CFR-Georgia Tech Election 2024 U.S. Foreign Policy Public Forum

Watch this in-depth, nonpartisan conversation on America’s role in the world and the foreign policy issues at stake in the 2024 election, including sustainability, artificial intelligence, national security, and trade and economics. Panelists with distinguished careers in government, business, and academia discussed the trade-offs presented by different policy options both locally and globally and provide context on the international issues, choices, and challenges facing the next president.

To learn more about the foreign policy issues at play in the 2024 campaign, explore CFR’s Election 2024 hub for candidates’ stances and expert analysis on international challenges facing the United States.

Take a deeper dive into the foreign policy issues that could affect Georgia.

The CFR Election 2024 initiative is made possible in part by a grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York.

(A video presentation is shown.)

CABRERA: Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the Election 2024 U.S. Foreign Policy Public Forum hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations in partnership with Georgia Tech. For those of you who are not as familiar as others with Atlanta and Georgia Tech, welcome to the greatest technological university of our time. Yeah. (Applause.) And our mission is to develop leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition.

And on behalf of Georgia Tech we’re honored to welcome the Council on Foreign Relations to our campus and to host tonight’s important conversation on our country’s upcoming presidential election.

For those of you who are not as familiar with the Council, the Council on Foreign Relations is an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit think tank specializing in international affairs and U.S. foreign policy. I am a proud member of the Council myself and I’m grateful for the role the Council plays in helping leaders and citizens better understand the world and the foreign policy issues facing our nation.

Tonight’s forum will delve into the impact of the 2024 election, the impact that it will have on foreign policy, and how these issues will affect trade, national security, sustainability, technology, and much more.

With distinguished careers in government, business, international affairs, and academia our panelists will discuss the trade-offs presented by different policy options and provide context on the international issues, the choices, the challenges that will face America’s new president or next president.

This is the second of four interactive forums the Council is co-hosting with higher education institutions across the country before Election Day. We’re grateful to the Carnegie Corporation of New York for their generous support in making these events possible, and I thank all of you here in person or following online for coming to listen and participate in this evening.

I’ll now turn it over to tonight’s moderator Rickey Bevington who will get the program started and introduce our panelists. Just a brief introduction. A decorated journalist and former longtime broadcaster on NPR and PBS, Rickey is now the president of the World Affairs Council of Atlanta and an executive in residence at Georgia State University’s Robinson College of Business.

We’re grateful to have Rickey with us tonight and with that I’ll ask her to take it away. Rickey? (Applause.)

BEVINGTON: Thank you. Thank you. Good evening.

Thank you so much, President Cabrera. It’s wonderful to be here. Let me just get us all settled. I’ve got some technology because we’re going to be doing an online poll. You all can take a look at the—here there’s a QR code so I’ll just tee you up.

Welcome to the Election 2024 Foreign Policy Public Forum cosponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations and Georgia Tech.

I am Rickey Bevington, president of the World Affairs Council of Atlanta. It’s wonderful to see so many of our own members here. Thank you for supporting Georgia Tech, CFR, and the World Affairs Council of Atlanta, all with a mission to help our community better understand the world around us.

Tonight’s event is the second of four public nonpartisan forums that the Council on Foreign Relations is co-hosting with colleges and universities across the country in pivotal states in the lead-up to Election Day. If you’ve spent any time in Georgia you know that we are a pivotal state.

Who here has voted already? Fantastic. We have a very engaged audience. I have not.

We will be discussing America’s role in the world and the foreign policy issues at stake in the upcoming election. Our panelists will examine the trade-offs presented by different policy options both locally and globally and provide context on the international issues, choices, and challenges facing the next president.

Specifically, thanks to our expertise on the stage here tonight we’re going to be focusing on climate change and sustainability, artificial intelligence, international trade and the economy, and, of course, everything else that comes up in our conversation.

As an independent membership organization, think tank, and publisher CFR serves as a nonpartisan source of information and analysis to advance understanding of global affairs and the foreign policy choices facing the United States and other countries.

The goal of this evening is to raise awareness of the international issues that affect our daily lives and to help you make an informed decision before casting your ballot. There are too many issues to cover in ninety minutes. We may not get to everyone but we will have audience Q&A so feel free to bring up your own.

We hope you will bring up the most important things to you during the Q&A. We also encourage you to take advantage of a host of election 2024 resources available online at CFR.org including a tracker of the candidates’ positions on international issues, podcasts, videos, and explainers that delve into specific issues.

In fact, for tonight I printed out the explainer that had both candidates side by side and where they stand on some of the bigger issues and I thought, you know, CFR puts out some of the best scholarship on the planet but somehow is also able to summarize it in such understandable language and in three sentences I can understand where each presidential candidate stands.

So thanks to everyone who continues their great work at CFR. I’d also like to thank Georgia Tech for hosting this event and the Carnegie Corporation of New York for their generous support of CFR’s election 2024 initiative.

So now we’ll welcome our panelists. Heidi Crebo-Rediker is senior fellow in the Center for Geoeconomic Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Kat Duffy—let’s go in order. Varun Sivaram is senior fellow for energy climate—energy and climate at the Council on Foreign Relations. Margaret Kosal is associate professor and director of graduate studies at the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs here at Georgia Tech. And Kat Duffy is senior fellow for digital and cyberspace policy at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Thank you all for being here. Welcome to Atlanta.

CREBO-REDIKER: Thank you.

BEVINGTON: So as a reminder, today’s discussion is on the record. It’s being livestreamed and you can also watch it after the fact at CFR.org on their YouTube channel and also just right there on their website.

So to begin, I mentioned that we’re going to be doing a poll. There is a QR code in your program for you to do a five-question live poll to get a sense of where you all stand in the room feeling about a variety of foreign policy-related topics.

So at this time please scan the QR code. It’s on the inside of the cover of your program. This is completely anonymous. Feel free to skip the username portion and share your thoughts on the following. We will be able to view the real-time results on the screen.

Here we go. We’re also going to do this at the end to see maybe how far, if at all, we’ve moved the needle among our audience. Please refresh your screen if you don’t see the correct question on your phone.

So, number one: How important is foreign policy when considering who you will vote for in the presidential election? We have very important, somewhat important, not important, and I will give you all time to vote. Are we ready to close the poll? And we are locked. OK. Seventy-three percent at very important, 27 percent at somewhat important, zero percent at not important. Excellent. It’s very rare to get zero or a hundred percent in any poll. So what did you say, Varun? It’s a good number.

Number two: How active should the United States be in global affairs? More active than it is now, maintain current level of activity, less active than it is now, not at all active in global affairs, and do not know? Allow time for responses. Are we locked? OK. I think we’re at 32 percent more active than now and 45 percent maintaining current level of activity, 16 percent less active, 1 percent not at all active, 6 percent do not know. Well, then I’m glad that you’re here tonight and maybe come to some conclusions on your own after listening to our experts.

Are we ready for the third question? Yes. Got the thumbs up. Which of the following do you consider the greatest threat to U.S. national security: AI—artificial intelligence, China, climate change, domestic challenges, Russia, or other? Wow. We need some theme music. I wish we could vote. Sorry I didn’t tell you all to bring your phones up here. (Laughs.) OK. We are locking. There we go. OK. The number one is domestic challenges. That’s very, very interesting for a foreign policy forum. (Laughter.) Number twenty-two is China—excuse me, second is China at 22 percent, climate change at 17 percent, other at 8 percent—and I hope that you’ll bring up other in your Q&A so we can know what you’re thinking—Russia at 7 percent and AI at 4 percent.

DUFFY: Rickey, interestingly, in the Arizona State poll, domestic challenges was also the number-one category.

BEVINGTON: Was also number one? And where was AI?

DUFFY: Higher than 4 percent, lower than 41 percent. (Laughter.)

BEVINGTON: We’re not worried yet, apparently.

OK. Third—fourth question: What do you think about the scale of U.S. efforts to combat climate change? The United States is, and then you comment on what you think the U.S. is doing—too much, doing the right amount, and not doing enough? Oh, wow. OK. And we are locked. So the United States—75 percent not doing enough with its efforts to combat climate change, 16 percent doing the right amount, 8 percent doing too much.

And then we have a final question and this is about artificial intelligence: How do you feel about the widespread use of generative AI in daily life—more excited than concerned, more concerned than excited, equally excited and concerned? I think we need a do not know. OK. We are locked. This is the final question. How do you feel about the widespread use of generative AI in daily life? Forty percent equally excited and concerned, 32 percent more concerned than excited, and 28 percent more excited than concerned.

