Twenty-Ninth Term Member Conference

 

FROMAN: Well, good evening, everybody. It’s great to see you all here, and welcome to those who are on Zoom as well. I’m Mike Froman, president of the Council, and this is one of my favorite events of the year, having been a term member myself just a few years ago. So thank you all for taking the time to be there.

Before I introduce our speaker and engage in conversation, let me just say a word about the Term Member Program. This is the Stephen M. Kellen Term Member Program. Stephen Kellen was a longtime member of the Council who was really focused on building relationships with the next generation. And we’re incredibly grateful to the Kellen family and the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation for their support of the program; also to current CFR member Andrew Gundlach, who’s Mr. Kellen’s grandson and who has continued to support the Council and be very much involved in all of our activities.

We expect about 400 term members over the course of the next twenty-four hours sort of streaming in and out of the—of the building, which is great. We’re going to be covering a lot of different issues on the agenda, but I hope you all take some time to get to know each other, to build your network here. This is a key part of what we view as the Council’s mission, to help identify, promote, and develop the next generation of diverse foreign policy expertise. Our internships, our research assistants, our young staff, our Term Member Program, our Young Professionals Program, these are all part of that overall mission. And the Term Member Program, perhaps the best known and the largest of those, is absolutely, absolutely critical.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t remind all of you that the next deadline for term membership application is January 10. You are by definition our best recruiters, so I do hope you’ll recommend your friends and colleagues who you think would be—make good term members. And Nancy Bodurtha and Vera Ranola are happy to work with you to make sure folks figure out how to—how to apply and apply on time.

With that, let me—let me introduce our very special guest, Nate Fick. Nate went to Dartmouth College, where he studied classics, which was excellent preparation for being a Marine Corps officer. (Laughter.) Served as a(n) infantry and reconnaissance officer in the Marines. He led combat operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. He wrote about it in his bestselling memoir, One Bullet Away. And then transitioned to civilian life—went to business school and the Kennedy School at Harvard, became CEO of a think tank. That should have been the pinnacle of his career, of course. (Laughter.) Went to a think tank, Center for National Security—excuse me, for New American Security. And then founded a cybersecurity software firm, and a very successful one, which he sold. And became, ultimately, the first U.S. ambassador at large for cyberspace and digital policy at the State Department. We’re going to be talking about some of that experience.

Along the way, he was a term member, a life member, and perhaps the shortest-serving board member of the Council on Foreign Relations—(laughter)—because I think he was nominated, added to the board, and about five months later was nominated to be U.S. ambassador at large. So welcome back to the—welcome back to the Council. It’s great to have you here.

Just a reminder, this is on the record. It’ll be posted afterwards. We’ll talk for a little while. I’ll then open it up to questions. At that point, you know, please stand, identify yourself, make it a question, and—(laughter)—we’ll try and get—we’ll try and get as many in as we—as we possibly can.

Let me start, Nate, with the fact that you’ve created this new bureau at the State Department—new Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy. You’re the first ambassador at large and heading that bureau. Starting a new bureau anywhere, maybe at the State Department in particular, any challenges? (Laughter.)

FICK: It’s gone without a hitch.

FROMAN: Yeah. Tell us about that.

FICK: Yeah. Mike, thanks. I’m happy to be here. It’s really good to be back at the Term Member Conference. Last time I was at one, I was in your seat. It wasn’t—it wasn’t very long ago. And as Mike said, the Council’s been a big part of my life and career, so it really is a thrill to be here. I was telling some folks on my team today that this might actually be the most intimidating office—audience I speak to in a long time here, given the depth of expertise that’s in this room.

But, yes, for the past two-and-a-half years we’ve been—we’ve been establishing this new organization at the State Department. And I think we often talk about capacity building, and when we do it we think about—generally think about less-developed countries. And the watchword or the phrase for us is capacity building starts at home. And it’s a little bit like the—you know, the airline safety statement that—put your own mask on before you help someone else. And if the United States is going to have a capable foreign policy in the world on technology topics, then we have to have a capable body of diplomats who are able to carry out that work. And so that means establishing a new—a new enterprise at State, but it also means ensuring that we’re training people and putting them out in the field where the State Department’s real work gets done.

So I’ll give you just a couple examples of the institutionalization.

One, we set up a course at the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute, which is the schoolhouse where American diplomats are trained, and we set the goal of having a trained cyber and digital officer in every U.S. embassy around the world by the end of this year. And we will hit that goal. Every is a little bit squishy because of personnel rotations and all this, but we’ve trained 216 of them so far and we have another cohort that will get trained before the end of the year. So now we will have a point person in every American embassy around the world on technology topics.

The second thing institutionally is when career officers are being evaluated as candidates to be new ambassadors, there are selection criteria, five or six of them, not very many—things you would expect: proven management ability, financial acumen, these sorts of things. For the first time in the last selection cycle, attention to cyber and digital issues and a commitment to incorporating them into all of the embassy’s policy issues is one of the selection criteria. So it cascades, I think, the incentives down through the organization, and we begin to mainstream these issues rather than having a vertical of excellence in a single bureau.

FROMAN: One of the—one of your CFR affiliations that I didn’t mention is that you co-chaired a task force here on “Confronting Reality in Cyberspace: Foreign Policy for a Fragmented Internet.” You worked with one of our fellows, Adam Segal, who then went with you into the—into the State Department, worked with you on the issuance of our International Cyber Strategy—or, Cybersecurity Strategy. It talks about—the task force report talks about how the internet is more fragmented, less universal than ever. And I guess my question is, why is that the case? Was it inevitable that there would be this fragmentation, or do you think there were policy decisions taken in the past that led to this?

FICK: Yeah. Thanks for mentioning the task force report. I did co-chair it. Adam was the lead drafter. And the first line of that report is “The era of the global internet is over.” It’s pretty definitive.

FROMAN: That got people’s attention.

FICK: Well, it’s not the sort of thing you want to publish immediately before a Senate confirmation process.

FROMAN: Right. Right. (Laughter.)

FICK: But I—my crystal ball didn’t work and I didn’t know what was coming.

But it ended up being sort of the best example of think tank work informing government policy because, you know, Adam and I and a team of people here labored for months on that project, and then in very quick order through sort of no—with very little, you know, malice of forethought we were in a position to—

FROMAN: Implement it.

FICK: —implement and act on it. And so that conviction that the task force arrived at—this idea that the era of the global internet, which was supposed to usher in this shared prosperity and dissemination of values and all of the upsides of global connectivity—was kind of coming off the rails, and it was coming off the rails in a couple of regards.

There was the—or, is the problem of authoritarian regimes walling it off. Think about China’s Great Firewall as an example. So that is a hindrance to the—to a—to a global, open, free information ecosystem.

But then there’s also the regulatory fragmentation of the internet and the broader technology landscape. And there you see a real difference, I think, between Washington’s approach and the approach in Brussels. So putting really onerous sovereignty requirements on cloud services, for instance, is another—it is a way—it’s not—I don’t want to put it in the same category as the Great Firewall, but it is a—it is a hindrance to a free and open information environment.

And so because of that concern that we all shared about where the world was going, when we were tasked with drafting the International Strategy—the U.S. strategy—for Cyberspace and Digital Policy, thank you to the Council for letting Adam come into government for a year, and he served as our lead drafter. And the orienting principle of that strategy is something that we call digital solidarity. So, as opposed to digital sovereignty, which is politically popular in a lot of places but kind of a mirage—you know, the benefits of technology are greatest at scale—if—operational efficiency, security efficiencies—we really had to develop—we thought we had to develop an intellectual construct to fight back against sovereignty even with our closest allies and partners.

FROMAN: And how far can solidarity go? Can it include countries that are not democratic, who may have a different set of values than we do?

FICK: I think—well, solidarity is one of the principles on which the strategy is based. The second is the affirmative vision. And I have two teenage daughters, so a lot of personal conviction that pounding the table and saying my way or the highway—

FROMAN: How’s that working for you, though?

FICK: —usually results in the highway. (Laughter.)

FROMAN: Yeah. Yeah.

FICK: And so I think the same thing is true in diplomacy. When the United States walks into the room, and pounds the table, and says you’re with us or you’re with China, middle-ground states don’t like that, small states don’t like that, and it’s not the most effective strategy for building the biggest possible coalition that we can build.

So the affirmative vision is the idea that rather than forcing a choice, it’s actually incumbent upon us to provide a better option. So how do we strengthen our offer, if you will, around the world, and bring the benefits of technology to bear in a way that gets citizens and governments around the world of their own volition to say they want to side with us? And when you look at it that way, sure, the most natural grouping of partners for the United States is always going to be values-based, but I think it does extend and ought to extend beyond democracies. Singapore is not purely a democracy. The UAE is not clearly a democracy. But there are certainly benefits to having tight technology partnerships with states like those.

FROMAN: Let’s talk about the UAE because that’s a relatively recent example where, in fact, they were sort of choosing or we made them choose between the U.S. and China in many respects. And it was called G42, the UAE company, Microsoft made a significant investment in them. It was brokered in part by the U.S. government, as I understand it. But it was predicated on the notion that they would not use Chinese equipment and Chinese infrastructure, and instead would rely and become closer to the U.S. tech stack and U.S. policies. Is that a model for other countries? And why was it so important to get the UAE on our side?

FICK: Yeah. Let’s take a step back and talk about digital infrastructure broadly, and then we can talk about AI infrastructure in particular.

So there’s a global rewiring that is—seems to be happening. And again, my crystal ball doesn’t work, but it seems as if we’re in the early innings of rewiring the whole global ecosystem, an ecosystem that developed generally since 1945. And when you think about supply chains, industrial supply chains and tech supply chains, they’ve been highly optimized for two generations really according to one variable, and that was—that’s cost.

FROMAN: Efficiency, yeah.

FICK: Yeah.

FROMAN: Yeah.

FICK: And a combination of geopolitics being back above the waterline and a global pandemic I think drove home to a lot of people that optimizing for that single variable maybe doesn’t get us where we want to be, and instead we’re perhaps willing to pay a little bit more in order to optimize not only for cost but also for trust and resilience and security. And so you see this rewiring happening.

And if data is kind of part of the lifeblood of a digital economy, then the security, and the resilience of, and the free flow of that data is essential. And so that really leads to the third principle of the strategy, which is that we need to think about the full digital ecosystem. When we talk about cybersecurity now—I built a cybersecurity business starting in 2012. In the beginning of that ten-year journey, cybersecurity really meant data security on laptops, desktops, servers, and mobile devices. It didn’t mean a whole lot more than that. And that’s changed wildly, and now we have to think about the security of undersea cable, and the security of datacenters, and wireless telecom, and communications satellites, and fiber—terrestrial fiber. And so we care about the trustworthiness of that whole ecosystem.

And so now we get to AI and the fact that the AI economy is going to sit on an architecture of a lot of hardware and that hardware is going to require an enormous amount of energy to power. And so there are only a few places in the world where all of the pieces come together for kind of a, you know, cost advantage development of that infrastructure and the UAE is one of those places.

And, I mean, make no mistake, if you look at the global competition in wireless telecom that unfolded in the ’90s there are a lot of lessons. You know, the U.S. and our like-minded partners had a commanding lead in this technology thirty years ago. We lost it almost entirely. We have a couple of providers in Europe in Ericsson and Nokia. We have one in South Korea in Samsung. But generally Huawei ran the table around a lot of the world based on IP theft and government subsidies.

And if you run that playbook across other technologies you can sort of anticipate what they are trying to do and will do if they have the opportunity in critical technologies like AI. So I think the Microsoft-G42 deal, with the support of the U.S. government and with some guardrails in place in how the deal was structured and how it’ll be monitored, is very much an effort to ensure that U.S. and other like-minded companies from countries where we share a basic foundation of values win the race to build up that infrastructure for the next generation.

FROMAN: Well, to your point, China has been engaged in their digital Silk Road and really trying to implement infrastructure around the world, Huawei or otherwise. It’s hard to fight something with nothing. We don’t have a lot of that technology in terms of the mobile infrastructure.

Does AI and the next generation of digital infrastructure give us an opportunity to play where we haven’t been able to play on the mobile side?

FICK: I think it’s a huge opportunity. You know, look at the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals—the SDGs. They’re, like, 85 percent off track, 88 percent off track, something like that. If there were a CEO of the SDGs he or she would have been fired by a board, right?

The only way conceivably to alter the trajectory of that line to meet the SDGs in any meaningful way is potentially the application of new technology. So I think the U.S.—I mean, rewind for a second. Put ourselves in these seats in November of 2022 when ChatGPT was released and every government in the world was scrambling to do something, you know, under pressure from citizens. Do something, do something. But nobody knew what to do.

So I actually think the U.S. took very much the right approach, focusing first on voluntary commitments from the major AI companies, and voluntary mattered for two reasons. One, it’s pretty fast. Two, doesn’t constrain innovation.

It was never intended to be the last step in a governance structure but it was an important first step, and that began a diplomatic task of making sure that the voluntary commitments—the substance of the voluntary commitments—became the DNA of the G-7’s international code of conduct for AI developers and now that governance journey, like, continues. It was through the Japanese presidency of the G-7 and then the Italian presidency and now onward to the Canadian presidency.

And while that’s all been happening on the governance side you’ve got people in developing economies around the world who are going, well, OK, great, but it still feels like a condominium of rich countries and we’re going to get left out.

So Secretary Blinken hosted an event on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly last month and at that meeting the leading American AI businesses made a commitment of a hundred million dollars in access to compute. So not a values-based alignment, not an airy fairy policy statement, but a hundred million bucks of access to compute for countries that may not otherwise have it.

And I think an essential piece of our AI strategy in the next year is going to be demonstrating via deeds, not words, to citizens and countries all over the world that these technologies are going to do good things for them.

FROMAN: I do want to go back to your data—digital sovereignty versus digital solidarity for a moment, because you mentioned that the free flow of data is awfully important and that’s been sort of the U.S. position historically.

More recently, whether it’s around TikTok or around Chinese electric vehicles and the hardware and software in those or, frankly, in some of the trade negotiations that have been going on—IPEF and the WTO—the U.S. is seen as moving away from that position, becoming more focused on digital sovereignty than on digital openness or the free flow of data.

Is that an irrational critique?

FICK: It’s a critique that I strive to rationalize all the time. (Laughter.)

I mean, I think if we take these sort of piece by piece so the—there was a spirited debate inside the U.S. government about whether taking action on TikTok would be a step down a slippery slope and would undermine our values in making these sorts of commitments about free speech and open—communication in an open society, and the ultimate verdict was TikTok is sui generis. There is enough evidence—empirical evidence—demonstrating the vulnerabilities that TikTok exposes on devices and algorithmic manipulation to determine what TikTok is serving its users. It wasn’t—the determination was it’s not a step down or slippery slope, that it’s a tool of the Chinese Communist Party, and also a judgment that it would be far better for that decision to be made legislatively and reflect a broader mandate and will of the people than to do it via executive order, and so that’s ultimately what has happened and the process that’s ongoing.

I think on Chinese-connected vehicles broadly they are—there’s a big difference between kind of data rich digital systems in how we treat the trading relationship with China and everything else, and the data rich digital systems are a tiny slice of overall U.S. trade with China. And so on both the—which is why I think the sort of—you know, Jake Sullivan’s refrain about a small yard and a high fence applies both on the export control side and also on the other side of the ledger when we’re talking about what sort of technologies it is going to be safe to have proliferate in the United States.

FROMAN: Let’s talk a little bit about the—just the threat, the risk matrix out there. We’ve had SolarWinds, Colonial Pipeline, the Typhoon, the hack of the—Russia hacking the Clinton campaign, Iran hacking the Trump campaign. How crazy is it out there right now in terms of cyberattacks happening all the time and it almost seems almost overwhelming—ransomware being used more and more? And how optimistic are you about being able to address it either through defensive measures or actually getting some agreement on what’s acceptable and nonacceptable behavior?

FICK: Yeah. I think—so let’s—again, let’s start with the first principle. So twenty years of ground game diplomacy at the U.N. resulted in a framework of responsible state behavior in cyberspace, which is a set of pretty robust set of principles governing responsible state behavior below the threshold of the use of force. It’s been repeatedly and unanimously endorsed by every U.N. member state and—

FROMAN: And. And therefore it’s enforced and—

FICK: And therefore it gives us—well, and therefore it gives us a little bit of moral authority and legitimacy. And there are a lot of states in the world that don’t care about our norms and don’t care about the norms that they subscribe to.

So, yeah, I went all the way around the world last week and I think my hair is, like, visibly grayer end than it was at the beginning because there’s—you’ve got a bunch of cyber actors that are doing a bunch of bad things in a bunch of geographies and there’s a trend line of increasing alignment among them.

So take just a few examples from the last week. The elections in Moldova—President Maia Sandu of Moldova had a reelection on Sunday. There was also an EU referendum in Moldova and President Sandu failed to win a majority. She was the—she got the most votes but failed to win a majority and so it goes to a runoff. And the EU referendum passed by the hair of its chinny chin, chin, and there was massive rampant Russian cyberattacks and a mis- and disinformation campaign underway to sway the outcome of that election. I was in Chișinău weeks ago and we’ve been working closely with the Moldovan government to try to shore things up.

Look at the latest of the of the Typhoon announcements, the—you know, the PRC holding U.S. critical infrastructure at risk in ways that has no espionage value, no intelligence gathering value. The only value that these actions have is the pre-positioning for future destructive attacks.

And so we’ve been very clear with the Chinese that we view this as dangerous and escalatory and unacceptable, that we fear that they’re mispricing the risk; they don’t fully understand how concerning we view this kind of activity. And then, you know, waves of Russian cyberattacks elsewhere in Europe including across NATO and crossing over into the hybrid, you know, and kinetic worlds.

So all these things are happening and I think the—if I were to distill it all out to a simple conclusion it’s that we’ve basically failed to extend deterrence into the digital world, I mean, in some very fundamental ways.

So our adversaries do things to us using digital means. Whether it’s stealing IP or influencing elections or shutting down government services they do it using digital means when they would never do it using kind of real-world kinetic means because we have declaratory and escalatory policies in place in the real world that deter them.

And so the fundamental challenge in all these places, in my view, is that we have to find a way to extend deterrence into the cyber domain or else we’re not going to be able to maintain the basic level of trust that we’re going to need.

FROMAN: Does that mean we have to engage in a lot more offensive cyberattacks?

FICK: Yeah. I think it means go fully asymmetric. I think it means—it’s not cyber tit for cyber tat. That’s a losing battle. It means in the same way that we do in every other aspect of our deterrence posture a willingness to bring in an integrated way every element of American power to bear—diplomatic, informational, economic, if necessary, military—in order to keep the peace and maintain a basic level of trust and order in the digital world.

FROMAN: At what point does Russia’s hybrid war, which you mentioned, including their use of cyberattacks—at what point does it trigger an Article 5 response from NATO?

FICK: One of my stops last week was NATO headquarters, and I think and the U.S. government has said and our ambassador at NATO has said that we’ve come perilously close in some really troubling ways, things like, you know, bombs inside cargo containers that are intended to be loaded aboard aircraft, in some cases in the cargo hold of civilian aircraft, commercial aircraft in Europe, and they blow up on the tarmac thank God before the—they’re on the plane or in the air.

Moving an international maritime boundary in Estonia, you know, a NATO ally. Arson attacks against warehouses and retail stores. Attacks against diplomats’ vehicles. An increasing drumbeat of attacks up the supply lines going into Ukraine.

I think it’s very serious and NATO—

FROMAN: Could a cyberattack trigger Article 5?

FICK: Certainly. We don’t debate whether an aerial attack versus a land attack versus a naval attack would trigger Article 5. A cyberattack is simply a vector. It’s a tool. So a cyberattack that has certain outcomes, that has certain effects, could absolutely trigger Article 5.

FROMAN: Let’s look at the other side of the coin. What’s the prospect for actually finding areas of cooperation even with these countries, these state actors, that are attacking us with cyber?

Are there common areas like satellite communications where—you know, we have a task force right now in space policy. Do you think there is room for working with China, Russia, other countries, to reach agreement on rules of the road for areas of common interest?

FICK: Definitely. I mean, look at the resolution that the U.S. introduced at the U.N. several months ago on AI that was adopted by consensus. It wasn’t easy but, again, ground game diplomacy got out there, and I think if you polled individual people—not talking to governments but talk to people around the world, certainly, around the developing world—there’s real conviction that at least the U.S. and China are going to have to figure out how to live together and work together in many of these key technology areas.

I think Russia is more problematic right now given that they’ve, you know, violated all the norms of the post-World War II world and launched the—you know, the largest land war in Europe since 1945. I mean, that’s a different case, which is why we engage everywhere and all the time with the Chinese on technology and topics but much less so right now with the Russians.

FROMAN: The whole cybersecurity and digital policy area is one where the private sector has an absolutely central role to play. We’re going to come back and talk about you and your career in a minute here but how do you feel the cooperation is going between the public and the private sector when it comes to cybersecurity?

It used to be—I remember when I was in the financial sector banks would be reluctant to tell the government or talk publicly about a cyberattack that they had suffered for fear of losing confidence of their depositors and their customers. Do you feel like we’ve gotten to a point where the private sector and the government are sharing information and best practices better?

FICK: I think it’s so much better than it used to be, Mike. I mean, to your point, I was in those meetings too when I was running a, you know, cyber software business and I’d get hauled into a public-private partnership meeting that usually resulted in me being compelled to give something up to the government that was then classified and I got nothing back and—(laughter)—that’s what we call partnership.

FROMAN: Partnership. Exactly.

FICK: Yeah. So I don’t see a lot of that anymore and for, you know, a few reasons but I think one, you know, it’s just the exigency of the moment. So the further invasion of Ukraine was actually a catalyst for a wildly positive transformation in how the U.S. government and private companies worked together in cybersecurity.

The migration of the Ukrainian government enterprise to the cloud allowed the Ukrainian government to continue to function after its physical infrastructure was destroyed. The provision of satellite communications—widespread distributed SATCOM in Ukraine has been transformative. That’s all private sector technology. And the rapid threat intelligence feedback-sharing loop among the Ukrainian government and our government and technology providers with a lot of stuff on the ground in Ukraine has basically blunted Russian cyberattacks in Ukraine.

I mean, I hear all the time, well, why aren’t there any Russian cyberattacks in Ukraine? Well, there are a ton of Russian cyberattacks in Ukraine. They just haven’t been as effective as they would be otherwise.

So, yeah, I think the trend line is strongly positive in collaboration between the public sector and the private sector and technology and there are a couple—one other example on the capital side.

So there’s been a really interesting push on trusted capital, getting venture and private equity firms to sign up to basically a set of principles saying that they’ll be deploying capital in accordance with—kind of in a values-based way.

It was very frustrating to me. I was a partner at a Silicon Valley firm and I was watching my partners fifteen years ago with other firms making big investments in Chinese tech and it just felt like that was going to come back to us in the wrong way.

FROMAN: You’ve been—I’m going to open it here in a minute for questions from the audience so please be ready with your questions.

You’ve been incredibly successful as a businessperson. You’ve been successful in government and the military. You have been successful in the nonprofit sector running a think tank which, of course, is the pinnacle of one’s career. (Laughter.)

You worked, literally, the triple threat, right? You’ve done it all. Any advice for this group—the young members here, term members—on how they should be thinking about the career and working in more than one sector over the course of their—over the course of their lifetime?

FICK: A couple of things. And, again, we’re all, like, captive to our own experience. So, you know, everything I say is through the lens of my own personal experience.

But I think that—I think context switching is not a bad thing. I really like it. I think it helps you develop kind of a binocular view of the world. And maybe I’m just justifying my own, like, peripatetic hopping around but I do think on these issues in particular you really need—you need the technical—not only the technical side but also the commercial sensibility. You need the government policy side and you need this sort of civil society and academic input.

So I do think that if anybody is, you know, worried about building a career that walks across that scene I would not worry about it. I think we really need that kind of diversity of experience.

Like, one rule of thumb that has served me really well has been hiring. I’ve always hired my boss or I’ve been fortunate to have good bosses, and I learned over time to hire my boss.

So you walk into a job interview and often, certainly early and mid-career, it feels like a one-way street where, you know, you’re getting interviewed. You’re, like, you know the dancing monkey and have to perform and don’t screw it up because you won’t get the job.

I think it’s really important that that conversation be a two-way street because the people we work for are often the people who will teach us the most. They’re also the people who will generally help create or unlock our next step—the next opportunity.

So I wish early on that I had been a little bit more conscious of it but I was fortunate to have good bosses who cared about developing the people on their teams and then were open minded enough to be generous and helpful, you know, even when members of their teams went on to do other things.

FROMAN: How many times a week do you use your classics education? (Laughter.)

FICK: I am reading the meditations of Marcus Aurelius right now to try to keep my heart rate down—

FROMAN: In the original language?

FICK: —in all things. I wish.

FROMAN: Oh, OK. All right.

Great. Let’s open it up to questions from the audience.

Yes, this woman near the aisle.

Q: Hi. Thank you for the remarks. Tiffany Tribbitt at S&P Global.

I want to come back to your comments around Typhoon and some of the critical infrastructure assets in the United States, and I will make this a question. So a lot of small entities running our water supply, some of our power supply—how real is the threat and what support is the federal government giving to those smaller entities that might not have as sophisticated cybersecurity measures?

