students to go oftentimes for a similar sense of shared culture, despite sometimes different languages and customs and backgrounds. And yet, nevertheless, South Africa is an important player within the continent. Not to say that there is no international mobility occurring, but there is increased capacity within the continent that would allow students and interested students to travel within the continent. Not the same extent, of course, as Europe. But the least we’re seeing that rise over time. And so it’s called Intra-Africa Student Mobility. Chika Sehoole and I coedited the book. We were able to get about eight African scholars to talk about the various reasons students would choose that particular African country, and what draw them. And what was really interesting about this phenomenon is that it goes against this prevailing notion of Africa’s victim of brain drain or all going to the north. That’s actually not what is happening. But that there is capacity building within the continent. So in trying to answer a different question, I skirted over a lot of the things I could go further into. But hopefully that book will shed light on what’s happening within that continent, at least from the perspective of eight different countries. FASKIANOS: Fantastic. Thank you for that. I’m going to go next to Jonathan Scriven at Washington Adventist University in Maryland: What are some of the strategies universities are using to make education more affordable in the United States? If that is a challenge, are schools investing more or less in setting up campuses in foreign countries as a way to reach foreign students? LEE: I’m just going to read over that question. OK, yeah. Great question, Jonathan. So what’s happening in my institution and many others is a way to attract students is we’re providing considerable aid, merit aid, financial aid, aid even to international students. The majority may not even be paying the full sticker price. Now this, of course, will affect the revenue that would have otherwise been generated, but nevertheless is a way to deal with the fierce competition across U.S. institutions for these top students. So how to make it affordable? There’s a lot of aid going around at the undergraduate, not just the graduate, levels. And so what are institutions doing? Well, for example, at the University of Arizona for our dual degrees, it’s a fraction of the cost of what it would cost to be a student at our main campus. When you have a combination of hybrid or online delivery with a campus partner maybe providing most of the gen ed’s and then we would teach most of the major courses as an example, that does significantly lower the cost where that student will still get a bona fide University of Arizona degree, just like they would at main campus. So these alternative forms of delivery certainly make it more affordable, especially for those that opt to stay in their home country and receive an online education, or a flipped classroom model, or a dual degree. FASKIANOS: Great. Denis Simon, if you can—why don’t you ask your question? Q: Here I am. OK. Recently, on a trip to China in September, a number of faculty have told me they’re no longer wanting to send their best students abroad. They want to keep them in China. And this is all part of the rise of Chinese universities, et cetera. And so it may not be simply the souring of Sino-U.S. relations that has causal effect here, but simply the fact that China now is becoming a major, you know, educational powerhouse. And that also could change the dynamics. For example, even the BRI countries could start to send their students to China instead of sending them to the United States. Do you see anything evolving like this or—and what might be the outcome? LEE: Yeah. Spot on, David. That halo effect of a U.S. degree is not the same as it was when I was a university student. Chinese students, as well as students in the world, are much more savvy. They have access to information. They have access to rankings. They know all universities are not the same. And they know that they have some institutions that are highly ranked and may offer better quality education than the U.S. So that the image of a U.S. degree, of course, is not as universally perceived as it may have been, I don’t know, pre-internet, or without the—all sorts of rankings in which institutions are rated against one another. And absolutely, Chinese institutions are very difficult to get into, fiercely competitive, producing far more scientific output than some of our leading institutions. And there’s another factor when it comes to Asian culture just more broadly speaking, is that social network tie. Sociologists refer to it as social capital. When a Chinese student, a Korean student, Japanese student decides to study in the United States, they may lose that social tie that may possibly put them in a disadvantage when they decide to come back and compete for a position when they may just have that U.S. credential, but may have either lessened or no longer have that relationship that may have allowed them to get a position at the university, or in a place where that alumni network would have been especially useful. So again, I don’t want to generalize, you know, in any place to the world, but there is that component that I think sometimes is missed in the literature. Maintaining that social network is pretty key, especially as jobs, of course, global, you know, unemployment—places where students are competing for positions need to have every edge possible. So that also can be part of that reason they decide to stay. FASKIANOS: Great. The next question from Michael Kulma, who’s at the University of Chicago. He’s following on David Moore’s comments about Florida: Do you know how many other states in the U.S. are enacting or are considering such policies against partnerships with China? LEE: I do not know the answer. So if anyone wants to raise their hand and share about their own state, or put it on the answer part of the question and answer. There are related concerns about DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion. Some of that may spill over to China. Hopefully, at some point at the Council of Foreign Relations will have a discussion on Israel and Hamas conflict and how institutions are dealing with that. And so we’re seeing a pretty challenging political environment that is clearly spilling over to our classrooms and to our international activities, our domestic recruitment. But I’m not answering your question, Michael. (Laughs.) I’ll leave it up to someone else to answer. FASKIANOS: Great. Thank you. So we don’t have very much time left. I thought maybe you could, given your research and expertise, could suggest resources—recommend resources for higher ed leaders and administrators to better understand how to promote collaboration. LEE: Sure. So promoting collaboration, it really—each person at a time. You know, again, MOUs may be signed, and maybe overarching presidents will come together and have an agreement, but there’s no guarantee that will ever happen. I’d love to do a study on how many MOUs never actually materialized into real action. So where do we begin? International affairs SIOs out there, identify who are your area studies experts? Who are your visiting postdocs? Who are your Fulbright scholars from other parts of the world? They all represent their own network and are certainly are valuable resources to consider. What I’ve sometimes have heard even at my own institution is, you know, how do we bring these people to the table? Why are they not at the table to begin with, and then how do we bring them there? And this is a relatively low-cost way to go about this, right? Like, faculty engaged in service. What kind of opportunities can your university provide for faculty service that is aligned with their area of expertise, the areas of the world they represent, the networks they have? And many of—some of you already have experienced this directly. These partnerships often begin with our alumni, international—former international students who decide to go back home. So, again, there’s just a lot of exciting opportunity. I love this field because it’s never boring. There’s always new ways to grow, expand new partners. But it really does begin with that essential element of trust. And that often begins with our own institutions and identifying those who’ve already started to build that network. FASKIANOS: Wonderful. Thank you very much. Really appreciate your being with us and for sharing your expertise and background, Dr. Lee. It’s been fantastic. And to all of you, for your questions and comments, and sharing your experiences as well. You can follow Dr. Lee on X, the app formerly known as Twitter, at @JennyJ_Lee. I will send out a link to this webinar, the transcript, and the video, as well as the link to the book—your book that you mentioned, and any other resources that you want to share with the group. And I encourage you all to follow @CFR_academic on X, visit CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for research and analysis on global issues. We also—just putting in a plug for our other series, Academic Webinar series, which is designed for students. We just sent out the winter/spring lineup and we hope that you will share that with your colleagues and your students. It is a great way for them to have access to practitioner scholars and to talk with students from around the country. So if you haven’t received that lineup, you can email [email protected], and we will share that with you. So, again, thank you, Jenny, for being with us, and to all of you. And wishing you safe and happy holidays. And good luck closing out this semester before we get to the holidays. (Laughs.) So thank you again. (END)

Meghan L. O’Sullivan, director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and the Jeane Kirkpatrick professor of the practice of international affairs at Harvard University, leads the conversation on energy security. FASKIANOS: Welcome to today’s session of the Winter/Spring 2024 CFR Academic Webinar series. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach at CFR. Thanks again for being with us. Today’s discussion is on the record and the video and transcript will be available on our website, CFR.org/Academic. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. We’re delighted to have Meghan O’Sullivan with us to discuss energy security. Dr. O’Sullivan is director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and the Jeane Kirkpatrick professor of the practice of international affairs at Harvard University’s Kennedy School. She’s served in multiple senior policymaking roles and has advised national security officials in both Republican and Democratic administrations. Between 2004 and 2007, Dr. O’Sullivan was special assistant to President George W. Bush, and was deputy national security adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan during the last few years of her tenure. In 2013, she was the vice chair of All-Party Talks in Northern Ireland. And Dr. O’Sullivan is a member of U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s foreign policy advisory board. And she serves on the board of directors at CFR. So, Meghan, thanks very much for being with us today. I thought we could begin by having you define energy security, and how the environment has changed over the years as you have worked on this issue, taught it, and made policy, in fact. O’SULLIVAN: Sure. Thank you, Irina. And thanks to you and all of your colleagues for inviting me to do this webinar. And I’m really looking forward to it. I spend a lot of time here at Harvard talking to my students about these issues, and I’m looking forward to talking to an even broader audience of students and professors. And it’s interesting. I’m glad to see we have a good group. When I saw the title of “Energy Security,” I thought, like, oh, well, that’s interesting, because usually we don’t talk just about energy security anymore. We talk about it in a broader context. And so what I thought I would do, just in response to your question, is to talk a little bit about how I’ve seen these concepts evolve. And it actually is reflective of the way that I have taught these issues. I’ve been teaching a class here at Harvard that was originally called “Energy and Geopolitics.” And it has evolved. That was back in 2007, I think, was the first time I taught it—maybe 2008. And over this period of time, it’s become probably unrecognizable to my 2008 students. In 2024 I’m teaching it, but it’s really much more about the energy transition and geopolitics. So, you know, there’s still a very big idea around the whole notion of energy and geopolitics. This whole idea that energy and the international system—kind of the distribution of power, alliances, the impetus for conflict or peace—that all of these things are often wrapped up in energy. And I think we can go through and be happy to talk about many historical examples. I can’t really say exactly where they begin, but certainly we start to really notice them in the historical record around the time that oil becomes a major driver of the global economy. But, of course, this was probably true long before that, where you have big changes in the energy system really influencing the state of relationships among states. And certainly the histories of World War I and World War II are full of examples of how commanders and leaders made decisions around oil—either strategic decisions or tactical decisions that ended up ultimately feeding into how wars played out. We think about the bombing of Pearl Harbor, which was so consequential to World War II, had a lot to do with the oil embargo that the United States had placed on Japan, and on the Japanese really thinking that they needed to neutralize the American force in Pearl Harbor before it made an effort to take over—they made an effort to take over the oil-rich areas in today’s Indonesia. So, that entanglement of energy and geopolitics has been with us a long time. And I would say fifteen years ago in highlighting what really is a history of international relations, that is about a fight for resources energy is a piece that I often was trying to expose as being a driver of international affairs. And I used a concept, and I still use a concept, which I think is really relevant today. And that is thinking about energy as a means in grand strategy, and energy is an ends in grand strategy. So if you think about energy as a means, is usually we think about producing countries—producing any form of energy, but maybe oil and gas in particular if we’re looking at the last decades. Countries that have this ability to produce large quantities of this energy have used this energy to try to advance non-energy interests. So, the most obvious example may be the 1973 embargo of the Arab members of OPEC. You know, using their prowess in the energy field to try to advance political objectives. And there are many, many examples of this around the world. We could look at Venezuela, how it used its oil wealth to try to buy the acquiescence of neighboring states and Caribbean states. There are many, many examples. But there’s also another frame to look at it and think about energy as a means of geopolitical ends, which is the flip side of this idea. That there are countries—and the United States is probably the best and most obvious example—that have historically used non-energy power—so economic, political, and military power—to try to ensure that they have sufficient energy. Their goal is to have energy—either to acquire the energy resources, if you think about some countries have looked at it that way, or to ensure that they have access to energy resources, which has been traditionally the view of the United States. And so there we get a lot into the Middle East and American strategy vis-à-vis that part of the world, where energy was a big part of the end goal. So, again, that was the frame that I had looking at this over a long period of time. Five years ago, I wrote a book called Windfall, which was really focused on how, when you get a big change in the energy system, you should expect a big change in geopolitics. And that book was specifically looking at the energy revolution that came from the fracking boom in the United States, and in some other parts of the world. And just the move of the United States from being a major draw on global energy resources to a major contributor toward it. And how that changed America’s role in the world, how that recreated a global atmosphere that on the whole was more conducive to America’s interests and the interests of its allies, and really moved the world into an age of energy abundance. So that has been a consistent focus. And energy security obviously fits right in there. I’m now spending more time—a lot more time, maybe all of my kind of intellectual time—or, not all of it. A good portion of it thinking about the energy transition, as both an ends and a means of foreign policy. And the energy transition I define really quite broadly. And to me, the energy transition and companies encompasses energy security and climate action, because the energy transition—some people think, oh, I’m just talking about substituting solar power for coal. And certainly, that’s a component of the energy transition. But when I conceptualize the energy transition, I am thinking about the huge societal movement to get to a net zero economy, to decarbonize the global economy. And all of the social, political, and in some cases even military, actions that different countries, and companies, and other actors are taking in their quest to get to net zero. And so while I think it, of course, matters a lot from the perspective of a human, the human race, a planetary matter. It matters if the world gets to net zero. The impact of the effort to get to net zero—regardless of whether that goal is reached—the impact of that has already started to really dramatically transform global politics and the basis of power in the international system. And here, I’m developing this idea—actually, working on a Foreign Affairs article on it with my friend and colleague Jason Bordoff—about the energy transition as both an ends and a means. But for the purposes of this call, I thought I’d just say a couple more things about the energy transition and geopolitics. And this is also reflected in three pieces that Jason Bordoff and I have written for Foreign Affairs over the last two years, which talk about the energy transition as a big driver of geopolitics, and geopolitics a big driver of the energy transition. So that first piece, I think of it as a cycle. And the first piece is how the energy transition is shaping geopolitics because, again, going back to this idea, this is an enormous change in how we generate, use, transport, store energy. We’re remaking the backbone of the global economy. Not just switching from coal to solar. Remaking the backbone of the global economy. And this has all kinds of implications for the way that our global system is organized, and political power, and diplomatic power, and otherwise. And there’s lots of examples of this. And I imagine that much of our conversation will be talking about this. One example is just looking at how China’s big investments in clean energy technologies are giving it a claim to geopolitical power. So that’s one way we see the energy transition shaping geopolitics. We could look at the Russian invasion of Ukraine. These are all things I’d love to talk about in greater detail if there’s interest. I wouldn’t argue that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was about the energy transition. I think it was about a lot of things, but primarily Putin’s kind of disillusionment and his fixation on Ukraine. But certainly there are real elements of how the energy transition played into that, played into the timing, and even empowered Vladimir Putin in this particular moment. And then we can look at the energy transition as a driver for trade routes and a whole variety of other things, depending on what energy sources end up being dominant. And finally, I would say there’s also this flip side. So we have the energy transition shaping geopolitics, but—and I think this is something we feel very acutely in the last year, year and a half, is how the geopolitical environment is actually shaping the energy transition. And again, lots and lots of good examples of this. The most obvious one, I think, is just the relationship between the United States and China. And this relationship, you know, going from one of some elements or dominant elements of cooperation to being the most highly competitive bilateral relationship in the world and the most consequential bilateral relationship in the world. So, looking at how that shift from cooperative to competitive has had an impact on a whole range of things, one of them is definitely the energy transition. And we could talk about a variety of ways in which that has played out. Some of