This is definitely the most balanced of all the answers so I look forward to especially having Kat unpack AI for us as we begin our panel discussion.

Thank you all for your answers. We will be doing this at the end so hold on to that QR code so we can kind of see if we’ve moved the needle at all with our panel discussion and then with also the questions. So we’re going to have about thirty-five minutes—thirty, thirty-five minutes of panel discussion and then a healthy thirty, thirty-five minutes of Q&A so please get your questions ready.

There’s actually a place to take notes in the back of your program if you’d like to jot down some ideas for the Q&A portion.

So let’s begin with trade and the economy. I feel like tariffs might be—end up being the word of 2024. Not quite sure. It could be brat. We’ll have to find out in January.

Tariffs is certainly a word we’re hearing over and over and over again and I’ll say for me personally it’s actually something that keeps coming up in conversation as well when I talk to people about the election. Voters seem very focused on the idea of tariffs and yet—maybe Heidi can help us really unpack what that means.

So they’re a tool of American statecraft. They are inflationary. How is the next—how the next president uses them on what basis, what goods, at what scale, to what end has major macroeconomic, commercial, and geopolitical consequences.

So why does trade policy and tariffs—why do they both play such a large role in this election and why do they matter?

CREBO-REDIKER: So, first of all, as someone who focuses on geoeconomics it’s actually—it’s a really big thing to have tariffs be part of this great discussion we’re having about the economy but I think that there are a lot of misconceptions about sort of what they are, how they can and should be used, and I guess I want to start with saying that we as a country and many countries around the world have been using tariffs for a very, very long time.

It’s not a new instrument, and we have a lot of data as a result of that to kind of look back and see what the implications are of having used them over time, which is important and I think what you raised in terms of the inflation, the fact that they’re inflationary.

So, I mean, it depends how you use them but it’s part of the trade-off conversation. So, there are—you know, there’s a candidate talking about 10 percent to 20 percent tariffs on every country in the world and 60 percent on China and then taking, you know, 100 percent tariffs on every country that doesn’t use the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency, which the Europeans might be a little confused about.

And so they’re, like, how do you think about using tariffs. The consumer is the one who ends up—you know, when final goods that are imported that have a tariff the consumer is the one, at the end of the day, who pays for that because if you are a company and you are importing a final product, whether they’re sneakers or a Schwinn bicycle made in—whether it’s China or Taiwan or, you know, a flat pack, you know, furniture kit coming out in IKEA, where that good was manufactured if there is a 10 to 20 percent or 60 percent tariff you will be paying 10 to 20 percent or 60 percent addition on that because the retailer is going to going to pass through that cost to you. That just—you know, that is a given.

There are ways to do them that are targeted and have different purposes. So there are, you know, reasons that, you know, for national security or for economic security to protect from over—you know, overcapacity and overproduction that you would see. I think we put China in a completely separate bucket when we talk about the use of tariffs.

But so the macro implications—if you think about inflation, we have been trying to fight inflation now since COVID. It’s been a huge battle. The implications are huge of having, you know, high interest rates for businesses, for consumers, for consumer credit, for mortgage—you know, mortgage payments, and so if you have a Fed looking at inflation, the ramifications of an across the board tariff, then that Fed would have to start looking at raising rates again and so there’s spillover effects for that.

You also would have every country in the world that had a tariff slapped on it retaliate, and so I think we’re living in a world where we aren’t—you know, we aren’t going to be able to actually, you know, not expect retaliation and a good portion of the world, actually, their number-one trading partner is China.

And so you have to just sort of think about what the different dimensions of how tariffs can play out when you think about across the board what the scale is and who will be impacted. Good studies have seen that middle class and low income families will pay sort of an average of $1,700 a year extra just on the 10 to 20 percent, 60 percent, and that’s important.

A state like Georgia exports about $50 billion a year worth of exports and 87 percent of the companies that export are small businesses. So I think when we think about who actually is going to have the—you know, the blowback on the global tariffs it really—it will go to consumers but it will also hit small businesses, intermediate parts. Any company that has a supply chain.

So I would just say that Georgia’s a great example of a state that actually is one of the greater exporters. You export to Mexico, to Canada. You have, like, I mean, very, very good ties with some of our closest trading partners but as exporters you will have retaliation against those exports.

So it’s not just a—it’s not just a one-time across the board and it’s the tool for all economic woes. There are multi-dimensional blowbacks that come as a result of what kind of tariff policy you choose.

BEVINGTON: Can I invite you to summarize each presidential candidate’s position and why they differ and why it matters?

CREBO-REDIKER: So, you know, I think one of the biggest areas I mentioned, which is if you have—if you have allies and friends and partners and FTAs with many of them that you really—

BEVINGTON: Free trade agreements.

CREBO-REDIKER: Free trade agreements. That tearing up those agreements and basically saying for reasons of what a presidential authority would have to invoke an international economic emergency to be able to have the authority to without Congress actually put those tariffs in place, that actually sends a message geopolitically that is bad and it also—you know, I don’t think that that is something that Kamala Harris would ever, ever consider.

BEVINGTON: You mean the emergency and not going through Congress?

CREBO-REDIKER: So going in and slapping tariffs across the board on every country and particularly our allies and partners. I think both of the candidates will take a very—and there’s bipartisan support for this—strong action to protect economic security, national security, and overcapacity threats from China and that’s why I put it in a separate bucket.

And I think both of them would be aggressive to certain degrees but mindful of what the implications are on a product by product basis as well as who gets disproportionately hurt by those tariffs.

BEVINGTON: Thank you.

Varun, let’s talk about climate policy. Why is this fundamentally a foreign policy issue?

SIVARAM: It’s a great question. I should think this audience is very enlightened. You know, I saw 17 percent of you thought climate is a top tier national security issue, if I read the poll right. More than 80 percent of you thought we aren’t doing enough on climate. I think I agree with both of those statements with some caveats.

But if there’s one message I want to leave you with today it is climate is and deserves to be a core and mainstream U.S. foreign policy issue. Look, you look at the news today. You put on CNN. You read the New York Times. What’s the foreign policy issue you’re probably reading about?

You’re probably reading about something happening in the Middle East, Russia and Ukraine. I’m going to make a provocative statement here. I actually think that the national security threats posed by climate surpass everything we have heard about in the Middle East.

I think that when Hurricane Helene or Milton ravages part of this country the best analogy I can think of is that by burning coal China or India just lobbed a missile over at the state of Florida, and when you think about it that way—now, that analogy breaks down in many ways. It’s not like they intended to send the missile but, nevertheless, the damage was done—$50 billion in damage from Hurricane Helene.

When you think about it this way, the national security impacts of climate change which are material even today, and will only grow in the decades to come, far surpass most of the other things we spend a lot of time thinking about in U.S. foreign policy.

The question, though, about what to do about it leads to many answers. Let me first make one point about American voters and how they diverge in this election. The Pew Research Center did a poll and asked Americans of all ages what’s your top foreign policy priority.

If you were above the age of twenty-nine climate change did not crack your top ten. If you were below the age of twenty-nine—eighteen to twenty-nine—climate change was by far your number-one foreign policy priority.

And this is highly rational. The effects of climate change are going to matter the most for the next generation. I have a ten-month-old son. It’s going to matter even more for my son than for me. I’m going to be OK.

That’s super important because there is a clear divergence of interest between those who hold power today and those who will inherit the world tomorrow.

So what do you do about it? Why is this a foreign policy problem?

Well, there’s not very much we can do just within our borders. A lot of you said—more than 80 percent of you said we’re not doing enough. Are you kidding? This country under the Biden administration is going to spend $1.2 trillion on clean energy technologies under the Inflation Reduction Act.

We will go into debt to build clean energy technologies here and drive our emissions down in one of the most expensive decarbonization programs in the world. We’re not doing enough? But I think you’re right to say we’re not doing enough because we’re probably doing the wrong thing.

America’s emissions account for, roughly, 12 percent of the world’s emissions and we’re a declining share. Between now and the end of the century our cumulative emissions will be less than 10 percent, likely less than 5 percent of the world’s total. Ninety-five percent will come from outside our borders. China and India will account for a majority and emerging economies overall will account for the bulk.

That means that what we do in our borders doesn’t really matter except in three ways, and then we can get into it in some more detail. One is we can develop technologies here in America that can be used around the world. We’re here on Georgia Tech’s campus. The work that’s done here on campus is arguably some of the most important climate work by developing the next generation of technology.