FICK: Yeah. I can answer some of that. So my remit is almost entirely outside the United States so there is less that I can say about what the U.S. government is doing to support those entities, although I see a colleague from CISA standing in the back and maybe she can help. (Laughter.) But I do think there’s a lot of attention and focus on helping improve the hygiene and build the capacity in small and medium enterprises that are involved in our critical infrastructure sectors but it’s not something I can speak to in detail.

What I can speak to is the severity of the threat and what we’re doing about it outside the United States. So I think the judgment of the U.S. government is it’s quite severe and I would agree with that, and a couple of things based on my past life on the technology side of this work. The attributions—public attributions have—generally attributing cyberattacks over the last fifteen years has migrated from being primarily a technical problem to being primarily a political problem.

It’s a lot easier now technically to attribute an attack, which isn’t to say it’s easy but it’s easier—it’s generally more possible than it was ten or fifteen years ago. Those public attributions are, in our view, and you see a steady drum beat of them now, right—in our view it’s important to do those things. Kind of our first line of defense against nefarious cyber activity is to point it out and say, we see it. We see it. We know who it is and we’re saying stop.

That’s only effective if a few things are true. One, the attribution has to be technically and empirically sound. It can’t just be, certainly, not a U.S. government “trust me.” There’s a global community of security researchers, of threat researchers, that’s pretty widely distributed, most of whom are pretty libertarian in their ethos and are generally not inclined to align with any government, let alone our government.

So mobilizing that community and making use of the independent judgments of that community in an aggregated way it’s pretty helpful to, you know, sit down with Chinese counterparts and say, hey, this is not only a U.S. intelligence community conclusion, this is a consensus view from these four dozen companies around the world and these 700 security researchers with public profiles who are all concluding the same thing, and oh, by the way, they have a hundred different nationalities. So it’s helpful when the attributions are empirical and technically sound.

And then, second, it’s helpful when we multilateralize them. It’s not the U.S. standing alone, it’s the U.S. standing alongside. You know, you see this again and again, right? Three other countries, seven other countries, twenty other countries.

So technically sound, empirically sound, multilateralized attributions are a good way to sort of take the political judgment out of it and call out the behavior in a more clinical way.

FROMAN: Yes. This gentleman—well, just back right there. You can stand up.

Q: Hi. Thank you very much, Ambassador. James Siebens. I’m with the Stimson Center.

We actually just produced a report on advancing accountability in cyberspace, so a lot of what you’re saying resonates very helpfully with me. I wanted to ask if you are—if you can comment on the concept of a cyber-crime treaty as being negotiated. One of the things in the international strategy, as you know, is to support a rights-respecting treaty so I wanted to see what your views are on the current language and what improvements might be in order.

FICK: Yeah. So it’s in flight so there’s a limit to how detailed a conversation I want to have about it. But—

FROMAN: You’re among friends. Don’t worry. (Laughter.)

FICK: Yeah, right. And a lot of cameras.

I think it’s important, my perspective—it was a Russian introduced treaty so that’s a problematic starting point, and we should not be totally prejudiced against the end point of the negotiation based solely on where it started.

So there was a robust negotiation over a long period of time at the U.N. that resulted in a final, true final, pre, you know, vote treaty that is wildly better in terms of its accounting for our values and the input of our multi-stakeholder community than it was when it started.

So I think we need to look at it kind of based on where it is today and what it says and not be overly influenced by its origins, and then you have to ask the pragmatic question of what do we do from here, and there’s been lots of reporting and plenty of think tankery on kind of what the different options are.

So I don’t want to pass judgment on any of them but a few of the options would be we could or others could introduce amendments. One has already been proposed. When you open the door to amendments you open the door to lots of amendments and better be—have a fair degree of conviction that your amendments are going to be more popular than other people’s amendments, and there’s this sort of implicit assumption on the part of a lot of Americans that, oh, the American amendments will be more popular than the Iranian amendments.

I don’t think that’s necessarily true. So we have to at least ask that question before we crack that door. The other thing you could do is you could issue a really robust explanation of position where unilaterally a government—say, in this case the U.S.—says, OK, here’s the treaty. We’re joining consensus on it and here are all the problems we have with it and here’s what we’re going to do to make sure that its enforcement is in keeping with the values that we defend globally.

Or another option—we could say we’re not joining consensus, which the U.S. has never done on something that we voted for in committee. So and that sets—conceivably, that’s—you know, everything in the world was done at some point for the first time. It doesn’t mean it’s inherently wrong. But it would be—it wouldn’t be a step to take lightly.

And so I think right now we, with companies and civil society organizations, are trying to weigh the different options and listen to different points of view in order to arrive at the best way forward.

FROMAN: I see way back in the corner. Yes, you. Mmm hmm.

Q: Hi. My name is Rudina Hajdari. I’m a former member of parliament in Albania.

And I just wanted to ask actually because Iran has launched an attack, a cyberattack, on Albania several times, actually, and the last attack was in September 2022. And it’s believed that the Iran cyberattack in Albania is because of—investigators say that it’s because of the sheltering that is done to the, you know, Mojahedin, or MEK—also known as MEK—the opposition in Iran. So my question to you is: Given that Albania is a NATO country, and you mentioned during your speech that maybe, you know, this could be something that can happen in the future—it didn’t happen this time around; maybe it wasn’t as serious, but it could happen in the future. So my question to you would be: Is cyber—are cyberattacks taken seriously by the—by the NATO members and NATO in general?

FICK: Yeah. Thank you. So, yes. As you said, that big Iranian cyberattack on Albania was in—ended—that one ended in September of ’22. I was standing in the main square in Tirana along with our ambassador to the U.N., Linda Thomas-Greenfield, in October of ’22 in order to send a very clear signal that the U.S. stands with our NATO ally Albania, and that any further attacks by Iran on a NATO ally should be very, very carefully considered. And after that visit, we began a really significant $25 million cyber assistance package to Albania to build capacity in the—across the Albanian government enterprise to prevent additional attacks from being successful. So what you saw in that case, I think, were two flavors of deterrence being deployed simultaneously: the reminder to the Iranians that Albania is a NATO ally, which is deterrence by consequence, saying that many more of this funny business will be met with consequences; and then deterrence by denial, trying to improve the cyber capacity of the Albanian government so that any future attacks would open the door to consequences but without achieving their objectives, because Albanian cyber defenses would have been improved.

And so that involved a lot of software deployment. It also involved some structural work with the Albanian government, the creation of a—of a cyber coordinator within the Albanian government, Igli Tafa. You may know him. And—yeah. And connecting Igli with people in our system, and really trying to wrap an arm around him and kind of build him up in his stature and his authority in the Albanian government to do these things.

We’ve had people on the ground in Albania on and off for the last two years. I think generally, I mean, the problem with these things is you can never say it was a success because that could end tomorrow. But it has been—it has been a strong trendline in the right direction in terms of the Albanian government strengthening its capacity, tightening the linkages with NATO.

We held a NATO cyber conference in Rome later that year. Representatives from the Albanian government came. They told the story. And it resulted, really, in NATO creating the Virtual Cyber Incident Support Capability, which is a—you know, more of a rapid-reaction force on the cyber side inside NATO.

So, yes, it was a terrible attack. Yes, it has a weird origin story with the MEK. And I mean, they were engaging in all kinds of shenanigans from Albanian soil. But generally speaking, I think it’s a pretty good story of a bad thing happening, it galvanizing action, and ultimately resulting in an ally that’s much more cyber capable today than it was two years ago.

FROMAN: Good.

Let’s take this gentleman in the front row.

Q: Ambassador, thank you so much for your—

FROMAN: Take the microphone.

Q: (Comes on mic.) Thank you so much for your presentation. Joe McReynolds. I’m here consulting.

I wanted to ask about the role of human rights in State Department tech diplomacy. Specifically, within our broad cyber solidarity umbrella, you sometimes have private firms working to provide tools of digital repression or surveillance to authoritarian regimes from within our tent, broadly speaking; obviously, role of NSO Group in Israel providing tools to the murderers of Jamal Khashoggi being an example. I was wondering if you think there’s room in our tech diplomacy to try and combat that practice, or if that’s something that’s very difficult to manage in a—in a multilateral way.

FICK: So not only is there room, but we’ve done it. So the White House issued an executive order prohibiting government misuse of commercial spyware. That included a joint statement that the State Department has been responsible for multilateralizing. And how many signatories do we have now?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Twenty-one.

FICK: Twenty-one. So twenty-one countries have signed up alongside us to prohibit the use of commercial spyware in ways that undermines human rights, whether it’s against journalists or dissident groups. So, yeah, I think that our view is that human rights are the bedrock on which all American tech diplomacy has to be built. Otherwise, what is it that we’re arguing about? And commercial spyware is a—is a good example of—frankly, of that in action, the executive order and the joint statement.

FROMAN: Yes, this woman in the second row?

Q: Hi. Good evening. Simone Williams, Department of Defense. Thank you for your time today.

As a leader of a new organization in the State Department, I was curious about, A, your leadership style that you employ to your employees; and then also, B, what are you doing in terms—because you talked about a lot of the programs that you were initiating and things like that, whare you doing for that institutionalization so that it lives beyond you and things of that nature?

FICK: Yeah. Thanks. So I mean, I can tell you the leadership style that I try to employ, but you’d probably have to talk to people on my team to figure out which one I really employ, and there are several of them here. (Laughs.)

So I—I mean, I learned a lot—a formative experience for me early in my career was serving as a Marine. And I had the good fortune to work for a really great boss in the Marines, and he was the kind of leader who—I was telling this story just earlier today, so I have this weird sense of déjà vu that I said this five minutes ago, but I think it was eight hours ago. He was the kind of person who would sleep less than the people in his command, eat less, drink less water, carry more weight, expose himself to more danger, and we loved him for it. And he really embodied this sort of officers-eat-last mindset where, for him, leadership was about responsibility, not about privilege. And I think—I think naturally a lot—I certainly gravitated to that, and I learned a lot from that.

The other thing I learned from him and in the Marines more broadly was the difference between formal and informal authority, the difference between legal and moral authority. And in the military, it’s pretty clear: You wear your—your formal authority is—you know, it’s on your shoulder, your collar. Ribbons are sort of like wearing your resumé on your chest; you know, you can—you can look somebody up and down in five minutes and tell exactly where they’ve been and what they’ve done. And that doesn’t matter as much as somebody’s informal authority, their moral authority. And the people who had a lot of moral authority were the ones who, one, knew their job; and, two, cared for the people in their charge. And we see this. Like, we all know this intuitively at some level. There are junior people in every organization who have a ton of moral authority, and they’re the heroes. And then there are senior people who have very little moral authority, and they’re the goats. And you know, it’s an example of, I think, what we ought to try to be.

So that idea of kind of the servant leadership, officers-eat-last mindset, coupled with the reality that you can lead from any spot in the org chart using informal moral authority were a couple things I really took from that early experience and have tried to keep in mind.

In terms of institutionalization, your other question, I think, I mean, people are policy, right, to a very large extent. And so the thing—the first thing that we need to do is train our people. And that gets to the Foreign Service Institute course I mentioned. It gets to creating an incentive system where people who want to rise in the State Department are rewarded for working on these things, so the selection criteria for career ambassadors in the Foreign Service. We’re trying to do a ton of other things, too, in order to attract people to doing this work. Created a fellowship with the Council and with a dozen other universities and think tanks so that our people mid-career can come spend a year here and do whatever they want, learn—you know, go—(laughter)—I mean, really, for my—I’ll rephrase that.

FROMAN: I’m going to work their tail off, but—(laughter).

FICK: What they do here is Mike’s problem, not my problem. (Laughter.) And that’s true also at Carnegie Mellon, and Stanford, and Vanderbilt, and a—and a ton of places. So try to create an atmosphere where people want to come, be, and do good work.

And I was influenced very much by a book called Drive, which is a little bit of pop social psych but also based on a ton of empirical research. And basically, the conclusion is people want three things in their workplace. They want mastery or the ability to develop mastery and get good at something. They want autonomy; they don’t want their boss mucking around in everything they do. And they want a sense of purpose. Mastery, autonomy, and purpose. The U.S. government, fortunately, has purpose in spades. But if we can provide opportunities for people to develop mastery, like coming and doing a fellowship or going to a training course, and then give them the autonomy to do their work without being micromanaged, I think that goes a long, long way.

FROMAN: OK. Let’s go right here.

Q: Hi. My name is Alexis Huseby. I’m with Lazard. Thank you so much for the time.

So you mentioned earlier that there is a need for scale when we think about technology. You also mentioned—and I’ll paraphrase a little bit—that you cringed when some of your colleagues invested in Chinese tech about fifteen years ago. So as we’re looking at the next five, ten, or fifteen years into the future, aside from values which feel like they can change at least from a country level fairly quickly given diplomatic relations or given new elections, for those of us without a crystal ball, working or otherwise, how do we think about investment in and partnership with some of the foreign technology players?

FICK: Yeah. So I do—I do think scale matters in tech. And the, you know, European French bakery approach to technology businesses is a hard one to pursue. And so I read the Draghi report on European competitiveness. I read almost the whole thing. (Laughter.) And I think it’s excellent, actually, and it says the right things. And a key—and a sensibility in Brussels has been to not allow technology—businesses generally, but certainly not technology businesses, to get too big. That has hindered the creation of global-scale technology companies in Europe. And I think that undermines not only European economic prosperity, but it actually undermines American prosperity and security, because we need—we need partners to work with with big, harmonized markets if we’re going to win the broader competition to decide which metaphorical operating system and tech becomes the prevalent one in the world—a generally, bottom-up, rights-respecting, multistakeholder approach; or a more authoritarian, top-down, multilateral state-centric approach. Those are the two big models that are in competition right now.

So if I were deploying capital in tech at this point, I would be doing it in the context of thinking about what I said earlier about a global realignment that’s happening. The U.S. has a very strong interest in our tent being as big as possible—in not de facto including anybody, in fact. It’s behavior that creates the exclusion; it’s not something more intrinsic. And so, you know, I’d be—I’d be investing in economies that generally are values-based. And I hear what you’re saying about that can change, but I’m not sure that it changes all that quickly. Even in the United States, wild swings in the White House don’t necessarily change the core values that we represent or stand for in the world. And I think we also—I’d be investing in economies that, from a—from a kind of tax and regulatory standpoint, understand that there’s a big competition underway, that geopolitics is back above the waterline, and that the outcome of that competition is going to—is going to determine answers to some of the really big questions like representative government, and free markets, and equal treatment of all people. And tech is perhaps the primary battleground of that competition.

FROMAN: The U.S. innovates; the EU regulates. (Laughter.)

FICK: And I—yet, I would argue that we each need to do a little bit more of what the other one’s doing.

FROMAN: (Inaudible.) (Laughter.)

Yes, way back at the end there.

Q: Thank you. Artemis Seaford. I’m with ElevenLabs, which is an AI company.

So folks that work in tech often encounter situations where there is pressure in foreign markets to conform to local rules, and I’m thinking here social media pressure to take down particular content. Often, that happens by countries that are partners to the United States; say India, Brazil. Now, the risk is going to increase with AI, because you can censor social media, but when you start censoring AI technology and have it respond a certain way in specific markets that can get a lot more dangerous.

So my question is: What can you do to support the private sector to withstand pressure from authoritarian regimes and authoritarian-like regimes to curb speech-offering products in their markets? And how do you make sure that stays on the diplomatic agenda when we’re talking about allies with whom, of course, we have multiple sets of interests to protect?

FICK: Yeah. I think a certain degree of intellectual honesty is required in navigating this, in my view. And our foreign policy—U.S. foreign policy on any topic, and by extension our diplomacy, is never going to be, you know, one inch stronger/taller than our domestic policy on that topic. In a—in a transparent, open, democratic society, we cannot do in the world any differently than we do at home, not over a long period of time. Maybe you get away with it for a little while, but not for long.

And so I do think that there is a certain humility that we need to represent in the world around the social platforms and how they are affecting public debate in open societies. And if we can’t acknowledge that, then we undermine our credibility in everything else.

And we also have to draw a distinction between states that are struggling to confront the effects of mis- and disinformation in their democratic process and authoritarian states that are trying to totally control the information that their citizens have access to. There’s a distinction there. And it’s not always clear where the line is on that spectrum, but we have to at least acknowledge that there’s a difference between, you know, what a—what a—I’m not going to name countries, but we all sort of know. There is a distinction there.

So I think a degree of intellectual honesty about the way the social platforms have changed/are changing the information environment in the United States, and some commitment to confronting that. And then a willingness to draw a distinction between truly authoritarian behavior and open societies that are—that are struggling with mis- and disinformation.

FROMAN: One last question. I’m sorry, the woman right next to you there.

Q: Hi. Thank you very much. My name is Carmem Domingues. I’m a presidential innovation fellow at the White House working on AI policy, but my question is in my personal capacity.

You talked about the role of the U.N. and the G-7, and you talk about this global realignment. Do you see the space for an international body, like we have for example for nuclear energy, for something like cyber and AI? And then can you also talk about your thoughts on the role of the legislative branch in the U.S. on helping this realignment and protections of, you know, the correct uses for AI around—within the U.S. and around the world?

FICK: Sure.

Q: Besides TikTok. (Laughs.)

FICK: Yeah. Yeah. I’ll take the legislative branch question first.

I would say that, broadly speaking, technology topics are one where I’ve seen a pretty strong bipartisan consensus in the United States. I and my office have really strong relationships on both sides of the aisle in both chambers. And that’s been gratifying. It’s reassuring. And it’s been true on policy. It’s been true on internal organizational issues. It’s been true on funding. In a—in a generally declining budgetary environment—the State Department budget’s under a lot of pressure—our budget—foreign assistance budget on tech has gone up not in percentage terms, but, like, in multiples. So you see—you see real solid bipartisan consensus that this stuff matters, and hopefully some consistency in the policies.

On the substance, I would argue there’s been a fair degree of consistency between the last administration and this one. I would hope to see a fair degree of consistency between this administration and the next one, whichever it is. And I don’t think it’s crazy, actually, to anticipate that, which should be good news for American citizens.

On your question of whether there’s space for a new body, we had that almost philosophical discussion a few years ago in this administration, and Secretary Blinken’s conclusion—with which I strongly agree—is that a more important task is making sure that all of our existing organizations are fit for purpose in a digital age. And so there are a limited number of hours in a day. There are a limited number of conferences or, you know, secretariats—conferences or ministerials you could attend, or secretariats you can fund and staff. And so rather than create a new thing, whether it’s a governance body for AI or whether it’s a T-15, you know, alliance of techno-democracies, we made the deliberate decision instead to invest in, you know, our engagement at the United Nations on technology topics like the Global Digital Compact; to invest in NATO and extending NATO’s relevance into the digital world; in ensuring that the G-7 digital track is strong and the G-20 digital track is strong; and that ASEAN, the U.S. shows up at ASEAN on cyber and digital topics.

And I think reasonable people can disagree about whether—which approach to take, but that’s the approach we’ve taken for very pragmatic reasons. And I—my judgment so far is it’s worked.

FROMAN: We are so grateful to you for your service, for being part of the CFR family, and for taking time out of your incredibly busy schedule to be with us tonight. Please join me in thanking Ambassador Nate Fick. (Applause.)

FICK: Thanks. (Applause.)

(END)

This is an uncorrected transcript.

BODURTHA: Well, good morning and welcome back to the twenty-ninth Conference of the Stephen M. Kellen Term Member Program. I’m Nancy Bodurtha. I’m the vice president of meetings and membership here at the Council. If we didn’t have a chance to meet or to catch up last night, I hope to see you around the conference today and I look forward to speaking with you. As Mike Froman mentioned last night, we couldn’t be happier to welcome you to Washington for this annual conference. This is our largest term member conference to date, with over 450 people coming and going throughout the day. And many of you have traveled quite a distance to be here with us.

A little known and fun fact about the Council is that the plurality of our members hail from outside the greater New York and Washington, D.C. areas. And the national representation here today is impressive. We have geographic diversity in the house, coming from Arkansas, Indiana, Hawaii, Nebraska, New Mexico, Utah, and Washington state to name a few, as well as term members who’ve traveled from Japan, India, Mexico, and the U.K. In the program book, that I see some of you are holding, there’s a list of conference participants. But there’s also a QR code that links to everyone’s biographies. And it was a very humbling experience to read through those bios last evening.

This is in the spirit of what Nate Fick said last evening about you all being an intimidating audience. You are an incredibly accomplished group, and there is expertise here in everything from AI, to interfaith relations, to transnational crime, to space policy, to venture capital, and so much more. You’re an amazing community and I hope that your takeaways from the conference come from both the content of the sessions that you’ll be participating in today but also from the connections that you make with your fellow term members. We’ve very intentionally built in a number of networking breaks. I hope you’ll take full advantage of the opportunity to get to know one another throughout the course of the conference.

Some thank-yous are in order this morning.

First, I want to thank Andrew Gundlach, a Council member, and the Kellen family for the generosity of the Anna Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation in supporting the Term Member Program. The program is an important way for the Council to further its mission to develop talent and to cultivate the next generation of foreign policy leaders. Andrew and the Kellen Foundation make this possible.

I also want to recognize my colleagues Meaghan Fulco and Sam Dunderdale for their outstanding leadership in producing this event. So let’s have a round of applause for Meaghan and Sam. (Applause.) We should also thank the teams that have supported them in the planning, and now the execution, of the conference. And that includes our mighty Meetings team and my colleagues on the Events and Facilities teams. Thank you. (Applause.)

For this morning’s plenary, in addition to the 300 or so who are here in person, as Stacey just mentioned we’ve got another 150 term and life members joining us by the magic of Zoom. Given the focus on the Middle East and the expertise of our panel, we wanted to make this session accessible to the broader Council member community. My colleague, Steven Cook, the Eni Enrico Mattei senior fellow for Middle East and Africa studies and director of the International Affairs Fellowship for Tenured International Relations Scholars, and, most importantly, the author of The End of Ambition: America’s Past, Present and Future in the Middle East, will introduce our speakers and moderate the discussion. But before I yield the floor to Dr. Cook, we’re going to take sort of a commercial break to share a brief video about the Term Member Program with you.

And as you watch this footage, please think about any friends or colleagues in your circles who would benefit from and contribute to the Council and the Term Member Program. You are our best recruiters. And the next application deadline is coming up on January 10. The video and information about the application process—which, by the way, you all aced—is available on the Council’s website, CFR.org, so it’s easily shareable with prospective membership candidates. As Mike mentioned last night, Managing Director for Membership Vera Ranola and I are always happy to speak with prospective candidates and offer guidelines on the application process. So please feel free to connect us.

All right, so let’s roll the video. And then our speakers will join Stephen on stage for a discussion on conflict in the Middle East. And I look forward to seeing you all around the conference today. Thanks so much. (Applause.)

(A video presentation begins.)

TORRES: A few years now.

PESTEL: I have been a term member since 2021.

SHENAI: From 2018 to 2023.

RACUSIN: I’ve been a term member for three years now. And I would describe CFR as the leading young professionals’ organization that’s focused on foreign policy.

TAN: The Term Member Program does three things. Number one, it allows you to be informed. Second, it allows you to have impact. And the third is, it gives you access to an incredible network.

PESTEL: What really drew me to CFR was the span of topics covered in the programming. While I have spent the majority of my career in military intelligence and in the Army, the access to topics that I wasn’t familiar with gave me a chance to really stretch myself intellectually.

WANGU At the age at which you’re eligible for Term Member Program, that’s kind of really what you need. You need to learn as much as possible. You need to be exposed as much as possible. And you need to meet as many great and interesting people who are interested in helping you, and who you can help.

TAN: My term member cohort, of about 120 or so individuals, are among the most accomplished and impressive people that I’ve met. So what’s valuable about this network is that it is truly cross cutting.

FROMAN: I think one of the core functions of the Council is to really make sure that the next generation of diverse foreign policy expertise gets access to information, gets trained, meet each other, and become part of a community.

WANGU: Every year there’s a Term Member Conference. And it alternates between New York and D.C. It’s a day and a half of amazing, relevant programming that was just kind of expertly curated.

DENNING: I was struck by how many term members attended, the shared interests that the term members and I had, and the relationships that I was able to grow and develop through that Term Membership Conference.

SHENAI: I think trips are one of the key features of being a term member.

RACUSIN: And our trip was going to Miami and Key West to really learn more about the Coast Guard.

TORRES: I visited El Paso Texas. The Council worked with organizations on the ground, including nonprofits, NGOs, also government entities, to give us sort of the full-range perspective of everything that was happening on the border.

WANGU: A bunch of us in D.C. traveled to meet some term members in New York. And we spent the whole day touring the United Nations. What was most memorable was we had a lunch meeting with the current ambassador to the United Nations for the United States Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield.

TORRES: One of the highlights of my experience as a CFR term member has been my pairing with my mentor.

SHENAI: I was paired with a former U.S. Treasury Department official. And he and I maintained a great conversation—how I navigate my career serving in the International Monetary Fund is a new father.

FROMAN: The Term Member Program had a big impact on my career. First of all, it really helped me do my job. I was working at the White House and then working at the Treasury Department on international economic. But beyond that, of course, it exposed me to the Council itself. And so I can definitely say I would not have been president of the Council on Foreign Relations if I had not started as a term member.

SHENAI: Many of the Council’s scholars served in the highest levels of government. Almost all of the Cabinet-level officials in any administration have some connection to the Council. You have the opportunity to engage in a community that actively shapes the U.S. role in the global system and, critically, uses American power for positive ends.

TAN: What’s very important in this day and age is that no one lives or works in their silo anymore. It is incredibly important to understand what is going on in other sectors of the economy, in other parts of the country, in other countries around the world, and the interactions going on between them. And wherever you work, whatever you do, having that breadth of insight is something that will benefit you in the judgments you make and how you think about the world.