it has been, I would say, detrimental in the sense that some of the international bodies, which are the obvious things to deal with global problems, are hamstrung a bit by an environment of geopolitical competition and great-power rivalry. On the other hand, I think the world is adjusting to the fact that this competitive relationship is the one that’s infusing competition into the global environment. And some of our efforts to pursue the energy transition have shifted to be more competitive. And the Inflation Reduction Act, that was partially in the reading people had for today, that’s evidence of a competitive approach to the energy transition rather than a cooperative one. There’s also, of course, the Russian invasion of Ukraine. That has had an impact. That geopolitical reality has had a big impact on the energy transition, which we could discuss. I think there are strong arguments that it expedited the transition, and also strong arguments that it has impeded the transition. So with that, I think I will stop there. Hopefully, I put enough on the table to define our topic in a fairly broad way. And I’m really looking forward to people’s thoughts and insights, and any questions they may have. FASKIANOS: Fantastic. Thank you, Meghan. That was terrific. Let’s go to all of you. (Gives queuing instructions.) So the first question we have we can take from King Fahd University, our international participants. O’SULLIVAN: Great. FASKIANOS: And you need to unmute yourself. Still muted. There we go. Please say your name— Q: So my name is Ahmed Hazmi. FASKIANOS: Good. Q: My name is Ahmed Hazmi. I am from King Fahd University. Before I ask the question, I have to let you know that we have multiple students with their own questions. So my question is, what are the recent effects of the energy crisis on the global efforts to move towards clean energy? That’s my question. O’SULLIVAN: Sure. It’s a great question. And I have some good memories of visiting King Fahd University. So nice to see you on the call and know there are several of you. This is obviously a central question and a really big question. And I can give you examples of how this geopolitical—this environment of geopolitical crises have moved the energy transition in both ways. As I mentioned very briefly, I think there’s are quite a strong argument to say that the crisis with Russia and the war in Ukraine has expedited the drive, and the commitment, and the ambition of Europeans in particular to try to get to net zero more quickly. So many of the already ambitious European goals have been made even more ambitious because the Europeans now not only have an environmental drive for meeting their energy—their climate goals, but now they have a very, very real kind of a national security, economic security argument as well. So you could—there’s, I think, a reasonable debate. You know, having more ambitious goals doesn’t necessarily mean that you meet them, but I think there’s a genuine and very authentic desire on the part of the Europeans to move more quickly. Now, that said, it can also be true that on the whole, if we take a global perspective, that if we just look at that one war, which has had ripple effects throughout the world, that it’s possible that that could slow down the energy transition in other parts of the world. And of course, if we look at the anticipated carbon emissions over time, going forward in the future, I don’t know what the numbers are for Europe but when I look at those numbers and I think of it from an American perspective, 88 percent of future carbon emissions are going to happen outside of the United States. So it’s absolutely essential that the rest of the world actually is bought into, sees value in, is then supported in an energy transition. Otherwise, it’s not going to happen. So Europe could end up being a carbon-free zone or a net zero zone, but if the rest of the world isn’t there—and I think in a lot of ways the war in Ukraine has by stoking inflation, creating a food crisis, raising the cost of energy, and really deepening the divide between the developed world and the developing world—all of these things, I think, work against the energy transition. And that’s just one conflict. So, the other geopolitical environment, I could do the net-net when it came to the U.S.-China relationship, or even the war in the Middle East is having an impact on all of this. I would say, just to wrap up, if you asked me on the whole how do I see it, I’m concerned that this deteriorating geopolitical environment is impeding our ability to get to net zero in some significant ways. It’s not the only obstacle. We need policy. We need new technologies. We need big investments. There’s all of that. But I think what’s often overlooked from the conversation about climate is the fact that the geopolitical environment is really an enabler of a successful transition as well. And right now, the geopolitical environment doesn’t look so good. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to take the next written question from Michael Strmiska, who’s a professor of world history from SUNY-Orange in Middletown, New York: I’m concerned about how right-wing political movements worldwide are converting energy issues into identity politics. I refer to those who denounce green energy transition as a globalist plot and promote continuation of carbon fuel production and consumption as a badge of identity. The “drill, baby, drill” kind of rhetoric. How can those on the side of a green future combat this effort by the right wing to demonize green energy and environmentalism? O’SULLIVAN: Yeah. This is a great—it’s a great question and a great issue. And I hope that you are writing something on this because I think it’s a relatively new phenomenon in the whole energy transition landscape, but is one that can be very consequential. So I’ll just say one example of where I’ve seen this, and then your real question is, how do we combat it? I was just ten days ago, I guess, in Germany for the Munich Security Conference, which is a very large gathering of people working on national security issues. And being in Germany was an opportunity to talk to some German colleagues and friends about just, like, the political landscape, and just the general feeling among Germans about a variety of things, including the energy transition. And right now, there’s a movement on the part of the German government to require people to make certain investments in their home, which are costly—or people perceive them to be too costly. And this is in a context of a real weakening economy in the wake of the war against Ukraine and what many people often refer to, like, the deindustrialization of Germany in particular, because of such high energy prices in the wake of the efforts to get off of Russian gas. And so, there’s a sense among many Germans—not all—but a sense, like, that these requirements are just getting very expensive in an incredibly tough time. And it’s building political opposition to it. That is not just among the right wing. And I think that the question had to do with, like, the right wing and people kind of consciously taking these issues and trying to stoke right-wing ideological agendas. That is certainly happening as well. But I think it’s broader than that. I think it’s leading to—it’s contributing to the rise in populism, which I think we’re going to see most consequentially in Europe with the European Commission elections coming forward. In terms of what can be done, I mean this is where we get into the piece about energy security and how literally, like, three years ago if we titled a webinar “Energy Security,” nobody would show up because people thought, like, that’s a concept—that kind of puts you in the caveman category, right, or cavewoman category. Like, we don’t talk about energy transition. We just talk about—or, energy security. We talk about climate action. The reality is these two things are not opposite. They are absolutely two sides of the same coin. And so recognizing that energy security is—meeting energy security needs is part of almost, like, a prerequisite for a successful energy transition I think is a very different way of thinking about it than many have in the past. And I think that is part of what’s required. And the challenge is that, like, that is going to be hard to do and to keep the speed at which we need to go. And the real answer there is just more and more investment into clean energy because there’s the need to meet the energy needs, but to do so with a different kind of energy. And we’ve seen huge increases in investment into clean energy, but those investments are still far short of what is needed not only to meet additional energy demand but to start to displace the demand for coal and then, eventually, other sources of fossil fuels—or, other fossil fuels. FASKIANOS: Great. Next question from Benedetta Luccone If you can—there you go. And state your affiliation. Q: I am Benedetta Luccone, from Lewis University. And my question is, how can advances in renewable energy technology contribute to changing energy security, particularly in regions vulnerable to geopolitical instability or resource scarcity? O’SULLIVAN: OK. So, Irina, would you repeat for all of us? FASKIANOS: Maybe—yeah. If you could—you’re breaking up a little bit, Benedetta. Can you just repeat it again? Q: Yes. So how can advances in renewable energy technology contribute in changing energy security, particularly in regions vulnerable to geopolitical instability or resource scarcity? O’SULLIVAN: Sure. OK. How can renewable energy contribute to energy security, particularly in vulnerable areas? So I think there’s enormous capacity for this to prove true. A couple of things I would say about it. So, first, energy security is in its most traditional definition, it is simply having adequate supplies of energy to meet one’s economic needs and to satisfy certain levels of growth, and prosperity, and human welfare. Energy underpins almost everything that humans do on the planet. So energy security is having sufficient energy. And in some of these very vulnerable parts of the world that you talk about, one of the biggest constraints, in many cases the biggest constraint, on growth and human flourishing is the lack of energy. And so to the extent that we can have more energy meeting the energy needs of a wider swath of the globe, that is going to be beneficial. And if that—particularly if that energy is renewable. If it’s not renewable, then it brings with it a whole new set of problems related to the climate. But the basis of your question is how can renewable energy assist in these countries? And I think there’s a very real sense that if the world could meet the energy needs of these populations with renewable sources, that it would be very beneficial. A couple of—a couple of just nuances here, or smaller points from that very high-level point. I would say, you mentioned countries that were geopolitically vulnerable. And I think there’s probably a lot of different ways to define that. One of the things about renewable energy—it’s not true for every form. But if you’re thinking about really renewable energy—solar, wind, and a variety of other types of energy—a lot of that energy is produced where it’s consumed, for the most part. So that has the benefit of diminishing the requirement to be dependent on outsiders in the way that importation of natural gas through big pipelines has been an issue. That just trade and oil flowing through choke points, all of these things. If you’re producing the energy where you’re consuming it in your own country, then I think it does kind of enhance self-sufficiency and energy security. The downside, I would say, and then I’ll stop here—not the downside, but one of the things—or, a couple of things that we have to be cognizant of. And one is the fact—this is known to everybody on this call, probably—but renewable energy is still intermittent. There’s a variety of ways to address it. We’re much better at it than we were before. But it is still very hard to have renewable energy as, like, a baseload for industrial development. So, if you have a source of energy that comes in and out over the course of the day, either when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing, it’s much harder to build a factory and expect that you’re going to get that kind of development. Sure, you can charge your cell phone, you can watch television, and there are—there are enhancements to the quality of life. But in terms of, like, the kinds of development that a lot of these countries want, we either need to make—continue to make big advances in battery storage, or we need backup, which tends to be natural gas and coal. Or we need new sources of green energy, like green hydrogen. So there’s still some technology that is required in order for the benefits to be realized in the way that many of us envision. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to take the next written question from Genevieve Connell at Fordham IPED: Given that new technologies can be quite expensive to develop and distribute to emerging economies, what political strategies would it take to allow for developing countries to be able to sustain economic growth while adapting to energy transitions? O’SULLIVAN: OK. So, I think the answer to this question really gets into the whole question of climate finance and how to help ensure that countries around the world, not just wealthy Western countries, are able to benefit from clean energy technologies. And this, of course, has been an issue that has gotten a lot of attention in recent years. And that attention is almost—I don’t know that it’s crescendoed. because I think it’s still building, but it certainly was one of the really big foci of COP-28 in Dubai, which I had the privilege of attending. So, really seeing the focus on getting that clean energy finance not just to different parts of the United States, or Europe, or even Japan, but how can—how can that money go and flow into countries that are developing? And here, the need is clear. The volume of investment that has to be found and facilitated is enormous. I’d say the last annual numbers we have for clean energy investment globally is about 1.1 trillion dollars. And the sense is that that has to grow to about 4 trillion dollars a year to kind of put the world on track. You know, 4 trillion dollars per year for decades, on track. And that the majority of that needs to go to the developing world. And so when the—when the person with a question mentioned the high cost of these renewable energy, I would say there’s been enormous advantages—or, not advantages—enormous strides made in bringing down the costs of many of these clean energy technologies. Some of them are cheaper depending on their location than certain kinds of fossil fuels. The challenge is in many developing countries there are other things that make it costly to develop these clean energy projects, political risk being one of them. So, again, you have money. You want to invest in clean energy. It tends to flow to Europe or the United States rather than to Africa. And there are reasons for that that people are trying to figure out how to minimize those risks, how to create new mechanisms of political insurance, how to have blended finance where you have a big loan, part of it is from a government or government public sector entity that kind of de-risks the rest of the loan for the private sector. And then the last thing I would say, which is really important and maybe it’ll come up, again, is just this whole idea that that finance ideally will flow to these countries to help them build the capacity to be part of the clean energy supply chain, rather than just give them finance so that they can buy solar panels from China or electrolyzers from the United States. You know, not just to buy products that are made elsewhere, but to create investments in places in the supply chain, which makes them part of the green energy transition in a way that their economies and their people can really benefit. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Next question from Wilson Wameyo. There you go. Q: Hello. Thank you for talking here. I wanted to ask some question—OK, I’m going to introduce myself— FASKIANOS: Wilson, can you identify yourself? Q: Yes, I’m Wilson. I come from—I come from Poland—Jagiellonian University in Poland, but I come from Kenya originally. My question is, how is rivalry between China and the U.S. affecting energy transitions? And how can we overcome it? FASKIANOS: Can you repeat it again? Because I think you broke up, Wilson. I don’t know, did you hear it, Meghan? O’SULLIVAN: No, I didn’t. FASKIANOS: OK. (Laughs.) Q: OK. My question is, how is rivalry between China and the U.S. affecting energy transition, and how can we overcome it? O’SULLIVAN: I’m sorry, Irina, were you able—do you think Wilson could put it in writing, just so that—because I wasn’t able to discern that. FASKIANOS: Right. We heard your name clearly. And then all of a sudden it muffled when you started asking your question. So I don’t know if you change positions, or— Q: Can you hear me now? FASKIANOS: Yes. Q: OK. So my question is, how is rivalry between China and the U.S. affecting energy transition? And how can we overcome it? O’SULLIVAN: Yeah. OK. Thank you, Wilson. And thank you for persisting. This is a really great question. So, I think there’s a number of ways. As I referenced earlier but I’ll say a little bit more about, we have this global challenge. I think everyone appreciates it’s a global challenge. That this is not something that one country can solve, but is a challenge that needs to be met by many countries, adopting—and, in many cases, fundamentally changing their behavior. So when you have a global problem, the ideal way for dealing with it would be through global cooperation, because, again, we need multiple actors to bring about a solution. And I think that the COP, the Conference of the Party, mechanisms that have been in place for almost thirty years were reflective of that analysis. You know, basically we’ve got a global problem. We need a global solution. And we’re going to cooperate until we find one. And so over nearly thirty years, that has been—not the only approach, but that’s been a center point of the approach. Where that has worked the best I think is when we’ve seen the U.S. and China cooperating together. So probably the most consequential COP—I think we could debate this, but that’s not the point—I think one of the most consequential COPs was Paris—the Paris COP in 2015. And a large part of that success was that a big agreement between China and the U.S. on climate kind of greased the wheels for the rest of countries to come forward. So this was the COP in which countries decided that they would—almost all of them—would come forward with a nationally determined contribution. That they would assess their own economic situation, they would assess their own carbon emissions, they’d make goals, that ideally would be consistent with keeping global temperatures, at that that time, under two degrees. And they would present those ambitions to the global mechanisms. And the idea was that every few years or so the world would reevaluate these goals and make them more and more ambitious. And really, the fact that President Obama and President Xi got together in 2014 and came up with a bilateral agreement where both countries really advanced their ambitions, made them clear, made them public, set the stage for a lot of other countries coming forward and doing the same. So, you had meaningful U.S.-China cooperation, which helped catalyze greater global cooperation. And that U.S.-China deal in 2014 wasn’t just the product of Presidents Obama and Xi sitting down and talking. It was months of negotiation at multiple levels of government. So that’s an example of how cooperation can really be helpful. And if you look at a map of global emissions, the U.S. and China really stand out as the countries that are putting the most carbon emissions in the in the air. China more so than the United States, but the United States, historically probably a larger amount than China. So now that kind of cooperation is hard to imagine. I think our diplomats—you look at Secretary Kerry and others—continue to pursue it, continue to hope that persistent efforts to get climate cooperation between the U.S. and China have continued. And certainly that is a noble pursuit, and one that should continue. But the overall relationship is one that is so sour that it’s very hard to imagine that both countries are going to put aside all of the issues that they have on completely other issues—non-climate issues—and come up with some kind of joint strategy. In fact, the Biden administration, that was its approach for the first couple of years, was simply saying: we’re going to disagree about all these things. We’re going to argue about all these things. But we’re going to cooperate on climate because it matters to the whole world. And the Chinese approach was, well, we understand why you want to do that, but we also understand how important climate is to you. And why would we give you something without getting something in return? And, why would we divorce this issue from the rest of the relationship? So if you want to come to Beijing and talk about climate, we want to talk about Taiwan. So, there was this real block. There’s been some progress. Saw a little bit of a joint statement on methane, something about some progress over the last year or so. But in general, what has happened is that in the United States the real impetus for climate action has shifted away from thinking we’re going to get these big cooperative mechanisms to competitive approaches, like the Inflation Reduction Act, which is this very large piece of American legislation—the biggest action on the part of the United States ever taken in the climate space. And I can tell you, that that would have not happened in the absence of U.S.