Again, it doesn’t really matter if we use it here. It matters if you use it in India and China and Indonesia and South Africa and Brazil.

The second thing we can do is other countries can learn from the policies that we pass here and see what our experience has been. If America, for example, builds experience in operating an electricity grid with a high penetration of intermittent renewable energy—wind and solar, that don’t always work because the wind and the sun aren’t always blowing or shining—well, other countries can learn the technical solutions that we through great expense have figured out ourselves. But if we only at great expense do it ourselves and don’t teach anybody else we haven’t done very much for the world.

And the third way that we can affect global climate change is we can serve as a large market for the products that are produced elsewhere—for example, industrial goods made with clean technologies, clean steel, clean aluminum, et cetera.

This suggests that we’ve been going about this entirely wrong and it’s critical that America realizes that climate is not really a domestic policy problem. It’s a foreign policy problem with clear national security implications.

BEVINGTON: Can you talk about the most exciting technologies in the climate sphere that you see coming online that might be happening right here at Georgia Tech?

SIVARAM: Absolutely. I’ll give you three examples.

Example number one is the next generation of batteries. America has a chance to win the next generation of batteries. They’re called solid state batteries. We’ve already—just to be clear, we’ve already lost this generation the lithium ion battery. It’s in your cell phone. It’s in your electric vehicle if you drive one. It’s in military drones, night vision goggles. It’s the cornerstone of our modern economy and we’ve lost it.

China owns across the supply chain somewhere between 70 percent and 90 percent of that supply chain, and no matter how many subsidies we throw at it we will never manufacture those batteries in any kind of globally competitive way with China.

Our best hope is going to be the next generation, solid state batteries, which can enable electric vehicles, for example, to drive twice as far, have five times as much horsepower, never, ever blow up because they’re inherently safe compared with lithium ion batteries, and a range of other important benefits such as durability. So that’s one technology.

Another that I’m really excited about, you know, if I had to answer the poll on generative AI I’m on the much more excited than concerned side—and Kat is going to give me a talking to after this—(laughter)—because I look at materials discovery as one of the coolest potential benefits of AI.

I think that AI-assisted materials discovery—you know, I was a graduate student once upon a time, like, fiddling with solar materials in the laboratory and I could only try so many permutations at once. What if AI could do that initial screen for me and I only really had to make in the lab the devices based out of the best elemental combinations? That would be amazing.

I think that will change clean energy materials for the better and we’ll have more efficient solar cells, batteries, hydrogen electrolyzers, catalysts, et cetera. That’s number two.

And then number three, the thing that really gets me going is technologies to clean up heavy industry. I think between heavy industry and heavy fuels we don’t have many good technologies but there are technologies that are emerging off the drawing board, for example, to use electrolysis to make clean steel. I think that’s going to change the world.

BEVINGTON: Thank you so much.

You connected climate and national security so we’ll move to Maggie now and ask you what are the biggest national security threats that you see internationally over the next first term of the next president?

KOSAL: Thank you, Rickey.

So the first one that I see—I’m going to leverage a Georgia Tech alum, Admiral Sandy Winnefeld. He likes to talk about the global operating system and what he really means is the international order—the agreements, the laws of armed conflict, the rules of war, the system—the economic and the geopolitical system.

And as we’re moving forward it is critical that the United States continue to play a role in that and that we not just play a leadership role but that we ensure that there are individuals who can bridge the technological and the geopolitical.

You know, it’s a great example—you know, my colleague here cited some of these amazing technologies that are being developed. Well, if you’re going to send them out into the world do we understand the implications and how do you best enable that technology to be deployed in a place that may not look like the United States.

So we need individuals who bridge the technological, the social sciences, the humanities. So that, I’d say, is the first thing.

You know, the second thing I’d say is we—and this ties quite closely—we need to continue and perhaps revisit the importance of expertise that—we have a lot of super smart people. We need to ensure that people who have expertise and who have experience are put in positions where they are making these decisions and where they have influence.

In this increasingly technologically dependent, interconnected, complex world, you know, we need to have the people who know what they’re talking about, who haven’t just watched three YouTube videos. (Laughter.)

You know, and then the last thing that I’m going to cite, you know, sort of my third thing—and there are a whole bunch of others that I could go on about. Certainly, climate change is one of them. Sometimes I say, you know, climate change is the most intractable question out there. That’s why I study nuclear weapons because by comparison nuclear weapons are easier. They’re not easy but it’s by comparison to dealing with climate change.

But I am from the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs, named for the senator who was responsible for the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program. So one of the pieces that I see is unquestionably we need to address issues of nonproliferation, whether that be looking at how do we get something back with Iran, how do we deal with the intersection of emerging technologies with some of these proliferation threats, and then what does cooperative threat reduction for the twenty-first century look like.

So I used to say that what I would like to see it be is the United States and Russia, we might partner to look at how do you do the beneficial uses of nanotechnology in Pakistan and India. Well, that’s probably not going to be something we’re pursuing these days, first of all, because not quite have the same partnerships with Russia when I was making those comments. But, certainly, we now look at AI. Are there places where how AI might have implications can be used as part of science diplomacy, technological diplomacy?

Again, my colleague cited a Pew study. If one goes and surveys internationally including countries that are often seen as adversaries or competitors what people cite as the single thing they admire the most about the United States is not our form of government, certainly not Hollywood. It’s our technological achievements, and that is something, an underutilized foreign policy lever that we do not utilize enough.

Now, the flip side is if you ask the American citizens why do they think other countries admire us it’s, like, 32 percent cite technological advances. So it’s this mirror imaging. We think what they value is our form of government, freedom of the press, these other things, whereas we, perhaps, are missing an opportunity to leverage that which we do fantastically.

BEVINGTON: How would you advise the next president to increase that leverage?

KOSAL: Well, first of all, you need to ensure that you have a scientific advisor to the secretary of state appointed and it be somebody who can—understands how Washington works and can be effective.

I think we need more of these individuals who are in the government at high levels where they are able to have influence within other parts of the federal government. Now, at the Department of Defense there are lots of PhDs. Especially in certain parts of the Department of Defense there are more PhD scientists than almost any other place than Georgia Tech.

But if you go into the office of the secretary of defense in the policy shop it’s mostly PhDs in political science, if they have a PhD. So want to see more PhDs in political science in OSD policy and put more political scientists, more economists, more anthropologists, more humanities folks, in DARPA, in the Army Research Lab, in Office of Naval Research, in Air Force Research Lab, hitting them all.

BEVINGTON: Thank you.

Kat, let’s turn to artificial intelligence. Thank you for patiently waiting and listening to the rest of the panelists.

DUFFY: I mean, I think we’ve already turned to it, right? Like, it’s—

BEVINGTON: Well, we have. Sure.

DUFFY: —sort of pervasive.

BEVINGTON: Well, sure. In fact, I might—actually, since we’ve opened it up may I ask what your initial reactions were?

DUFFY: Like, that tracks. (Laughter.) I mean, truly, I think it’s reflective of the fact that AI is not a monolith, right? We’re talking about artificial intelligence as if it’s this one specific thing, and everyone is in agreement on what that term means, and so I think we are at the very beginning of what’s also going to be sort of a lexicon journey.

We’re going to end up using different words and different phrases for the way that we talk about this. I spend a lot of time when I sit with people and they want to talk about AI. I’m, like, who checked the weather today? Like, everybody used AI, right?

Like, who had a predictive word in a text message? Who had Gmail suggest a response? Like, all of that’s AI. What a lot of people are really concerned about is, you know, the emergence of generative AI and I would say in the public discourse what we’ve seen is that people are mostly responding to that version of generative AI which they have access to, which tend to be chatbots and a little bit of search.

That’s a very small component of what this broader technology is about and I also think it’s why that accessibility, though, if you come from a humanities background, if you come from a words background, if you come from that space which many policymakers and decisionmakers and governments all over the world come from, right, they live in the land of words. They live in the land of ideas. They live in the land of imagery, of communicating ideas. They’re not necessarily living in the land of, like, how am I going to use the right solar—like, how am I going to use right tools for the best battery, right?

And so, you know, my first gig in tech policy was Y2K, y’all. Like, I was part of the original hype cycle, OK, and I have still never seen anything like the response that I’ve seen from governments around the world to the emergence of these generative AI tools, and including with the Biden administration. An unbelievably quick turnaround on an administrative—on the executive order for AI. Like, phenomenally faster than they were able to put out the data security EO which they, frankly, worked on longer.