PESTEL: The NASA administrator, Bill Nelson, came to speak to CFR. He shared a story from his experience while in orbit around Earth. He talked about the gratitude that he felt in realizing that we’re all in this together. That really crystallized why coming together and talking about foreign policy is so important. Because, just as he said, we really are all in this together.

FROMAN: I’m hoping to provide even greater energy and support for the Term Member Program going forward. Very grateful to the Kellen family, and Andrew Gundlach, and others for making sure that we have all the support we need for this program to exist.

RACUSIN: My advice to someone who’s considering applying is immediately applying. Don’t think about it anymore. Just apply, apply, apply.

PESTEL: You may be thinking, is this for me? Am I an expert in my field? Do I have something to contribute? What will I get out of this? And my answer would be, you absolutely have to go for it.

TAN: Go ahead and apply. We’d love to meet you.

(Video presentation ends.)

COOK: Hey, everyone. It’s a great pleasure to be here with you at the Term Member Conference. I was getting nervous during that video. You noticed me—very quick photo of me at the end. I think I’m wearing the same tie. (Laughter.) Anyway, which is kind of embarrassing. I do have more than one, but I only take it out for Term Member Conferences. (Laughter.) Anyway, it’s a great pleasure to be with you this morning. I’m Steven Cook. Nancy, thank you very much for the kind introduction and for actually holding up the book. I want to remind everybody here, some of you may not be in this position yet, but I do have a child in college, so the book is helpful. (Laughter.)

Anyway, it is my tremendous pleasure to moderate a panel of three extraordinary experts this morning. The title of this session, the second plenary session, is The Threat of Regional Military Expansion in the Middle East. I’m going to use an expansive definition of The Threat of Regional Military Expansion in the Middle East and ask these fine folks things that I think are interesting and important. So it may or may not be about military expansion.

But let me start out by introducing the panel.

First, way to my right, is Professor Dana El Kurd, who is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Richmond and the author of Polarized and Demobilized: Legacies of Authoritarianism in Palestine. She’s also a nonresident fellow at the Arab Center in Washington. Let me just say that, from my perspective, Dana is one of the most interesting and important new voices on the scene on Palestine politics in the Middle East. We first met over the summer because I read Polarized and Demobilized, and I liked it so much I emailed her and I said, hey, next time you’re in Washington let’s get together and talk, because I think it’s such a terrific, terrific work.

Sitting next to Dana is General Stanley McChrystal, the CEO and chairman of McChrystal Group. Former commander of the Joint Special Operations Command and a fellow CFR member. You’ll notice, I’ll refer to Dana as Dana and Alex as Alex, but I will refer to General McChrystal as General McChrystal. When you’re the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, I want to be as absolutely proper and polite as I possibly can. I don’t want to cross any lines here with this guy, OK? (Laughter.)

And sitting just to my right is Alex Vatanka, the director of the Iran Program and a senior fellow in the Black Sea Program, many programs, at the Middle East Institute. Alex is also one of the most interesting and important voices in Washington, D.C. on Iran and Iranian politics, and apparently also the Black Sea, which is important to Iran. So let’s get started. I’m going to ask some questions for the next half an hour, and then we’ll open it up to you all.

Dana, I want to start with you. And again, folks, this is not just about military expansion. I think we need to get some kind of ground truth about what’s going on in the region. And, Dana, let’s start. You had a piece in the Financial Times relatively recently in which you were critical of policymakers, particularly American policymakers but policymakers in the West, for ignoring the Palestinians when it comes to the Palestinian political reality. I’ve seen this myself. People talk about, oh, well, we’ll do this, this and this. And has anybody asked the Palestinians about this? So if you’re sitting with said policymakers, what are the three most important things you want them to know about Palestinian politics, as we think about things in the region going forward?

EL KURD: I may not be able to stick to three, but I’ll try.

COOK: Try the three, and then we’ll—I’ll get you to work in the other ones later.

EL KURD: Right, right, of course. Yeah, thank you for having me.

So I think the first issue is that they need to understand particular solutions that they have put together in the past will no longer be relevant in the future. So the ways in which Palestinian politics has been attempted to be controlled really no longer can play out in the same way that the last thirty years has played out. So the legitimacy crisis that I identify in that piece is a really serious issue in Palestinian politics. Meaning that it’s not just ignoring the Palestinians in some sort of Israeli-UAE deal that’s being discussed for postwar Gaza. It’s for the long-term Palestinian political trajectory that they need to engage with all of the actors that are relevant in that political trajectory.

So I know that there’s a lot of, you know, kind of wishful thinking, I think, about being able to sideline particular political actors in that discussion. And—

COOK: Those political actors being?

EL KURD: Well, not only particular elements within Fatah, but also Hanas, but also other actors. (Laughs.) And so right now, for example, there is an attempt by a Palestinian civil society called the Palestinian National Conference. That has been trying for the—you know, the better part of the last year to move beyond the Palestinian legitimacy crisis and address some of these issues. But I haven’t seen any actual, you know, engagement with this kind of—this kind of initiative.

The second thing is, there have been a lot of discussions about further fragmenting Palestinians. So, for example, there’s been this idea floated that, like there could be particular mayors appointed in Gaza in the aftermath, and they can try this out, and kind of cantonments in the Gaza Strip, and it can resemble something that’s happening in the West Bank. Again, that’s not going to work. There have been many historical examples of this not working, including before Oslo, during Oslo.

And finally, I think that one thing that policymakers need to understand is that when they discuss a two-state solution, a one-state solution, whatever is—whatever configuration of a solution is supposed to get us out of this crisis, they need to understand what Palestinians mean when they say state, and what they mean when they say sovereignty. I think that that has been really downplayed in the discussions and/or assumed, and assume that there could be some sort of realignment about the fact that people mean very different things about these issues. So I can elaborate more as we move on.

COOK: Great. Thanks very much. It’s a terrific way to start.

General, I’m going to skip over you moment—just momentarily, and go to—go to Alex. Because, again, I want to get—I want to get some of the current events out first.

Alex, you wrote actually a little bit—a while ago, 2023 for Foreign Policy magazine. You wrote a piece that said: Iran can’t afford a regional war. And you identified one of the reasons why Iran can’t afford a regional war is because Iranians resent the axis of resistance. And that, you know, Ayatollah Khamenei and the IRGC must factor in public opinion when it comes to the conflict that has enveloped the region. But since then, Iran has fired missiles and drones at Israel. That was April. And then most recently, I guess about a month ago, fired 181 ballistic missiles at Israel. And as we sit here today, everybody is wondering when and how the Israelis are going to respond. Seems like there’s kind of a regional war in the offing. So do you reevaluate? Do—they still can’t? Are they still unable to afford it? And what about Iranian public opinion and this unfolding conflict?

VATANKA: Well, first, good morning, everyone. It’s a pleasure to be with you all, and fellow panelists.

Look, I—let me—let me ask this question of myself, as a way of answering your question. Did Iran know that Hamas would attack Israel on October 7 of last year? I’ve seen all sorts of reports out there. A lot of it is misinformation. It’s disinformation. I would tend to say they probably didn’t. That doesn’t mean they don’t support Hamas. The track record of Iranian support for Hamas is there for anyone to see. But did they know on October 7 that that would happen, that attack would happen? I tend to think, probably not. And, by the way, Hamas leadership in Doha and Qatar probably didn’t know either.

What I’m trying to get at is Iran is engaged in the long war against Israel. Iran does not have the confidence for that big clash with Israel today or next month, or next year. Just listen to the speeches of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. He says it all the time. This is a long war. This is a generational war. Israel has been around for seventy-six years in this—in this part of the world, but is it going to be around for another twenty-five years or fifty years?

The Iranian narrative—and I think everyone in this room knows that—the Iranian narrative, which is really hard to miss, is that Israel is a Western colonial settler project. And at some point the cost-benefit analysis for being in this region will change for the Israeli people, and will change for, most importantly, the main protector of Israel, the United States. And without the support of United States, there will be no Israel in the Middle East. That’s the narrative. That’s not me saying so. This is the Iranian regime’s narrative.

So if you believe in the long war, then what you’ve seen over the last year goes counter to that calculation in Tehran, because what has Israel been able to do over the last year? Hamas is pretty much out of business, at least for now. I wouldn’t count them out forever. But I wouldn’t count any Palestinian political movement out forever. I mean, we’ve seen over the last—since 1948 that you can’t marginalize the Palestinians. They’ll come back until they get something that they can live with, to Dana’s point.

So I think, Steven, yes. They can’t afford that war. And there are a lot of factors why they have that position. You mentioned the most important one. The Islamic Republic of Iran has a bigger enemy than Israel. It’s called the Iranian people. The Iranian people do not like the Islamic Republic. If I had put numbers out there, I’ll say probably 15 percent of the country’s ninety million people support the regime. Again, 15 percent out of ninety million is a pretty significant number. So they still have enough forces to go out there and repress to keep the regime in power in Iran, and enough spare capacity to go out in the region and keep what’s left of the axis of resistance.

And I think that’s going to remain true for now. But if there is that big war that some people are anticipating, I’m skeptical. I don’t think it’s just not Iran that doesn’t want that regional war. I don’t think the United States wants that regional war. And I think the U.S. is on good ground for not wanting to get sucked into another war in that part of the world when we—as we all know China, Russia and other issues that there should be also top of the list for the United States. So I think when you don’t have the Iranian people behind you—and you got to stop me because sometimes start ranting in the mornings—(laughter)—

COOK: I have a follow up. I’m going to stop you. I’m going to give you two more sentences, and then I’m going to—

VATANKA: Yeah, yeah, yeah. (Laughs.) Two more—no, let me—let me make one final comparison, and I’ll stop. September of 1980—September of 1980 Saddam Hussein invaded Iran.

COOK: None of you were alive.

VATANKA: None of you were alive.

COOK: I was. I was.

VATANKA: I was alive. I was not a soldier. So that was supposed to be the end of the Khomeini regime. A lot of people thought. Didn’t happen. The opposite happened. The regime got consolidated. And forty-five years later, here we are. So be careful in terms of the quick solutions. What can Iran also do? It can bring a lot of damage to the region in a regional war in the short term. In the long term, questionable. But the big difference between ’80 and today is rallying the people of Iran around the flag against Israel is that much tougher, because the Iranian people think this fight with Israel is a fight of choice by the Iranian regime. That if you leave Israel alone, Israel will leave you alone.

COOK: Let me ask you a question. From where do you derive those numbers about Iranian support—about the people’s support for the regime, or not? Where does that come from? I mean, you know, I’ve spent a long time working on the Middle East. And, you know, for years, people have given me numbers about support for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, or support for Hamas in Gaza, in the West Bank. And it rarely kind of lines up with reality. So, where does that come from?

VATANKA: You’re right. It’s a tough one. There are no scientific data here to point to. For obvious reason, the Islamic Republic doesn’t allow you to go in and do surveys. (Laughter.) So no surprise—

COOK: Well they, do as long as it comes out the right way.

VATANKA: But there are—there are lots of ways—and I’m glad you asked this question. There are lots of ways you can actually, from outside, still do pretty scientific polling. And we actually just published one at the Middle East Institute. I would urge those interested to go on our website and check it out. But let me give you two numbers that I thought were interesting. Seventy-eight percent of Iranians think that the regime’s foreign policy is making life worse for them at home. And 68 percent of Iranians believe in normalizing relations United States as soon as possible.

So you have a regime in Tehran that is engaged in a foreign policy that it’s not only not advancing the people’s livelihood and, you know, bettering their lives, it’s doing the opposite. It’s bringing war to them. And that’s not going to be sustainable. And again, Steven, how many volunteers you think the Iranian region can get to send to fight Israel in Lebanon or Gaza? So far, they’ve sent zero. And that’s because they know it’s going to be a tough challenge for them to get people excited about a war they don’t want.

COOK: Great. Thanks very much. General McChrystal, let’s assume for a second—maybe I don’t need to assume—that the McChrystal Group has a contract with the Pentagon. (Laughter.) And, you know, this is how Washington works. And the secretary of defense said—sent you out to Israel to meet the Israeli Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi, and kind of get a gage of what’s going on. What would your advice be to the IDF brass about bringing the war in Gaza to end, and Lebanon?

MCCHRYSTAL: Well, thanks for having me here, everybody. And to term members, watch this. He just asked a question I’m going to answer what I want to answer. (Laughter.)

COOK: Well played, sir. Well played. And you’re allowed.

MCCHRYSTAL: So I did go out—in January, I did go out to Israel with Michele Flournoy and a couple of friends. And we met with many of the people that I had known for my time in special operations and intelligence. And so connected with them. And I was able to get—it was about two and a half months after October 7. We went down Be’eri. We went down to Gaza. And I had been there, right after the 2006 war. So I don’t claim to be an expert, but I know a lot of the players. And so I was able to have some really interesting conversations.

What I’d offer to you is, when you think about war and you see it from afar, it looks a bit clean. It looks—it’s on maps and, I mean, there’s damage and death, but still, it’s big movements. The first thing that jumped out at me in Israel was the rage on the part of the military and intelligence people about October 7, partly because of the horrendous things that happened, partly because they’ve been caught flatfooted. They were humiliated. And humiliation produces a kind of motivation that’s different from just anger. You really want to reprove yourself. So that was one of the first things.

And we went down and saw the Golani Brigade just as it came out of its first couple of months in Gaza. And it was young people. Many of you in this room have served. I’ve got some comrades in here, and thanks for what you’ve done. They pulled the track vehicles out, and they were in this recently flattened field. And they parked the track vehicles next to each other. They dropped the ramps. These young kids, men and women, literally look about fifteen years old. They were slightly older than that, but they’d just come out of two months combat. They were different people. How they interacted with each other was different.

When somebody comes out of that experience, you put on—you act like you think a veteran is supposed to act, because nobody ever taught you that. But suddenly you’ve been out there, you’ve seen the elephant, you know the deal. And they came out, and they were acting that way. Not arrogant or braggadocious, but with a—almost a feigned confidence, and whatnot. What I would tell you we were watching there, and it happens on every side. It’s not political. I happen to be with Israeli forces. That generation just became made men and women. Before they’d had to read the stories of the War of Independence, ’67, ’73, and here are the heroes and all this. Now they had been, and they had had a trial by fire.

And they didn’t have a flashy victory like before, but the point is that’s going to change Israeli society. Because they are going to be a constituency now with a seat at the table. And that’s—it won’t be obvious at first, but they will have a seat at the table because in their minds, and in the minds of other people, they’ve earned that. The other thing it will do to them, unfortunately, is wars start for political reasons and they continue for very human reasons. They continue because you lost your friends, your buddies. You can be on the fence when you start, but after you fight for a while you are for your side. You can very—you can do an analytical thing and say, well, the other side’s got an absolutely valid point. I got it. But I’m on this side, and I got to fight on my side.

That’s one of the dangers of anything like this, because once you start fighting you do—you start this binary phenomenon. And then it takes real leadership to start to break down and get it back to politics, like Clausewitz reminded us. You know, it’s an extension of politics, and into politics it must return. And so that’s the first thing. What we’re seeing in the region now is the rules have been changed. There were a number of rules for a number of years that a lot of people didn’t like, but now we are to much wider combat. We are doing things—we are seeing things done on both sides that people wouldn’t have done a couple of years ago. That beeper attack was extraordinary. It was clever, but it changed the rules. That was the kind of thing that we wouldn’t have done because of potential countermeasures by an enemy.

So I throw that out to you. So as we think about how this region is going to be, there is a military dynamic that we haven’t seen for a while. And that dynamic is going to rule for a period of time. Hopefully, not too long, but there is a momentum to that that that is going to be dominant. It’s going to be hard for politicians or societies to control. And it will take a while before things can, I think, get into a position where you start to have really rational conversations about the future, and whatnot. It just—at a certain point, it’s hard for those to occur.

COOK: Thank you, sir.

Pivoting off of that, let me go back to you for a second, Dana. The future, you mentioned it briefly in your—in your response to my previous question, about an Emirati-Israeli plan for Gaza. And there’s been so much talk about the day after. In fact, my research associate, who I see over here, and I collected every day-after plan that was produced in the months—I mean, it was—it was prolific. Washington is prolific. Everybody had a day-after plan. But none of them, as you wrote, are connected to reality. So two-part question for you. What is your preferred day-after scenario for Gaza? And what is the most likely day after scenario for Gaza?

EL KURD: Yeah. So let me respond to that question and also pivot off of what General McChrystal just said. It’s deeply concerning, some of the things that you’re mentioning, because already Israeli society was going to the right, was becoming less interested in the political solution. And when we see polling, I know you said polling, where did these numbers come from? But the Palestinians are the most polled in the world, and very scientifically. So when we see polling, for example, about what some of the fears that Palestinians have in this moment is that what happened in Gaza will be replicated in West Bank. I don’t think that that’s an unreasonable fear. There is—there are elements in the government, and now clearly elements in society, that don’t mind that level of mass violence and that level of destruction.

So I’m also concerned on the Palestinian side that—what you’re seeing emerging out of what the Cost of War Project out of Brown University said is possibly 200,000 dead, is one estimate—is a generation that sees no hope in the political solution. Not because of a buddy dying or revenge or things like that, but because of the sheer level of devastation that they’ve witnessed currently in the Gaza Strip, that they have been subject to, and what other Palestinians are facing in other parts of the occupied territories. So in that scenario, I’m thinking the kind of Yahya Sinwar of these people who don’t have grand ideological ideas. They are people who see that armed resistance and armed action is the only solution. That is going to become much more—you know, that’s going to be just much more salient to Palestinians over time, because the political solutions are closed off to them.

So my ideal scenario for any—you know, first of all, immediate ceasefire and immediate ends to the conflict. It would be to engage the Palestinian stakeholders in the humanitarian relief after and in the political process moving forward, so that you can provide some relief to this kind of level of devastation, and the sense that there are no options and that it is closed off. I understand that there were—there is absolutely no appetite on the Israeli side. But that’s why the United States is the key actor here. So the Israelis can be made to have an appetite for this kind of action, and moving towards a political option more quickly, if the United States, which is the main benefactor which is already involved in their war, changes its policies. Like, it’s just very simple. So that would be my ideal scenario, that the United States changes how it’s engaging with the Israeli side so that political options become available.

What can happen? It seems—or what is likely going to happen? It seems that, just from my discussions in the last couple of weeks, the Biden administration does, you know, has ceasefire off the table and wants to wait it out until after the election. I don’t—you know, there’s a lot of kind of ambiguity about what the—or, if it’s a Trump election—Trump is elected, that’s one scenario. If Harris is elected, there’s also some ambiguity about, you know, what the process moving forward is as well. But there’s this, like, fake Winston Churchill quote about how the Americans will exhaust all bad options and then, like, they’ll do the right thing. (Laughter.) So perhaps—but, you know, after exhausting all the Israeli-UAE plans, and seeing that this is not going to come to fruition, and that Palestinians will continue to be a thorn in the side of all of these—all of these discussions, perhaps the likely scenario is that we wait very long, but then we finally get to the political option at some point. (Laughs.) I know it’s not—it’s not very cheery.

COOK: (Laughs.) Well, yes. Not very cheery.

Alex, let me go to you for a second round here. The new Iranian president, whose last name I have a really hard time pronouncing. I had no problem with Ahmadinejad, but I have a hard time with Pezeshkian.

VATANKA: Pezeshkian.

COOK: Pezeshkian. OK, great. Now I know. My Farsi is—my Farsi extends to “death to America.” And when he was—when he was—I mean, I don’t support it. That’s the that’s the Farsi I know. (Laughter.)

VATANKA: Very good Farsi.

COOK: When he was in New York for you UNGA, he came armed with a message about peace and cooperation. Should we—and, you know, immediately the press picked this up, and there was general interest among European allies of the United States. And there are, you know, folks here in Washington who said we should take this very seriously. Should we take it seriously?

VATANKA: I wouldn’t take Pezeshkian seriously, for simple fact that in Islamic Republic the president is not really the person who decides strategic policy, certainly not on what to do with the United States and Israel. These are sort of decided at two other centers of power—the Office of the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who’s been there since 1989 and he’s not going to go anywhere despite the fact that he’s eighty-five, but he looks pretty sharp from when I listen to his speeches. And the other one are the Revolutionary Guards. These are the guys who are running around in the region recruiting Arabs to fight Iran’s wars for it, essentially.

So Pezeshkian had his trip to New York. And that message, you know, when people don’t know the Iranian system, you should be forgiven for thinking, well, there’s the president of the country. He’s talking peace. He’s talking a new nuclear deal. But Iran watchers would tell you that that’s great. That’s a wonderful message. But let’s look actually what you’re doing in the region. Where’s the change? Where’s the change on your position? Look, the two pillars of Iranian policy since—(background noise)—bless you—since 1979. Two pillars. (Background noise.) Bless you, yes. Two pillars. Fight Israel, and to the extent that you can squeeze the United States out of the Middle East. It has been true for about forty-five years. Unless the Iranian regime, including the president, are willing to show some genuine movement on those issues, then I don’t see where you can take Iran’s call for détente, rapprochement on other issues that seriously.

Essentially, what, Steven, they’re trying to do is—and it didn’t work out in 2015 with the last nuclear deal, and it’s not going to work out with another nuclear deal. You cannot just isolate the issue of Iran’s nuclear deal, have a diplomatic resolution, because it will be a temporary one at best, because the problems between Iran and the West, particularly the United States, are obviously deeper than just the nuclear issue. It involves, above all, what Iran is doing in region, and that policy of squeezing the United States out or challenging us interests. That needs to be adjusted on the part of Iran for the United States to take an Iranian call—a Pezeshkian call for sort of a rapprochement more seriously.

That was—you know, I was somebody who basically defended, to the extent that I could without not being a nuclear scientist, the 2015 nuclear deal. I said, look, it’s clearly not perfect, but it’s the best thing you can achieve under the circumstances. This idea that you can get them to surrender and give you everything they have, it’s not going to happen. So take what you have. But the Trump administration’s policy of pulling out of the deal had also its reasons, in the sense that it said, well, we don’t want a nuclear deal while you guys are making money selling oil, becoming more powerful, but you’re not walking away from your two pillars in terms of policies of confronting Israel and squeezing the United States out.

And on that front, Steven, I didn’t hear Pezeshkian bring any new messages. But I have to say—and this takes me to the issue of who really calls the shots in Iran. I don’t know what happened to that previous Iranian president’s helicopter trip that crashed into the mountains in May. All sorts of theories out there. But I do know for sure that it was very convenient for the so-called “deep state” in Iran to turn that into an opportunity to suddenly present a new face to the world.

Because Pezeshkian, God bless him, he’s a nobody, essentially. In the sense of, he doesn’t have his own network. He doesn’t have a base. He doesn’t even have a base, as Ahmadinejad did. So he is very much manufactured by what I call the deep state. He is put on the stage. He speaks a very plain Persian language. You’ll pick it up soon. (Laughter.) A very, very plain Persian language. It appeals to anybody. Really appeals to anybody. So I see why they put him out there as president. But when I—as, again, Iran watcher, put my hat on, go, hmm, is it really serious? Is it another gimmick? And that’s where I kind of struggle.

COOK: Gotcha. By the way, Ahmadinejad has a great Twitter game. General McChrystal, let’s talk about the Red Sea for a moment, because this is an obvious flash point. And there’s been a fair amount of criticism of U.S. posture in the Red Sea. How would you evaluate the American effort to ensure freedom of navigation in the Red Sea? And do the reports that the Russians have been providing targeting for the Houthis change anything, from your perspective?

MCCHRYSTAL: Yeah. Thanks. I think the U.S. has done pretty well in the Red Sea. I mean, it’s easy to be critical from afar, but it’s a lot harder to do. It’s like when we started—first dealt with Somali pirates everybody said, how hard can that be? Well, it can be very hard. And then the Red Sea, if you look at the geography of it, it’s pretty hard to stop an organization like the Houthis. And then, of course, as Peter Bergen pointed out, we said, well just bomb the Houthis. Well, they’ve been bombed more than anybody in history, and they’re really good at being bombed. (Laughter.)

So it’s really hard, unless you go on the ground in Yemen, to really—to stop. Because you can move in precision weapons now that are pretty dangerous. So I think we’ve done pretty well. I mean, the level of effort it would take to completely shut that down is probably unrealistic. The real question is, of course, outside support. You know, as long as Iran supports the Houthis and the Russians with targeting data—and I don’t know whether that’s correct or not, but it would be valuable to them—as long as they’re getting outside support, they’re likely to keep up doing what they’re do.

COOK: So then the implication of what you’re saying is that the United States should focus less—continue doing what it’s doing with the Houthis, but focus some of its attention on Iran if we want to ensure the freedom of navigation, which is a core global interest to the United States.

MCCHRYSTAL: Well, I think it goes to all of them. It goes to Hezbollah. It goes to Hamas. It goes to the Houthis. The foreign policy levers that Iran has been pulling have been proxies. And they’ve done it very well. And they have been able to do that for long enough where I think it takes the world to stop them. There should be national—or, international norms that pressure them. And, of course, as Alex said, and I am persuaded by your argument about where the Iranian people are, whatever we can do to help move the Iranian population away from that—I’m not recommending that we go head-to-head militarily with Iran. I don’t see much value in that. But I do think in the short term we go after the proxies where we have to, but we pressure Iran.