-China cooperation because members of Congress and of the political establishment are now so concerned about China having a competitive edge in a number of technologies that it decided, hey, it’s worth us putting hundreds of billions of dollars into American capacity to develop these technologies. And if China wasn’t on this planet, I don’t think we would have at all seen a consensus for such an enormous investment in climate, but really that investment was also in American competitiveness in the face of this very, very competitive bilateral relationship. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to go next to a written question by Gavin Rolle, who is a senior international business major at Howard University: Could you talk more about how large multinational corporations play a part in the geopolitical implications of the energy transition? O’SULLIVAN: OK. So large multinational corporations—I mean, that could mean so many different things. So I’ll make a general point and then maybe put forward a few examples. I think there’s no question that corporations in the private sector are now a big part of what is perceived as the solution. They’re also, of course, if you think about corporations as oil and gas companies, they’re part of the problem. So I think there’s that dual component of it. First, let me just talk about part of the solution. So multinational corporations, we think about all kinds of things. But the ways in which they’re going to be central to a solution is manifold. So, one, I would say think about big global mining companies and the role that they have in trying to meet this really, really staggering growth in demand that is anticipated for critical minerals which are needed for clean energy technologies, particularly batteries and large, offshore and onshore wind. So on the one hand, those companies, some of them, might be state owned—or, are state owned, from China and other places. But a lot of them are big, multinational companies that have mining operations all over the world. And so suddenly the energy transition rests to some extent on these companies being able to produce a lot more critical minerals than it was anticipated in the past. On the solution side, think about corporations, the private sector more generally, I mentioned about the need for more climate finance. Most of that new climate finance is going to have to come from the private sector. And so, again, there the question is how to mobilize that finance. But it’s not going to come from governments. The gap is just too large to be met by governments alone. And then on the contribution side, I think shifting to oil and gas companies here, you do have companies that have the ability to make very big investments in new technologies. And so, what you do see is some companies investing heavily in carbon capture and storage technologies, trying to see if those technologies can—the costs of them can be brought down and the scale that they can be exercised at can be increased. There’s some controversy around those technologies, and the idea of oil and gas companies being the funders of it. But I think on the whole, if you look at any of the scenarios of what the global energy mix looks like in a net zero global economy, there’s a big element of carbon capture, right, that we really can’t get to those goals without having that technology play a bigger role than it is today. Now, in terms of multinational companies, on the downside there is—I would say there’s this intense focus on the role that these companies play in producing oil and gas, and the role that those energy sources play in creating carbon emissions. And that—I mean, those links are very well known to all. And here, I think what I would say—this is obviously a long and complex situation—but I think we need to look at the entire energy system and see the role of energy companies in the global energy system, and to think about their supply, and think about their investments, and moving those investments into more renewable energy areas, which some of them are doing. And we also need to think about demand. That as long as global demand for oil and natural gas are rising, as they are today, you have companies that are going to be interested in meeting those goals. And when the supply falls short of the demand, what also happens is that prices go up and you have politicians trying to get companies to produce more oil. So I think it needs to be tackled from both the supply side and from the demand side. And we rightly focus on supply, but we often overlook demand. So I think whenever we’re thinking about that, we should keep both in mind. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Next question from Benjamin Schmitt, who has a raised hand. Q: Hi. Benjamin Schmitt. I’m an affiliate at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Harvard Ukraine Research Institute. One of the questions I have is, there’s been a—first of all, Meghan, thank you for doing the, quote/unquote, caveman energy security discussion today, because it’s really been lost, as you said, in some of the good—very good discussion over the energy transition. What I want to ask about is the extent to which physical energy infrastructure attacks that we’ve seen across Northern Europe in particular, but more broadly, whether it be Nord Stream, or Baltic Connector, or some of the telecommunications cables, including that in the Red Sea that we’ve seen. How does this impact the thinking of the global energy transition? Because when I was at COP-28, I tried to talk to folks as much as possible about the need to have physical infrastructure as a part of an energy security strategy. But it’s oftentimes overlooked as a key element of this, because if you don’t have energy security of the physical infrastructure, you might end up with energy poverty. And that would reduce the support for electorates to support the energy transition, which we obviously need. So want your thoughts on that. And thanks, again, for doing this great event. O’SULLIVAN: Thank you very much. And it’s always great to meet a colleague over a webinar of another institution. So nice to meet you. And I hope I’ll get to benefit from your work. You know, I think you’re hitting on an extremely important point. And it is one that I do think is very much underweighted in the conversation around climate. And that is the security of energy infrastructure. And, of course, we had some of those—some of those failures of energy infrastructure here in the United States a couple of years ago, that really made people nervous, woke people up to the importance of pipelines and energy security infrastructure. But seemingly not as much attention sustained over a long period of time. There’s no question that this is going to be part of the vulnerability of an energy transition. So it’s not just a fact today. You mentioned Nord Stream and some other pieces of infrastructure in place now which have been or were vulnerable. But this vulnerability is going to intensify dramatically as the energy transition progresses. And, again, just make more vulnerabilities with energy transition around things like electric grids, and other transmission modes, and storage. So one of the big things about the energy transition is that in a successful energy transition world, so much of what we do on a daily basis will be electrified. So I think now 20 percent of global economic activity is electrified. That number will be more like 50 percent. And so at first you think of all the additional infrastructure that is going to be needed to support the electrification, not just of the transport sector but of many, many other places. And that that electricity is going to need to be almost fully decarbonized, which is a big step up. I think, now it’s about—globally, about 38 percent of the energy flowing through to electricity is of a decarbonize nature. So you’re going to have a lot more infrastructure that is going to be sustaining a much greater proportion of global economic activity. And with that is going to come all kinds of vulnerabilities. Now, some of the vulnerabilities will be, as we’ve just been discussing, kind of like attacks, cyberattacks, physical attacks, like we saw on Nord Stream. But some of them will come from other sources. So if you think about climate change and look at just how climate change has affected the generation of clean energy in the last few years, whether it’s in France, where a very hot summer made it hard to cool the nuclear reactors of France, or in Brazil where droughts have made hydropower very hard to sustain. But then we think about increasing vicious weather systems and the impact that that’s going to have on energy infrastructure. So you have kind of manmade threats, but you also will have climate change—all of these things making this infrastructure more vulnerable. And then finally, I’d just point out, if you look at the government’s assessment of kind of cybersecurity vulnerabilities, one of the areas where I’ve had friends and colleagues who are in government kind of point out to me—this is public information, but public information that they feel nobody has focused on—is just how concerned the U.S. government is about the Chinese penetration of energy infrastructure in the United States, and presumably other parts of the world. Which is just a dormant capacity, but the sense is that if the United States and China were to get into any kind of conflict, that there’s actually a latent Chinese capacity to do some significant damage to our energy infrastructure. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Next question from John Francis, who’s at the University of Utah: Regardless of the outcome of the war in Ukraine, do you think that lasting impact on Europe will be an increased and sustained commitment to renewable energy? O’SULLIVAN: Great question. I touched on it a little bit at the beginning. Since it’s asking for my opinion, I’ll give my opinion. And as I said, I think there are some reasons why this is a good source of debate. In fact, I had this as a debate in my class not too long ago, a few weeks ago. I do think, on the whole, if you’re just talking about Europe—and I understand the question was directed towards Europe—on the whole, I do think that this is probably going to lead—not probably. I think we’re already seeing it, and I believe it will continue, which is this enhanced commitment to energy transition. So keep in mind that Europe was already there. Europe was already the most advanced in terms of reining in its carbon emissions to any other region in the world. So it already had that commitment. And this goes back to the whole caveman question. And it generally was not focusing so much on energy security, because it saw Russia as a reliable supplier over the course of decades. And so there was a desire to transition away from natural gas and fossil fuels, but there wasn’t seen to be a national security imperative at all. And that has changed. And I think that has really meant that you’re going to have this intense, intense commitment to it. Some people have asked me—I think this question was prefaced with “regardless of the outcome in Ukraine.” Some people have asked, well what happens if, when Putin is no longer in power in Russia? Are the Europeans going to go back to importing Russian natural gas? And my answer there would be, I don’t really see that happening even remotely to the scale of European dependence before the war. Even in the face of a different kind of Russia. I think the effort that the Europeans are taking to move away from Russian natural gas is not going to be easily reversed, even in the face of a different kind of government in Russia—which I’m quite skeptical about happening in the short term in any case. So I think we could certainly imagine a future in which Europe is importing more Russian gas than it’s importing now—and it still is importing Russian gas, a lot of it liquefied natural gas. But I don’t see it reverting back to the volumes in which the Europeans were importing Russian natural gas before the war. I see more of this commitment to meeting energy needs through renewable energy. What I see is really slowing it down, to some extent, is what we talked about earlier, which is the rise of populism and that, again, if energy security becomes a rallying factor for European politics, I think it could influence some of the initiative and energy and resources that exists to go into it. But I don’t think the political commitment is going to disappear. FASKIANOS: Great. I’d like to go to Ken Bernier at Central New Mexico Community College, with a raised hand. Q: Yes. Thank you, Irina and Dr. O’Sullivan. I am with Central New Mexico Community College, in the political science department. I had a relatively simple question, and it’s a follow on to Nord Stream. I’ve read Seymour Hersh’s article and I’m trying to figure out, was this an attempt to convert Europe to green energy quicker or was it an attempt to stymie Russia’s influence on providing natural gas and reaping the benefits of all that money? Thank you. O’SULLIVAN: So I haven’t read Seymour Hersh’s article, so I’m at a disadvantage. And when somebody says, I’m asking a relatively simple question, I always think, Ken, hmm, that’s not going to be simple. So it’s hard. I haven’t read the article. And to be honest, I think there’s a lot of uncertainty around the motives and the particular actors, and who ordered it, and all of that. So I think it’s a little bit hard to answer your question in a very specific sense. I think what was happening—if you look at the graph of how Europe was getting off of Russian energy before the explosions in the Nord Stream pipelines, it was moving pretty rapidly away from Russian natural gas. And the flows through the Nord Stream pipelines had diminished greatly but were still substantial in some way. I suppose—again, I could speculate on the motives of potentially various actors, but I think that the trend line away from Russian energy was very, very clear. And if we keep in mind—we kind of go back to—the IEA had this report that came out. I think it came out in March 2022. And it basically was an assessment. This is the International Energy Agency in Paris. It had this assessment of what does Europe need to do to get off of Russian energy by the end of the year? I think that was their timeframe. And they had ten steps. And these were really hard steps. They had to do with curbing European demand for Russian energy, or energy generally. Had to do with diversifying supply. Had to do with reigniting politically controversial nuclear power plants. Had to do with building new LNG capacity. All of these things, to get away from Russia natural gas. And I looked at that plan and I thought, like, well, that’s great. It’s good that there’s a path forward. But I was deeply skeptical that it would be able to be achieved. And I think for the most part the Europeans outperformed even their own expectations. And I think that would have happened regardless of whether that pipeline had been destroyed or not. So I don’t know that that particular act had a fundamental effect on the direction of Europe weaning itself away from Russian gas. FASKIANOS: So thank you, Meghan. I’m going to take—there are lots of written questions and raised hands, and I’m sorry that we can’t get to them all. But I wanted to take the opportunity. If you could just give us a little bit—we have professors and students on the call. You’ve worked in—you’ve worked in the government. You’re now heading up the Belfer Center. And just talk a little bit about your career choices and encouraging students, what you would like to say to students and professors who are teaching students, what you would like to leave with them about career opportunities. O’SULLIVAN: Sure. So, first of all, I’ve really enjoyed speaking with you all, and wish we had more time to go through your questions and hear from you. I’ve been at Harvard now for about sixteen years. And before that, as Irina mentioned when she was introducing me, I served in the U.S. government. And I served at the State Department. And I served at the Pentagon, and overseas. And most of my time at the White House. And I sort of feel like there are different stages in life and different delights out of different career paths. And I think that many of the professors on this call will share with me the real sense of privilege to be able to teach young people, and inspire young people, and to learn from young people. It’s a great thing to be in an environment that is filled with people with lots of energy to change the world. But being in government was a certain kind of extraordinary privilege as well. And in many respects, the ability to combine both of those things I feel has been a true professional gift, but one that that many people are able to create because there’s a real synthesis between thinking deeply about things and then deciding that you’re going to take the deep thought that you have had the opportunity to indulge in and try to turn it into action. And to me, that’s just been one of the greatest satisfactions of my career, is to have an idea and work with others in a government setting to try to put it into action. Of course, there are other settings where you can put ideas into action—the private sector, that world of philanthropy. There’s lots of places to do that. In government, the beauty and challenge of it is, one, you can never do it on your own. So it’s inherently a collaborative effort. And two, the government can be very hard to maneuver, very hard to get an aircraft carrier to shift course. But when it does, it’s so powerful and your impact is magnified. So, I would say that if you’re interested in public service it is still a very noble career. And it is one that I think you’ll find enlists every part of you. You’ve got to be smart, but you also have to know how to cajole people and convince people. You have to be persuasive. You have to have a certain amount of stamina. You have to be able to look at the long term, but also not lose track of the details. So, if you like to challenge yourself and you’d like to wake up and never ask yourself the question, what am I doing, then I definitely would consider a career in public service. FASKIANOS: Thank you very much, Meghan. That was terrific. Again, Meghan O’Sullivan. If you haven’t read her book, Windfall, you should, as well as go back to those articles that she mentioned coauthoring with Jason Bordoff in Foreign Affairs. We have already sent out—shared at least one with you, but you should go back and look at those. And thank you for serving on our board. We look forward to seeing how you’re shaping the Belfer Center as the new leader of it. To all of you, thank you for your questions and written questions. I’m sorry, if we could not get to you. We will just have to have another webinar on this topic. The next one will be on Wednesday, March 6, at 1:00 p.m. with David Scheffer, who is a senior fellow at CFR. And he’ll talk about complex humanitarian emergencies. In the meantime, I encourage you to learn about CFR paid internships for students and fellowships for professors at CFR.org/careers. You can follow us at @CFR_academic on X, and visit CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for research and analysis on global issues. So, again, thank you all, and thank you, Meghan O’Sullivan. O’SULLIVAN: Thank you. (END)

Panelists discuss private capital’s role in leading the clean energy transition and what it takes to establish a redeployment of steady capital investing in decarbonization. 

At COP28 in Dubai, negotiators once again focus on increasing climate finance as the world struggles to manage rising temperatures, historic natural disasters, and environmental depletion. Panelists explore innovative finance-based solutions to protect and take account of the economic value of natural capital to advance the goals of the Paris agreement and other key international efforts.