So right now there’s about—there’s between 750 and 800 different national-level AI governance initiatives that are happening around the world, to someone’s best count, right? There’s more than fifty international, transnational, global governance initiatives or mechanisms that are happening around AI as well.

There were more than a hundred and fifty types of national legislative acts around the world on generative AI in 2023. There are seventy-nine countries now that have national AI plans, right, so this is exploding all over the world, not just in the United States.

And in terms of the polling on national security I would say what’s interesting to me is how much the national security discussion these days has this subtext of we must retain primacy in AI in order to retain primacy against China, and if we do not retain primacy against China we will be risking our national security.

And so there is this AI tension, I would say, and anxiety that is sort of bubbling underneath a lot of the—I would say a lot of the great powers competition discussions right now, a lot of the thoughts around, you know, where markets could go, what could be powered, and that really comes home to this—the survey we had on domestic challenges.

So January, Fulton County ransomware attack, right. Took the county up till end of March to be fully functional, and you’d think, oh, like, that’s terrible to get hit by a ransomware attack. That’s a new thing. 2018, Atlanta got hit by a ransomware attack, and it cost $2.5 million to remedy a ransomware charge for $50,000.

OK. This past year, 2023, we hit $1.1 billion in ransomware demands and payments globally. This is a global issue and it’s being supercharged by AI, right, because AI makes it a lot faster to just sit and try to find vulnerabilities in a system and also to sit and do social engineering and come up with social engineering problems. It’s really powering ransomware.

And so this is where I’m—this is what I mean when I say, like, it’s not really the technology that I’m concerned about. It’s the different use cases and where are the use cases where we want to harness it and we really want America to be a global leader in allowing access to opportunity and a transformational new century and where, on the other hand, are we going to see AI truly exacerbating and scaling risks and what I think of as really sociological problems in some respects to a degree that we’re not necessarily prepared to handle.

And those, to me, are the—that’s the real tension right now with how we think about governing it. But you don’t govern your electrical outlet the same way that you govern, like, a power station, right? Those are both electricity, and I think AI is going to emerge to look more like that over the years.

BEVINGTON: Well, you mentioned the tension on—there’s the subtext of there being this arms race on AI with China. Where do you come down on that?

DUFFY: I mean, it’s tricky. (Laughs.) I would say this.

From a pure national security standpoint I’m actually more concerned about where AI makes it faster, easier, and cheaper for incentivized bad actors to do something that is bad. Where does it take nation-state capabilities and allow them to be given to actors who operate at a much lower level than a nation-state?

I’m not sure that our intelligence community is set up to deal with that. It just decentralizes the threat to a really significant degree. So if you think about, you know, armed militias with autonomous drones, right, like that—I am worried about the degree to which national security threats can scale across the globe, not just in the United States.

In terms of—you know, with China I get a little—I am uninspired by the positioning of China and the U.S. as a hard binary here. The world does not look at it that way, right. The world does not think of the U.S. as a good actor and China as a malign actor, right.

The world—most countries do not look at the U.S. as, like, the good guy and China as the bad guy, and there’s a lot of the research that China is putting out on things like testing of AI systems, right, that could be actually incredibly important and transformative and there are probably areas where—for example, in climate change—where advancements in AI that are coming from China and advancements in AI that are coming from the United States are going to be most powerful if they’re brought together.

Same thing with public health, right. Same thing in other areas that are of mutual concern and benefit. And so I worry a little bit that AI is being used sometime as a bit of a boogeyman in order to really push on a more hawkish narrative than may be merited.

That said, adversarial uses of it are incredibly concerning. And if America does not exert leadership as the country that helps low- and medium-income countries to realize the opportunities that AI can offer, and to access it, there’s a much greater sense of enthusiasm in lower- and middle-income countries for what AI could offer. And there’s a giant sense of FOMO right now, right—fear of missing out—among a lot of the sort of G77 nations.

If China approaches AI the same way that it approached connectivity, which is to show up and say, we’re going to wire your country with Huawei. We are going to give you routers. We’re going to give you fiber. We’re going to set it all up for you. We’re going to do it at basically no price and aren’t you happy that we gave you connectivity, right—if China shows up in the same way with subsidized AI systems that just happen to be sucking up all of the data that is being collected in smart cities all over the world, we—the U.S. will have lost a real opportunity.

I almost think about this as the battery waves. Like, we lost the first wave in terms of connectivity. China won. I think it was one of our biggest foreign affairs failings of the last decade.

We now have an opportunity to learn from that, double down and really work with lower- and middle-income countries to help them feel equitably included in the opportunity that we and our innovation economy can offer and to create that market for them as well because there are going to be incredible solutions that come from those countries that will not come from us and I just really hope we don’t fail to seize this moment.

BEVINGTON: Well, you—it’s a perfect segue to how I want to end this portion of the evening. We’re about to turn to audience Q&A, and there are two podium mics here and you can just line up. So please get your questions ready.

Because we have a perfect segue I would like for us to end on opportunities. Let’s look forward into the future with some hope and leave our audience with that energy, shall we?

So going backwards, Kat, you talked about that being an opportunity so my question is what is the—what are the biggest opportunities in terms of foreign policy for the U.S. over the next four years? And we hope that the future president of the United States is listening to our panel. So as though you were speaking, what opportunities can we not afford to miss?

DUFFY: For me it’s all about really leaning into winning over hearts and minds and building truer and deeper partnerships with many of the countries that have felt excluded from the economic growth that has occurred, that feel excluded from a lot of the benefits that we’ve seen in Western democracies.

And so I worry very much that, you know, the issues that we’re seeing in AI, and in cyber and digital generally domestically, they cannot be solved purely domestically, right? These are inherently—these technologies and the systems upon which they operate are inherently global.

We will not be able to fix our own domestic challenges and we will not be able to help move the world forward in a way that is more aligned with American values and democratic principles if we don’t really get out ahead and lead not by sort of lecturing and finger wagging but instead I think lead truly by coming in and offering all sorts of carrots and being that willing partner.

KOSAL: So it’s a fantastic question. So many different ways I can address that.

I would say that, you know, in some ways I’m going to couch my response, that I may be a little bit more of a—more to the hawkish side but still not John Bolton in terms of China. You know, that internationally China approaches most of their relationships very transactionally. We don’t.

We need to continue to approach it from a way that is not purely transactional. That matters for what the United States stands for, for, you know, all of those good things that we want to be citing, or the city upon the hill. You know, so it matters how we interact and that we are not transactional.

You know, opportunities or things that I am most optimistic about it’s actually the young people. And recognize that I have a bit of a biased perspective. You know, Georgia Tech, our students are amazing, and they may not be a representative sample of all the 18- to 22-year-olds out there but they are amazing.

Even if they aren’t Georgia Tech students, younger people are more skeptical, and people hate this when I cite it but it’s the folks who are over fifty who are most—who tend to most be subjected to and fall to mis- and disinformation. Younger people tend to be more cynical—we might put it that way—and—

BEVINGTON: Discerning. We’ll say—

KOSAL: Let’s say that. Let’s say that.

BEVINGTON: (Inaudible.)

KOSAL: Now, of course, they’re individuals. You know, I know lots of, you know, cynical people over fifty. I might be one of them. But the younger people have grown up in a world where they are digital natives. They have a greater ability than me and, certainly, than my mom did to discern. So that gives me a sense of optimism. Lots of other things I could go to but in the interest of time passing it over to my colleague.

SIVARAM: I appreciate you saving me here because the last answer I gave was real doom and gloom. (Laughter.) But, hey, I am actually fundamentally optimistic about a lot of things in climate and the clean energy transition.

You know, this is the year that solar energy really got cheap. It’s so cheap, less than ten cents a watt, that you’re starting to see some really bizarre things. Like, in Pakistan these households, these shop owners, buying solar panels, going entirely off the grid because it’s quite unreliable and the solar is so darn cheap.

How do we take best advantage of this? I think of two things that are real opportunities over the next four years for the next administration.

Number one—I’m cribbing a little bit from Heidi here—the more free and open our global trading system the better for climate change. Clean energy products are so darn cheap right now—batteries, solar panels. A lot of this, by the way, is down to China’s both muscular and somewhat illegal industrial policy but, nevertheless, these products are cheap.

If we’re going to decarbonize the global economy we’re going to do it with an open trading system. So the more that we can do to bring down trade barriers around the world and in this country the better for the clean energy transition.

And the second thing—and this is important for Georgia Tech in particular—the second thing is this is the four years that we need to bring a series of exciting technologies to scale, to commercial scale, and reach what I call tipping points, because for any technology’s life cycle for much of the early days you feel like you’re pushing a boulder up against a hill and it just keeps rolling back over you.