COOK: Understood, OK, we’re just at 10:00, which is my moment to open it up to all of you. Let me just—as a reminder, this is an on-the-record meeting. So if you have something salty you want to say, you might want to think twice about it. I can’t believe I just said salty. Anyway, we’re going to focus our—the questions on you all in Washington. But we do have people on Zoom. And we may take a virtual question. So let me see hands. Straight back from me, yes, right there. Christina, yeah, you’re in the right place. Great. Please identify yourself. We know you’re a term member. We don’t need your resume. Just your name. Thank you.

Q: Thank you.

To Dana’s point about the need for the United States to really engage in order to change the course of the crisis in Gaza, can you all speak to the specific levers that you think would be effective? What kinds of weapons sales and what other things might be restricted, or other conversations that have been had. What would be effective?

EL KURD: Shall I start?

COOK: Please.

EL KURD: I mean conditioning military aid to begin with, beyond the thirty day, you know, possible red lines that have been discussed. I know that there’s—I mean, I’m not an American politics expert, but I know that within the Biden administration there’s like kind of an ideological commitment to, you know, bear hugging Netanyahu and, you know, not touching those issues. But actually conditioning aid when it comes to applying international norms and laws, as well as U.S. laws, I think that that’s the first step. So that would be—I don’t think the Israelis would have been able to conduct the level of war that they have without American support. So that would be my first step for that.

COOK: Do you have another step?

EL KURD: Well, I was hoping other people would speak. (Laughter.)

COOK: OK, you said first, so it made me think that you might have a second. Either of you want to take a stab at this? No? OK. Great. Right here. This guy’s hand was first, really quick.

Q: Thank you very much. Joseph Gasparro, Royal Bank of Canada.

It’s been thirty-five minutes. There has been no talk of Saudi Arabia. And if you look at just broader dominant power in the region, obviously Israel is probably one of the biggest contentious points between Iran and the Saudis. Love to get a sense of how much does that take out of your broader mind share. Is it zero? Is it 5 percent, 10 percent? Could there be a broader, you know, regional conflict with them? Thank you.

COOK: Alex, you want to take it?

VATANKA: Yeah, I mean, look, it’s a really important question, because Saudi Arabia is such a significant player, obviously. But, you know, where they are at—and I’m—certainly, I’m an Iran watcher. I spend ten days—ten hours a day watching what’s going on in Iran. That’s a whole different country and a whole different set of challenges. But from what I understand, Saudi Arabia right now, bottom line, just wants to be left out. Does not want to become a frontline state. Does not want to have to fight America’s war against Iran, or Israel’s war against Iran for it. Doesn’t want to provide even airspace rights to the Israelis.

So they are focused. They got a generational shift of power. They got a, you know, crown prince who is not even forty yet, MBS, who is committed to economic development, integration into the world’s global economy, post oil—all sorts of things that you don’t hear the Iranian side talk about, right? The Iranian side is talking about—you know, you really can’t start fixing Middle East, if you will, until the issue of the Palestinians has been resolved. Now, for some Arab countries Saudi Arabia didn’t make the Abraham Accords but, you know, the United Arab Emirates did, Bahrain did, Morocco did, Sudan did.

Before October 7 of last year, you had two sort of narratives out there, two models that you could subscribe to—Abraham Accords, the idea that you can, through engagement, integration, economically, politically, with Israel get them to sort of give the Palestinians a better deal. That was before October of last year. Obviously, right now nobody wants to talk about expansion of Abraham Accords, because it’s not seriously going to go anywhere. It’s Iran’s axis of resistance that might gain traction depending what happens in in Gaza, in the West Bank, and elsewhere.

I said earlier, the Iranian people are not backing the axis of resistance. And I’m genuinely of that belief. But I’m not sure if the Arab street out there might not find axis of resistance actually the only way to deal with the issue of helping the Palestinians. And that’s a challenge for the United States, because that axis of resistance message isn’t just gaining traction in in some quarters in the Middle East, but the Global South. In the third world, if you will, if you can use the word “third world” anymore.

But final thing, it’s interesting. You got twenty-two Arab countries that are more or less on the fence in terms of their governments. And then you got Iran, non-Arab country, that is all in. You know, if you’re not careful then you’re giving the Iranians an opportunity here to exploit what’s happening. And that’s really a challenge for the United States. To the point about—you know, U.S. needs to help Israel, for obvious reasons. There are all sorts of things you can point to—moral, political, you know, historic. But at some point, U.S. needs to go back, once the timing is right—and I frankly, don’t know when that is—and sort of try and see if you can avoid giving the Iranians something they have always exploited since 1979, taking advantage of somebody else’s mess up.

That’s how Iran has always succeeded in the region. You don’t have one example of the Islamic Republic walking into a state that’s operating normally and being able to turn things around in their favor. Iran only succeeds when there is security vacuum, when there’s a state collapse, and they can come in with a bit of money, a bit of indoctrination, to turn things around in their favor. That has to be something that should be on the radar and avoided.

COOK: General McChrystal, you want to get in on this Saudi-Iran issue?

MCCHRYSTAL: It seems to me that there’s a significant part of the region, sort of led by the Saudis, who want to move on to some different future. And they would like—to be honest, they’d like Palestine just to go off the radar screen, and they’d like to move on. And I think they’d like the Iran, you know, friction to do the same. And so my sense is we’ve got this pull between the past—and the Palestinians sort of reflect the past. At least, that issue reflects the past, because it used to be supported by Egypt, Jordan, you know, all of the other nations. And now they’re pretty quiet about it. And so I think that that’s the basic tension. And I’m not sure where they go. I’m not sure where—that I understand where the people of the region’s popular opinion is.

COOK: Understood. Dana, you want to jump in there for a second?

EL KURD: Yeah. So the latest polling from the Arab Opinion Index back in January of last year shows pretty consistent trends in where people are at regarding the Abraham Accords, regarding all these issues. So in terms of their support for the—for normalization with Israel and the Abraham Accords, it’s very, very low, less than 10 percent, depending on which country. And this was polling that was conducted in sixteen different Arab countries, and so it’s a pretty wide swath. And in terms of their support for the Palestinian cause, it’s very, very high, especially in the aftermath of the war in Gaza. And it’s only gotten higher, but still very consistent over time. And so when we say—when I hear something like Palestine is an issue of the past, I think governments in the region certainly want it to be an issue of the past. I don’t think the people think of it as an issue of the past in any shape or form. This is very much an alive issue for the vast majority of the Arab world.

Now, I know that in the United States when I speak to audiences like this the question I always get is, like, you know, why should we care what they think? These are authoritarian systems. As long as the leaders are on board with our restructuring of the region and our Abraham Accords and our—and our security arrangements, then, you know, the people will come along, or they’ll be repressed into it. But the fact is that that is not a sustainable situation because the Palestinian issue is not just an emotional issue for Arabs in the Arab world. It represents this issue of unaccountable government. And that kind of connection in people’s minds between the Palestinian crisis, what’s happening to Palestinians, what they’re seeing on—you know, on their screens, as well as their inability to even oppose particular issues that their government is supporting, or, you know, being able to just say that they’re pro-Palestinian. They’re feeling repression around that, and obviously to varying levels across the region.

That becomes an incubator for dissent. And we’ve seen it in the past. I mean, the people that put on and were responsible for the organizing that led to the Arab Spring in Egypt became, you know, politically active and motivated as a result of the protests around the second Palestinian Intifada. So it’s, I think, a very—again, just Washington not really learning any lessons from the past thirty years, which is that we seem to think that we can sideline this issue. And we seem to think that the Arab street and the Palestinian issue isn’t going to continue to impact our strategic interests in the region. And that’s just not going to happen.

I wanted to say one more thing, and I’ve forgotten it. (Laughs.)

COOK: OK, we’ll give you an opportunity. Right here. I’ll get to the back of the room, don’t worry.

Q: Hi. Chloe Demrovsky. Thank you so much for this.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the impact of weaponized interdependence. And I’m so—I’m curious for your thoughts on the interplay between economic and other financial levers—sanctions, informational tools—with our military objectives, the impact on Iranian behavior, and on the Palestinian side the effectiveness of these calls for divestment, for example. Thank you.

COOK: Who wants to take it?

VATANKA: Iran is pretty straightforward. It’s the either most sanctioned or second-most sanctioned country on Earth today, after Russia. Has been sanctioned for a very long time. So the Iranian case, you know, their military is pretty much—I shouldn’t say all of it. A lot of it is indigenous. I don’t want to give you a long history, but, I mean, out of necessity during the Iran-Iraq War, what you were seeing, the missiles, that’s all out of necessity. They were out there in the marketplace getting whatever they could get their hands on from the North Koreans, the Libyans, the Syrians. And spent the last thirty years fixing up their missile to a point where they have a pretty formidable missile arsenal today. And you can’t—you know, we shouldn’t laugh it off.

So and then in the marketplace of weaponry, their friends are the likes of Russia, China, again, North Korea, and some others. They are, I assume—I mean, they would love to get their hands on latest weapon. One of the reasons Iran doesn’t have an air force really to speak of—they’re still flying F-14, second generation, whatever kind. So they would love to get their hands on, and they might get some latest—later technology from the Russians. But overall, in terms of where they are, I think they can probably manage on their own for the kind of war, so-called asymmetric warfare, they have in mind. They’re not going to look for that big war of, you know, fighting the United States on equal terms. They know that’s not going to happen. So they’re in different place, if that makes sense.

COOK: Dana, did you want to get in on sanctions or so stuff like that?

EL KURD: So I think there is a difference, though, between sanctions that Iran has faced with, like, conditioning military aid that’s, like, from one ally to another. So I just wanted to mention that. But I wanted to talk about the Abraham Accords and axis of this resistance. So I can—

COOK: All right. Well, maybe we’ll get a question on Abraham Accords and axis of resistance. I promised way back.

EL KURD: Well, it a response to the previous question.

COOK: In the back I see one hand back there. Great, yes, terrific.

Q: Thank you so much. Kelly Trubko (ph).

I was wondering, from your perspectives, what you think the long-term consequences of the war in Gaza are for us here in the U.S.? So, General McChrystal, you talked about how fighters on both sides have been fundamentally changed. Dana, you talked about, likewise, for civilians in Gaza and in Palestine. And beyond just, you know, short electoral shadow of the future right now, but just longer-term consequences for the U.S. public and for U.S. policy. Thanks.

COOK: Anybody want to jump in on that? I know my standard to do this is I do policy, not politics. But you all may feel very differently.

MCCHRYSTAL: Yeah, I’ll start on it. If you go back historically, Americans get exercised about something, and then our opinions sort of evolve over time. You know, we get—you remember, after October 7, there was all the energy to support Israel. Right after the invasion of Ukraine, there was all the energy to support Ukraine. And it wanes a lot. And so this is something that actually saddens me, because I’m not sure it wanes because people have sat down and thought it through and come, like Dana says, really decided what’s right or wrong. I think it almost goes with sort of the popularity of opportunist politicians leveraging things, deciding what’s going to be good for them at a certain point. And we have a tendency to be—to be influenced by that, and we lose interest pretty quickly, which is concerning to me.

So I think that it sort of depends upon how the future—the near future in Gaza plays out. If it sort of calms down, even if the Palestinians are not being treated well, many Americans, it’ll go off our radar screen. And we won’t, you know, make the value-driven decision. It’ll just be out of sight, out of mind. For a lot of people. Not for, obviously, people like in this room.

COOK: Dana.

EL KURD: Well, I think it—I think it will impact American politics, in two ways. One is that the American model for the international order is facing a lot of challenge right now in the—in public opinion, and in the minds of the Global South. It’s not just the Arab world. But it goes back to that question of, like, the traction of the axis of resistance. The reason that that kind of framework gains traction is because of the perceived hypocrisy and illegitimacy of the American model.

Now, with that being said, polling shows that the Iranian position is not, like, very popular. It’s about half and half, for the Arab public in those sixteen countries I mentioned. And then in the Palestinians, there’s like a 33 percent approval of Iran, because Iran hasn’t really risen to what was expected. You know, there are assassinations and things like that, and Iran hasn’t been able to engage. But the fact that the United States is seen as protecting an ally at the expense of international rules and norms has really changed people’s public perception of the United States, not just in the Arab world. And in the Arab world, it has tanked.

COOK: Well, of course, Israel isn’t the only country that we protect. You know, Egypt—huge violations of human rights, Saudi Arabia, same kind of thing.

EL KURD: Well, there—

COOK: I mean, I think it’s American partners in the region have no red lines.

EL KURD: Well, that’s—but that’s the thing. Amongst the Arab public, they see this all as one structure. They don’t see the Egyptian government as being very different from the Israeli. I mean, it’s all part of—you know, to them an authoritarian structure, American-led authoritarian conflict management. And that is, you know, I don’t think very good for American strategic objectives in the long term.

Now, in terms of the, you know, how public opinion, American public opinion might wane, we actually do have a study that shows that support for Israel waned within two weeks. But that’s not—I don’t think that’s because Americans are fickle. I think it’s because they saw the level of destruction in Gaza that began very quickly. And for Gen Z in particular, I think this is a defining moment for their generation, in the same way that Vietnam was for a previous generation. So I don’t necessarily think that we can write off the impact on American politics in the medium to long term of this moment.

COOK: We’ll have to see. Alex, do you want to get on this?

VATANKA: Well, no, you have questions here.

COOK: OK. No, I’ve got a question from the virtual world, correct? We got one question from the virtual world. Go ahead.

OPERATOR: We will take the virtual question from Charles Weiss.

COOK: Charles, you’re on the air.

Q: Yes. This is a military question for General McChrystal.

Given the facts on the ground, with the tunnels and the military use of mosques and schools and so on, and given the obligations to minimize civilian casualties and to keep collateral damage commensurate with military stakes, what is Israel’s military strategy supposed to be?

MCCHRYSTAL: Well, if the military mission was to destroy Hamas—and we can argue about whether that’s the right mission or not, but if the military is given that as a mission, then it is impossible to do that without a significant amount of damage. The tunnel network under Gaza is a hundred times greater than anyone here imagines—more modern, more effective. The use of it by Hamas is more effective than anybody here probably would ever have guessed. And so you gave the Israeli military an impossible task if you wanted them to accomplish the destruction of the Hamas battalions and you wanted them to not do significant collateral damage, to include the death of civilians. Now, we can make a decision whether they should have gotten that mission. But I’m just telling you, from a military practicality standpoint, you can’t have it both ways.

COOK: So, was it the right mission, from your perspective?

MCCHRYSTAL: Oh, I don’t think so. I would not have recommended that to them. I think that you were necessarily going to produce what we’ve seen, which, as Dana says, has a cost to it to Israel that it is pretty impossible to measure right now. We can guess what it will be long term. So I would have seen that. Now, you got to give Hamas credit. They created a system where that’s exactly what had to be the outcome. Hezbollah, to a great degree, did that 2006, and they’ve done it again now. Once you get into southern Lebanon, it is really hard to accomplish your mission and get out again.

And so when we have that kind of a situation then we have this conundrum. Do you live with whatever the situation is that you’re not addressing? Is that intolerable? Or do you accept the fact that it is going to be very, very painful? And of course, people will have different perspectives. The people who lived in northern Israel and were being rocketed probably have one view. The people on the ground in southern Lebanon have another view. People around the world have yet another view. And they’re—no views are wrong. They’re your particular perspective. But again, you can’t—you can’t pretend you can do something that’s not doable.

COOK: Understood. Right here. You’re going to get a mic. No, you can’t just project. (Laughter.) As someone who just projects, it doesn’t always work with the tech.

Q: Hi. Nakissa Jahanbani. Thank you for your remarks today.

How do you see advanced technologies affecting Iran’s involvement in the conflict, and also for countering Iran as well?

VATANKA: What was the first part, technology?

COOK: How do you see advanced technologies in the conflict and with regard to Iran.

VATANKA: Thanks for the question.

COOK: Is that a plant?

VATANKA: No. (Laughter.) I wish—I wish I could operate like that on a Friday. I can’t. But look, I sort of pointed it out earlier in terms of my reading of where Iran is. Clearly, as General McChrystal just said, there have been surprises in terms of what Israel’s thrown at Iran and the axis of resistance. I mean, we all know what’s happened in the last few months. So, yes, I think the regime in Tehran clearly has a new level of respect for the damage that sort of technology—infiltration by the intelligence services of Israel and allied countries—can do to Iran. I think that is a reality.

Will it change Iranian calculations? Is this the moment where Iran says, you know what? We’re not even an Arab country. And the Palestinians should really go and talk to their fellow Arabs to get support. We should stay out of this fight. If they did that, that, you know, is a kind of an outcome that I think Israel would really welcome. But as long as the fight is going on—as long as the fight is going on, in terms of advanced weaponry, I think the one point where they will genuinely panic and talk about maybe changing course, the way I just described, is if the regime’s survival inside of Iran is at stake.

Now, again, you have to contextualize it in terms of what kind of weapon you were talking about. But if it’s just the axis being hit in Yemen, or in Syria, in Iraq, or in—Iran, is willing to, as the cliche goes, to fight to the last Arab. But if the weapon you’re talking about suddenly turns the table, and Iran has to question can we survive as a political system, as the old man himself said, Khomeini, you can even override anything that the Quran says and Islam has to say. You can breach all the rules, survival of the regime is number one. And I think that is how I would answer the question. I hope that made sense.

COOK: OK. This guy right here in the front.

Q: Thanks, Steve. This question’s for General McChrystal.

I was going to ask you a real salty one about Afghanistan, but I thought that might stretch our definition of “region” too much. So I want to talk about technology as relates to the conflict in Gaza. On the one hand, there were some, like Audrey Kurth Cronin, who I’ve debated on this point, that will tell us that new emerging technologies allowed nonstate actors like Hamas to approximate the military power of countries, of the militaries from countries. I wonder if you could reflect on that. And then the other hand is that, you know, these new technologies—Gospell, Lavender, and other AI-enabled decision support systems, are changing the future trajectory of war, the character if not nature. So I’m curious if you could reflect on that as well.

MCCHRYSTAL: Yeah, it’s changed it dramatically. We’re seeing it on the ground in Ukraine, but of course in Gaza as well. The first thing is they can manufacture—and they’re not really high-tech missiles—hundreds of thousands of missiles with a relatively accurate capability. So even a nonstate actor can act like a state actor hoped to act a generation ago, to put that kind of power out there. What Israel did with the beepers and all wouldn’t have required a state to do that. A nonstate actor could have done the same thing. Would have taken apparatus and time, but they could do it. So the answer is, technology is giving a reach to everybody. Everybody has more power.

Some of the things we’re seeing, though, is the ability to kill anybody we want to kill. Say we in the world, not the United States, not Israel. Just kind of anybody. You can find them, and you can target them, and you can kill them. And that’s got huge implications, because if you think about it in the nineteenth century there was a—really, an understanding you didn’t shoot the officers of the enemy army on the battlefield. And you didn’t do it because as soon as the officers were dead, it was a leaderless mob that wouldn’t be controlled, and your enemy would be, in fact, more dangerous. And so now we’ve got the ability to target leaders of Hezbollah, leaders of Hamas.

But it doesn’t change—we found this in Iraq and Afghanistan. Decapitation very rarely actually changes the outcome of something. It makes you feel good, but it doesn’t do it. So we’re in this movement of technology that’s going to make it more and more capable to do those kinds of very targeted strikes. And we are going to be the recipients of those as well, too, because we’re probably as vulnerable as anybody in the world because we’re in so many places that we theoretically have to protect.

COOK: Well, I guess we invest in Cyberdyne Corp. Straight in the back here. Yeah. No, not you. You. (Laughter.)

VATANKA: Terrible.

Q: Sorry. You’re next. Ben Frohman, U.S. House of Representatives.

Steven, you mentioned this up front that we’re expecting, you know, potentially imminently, in exchange or retaliation from Israel against Iran. I’m curious the panel’s views of what that might look like, the escalation dynamics between Israel and Iran. And then, kind of linked to that, there’s been discussion of that this is a once in fifty years opportunity, in the views of Israeli leaders, to reshape the Middle East. Obviously, there’s a lot that happens between now and the end of this war, but what might a future regional order look like, whether it’s from the view of governments or the citizens of these countries in the region?

COOK: Thanks. And we have four minutes. Why don’t we start with Alex and then skip over to Dana.

VATANKA: Look, I mean very quickly, you know that over the last few weeks we’ve seen reports. Israel is saying they will retaliate, they will retaliate hard. The list of, you know, things mentioned, nuclear facilities of Iran, critical energy infrastructure, and then, a last one, limited to military bases, Revolutionary Guards bases, sites—for example, missile launch sites, that sort of thing. So at this very moment, it seems that the military—the military sites are the most likely targets, from the open-source reporting that’s out there. The U.S. has made it very clear, from the president down, that, you know, Israel shouldn’t attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, and even critical energy infrastructure, which could bring the price of oil up. So I don’t know in terms of what Israel will do, but I think obviously the Israelis will do something. And they have to do more than they did last time around in April when they took out this 300 anti-air defense system in Isfahan.

Four minutes and talk about post—what is coming in the region? I don’t know—

COOK: Well, you just took up two, so. (Laughter.)

VATANKA: I’ll stop.

COOK: Dana.

EL KURD: I’m just reflecting on the general discussion and how we’re talking about how this kind of level of technology, not only nonstate actors can become as—very powerful, but that there’s all this kind of precision and targeting and assassinations. But I think what this moment has also shown, that something like the Lavender Program, it’s also—not only can you be very precise, but you can also increase the scope of the violence to be very broad. And so the Lavender Program, you know, increasing who is even a target. So I think that moving forward—I don’t know what Israel is going to do with Iran. But moving forward, I’m just really concerned about the possibility of states to engage in mass violence at a large scale, given, yeah, how broadly these programs are being implemented.

COOK: I have time for one quick question. What about this first hand right here?

VATANKA: What about—

COOK: Eh, OK, you don’t get a second shot.

Q: Good morning. Rudy Novak from the U.S. Air Force Academy.

So I work in an organization that’s very hyper-focused on great-power competition of a possible future war with China. Can you remind all of us, and hoping my students when I bring it back, like, why this region matters? What are the American national interests, besides oil, obviously, in the region?

COOK: Lightning round, folks.

EL KURD: I mean, maybe General McChrystal can speak to this as well, but isn’t the Middle East region strategically important for American hegemony because of all the choke points, like, free flow of trade, not just oil? I thought that was the main reason the Americans were mostly interested in the Middle East. I don’t know that China is that interested, by the way, but, yeah.

COOK: General.

MCCHRYSTAL: I think world trade goes through it. I wouldn’t have used the term “American hegemony”—(laughter)—because we’re a globalized world. But, no.

EL KURD: If you don’t use it, I’ll use it.

MCCHRYSTAL: I think everybody needs it. But, you’re right, I think the value of oil over time is decreasing pretty rapidly. And I think the Mideast has got to fight to stay relevant.

VATANKA: On that point, that’s exactly what leaders in the region are concerned about. And that’s exactly why they’re talking to Russia, why they’re talking to China, whether joining things like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, why BRICS just had a summit in Kazan, because of the question they have. Will the United States stay? Are they getting bored with us? And then if they are, we—because a lot of these countries are wealthy, very wealthy. We’re talking trillions of dollars sitting there. But they’re insecure in terms of their survival and worried about larger neighbors—Irans of this world. And so I don’t know. I’m not smart enough to talk about what’s going to happen in terms of going forward. But I tell you one thing, if I was China and Russia I’ll do anything to undermine U.S. in that region, because it’s a no brainer. And that’s what exactly—just because we don’t read about what China’s doing right now in the Gaza war, doesn’t mean they’re not doing something, right? And that I’m convinced of.

COOK: Great. I’m so happy when I could bring it home exactly on time. If you’re really interested in those issues, however, I know a good recent book that came out that explores all of those things. (Laughter.) I mean, that wasn’t even a plan. That was good too. Listen, thank you all very, very much. It’s been a fascinating session. Thank you to Alex, to General McChrystal, and to Dana for their wisdom. It was very interesting. I learned a lot. The video and the transcript of this will be on CFR.org. So if there’s anything that you want to clarify or anything that you missed, you can—you can go back over it.

And now we’ll take a break until I don’t know when but you all have your program. So thank you all very, very much. (Applause.)

(END)

This is an uncorrected transcript.

 

TOGUN: (In progress)—is a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and he’s also an associate professor of political science at Skidmore College.

One thing to note, this is an all-Nigerian conversation. This is the first time I’ve been at a CFR panel—(laughter)—where everyone on the panel is from Nigeria. It’s pretty amazing. I think it’s kind of cool. So we’re going to spend the first thirty minutes with me in conversation with these three folks, and then we’re going to open up to questions from you all afterwards. So just as a lay of the—to get the lay of the land.

And, Zainab, let me begin with you to give us that lay of the land. How would you describe the economic and development opportunities as well as the challenges that’s facing the African continent on a macro level?

USMAN: Great. Thank you very much. Very nice to connect with everyone. This is my first time attending a CFR conference. I’ve been here for a number of roundtables, so.

I think I want to start by talking about where the continent is right now, and then I’ll discuss opportunities and maybe some challenges. As we know, the African continent is the world’s youngest continent, with a median age of something in the region of eighteen to twenty years. In some parts of the continent, West Africa, Central Africa, the median age is actually fifteen, sixteen. So a very young continent. It’s also the fastest-growing continent right now. Projected to reach, what is it, 2.5 billion people by 2050. This is a continent with a lot of young people that need jobs and economic opportunity.