Panelists discuss the increasing demand for technical talent in the current age of automation, how to foster a competitive workforce, and resources available to state and local governments through the CHIPS and Science Act. TRANSCRIPT FASKIANOS: Welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations State and Local Officials Webinar. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president for the National Program and Outreach here at CFR. We’re delighted to have participants from forty-nine states and U.S. territories for today’s conversation, which is on the record. CFR is an independent and nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, publisher, and educational institution focusing on U.S. foreign and domestic policy. CFR is also the publisher of Foreign Affairs magazine. And as always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. Through our State and Local Officials Initiative, CFR serves as a resource on international issues affecting the priorities and agendas of state and local governments by providing analysis on a wide range of policy topics. For today’s discussion, we are going to be talking about “Building a Competitive U.S. Workforce,” and we have an amazing panel of speakers today. Bo Machayo is the director of U.S. government and public affairs at Micron Technology. He has a decade of experience as a public policy and public engagement advisor the local, state, and federal levels of U.S. government, and has had a number of positions including in the office of Virginia Senator Mark Warner, Loudoun County’s Board of Supervisors, and in the Obama administration. David Shahoulian is the director of workforce policy and government affairs at Intel Corporation. Previously, he worked at the Department of Homeland Security on border and immigration policy. He’s also served on the House Judiciary Committee for over ten years. Dr. Rebecca Shearman is the program director for technology innovation and partnerships at the National Science Foundation. Previously, she was an assistant professor in the biology department at Framingham State University and holds a Ph.D. in evolution and developmental biology from the University of Chicago. We also will be joined by Abi Ilumoka, who currently serves as a program director for engineering education in the Division of Undergraduate Education at NSF. And prior to that, she was a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Hartford in Connecticut. And finally, I’m happy to introduce Sherry Van Sloun, who is the national intelligence fellow at CFR. Previously, she served as a deputy assistant director of national intelligence for human capital at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for nine years. And she’s also held various positions with the National Security Agency and served in the U.S. Army as a signals analyst for eight years. Sherry is going to be moderating this conversation. She brought this great panel together, and can talk a little bit about her research, and basically the provisions for state and local governments and the CHIPS and Science Act. We will then open it up for questions and turn to all of you. Again, this is a forum where we can share best practices. So we do want to hear from you. You can either write your question or raise your hand when we get there. So, Sherry, over to you to take it away. VAN SLOUN: Thanks so much, Irina. And thanks to you and your staff for putting this webinar together. I really feel lucky to be here today. I want to say thanks to Becky, Bo, David, and Abi for being here as well. I know your schedules are busy, so we really appreciate you taking the time out of your day. And then I want to thank all of you who joined today. I think it’s great to have all of us here to talk about this important topic. So a little context. My last few assignments in the intelligence community revolved around building talent pipelines to meet the emerging demands of intelligence work. So my time here at CFR, I’ve spent some time looking into the implementation of the CHIPS and Science Act, specifically the human capital aspect of the act. My focus has really been around the need to build semiconductor manufacturing talent but, to be clear, the CHIPS and Science Act covers many other STEM workforce advancements and future technologies, from AI, to biotechnology, to quantum computing. So today, we have Becky and Abi here from NSF to share about the broader reach the CHIPS and Science Act gave the NSF regarding cultivating workforce, and then Bo and David to dive into some of the semiconductor manufacturing perspective around talent. So looking forward to this. And I think we’re going to kick it off with going to Becky and Abi at the NSF. Let me start here, and say the NSF has been involved in promoting science for many decades. It’s been active in supporting workforce development through your directorate of STEM education. And what the CHIPS Act legislation did was create the director of technology, innovation, and partnerships. And one of those new programs under that new directorate is the Experiential Learning for Emerging and Novel Technologies, which is the ExLENT program. Which I think, Becky, you helped to create that program. So we’re glad you’re here. So can one of you share how the ExLENT program works, the timelines you’ve laid out, and the impact you’re hoping to see over time? And then specifically maybe you could focus a little bit for a minute on the semiconductor workforce specifically, and how the ExLENT program will help to build this much-needed body of talent for the U.S. SHEARMAN: Sure, Sherry, happy to jump in. You’re correct, I was involved in the development of the ExLENT program. And we are super excited about it. So TIP is—which is the acronym of our new directorate—just celebrated its first birthday very end of the spring. And we’re really in just our first funding cycle of ExLENT. So you read out the full acronym, right? So this is really centered around experiential learning. And we’re named emerging and novel technologies. So emerging technologies really are those technologies that we—you know, we point to the CHIPS and Science Act and say that’s, you know, what we’re interested in funding. But we did keep it kind of open. So, novel technologies, right? We are kind of allowing the community to tell us, look, this may not fall precisely in the line of these emerging technologies, but we need to be building a workforce that can do X, Y, and Z. And we specifically developed this program with a few things in mind. We need to build a workforce that is nimble in its ability to get training as expertise evolves, as our technologies evolve. And we’ve got to engage all Americans in the STEM enterprise, if they’re interested in being in the STEM enterprise. For us to be really competitive, everyone needs to have access to a good STEM education. And then we also built it around the fact that we felt like we really need to be bringing organizations across different sectors together to do this correctly, right? We need to have those experts in education, but we also need to have those industry partners who understand the needs of the industry and the needs of a specific company. So the program is really designed to address those things. It’s very broad. So we allow the applicant—who can be from academia, they can be from the private sector, they can be nonprofits, we’re really trying to reach everybody here. They can say: This is the population we’re trying to reach. So maybe it’s, you know, middle school/high school students. Maybe it’s adult learners at any point in their educational career, and trying to get them hands-on experience that’s going to give them some credential, expose them to something so that they, if they choose, can kind of be on that educational path towards a good-paying job in an emerging tech field. And of course, the semiconductor industry is central to that, right? We don’t have a specific call-out to semiconductors, but we highlight it as one of the emerging technologies. VAN SLOUN: And Becky, thank you. So can you share a little bit more with the audience about, like, how they would go about engaging with you on a proposal? What is the process that folks do there? I know you have calls, but can you explain that a little bit about how a call goes out and then what that looks like once it closes? SHEARMAN: Absolutely. So we have a solicitation out. And if I’m allowed to drop something into the chat, I’m happy to share the link and you can go right to it. And there’s—we have deadlines. In fact, our next deadline is September 14. So if anyone’s really interested and has nothing to do in the next month, you can take a look at the solicitation and consider applying for the program. It outlines—the solicitation will outline everything you need to do but, basically, you’re writing up a proposal, submitting it through our standard process at NSF through a site called research.gov. And then your proposal goes through a merit review process, where we bring in experts from the community that will include people with the expertise in education, expertise in industry. You know, we try to have a very broad cross-sector expertise represented on that panel. And they review all the proposals and give us recommendations and feedback around where we should make our funding decisions. The best thing to do if you go to that solicitation, there are links on that first page to an inbox and to program officers that you can reach out to. A good place to start is just reaching out to them and trying to connect, and have an initial conversation. VAN SLOUN: Thank you. And if I recall, your first grant announcement will be announced soon, right? SHEARMAN: Very soon. VAN SLOUN: And then the call in September will be announced later this year or early next year. Super. OK. Thank you very much, Becky. Bo, let’s move to you and, you know, really kind of diving into semiconductors specifically. You know, your role allows you to see kind of across Micron and how it’s working with partners to build the talent pipeline that you all need for your existing locations and where you’re also expanding at new locations across the country. Can you share a little bit about how Micron has responded to the passing of the CHIPS Act legislation, specifically here in New York? And how you’re tracking that talent pipeline gaps at all levels of the manufacturing lifecycle? MACHAYO: Yeah. Thanks, Sherry, for that question. And it’s great to be a part of this discussion. Per, you know, your conversation, we’re happy at Micron. Thanks to the CHIPS and Science Act and also thanks to the incentives from the, you know, states and localities, we were able to make investments of, you know, in New York, of $100 billion over the course of the next couple of decades. And a big part of that is around how we can address the talent pipeline needs. You know, we’ll have 9,000 direct jobs and over 40,000 indirect jobs due to economic activity that will happen in the central New York region. But we know that all those—you know, that talent won’t be able to come directly from central New York. It will have to be a whole of New York approach, but also a regional approach across the northeast. And so specifically in New York, we’ve, you know, been able to, you know, establish partnerships from what we’re calling the K through gray level, really making sure that from K-12 we’re doing interactive activities and sponsoring what we call chip camps, that are unique to Micron and we’re able to make sure that we are, you know, engaging young K through eight, you know, students to be able to really understand the jobs that are available in semiconductor industry. Another thing that we’re doing specifically in New York is really working on kind of both curriculum development and how we can partner with schools. As a part of our announcement, we made a commitment to doing $10 million into the steam school, which is a local initiative that will focus on both career—or, both technical kind of education, but also kind of an engineering pathway to assure that, you know, we can get students interested in the semiconductor industry early on. We’re also—you know, have half of those jobs are going to be technician jobs, and the other half will be engineering jobs. So how we’re partnering with, you know, local building trades unions through our PLA to make sure that we’re educating folks, establishing certificate programs so that we can make sure that folks who are looking to transition to the semiconductor industry, thanks to the investment that we’re making there, how can folks be part of the Micron experience? And then also, how are we doing that with community colleges and also higher ed institutions, as well? And so we partnered with the SUNY system in New York, and also the CUNY system in New York to make sure that we’re building the pipeline from a community college there. Particularly investing in creating clean rooms at Onondaga Community College and then utilizing the existing clean rooms across the state. We also established a couple of regional networks for New York, especially the Northeast University Semiconductor Network, to really make sure that we’re taking, you know, what individual community colleges and higher ed institutions have to be able to make sure that we’re addressing those gaps. You know, that is—these are kind of examples of ways. And as a matter of fact, earlier this week when I was in central New York we also are able to partner with the local museum, a science and technology museum in central New York, to create a semiconductor exhibit so that kids from K-12 can actually be able to understand what a semiconductor is, what a memory chip is, and multiple different ways and avenues to be able to attract talent to be able to come and to meet the gaps that we have throughout the semiconductor industry. And so those are just a couple of ways in which we’re looking to build partners and to address some of the needs that we’ll have in New York. VAN SLOUN: Thanks, Bo. That’s fantastic. David, I’m going to turn to you now. I just got back from Portland, Oregon last week, where I was able to get a tour of Intel’s fab and their innovation center. And it was really incredible to see firsthand the different kinds of talent needed to make this industry possible. Can you share a little bit about the makeup of Intel’s workforce? I think many people will be surprised that the bulk of it really isn’t Ph.Ds., but how you’re building efforts for a talent pipeline needed for your major investment in Ohio, specifically. I know it was a huge one for you guys. I know, the Ohio State University is kind of the hub of that consortium there, but—which makes me very proud. I’m a Buckeye. But can you talk a little bit about that and what’s happening there? SHAHOULIAN: Sure. Happy to do that. So, first of all, thank you for having me. It is a pleasure to be here. Second, like Bo mentioned, you know, we’re excited about the opportunity the CHIPS and Science Act provides. And, you know, because of that, and the incentives that we’re getting from the federal government and the state governments, you know, we are right now building—expanding all of our sites, and building a new greenfield site in Ohio. So yes—on your first question, yes. People are generally surprised to hear about the makeup of our manufacturing workforce. Let me just—to just give it—summarize it really quickly, right, each of our fabs is generally around 1,500 positions that we create for that fab. About 60 to 70 percent of those jobs are for semiconductor technicians. These are individuals that can have an associate’s degree, but in some cases we don’t even require that. A certificate would do. And in some cases, you know, we hire people with even less than that to be technicians. These are people that oversee and troubleshoot the manufacturing process and then all of the support systems, like the electrical, water, gas, and air filtration systems that, you know, support manufacturing operations. So that’s, like—that’s the bulk of the jobs that we will be creating with our new factories. The other—the remainder is about 20 to 25 percent, you know, individuals with bachelor’s degrees in electrical engineering, computer science. And then it’s about, you know, somewhere between 5 and 10 percent individuals with advanced degrees. I will just want to say—just add a little caveat for Oregon, right? Because Oregon is a location where we do manufacture, but we also develop our manufacturing technology, there we do—you know, there is a higher ratio of Ph.Ds. So there, you know, there are more advanced degree folks. Second, with respect to Ohio, we’re very excited about the work that we’re doing there. One of the reasons we chose Ohio as a site was because of the great educational system that already existed there and their history with advanced manufacturing. When we announced that we were going to be building there, we immediately committed $50 million into, sort of, you know, expanding that education ecosystem that already exists. And that’s, you know, modernizing the curricula, creating modules that are semiconductor specific, providing semiconductor manufacturing equipment, helping build clean rooms. These are all the things that are necessary to train individuals and give them, you know, hands-on training in our industry. We’ve already awarded 17.7 million dollars of that. That has gone to eight collaborations involving almost 80 schools across the entire state of Ohio. We’re really proud of that effort. One of them—just to give you two examples—one of them is being led by Columbus State Community College. They’re working with every other community college system in the state of Ohio to create semiconductor technician curricula with shared credits, right, that can be shared across all of the different institutions. There’s another one that’s being led by the Ohio State University, I should have said, The Ohio State University. Forgive me for that. Right, they’re partnering with nine other universities to create an education and research center for the semiconductor industry to lead on innovation and education. So, you know, these are the—of course, the things that are necessary, you know, to create the education ecosystem that will help not only us but our suppliers, and then other semiconductor companies across the country. VAN SLOUN: So do you—thanks, David. Do you think that what you’re doing in Ohio, you’ve got quite the consortium, like you’ve just talked about. Is that going to be enough to be able to source the talent pipeline for that fab and the outlying things that are going to happen around that fab in Ohio? Or is there a way that other—that you’re going to reach into other areas, like Bo mentioned a regional approach, to that space in Ohio? SHAHOULIAN: Yeah, so that is—you know, that is a regional approach, in the sense that we’ve reached out to all of Ohio. We are also—we also have interest from other universities in the rest—you know, the remainder of the region. Purdue, Michigan, you know, other universities in the Midwest. You know, what we’ve asked is for them to help partner with the Ohio universities, and, you know, working on trying to build those partnerships and those collaborations. You know, we’ve also, you know, collaborated with NSF, right? So, you know, when NSF got $200 million to build out the education ecosystem, you know, we know Micron partnered and put some money on the table. We did as well. You know, we matched 50 million dollars in funding to create $100 million partnership with NSF to sort of also bring those opportunities nationwide to any school, not just ones where we’re operating. So NSF has already rolled out two programs with that funding. And, you know, we anticipate they will be rolling out more this year. And, you know, schools anywhere in the country will be able to apply for that funding. VAN SLOUN: That’s fantastic. Thank you very much, David. That’s very helpful, I think, for the audience today. Becky, if we could come back to your or Abi, it seems to me that the U.S. wants to be a leader in this industry, for semiconductors specifically. It’s going to take a village, right? I mean, how do we best prepare the partnerships between private sector, academia, and community organizations to really find ways to bring exposure to this kind of work? I know Micron and Intel are doing their great work, but is there anything that NSF is doing kind of to get this message out and get excitement built around this industry? SHEARMAN: So I’ll start, but then I really do want to invite Abi to join me and add anything she may have. She sits in a different place than I do at NSF. I can at least speak from the from TIPs directorate. I know we’ve been doing a lot. So TIP stands for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships. And we are very much interested in really trying to move emerging tech innovations into practice kind of at speed, at scale. And a big part of that includes making sure we’re thinking about the workforce needed to do that successfully, right? And so everything that’s coming out of TIP is really emphasizing these partnerships. So even when it comes to workforce development, we feel like we’re not going to be able to do this well unless we’re really engaging all the people who bring some sort of expertise to it. And I think when you listen to David and Bo talk about what they’re doing, right, they’re talking about doing this in partnership, in collaboration. And you know, the ExLENT program in particular is—so, I guess, let me start by saying I just—with TIP being a new directorate and all the attention that has brought, we’re trying to bring these different sectors who maybe aren’t used to talking with each other into the same room. And all of our programs that are coming out are doing that, and ExLENT is no exception there. And we are trying to get the community thinking beyond—although, you know, Intel and Micron are absolutely central to the success—but we’re trying to get the—as is, you know, The Ohio State. But we also recognize that if we want to educate the domestic workforce, there’s a lot of other organizations that could bring real value. So we are being very