But once you get to the top of that hill and the boulder starts rolling down and gathering its own momentum you’ve hit what I call a tipping point. We hit that in solar and now that boulder is rolling down the hill.

We haven’t yet hit that in, like, forty different technologies and it’s time to hit it. Whether it’s, as I mentioned to you, clean steel and clean fuels, we’re getting close in electric vehicles. Getting technologies from small-scale laboratories or first-of-a-kind demonstrations and scaling them up to the first twenty-five or fifty pilot plants for steel or cement or aluminum or clean aviation fuels that’s got to be the priority of the next four years and we got to do a lot of that work here in the U.S.

BEVINGTON: Thank you. Heidi, close us out.

CREBO-REDIKER: So I liked all of these ideas and I think that they are all achievable. But what you need to have is talent to do it and so I am optimistic that we will in some way, shape, or form crack the immigration nut and actually realize that we can’t demonize people who are from other countries and we need to have a workforce that’s going to support our baby boomers who are retiring really, really fast.

So, you know, we need to have an economy that has—that brings people in legally and have a system that is able to process and take all sorts of considerations into effect particularly on the innovation side.

I mean, if you look at where—you know, where half of the billion-plus unicorn startups are coming from, they’re coming from immigrants. If you look at even in the state of Georgia, you know, your immigrant community is, like, 11 percent and yet 20-plus percent are the ones that are starting new businesses, and 22-plus percent are the ones who are in STEM and actually doing cutting-edge work.

So I’m, like, staple the green card to all the PhDs. I think we need to get to that place because there’s so much talent that wants to come to the U.S. and I think that we have the ability. There was a bipartisan bill in the Senate in February so there—you know, people have been working on this for a very, very long time. There are lots of different trade-offs there.

But I think if we get the talent part right that the U.S. is the best place in the world to actually make that happen so that we can have all the spillovers around the rest of the world that my friends and colleagues were talking about.

DUFFY: Can I add on to that just really quickly?

Because I think sometimes this gets missed and I think it’s such an important component to add on to what you’re saying, which is it’s not just about, like, keep it—you know, allowing that talent to be here and keeping that talent to be here because we’re a great place to build and also because we have access to capital, right.

But, I mean, I’ve lived about half my life—adult life outside of the United States in different countries and about half my adult life in the United States. Our culture is so much more open to failure and to risk. We are so much more rewarding of people who will just take a leap, and if they fail they can try again.

And that idea, that ethos of try, try again is not common culturally in many countries, and I think it is a huge component actually of our soft power and of our cultural capacity to be a global leader.

And so I think there’s just some things that are truly incredible about the American innovation economy that—you know, if you’re a fish in water, like, you don’t know there’s water, right? We’re just really used to that dynamic. But I think it’s rare and special and something we can leverage.

CREBO-REDIKER: So you’re, like, stealing my talking point because I always talk about the capital markets and how they actually won’t penalize failure, which is what gets a lot of people to bring their great ideas here. So, anyway, I think there’s a lot to be optimistic about.

BEVINGTON: Well, thanks to our panel.

Let’s go directly to questions. We’ll start here on this side with this person. Then we’ll go back and forth. Please tell us your name and what organization you represent.

Q: Sure. Thank you all for being here. Amelia Thompson. I’m representing the Atlanta chapter of Harvard Women in Defense, Development, and Diplomacy, and my question is for Ms. Duffy.

Just curious, in your view if you were to sort of assign metrics to all of these national-level AI initiatives what would you think would be the appropriate metrics to gauge your effectiveness?

DUFFY: Sorry. Unpack that for me a little bit. So—

Q: How would you assess how effective these national-level initiatives on AI are? What would you say—what are sort of some indicators of success in the long run?

DUFFY: The ones that are floating around in different countries, you mean?

Q: Yes.

DUFFY: Oh, great question. I am not convinced I would try to put metrics around that at all, frankly, because I think that this is a moment of hyper reactivity from a lot of different governments that want to be able to say they did something.

But the differential capacity between those various nations or among those various nations is so broad that I don’t think that I would try to standardize measurements against it right now. You will see, for example, in the UN the U.S.-led a sort of, for us, groundbreaking resolution in terms of being focused on the SDGs and supporting, like, AI that would build capacity in the SDGs, and the U.S. marshaled a tremendous number of votes. I think it was close to unanimous if not unanimous.

And then China was, like, uh-oh. No, we’re supposed to be the one that rallies everybody on SDGs, not you all. You all are supposed to be civil and political rights. We are supposed to be SDGs. You don’t get to come in on our home turf. So then China did a resolution and a ton of countries also voted with China, right.

So, again, the nations right now are just sitting on the fence trying to figure out what’s going on and trying to get into it. For me, the interesting metric is how many of those didn’t exist three, four years ago versus how many of them exist now, and if we continue to see that scale ramp up so dramatically I suspect what we’re going to see is that scale start to taper off because it will start going into different mechanisms as opposed to being just, like, AI as a monolith.

Q: Thank you.

BEVINGTON: Thank you for your question. We’ve got lots of people standing so next over here.

Q: Thank you. My name is Hans Klein. I’m on the faculty of the School of Public Policy and I teach in the ethics program there.

Thank you very much for this interesting panel. I have a question about the Middle East. It was mentioned in passing, but this is a pretty hot area and it was only mentioned in passing but it’s in a terrible state right now.

So our closest partner nation-state in the Middle East is accused of genocide and credibly so by lawyers, by nation-states, by scholars, by world opinion, and we in the United States are supporting our partner in its actions there and through that are possibly somewhat implicated by that.

So my question is, why—this is an incredible, terrible issue. Why is it not more of an issue in our election? And why are we not focusing more on human rights and actions in the Middle East? Thank you.

DUFFY: Well, I would say it seems like a big issue in the election. I mean, I feel like it has been an important talking point, at least, in the election in the big area of protest, and student protest, and I think a lot of those concerns permeate into how some people have thought about their vote.

So I feel in the election it is there—human rights more broadly. As someone who has worked in human rights forever, I’m always, like, where’s human rights in here? That really surfaces in any American election, right? We’re a civil rights country, like we really think about civil and constitutional rights. We just don’t vibe in human rights.

But, Varun, you were going to say something.

SIVARAM: I mean, I’m probably the guy who brought it up in passing, and I was making literally the opposite argument to what you are making, which is it has taken on outsized importance in this election compared with things that actually affect Americans within America’s borders. So definitely, definitely hear your point, but my argument was that the Middle East tends to dominate foreign policy headlines when in fact there are other issues that have effects on Americans at home.

Now insofar as we are talking about the situation in the Middle East, it’s linked to this emerging concept that folks have been talking about—I’m going to get out over my skis here—the Axis of Autocracies, this set of four nations—Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran—all of whom are increasingly close together. And the Middle East has a different axis known as the Axis of Resistance—Hezbollah, Hamas, Iran, and the Houthis in Yemen, and then a series of militias in Syria and Iraq.

I’m channeling my inner Steve Cook—(laughter)—who is our CFR senior fellow on the Middle East, so anything I say wrong, you can blame him. But I do believe that this is, you know, obviously a core part of what our policymakers in the U.S. think about, and there’s a grand strategic set of objectives and priorities here. For example, ensuring that, among this Axis of Autocracies, one goal may be to pry apart two of the most powerful members, Russia and China. And one way to do that is to demonstrate to China that its other partners are quite weak—if Russia is quite weak against Ukraine—thanks in part to Western action to support Ukraine. If Iran is weak, thanks to the falling apart of its Axis of Resistance, all of this can help to dismantle or at least pull apart the Axis of Autocracies. That at least, I hope, gives some color into some of the strategic thinking behind our approach to the Middle East.

BEVINGTON: Thank you for your question. We have a question over here to the right.

Q: Hi. Bryan Tolleson, serial entrepreneur, currently leading Lexicon Strategies and my new startup, Connexion South, which is helping bridge the American South and Southern Europe.

But I’m really interested in AI and its ability to create what I believe is coming in the next two to three years, which is instant, real-time translation all the time. And Americans historically having the lack of capability for language, unlike other countries who have a lot more language proficiency than we do, and what sort of transformational effect do each of you see happening around foreign policy when Americans are able to have a more personal relationship with people who speak other languages.

DUFFY: I mean, here’s the thing. It’s one thing to be fluent, and it’s another thing to be bilingual, right? And I can say sacar in Argentina, and it’s going to mean something very different than if I say it, like, in Mexico. And so I think that the translation capacities are going to be—they’re already remarkable, and I think the possibility for real-time translation is going to be profound.