A lot of people right now tend to end up in low-wage, informal work in growing cities, cities that are growing larger. So there’s urbanization but, you know, cities that don’t have a lot of infrastructure and often don’t have a lot of very good jobs. So that’s the first thing I want to talk about. Secondly, it’s also a continent with the largest number of low-income countries, as defined by the World Bank within a certain threshold. There are other low-income countries around the world, but increasingly we’re seeing, you know, that shift towards Africa. The largest number of low-income countries. And it’s a continent that now has increasingly a rising share of global poverty.

Depending on how you do the analysis, the center of global poverty is shifting from Asia, which used to be the case, you know, in the twentieth century, to increasingly now Africa. I think there’s still a larger number of aggregate poor in Asia, but we’re seeing really that shift—more poverty reduction happening in South Asia, East Asia, but more concentration in Africa. Meaning that this is a continent that needs industrialization to happen and to be a lot of academic, structural economic transformation to happen so that we can see sectors transforming, becoming more productive, generating jobs and opportunity for people.

It’s a continent also with natural resources, whether it’s minerals and metals essential to the global energy transition, or even forests and carbon sinks, actually, the Congo Basin. And finally, as some of you might have been following, the IMF just released the regional economic outlook for Africa. And in a sense it kind of reinforces what we already knew right from the beginning of this year, that the continent has the—nine of the world’s twenty fastest-growing economies. This was actually the case also before the pandemic. In 2019 you had some of the world’s fastest-growing economies on the continent before that disruption happened, and now we’re back to that.

Now in terms of the opportunities and the risks—because I think the three points I’m going to talk about now they are, like, you know, double edged. There are opportunities there and there are also risks. The first is that within this context the African continent has huge investment needs. It used to be the case that—you know, until recently one estimate was that the continent had an investment financing gap of around $100 billion a year. But earlier this year, the African Development Bank released updated numbers around the investment needs on the continent for countries in the region to be able to meet their sustainable development goals and also to achieve a just energy transition—$400 billion per annum until 2030.

You know, energy poverty on the continent is quite severe. Over 300—actually, I think it’s over 500 million people lack access to clean, reliable electricity. So there’s an opportunity there, which is, you know, an opportunity to be very creative with energy solutions. For example, electricity access solutions. And, indeed, a number of multilateral agencies and philanthropies have come up with a new initiative just a couple of weeks ago. I think it’s 300 M, electrify 300 million—is it individuals or households? I don’t quite know. But 300 M. So there’s an opportunity there for creative solutions for investors to meet a lot of the investment needs on the continent.

Then the second point I want to talk about opportunities and risks is a change in trade environment for Africa. Internally within the continent there is now the African Continental Free Trade Area, which is the world’s largest free trade area by number of participants, number of participating countries. I think over fifty African countries have ratified the African Continental Free Trade Area. But, actually, RCEP in Asia is the world’s largest free trade area by market size. I think one-third of global GDP. So there’s the African Continental Free Trade Area, which is a huge opportunity for African countries themselves but also for external partners, because you have this huge market.

And also market with latent demand, right? You know, ultimately, if things go well we’re going to see a rising middle class that can consume and can be the market for a number of goods and services. But also, beyond the continent, there’s a changing global trade environment. The trade war between the U.S. and China. Trade tensions in Europe, you know, EU, Russia, and those also middle powers kind of been a little bit more assertive. The World Trade Organization being, you know, in disarray, more or less. So this really presents also some challenges for African countries, particularly with respect to access to markets for their goods and services.

As we know, the way that East Asian countries were able to make that transition from poverty to prosperity in the middle of the twentieth century was being able to produce goods and services for Western consumers. So access to markets very essential to the East Asian economic success. Then the question is, if African countries are not able to access markets and follow that same pathway towards economic transformation, what future could they have? So that really is a big question mark. And that perhaps is a challenge.

The final point I want to make is with respect to Africa’s natural resources. And I want to emphasize specifically on the minerals and metals that are essential inputs to clean energy, renewable energy, and electric mobility technologies, also called critical minerals. I personally, in my research, try not to use the term “critical minerals” because it’s a very kind of subjective definition that is time bound. That is, you know, there are so many considerations as to what is a critical mineral. But minerals and metals essential to the transition, African—the African continent is endowed with a number of these minerals. There are at least twenty mineral-producing countries—graphite, cobalt, manganese, bauxite, platinum, group of metals. You name it, you can find them in Eastern, Southern, Western, Central Africa.

So the key challenge, I think, for—maybe key question, I would say, that could be an opportunity or a challenge is how can African countries ensure that, with this commodity—scramble for commodities, and potentially a new commodity boom, that they benefit to this time around? That this time around it’s not just like this extractive relationship between Africa and, you know, the rest of the world, that has really characterized the relationship between the continent and the rest of the world for maybe 500 years, making sure that we have a completely different dynamic where we see mutual benefits. The entities, countries, companies that need these resources, they can access them in a sustainable manner, but that African countries and populations also benefit from these resources.

So I’m going to stop there.

TOGUN: Thank you, Zainab. And I think this point that you make around the concentration of poverty, but also the fastest-growing economies and what it means to have mutually beneficial relationships, is one that I hope we can come back to perhaps during the question and answer.

Emmanuel, I want to sort of go from the inside of the continent to the outside. So a lot has been made of the U.N. reforms in the multilateral systems, and so this idea of Africa having two seats at the Security Council. Can you talk to us about what—is this a sign of the continent’s import? And also, what would that actually look like in practice?

BALOGUN: Yeah. Thanks. And I think I want to tie my answer to the point that Zainab just made at the end here about mutual benefit. So, specifically to the question on, you know, U.S. support specifically for two seats for African countries, permanent seats for African countries on the U.N. Security Council. One, this is a reflection of the U.S. keeping a promise. When this current administration first got into office, they first announced at the U.N. General Assembly in 2022 that they would support a seat for Latin America and Africa on the Security Council. And then at this General Assembly this year, came out with a plan. And what it shows also is that the United States has listened to African countries and the African Consensus on this topic, to an extent.

So the African Consensus came out, a common African consensus on U.N. Security Council reform, was as old as 2005. Calls for both—two permanent seats, but also veto power at the U.N., which the U.S. came out and said that they do not support. But what I think this indicates is a sign that some of the traction of the rhetoric that’s coming out of African countries and African regional organizations about centering Africa in the—in the global conversation. So not just including Africa in existing institutions and stirring, right, but actually thinking about how can African countries, African stakeholders, African private investment, African diaspora, and the African regional organizations, how can they play a crucial role and a central role in global governance?

And so this is exemplified by a call for a new public health order, for example. At the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, after the African Union scaled up the Africa CDC and Africa CDC—and Africa as a region was one of the few regions in the world that actually turned to multilateralism and turned to a collective response in order to respond to the pandemic. And in that—and coming out of that was this call for a new public health order that does sort of derive and pick up on the best practices around global health that are coming out of Africa. Calling for equity in terms of TRIPS waivers and the ability to develop and manufacture vaccines on the continent.

Similarly, this week is an extension of the last few years of calls from African finance ministers to also call—to also have equity in the global financial system and restructuring of the global financial system. One of the main things on the menu for that, that is that’s being discussed at the World Bank and IMF meetings this week, is a redrawing—is what to do with special drawing rights. And one of the calls from African finance ministers is to redirect special drawing rights to the African Development Bank, to give African countries more—and the African Development Bank—more capacity to help in the development space there. Also, climate finance is another area where we’ve seen this call happening.

Now, you also asked how this would look in practice. I think one of the things that we—you know, while we can log African countries and, you know, the politics around trying to center and be more inclusive in the global governance system, we should also be aware that African countries are not, you know, monolithic in their thinking, right? And that things as—you know, as inclusive as two permanent seats on the Security Council would be, that will be a fight in the—amongst African countries, in terms of who represents Africa there, right? This was the case also in trying to go—in the negotiations around Africa joining the G-20.

There was, you know, a lot of—a diversity of thought and a diversity of perspectives around what representation on the G-20 would actually look like, whether it would be emulating the EU model of having both the commission and the current EU president representing the continent. In that regard, would it be the chair of the African Union and the chair of the—and the head of the African Union Commission, right? And who—and so there’s some internal politics that that exists there. But overall, I think it’s a sign U.S., support China support for inclusion, for Africa in global governance spaces.

The fact that two of the key geopolitical powers in the world are recognizing and making part of their foreign policy this need for Africa to be included, and African regional organizations and African actors also thinking to multilateralize their policies—their inclusion in the world as well. And working through the venue of multilateralism I think is a good sign forward for what an inclusive African future would look like that is not predicated on reifying the existing systems, but to actually have true reform that allows decisions to be made from the vantage points of Africans. Thank you.

TOGUN: Thank you. Diverse perspectives, that’s perhaps the biggest euphemism of the day. (Laughter.) So but I do think the point you make there, for many of us who are doing this work, how we think of meaningful inclusion. And so the U.N. might be one shiny object and, like, a thing to look after, but there’s health, there’s financing, there’s other areas where we think of what does inclusion actually look like? And that might have more meaningful impact on people’s lives. So I think that’s a fair point, and excellent.

Bowale, can I turn to you and ask—because you spent a significant amount of your career to think of investments, right? So what do you see the growth areas for investment on the continent? And do you see these as country-specific, or do you see them as sort of thematic areas and things that transcend multiple countries?

ADEOYE: Thanks for the question. And thanks for the opportunity to be here. So investing in Africa presents a range of opportunities. And many are impactful and scalable. I will focus on three key areas. The first is renewable energy and technology. I think we’re all aware of the energy shortage on the continent. That was mentioned earlier. But we also know that Africa has abundant renewable energy resources, such as solar, wind, hydro, and geothermal, as well as transition fuels like natural gas. And Africa actually has 9 percent of the global gas reserves. So this presents an opportunity for renewable energy development and technology.

I’ll speak about solar first. You know, several countries on the continent have high solar radiation levels. And this makes solar a scalable solution. Countries such as South Africa, Morocco, and Egypt have made significant investments in large scale solar farms. However, there’s still a growing interest in off-grid solar solutions. And it’s important for homes and businesses that have no or limited grid access. Wind energy also has a vast potential, especially in the coastal regions. And then hydropower has really been part of the energy mix for decades, but they continue to be opportunities. The last resource is geothermal. There’s a lot of strong potential. This is mainly concentrated in the East African region. Specifically Kenya and Ethiopia each have about 10,000 megawatts of capacity, which, you know, is still in in relatively early stage.

So the renewable energy and clean technology sector have some elements of country-specific because of the nature of the resources we’re talking about, but also through regional power pools there’s the opportunity for the countries to share energy resources. And so the second growth area is manufacturing and agriculture. Zainab spoke earlier about industrialization and the need for this. Africa holds 60 percent of the world’s arable land and 30 percent of the mineral reserves, including critical minerals which are needed for renewable energy technology. I know there’s some conversation around the terminology, but most of these resources historically have been exported in raw form, whether we talk about cocoa or we talk about, you know, oil and gas, right? And without any value addition. You know, exporting raw materials limits job creation. It limits revenue generation. And also limits the economic growth.

The price of a finished good can be four to ten times higher than that of the raw material. So there’s a lot of value really being left on the table by African countries by exporting these resources in its raw form. So therefore, there’s a strong case to invest in local processing and manufacturing to add value to the—to the raw materials, which will achieve a number of objectives. One is supporting import substitution. The second is enabling international buyers to diversify the supply chain, which has sort of been a priority for a lot of international players today. And then the third, is very important, it’s the reduction of carbon emissions because you’re then producing the goods closer to the source, and so you’re reducing the carbon emissions that—you know, from sort of sending the goods all the way—halfway across the world, re-importing it, you know, which, you know, is a significant drain on the FX as well of many of the African countries.

So Africa’s large scale agricultural base provides opportunities for investments as well that can improve the yield of the agricultural products, reduce the waste—because we have about 50 percent of post-harvest loss in sub-Saharan Africa—expand market access, and also enhance food security. Food security has been a problem, but it’s getting worse on the continent. And so I believe that integrating local manufacturing with agriculture could boost the country’s—the continent’s role in the global supply chain. And then the third growth area is the digital economy and technology. So investing in digital infrastructure, such as broadband expansions, mobile network upgrades, and data centers, can lower transaction costs and improve trade efficiencies. We also have the importance of financial inclusion and market access still comes up in digital economy and technology.

And then the last is really ensuring that we are creating jobs and upskilling the young—the young population, that Zainab also spoke about earlier, by equipping them with the skills that are in demand, such as software development, data analytics, cybersecurity. And also providing access for them to sort of incubate their ideas through accelerators and technology hubs. We’ve seen quite a few success stories on the continent. And I think that there’s a lot more that can be done. So overall, I believe that Africa has a mix of localized opportunities as well as regional opportunities that can be scaled, and that can unlock sustainable and inclusive growth.

TOGUN: Thank you, Bowale. And I think—so there are multiple sectors that you named there, but it sounds like one of the key things around it is industrialization to make sure there’s—actually, opportunities are real, but also upskilling the young people so that they can be both beneficiaries of but also participants in these economies as they’re coming to market.

So we have about seven or so more minutes for me to ask you all questions, and then we’ll turn it to the audience. Just for those of you paying attention to how much time you’re talking. So for Zainab, a lot of your work is focused on climate and energy futures on the continent. What do you think the U.S. government and the private sector might be getting it right? And where are they making the right bets? And where might they be wrong, or need to think differently?

USMAN: Sure. I think climate and energy, very big, big, big topics, that are multisectoral and multidimensional. A lot of the work that I do really focuses on countries in Africa that are rich in natural resources. So countries rich in hydrocarbons, but also countries rich in minerals, critical minerals, and how they all navigate the global energy transition. The opportunities for them, the trade and investment relationships that they need to mobilize and partnerships. Yeah, so, and then, you know, questions around technology, new technologies, and local innovation ecosystems. So those are the kinds of issues that I look at with respect to climate and energy.

So through that lens then, with respect to the relationship with the U.S., there is such a huge opportunity here to strengthen the relationship between the U.S. and Africa in a very different way, in a mutually beneficial way, and in a way that emphasizes on partnership, as opposed to, you know, something else—some kind of—you know, the kind of donor-recipient, charity relationship of the past. And I’m very glad to see that in the U.S. strategy towards sub-Saharan Africa that was published in 2022, this was very much the framing of the vision of that relationship between the U.S. and Africa.

I think the discussion around the energy transition really provides an important basis for advancing that vision of an equal partnership between the U.S. and Africa, because the U.S. is trying to build out clean energy supply chains that, in a sense, are localized, focused on maybe North America. You can think of it as a North American clean energy ecosystem that has been enabled by legislation such as the inflation Reduction Act of 2022, the CHIPS and Science Act, and, in fact, the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021.

And within that context, then suddenly there’s a realization that, with respect to critical minerals, for example, the U.S. is very much import dependent on China for at least ten of the fifty critical minerals identified by the USGS. So the import dependence is anything in the region of 50 (percent) to 100 percent for at least ten of those critical minerals. And some of those minerals are actually found in Africa. So, you know, Africa could be an important supplier of these minerals to help the U.S. achieve its own strategic, economic, and national security objectives of, you know, diversifying away from China, reducing dependence on China.

So for a whole range of these reasons, we’re seeing that the U.S. is looking at the African continent differently. And within that context also the Biden administration introduced or announced the Partnership for Global Infrastructure Investments, which is really the U.S. demonstrating clearly to the world that it’s back, or it’s going to enter into the infrastructure game—or, maybe it’s back. I don’t know, depending on how you want to view it. One of the flagship projects of the PGII is the Lobito Corridor project that connects Zambia, DRC, and Angola, to refurbish or rehabilitate an existing rail line and to have a series of projects around energy and manufacturing processing across that corridor. So that, then—to the first part of your question, that is a good bet that thinking about doing hard stuff in Africa, infrastructure, and then connected with the resource endowments of the continent.

I think what needs to be done better, and this is the truth and I’m glad I’m speaking to this audience. Maybe in your respective engagements, whether with policymakers, is that the truth is, the Lobito Corridor project, as it is right now, is an extractive project. There’s no refining and value addition and processing. But I also know that down the line the ultimate objective is to have, you know, the manufacturing, the refining, the beneficiation, renewable energy projects layered onto the Lobito Corridor project. So this is something that needs to be accelerated, because when I speak to African stakeholders there’s still a lot of skepticism. People are saying, but this is an extractive project. We’re still going to be extracting unprocessed minerals to be evacuated to the coast of Angola for shipment to Western Europe and North America. What is different?

So I think that needs to be communicated better, number one. And then the actual projects, projects beyond extraction, projects around value addition, they need to be accelerated. I don’t know what the timeline is right now. So I think, just to conclude, what needs to be done better, and sometimes, again, in my engagement also with U.S. policymakers it doesn’t always occur to people, because this is a developed country, those pressures to industrialize and develop are not evident and imminent. People forget.

You know, when you say, oh, but the Lobito Corridor project is just an extractive project—honestly, I’ve had conversations with people and they’re, like, well, what is wrong with that? And I’m, like, that is not a good thing. When you’re talking to African counterparts, they don’t want that. So just kind of reminding people why this is important, because I don’t think people have malign intent. They just—it just doesn’t occur to them. You know, this is a service economy. How many people have even been to, like, a manufacturing plant, right? So I’m going to stop there.

TOGUN: That’s fair. And I think this point around rethinking the ways the U.S. government engages the continent. And I think the Africa strategy is one example of how to narratively change that. And I think it’s yet to be in practice. I think there’s some good elements that we’re beginning to see, but for this—like, Lobito Corridor is a really good example of, like, for this to be meaningful and actually work differently we have to rethink how we orient it in the future.

I have a lot more questions for you all, including some that are—I actually want to talk about human rights. But I also want to—there’s some really smart people here, so I want to make sure that they get to ask questions. So, yes. Go ahead.

Q: Oh, OK, sure. Hi. Good afternoon. I’m Nate Allen. I’m an associate professor at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies at National Defense University. Good to see you, Emmanuel, Usman.

Sorry if this comes a little bit out of left field, but I’m wondering if any panelist has thought about some of the implications of increasing development in the space industry for an African—an African development, especially the technology sector. So, like, one really eye-popping analysis I read the other day—this is by Ndubuisi Ekekwe—if SpaceX gets approval to launch 30,000 low-earth orbit satellites in outer space, that’s going to reduce the cost of mobile broadband by fourfold, which would potentially put Starlink into direct competition with a lot of terrestrial-based telecommunications providers. So I’m wondering if—A, have you been aware of that? Or if you have any thoughts on how—what that might mean in terms of kind of U S engagement on the telecommunication sector, and also kind of on the African government side in terms of having potentially a major shakeup in the telecom industry as a result of that. Thanks.

TOGUN: Thank you. Bowale, can I turn to you to maybe you might have a chance, and then other folks here afterwards.

ADEOYE: Yeah. No, thanks for that question. It’s a really good question. You know, I think, again, you know, it’s a question that hopefully the key operators and players in the space are really thinking through in the risk analysis process and sort of engaging with governments and just ensuring that they fully understand the implications. Because this is a classic disruption of an industry. And my expectation is that the key players and the regulators should be liaising with each other on this, and just understanding the implication for their businesses, and the landscape, and ensuring that, you know, it’s—there’s no, you know, extreme negative impact that people are just not prepared for. So I think this is a classic case of risk identification and mitigation, that hopefully the key players should be looking into.

TOGUN: Great. Katherine.

Q: Hi. My name is Katherine. And I’m from the Rockefeller Foundation.

And, first, thanks for shouting out Mission 300. We’re a key partner on the Energy Access Initiative. So thanks for that. My question is actually a slightly different angle to the energy access question for Africa. So it’s about AI, and whether Africa is going to be poised to get left behind. So I’ve seen some recent analysis that the global economy is poised to grow by something like sixteen trillion (dollars) by 2030 as a result of the AI revolution. Yet, currently Africa may only get a fraction of that growth, for a number of reasons. You know, due to the digital access gap, as you mentioned, as well as the fact that data centers take a lot of energy to run, and are, you know, very energy heavy. So I’d love the panel’s perspectives on that—both what needs to be done to ensure that Africa can reap the benefits of the AI revolution from a core infrastructure perspective.

TOGUN: Thank you. Zainab, I’m going to have you take a stab at that first.

USMAN: Actually, think maybe Bowale might be in a better position. But just on AI, very, very briefly, because this is a—I think it’s a technology that everyone is trying to grapple with. That’s the honest truth, even here. You know, even service industry, service sector jobs are really at risk in a lot of advanced economies. So there’s a lot that, you know, everyone is trying to wrap their heads around. I think, for the African continent, those risks that you mentioned are very real. And for that reason, I’m aware that the African Union, they’ve put forward an AI strategy just recently. A number of countries also are coming up with AI strategies and policy documents—Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, among others. So a lot to watch in that space.

What I will say, though, is—because we’ve done a bit of work—in my previous life, when I was at the World Bank, we looked at some of these fourth industrial revolution technologies. At the time, they were called disruptive technologies. I think the name has now changed. So, of course, in addition to artificial intelligence, you know, you’ve got robotics. And at the time when we did that analysis, a lot of the fear was around the automation of factories and how that could result in the displacement of workers working on the factory floor. But also in conjunction with AI and robotics you’ve got, you know, obviously, like, blockchain technology. So at the time that was a very big deal. I think there are, like, seven categories of these technologies and the implications they could have for different kinds of industries and then the—of course, the jobs implication, among other kinds of impacts.

I think for the African continent I would say that, you know, the implications are not just risk oriented. At the end of the day, this is a continent that, for the most part—maybe if you take out North Africa and parts of—basically South Africa, countries are still not industrialized. So the risk of—if we think just in terms of jobs, which is an area I’ve looked at closely—if we just think in terms of the impact of technology on jobs, the impact is not just going to be a displacement impact. You know, you don’t have those formal sector jobs to replace anyways. So there could be very, very interesting opportunities there. But the risks are also real. The risks of being left behind, the risks of not being part of, you know, the creators or producers of these new technologies. And I think there are a lot of conversations happening right now on that front. So I’ll stop there.

TOGUN: And just one thing I would add on this. I think for us—at Humanity United, we—some of the work we do is around forced labor. And so thinking of things like Nigeria creating, like, AI—what could essentially become an AI farm for, like, labor, without any, like, value addition. I think that there’s many ways that we think of, like, the transitions that could be happening, and not only leaving Africa behind but actually putting Africa further behind, from some of the ways that the African leaders are thinking of these initiatives.

Emmanuel, Bowale, I don’t know if you have want to—no? OK. Questions. Let me go to the front of the room this time.

Q: Thank you, guys. Martial Combari.

A lot of my questions were kind of touched on earlier, so I just want to go straight into the ability to democratize. Oh, it’s not working? Sorry. Hello? OK, much better. (Laughs.) To democratize access to capital in certain parts of Africa, right? Can you talk about your insight around, I would say, how financing structure, such as blended finance or the ability to invest in certain local currency, can help bridge the gap between the immense —I would say, immense opportunity that Africa presents, but the lack of capital that it gets. Thank you.

TOGUN: I’m going to turn to our resident finance person for that question. Bowale, do you want to?

ADEOYE: Yeah, no, sure. I mean, I think one of the key—you know, I mean, you have—we know that there’s a significant financing gap on the continent. And, I mean, what is encouraging to me is that I am seeing a lot more sort of sources of capital. So historically, you would say that, you know, you’ve always seen the development finance institutions investing in, in my case, infrastructure on the continent. However, most of these funds are in hard currency. Unfortunately, many African countries have, in recent years, experience significant devaluation against the dollar, for example. And that has significantly shifted the base case by which the investments were made.

So there’s a significant opportunity for local currency financing. You see now a lot of pension funds looking at playing in that space, in the infrastructure financing space for example. You also see, you know, green bonds being raised. And so you’re really starting to see a lot of capital—alternative sources of capital and innovative capital sort of going to that space. And even from the—you know, maybe from the startup phase, from, like, a technology startup phase, I am actually familiar with some crowdsourcing, crowdfunding platforms that actually allow smaller scale investors to invest in assets that they ordinarily wouldn’t be able to. Some of these are under development. Some are in more mature stages. But certainly I think innovative capital and alternative sources of capital will be a key—a key enabler to, sort, of Africa achieving its growth.

And in addition to that, we also have, you know, the early stage risk capital, right? Because at the earliest stage of the projects, the risk of failure is higher. And historically, financiers would sometimes wait for the project to become bankable before they invest. Now you’re seeing some of them say, well, no, how do we actually put some of that early stage capital into projects to sort of support them to become bankable? And from the tech space, from the VC space, you’re seeing the VC start to have, you know, incubators. They have—there’s a—there’s a terminology that—venture studios is the word I was looking for. They have venture studios where they actually have an idea, and then they sort of bring the team together to implement the business model. And so the ability to take more risk is also quite key. And I’m starting to see that. We obviously need a lot more of it.

TOGUN: Great. Other questions. Let me get back there.

Q: Yeah. Hi. Thanks. Kate with Amnesty International.

So I think the Biden administration’s Africa strategy does a really good job of starting to frame the narrative around partnership and equal engagement. And that’s important and valuable. But at the same time, as we’ve seen the shift in this focus on private sector investment, it feels like it’s been at the cost of human rights. And it’s not that the U.S. is perfect and should be telling everyone else what to do, but if you think about Congo, for example, we have two pieces of legislation in Congress that talk about access for cobalt for the U.S., because it’s a critical mineral for clean energy transition.