intentional about reaching out to community organizations, to nonprofits that are thinking a lot about reaching specific communities to get folks who would never consider themselves someone who would be in this space, have a job, you know, in a in a semiconductor manufacturing plant, working for Intel, right? It just—it wouldn’t occur to them that that’s something that they would do. We’re trying to create those pathways to reach out and give them some initial exposure and bring them into the fold so the opportunities are there for them, if they want them. And we’re also including those industry partners and the large universities, but we think that the more different perspectives we can get together in a room the better we’re going to be able to diversify the pathways and reduce the barriers to those jobs. And that’s what ExLENT is really trying to do. And, like I said, I’d love to—I’d love to give Abi an opportunity to share anything from her perspective at NSF, if she wants. ILUMOKA: Thank you, Rebecca. I agree. I agree with everything Rebecca has said. What I would like to add is that in addition to ensuring that the content is being provided, and experiential learning is being provided to students across the spectrum of academic levels, we in the education directorate are focused on ensuring that evidence-based teaching and learning practices are brought into the classrooms. We want to ensure that the right environments are available to students, the right kinds of support for learning, right kinds of assessment. And so we have partnered with TIP on some innovative opportunities, known as DCLs, dear colleague letters. These are opportunities that bring together programs in the education directorate and programs in the TIP directorate to fund investigators that are focused on not just teaching, in the case of semiconductors, how to design chips, but also how to teach the design of chips. I taught the design of chips for twenty years before I joined NSF, so I know exactly how challenging that is. You know, designing structures that you can’t see, essentially, and you’re having to refine and redesign to ensure that they work—to test and ensure that they work. And so in the education directorate, we have held a number of events to get the public excited about chip design, and chip design education. In May, we had a workshop to which we invited folks in academia, all the way from universities to kindergarten. And we had a wonderful attendance. Over three hundred people showed up for the workshop. It was a two-day workshop. And folks were invited to brainstorm on how to teach microelectronics at all levels. So a lot of interesting information came out of that. We had participants from industry, Intel, Micron, and so forth. We had participants from government and from academia. So that was a very successful event. We have a second webinar on the eighth of August along the same lines. So we have currently two DCLs. And I’ll put the links in the chat, dear colleague letters. One is called Advancing Microelectronics Education, which looks at ways in which you can actually teach this stuff to folks who don’t have the extensive math, and physics, and chemistry background. The second thing we’re doing is making sure that we integrate these opportunities with existing programs in the education directorate. For example, the IUSE program is Improving Undergraduate STEM Education. It is a well-established program in the directorate, and it looks at innovations for teaching and learning in STEM in general. Now, by bringing this program into play with the ExLENT program, then we attract investigators that have an interest not just in the content, the chip design, but also in how to teach the chip design. Now, that confluence brings up very exciting, very interesting proposals on ways in which you can present this material to folks who are not experts at all, or are not in the domain. So I hope that answers your question on how to get folks excited. We have a couple of workshops and webinars scheduled going forward that will draw in participants from all over the country. And we generally keep pretty good notes on what goes on at those workshops, the kinds of questions, the kinds of ideas that are shared, and move forward on those to help the community grow. VAN SLOUN: Abi, that’s fantastic. Thank you very much. It’s really helpful. If you could put those things in—the links in the chat, that would be fantastic for the folks listening in today. Irina, it’s 3:30. Do you want me to turn this over to you for Q&A? FASKIANOS: Yes, I think that would be great. Let’s go to all of you now for questions. You can either write your question in the Q&A box. If you do that, please include your affiliation. Or you can raise your hand, and I’ll recognize you, and then you can ask your question. And don’t be shy. We really want to hear from you. Right now, we have no questions, which I think people are just collecting their thoughts. So Sherry, if you have one—another question while people are thinking about what they want to ask. VAN SLOUN: I’m actually—oh, ahead. FASKIANOS: We do have one question. Raised hand from Usha Reddi. And if you could identify yourself and unmute yourself. And you’re still muted. There you go. Q: Thank you. So my name is—I’m from Kansas. I’m Senator Usha Reddi, but I’m also a public school teacher, elementary school. And I also am part of several nonprofits which advocate for STEM learning, especially for young women and girls. So I wanted to know, can anybody apply for these NSF grants? And do you have to be a doctorate or affiliated with a university? Can it be a teacher? Can it be a nonprofit organization? Who is eligible for these types of grants? SHEARMAN: Sure. Can I just jump in? VAN SLOUN: Yeah, please do Becky. SHEARMAN: OK. So that is a great question. I’m so glad that you asked that. So I guess in reality it depends. NSF historically, you know, makes grants to academic institutions. We are trying to change that quite a bit. So for a lot of our—for a lot of our funding opportunities you can be something other than an academic institution to submit. But you would have to look at the eligibility, right? So some are some types of organizations are not eligible. For example, the federal government can’t apply for an NSF grant, right? But nonprofits, some local government offices, if they’re related to education, can apply for these for these funding opportunities. So those opportunities definitely exist. And if there’s a program that you’re specifically interested in, I would encourage you to reach out to a program officer associated with that program. And if you can sort of Google the program if you happen to know it—if you’re familiar with the program, it’ll direct you to a contact. FASKIANOS: Fantastic. Let’s go next to the raised hand from Mayor Melissa Blaustein. Q: Hi, everyone. Thanks for a great session. I really appreciate it. And actually, Sherry, I was so happy to see—(inaudible)—intelligence. I’m coming to you from the Naval Postgraduate School. I’m a student at CHDS right now, the master’s program for local governments on homeland security. And in that vein, I’m wondering—I’m from a smaller municipality. Sausalito is quite small, but very well known. And we don’t often think about the issues of how we can attract hiring for these types of industries, but I’d love to hear maybe from Bo and David a little bit about what you’re seeing smaller communities or policies do to attract these type of people, or perhaps if remote working is being qualified or considered for folks who want to pursue a career in chips and semiconductors. And any advice any of you have as well for smaller local governments to attract a conversation around this type of topic. Thanks again for your time. Really appreciate it. VAN SLOUN: Bo, do you want to take that first? And then, David, if you want to chime in, that’d be great. MACHAYO: Yeah, no, I think—so we are investing in, you know, Boise and in—Boise and in in central New York, and in Onondaga County, but in a small town called Clay. But one of the things that we have been—we had found successful, and I’ll focus on the New York model, was working with the state and the locality to come up with something called a Community Investment Framework. So it was a partnership between Micron, the state, and the locality to really look at how are we investing in things that the community needs. Everything from housing, to workforce, to childcare, and really kind of focusing on what those barriers to entry were, to ensure that folks could be able to work in the semiconductor network. And then also using that as a model to say, what around—like, what will we be able to do similar to that model in Boise? And how do we make sure it’s a whole-of-state approach and also kind of a regional approach to invest in these barriers to entry to the semiconductor network? And how can Micron do—Micron play their role in that? And so in the—(inaudible)—in particular, we decided to invest $250 million of that $500 million over the—and then committed to raising the other 150 (million dollars). And the state put in 100 (million dollars), and the locality also put in some of those dollars to ensure that we meet those needs and those barriers. And to be able to make sure that over the course of the next couple of decades, as we implement our project, that we are providing and addressing—whether that’s a skills gap, or a barriers to workforce gap, or providing or investing in childcare or whatnot—to make sure that we’re able to attract talent from across the area. And then also making sure to kind of work with our localities and other localities that are surrounding to make sure that we’re also partnering with them to do the exact same thing, and to replicate that model. And that’s something that we’ve found successful, is that just intentional partnership to make sure that we are kind of building up that next generation of workforce to have those skills that are necessary. But I’ll turn it over to David to talk a little bit about what Intel is doing. SHAHOULIAN: Yeah, thanks, Bo. You know, I don’t want to speak for Micron. I assume this is also true. We sort of take a both-and approach to building up the education ecosystem in across the country, right? I mean, we have national partnerships. You know, like Micron, Intel partnered with NSF. We put in money, along with government money, to create, you know, grant opportunities for schools across the country to apply for if they, you know, wanted to get into the semiconductor space, or they wanted to, you know, up their game in that space. And then both companies, right, we also have regional partnerships, right? Particularly in the communities in which we, you know, build facilities, we dedicate a lot of our effort. Partly because, you know, the reality is with technicians, you know, community colleges are only going to build technician programs for their communities if there are facilities nearby where their community members can work. You know, you don’t see community colleges far from semiconductor spaces actually bringing on semiconductor programs, you know, if there isn’t a job anywhere in in that area for the community members who go to that school. So that is—so that is why we worked really closely with the local community colleges in Oregon, Arizona, New Mexico, now in Ohio, to build programs near the facilities. That said, you know, we are happy to share their certificate programs, the curricula, the—you know, the associate degree program curricula with any community college that that wants to build that. You know, I’ll say we’re also partners with the American Semiconductor Academy, right? Which is, you know, along with the SEMI Foundation is working to try to build curricula that is shared across, you know, all universities so that, you know, again universities, and community colleges, and other educational institutions can basically start or upgrade their semiconductor-related curricula much more easily. So I just want to say that, you know, there are—there are both opportunities near where we are, and national opportunities as well. FASKIANOS: Fantastic. So we have a written question from Shawn Neidorf. What is the career path for a person who comes in as a semiconductor processing technician? What does a career in semiconductors look like for a person with an associate’s or less education? And then a related comment/question from Alison Hicks, who is the mayor of Mountain View, a Silicon Valley city and home of Google headquarters. The big thing I hear from constituents regarding barriers to jobs is getting a first job after getting an engineering degree. People tell me there are 100 more applicants for many, if not most, jobs, and they can barely even get interviews. They feel their resumes are being auto-screened out if they don’t have a degree from Stanford, Berkeley, et cetera. So they rarely make it even the first step of the hiring process, let alone getting a job. Can your programming do anything about that? I know engineers who give up and don’t even work in the field. They’re not just applying in the Bay Area. They’re applying throughout the United States. So if you could speak to both of those, that would be great. SHAHOULIAN: Bo, do you want me to go first, or do you want to do it? MACHAYO: You can take it first. SHAHOULIAN: You know, I’ll just go very quickly. So, first of all, you know, at least the engineers in the semiconductor space, particularly electrical engineers, I mean, that the unemployment rate for electrical engineers right now is, I think, at 1 percent. I mean, it is full employment. So we are desperate for talent. (Laughs.) So I’m happy to have a conversation offline. I don’t know whether the engineers you’re speaking to have semiconductor skills or not. But, you know, we have strategic partnerships with many universities across the country. And that goes from the MITs and Berkeleys of the world to, you know, the Arizona States and Oregon States, or, you know, an Ohio State now, where we have two—we have partnerships with Historically Black Colleges and Universities and other MSIs to help build their engineering and computer science programs. And we hire directly from those, and we sponsor undergraduate research and things like that to really kind of build the talent pipeline. I would just say, for technicians, I—you know, the technicians I’ve met love the job, right? It’s a different lifestyle than I think many other jobs, right? It’s like, basically, they do these rotating weeks where they do three days on four days off, or four days on three days off, so you got like three or four days in a row off, and then, you know, they work either 36 or, like, 40-some hours a week in those jobs. They are jobs that, you know, we have—you know, we’re not paying six-figure starting salaries, but we have lots of technicians who do earn, with an associate’s degree or even less, more than six—I mean, you know, over 100,000 (dollars) a year. And that’s just base salary. You know, with us you’re getting stock options, you’re getting annual and quarterly bonuses. So it is, again, a really good life. And we have people with, you know, high school diplomas who are earning over six figures—you know, who are earning six figures. MACHAYO: Yeah so, you know, I’ll add to what David was saying. For us, in terms of what does a career look like, you have your technician pathways, you’ve got your engineering pathways. But, you know, holistically for us for to attract this next generation of talent and to also be able to get folks who are looking to transition from an industry and come to Micron, you know, we want to make sure that, you know, the jobs that are available at Micron, are skill-based. And so not necessarily looking at the levels of degrees of what folks have, but to be able to make sure that the skills can easily translate to work at Micron. So for example, you know, we’ve been really successful in this with the veterans community, where we have about a two times higher national average in terms of hiring veterans than kind of other tech companies as well. And so being able to attract those folks, not only because they align with, you know, the skill set that we have, but also the values that Micron has and, you know, the values that are aligned throughout the entire semiconductor industry as well. We also are able to utilize our existing footprint to be able to have folks have the opportunities at different fab locations across the U.S. A great thing that we’ll be able to do is having our, you know, fab in Manassas—in Manassas, Virginia, our R&D site and our new manufacturing fab in Idaho, and then also our four fabs that would be in New York. Having the ability for folks to go from site to site, and to be able to learn the different aspects, both from the kind of legacy fabs to the—to the leading edge as well, on both the R&D. And then also our international footprint as well. And so, we have that—you know, we are looking at this as an opportunity to be able to ensure that we, you know, allow more folks to be a part of the semiconductor industry, but also, you know, making sure that we’re—you know, as we create, you know, the 50,000 jobs in New York, the, you know, 17,000 jobs in in Idaho, looking at it from a regional approach. You know, Intel will be making—has made announcements across the country as well. So have other folks in the semiconductor industry. And so we know it’s going to need to be an all-hands approach that we’ll be able—that, you know, we need to make—think about things as regional, both northwest and northeast, and, you know, making sure that we’re incorporating, you know, everyone to be able to be a part of this industry. And that’s going to be, you know, us working with localities like the ones you’re part of, and the institutions as well, to be able to make sure that we are attracting talent early on, and then also making sure that, you know, we’re addressing, and having, and equipping the skill sets necessary to come and work into the industry. FASKIANOS: Fantastic. The next written question is from Gail Patterson-Gladney, Van Buren County commissioner in Michigan. Where the materials come from for the semiconductors? Are they recycled after use? I do not know much about the semiconductor, but am willing to learn more. Where do I educate myself and community members about programs? VAN SLOUN: Can we go to David for that? And we’ll start with David. SHAHOULIAN: If I had the answers to those questions, I’d be happy to answer them. (Laughs.) I am the workforce policy lead. And so I don’t know about our materials, and I just—yeah. I’m happy to let Bo try to take it. MACHAYO: (Laughs.) Yeah, so from a supplier standpoint, you know, there’s going to be materials suppliers, there’s going to be, you know, chemical suppliers that will be needed for the semiconductor industry to be successful. A huge part of that will be, you know, how successful are we going to be—the Microns, the Intels, the Samsungs, the TSMCs of the world, of making sure that we’re investing in building up these fabs that are needed to manufacture folks. And then ultimately the suppliers will need to be able to kind of co-locate around us, and also make sure that we’re equipping those talent—those folks that are going to be at, you know, all of our fabs. And we’ll need all of those suppliers, both chemical and material suppliers, to be effective. And so, you know, those folks are constantly—I’ll speak for Micron, but I think this is probably true for Intel as well—will be at our fabs throughout the duration of our construction phases, and as we get chips out the doors. And are important to kind of continue to make sure that we have the leading-edge chips that are coming out of their facilities. So, you know, happy to—there’s a supplier page on Micron’s site that you’re more than—you’re more than welcome to visit to kind of learn about the suppliers. We’ve been doing webinars both kind of regionally and throughout the state as well, to be able to, you know, talk to folks about what’s going to be needed as we kind of implement our two projects, our two investments in the U.S. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to take a question from Eno Mondesir, who is executive health officer in the health department in Brockton, Mass. If you can unmute yourself. Q: Good afternoon. I am posing this question perhaps to Bo or to David, or anyone. I wonder if—how do you see AI affecting hiring human subjects? Maybe not now, but maybe two to five years down the road? SHAHOULIAN: Is your question—sorry, you don’t mind, you know, is your question about AI in the hiring process when it comes to screening applicants, for example? Or do you mean AI, you know, potentially replacing— Q: I mean replacing human labor force. SHAHOULIAN: Yeah. Well, let me just say, I mean, I think all of the semiconductor companies see AI as a value-add, right? You know, these are very complex—you know, designing and manufacturing semiconductors is the most difficult human endeavor on the planet, or among them, right? I mean, it is the most complicated process there is. So to the—to the degree that AI can help us perfect chip designs, perfect software and coding that goes with those, you know, discover flaws, those things, you know, those are absolutely beneficial to the industry. You know, at this point in time, we don’t foresee that, you know, really supplanting, you know—(laughs)—our employees, right? I mean, you need workers, again. You know, fabs, right—again, every factory, I just pointed out, creates at least 1,500 to 2,000 jobs. A lot of the work that’s done in the fab is already automated, right? You have robots that move the chips around. The lithography tools, you know, themselves—the etching tools, the chemical layering, you know, all of that happens basically automatically. The work is for, you know, people, right, that is all about maintaining that process, you know, troubleshooting, discovering flaws, tuning the machines. I mean, that work will continue, right? We’re not at a point where that work gets supplanted anytime soon. I don’t know if, Bo, you want to add anything. VAN SLOUN: Bo, do you want to add anything to that? MACHAYHO: Yeah, you know, I agree. I think the job—the economic impact and the jobs that we’ve relayed on the figures for our investments in both Boise and New York, we anticipate, you know, remain the same. And to make sure—and we know that, you know, AI is an important thing kind of moving forward in the semiconductor industry, and for Micron particularly. You know, memory chips are going to be important for AI, and in that conversation. But really believe and have seen, you know, throughout the globe the economic impact that’s been made from the investment of the semiconductor industry in terms of jobs, both direct and indirect jobs, and believe that would continue. FASKIANOS: Great. So we have a written question—or, comment from David Di Gregorio, who’s an administrator at Tenafly High School, and also as a councilman in Englewood Cliffs. And he wants to work with you all. He’s responsible for engineering and design. So I will share his contact information with you all after this. We have a written—or, sorry, a raised hand from Michael Semenza in the office of Representative Puppolo. If you want to go next, and unmute yourself. There you go. Q: Hello. Good afternoon. Are you able to hear me? FASKIANOS: We can hear you. Yes, we can. Go ahead. Q: OK, great. I apologize. Would you be able to repeat the question real quick? FASKIANOS: Oh, I thought you were asking a question. You had raised your hand? Q: Oh, I don’t know how that happened. I’m sorry. FASKIANOS: Oh, OK. No problem. That’s, you know, technology, it’s sometimes—we’ll go next to Senator Javier Loera Cervantes. Q: Hello? FASKIANOS: Yes, we can hear you. Q: Hi, my name’s Anelli (ph). I’m actually the digital director representing Senator Javier Loera Cervantes from the state of Illinois. First, I’d just like to say thank you to everyone who did come out today, because I know this is a sort of the first step, and taking initiatives to our curriculums, to our districts. We did discuss a lot education. And I just had a quick question. Especially for New York and sort of your approaches to discussing with principals how to bring these initiatives to the schools, when you essentially decide which districts to sort of work with, what does that—what does that approach look like? Do you sort of target low-income communities? Ones that just kind of tend to work more vigilantly with your company? Or just sort of sort of what’s the approach that you take when you want to bring these initiatives and change of curriculums to the districts in New York? MACHAYO: Yeah, so it’s been a kind of an all-hands approach. Obviously, we want to make sure that we are investing in the community in which we are going to be at, but know that especially in New York it’ll be a kind of an all-hands and all-state effort, both kind of central New York, where we’re located, downstate in the city, and then also in Albany, and Buffalo, and Rochester, and really an all-encompassing approach. And so, you know, we both work with the New York State Department of Education and local—our local K-12 superintendents and school systems to be able to make sure that we’re identifying and sharing exactly what is needed in terms of curriculum development, but also how are we spurring the interest of—to make sure that we’re getting a diverse set of employers and workforce, not only to be interested in the semiconductor industry and working directly for Micron, but also for the suppliers and the other indirect jobs that will be associated with Micron that are going to be important for Micron to thrive and succeed there. And so it is working with kind of everyone, and identifying, in New York, you know, a handful of places right now that we can have a prototype. And knowing—and then expanding, and knowing, and understanding that this project is going to, you know, take a couple of decades to make sure that we’re—to make sure that we are implementing our project correctly, both kind of in in New York and then also in Boise. And so knowing that it’ll expand, and the partnerships will expand as well throughout the entire state. VAN SLOUN: Irina, are there any more questions? FASKIANOS: Yes. We have a question from Ernest Abrogar, who is the—let’s see, I have lost it—the research specialist at Oklahoma Department of Commerce. How can suppliers to semiconductor manufacturers participate to provide educational or practicum opportunities to those areas that don’t have a major fab facility nearby? VAN SLOUN: David, do you want to—do you want to take a first shot at that? SHAHOULIAN: Sure. Look, I mean, we have suppliers in every state in the union, and the territories as well. So, you know, we partner with our suppliers in many different ways. You know, we work with suppliers, you know, to grow their businesses, to improve their practices, to, you know, ensure compliance, right? And we work with them also on workforce, you know, development strategies as well. You know, we do that. A lot of our suppliers are co-located or near located to our facilities, but a lot of them are not, I guess most are not. And so we are happy to partner them on these efforts. Again, there are—you know, we’re happy to share, you know, the curriculum, the modules, the things that we have designed in partnership with the schools that have been our partners, right? We’re happy to share that with other educational institutions. So if there’s, you know, a curricula or something that you, you know, want to—you know, want to take or modify, you know, or expand on in Oklahoma, you know, we’re happy to assist with that. VAN SLOUN: Great. Bo, you have anything to add? MACHAYHO: Yeah, no, I’d share that too. I mean, I think anything that you—anything that you’re doing in Oklahoma, or any state in the country, if you’re focusing on, you know, education and investing in semiconductor education, if you are focusing on, you know, incentives for suppliers in certain states, and are looking to attract that part of the industry, I think, you know, we’d be happy to talk to you and figure out how we can kind of partner together in states—in states that we are currently investing in for the manufacturing side. But understand that, you know, we’ll need to also work with other states to make sure that we have the suppliers and their downstream suppliers that will be helpful for us to be successful. FASKIANOS: So, we have one other question that just came in from council member Anita Barton. Do either of your companies plan to get together with any universities in Penna? SHAHOULIAN: Not sure. I understand that. Universities—say the last part? FASKIANOS: Companies plan to get together with any universities in Penna. Maybe Pennsylvania? I’m not— VAN SLOUN: I’m thinking that’s what it is, yeah. FASKIANOS: Yeah, I’m thinking it’s probably Pennsylvania. MACHAYO: So I can take that. I mean, we—so we launched our—along with the NSF director, and Senator Schumer, and our CEO, Sanjay, and, you know, some of our other leadership team, we were able to launch the Northeast University Semiconductor Network. And there are universities that are a part of that network that are based in Pennsylvania. And we are kind of—again, understand that it’s going to be a regional approach to be able to attract the semiconductor folks—or, the next generation of semiconductor workforce to work at Micron. And so happy to partner in that way as well. And we also just recently launched a northwest one as well to kind of do the same thing, look at states within our footprint region to be able to make sure that we’re attracting the workforce that’s needed. FASKIANOS: Great. VAN SLOUN: David—(inaudible)—on Pennsylvania, or? SHAHOULIAN: You know, I know that we have been in some conversations with Pennsylvanian institutions. I cannot tell you right now which ones they are, because I have not been part of those conversations. But, you know, given our proximity—the proximity to Ohio, I know that in the western part of the state, there has been some interest. I would just say, again, we are participating with NSF in, you know, ensuring that there is funding available to, you know, schools nationwide. VAN SLOUN: Thanks, David. So I think we only have a few minutes left. And I’m going to turn to Irina to close this out. But I just wanted to say thank you to, you know, Becky, David, Bo. You guys have been fantastic in sharing information that’s going to help, I think, across the entire United States thinking about semiconductors, and the need to build this pipeline and get excitement around this. And I’m really excited to hear about some of the programs you all have going on. So thank you so much. Irinia, I’m going to turn to you to close us out here. But thank you for joining us. FASKIANOS: Yes. And thank you all. This is a great hour discussion. We appreciate you taking the time, and for all the great comments and questions. We will be sending out links to the resources that were mentioned. And we will go back to Becky, David and Bo, and Sherry for anything else that they want to include, along with a link to the—this webinar and the transcript. And as always, we encourage you to visit CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for more expertise and analysis. And you can also email [email protected] to let us know how CFR can support the important work that you are doing in your communities. So thank you again for joining us today. We appreciate it. VAN SLOUN: Thanks, everyone.

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Jess Maurer, executive director of the Maine Council of Aging, discusses demographic trends in Maine and the work of her organization. Jennifer Sciubba, global fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, discusses demographic trends and the implications of an aging population at home and abroad. A question-and-answer session follows their opening remarks.  TRANSCRIPT FASKIANOS: Thank you. Welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations State and Local Officials Webinar Series. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president for the National Program and Outreach here at CFR. CFR is an independent and nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher focused on U.S. foreign policy. CFR is also the publisher of Foreign Affairs magazine. And CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. Through our State and Local Officials Initiative, CFR serves as a resource on international issues affecting the priorities and agendas of state and local governments by providing analysis on a wide range of policy topics. Thank you all for being with us today for this discussion. The webinar is on the record. We will circulate the video and transcript and post it on our website after the fact at CFR.org. We are pleased to have with us today Jess Maurer and Jennifer Sciubba to talk about demographic trends. We’ve shared their bios with you, but I’ll give you a few highlights. Dr. Jennifer Sciubba is a global fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center. She’s an expert on demographic trends and their implications for politics, economics, and social relationships. Previously, she worked for the Hess Center for New Frontiers at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and was a tenured professor at Rhodes College. Dr. Sciubba is the author of 8 Billion and Counting: How Sex, Death, and Migration Shape our World. Jess Mauer is the executive director of the Maine Council on Aging, which she co-founded in 2012. The Maine Council on Aging consists of over 135 organizations, businesses, municipalities, and community members. Its recent achievements include increased pay for direct care workers and increased eligibility for the Medicare Savings Program in Maine. And Ms. Mauer previously worked in the Maine office of the attorney general for nearly two decades. So thank you both for being with us. Jennifer, I thought we could begin with you to give an overview of the global demographic trends you’re seeing and their political, social, and societal, and economic implications. SCIUBBA: Absolutely. Glad to do so. And I have just a few slides to show and tell a little story, if we can pull those up. Perfect. Let’s go to the next one, but it might even—that one might be blank, and it might be the one after that. Perfect. Let’s start there. So pop back one to the star. So let’s think about that.  I love this, the idea of the night sky as a metaphor for understanding global population. Because I remember learning—I had to take one science class in college as an International Studies major. And that one science class was astronomy. And I was so fascinated in learning that when we look at those stars in the night sky, some of them are so far away from us that they don’t even exist anymore by the time their light reaches us here on Earth. And when I think about where we are in this moment of global population trends, I think it’s a lot like that night sky.  In parts of the globe, the human population is already or will soon be shrinking. And that’s really different from what we hear all the time. We hit eight billion globally in November. And Irina mentioned, that’s the title of my most recent book. And we know that we are continuing to see global population grow. But what I don’t think everyone grasps is that while those overall numbers are increasing, there’s a tectonic force underneath that is leading us towards shrinking. It’s kind of like looking at a star that seems to be shining brightly, but in actuality it’s already imploded. And so to understand where we are today in terms of global population, and where we’re going, I want to explain first how we got here. And what I hope you’ll take away from this few minutes that I have to speak with you is thinking about the night sky as representative of our soon-to-be shrinking population is that it is a trap in data analysis. And so I’m actually going to talk about two traps and data analysis and how they relate to demographics, that I think can help us understand how to incorporate demography into our larger planning, which is exactly what I hope you’re all doing at the state and local levels. So let’s go to the next slide, please. Alright, so how did we get here? There are just three ingredients to population change. So that’s all we have to wrap our brains around, and that’s fertility rates. We typically talk about the average number of children born to a woman in her lifetime. Mortality rates. Think about us dying. And, of course, migration. And if we’re at the global level, like the whole planet, migration doesn’t much matter. We don’t have other species coming here yet. But when we zoom down, it matters a lot. And I know to a lot of you on this webinar it matters a great deal for what determines population change at your local level, whether it’s in-migration or out-migration there. So where else did we—how else do we get here, putting these components together, particularly the births and deaths? Next slide, please. A quick overview of our human history in thirty seconds here. It took from all of human history until around the year 1800 for Earth to amass its first one billion people. But as we started to get control over that second variable on that preceding slide, over death, we started to see populations boom. In particular, we were able to help infants and children live to reproductive ages. And that allowed population to boom. If you’ll click one more time you’ll see that it actually boomed from 1.6 billion at the start of the century to 6.1 billion by the century’s end.  And I want to flag this as a moment to understand that probably for everyone on this webinar—maybe a few of you who are in your early twenties not so much—but this is what you were born into, right? I know this is what I was born into. We were born into this context. And when I talked about traps—you know, a little hint about the traps in data analysis, this is one part for us to take stock. What kind of world were you born into? What kind of messages were you receiving about population? We’re going to think about how that colors our view of it. Next slide, please. We’re not just talking about size of the global population. We’re talking about a shift in the composition of the global population as well. So what you see here, they’re commonly called population pyramids because they actually used to all be shaped in this little pyramid, like 1950s, but maybe more accurately called population trees now because they’re actually turning into more of trees. And it’s typically males on the left, in the blue, females on the right in the red. And we see age groups in the ascending order there. So it’s thin at the top in the 1950s. Not a lot of folks living to be over ninety, a hundred years old. And we see that it’s fatter at the bottom. And if you think about where people of reproductive age, particularly women of reproductive age, would be located on that pyramid, and you see that it’s fatter at the bottom, you know that your fertility rate—the average number of children born per woman—was over replacement level. By the time we get to 2023, we now have a total fertility rate globally of 2.3 children per woman on average. And that’s really close to replacement level of 2.1. And where we’re headed is a more tree-like structure. Next slide, please. That mirrors what happens at the country level. And so still today there are countries in the world that do have high fertility rates. In case you thought I was off my rocker in talking about shrinking populations and forgetting about places like Nigeria, or Tanzania, Ethiopia. No, that’s certainly still the case. But there are fewer of them. There are only about eight countries left in the world, out of two hundred, where women have five or more children on average. That is a complete sea change from 1960s, when it was, you know, about 130 countries. So the shape of Turkey’s population today looks a lot like the shape of the global population. And if you’ll click one more time you’ll see that Japan’s population has that tree-like structure, with lots and lots of folks at those older ages and fewer people at the younger ages. So the next slide, we’ll see why that happened. I said there were tectonic forces at work all along. Well, here they are. Since the 1960s, the rate of global population change has been slowing. And so what we end up with, next slide, is that in 1968 lots of women—lots of countries had high fertility. Very few had two or fewer children on average. And now, we click again, and we see that very few have high fertility and that two out of every three people on the planet live somewhere with below replacement fertility. And nearly half the countries that are above replacement, are only just above it, with women having fewer than three children on average. So we’re part of a global trend. And I think this is a spot for us to pause and think about why it matters. And that, you know, we’ll get into this in Q&A because I don’t want to get into Jess’ time, but when we think about priorities, and setting priorities and policy—and I’m at the global level—then we’re thinking about how the interests of those countries that have rapidly aging and potentially shrinking populations might increasingly differ from those that still have very young and growing populations. And it’s just something that I want us to keep at the front of our minds, is how investments and policy priorities might be different in those different settings. But, of course, we all need to be thinking about demography. Next slide. Because if you are thinking about planning for education, care work, et cetera, demography matters. This is just a quick map to show you places where fertility is still higher, which are some of the poorer places on the planet, as you might expect. OK. Next slide. OK, so the first trap is getting stuck in the past in terms of our trends here. So we know that trends change but sometimes our thinking does not change. And so I want to make sure that we understand how much the global situation behind fertility has changed, like those stars. OK, next slide. And, of course, that matters at the state level as well. So state—here, I’m thinking about the United States. And we’re about to make that a very different kind of state. But we—whoops. My own little screen just did something strange. So U.S. population has been, in some ways, exceptional compared to some of its peers for a while. We had relatively higher low fertility, if that makes sense to you. So low could be anywhere from zero to two, right? And we were on that relatively higher end of low. But that’s not necessarily the case anymore, as we’ll see here. And I’m sure some of you—well, probably all of you saw the news coming out of U.S. Census in November and December of last year, that really talked about these changes at the regional and state level in the United States, and which regions are growing or not growing. Next slide, please. That, much like the slide I showed with the little baby and the death and the migration, it’s driven by births, deaths, and migration at the state level as well. So we see here in the United States, our total fertility rate is somewhere around 1.6 to 1.7 children born per woman, on average. That places us, again on that higher—still kind of on that higher end. For comparison, in Japan is probably around 1.3, maybe a little bit lower than that. So this is, you know, kind of typical of a wealthy, industrialized country. And places in the country that it has historically been lower are the Northeast. So we typically see lower fertility rates. This down here is called the general fertility rate. So it’s expressed a different way, which is basically the birth rate—births per one thousand, women fifteen to forty-four. You can see where it’s slightly higher. It’s already, I think, starting to fall again in North Dakota and South Dakota. And, but we see regional differences here. Next slide, please. And we see regional differences in terms of migration. Now, let’s—look, this is taken from the Tax Foundation. So you know that they’re trying to make the point that people are moving to states with lower taxes, but that is true, demographically speaking.  