That said, so much of how we connect with each other, as well, at a deeper level, is about culture, it’s about idiom, it’s about context, right? And it’s about a shared context and understanding; if you make that joke or if you use that word, this is how it’s going to land.

I don’t know that we’ll get close to an AI that can replicate that. So I think it’s going to be great for, like, traveling, all right—like where is there a bakery; like how can I do my laundry, right? I think it could be great for things like simultaneous translation at conferences, right—supercharged and things like that make it far faster, and cheaper, and easier to do that more sort of formalized translation, but I think that the true human connection, I would worry a little bit that we will gradually flatten out the richness and the range of so many different languages and dialects if we generalize it and sort of mush it into large language models that have just learned against each other to find as many parallels and syntactical connections as they possibly can because a lot of the best translation techniques, as your probably know, right, are actually using English as a mediator, and so it’s taking two languages, using English as the mediator between them, and so they are learning through English for each other. English is a really rich, diverse language in terms of concepts and the number of words, so that’s good, but the—you know, I don’t—I mean, maybe AI could produce like something by Gabriel García Márquez someday. It’s possible because, I mean, fantastical realism—it is basically a hallucination, it’s—(laughter)—(inaudible). But I think, you know, that that’s the part that I worry we would miss, and I’m worried that we would normalize not missing it, and in so doing, lose a lot of our humanity.

CREBO-REDIKER: So I think one of the really, you know, potentially negative consequences is that people stop learning languages.

BEVINGTON: Yeah.

CREBO-REDIKER: And I am completely with Kat here. I mean, part of learning a language is going, and moving, and spending time in a country where you actually learn everything about the culture because, even if you understand the technical dialogue that you are having, you don’t understand, you know, why they would think the way they think. And you don’t—and you can really do that if you live somewhere long enough and you are speaking another language long enough, your brain can start to internalize how you can actually negotiate with people, interact with people.

It’s important at the State Department, for example, if you’re going to be able to, like, read all the signs and understand how to get what you—you know, what you—what’s mutually beneficial, you really need to not use a translation mechanism through AI.

DUFFY: If a British person ever tells you something was interesting—real insult. (Laughter.)

KOSAL: You know, so to further this, you know, I want translators like that because I travel so many places and would love to have that. But there are—you know, again, I just—you know, concur with my colleagues. It’s reductionist to say that an AI translator is going to be able to deal with the things—and again, something I mentioned before, that expertise. You know, if you are negotiating an arms control treaty, you know, it needs to be in both languages, or in multiple languages, and you need to understand those nuances, and that is critically important—just as one example in the national security realm.

The other piece to it that I’ll flip it over is currently most of the generative models are based on English, and that in some ways is a national security potential vulnerability. We need to be developing models, and there need to be models out there that are using other languages because right now it’s just everything is potentially in English—you know, it’s this bias with the English language, it’s mostly American English that is potentially going to be included in some of the further down applications. So that’s sort of the way that I look at that, is I want to see other languages being developed in and used as the initial data sets for other LLMs rather than it just all being American English.

BEVINGTON: Thank you. Next question here.

Q: Hi. I’m Dennis Murphy. I am a current PhD student at the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs, and a former CFR young professional.

So I’ve got a quick question—very easy. Early on we saw that domestic issues is the number one thing we’re all concerned about. When we talk about foreign policy, it’s usually good to have buy-in from the public to have enduring foreign policy.

If you could persuade the American people about any one thing, what would it be to have some type of beneficial enduring foreign policy. Thank you very much.

BEVINGTON: Great question.

CREBO-REDIKER: I’ll take it.

BEVINGTON: The future president is listening, so here we go. No pressure.

CREDO-REDIKER: The world is an unbelievably complicated place; it has gotten significantly more complicated over the past couple of years, and that having friends and allies, and being able to work with them constructively will continue to be one of the most important things that the U.S. can do as a leader.

(Pause.)

BEVINGTON: Maggie or Kat? (Laughter.) Or, Varun, do you want to answer?

KOSAL: I mean, I’d tell them to turn off the TV, start reading and, you know, talk to your neighbors more—if I could do one thing. Also have people—have interactions one-on-one where you are going across the different groups. Now this is—this is not going to be able to deal with all of it, but I think it will help if you have more people from rural areas interacting with more people from city areas. We are becoming increasingly balkanized in the urban and the rural, and so turn off your TV.

SIVARAM: Yeah, I mean, I really like—I like both of these, and sorry I was trying to pass, but if I had to say one thing it’s that our actions around the world deeply affect the everyday issues that affect us, right? I can fill my gas tank, and one day my electric vehicle, for a very low price because America has primacy and the ability to protect freedom of navigation in the world’s oceans. I am able to—as Heidi mentioned—access cheap goods through Amazon or even Shein or Temu because we have a global trading order that works quite well but is now crumbling.

America’s actions around the world affect our everyday lives. I stay safe, and my child is safe because we have a strong military and alliances around the world, and are deterring countries with large nuclear arsenals. We may not see foreign policy every day, but if we don’t engage in intelligent foreign policy, our everyday life does not stay the same.

DUFFY: Wow. I mean, basically the same. I think I would phrase it a little differently, but I would say, like, hey, if you want to live in the United State and not other countries, why is that? And if living in the United States feels really great, then foreign policy is part of what is helping keep it that way.

BEVINGTON: Thank you.

Next question from Byron.

Q: Hey, everyone. So my name is Byron Stokes, and I’m actually a staff member at Georgia Tech, also a graduate student at the Nunn School. I’m taking Professor K.’s class. And I’m also the vice chair for the World Affairs Council of Atlanta, the young leaders, so, hey, Rickey. (Laughs.)

BEVINGTON: Thank you, Byron.

Q: I have a lot going on. (Laughs.)

So my question has to do with nuclear energy. I really like how you brought up, Varun, about, you know, solar energy and things of that nature. So I guess my question is more is nuclear energy a viable option for the U.S. to pitch to other countries, you know, Dr. K., on the lines of nonproliferation, or should we just shun that altogether and just say, let’s focus on solar energy?

Varun and Professor K., if you all could answer that, that would be great.

DUFFY: I’m so interested in this answer.

SIVARAM: Great, great question. I’m so glad you—do you want to go first?

KOSAL: No, you can go first, and then I’ll—

SIVARAM: I’m so glad you brought that up.

Look, first of all, let me just say I’m a huge fan of nuclear; like nuclear has so many inherent advantages. It’s very compact. You can have a one-gigawatt plant—that’s a very large plant—in a very compact area. We have basically an unlimited fuel supply on this planet. We could power our whole energy needs many times over with nuclear, and the best part is it’s completely emission free, and it’s maybe the safest source of energy in the history of the earth minus, maybe, solar energy. It’s much safer, for example, than coal or gas power plants that kill people through air pollution. Nuclear has an excellent safety record, notwithstanding the criticisms.

The reasons that we don’t have a lot of nuclear reactors is kind of a historical accident. I think we picked the wrong nuclear design—there are many possible designs. Back in the 1950s, American first made nuclear reactors and put them on submarines, and then they put them in Pennsylvania—that was the first nuclear reactor—and it happened to use this design that we then scaled up, and then the world scaled up this design called the light-water reactor. And it was really hard to build, and you had to build these enormous containment zones, and it wasn’t very practical.

There’s a series of new designs now—they are either smaller—what are known as small modular reactors—or they can be large, but they just don’t need these enormous containment zones, and they can be much cheaper, prefabricated, faster to build. It would be really great if America was in the lead on this.

You know, when I think about the set of technologies where we could win, we could really lead the world, I think advanced nuclear is one of them. There are American startups—just two of them just announced big deals over the last week with Amazon Google—Oklo Energy, for example.

We could lead the world in this. We could lead the world in geothermal because of the oil and gas tie. We could lead the world in solid-state batteries, as I mentioned to you. But we’re not, and I think it hurts our global credibility and our ability to make an offer to other countries.

A Russia or China will go to a potential client state and say, hey, I’ll build your nuclear reactor, I’ll operate it, I’ll give you the fuel, and in exchange, you will give me diplomatic or other benefits. I may want to have a military benefit, a base that I get to site. That’s leverage we give up when we don’t do well in nuclear, so to your question, we should push hard on nuclear.

I wrote a book on solar energy, so I’m a solar advocate, but I love nuclear, and I’d like us to do more of it.