And at the same time, Amnesty has documented forced evictions. We saw Tshisekedi this week looking to change the constitution. We’ve seen human rights activists detained, and the U.S. being silent because they’re in such competition with China around the mines. Or thinking about Biden’s trip to Angola, where they’re passing increasingly restrictive laws on civil society. And we don’t expect any of that will be publicly addressed. There will just be focus on this Lobito Corridor. So I guess my question is, how does the U.S. continue to have a positive focus on private sector engagement, because this should be happening, while not doing it at the expense of continuing to develop democracy and human rights?

TOGUN: Every time I’m on a panel with Zainab this is a conversation that seems to come up. (Laughs.) But I’m going to go to Emmanuel first this time.

BALOGUN: Yeah. I think these are great concerns. You know, just, you know, full disclosure, I was—I worked in the administration for a little bit. And this is, like, personally one of my tensions too. And what I think—what I observed, I should say, is that, you know, there’s a balancing act that I feel happening. In that, on one hand, you know, when the U.S. has come in and been forceful about human rights, you know, violations or attacks on civil liberties and openness, you know, they’re met with resistance, right? And I think there’s this internal conflict of, well, if we don’t—if we forego our values and ideology, then—or, if we don’t—if we stick to our values and ideologies, we’re ceding the space to malign actors, right? And I think the evidence of this is—one illustration, I should say, and not evidence, that I see where this has happened was in Niger.

During the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit, U.S. propped up Niger as a burgeoning democracy, you know, security partner, et cetera. And, you know, Niger ends up having a coup and has all of a sudden ceased relations with the United States. And public sentiment and, you know, governing sentiment against United States has been about sort of the U.S. trying to force ideas, ways of governance, how to return to civilian rule back onto the country. And I think this is true in all of these other contexts as well. And so I think what I—what I would say about what I see happening in this turn to private investment, right, is that, you know, the U.S. is trying to make a calculation of that.

We’re going to be very selective about how we want to engage on human rights issues. But also, we still have to—we still have to, you know, be competitive, or we still have to have some credibility so we can get in the rooms and get our policy—be the partner of choice, to use their language, right, so we can still have some credibility as a viable partner for these countries. And so that might mean we have to look the other way. I don’t know how productive that is. I don’t know how pragmatic that is either. And I don’t know how it actually changes the material conditions of those who are suffering from these abuses. And so I would just say, as a personal commentary, I would hope that, you know, whatever administration comes in next is more attuned to or takes more—takes that perspective into consideration.

And I think it also goes to Zainab’s point on the extractive piece, right? That it’s not—it’s important, because we all know that, you know, the engagement around these critical minerals is inherently about interest extraction, you know, bolstering up those who are—who are doing it. But it’s not—it’s not taking heed to the lesson that the reason why African countries are worried or frustrated about this being extractive is because of the history of engagement on the continent, right? And that, you know, one of the reasons why I would say that the China competition is not necessarily a competition is because the starting point is different. China’s engagement with Africa starts at the moment of decolonization, right? And that there’s this long iterative process of the Chinese narratively and materially conditioning themselves as partners and in solidarity with the—with the plight of Africans who—African countries that have suffered through the vestiges of colonialism, right?

Not to say that China is, like, you know, doing it—you know, doesn’t have its own issues on these things, right? But my hope is that there is a cognizance that the history also matters. And that the material lives of the citizens of African, and the young people, and those who have to live through these, you know, repressive governments, that the U.S. still has a value proposition here. And, you know, these values are not just talking points. That they’re something that we should be standing by.

TOGUN: Zainab, do you want to take? Bowale, do you want to take a stab at that question, or? Yeah. And one thing I would just say is I think the race to the bottom with China, I think, is perhaps not the ideal way to think of, like, how we think of competing with China. That’s just one thought.

And I’ve been on this side for a while, so let me go that side. Yes. Oh, yes.

Q: Thank you. Not to return to China, but to return to China. So talking about critical minerals and the extraction issue, I think what we found—so, I’m Liz Liebowitz. I work at the ONE Campaign.

When we talk to policymakers, I think they understand, for the most part, the problem around just being an extractive goal. But the concern that it’s raised when talking about support or investments in processing is more so given the Chinese investment in the supply chains, that not just as it may be not beneficial but maybe it’s actually harmful. It’s benefiting the PRC, is the view of some that we’ve talked to. So can you talk a little bit about if that’s a fair criticism of processing investments, or if there is perhaps just some misinformation going around?

USMAN: So let me make sure I understand your point and your question. That in your engagement with some, emphasis on some, U.S. policymakers, concerns around investing in processing and value addition because it would benefit PRC? The PRC and—

Q: (Off mic.)

USMAN: Yeah, yeah, yeah, and then some of the potential externalities, right? Negative externalities. I think that’s a very interesting perspective because, in a sense, then that reinforces the point that the whole conversation is about China not about the African people, right? If it’s about the African people, then surely the emphasis should be, are there better ways to do—cleaner ways, more sustainable ways to do manufacturing and processing? And there are. In fact, there are a lot of U.S. startups with very interesting innovations around cleaner types of refining and processing.

The other thing I’ll mention is the history of manufacturing is not a very clean history. But we need it. You know, ultimately, there are trade-offs with every policy decision. So then the tradeoff is, if you are in the Sahel, do you set up a manufacturing plant? Sure, it would have some pollution. And with great effort, with good policies, you could reduce that pollution. But you create jobs for young people that would otherwise be vulnerable to violent extremists. So at some point we have to take hard decisions. And I think that is a function of government, to take those hard decisions on behalf of their citizens.

TOGUN: Bowale, do you want to answer that question, or?

ADEOYE: Yeah. I mean, I just wanted to say that I know we talked earlier about the Africa Continental Free Trade Area. One of the objectives is to increase intra-Africa trade, which is currently about 16 percent—16, 17 percent, and the lowest in in the world. Africa’s exports are 70 percent raw materials, and its imports are 70 percent roughly finished goods. So besides, you know, the job creation and the industrialization that Zainab has mentioned, there is actually significant carbon emissions from the inefficient trips around the world. And I think as we look to, you know, climate change, I mean, I think it also makes sense to just manufacture and process at the source.

TOGUN: Thanks. Paul, right here.

Q: Thanks. Thanks for the discussion. I’m Paul with the U.N. Development Programme.

So my question does tangentially relate to China, but it also focuses on the natural resources that are in Africa.

TOGUN: This is the last China question.

Q: It’s actually not a China question, don’t worry. (Laughs.) But my question is about the over-indebtedness of African countries, and the collateralization of its natural resources as taken by decisions of the governments of these countries, which I think we all can understand is sometimes done in a corrupt way because it benefits the government officials. And they’re sort of willing to collateralize their natural resources for these loans. What is the solution to this moving forward? How does this affect Africa’s ability to continue to develop and to use its natural resources for the benefit of its own people? And to, you know, continue to have manufacturing and processing done next to the source of these natural resources? I don’t know who wants to answer that, but, yeah, thank you.

TOGUN: Might throw that to Zainab first, and then to you.

USMAN: Debt distress, collateralization of natural resources and assets, these are two separate things. They’re kind of related, but they’re quite separate. There’s a global debt—I don’t want to say crisis, but maybe an impending global debt crisis. So throughout this week a lot of discussions happening. In fact, the G-20 is doing something on this. They’ve published a number of reports. They have a number of working groups. So it’s not just an Africa issue, by the way.

And the debt distress in a lot of low- and middle-income countries has been, in a sense, propelled by the pandemic. But, of course, we also know that a number of African countries are in severe debt distress. Some have defaulted on some of their loans. China is an important creditor for a number of African countries. But it’s not the main creditor. In fact, if you take out Angola, maybe Zambia, for a lot of countries they—you know, their debt is owed by—or, they owe their debt to a number of—a variety of creditors. So there’s that.

Some of the loans associated with Chinese creditors, were taken on the basis of resource for infrastructure loans, resource for infrastructure arrangements. And it is unfortunate that in our—the current climate is—you know, with the great-power competition, and—I think we’ve kind of lost, you know, how do you put it? We’ve lost track of how and why these resource for infrastructure deals came about in the first place. And the motivation for them is not all bad. There’s important context here. And there’s literature on this, for those interested.

They came about because a lot of countries that needed financing for infrastructure were not able to get the financing from traditional lenders, whether it’s the World Bank or bilateral development finance institutions. In fact, throughout the—from the late ’80s, ’90s up to the 2010s, a lot of development finance institutions were not doing infrastructure lending. They decided that poor countries, what they needed was not infrastructure. Like, there are white papers on this. So countries emerging out of civil war or military coups in the late ’90s and early 2000s, you know, that settled some of their political challenges. They’re, like, OK, we need to do the business of, like, rebuilding our countries and our economies, they could not access the resources for that.

So they turned to, who? They turned to China. Coincidentally, at the time, China was doing it’s—what is it—going out strategy. They had excess, you know, liquidity that they needed to export, excess industrial capacity. It was just kind of a match made in a fringe heaven. You know, everyone marginalized from the system. And, you know, they’ve kind of found themselves there at, like, a back-alley bar or something. (Laughter.) So China stepped in, but Chinese financial institutions were also quite weak and underdeveloped. So it just made sense that for also African countries that didn’t have strong bureaucracies, and countries that were worried about corruption, if you are to go through the normal public sector and civil service, even if you get the loan from China it’s going to be stolen.

So it made sense that they would go into deals with the construction companies from China that they would, you know, basically commit some portion of future revenues from commodity exports to the Chinese entities or maybe a construction company that would build—whether it’s buildings, or hospitals, or bridges. So sorry I’m going into all this detail, but there’s an important context here. But, of course, you know, debt sustainability issues, fiscal sustainability issues came about. And there’s still a challenge today. So I think it’s important to separate certain things here. And that ultimately the main issue is that countries that are serious, whether on the African continent or elsewhere, are still finding it difficult to access financing for development projects. I think that is the critical issue that needs to be addressed. Sorry I took up a lot of time, but I think it’s an important context.

TOGUN: Thank you. We have time for one last quick question and a quick response. In the back, yes.

Q: Wyatt Yankus from Standard Chartered.

I guess to go off your question then, I mean, you’re saying that there’s a $400 billion gap in terms of financing, that’s the equivalent of the entire GDP of South Africa each year, in addition to what’s already being done, when there isn’t a lot of fiscal space, there isn’t a lot of public sector, et cetera. So how do we bring in the private sector, right? How do we at scale—there was—Bowale mentioned some of these experiments. But if you’re going to be doing $400 billion a year addition, you need major wholesale, not sort of experimental. So how can the multilats and the public sector bring in the private sector?

TOGUN: Can I actually have Bowale answer that? Very quickly, though.

ADEOYE: Yeah. No, I think it’s partnerships. I think partnerships is key, right? Obviously, the local context is very important. And so, I mean, there are a lot of institutions that are looking—you know, that are already investing on the continent, and are doing so well, looking to raise additional capital. Looking for those, to invest in them, looking for those, to cofinance with them. But I think also there’s a role in sort of reforming the policy. So I think these players have to work hand in hand with the government, because in the power sector there are opportunities. And in some countries, the environment hasn’t fully ripened for investments.

And so working in partnership with the co-financiers and other stakeholders to sort of ensure that the policy environment is enabling for the private sector investors, and then working with other private sector investors who are already in the space. And also, you know, there are—there are companies, you know, institutions that are—have established outside of Africa. There’s the opportunity to bring the expertise in-house, whether by recruiting local people or, you know, sort of building a team. You see that IFC, for example, is, you know, spending a lot more time building the upstream capacity and putting more of their resources in the local markets versus operating in their international offices.

TOGUN: Thank you. I know that there are a lot more questions. Unfortunately, we’re out of time.

So thank you to Zainab, to Emmanuel, and to Bowale for all of the insights that you’ve given us. (Applause.) Thanks also to you all in the audience for the great questions you’ve asked. And thank you to CFR staff, who’ve put these two days together for you. And finally, thank you to Liz Lowe, who’s put this entire panel together. Thank you. (Applause.)

(END)

This is an uncorrected transcript.

IYER: Awesome. Well, welcome, everyone. Thanks for coming to one of two panels here this afternoon. I know we’re a post-lunch panel, so we’ll try and do our best to keep it as lively as possible.

My name is Akhil. I’m a CFR term member and a member of the Shield Capital team. I’m really excited to be here on stage with some incredible professionals, both from the national security, private, public side, as well as some friends as well. What we’ll plan on doing for the next fifty-five minutes or so is have a little bit of a discussion.

The general theme that I like to go with on this topic of emerging technology and national security is, first, where we have come from. You know, what has been the evolution or recent history in the last twenty years at this relationship between emerging or not-so-emerging technologies and the national security enterprise, both the implications and how they were developed. Second, I’d like to talk about where we are today. Not just the United States and its likeminded allies, but how are we thinking about technology and competitive advantage in the national security domain when it comes to our global partners and adversaries? And finally, and before we open to questions, talk about where we go. How do we think about recommendations for the national security enterprise to think about both the challenges and opportunities in emerging technologies, and how we think about ensuring we can consume and adopt these technologies for the needs of the nation and others.

I’ll do some quick intros myself. I think you all have their bios, but I’ll highlight a couple things about Josh, Laura, and Danielle. Starting with Josh, who I’ve known for a bit.

Josh comes from an incredible lineage looking at both the public and private sector experience in the Pentagon working on the Defense Innovation Board, which really in recent memory captured a lot of the challenges, the issues, and the recommendations. So really looking forward to having a chance looking back on that perspective, and now where you sit, at Google Public Sector, thinking about what has been an evolution, certainly in Google’s approach and interaction with the national security enterprise.

We have Laura, who works at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence at the Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center. But, before that, Laura comes with this unique mix of Mandiant/FireEye experiences, which for those in the audience are the sort of premier cybersecurity private sector organizations that have really done a lot both for the nation and for its critical industries. And so, Laura, we’re excited to again, here too, have this tri-sector athlete to talk both about public-private partnerships, and maybe use cybersecurity as a case study in this relationship between technology and national security.

And finally, but—last but not least, Danielle, my friend from business school, who has spent a long career in the intelligence community working directly on technology issues and building technology at the Central Intelligence Agency, and most recently joined Palantir to help with a lot of their efforts, again, thinking through the public and private partnerships. I’ll note that I think out of all of us, Danielle, you’ve probably been on terminal most recently, working in Python, and maybe COBOL if you want to go to the government space. (Laughter.) But we’re really looking forward to—thank you. We’re really looking forward to getting a sense of where technology is from actually having built it.

So, with that, I’ll kind of launch into the first theme, which is where we have come from. Josh, I’d love for you to start. Are there some key moments in your own career, as you think about recent memory, that really stand out to you? I won’t necessarily name Project Maven as one of them, but I think you might have some defining moments either professionally or personally when it comes to the evolution.

MARCUSE: Sure. Akhil, thank you very much for having me here. I started my career here at the Council on Foreign Relations in 2004, and bear the distinction as probably being known as the worst-period-RA-period-ever—(laughter)—at CFR. And I’m actually—I became a term member. And I applied to the Term Member Program for the sole purpose of proving to Richard Haass that I was not a loser. (Laughter.) And I was allowed back in CFR. But I have to say, coming back now as a speaker is really a major honor. And I see, looking out at this audience, that the standards for becoming a term member have increased substantially since I was in that program. So it’s really—it’s amazing to be up here with all of you, and this great panel.

So, you know, I thought about, like, what were the turning points, the obvious ones and the non-obvious ones. And I’m going to give you a multiple choice, Akhil. But I think what I thought the five most important ones are. And you can pick the one that you want me to talk about. And I know which one you’re going to pick, because you already told me. But I’m going to—(laughter)—I’m going to try—for the sake of the Google Public Affairs people, I always try to deflect this one. But I think you have to start the clock not with Ash Carter, where many people would start the clock, but actually with Hagel, who in 2014 launched what was then known as the Defense Innovation Initiative, that became the Third Offset, that really became the strategy that we understand today. And so I think the key turning point that separates really the thinking of the small—the small wars, insurgency technology, innovation space of Iraq and Afghanistan from what became great-power competition really began with Hagal in 2014.

Then I think a crucial turning point that you might not guess was in 2015 when Google DeepMind created AlphaGo and defeated Lee Sedol at Go. And that was actually the Sputnik moment that began the AI contest that we’re in. And I got to see firsthand how the people that had a front-row seat at that game in Taiwan brought that insight right back to the Pentagon, and told the secretary of defense directly, whether you know it or not you are in a competition. This is the competition you’re in. You are losing. And this is what you need to do to catch up. And many important dominos fell from that recognition and that conversation. And it’s super interesting also because it gets to what you were saying about how the commercial innovation and the defense innovation converged at a certain moment. And I think you could argue that was the moment.

That led to milestone number three, the creation of Project Maven, the first operational pathfinder of modern computer vision as we understand it, applied to a current warfighting example. Not—when AI escaped the lab and got onto the battlefield. And I would couple with that moment also the very consequential decision of Google—which I did not work at at that time—the very consequential decision of Google to complete but not renew that contract, and then how that defined the next four years of the relationship between Silicon Valley and DOD.

Fourth, and this is the sleeper that I’m most proud of, the cancellation of the AOC 10.2 contract. And some of you in the room will know what that means. Most of you will not. That was the multimillion-dollar, three-Nunn-McCurdy breach, completely non-performant contract to determine how the common operational picture and the war fight would be conducted in an Air Operation Center. That was replaced by a single application built by DIU in six weeks for $2 million. If you want to know where the battle of Lexington for the software revolution, where the first shot was, that was the first shot in the battle of the software revolution right then and there.

And then last, and this might surprise you, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Because the ending chapter that begins with Google not renewing Maven ends with Putin invading Ukraine. And Putin has done more to unite not only NATO but Silicon Valley and DOD around the idea that was now know what great powers do invade each other. The world is not a post-utopian technological place. It’s a dangerous place. And technologists need to choose sides with democracies. And DOD could have never made that argument. Putin made that argument. That case is over. That’s done. We now know that for another decade. So which one do you think?

IYER: Well, while I’d love to get into the intricacies of defense acquisition reform, I will prevent the audience from having to do that, at least for now. I’d actually maybe love to catch up on the very last one, because I think you have now seen the progression over those five events to the point where emerging technology—or, frankly, technology is no longer emerging. It’s being demonstrated and leveraged on the battlefield. Are there one or two aspects of the actual engagement, the conflict, either locally within Ukraine or in the digital space, or globally, that stands out to you as, hey, wow, we are really at a new moment when it comes to this intersection?

MARCUSE: Yeah. I mean, so one way I would describe it is the most exciting thing happening in defense innovation today is Replicator. And Replicator is a possibly failed attempt at America doing in two years what Ukraine does in one month. You know—and, again, and I love it. And I love everyone who’s working on it, and the audacity of it. I mean, I could not be more stock up on Replicator. But to be clear, like, we are trying to figure out if we can make thousands of, you know, cheap, attritable, autonomous systems that can operate effectively, you know, in a warfighting scenario and make them affordable and make them numerous. And, you know, Russia and Ukraine, they’re both doing that without us. So I think that’s really consequential. And thinking about iteration speed, cycle speed, and what we have to do. So I think that’s a sobering one.

A positive one is you go from 2018, with every major tech company trying to figure out how much distance they can put between them and warfighting, to Russia invades Ukraine and now they’re clamoring over each other, they’re falling over each other to argue about who’s doing more to support Ukraine. And, like, thank God, right? That’s what we should have. I commend to you—is anyone here from CSET? Any CSET people here? CSET and Christine Fox, APL, did a great paper on big tech support to fighting Ukraine. It’s a great—it’s a great short read. And it documents really clearly all the important things that American tech companies have done to be part of this.

IYER: Thanks, Josh. I’ll come back to the topic of some of these initiatives in the latter sector, but I want to stay on where we’ve come from. Laura, you’ve had numerous experiences both seeing it, again, at Mandiant/FireEye or in the public sector. Is there one or two moments in history—either professionally, events we know about, or personally—that really defined this nexus for you?

GALANTE: Sure. Akhil, I won’t make you pick. (Laughter.) So if you’re—(inaudible).

Look, when you think about emerging tech, I think sometimes it’s easy to, you know, get really fixated on what that technology did, right? I know we kind of talked about this as a Sputnik moment here. And pick your favorite Sputnik moment. But let me go a little bit in reverse here. So I’ve lived in the cyberthreat intelligence space for my whole career, which is roughly about the same as long as we’ve called that space cyberthreat intelligence, OK? (Laughs.) So kind of new, even though I look too old for that.

Here’s where we are. We went through a period from the early 2000s into about 2010 where figuring out that cyberthreats were not just an IT issue that was a bad day for changing passwords, and that this was truly a national security threat to intellectual property, if you were a Fortune 500 company or someone in the defense industrial base. It was an espionage threat, if you were an agency or the Department of Defense, who had to cope with espionage. And then this was also just a literal state-grade threat to the types of technology that would be developed in the U.S., whether that was civilian, whether that was green energy, or more, right?

So getting this to be seen as a national security, versus something wrong with your tech department, has been the story and trajectory of how we understand cyber threat intelligence and cyber intelligence writ large in the U.S. government, and then also on the private sector side. When I think back to just, like, a single moment, or sort of think about what’s the pivot point about how we think cyberthreat actors will move against the technologies in the space that we’re in today, I’m going to pull you to an example we’ve been working through for the last year in the intelligence community.

Has anyone heard of the Cyber Army of Russia Reborn? I hope Ryan has. OK, good. There we go. OK. So let me tell you the story for just a second. While we’ve long talked about Russian state capability against networks, and Chinese and PLA activity, Iranian activity, and more, one of the more curious incidents that we’ve had over the last year is dealing with a loosely affiliated group out of Russia called Cyber Army of Russia Reborn. So the shorthand of it is CARR. And what this group has been aggressively doing is going after the human-machine interfaces, the control system—like, how you control your thermostat at home—of a variety of water treatment plants across the U.S.

And by getting into very loosely secured edge devices, they are able to cause an effect that we have talked about for almost twenty years in this space, called jumping from the cyber to the physical domain. In this case, getting access to something online that lets them overflow water tanks, right? And on its face, this doesn’t sound like a huge Sputnik moment or some massive advancement. But it is. And here’s the piece here. If you are able to use a domain, in this case cyber, to be able to extend your influence and push to the edge of literally how people are getting water, this presents an opportunity, if you’ve got your black hat on as an adversary, to really go to the next level of how you can positionally put assets in another country at risk, right?

This is something where building a state program for fifteen years to get at core espionage intentions, that’s important, but, wow, if you can go and hold an adversary at risk at that edge, and have an effect on civilians, have an effect on a population, you’ve really changed that game. So it’s moments like that that we’ve been seeing in this shift towards a more disruptive landscape in cyberthreat intelligence that I would kind of put out there and posit as the next real fissure as how we see that growing technological edge, especially in critical services, as the place where actors are going to innovate.

IYER: Thanks, Larua. I want to stick on the cyber topic. For those of you who were there yesterday hearing from Nate Fick, one of the things he brought up was the fact that our ability to deter in the digital domain is, frankly, dead. Do you believe we’re on—is that a true statement? Is the trajectory even worse, as you think about where we’re going to in the future? And is there even the realistic ability to mitigate this?

GALANTE: Yeah, I think—and just putting deterrence theory aside. And, I’m sorry, I’m a good PoliSci major, like so many other people in here. But putting the deterrence paradigm aside, I think the question that we’ve got to continually ask is how do we raise the stakes for how threat actors will go after technology, in this case in the U.S., right? And doing that is a really tough, but kind of critical, endeavor to figuring out how our systems are less targeted. Let’s take ransomware for a second, right? This is the major scourge of the cybersecurity industry. And it’s the major scourge that we’re dealing with, writ large, with a ton of different entities.

When you have vulnerabilities that haven’t been patched—I know this isn’t cool—but, like, vulnerabilities being patched is the basis for how most actors get into a network, right? We have not been able collectively, as a society, to get boards, IT departments, CIOs, et cetera, to be able to have enough focus on that rhythm of patching to just get the baseline of attacks off the table, right? Some of the biggest attacks in the health care sector against hospitals, emergency services, schools on the first day of school, et cetera, all were because unpatched vulnerabilities that our good CISA, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, had been warning about for months. Had not been patched, right?

And I don’t want to say diet and exercise and, you know, all the sort of basics, but it is the basics of raising the bar on network security practices that will be the best deterrent, if you want to go back there, right—(laughs)—for just increasing the security posture that the U.S. has today.

IYER: Thanks, Larua. Last question before coming to Danielle. Generative AI. I feel like I can’t—I live in San Francisco. I can’t throw a rock without saying the word. Do you think the application of generative AI to cybersecurity, as a case study, inherently favors the attackers or the defenders?

GALANTE: Look, it’s double-edged. I mean, I think that’s constantly the question here, right? If you’re able as an attacker to have a more refined phishing email—and, yes, they’re still getting in with a good phishing email, right? (Laughs.) That certainly gives you an edge as an attacker. But if you’re able to scale your vulnerability, and vulnerability patching, and really understand where’s my attack surface vulnerable, that starts to give the defender the edge. It’s a tool, like everything else.

IYER: Great. Thanks a lot.

Danielle, you have built tools, both in the hardware embedded systems and software component. Are there some moments that stand out for you, either in building the actual application—where there was some novel technology that was a punctuated equilibrium, so to speak, in advancing what you were able to apply? Or was it something not actually about technology, but about how the organization or the ecosystem actually adopted it?

REGIS: Yeah. It actually touches into how actually you and I met. So we met at business school. And the reason why I actually sought to go to school is because as a developer who’s developing tactical tools for those who were doing all the spy-dy things at the agency, I realized that there were things that we just did not have access to. We did have more than COBOL. Let’s just make that clear.