You start to peel down at the level here, and we see people are moving to Texas for jobs and cheaper housing. They’re typically a working-age population. Most of Florida’s growth came from people between the ages of fifty and seventy. So, you know, nuance is always really important with demographics there. So I would submit to you that U.S. exceptionalism is over. We have low fertility. We do have some in-migration that is propping up the size of the population, but the U.S. is facing the same set of issues and opportunities—challenges and opportunities—that other wealthy industrialized countries are. And I think it’s time we wake up to that. Next slide. And we’re almost done.  And then trap two, I just really quickly want to point out that we are all carrying biases in with demographic data. All kinds of ones. Jess has a whole other set of biases besides the ones I’m going to talk about. But it’s really important for us to recognize that. I saw it when I worked at the Pentagon. I saw the U.S.—that line about U.S. demographic exceptionalism, perfect, was talked about all the time. Yeah, you can go to that one. And I say—would often say, we’re not that different from Russia and China. Just look at the little shape of our population here. A lot of things are really similar there. And in fact, if you are a democracy and you need to pivot quickly to deal with an aging population, it is very difficult. If you’re not a democracy, it’s a lot easier.  Next slide. I also often point out that there is a sense in the United States that migration will continue forever, whether you want it to or not. That does not matter to me. It’s just this idea that this—you know, we have the world’s largest stock of migrants in the U.S. So we tend to think global migration is really high. But really, 2 to 4 percent of people live outside the country in which they were born. That’s been true over the last decades and decades. There are actually far more older people worldwide than migrants. If you look at just those ages sixty-five to seventy-four, there are about 200 million more of them than global migrants. So this is a huge segment of the global population and of the U.S. population. But I think we kind of carry some of that bias into looking at the data there as well. And so a question we might ask is, will migration continue at these levels, and for the United States, or not? And last slide for me is just to say—I got two plugs for you here. One is the personal plug. The list of you on this webinar I’m salivating over because I would like to talk to you. Sorry, Irina, but I got to give this plug. My next project, research-wise, is trying to understand how we can thrive, not just survive, economically particularly, in this era of shrinking populations. And so if anybody is talking about this at your state or local level, please shoot me an email or find me for us to chat. And then the other is I’m on the board of the Population Reference Bureau, which does a lot of data and analysis for state and local governments about population projections. And I’m sure that soon—if this is the kind of thing that you’re interested in, I’d be happy to send you their way. Thank you so much. FASKIANOS: Jennifer, thank you so much for that and your wonderful slides. And we will circulate your contact information after the fact as well, in case people did not get it on the—on the slide presentation. So, Jess, now we’re going to over to you with your experience. Talk about what you’re seeing in Maine, what policies you were looking at to prepare there. And I know you’ve been advising other governments as well as the federal government—some national governments and the federal government. So what you were saying and where you see things are working well, and any best practices you can share with the group. MAUER: Sure. And thanks for inviting me. Glad to be here. And I just learned a whole lot from Jennifer. So I’m really excited to be here. And I have questions. And I’m going to be using some of—some of this data as I talk about this stuff in the future. So if whoever is going to share my slides could do that, that would be great. And so you can go right ahead to the next slide. I just thought before we jump into the issues that we’re seeing and some of the solutions, I’d talk a little bit about Maine. So Maine is the oldest state in the country by median age. Our median age is 45.1. We’re also the most rural state, which a lot of people find interesting. And I find that when I talk about rurality, a lot of folks particularly in urban areas don’t really think the same way we do. For instance, I’ve heard people talk about a city of twenty or twenty-five thousand people as rural. So, for reference, I like to say, only nine cities in Maine have a population greater than twenty thousand. And 83 percent of Maine’s five hundred towns have a population of five thousand or less. And, in fact, 44,000—sorry—44 percent of Maine’s population lives in towns with fewer than five thousand people. We have towns, like, with five people in them. And so, you know, we have a lot of rural communities.  We also have the lowest working-age population, which creates a significant challenge. Not just for business, but also when we’re talking about the direct care workforce and a significant growing care gap that we have for populations of all kinds across all settings. So next slide.  So here’s an actual look at our demographics. We have 44 percent of our entire population—entire population—is over the age of fifty. For reference, 18 percent of our population is under eighteen. And 23 percent is over sixty-five. So, this means for the better part of the last decade we’ve had significantly more people every year turning sixty-five than we’ve had babies, and sometimes twice as many for a good three, five, or six years. We had about 24,000 people turning sixty-five and about 12,000 babies born every year. Next slide. So in 2020, we launched a three-year municipal data dashboard project to help communities in Maine understand the challenges that older people in their community might be experiencing, and to take a look at their demographic challenges generally. These were our pilot communities. Just want to say that three of them were remote rural communities. One was our—one of our largest cities. One was a midsized city, and two are sister suburban towns. Next slide, please. So these are two different data points that highlight the differences between rural and urban communities in our—in our community, in our state. One generally looks at the median age. And you can see that, particularly for urban areas, not surprisingly, our median age is lower. But in some of our most rural communities, is very high. So in Eastport, the median age is sixty-one versus forty-five, as a state average. And in that same community, you’ll see that just over 70 percent—70 percent—of the households in that community include a person over the age of sixty. Next slide. So one of the shocking, really, pieces of data that we learned when we started digging deep at a community level was that some communities do better and others do worse at supporting people later in life. So you’ll see here, one community has very few people living in their community who are eighty and older, as opposed to another community which has a much larger percentage. And the next slide is actually the data. And you’ll see that these two communities have essentially the same population of people who are over sixty-five. And so you have to ask yourself, why is one community the community that’s better for older people—which is a city setting, walkable, access to transportation, access to affordable housing—so much better for people over eighty then another, which has no transit, all single-family homes, very few affordable housing units, rural, and very few services? So these are the reasons we start, like, saying, you know, it’s really important for municipalities to look at their own data and not just rely on state and county data to sort of see how they’re doing. I will say, interestingly enough, and why it’s important, this community that I mentioned in the last slide, that has—more than 70 percent of the households have sixty and older, they have a very, very low working-age population. And they said, well, that’s because nobody can afford to live in our city anymore. And they all live outside of our city. So we did a demographic profile of all the communities around their city that they said that older people—that younger people lived in. And the reality is, they don’t live there. They just have a really, really low working-age population, and it’s something that they need to consider. So next slide. In 2022, we did a report on the economic status of older women in Maine. And the next few slides highlight some additional demographic concerns specifically related to older women. On this slide, you’ll see why it’s important to explore data by gender, race, and age. Nationally, eighty—women over eighty have a significantly higher rate of poverty due to—than men—due to gender-based wage disparities across their lifetime. But in comparison to White women, Black women or women of color over the age of eighty experience nearly twice as much poverty as White women. So these are issues we just have to look at, right? I mean, it makes a difference if you’ve just experienced gender-based bias versus gender-based and race-based bias across a lifetime. Next slide. And then to truly understand how folks are doing in your community, you also have to disaggregate data related to age. For instance, all the reports we see show poverty among older people at a rate at about 8 or 9 percent. And we can see here, however, that women over eighty in Maine experience poverty at a rate nearly twice that of men over the age of eighty. So it’s really important not just to say, how well are people over the age of sixty-five doing? But now we have to say, how well are people over the age of eighty doing in our community? And are there demographic differences again, by race, or by age? So next slide, please. So the federal poverty level is the piece that we look at when we say whether or not older people are experiencing poverty. But living alone is a clear demographic issue that has big impact for people later in life. People who live alone when they’re older don’t have a second income, right, to help cover costs, and have no informal care within the home if they need help with care. And they also have no basic help with chores. They have nobody to drive them if they can no longer drive. They have nobody to help them with home maintenance. So two times as many women over the age of sixty in Maine live alone. And women who live alone, not surprisingly, have less income than men who live alone. The next slide, please. So we look at something called the Elder Economic Security Index, which is a national index that tells us how much income an older person or older couple needs to meet their basic needs if they’re in poor condition, poor—good health, poor health, excellent health, and also if they own their own home, with or without a mortgage, or they rent. So you’ll see here, this is both the previous slide and this slide, that at least half of the older women who live alone in Maine do not have enough money to meet their basic needs, regardless of where they live, and regardless of their health status. So these are issues that also help us think about: How we target services? And what do we do, right, when we come up against this sort of issue? So next slide. I just want to say a little bit about some of the policy-level solutions. We’ve been focused on really creating new models of housing in Maine for older people to address the very issue of a community that is no longer working for people over the age of eighty. We asked, well, what can we do? How can we help older people find housing, help older people find transportation? So with our focus on housing, we’ve actually just in the last few months—few weeks, actually, signed a contract with a new organization who’s going to start doing a home-sharing pilot project here in Maine, to get that up and running.  We’ve also been doing a considerable amount of work over the last many years on zoning, specifically related to accessory dwelling units. We’ve had a big win recently on that. And so it’s no longer just town to town whether you could—you can put an accessory dwelling unit or a second home on your property, but now really municipalities have to allow for that accessory dwelling unit. Which is a really terrific thing. We’re looking to implement transportation solutions that really knit together technology that we already have, and we already use, and volunteer driver—volunteer driver programs as well as public transit systems. Trying to make sure that they’re more accessible for everybody and also better funded. We’re also focused, and have been for a decade, on growing the direct-care workforce to meet the increasing support needs of older people. And have had some real success. If you’re—if you’re a direct-care worker in Maine and you’re living alone, you can actually earn a livable wage, which is really terrific. But, you know, not if you’ve got kids or a husband. So we’re still working on cracking that nut. But our big focus has really been on older people themselves and reducing poverty. Our biggest win just came in the last legislative session last year, when we used a lot of the data that’s in this presentation to secure economic justice for older people who’ve experienced a lifetime of economic injustice and disparities, by significantly increasing eligibility for the Medicare Savings Program. It’s a program that puts about $7,500 in the pockets of older people. So this ultimately means that about—well, about thirty thousand people in Maine, older people in Maine, will have more income. And they’ll be more on par with a livable income and will be better able to meet their basic needs.  And this is something any state in the country can do. The Medicare Savings Program is a terrific program. And for those of you who’ve done Medicaid expansion, Medicare eligibility expansion is essentially the corollary. It’s the part that lifts older people in your communities out of poverty. And D.C. actually increased theirs to 300 percent of the federal poverty level. We didn’t go that far. We’re up to 250. So pretty exciting stuff. And but totally doable, to really make a huge difference in the financial security of older people. So next slide. Just a couple more pieces, and then I’ll be done. We’ve also been using this data—and I loved Jennifer’s talking about traps. And I think, you know, we talk about this idea that we’re still sort of stuck in that 1950s thinking about older people, and what they should be doing, right? They should be leaving work. They should be retiring. The reality is, they’re supposed to be dying at seventy, and they’re not. They’re living to a hundred. And, but we really haven’t gotten rid of the views that older people aren’t good workers, that they cost too much money, that they’re not good at technology. And so what we see a lot of is ageism, both at an institutional and a systemic level. And so we’ve been using this data to talk about, you know, these outdated views that older people and aging—that they’re a problem.  And really, this image is what I like to—like, when I think about, you know, for the better part of the last thirty years, we’ve been talking about this, right? A silver tsunami. It’s literally a gray wave of sedentary, medically needy, older people that’s going to crash down on your head and ruin everything. I mean, that’s what we’ve been talking about. And it makes you feel all warm and fuzzy about older people, right? I mean, they’re a problem to be solved. They’re not a solution. So next slide, please. Really, the primary work that we’ve been doing lately is flipping the script, really changing the way we look at this wave. Literally turning the wave upside down, and looking at it as an opportunity. The key here—and I love—I love this point. We’re so focused on in-migration. And we haven’t—we’ve just started to move the needle in increasing the number of people over the age of sixty-five who are working. I mean, we’ve been working on that for a decade. So we’re glad that there’s movement, finally. But the focus has been on getting people to move to Maine.  And so getting this number, this is—you know, there are 200 million more people sixty and over than there are migrants in the world. I mean, that’s a really interesting number. And I’m going to be thinking about how to use that because, you know, we’ve really been looking elsewhere for the solution, when the solution, as we’ve been saying, is sort of right under our nose, that if we are seeing that older people—that people—all people are living longer, healthier lives, and can continue to work long into their seventies, and eighties, even in their nineties, then our solution is right there. But we’ve not yet been able to do that. So we really do need to flip the script and see older people not just as our workers, but also as our volunteers, as our cultural and municipal leaders, stewards of our environment, right? Caregivers for young and old, basically integral parts of our community that we just can’t let go and we need to actually embrace. And then the final slide is a new map. It’s called the new map of life, that’s come out of the University of Stanford. We look at this and it’s basically saying, look, kids are going to—kids born today are going to live to a hundred, by and large. And we have to think differently about our systems. We need to learn differently, right? Space out the way we learn, space out the way we work, and also need to build longevity-ready communities, right? Communities that have these new models of housing, transportation solutions that work for people who can’t drive. Again, not being able to drive didn’t used to be a problem, because people died when they were seventy. Now people stop driving in their eighties and nineties, for many physical reasons. Also just don’t feel comfortable about it. But we just haven’t—we haven’t invested in the solutions that help people move around when they can no longer drive. So we have to do this through this lens of equity. Age equity is what we have been talking about. And need to be intentional about who’s in our communities, who’s being included, who’s being excluded, partner with people in their eighties, nineties, and hundreds to talk about how we design solutions that work for them. We really haven’t been doing this, but it’s really what’s next in relation to, you know, sort of, again, how do we take advantage of what we have and also build what we need to build for the future? So I’ll stop talking there and say thanks for the opportunity. FASKIANOS: Thank you very much. Again, another fantastic presentation. And so we’re going to go to all of you now for your questions and to share what’s happening in your community. As a reminder, we are on the record. So I’m going to take the first written question from Justin Bielinski, who is director of communications in the office of Wisconsin Senator Chris Larson. Do you have any successes from Maine to share regarding increasing density, affordable housing in urban or suburban areas? MAURER: Sorry. We do have some successes. And we passed a really comprehensive—we actually had a committee that worked for a year on recommendations regarding these things and have passed a comprehensive bill in this regard. And I will say, it’s still early days to be talking. So I think the bill—the law itself is a success. But there have been real challenges to implementation. And I’m happy to share a link to that law in the chat. FASKIANOS: Great. And we can also share that out. Next raised hand from Councilmember Jose Trinidad Castaneda. Q: Hi. Good morning. Or, sorry, good afternoon.  So I’ve worked on some of the California ADU legislation. And I’m working on an innovative program for our city, in the city of Buena Park, California. One of the challenges that I have is how do we allocate our Medicare-managed plan funding for ADUs, specifically for categories of our population that are most vulnerable to demographic shifts—employment and economic trends that you were bringing up in both of your presentations? And since we have a silver tsunami right here at home, how do we—how do we balance that, as local policymakers, between what we need in terms of migration, a baby boom, and, like, a long-term kind of stabilization of a very—you know, a massive aging population in our city? So how do we allocate those funds? And how do we balance between those challenges? Thank you. MAURER: And, Jennifer, I don’t know if you—if you have any interest in jumping in. I’m happy to, I just want to— SCIUBBA: I’m listening to this part. Yeah. I’m learning. MAURER: I mean—I’m not going to say that we have it sorted out in Maine, by any stretch of the imagination. And I think the answer is, it’s going to take a lot of different solutions. There’s not one solution that’s going to work, A. And, again, you’re in a very different place than we are, because we’re so rural and we’re so spread out. But one of the things we’ve been talking about, A, is that we don’t ask people what they want. And the things we know that are true is that it’s better for older people to stay in their community. And because we have decided that we have to build—from an economic standpoint, we have to build affordable housing in a certain way or housing with services in a certain way—build and fund in a certain way, we just do. And so that separates people from their community if they, you know, don’t have an affordable housing option in their community. And so, you know, what we’ve been talking about are that we—you know, we really have to build what’s next. We haven’t—we haven’t designed or built that thing, although it’s starting to work. So we—you know, we’ve got a couple of—like, a pocket community in Dover, New Hampshire of, you know, forty small homes, tiny homes. They’re workforce housing, but I think that’s exactly the kind of thing that older people want. And the question is, how do we incentivize the development of the things that people want? I’m not sure I’m answering your question directly, but it’s going to take a mix of doing affordable housing differently. We need some changes within the federal government around Medicare and pairing of—well Medicare, and Medicaid, and also paying for services within housing. And we need to have affordable housing investing in accessory dwelling units and figuring out how to build affordability into them. So I think there’s a lot of solutions. There are a lot of problems that we haven’t found solutions to, but we’re working on them. SCIUBBA: I want to add in a little on that too, because I think what is great about a demographic lens is it lets you see the future in the ways that no other trend does. I mean, there is no other trend where we can be so certain about what the world will look like in twenty years. You know, the people of—the retirees of tomorrow are already born, or they’re sitting in kindergarten desks today. And so we can do this long-term planning. And I’ve even—there’s an architect who looks at age-friendly architecture out of New York City, who’s German, Matthias Hollwich. And he and his firm build modular homes. Imagine being in New York City or in a densely populated area, and when a building is being turned into housing units it’s done so modularly so that it can adjust for: Do you work from home? Do you have two small children? Did your children move out? Do you now have an aging parent move in? And some of this is done in the context of being environmentally sustainable as well.  