CREBO-REDIKER: The Department of Energy actually did a lot of the funding of some of the first SMR demonstration projects that have turned into companies actually. We have the “not in my backyard” and a lot of issues around how we were going to actually put those demonstrations to work. And luckily, Canada stepped in, and actually the companies that I’m thinking about actually had contracts with Canadian countries—or with Canadian companies and provinces and were able to actually start doing demonstrations there. And now they are coming back, fundraising in the U.S. And it’s actually—for the SMR space, it’s really—it’s really quite interesting.

The other side is that the Defense Department has a mini—small modular reactor that has come off—come off of the nuclear submarine that they have—it’s called Project Pele, and they are teamed up with the Idaho lab right now. It’s actually a 2025 thing, so it’s not like we have to wait another 15 years. It’s actually—they are putting it into the—into the—you know, the lab with a couple of companies right now. It’s just—it’s something that I think is right around the corner.

So I totally agree that this is something we could—we could actually own, and the little ones that DOD is actually working on from Project Pele, they can go for—you know, if there is a natural disaster somewhere, if there is—you know, if there—if there is a need in a poor, rural, remote community, those are perfect. So I think that there is a lot to be optimistic about there.

Georgia Tech, I believe, is actually working with DOD on Project Pele.

KOSAL: So great question, and I appreciate my colleagues here, you know, providing pieces so I don’t have to, you know, say those things.

So, yes, small modular reactors; yes, some of these other approaches to nuclear energy are ones that we should be supporting. Also fusion, and that’s someplace where we need investment in the research and development.

By coincidence, I’m going to be speaking tomorrow at Spelman, at a conference on new, inclusive voices in nuclear policy and deterrence. And a big piece of it is actually going to be on what are the things that the United States and the world can do to help address nonproliferation, climate change, as it intersects with nuclear energy.

And as I was, you know, beginning to put together my comments, I started looking at what are some of the statistics. And, you know, if you look at nuclear engineers—although those are not the only people who are important in development of nuclear plants—they’re still 70 percent white men. If you look at the attempts thus far to commercialize small modular reactors in the United States, they have not been successful. And it has mostly been—there was an attempt in the West, and it had to do with some of the internecine politics of the way our grid is set up, and actually the person behind you could probably speak more authoritatively to this than I could.

And here’s the place where we need more entrepreneurs. And again, you look at the statistics. You know, most entrepreneurs have a certain demographic, particularly in nuclear. So we need more voices in this.

And the other piece particularly—and this is more of a domestic politics aspect—women tend to be the most skeptical about domestic nuclear energy. So we need more women who can speak authoritatively about why it is important—and women of color, so that’s sort of pulling some pieces.

As far as the nonproliferation issues, it varies as we’re looking at these different approaches, but there is a challenge that sometimes some of these advanced nuclear reactors that are proliferation resistant, what that ends up being is it makes it harder to verify. So, you know, there’s this change in the way that you would do verification in terms of this is not being converted for other uses where we don’t want it, and that’s something that needs to be approached—proliferation.

And then with fusion, we should be doing a lot more thinking about what are the proliferation concerns with fusion. Certainly tritium is one of them, but we don’t currently have any meaningful restrictions with regard to tritium, and some of that has to do with the fact that it has a very—a relatively short half-life. But that’s a piece where looking out further—nonproliferation in the context of fusion—is something else that we need to be thinking about.

BEVINGTON: Thank you for all of your answers. We are actually at time, so here’s what I’m going to ask us to do. I know—I’m not trying to disappoint you.

I’m going to invite all three of you who are standing to ask one brief question. We’re going to get them all in, and then I’m going to invite the panel to answer as they wish. So we’ll go these two, and then this one.

Q: OK. Marilyn Brown, recovering utility regulator—(laughter)—from Pennsylvania authority, and also professor here at Georgia Tech where I teach in this field of energy and climate.

You talked, Varun, and I wanted to ask you a question, particularly with the publication of your new MIT book, Taming Solar—Taming the Sun, you were speaking lamentingly about how the U.S. has lost the race in lithium batteries, and we need to, you know, rev up the capability in solid state batteries.

But you talk in your book about the potential for global transmission to bring sun everywhere on the globe, in which case we don’t need these batteries. Could we not instead excel at that? And is there—that not a great agenda for a foreign relations book?

BEVINGTON: Thank you so much for your question. And we’ll have you ask your question.

Q: Good evening. My name is Kashoon Leeza. I’m a Fulbright candidate from Pakistan here at Sam Nunn School.

My question is to Duffy, and it’s related to cyber. We know that cyber is gaining relevance in the threat landscape, particularly at the foreign level, but also at domestic level. Just a few weeks ago we saw the pager attack in Lebanon. We see Russian attacks on the critical infrastructure. How do you think cyber is going to be factored in U.S. foreign policy moving forward?

BEVINGTON: Thank you. And the final question here.

Q: Hello, my name is Vangtha (ph). I’m currently an undergraduate computer science major at Georgia Tech. And my question is also for Ms. Duffy.

And so when you were discussing America’s primacy in artificial intelligence, one thing that I’ve been reading in the news lately has been that America is losing its primacy on various fronts when it comes to knowledge and stuff like that. And I was also reading the Foreign Affairs booklet that was handed out, and I think there was also an essay about that.

And so my question is related to our primacy on various fronts. I know that you said that we should focus on uplifting other countries rather than focusing on maintaining our primacy, but is it something that we should—in the—I think the words that you mentioned it was more like a conscious shift that we have to make, but is it something that’s more like we’re losing it, therefore we should shift it, or is it something that we’re deciding to shift gears because I think that’s something that’s a bit more concerning.

BEVINGTON: Thank you for your questions, and we’ll have some brief remarks, and then we’re going to go back to the poll, so get your QR codes ready.

SIVARAM: OK, I’ll take the first question. I’m so honored, by the way, that you brought up the super-grid concept because it proves to me that you got all the way to Chapter Eight—(laughter)—which blows my mind. But thank you.

DUFFY: Are you sure she didn’t just summarize it? (Laughter.)

SIVARAM: (Inaudible.)

But, look, I’ve got to say I wrote the book six years ago. I am substantially less optimistic about opportunities for long-distance transmission than I was back then. And even in our own country, in the U.S.—and you know this as a recovering utility regulator—you know how difficult it is to build transmission here in the U.S., let alone try and build a globe-spanning super grid.

There were various initiatives in place. I actually spent the last two years of my career working in Europe, and we’ve been substantially successful in Europe in connecting different zones and different countries through transmission. But let me zoom out.

How do we get renewables to power the economy? There are kind of four ways. You can store energy through batteries, you can build long-distance transmission, you can pair solar with other kinds of what we call dispatchable generation, generation that you turn on and off whenever you want, instead of solar, which only happens when the sun is working. And fourth is you can turn up and down the demand side—how we use electricity. And I think the demand-side revolution is what’s coming. That’s what I’m most optimistic about—about us being able to control loads, whether they are electric vehicles, or factories, data centers. Demand-side management, I think, is going to make it possible to integrate solar and wind even as we struggle to build transmission around the globe.

Thanks for the question.

BEVINGTON: Thank you.

DUFFY: OK, and on the—I’ll start with the last question and then move to the second question.

I would say—to me there’s two things. One, there is maintaining our excellence and our primacy in AI through a very strong and strategic domestic strategy, so I think the entire R&D budget for the federal government for AI for 2025 is $3.3 billion dollars. Amazon invested $4 billion in OpenAI alone, OK? So the degree to which innovation has been captured by the private sector in this space and, consequently, rewards revenue models that—or rewards models in governance that are based in managing investor risk and not managing societal risk is, I think, of very profound concern.

And so one of the things that I would love to see is an enormous effort by the U.S. government to build back more innovation space and capacity. And you see this under the CHIPS Act. You’ve seen it—like it’s—the Biden administration has worked on this; we just need a lot more because I want Georgia Tech having, you know, the leading research facilities, having the ability to attract the top talent, pay these types of salaries that are sucking people into the private sector. We need to balance that equation out domestically to maintain our primacy globally.

In terms of the broader thing that I was saying—kind of like leading with carrots, right—I think it’s more sort of to where Dr. K. was going. It’s that our leadership needs to be a values-driven one, and one that inspires people to come along with us, and I think that we have, in past years, a foreign affairs strategy and narrative that was much more maligned influence and malign actors, and it wasn’t something that really brought a lot of nations into our fold. And so I think the more that we can strengthen our capacity domestically while also coupling that with a narrative that really encourages people to feel like we’re the partner they want, that’s sort of what I mean. It’s kind like a two-step.