IYER: Good to hear. (Laughs.)

REGIS: Like, do not be afraid. Like, we do actually have modern technologies. We have, like, ways of actually, like, using Git. Like, we’re regular developers. (Laughter.) And then, on top of that, afterwards of spending a couple years as a developer, I wanted to see what it was like to do large-scale acquisitions. I knew I was interested in going to school. I was doing all my whole business school-y things and trying to figure out how I could be most marketable. But in that journey, I too learned the fact that when you’re doing both tactical as well as strategic, there were still going to be a lot of inefficiencies when it came to figuring out partnerships. How are you able to figure out the best people to actually work with? And, like, what did velocity look like?

And as we’re talking about, from, like, my two panelists here as well, we are in a time where agility is really important. We talked about Russia-Ukraine. And we’re also talking about how baseline upgrades, in terms of cyber, is also really important. And those things come with being able to have not only visibility, agility, but also partnerships, as to who could actually do these things. Oftentimes not the technology anymore. It’s a matter of how you’re able to apply it, as to who is actually listening and who is actually able to align incentives in order to actually make sure that you’re going to make sure that the first day of school is going to be safe for kids, or that hospitals are going to be able to have their medical records safe.

A lot of these things are not actually technology problems. They’re actually alignment of incentives, but also understanding and communication versus actually being a technology problem. Oftentimes it’s a velocity, and it’s also a matter of understanding. So when I went from tactical to strategic, that was something I really understood. And it went way more than me thinking about, like, my engineering degrees. It was about how can you actually talk to people, and understand incentives, and actually align them so that you’re able to actually solve the biggest problems?

IYER: Thanks, Danielle.

How would you currently, today—you know, you’ve seen it from the inside. You’re at a company now. How would you rate our ability as the United States or its allies, to adopt and consume emerging technology relative to potential adversaries or just global partners?

REGIS: Yeah. So you made a very hot statement earlier in regards to Russia-Ukraine, and how—oh my gosh, why am I blanking on the name right now—but as to DIU’s Replicator.

MARCUSE: Yeah.

REGIS: So Replicator, as to how Russia-Ukraine, they’ve been able to do it at far faster, like, velocity. I think that we have a lot of the ability to do so. Like, we do waivers all the time. But we also have a lot more policy, right? Like, we have a lot more policy that is written such that there is going to be uniformity as to how we are going to be able to address the rights and also securities of American technology. I think that we do have the ability, it’s just the matter as to be able to follow the bureaucratic processes that are absolutely necessary sometimes, it does actually happen a lot slower. But when we do actually have alignment around mission, I think you’d be surprised to see just how quickly a lot of these things can happen. And it’s just a matter—you just need a cause.

And so being able to centralize around a cause, and how people are clamoring at being able to actually address these problems, actually shows you the fact that people want to actually be in the game. But we also have things called security clearances for a reason, right? And some other places, I’m not as informed as to, like, how they go about being able to go through some of these gates, but I imagine they’re not as high as how we actually think about national security in America. So I think that we have the ability in order to actually adopt a lot of these technologies, but there are a lot of safety mechanisms that we actually use.

But where I think that we need to actually push a little bit further is thinking about what is considered—what are classification levels for different types of development. And that is where I actually think the most amount of velocity can be gained, is thinking about how we’re able to start bifurcating what things are done on the low side, and when do they actually become classified. Because there is a process to getting your security clearance, and then there is actually a shortage, I find, of those who are cleared at these levels who are maybe your emerging technologists. Therefore, that’s something that we need to think about.

IYER: Thanks, Danielle.

Josh, I want to come to this same question I asked Danielle. But looking back at your prior role as Defense Innovation Board chair, what recommendations did you offer when you were on the DIB that you think should have already come to fruition today?

MARCUSE: Should have already come to fruition today, but haven’t.

IYER: But have not.

MARCUSE: Yeah. We had a whole genre of recommendation that I feel was, like, pretty categorically ignored, around people and culture. (Laughter.) We had a pretty good track record on organizations being stood up. We got a pretty good track record on zero trust, for example. I was pretty happy about that. I thought our 5G paper, especially the classified one, was great. Completely whiffed on that. I mean, that was a disaster, 5G. We screwed that up. But, for the most part, I thought, pound for pound, in four years that was a pretty strong FACA board. I’m pretty proud of that. But where I felt the department was just, like, just not listening was connecting talent management policies and personnel reform and all of those elements of how digital transformation happens to the way they—the way they actually staff the projects.

And so we have seen an enormous number of new authorities given to the department by Congress, because Congress desperately wants to see change in this area. Very slow adoption of those new authorities. And, you know, one of my favorite examples, just to be precise—because if you’re throwing stones, you know, you should be clear about it, is, you know, Congress has given every military service so many new authorities for lateral commissioning of people into active duty or Reserves to give them, you know, a faster path to a commission to be constructive service credit, to bring those people in at a higher rank or a higher pay. And almost none of that has been done. Almost none, right?

So, like I had a gentleman reach out to me. He seemed, from his LinkedIn, super bright. You know, chemistry at MIT. You know, looks like the kind of person be, like, yeah, I would really like to have that person join the Reserves, you know, and have a job relevant to their skill set being at the top of their class in a STEM field at MIT. And there was a new authority given by Congress. I think it was called 63(b), if memory serves. This gentleman and five other super elite, you know, graduate students in sciences, who have all said, I really want to be 63(b) accession reservists. And the Air Force is just, like, not moving forward on these five people.

Or another one was, you know, I had a conversation with a four-star general in the Army who was responsible for their constructive credit promotions for people in the cyber field. We have—as both of these ladies to my left know—huge shortages of cyber talent in basically every type of formation. And, you know, just, you know, I asked him, you know, Congress has given you fifty billets to promote people up to the rank of colonel. How are we doing? He’s, like, well, I have two guys. One we promoted to lieutenant, and the other, I think, was, like, major. And the other forty-eight, we’ve done nothing. And the only example of a brevet promotion I’ve seen is the two directors of the Army Software Factory got promotion to brevet Colonel.

That was amazing. Love that they did that. That was phenomenal. Let’s see more than two. You know, these are the kinds of things where I think they just don’t get it. And so here’s why this matters. I’ll just sort of bring it home to, like, why do I care about this. There is a fundamental philosophical mismatch between the way the department thinks about talent and the way industry thinks about talent. And it basically boils down to this: In the commercial world of venture capital, of startups, of entrepreneurship, of hyperscaling, high performing Fortune 100 companies, we look at your personality as a feature. And the government sees it as a bug. (Laughter.) And that really boils down to that.

What the military wants to promote for is interoperable, general purpose, 1980s general managers that they can just swap in and swap out, and they will all look the same on the promotion board, and they will all look the same in the precept, because there’s only one reason they’re there and that is that there’s, like, 150,000 of them, and one of them could be the commandant or the chief of staff. And the entire thing is this giant sorting mechanism to winnow them all out in the up or out system until one of them, you know, gets to be the four-star that rules of all of them. Because the people that wrote those rules were fixated on that dream. And they thought that the system that produced them was obviously the best of all possible systems, because it selected them. And so they really cannot wrap their minds around a different system. (Laughter.)

And so that’s the opposite of the way we think about it in the world of innovation and entrepreneurship, where we think about those noncognitive factors—like openness to new ideas, cleverness, grit, you know, fascination and obsession with an engineering problem or a customer, or any of those things that would make someone fit to be the leader of an innovative software company. That’s the same quality you need to be the leader of an innovative organization in DOD, whether it is a software factory, a BESPIN, an AFWERX, a software Cloud One, Platform One, DIU, SOFWERX, AFWERX. Any of those organizations, they all need leaders like that. Women and men that have those qualities.

But the department will not assign anyone to command any of those units based on having those traits. They just can’t bring themselves to bear that thought. And that is the reason why we’re not seeing more adoption, because you need human beings who will behave that way regardless of the incentives. We have spent fifteen years trying to change the acquisition processes. And we have now finally, God—thank God—we’ve now spend one-and-a-half years changing resource allocation of the PPBE Commission. But we have yet to take seriously the idea that none of these dollars will be spent by the wrong people in the right way. Only these dollars will be spent in the right way by the right person. And the system needs to focus on putting those 100 officers or civilians in exactly the right job for them.

It’s only a hundred. We mapped it. There’s a hundred key leadership technology positions in DOD. And you got to staff those hundred jobs with absolutely the right people. And until we take that seriously, the rest of it won’t matter too much.

IYER: Yeah, Josh, I think you would probably revise the title of this panel too. Instead of focusing on emerging technologies for national security, you would be—you would, frankly, talk about talent to enable emerging technology adoption.

MARCUSE: Well, I just—I just do speak about it in the way that I did because I just want it to be included on the agenda. (Laughter.) It doesn’t need to be the whole subject.

IYER: But it’s a lot of it.

MARCUSE: It doesn’t need to be the whole thing, but I just want very much that it be on the list.

IYER: That’s right. But I do want to stay on this topic, and maybe end with some thoughts from Danielle and Laura on talent, because it’s so critical.

And, Danielle, I want to start with you. I’ve been inspired by your work in STEM education. This is something you’ve done since I think you were in high school, enabling young men and women from high school on to advance their skills when it comes to STEM. And so I what I want to do, before ending with Laura here, is maybe take it a bridge out from national security, since I’m looking in the room and probably some eyes are glazing over on DOD acquisition. But all of us, regardless of where we are, we are here at CFR because we have some relevance to how technology will affect our jobs, our leadership, regardless of what that domain is. And, Danielle, you’ve had a chance to look at that, not just from the national security domain but elsewhere. Do you have a couple good examples, or maybe a recommendation or two, about how us as leaders can think about either bringing in the right people, developing people internally with the right technical skills, or finding creative strategies to partner with those so that the right technical experience on these emerging technologies is coming into the organization, regardless of what that organization does.

REGIS: Yeah. So I have two prongs to that. One of which is, like, the right people who have the technical skills actually getting exposed to national security. And then also, just, like, generally younger people, who might have never thought about this arena at all, actually just be interested in technology, even though they might not be seen as technical. One thing I find is that from a very young age people are told that they are technical or not. Maybe when you are in middle school, lower school, anything of the sort. It could be impacted by your parents saying that they are non-technical, then therefore their brain juices have gone down to you, and then therefore you are not technical. (Laughter.) Even though maybe you could learn it just fine, right?

But you are pre—like, you have this preconceived notion that you are not technical. And, like, based on the number of maybe PoliSci, like, majors in here, maybe you thought you were not technical. But I generally feel like there are so many other parts of this technology field that are way more important than just understanding the bits and bytes, but actually understanding how to solve problems, leveraging technology. On stage here, none of us, actually, day-to-day are actually dealing with bits or bytes. But we are making very large decisions that, from a scale perspective, are actually going to have far more impact when it comes to technology than is sometimes just making those innovative, groundbreaking, Einstein-type of breakthroughs.

So when you’re actually talking to those who may be considered youth, you need to actually start exposing them as to how technology is actually way more than thinking about how they’re good at chemistry, or how they’re good at math. But really peeling back how the things that you’re doing actually have technology components, and how they need to have an interest in it because that’s actually where, as a society, we’re actually moving towards. I think a reservation around technology is actually one of the biggest things that actually scares me about students these days sometimes. Because you really do need to have an openness to understanding it, without actually having to be an engineer.

So that is the first thing. Really making sure that you’re exposing what you are doing today to children, about how technology actually intersects with it. And that means, like, doing bring your children to work days, or doing some exposure elements with schools, colleges, et cetera, in ways that are just not, like, super technical. Just break it down. It can be done. And then, in terms of national security and, like, those who are actually technical, I think that oftentimes it’s those who, like, actually know all about it, and who are super excited about it. I fell into the CIA. It’s a story about me winning an iPad. Find me afterwards. (Laughter.) And, like, I personally, would have never been in this industry had it not been for just, like, a random moment.

And I think that it comes down to actually exposing the fact that there are a lot more threats to this nation that I think people just do not realize. I think we have been in a very, very safe perceived—I’d think cyber, you’d say otherwise—environment for a very long time. And there’s a greater—there’s a greater divide to those who actually even know a service member that has been decreasing over time. And so we need to just make sure that people know about the fact that there are things that are happening. And make sure that at these tech companies that it is actually put forward, the fact that the USG work does have great impact. And figuring out ways to declassify some of our biggest wins, because those are the things that are actually going to inspire people to have impact, because there are actually problems out there.

IYER: Thanks, Danielle.

Laura, I want to end with you before going to questions, coming back to maybe your role currently, but obviously in your personal capacity. Nate talked about last night the role of public-private partnerships. You’ve been at the core of that. As you look in the future, what is the appropriate and unique role of the public sector and private sector as it comes to harnessing emerging technology—both the advantages and mitigating the risk?

GALANTE: Great. I’m going to get to that. But let me start with this talent question that’s out there. (Laughter.) Can’t help it, all right?

So, look, I hear some of these broader organizational questions and issues that you’re bringing up, Josh, and that you were alluding to as well, around how you drive the government towards more innovative people strategy, right? But let me just tell you, I’m the government employee who came from the outside up here. Everybody else went the other direction, OK. I’ve been in government for about three years now, and came from a ridiculously fast-moving paced cybersecurity world, where I ran cyber intelligence at one of these companies. The last three years for me have been the most creative, the hardest, and probably the most exhilarating in terms of what space you could drive towards. And I love seeing an NSC colleague out here, because I think he’ll share a similar experience with you out at the reception.

But if you are willing to jump into the public sector with the experience that you have, whether it’s at an NGO or whether it’s on the private side, and bring the same sort of gumption of problem solving on really tough, difficult to scale solutions to fix huge problems, you’re going to be so successful in national security. And to see the opportunity space, no matter what agency you’re at—big, huge ones like DOD, nimble ones like the Director of National Intelligence Office assignment, or anything in between, there is such a need and such an interest in people who are willing to connect—I’m getting to your private sector piece—what they brought from the outside and the capabilities and innovation that lives and is driven in the R&D and in the public sector, and bring that into the government, harness it, and create that dual use sort of feed between these two cultures.

I’ll give you a couple more tactical examples about how we’ve been doing this at the center that I lead. So, look, one of the big things in cyber is how do you integrate intelligence from the outside, data from the outside—whether that’s a technology company or a cybersecurity company or elsewhere—and bring that intel into the community. Not to be duplicative of classified information, but to amplify it, right? How do we get the picture of what’s going on, on the digital attack surface, right? So what do we do about this? Well, we realized that we needed to pull that information in, in a way that was accessible to all eighteen of these different IC agencies, clear, and also allow it to be accessed in a way that your analysts working on China and your guy defending a network at DOD could all see and understand that data in a useful way for their jobs.

So it took a couple years, but I would throw that timeline up against anything I’d done in the private sector that was this hard. It took us a couple years, but three months ago we just did the first IC enterprise eighteen agency buy of the major intelligence companies that feed the intelligence community, so that everyone’s got access to the same data. All right, talk about a buy or build strategy, you’ve got to do both, right? And the opportunity that you have to do something like that is how you set up the national security apparatus to be able to look at huge emerging tech threats for the next five, ten, fifteen, twenty years, right?

The reason why it’s so tough and also so rewarding to make change in this public sector space is because you’re setting this up not for the analysts or the operators or the people that you’re working with today. You’re doing it for the ones a generation from now. And that’s huge. And that responsibility is enormous. And the ability to be part of it is incredibly cool. So not to be too much of a shill for the U.S. government, but think about—truly think about what you can do there. I hear you on how tough the space is. But, boy, is it great to be part of that kind of effort.

IYER: Love it. And, Laura, you are hiring right now, right? (Laughter.)

GALANTE: I’m always hiring. I’m always recruiting.

IYER: Awesome. I love it.

GALANTE: Yeah.

IYER: Well, we’ll go ahead and turn to questions. Reminder, this is on the record. If you can just state your name. And would love to start.

Q: Hi. My name is Hall. I work for a health care AI tech startup called Cogensus.

I am a recovering political science major. (Laughter.) But once upon time I was in higher education policy. And I remember around, you know, 2018-19, there was a fair amount of a version—some, you could call it hostility against working in national security. We talked about the Google employees at Project Maven. And I believe my rival undergraduate institution, Duke University, wouldn’t let Palantir into their career fair. So I’ve been out of that space for a while, so could you give me a temperature check? Has it gotten better? How has it gotten better? What are the drivers? Is it the war in Ukraine? Is it the bad economy? Or what’s going on?

IYER: Yeah, absolutely. Maybe I can start with that. I would love to—love to hear. Sitting in Silicon Valley, from having been there fifteen years ago to today, there is a fundamental change. And it started before the war in Ukraine. A fundamental change in individuals that care about the mission and want to build things beyond—that have real mission impact. And you see that in the number of startups being involved. You see that in the government being willing to partner with and try, regardless of what might fail and succeed. And a real tone change around campuses. I just remember being at Stanford last week, and just happened to sit at a table with someone talking about wanting to leave a big tech job to think about doing something in the national security space.

Any other anecdotes?

MARCUSE: So I deal with this, as you, every day in my day job, because I’m part of a two-year-old division inside of Google that was stood up to do work with the U.S. government. And I do feel exactly what Akhil has said. That there is a major change. I think Russia-Ukraine was an example of driving that, COVID was an example that drive that, the macroeconomic picture, of course, did also drive that. But I would do say that employee sentiment across all of the major players has really changed. And it’s not just also big hyperscalers. If you look at OpenAI, and Anthropic, and companies like that, they also are interested in doing work. And I give Palantir huge credit, by the way, for having really led in the thought leadership space. And they’re really calling attention to some of these issues, and sort of changing the Overton Window of what the extremes of it were also.

But, like, it’s also because of companies like Shield. We’ve seen $140 billion in venture capital move into this space. No one can work in Silicon Valley and ignore that VCs are moving into this space, and private equity as well. So I think many things have changed. And I think it’s really a welcome change. And I will also just say, I completely agree with everything that you said, Laura. And I in no way meant to debate you on that. (Laughter.) And I do love that. But I do also think that there are so many extraordinary, innovative people in government. I just wish the system were trying to amplify, not dampen, their positive impact. But I think we are in agreement about that. And you should all go work in the government and not come to the private sector, right? (Laughter.)

IYER: Thank you, Josh.

REGIS: Thanks, Google.

IYER: Awesome. Yes, ma’am.

Q: Hi. Tiffany Tribbett, S&P Global.

I want to connect back to something, Laura, you started with, Danielle, you kind of built on, when you were talking about we have no idea the greatest threats that are facing, kind of, the United States. And you were talking about the CARR situation, last night we talked about Typhoon. The threats to physical infrastructure in the United States. And so this is a tough one. I know last night we were joking about broken crystal balls, but if you have one where do you see the next vulnerability as kind of coming in that space: And how do we best kind of work to secure our nation’s assets?

GALANTE: Do you want to start, or?

REGIS: You can start.

GALANTE: OK. (Laughter.) All right, I think two things to look at. One, our adversaries have gotten really good at understanding how to take a deeper, kind of more positional—I’m going use, like, a chess analogy for a second and I’m not a chess player so, like, bear with me—a more positional approach to the types of targets that they are going after to hold the U.S. at risk. Here’s what I mean. First time you play chess, you kind of understand the rules, and you realize you got to move your pawn and, like, knock the other pawn off. And then if you’re playing against someone good, you start to realize that they’re seeing the board in a completely different dimension from you. You’re, like, oh, gosh, just give me pick-up-sticks, or checkers, or something, right? OK, that’s what’s happened here.

We had this bulk compromise and hacking of so many different entities. Take the Chinese example, the PLA’s example for some time here. Back in the 2012, 2013, 2014, these groups would go after so many targets. It was multiple APT, advanced persistent threat, group, hacker groups, going after multiple targets in the sector every day, right? Just quantity. Today, we’re in a place where, whether it’s the PLA or another threat actor, adversary, is able to think, hmmm if I compromise one of these key targets—sometimes we call it supply chain, but that’s really such a shorthand—one of these key targets on the tech stack, right? Whether it’s a telecom, whether it’s a technology company, whether it’s a security provider. If I can go at one of those guys, the ability to stem into other victim spaces is enormous, right? And that’s the big shift here that our adversaries have been really instantiating over the last couple years. And that’s huge, right? That’s really a difficult place to defend against, but it’s a type of thinking that we have to wrap our minds around on how we do better defense.

Then the counter to that, right, is what I talked about with the Cyber Army of Russia Reborn, right? Don’t go after these big positional targets. Go after the edge, because you can have this edge effect quick and fast, right? Not only was it the Cyber Army of Russia Reborn, but there was also an Iranian group that went after—and they took down, I think, sixteen—infrastructure in sixteen different states off of watching a YouTube video from an Israeli company that had a bunch of logic controllers. And in the promotional video for this logic controller for this tech, the CEO types in his password.

REGIS: Oh, Lord. (Groans.)

MARCUSE: No.

IYER: That’ll do it.

GALANTE: Right? You’ve got a great opportunistic actor who saw it. And then you’ve got multiple targets across the world down, right, in the water sector. So, like, those two pieces I think kind of illustrate the different dynamics that you have at play here.

IYER: Laura, can I have a follow up on that? Not about cyber hygiene, but do you think the public sector utilities for instance—you know, the Cyber Solarium Commission talked a lot about this—or tech companies, when someone here is going—or, already a CEO, are they appropriately incentivized to mitigate some of these? Or are they just hoping that they’re not the next SolarWinds?

GALANTE: Look, there are so many different efforts at play, whether it’s what the FCC did in terms of cyber materiality and the guidance around that over—it’s now last year, but over the last twelve months here. In addition to the secure by design efforts that CISA’s been doing. Like, there’s a panoply of different ways to try to figure out, what does that incentive structure looks like. But this isn’t a one-size-fits-all, right? And figuring out what agencies can bring to bear and continue to bring to bear to make this a problem that not only is sitting there at the C-suite and at the board of directors’ level for so many of these companies, but also is just good common sense, right? Like you don’t build a building for a construction—for a plant. You don’t do construction without having badging at this point, right? We’re at that same place. What are the digital locks on the door? How do you get the game to just raise as a matter of how corporate thinking starts to raise the bar in security?

REGIS: But I think there’s also the element of there’s a lot of legacy utility, right, like that is honestly operating at a hairline profit, when you think about utility and, like, things along those lines. Where I understand how it is difficult in order to incentivize and to actually do it, when they’re, like, I pay for insurance because I’m required to. And if I have insurance that covers this, and I have lawyers that are already going to be here when this happens, then what’s the big issue and what’s the likelihood? I think that sometimes people’s element of understanding the impact of threat is diminished when they have a lot of problems every day where they’re, like, I need to make payroll, I need to make sure that the lights are on, and, like, the things that feel immediate.

And that is the alignment of incentives where I feel like sometimes is a little bit lost for those who are not in the cyber realm. They’re, like, oh, like, I just change my password every thirty days. Like, I don’t understand the reason why I do it. It’s, like, oh, it’s because you can have seventeen different municipalities shut down tomorrow if you don’t, or if you do this during your demo. And those are things—like, that’s the disjointed nature of what I honestly fear about, is that as sometimes we get more and more abstracted away from what cyber means, and it gets more complex to people, they don’t realize the reason why you’re actually doing the very simple hygiene things that actually can prevent these very big things from happening.

IYER: Thanks, Danielle.

Yes, sir.

Q: Hi. Martin Chorzempa.

I’d like to ask a question about small yard high, high fence, and kind of the limits of where we consider national security risks versus acceptable economic opening. I’m an economist, and I sometimes joke that the national security people’s small yard high, high fence has, you know, been encroaching on the economists’ yard, and we’re often listened to a little bit less than we did before. Like, how do you think that people with economic expertise and security expertise can come together as these national security measures end up affecting a lot more commercial activity, and their effectiveness often requires you know, understanding of how firms will respond and how economically over the long term we, say, can have continued American leadership, where some of these measures might make us get designed out of supply chain, so we don’t have that leverage. How can we better work together on that? Thank you.

IYER: Maybe, Josh, we can start with you. I think the framing of the question is what actually is national security and what may not be? Google does a lot. What are some of the conversations there, maybe, of what fits within that bucket and what doesn’t?

MARCUSE: Yeah, I—well, let me—let me—very briefly, I’d say, first, I would say that a really good example of the problem that I think you’re highlighting is how we started to realize what an important national security tool CFIUS was, and how it was limited, and then looked at a whole bunch of different ways to try to add things to the CFIUS plate, and things that were relevant to try to do other things in economic statecraft that had to do with protecting our IP and our competitiveness. And I would agree that, in the same way that we found ourselves often bereft of cybersecurity leaders or bereft of people that really understood software or AI, we are often hamstrung by not having enough brilliant economists who have a seat at the table in defense matters.

I will say, I think the State Department and the intelligence community has done a far better job of integrating economics into the way they think about their mission. And I would agree that for the things that are more defense issues, like particularly Defense Production Act, supply chain issues, defense industrial base, I think we would be very wise to have more people with your tradecraft, especially as we imagine what a defense industrial policy should look like in the 21^st century. Both with respect to the traditional systems integrator suppliers, and even more so as we think about what an industrial policy would be for our digital economy. So as a general matter, if you’re saying that, like, we should listen to you more, I agree. (Laughter.)