So, you know, if we build for that, as Jess said, that can look all kinds of different ways depending on the community. In New York, it looks one way. You’re not going to do that kind of thing, you know, in my suburb of Memphis, Tennessee. But there are many options. And I think also, when we start to do an international comparative context, we can learn a lot there as well. Like, we can learn from other states but, like I said, the U.S. has seen itself as demographically exceptional for so long that in many ways we’re way behind. You know, I remember doing some fieldwork in Singapore in 2009. And they were working on complete streets there for older people to get on the buses, and how did they make that age-friendly? And that was, you know, fifteen years ago. So I think there are some places that have aged faster or have been aware of their aging faster that might serve us as models. Yeah. FASKIANOS: Fantastic. Texas Senator Donna Campbell has raised her hand. Q: Hello. Good afternoon. Can you hear me? FASKIANOS: Yes. Q: Yes. My name is Jim Morales. I work policy for Senator Donna Campbell here in Texas.  Thank you, Jennifer, for that presentation earlier. It was very enlightening. And also Jess, as far as the state of Maine. We are taking some good notes here. As you presented earlier, the growing population here in Texas from basically all over the country and other parts of the world. And we are currently working on legislation for the next session that addresses the workforce, especially, like it was mentioned earlier from Jess, as far as the age population—working population. The infrastructure, medical facilities and centers, nursing homes as well for that—in preparation of that longevity. My question is, if you can share, if you have that information, does Maine have any—have data or best practices on nursing homes, preparation for public health emergencies, and natural disasters? Of course, our natural disasters are going to be different from state—from state to state, but there’s some commonalities there, especially when addressing and sustaining our aging population. Thank you. MAURER: Yeah, and I wish—I wish I knew. You know, I don’t do direct advocacy, nor support—I mean, we’re partners with all of the aging services in Maine. But I can certainly find out for you. I know of a lot of our policies, but I don’t know of a specific—or a specific report that would answer that question. But I will find out and be happy to share it with you if I—if I find it. FASKIANOS: Great. One question, how does women’s access to reproductive care influence the population trends that you’ve cited, both globally and domestically? I think, Jennifer, maybe you can start. SCIUBBA: Yeah, sure. I’d be glad to take that. It makes a difference if you have a desired number of children, and you’re able to act on those desires. Certainly, that is why we have seen global fertility fall from, you know, seven children per woman on average to lower. But by the time you get to a wealthy country and how far it is along the demographic transition to lower fertility and mortality, we’re really talking about a lower number of pregnancies generally. So that would be women’s ability to control whether or not they get pregnant. And women have been getting pregnant less, particularly teen women. So in the United States, what a lot of people don’t realize is that that drop to below replacement fertility has really been in large part at the teen level. And so we see fewer teen pregnancies. That is not just from contraception and reproductive health. It’s also from the fact that they are less sexually active than previous generations were. So, you know, it’s always good to look behind those numbers and really see things like, you know, we see increasing pregnancies in my age group, in the forty-plus age group, is actually up. And so it does differ for those different age groups, yes. But having the ability to control who gets pregnant, when, and where does make a difference, of course, as to how many children are born. FASKIANOS: Great. I’m going to Patricia Farrar-Rivas. How are you addressing the high costs of care for individuals with dementia and Alzheimer’s? I think, Jess, you marked that you could answer that. MAURER: Well—I’m not sure that we’re addressing the high cost, but we are trying very specifically to, A, support informal family caregivers. We’ve increased the respite care benefit and have created a respite care program specifically for people with Alzheimer’s and dementia. Are doing a better job of trying to do care coordination. So that is one of the bigger cost drivers in the federal government, or CMS, or—you know, sort of uncoordinated care for people with dementia. We also have just completed the revision of our state plan on Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias, and have a BOLD—the second iteration of the BOLD grant, and are working collaboratively—starting implementation of many of the recommendations of that. And, again, a lot of that talks about coordination of care early, early diagnosis, early connection to services, and then additional training for all kinds of providers. Which I think is really critically important from EMS and Fire and Rescue to local municipal officials needing to understand, you know, sort of how do we—how do we intervene with people who are in our communities, particularly, as I mentioned, right, I mean, women are more likely to live alone than men. And this is a trend not just in Maine, but nationally. And so—and also, we didn’t talk about this, but I think, Jennifer, you bear this out, the generation before—Boomers had 10 percent fewer babies than the generation before it. And so you have a lot of older people who don’t have kids. And so you’ve got a lot of older people with dementia, with moderate dementia, living in the community, and really no supports. And so we’re really talking about, you know, looking at dementia-friendly communities, and how do we integrate some of the good work that’s been done nationally at a local municipal level to put supports in place, both for people living with dementia and with family caregivers. So happy to provide some more support. I’m not sure that we’re—I’m not sure we can say we’re addressing—we’re addressing the cost drivers at a very local level. I’m not sure we can say we’re being successful at the CMS level. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to go next to Tom Flight, board member in East Hampton Village in New York, with a raised hand. Q: Hi. Good afternoon. And thank you both very much. A fairly straightforward question, which is: What have you found to be the most effective means of educating the public on the changing profile of the population and the services required? SCIUBBA: I’ll add some global part of this. I think that we have a long way to go to get people to understand that this shift towards fewer babies is permanent, and not a problem to be solved. So that is, there’s just a long way to go in getting that. But it is a necessary first step then if we are going to implement these policies and programs that Jess talked about in detail, and all of you are concerned about in detail. It seems to me that without getting that first hurdle—getting over that first hurdle, we don’t plan for the long run.  So that’s why I do always start by putting it in global context. This is not some fluke. This is not an exception. This is a permanent shift, the likes of which we’ve never seen before. But we worked so hard to get there. We worked so hard to get infants and children to live to reproductive ages. We’ve worked so hard to create economic opportunities outside the home, and to educate people and, you know, to thrive. The result of that was having fewer children on average. And so I think we’ve got to—that is a first hurdle, and then understanding how to be resilient and adapt to this is the next step, which I’ll hand over to Jess.  MAURER: Sure. And, you know, I mean, I know this is going to sound ridiculous, but I’m going to say the answer is really just conversation. And we’re hosting those conversations at multiple levels. So we actually have created a thing called the Leadership Exchange on Ageism, which is a fourteen-hour, very intensive peer learning, leadership learning experience. We’ve had 180 leaders graduate through that. And we’re really digging deep on these issues. And what we found, which I don’t—you know, it’s sort of been stunning, actually—is that people—the program itself leads people to take rapid action within their own institutions, systems, and spheres of influence to create some change. It is an aha moment. And so we’ve now taken that. We’re having community conversations. And, again, we are finding them very impactful. People haven’t had a chance to have these conversations. And when you kind of bring cold, hard facts—as Jennifer presented them, and, you know, we talk about them, that people get it and they want to know then, what do we do next? And so, anyway, I will just say, we’re just hosting a series of conversations with employers. Again, helping employers understand why—what are the benefits of a multigenerational—first of all, what’s the business case? And then, what are the benefits of a multigenerational workforce? And if you approach it in that way, and then you give them examples of multigenerational workforces in Maine that are thriving, that are actually attracting workers because of—because they’re multigenerational.  And the ways—that’s the other piece. Is there’s a lens that we talked about, right? When you—when you do things to address challenges—real or perceived, by the way—for older people, older workers, it works for everybody. I’ve heard, you know, it takes longer to train an older worker. And then I say, well, even if that’s true, don’t you think that would benefit younger workers too?  Let’s start there. It’s not true. But even if it were true, wouldn’t it be better for younger workers to have a four-week onboarding process instead of a two-week? And don’t you think they’d probably do better, and feel actually better connected to the organization if you did that? So conversation is the key to this. And I’m going to say it works. I swear it does. So that’s my answer, and I’m sticking to it. FASKIANOS: Great. I’m going to go next to Emily Walker, legislative director in the Office of Pennsylvania Senator Katie Murth. Q: Hi. Thank you guys so much. I’ve learned so much from both of you. I am a Pennsylvania native myself, but I lived in York, Maine, for a long time, and I have family in Dover, Delaware—I’m sorry; Dover, New Hampshire, not Delaware. But, so familiar with the area and the issues that they face. And so it’s very helpful to see the work that you’re doing there. I have a question about kind of tying in sort of the needs of our younger generations into the needs of older generation. You mentioned, you know, more accessibility to affordable housing, more accessible public transportation, and just generally, like, more working—more workplace accommodations as well. Do you think there’s more opportunity that we could be bringing in young—so for being—I’m at the end of the Millennial Generation, and right at the beginning of the Gen Z generation. So I feel like, is there opportunity to kind of build on things that we do need for our aging population, and then the things that our younger generation are also asking for, that they want in their communities? And how can you sort of bridge that together a little better? MAURER: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s work we really have to do. And, yeah, all right, well, I’ll just say it out loud because I feel like, you know, it’s my—it’s my duty to say, you know, I’m not sure generational—like looking at generations are really helpful. Because I think it skews things. What I think is to say, you know, we have older people who need X, Y, and Z. And if you solve that solution—by the way, we have younger people who need X, Y, and Z. As a matter of fact, you know, older people—they’re lonely and isolated. That’s, like, I hear it all the time, like, with pity in your voice. Poor older, lonely people. Well, all of the data suggests that the people who are struggling most with isolation and loneliness are in their twenties and thirties, particularly young people who are going to college right now, because of the pandemic, are really struggling, right? And so, you know, it’s sort of, like, we need to stop talking about age and start talking about what we all want. And what you find, right, is if you look at workers today, right, older workers—oh, they need flexibility, or want flexibility. They want—they don’t want to work forty hours a week. They want to—well, OK, that’s also true for younger workers. I mean, all the trends say it. And so, you know, like, moving to a value-based sort of view, or what do we—what do we—where, where is there common ground, right?  I’ve heard over and over again that people who are described as millennials don’t like to drive, right? They would prefer to be driven. They would prefer to use public transportation. Well, public transportation is what we need. That that wouldn’t be what older people say, but they need—but they need public transportation. That’s what they would say. So for different reasons. So I think it’s like finding commonalities where things work for everybody, regardless of how you come at the problem. We come at the problem through aging, but we always try to solve that problem for everybody. FASKIANOS: There’s a written question from Stuart Murray in the Village of Corrales in New Mexico: It seems this presentation is aimed at higher-density communities. I was raised in a small Oklahoma town where services do not exist. When I talk small, 1,500 people or less. People do lean on other people, churches, et cetera. However, creating these services may not be financially possible. Is this where higher levels of governments need to step in to help these rural communities? MAURER: So I’m sorry if I gave that impression, because, like, all of Maine is rural. We don’t—we have, like—we have, like, nine communities that are not rural. And what we have are—one-hundred-plus communities have started volunteer initiatives called lifelong community initiatives, age-friendly communities, villages, NORCs, whatever you want to call it. We don’t—there’s lots of ones that have no models at all. But these are volunteers within communities that are doing volunteer driver programs, food, lunch programs, home repair initiatives. The key, though—particularly what we found in rural settings—is that you do need some community backbone, some community-based organization backbones. So, for instance, Habitats. And we don’t have Habitats in every community. Well, we also have public housing authorities, but not in every community. So we have some churches—that wanted to—so we look at—from a policy perspective, right, we say we need home repair, right? So the very first—so older people are living in homes that don’t work for them anymore, but we haven’t built the next iteration and we’re not going to build enough affordable housing. So we have to keep people safely in homes. So home modification, and weatherization, and home repair is the—is the first line, right, of keeping people safely at home. So how are you going to get those services affordably? Well, you have to figure out who you have that serves any community. And then we have successfully had Maine Housing then fund those home repair initiatives. Some of them use volunteers. Some of them use public housing authority staff. But it’s about, you know, sort of—we can do this. But it does have to be knitted together through the municipality, through volunteers, and through a community-based organization. We have found, over and over again, different models that work to solve different challenges that people who are living rurally are experiencing. FASKIANOS: Great. I think we have time for one last question. And I’m going to take it from raised hand, Monica Rossman, Glenn County supervisor. Q: Good afternoon. Thank you for letting me ask a question. We live in a very rural county here in California. Population twenty-eight and change. The problem that we’re having right now is getting our seniors to actually take advantage of the services that we are providing, even though it is limited. I keep saying over and over again, in fact I said it during my campaign, you know, a hungry bird only gets fed when it opens its mouth. And if these don’t want to do it, they’re just not going to. And, you know, I’m starting to see all of these programs, which I’m sure, you know, Jess, you could probably agree with me, there are a ton of programs out there. It’s just when they’re not used, they’re forgotten. And, you know, we have a grant for tablets to senior citizens that have been open for two years.  They’re just now, ever since I started—I started peeling an onion, is what I did. When I first got into office, I started taking care of, you know, my senior citizen parents who have Alzheimer’s, dementia, the shared cost, you know, taking care of two households, you know, trying to get two households to run. So my question is, how do we get the—what is the incentive to bring them in? You know, what can we do? That’s the problem that I’m having. And I’m working on it. I feel like I’m going uphill. And I could definitely use some help. So thank you for letting me ask the question. MAURER: Yeah. So, you know, I mean, if I were in a room full of however many people who are here today, I would say how many people like asking for help? And the answer is zero. I mean, like, every once in a while some doctors will raise their hand. I don’t know what that’s all about. But most people really don’t like asking for help. And it’s really true. I mean, like, I mean, I love, you know, it’s a trap, right? Independence is a trap. And what we hear all the time when we ask, when are you old—what’s old and when will you be old, it’s always about what I can’t do for myself. And so there’s a real tension inside of us that says, if I need help, you know, I’m on the—I’m on the downslide here. And so there’s—so one of the things we found that’s really helpful is to ask older people, why is it hard to ask for help and what would help you ask for help? And, specifically, what’s the trusted source? What we heard in my own community when we asked that question is: We don’t want to rely on the same volunteer over and over again. We don’t want to burden our children. We don’t want to, you know, burden our next-door neighbors. But if there was—if we could call the town, or we could call a church, then—and say, I need a ride to the grocery store, that would feel less burdensome for us. So I think it’s about asking the people themselves. And then, I will also say, getting a whole bunch of volunteers, right, together who know about the services to be the bystanders who are there to say: Hey, I know about this great program, when they hear that people are in need of things. And we have found that’s a great way. The final piece, I’ll just say, in my own community, again, we’ve had this—every community has this problem that there are benefits that people don’t want to use. Telling stories in your local paper about people who did use them successfully and how it changed their life is really good. It’s money. It does—it does bring people in. SCIUBBA: Yeah, the two last ones that Jess mentioned, I was thinking come—we have so much research in the public health literature about how to change people’s behavior. And the most effective way being a peer who’s used a service coming into your home and talking about that service. And if we’re talking about family planning, or if we’re talking about old-age services, or, you know, any kind of help in the home, that model just—that community-based model seems to work really, really well. FASKIANOS: Thank you both for this wonderful hour. We really appreciate it, for you taking the time to share your expertise, and for all the great questions and comments. We appreciate you as well. We will send out a link to the webinar recording and transcript, contact information, links to resources. You can follow Jess Mauer at the Maine Council on Aging on X at @mcoaging, and Jennifer Sciubba at @profsciubba. As always, we encourage you to visit CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for the latest developments and analysis on international trends and how they are affecting the United States. And please don’t hesitate to share suggestions for future webinars. You can email us at [email protected]. Again, thanks to Jess, and Jennifer, and to all of you. And we hope you have a good rest of the day. END  

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