In terms of cybersecurity, I mean, it’s so critical. The U.S. government has made incredible gains, right, in what it can do with cybersecurity. Here’s the tricky thing. It’s the Constitution. Ya’ll, federalism not good for cybersecurity, right, because the federal government actually has very limited authority over what it can tell a municipality to do, what it can tell a school district to do, what it can tell a state to do. It doesn’t have the authority to do it, and so it’s kind of like a charm offensive, and—you know, and trying to bring folks along, and then the states and the governments don’t have—local governments don’t have the money and the resources that we need.

This is a very big problem. Eighty percent now of the common routers in households in the United States are TP-Link, which is produced by China, and which are known to be sold at a loss, and which are known to be riddled with bugs, right? That’s concerning a little bit maybe.

And so I think with cybersecurity, one of the best things that we could do moving forward is—and we have someone in our audience who is an expert on this—is we need a transformational capacity for the U.S. government to handle cybersecurity incidents, reporting, and investigation. Right now we have a volunteer board with relatively little independence and agency. The reason we have the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), right, is because planes crashed, and they needed to figure out why, and in having that and having those subpoena powers, those investigatory authorities, we’re able to help the entire world fly safer. It’s not just the United States, right?

The United States can lead through having a strong, independent, rigorous, strategic cybersecurity incident review board in the same way that we have the NTSB, and that is something that is being considered in Congress that I would hope any next administration would really take on as a key goal.

BEVINGTON: CFR is famously prompt for ending on time. I’m going to give Maggie two minutes, and then we’re going to get to the poll. And I’m taking moderator privilege because we’re at Georgia Tech.

DUFFY: She’s from Georgia. She doesn’t have to end on time. (Laughter.)

KOSAL: Well, I am a big believer, don’t punish the punctual. You start on time and you end on time. I want to actually pull together the cyber and the AI. We do often hear about concerns and potential threats. The reality is, right now any time you send an email to a .mil email address, dot military, the Department of Defense, it goes through an AI ML that is faster in detecting dox attempts, at detecting malware, than people can do. It’s called SHARKSEER, was the original name of the program when it was in NSA, and then somebody mentioned it at an open congressional hearing.

So as we’re thinking about AI, it is also really important to remember that there are likely going to be things that we can employ AI that are going to be benefits. And in terms of, you know, defensive cybersecurity, I think that’s one of the ones that it may have some of the greatest implications for. I won’t talk about this because of time, but a second one, and if anyone’s interested, for detection of potential proliferation programs—nuclear, chemical, biological.

BEVINGTON: Thank you all very much. Now we’re going to go to our poll. So we don’t have the screen here for you to see the results so please look at the results on your phone as you’re voting. And so we’re going to go to the first one.

How important is foreign policy when considering who you will vote for in the presidential election? Your options are “very important,” “somewhat important,” and “not important.”

Am I supposed to be—OK, am I supposed to look for an email, Rachael? OK. It’s going through the AI nonproliferation system. (Laughter.) Oh, it threaded. OK, here we go. OK. Poll number one. Oh, Rachael, this is the first one, not the most recent one.

DUFFY: I’m terrified that the numbers will suggest that everyone now thinks it’s less important. I’m really feeling very anxious. (Laughter.)

SIVARAM: Let’s go climate! (Laughter.)

DUFFY: I mean, if AI goes to 6 percent, that’s doubled. (Laughter.)

SIVARAM: You promised me a y’all at some point, it took you till 7:00 to give me a y’all.

DUFFY: That’s true.

BEVINGTON: Y’all?

SIVARAM: You said, federalism, y’all.

DUFFY: It’s true. (Laughter.)

BEVINGTON: Well, anyway, while we’re waiting for the email to come through I’ll just read the rest of the questions so you can get ready to answer them.

The next one will be: How active should the United States be in global affairs? More active than it is now, maintain current level of activity, less active than it is now, not at all active, and do not know.

The third question is, which of the following do you consider the greatest threat to national security? Stand by. Let me see if I can get results here on my little CFR iPad.

DUFFY: Well, while we’re waiting, on the subject of y’alls I’m from Kentucky, so I come by it naturally. And I went to lunch. She said, what do you want to drink? And I said, I want a coke. And she said, what kind? (Laughter.) And I said, Sprite. (Laughter.) And I hope—and it was so great. (Laughter.) I know. It was just very restorative. It’s the appropriate way to order a soft drink. (Laughs.)

SIVARAM: I’m so confused. (Laughter.)

DUFFY: Yeah. He’s from the West Coast.

BEVINGTON: There we go.

KOSAL: Yeah, I’m from the Midwest, so we say pop.

BEVINGTON: You say pop?

KOSAL: Mmm hmm.

BEVINGTON: OK. I think that we have results. Do we have results here? I’m just seeing the poll, Rachel. I’m so sorry.

DUFFY: I’m terrified this is like what 2:00 a.m. on election night is going to be like. (Laughter.) November 8. (Laughs.) I think, maybe, do we have—no. (Laughs.)

BEVINGTON: Well—

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hand counting is the answer, y’all.

BEVINGTON: Hand counting is the answer. (Laughter.) I love it.

KOSAL: All y’all, plural.

DUFFY: Uh-huh. In Louisville, we say “your alls.” We don’t say, like, y’all, get y’all—

BEVINGTON: Just to give you all an update, and thank you all for your patience. I’m seeing the questions, but not the responses at the moment. So I can’t give you kind of a live, you know, update on what the purpose of the poll, obviously. And now it’s logged out. So yes.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: What about if we raise our hands?

BEVINGTON: We could raise our hands. Got it? OK.

OK, number one, here we go: How important is foreign policy when considering who you will vote for in the presidential election? Seventy-four percent say very important. And before—

DUFFY: We increased by one percentage point.

BEVINGTON: —we’ve got—were one percentage point. At the beginning of this it was 73 percent. And actually, so that’s great.

Should I just do the topline ones? OK, great.

So the next question is: How active should the United States be in global affairs? And we’ve got “more active than it is now,” “maintain current level of activity,” “less active,” “not active at all,” and then, “do not know.” And we have raised to right now, after the panel, we are at more active than it is now 51 percent. We were at 32 percent before. (Applause.) We were listening, apparently.

And then the next question is: Which of the following do you consider the greatest threat to U.S. national security—AI, China, climate change, domestic challenges, Russia, or other? Domestic challenges has lost a few points, at 38 percent. We were at 41 percent before the beginning. And let’s see who picked up some. Climate change picked up about—a little over 10 percent. Was at 17 percent, now at 32 percent. China went down from 22 percent to 20 percent. And AI went up from 4 percent to 6 percent.

OK, which of the following do you consider—sorry. That’s not the right one. What do you think about the scale of U.S. efforts to combat climate change—the United States is doing too much, doing the right amount, or not doing enough? And the live results are not doing enough wins at 59 percent, down from 75 percent, OK, which means doing the right amount has risen to 32 percent from 16 percent, and doing too much has gone down from 13 percent to 8 percent. We are changing hearts and minds.

OK, and then the final question: How do you feel about the widespread use of generative AI in daily life? And we have picked up significant percentage. More—no. Equally excited, and then, sorry, it’s still changing. Are we still—we’re not locked yet. Hang on. This was not in the job description, but anyway. (Laughter.)

DUFFY: I should have suggested that we just add a line that just says, “yarg!” (Laughter.)

BEVINGTON: I know that feeling. OK, we have actually changed a little bit. Before this panel we were at 44 percent equally excited—excuse me—40 percent equally excited and concerned. Now we are locked at 43 percent. And there’s been a little bit of change on more excited than concerned, 28 percent to 30 percent. And then more concerned than excited, 32 percent down to 27 percent. And I’m sure that we will have these available if you all want on the website. Thank you so much for the tech support.

OK, so now we just have some thank-yous. First of all, thanks to all of you. Applause for our audience. (Applause.) Thank you for your patience and for your attendance. Thanks to Heidi, and Varun, and Maggie, and Kat, and, of course, all of the staff at Council on Foreign Relations for making tonight possible, as well as Georgia Tech. Thank you. This event was made possible in part by the generous support of the Carnegie Corporation of New York. It will be available to watch after the fact on CFR.org. We hope that you visit CFR.org and ForeignAffairs.com for additional nonpartisan information and analysis on international affairs and U.S. foreign policy in the lead-up to the election and beyond. But most important, please vote before or on Election Day. And we will see you next time. Thank you so much. (Applause.)

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