And then, with respect to Google, you know, I think what’s really interesting, we think about it is, like, when is Google playing to its strengths in this market, and when are we not? And one of the ways we think about is, like, what are the truly commercial aspects of technology that we want government to adopt where we think there’s a genuine dual use need, and how do we get the government to think about buying technology more on a commercial curve that generates economies of scale and helps the department modernize at the rate of industry? And then there’s other problems that, like, really don’t have commercial analogous use cases. And in those situations, what you want most is a company that applies a really commercial lens to providing a service or a product that the government really wants to buy.

And I think that’s what’s special about Anduril and Palantir, and companies like that. These are companies that have product mindset. They have venture backing. And they provide the government with a product that has a lot of the benefits of the true commercial economy. And that helps the government adopt technology. And then there’s a narrow set of things where it’s, like, this is really something that only the government should buy, and you need to have an industrial base of some type that provides that thing that’s really a unique government need. And I think the goal since the ’70s has been to shrink the things that are purely government and expand the things that are commercial. And we’ve gotten better at better at that.

And so when I think about what Google does, you know, or companies like Google, like, what we think about first is what are the things that we’ve built for our ten billion users around the world that have broad use for the government? Like cloud storage. And then we think about the things that are narrow and specific, where you can take that technology and adapt it to a government-specific use case, like computer vision applied specifically to humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, or even to some other sort of computer vision use case that’s a bit more narrow.

And then there’s just a very narrow set of things that a company like Google will build that’s just for the government to use for one narrow purpose. And oftentimes a different company is better at building that thing. And that’s why we think of ourselves more as a platform company than as a product company. Because one of the things that Amazon and Microsoft—and especially Amazon—have been extremely good at is attracting companies to their platform to build with their tools something that is specific to government need. And so that is the way I think about it from a Google lens. And I think many other companies of a similar size would think about it that way. Which is, like, we want people to build solutions for government on our platform. We want to change our platform to be optimized for them to build on it. But we only build ourselves in very rare and specific cases.

IYER: Thanks, Josh. Laura, Danielle, any thoughts?

GALANTE: Let me just add real fast, and I love how you used economic tradecraft in sort of a data sense for these guys. One of the things that we’ve done for the IC, and we just released a strategy on it today—the ODNI strategy—is set up an Office for Economic Security and Emerging Tech to do the cross section of what you just walked through, right? How do you get better macroeconomic, I guess sometimes microeconomic, analysis married up with some of the intelligence questions and other pieces of intelligence that we have to provide better decisions?

Case in point is look at the beginning of the reinvasion of Ukraine, and what Russia did in ’22. One of the first tools of choice, of course, were the massive sanctions that were levied upon Russia, right? Real economic kind of cudgel right at the beginning. What effect would that have? What would that look like, right? And that analysis was really critical. So we believe deeply in kind of continuing to synthesize that economic data space with the more traditional intelligence space so that we can get to better decisions.

IYER: Awesome. Thanks, Laura. Time for one or two more questions. Yes, please.

Q: Hi. Good afternoon. Simone Williams. Thank you all for joining us today.

We’re tapdancing around the question of how do we incentivize companies in this public-private partnership. Can we, like, name some, like, examples on things that either government isn’t doing and should be doing, or things that maybe companies should lessen up on so that they can understand the abstractness of why this matters? Because when you say, hey, you need to do this for national security imperatives, they’re like, OK, cool, but what about my bottom line? So what are some things that we could tactically actually think through for some of these solutions?

IYER: Absolutely. Thanks. Danielle.

REGIS: I mean, I could start on that one. When you say, do this for me, do you mean—like, I want clarity around the question where—(laughs)—when you’re asking a company to do something for you, are you saying that, like, please stop this thing because of national security, even though they have a capital gain? Is that kind of the thought around it? Because if you’re looking at that capacity, like, there are some cybersecurity elements where you’re, like, hey, you might not know this, but there is this vulnerability that is in your software. You should patch this such that your people are going to be safe. And they’ll be, like, well, it’s going to actually have my software down for six days. That’s $6 billion. What are you going to do for me? Like, I feel like sometimes economic to safety trade off, especially in a capitalist society, is something that we really need to communicate through of, like, really understanding the greater impacts of things over time.

And that’s a big piece of where, I think, the communication aspect of finding mechanisms to where there are people who are going to be very, like, honestly, patriotic, right? Like, I am doing this for the greater good. I understand the fact that I might end up losing this amount of money, that my shareholders need to have a letter that’s written to them, and that’s fine. And I think that that’s a big element of it. But in terms of actually having national security work better in terms of partnerships, I think that there is a greater incentive right now because there is an understanding the fact that there are a lot of inefficiencies to the way that the government can get things done in terms of even just capital allocation. Like, there are firms like yours that are investing in the private sector because they’re able to be a lot more agile in regards to how development is done, and actually able to have some commercial applications as well.

Google is a big example of this as well, to where you have billions of dollars that have been invested in internal development that sometimes never actually sees the light of day commercially, or even in the federal sector. And focusing on the fact that the government is a really good project manager sometimes, but maybe not the best innovator, but knowing actually how to transition technology better is where I think we need to really focus on in regards to partnerships. And that’s where the government is actually understanding where national security comes in, or the government is making sure that the private sector really understands where they are able to partner on things, but not actually get into the weeds of some of the national security problems.

IYER: Thanks, Danielle. Laura, Josh?

GALANTE: I’d just say, articulating thresholds is sort of the area where I think both the government side on info sharing and then where companies come in, right? Where a newer entrant to either an intelligence market or a defense market can articulate why or how their product or the information that they’re bringing either is important to them—like, it signaled I am a major defense company. This finding was important internally because it showed us X, Y, and Z. That starts to get to a more particularized conversation that then the intel side or the government side, can sort of latch on to.

And it’s been the same way from the other side. There have been three huge kind of muscle movements in the intelligence community, in cyber alone, to drive towards clearer thresholds for intel sharing. One is through NSA’s Cyber Collaboration Center. One is through the newly launched Treasury T-Suite. So a real intel to intel for banks, literally three blocks down right here that’s just opened in the last couple months. And then the third, which is just moving out of their pilot mode, it’s the Department of Energy’s Energy Threat Analysis Center. So again, energy intel to intel with key partners in the energy sector. And what has really built the partnerships in all three of those cases is clarity around what to share and why it matters.

IYER: Thanks, Laura.

Josh, last comments before we close.

MARCUSE: I can’t improve on either of those answers. But I did want to just say what a marvelous job you did, Akhil, narrowing down a very broad topic. And I’m thrilled with so much enthusiasm for something that I think is going to define the next decade for our country.

IYER: Most importantly, Josh, thank you, Laura, Danielle, for spending the last hour with us. And look forward to continuing the conversation rest of today. Thank you. (Applause.)

(END)

This is an uncorrected transcript.

 

SUBRAMANIAN: Thank you, everyone, for coming. I’m sure we’re going to have a very comprehensive discussion today.

We have three brilliant guests who can give us their vantage point on the 2024 election. We have Michael Dimock, the president of Pew Research Center; Frank Luntz, veteran pollster and communication strategist; and Ashley Parker, the senior national correspondent for the Washington Post.

So, guys, I just want to start with where we’re at. You know, we have a little under two weeks until election day. Both candidates have been hitting the trail. We have a couple unconventional stops this weekend.

So I just want to talk about their closing strategy and, Ashley, I thought we could start with you on Kamala Harris. She’s had a very condensed campaign. Her time is precious. Messaging has to be very deliberate. How has her team decided to close their message to voters in the final days of the campaign as some people are already casting their ballots?

PARKER: So they have a couple messages they want to get out to voters. They probably have five, which you could do in an eighteen-month campaign in a, you know, post bad debate campaign they’re kind of doubling down on three core messages.

One is reproductive rights. You’re going to see her hit that harder, and it’s interesting there’s some debate in the Democratic Party in her orbit of, like, if this election should have just been—when you go back and you look at 2022 and every special election if the argument for Democrats should have been to make this a referendum on a post-Dobbs world. But that’s—they’re not. That’s one of their messages.

Another one is, obviously, the economy, trying to win the message of that she cares about the economy, that the economy is getting better. That’s two. And then the third one, and they will say there’s a very nuanced distinction which is if Biden had been the candidate and this is how he started his campaign he would have very clearly closed on democracy, on threats to democracy, and that’s sort of what her team is doing.

She has this big rally on the Ellipse on Tuesday but they say it’s slightly different. It’s not democracy. It’s more danger, making the argument that Trump would be—a second Trump term would be more dangerous. And so those are kind of the three closing messages.

SUBRAMANIAN: And what about Trump? Has he changed his message in the final sprint or are we still hearing a lot of the same messaging we’ve gotten from him in the last—

PARKER: Arnold Palmer was pure strategic. (Laughter.) I mean, Trump’s—you know, what Trump tested that tests quite well is this trans ad against Kamala Harris where, you know, he says—it shows her talking about how she supports tax dollars going to prisoners to undergo gender-affirming surgery and then the tagline is a sort of brutal Kamala Harris, she’s for they/them, not you.

And it’s interesting because there’s—and Frank does focus groups so he can weigh in—but voters will say they don’t—even many liberal voters, Democratic voters, will say they don’t really like that policy. It kind of makes them uncomfortable but they’re—but that’s not what they’re going to vote on, right? That’s not related to their lives.

But the reason that the Trump campaign and some Democrats believe it’s so devastating is because it gets at this idea that she is dangerously liberal and it taps into all of the young voters. So the election, you know, right, will be decided by young voters, brown voters, Black voters, especially young, although that sometimes is described as under fifty. (Laughter.)

So do with that what you will. I’m a young voter.

SUBRAMANIAN: It’s all subjective.

PARKER: But it also, again, taps into sort of like a wokeness, right, and it appeals to an anti—people who don’t like the reactionary wokeness on the left that’s what it taps into more than someone being, like, I’m going to vote against her because of something that will affect a very small number of prisoners.

SUBRAMANIAN: And, Frank, can you tell us about—you know, you do these focus groups. How are these messages being received? Like, is any of this breaking through to voters? And I know you recently said—you know, one thing that Ashley mentioned you had recently said that her turn to focus on this sort of anti-Trump rhetoric—this, you know, he’s a threat, has changed the momentum behind her campaign.

I mean, what are you hearing?

LUNTZ: So I’m trying to figure out how to begin this. I haven’t been here in a couple years and I’m grateful for the invitation, and another—what I’m about to say may cost me ever being invited back. (Laughter.)

So you either say that this whole election is a shit show or you say we’re fucked. (Laughter.) So I don’t know which one is more appropriate and I was suggesting in the green room that we’re totally fucked and they said, no, the word totally is too much. (Laughter.)

And that’s the best I can do at an attempt at humor because it’s not funny. I’m not afraid of what happens ten days from now. I’m afraid of what happens the ten days after ten days from now and I never felt this way before. I thought January 6 was impossible and now I’m thinking how can they make it even worse, and it’s already starting.

Trump is uncontrollable and it’s not going to change. He’s going to do whatever he’s going to do. His own staff cannot control him. They do every kind of guardrail that—by the way, I’m taking notes. I’m not returning texts. I want to be clear. You can—I will hand my phone to you when we’re done and you can look at it. Just don’t do anything with the pictures. (Laughter.) Although, actually, I’m sure the Chinese have my phone already so it doesn’t matter.

I want to do Harris first. She could have come out at CNN and said, Anderson, with all due respect, I’m not going to answer a specific question. The public has a right to know where I stand, what I’m going to do. Not my goals, not my objectives or my priorities but exactly what I’m going to do the first hour, the first day, the first week, the first month, and the first year, and this is going to take a few minutes.

So we’re at a town hall. I’m going to answer your questions right now, and she goes on and she talks about each of those. She’ll probably get to the first month and Anderson will say, I need to ask you questions, and she puts her hand up to him and says, no, they have a right to know what I’m going to do and I have the responsibility to tell them.

He looks at—she looks at the audience and says, will you give me permission to go on for three more? Isn’t it OK that I go on for three or four minutes? And in that effort she will have changed the narrative that she says what people want to hear rather than what she believes. She will have changed the narrative into someone who’s going to get things done. It is so easy, but she so wants to go with Trump as I’m sure some of you here do.

We know who Donald Trump is. We know what he said. We know what he’s done. It’s all done. Trump is done, good and bad. She’s not, and this is the way to make a change and I don’t get why—when they asked her about the wall she goes right into Trump, the first word, and then she does it in a second sentence. We know where he stands on the wall. She needs to tell where she stands.

And I’m going to do something that’s going to bother a few of you in here. I’m seeing vestiges of Hillary Clinton in 2016. Hillary Clinton never—she hated Trump so much that she couldn’t get off him and on election day she won, which he hates to hear, but she didn’t win the Electoral College, which is what really matters.

So we’re doing the same thing all over again. Mark my words, on election night you’re going to call me and say, what the hell. You’re not actually going to say, what the fuck, but you’re going to say, what the hell. And children, you cannot watch this video or you’re going to have to edit this out.

As far as Trump is concerned it’s simple. Here’s $10 million. Go to the Cayman Islands and shut the hell up for the next ten days. His staff is letting him go to Madison Square Garden. Are they nuts? What’s he going to do there? He’s going to go full Trump. He’s going to love the audience, he’s going to take it all in, and he’s going to say something that gets him defeated.

So I don’t—I’m spitting as I’m telling you this. I’m sorry. I will get you a wipe when we’re done with this. (Laughter.) And I swear to God I do not have COVID, right? Didn’t have COVID this morning so good luck. (Laughter.)

But they should have actually gotten him away from there because he can still cost himself the election.

PARKER: I would just add very briefly that makes me think of something. I was covering Trump in 2016 and one of his top advisors said to me—because it was the same—it was a different challenge but it’s the same thing. It was can they get him for that—for eleven days, right, to be un-Trumpy, right?

No, to like, get people to plausibly think, like, when he gets to the Oval Office he’ll become presidential, and I remember an aide told me that they printed out, like, a cartoon of—I may be getting the characters wrong but it was, like, Road Runner chasing—or Wile E. Coyote chasing Road Runner off of a cliff. And they were, like, you can do this. You can chase Hillary Clinton off of that cliff but look where Road Runner ends up, right? Or Wile. I forget who chases who.

LUNTZ: Wile E. Coyote ends up—

PARKER: Yeah. But, like, they both end up looking down and realizing, oh my goodness, right, there’s just air under my feet. And in 2016 that was enough. Like, he internalized that and he was sort of calm-ish for, like, the necessary, you know, five to nine days.

LUNTZ: Here’s the problem. I was in the White House on—I should not acknowledge this because there’s a camera somewhere in here. I was in the White House December 23, 2020. It was the White House Christmas party. I should not have been—I’m Jewish so I should not be at a Christmas party in the White House. (Laughter.)

By the way, is anyone here Jewish? Raise your hands. Don’t raise your hands. (Laughter.) Have you not learned anything about history? Every time someone from the stage has asked that question it hasn’t worked out for us.

I’m in the White House. I’m in the White House and I finally get the guts because he’s difficult to go up and ask him, what does the J in Donald J. Trump stand for? You know what he told me? Genius. (Laughter.) I’m done. Can I leave now?

SUBRAMANIAN: Please. No, there’s a lot there—a lot to unpack—(laughter)—about both campaign strategies.

But, Michael, I want to bring you into the conversation as well. You know, this election we’ve had a few very historic and tumultuous moments, you know, with Biden dropping out, a couple assassination attempts.

But, you know, I think the one thing is that nothing has really fundamentally moved the needle when it comes to this race. The candidates remain in a dead heat. We saw some polling today—new polling today from the New York Times-Siena poll which has them both tied, locked 48 (percent) to 48 (percent) for popular vote.

I wonder if you can just talk about what’s changed over the last ten to fifteen years in terms of just the deeply entrenched partisan attitudes and how that factors in to where we are in this moment.

DIMOCK: Yeah. No, it’s stunning, isn’t it? I mean, to watch an election season that’s had as many enormous turning points in it and yet every time we look for those post turning point polls it just hasn’t really shifted in a really—in a significant way, I mean, that does tell you that there’s a big chunk of America that’s pretty locked in, and maybe that’s not a surprise.

To your point, Trump is the dominant figure in the American political conversation and there’s not a lot to learn about him for most people. They know where they are and they know which side they’re on.

We thought maybe the shift on the Democratic side would shift that dynamic. Oh, people are going to learn about Kamala Harris. That could move things. But I think I’m agreeing with you, Frank, it’s sort of—it’s all a conversation around how that compares to Donald Trump and Donald Trump is the bigger figure in that equation in terms of how people are thinking about this.

But it’s all part of this longer-term sort of trend of polarization in America, which is no surprise to anyone. But that dynamic has certainly just continued to amplify. You know, I remember at Pew Research Center the first time we were doing really big studies on polarization in, like, the late ’90s and 2000.

We thought we were seeing sort of the extremes of this political dialog and how could things get any worse and, you know, there are no independents left in the American electorate, oh my gosh, you know and that is, obviously, sort of quaint by today’s standards, you know.

And one thing we’ve been seeing is that it really is an American phenomenon in some ways. That’s not to say that these trends aren’t happening in other parts of the world and for those of you who follow the world, right, there’s a lot of polarization going in a lot of countries.

But the way that almost every issue in America is falling into this same left-right divide, the way that there isn’t a dynamic or shift, some of it’s just the fundamentals of the American electoral system, right? It’s so rigid that everything just gets sort of locked into this winner take all structure.

Some of it may be in the technology and media environment that amplifies it in ways that maybe are less so in other countries. But this is a very deep American divide and not only do you see it, like, in comparisons to other countries but you see it in the American self-awareness.

You know, we asked a question around the world about how deep do you think divides in your country are over this and this and this—you know, religion and race or ethnicity in your country, or partisanship. And, I mean, in America we’re fixated on this, right? It’s become our identity. It’s become our entire national conversation.

We’re so panicked about it, yet we’re so frozen in it, right, all at the same time and I think that goes a little bit to, boy, you know, with all the things that have changed over the past seven months there was very little dynamic in the kind of fundamental underpinnings of this.

SUBRAMANIAN: And, Frank, I wonder if you could weigh in.

LUNTZ: You’re coming back to me? (Laughter.) Didn’t you shut her up at this point?

SUBRAMANIAN: Well, I just think in this election there’s all this talk as it is in every election but just this—about undecided voters and where they fit in in this particularly because we see people—like, this partisan entrenchment right?

Where are they at this point? Are there still undecided voters and what is going to drive them to come out?

LUNTZ: How many of you in this room are undecided? Raise your hand. I’m not going to kill you. I just realized—how many of you are undecided here? Anybody? Not a single person raises their hand. It’s almost nobody, and it’s more male than female. It’s younger than older.

The problem with Trump is that he reminds women of their first husband’s divorce lawyer—(laughter)—and so women look at him and say they’ve made up their minds. If they like him it’s because they like his straight shooter. They like someone who’s going to break up the system. They still want to drain the swamp, and it tends to be older women.

I think younger—the biggest undecided population are women eighteen to twenty-nine who have to decide whether or not they vote, which is why I don’t understand why they’re bringing Bruce Springsteen along in this because women eighteen to twenty-nine don’t know who he is. (Laughter.)

It should be Taylor Swift, and I can’t believe I’m saying that at a CFR event but Taylor Swift matters to eighteen- to twenty-nine-year-old women, and if she wants to make a difference—I know she hates Trump—you go on the road. You do two or three concerts—Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin—Saturday, Sunday, Monday. Taylor Swift can move this election. She really can. They did a survey on this.

By the way, it makes me cough, too. (Laughter.) We asked, who do you trust more? This was when Biden was still in the race. Who has a greater influence on you? And Trump at 38 percent, Biden at 35 (percent), and Swift at 24 (percent). Twenty-four percent said she influences them more in politics than the other two.

Now, one of the reasons for that is that Joe Biden is so old it takes him an hour and a half to watch 60 Minutes. (Laughter.) I’m going to—see, when you actually start to get angry with me. His favorite painting is “The Last Supper.” He’s actually—(laughter)—let me finish the joke first. (Laughter.) He’s in the painting. He calls himself a constitutionalist; it’s because he was in the room when they wrote the document. (Laughter.)

Younger women, if they participate, can swing this election because they exist in every state. I don’t know what they’re going to do and I know that abortion rights is their number-one issue, more than prices and more than immigration, and that’s the only group that prioritizes in first place abortion rights.

Harris is doubling down on younger voters. I don’t know if that’s the right strategy because in the end it doesn’t work with men, even fathers with daughters, husbands with wives. And if you don’t answer the question of immigration or prices I don’t know if the abortion rights issue gets you to where she wants to go.

And as far as undecided they’re not voting. I’ve been doing this for the New York Times. It’s the best series—sorry, I just realized what the hell am I doing. She’s the Washington Post and I’m mentioning the New York Times.

PARKER: That’s true, but my husband works for the New York Times. So—

LUNTZ: Excellent. So the New York Times has got this great series—

PARKER: So we’ll accept it. (Laughter.)

LUNTZ: —and it’s on younger voters, but the undecided I don’t believe votes or I believe votes third party, spoils their ballot, does something. It’s the persuadables and they’re still there, and I just don’t believe that abortion rights gets you the persuadable vote—that they’ve already made their decision. The persuadable vote cares about prices, affordability, and safety.

SUBRAMANIAN: Well, that kind of brings me to my next point, which I was hoping the two of you guys could talk about, but it seemed that Harris has been focused on independents, disaffected Republicans in these final days. Is that the best use of her time?

I mean, she, you know, obviously, has really emphasized or is emphasizing the message about Trump, you know, as a threat to democracy. You talk to her advisors they say we want them to—we want voters to visualize a second Trump term.

You know, there’s a concern that there’s Trump amnesia, according to her campaign, and so they’ve really tried to focus on these Republicans who may otherwise stay home if, you know, they’re not going to vote for Trump. I mean, is that, you know, addressing the persuadable people in this election?

PARKER: I mean, I do—so I think Trump amnesia is a real thing even—you know, I have covered Trump since basically two days after poor sad sweet Jeb Bush dropped out in February of 2015, first for the New York Times, then for the Washington Post, and even I—like, you know, sometimes I’ll look up an old story to try to remember an expert I want to call or what and even I—like, I’m paid to steep myself in Trump but even I’m, like, wait, he did what—like, I wrote what? Like, what happened then?

Like, it is just—I think Trump amnesia is real, but at this point they need to do more than—as Frank said, there’s a belief that Trump is sort of baked in the cake and, frankly, he was—the cake was baked when you showed up to vote for him in 2016.

Like, sort of fundamentally who he is, whether you love him, whether you hate him, you knew that when you went to the polls on election day in 2016, which is why character attacks on him are so difficult, right?

The idea that, like, a twenty-seventh woman coming out is going to—like, she is going to be the—like, it just does—like, either that bothers you or it doesn’t bother you, or it bothers you and you’re going to hold your nose and vote for him, or it bothers you and you’re going to rally all your friends to not vote for him.

But, like, it’s just known. So what they—their belief is, again, that sort of in pushing it forward it’s not the, like, remember, you know, when he called—you know, remember when he said this offensive thing or remember when he did that, it’s that they have to move it forward to he will be dangerous, right? He has said he wants to be a dictator on day one.

He will take—you know, he will move us towards an autocracy. He will—he has said he wants to weaponize the Justice Department and his candidacy—his presidency will be about grievance and retribution. And I don’t know the answer if that will be a successful closing pitch or not but there is an understanding that, like, you can’t just be, like, remember how chaotic, you know, 2016 to 2020 was.

You have to push it forward in some sort of way because there’s a lot of voters—as Frank was saying they care about the economy, they care about prices, maybe they care about safety and immigration, and they don’t like Trump as a human. They don’t like his behavior and they don’t like how he acts. They don’t like what he says.

He’s off Twitter now but they didn’t like having to come down to the breakfast table and explain new words and phrases to their nine-year-old daughter every morning. They don’t like any of that but they liked a lot of the policies. Those four years he was president felt good, and there’s the concern and the risk that they go into the voting booth and just, like, hold their nose and they’re, like, I’m voting my 401(k).

And so there’s a thought that if you can push it forward to the danger that that may be compelling. That is the theory of the case. I don’t know if it will be successful.

LUNTZ: Let me give you three numbers to remember, and this was done in the week before Biden dropped out so he’s still presidential candidate. They asked the public who was more successful—was the administration successful, Trump and Biden. Fifty-five percent said Trump was successful. Thirty-nine percent said Joe Biden.

When I got those numbers back I—I should not admit this. I yelled to my office saying, you transposed the columns. This is wrong.

They didn’t. I was an idiot. This is what it is. The public really thinks that Donald Trump had a successful administration and they believe that Joe Biden for all the things that he did, all the legislation that passed, his communication was horrible. So that’s point number one.

Point number two is on the issue of affordability to not let anyone say it’s the economy because it’s not. It’s not jobs. It’s not wages. It’s not economic insecurity. It’s the fact that wages went up. They’re going up but prices are going up even more or at least they did for a couple years.

So that affordability Trump has a ten-point advantage over Harris despite the programs that she’s put out and he has a twelve-point advantage on immigration. She still can’t answer—she won’t answer that the last four years have not been successful on immigration and if she won’t come clean on that then voters start to doubt her authenticity.

And I use that word explicitly because that’s the word that I get in the focus groups. She’s not authentic. Trump is scary. Actually, that’s not what they say. They say, I don’t like what he says, exactly what you said and the words you used, but at least he’s authentic.

So I want you to ponder this. They trust Trump more than they trust—she’s more trustworthy but they trust what Trump says more than they trust her, and this is now an alternative universe. We’re now eleven—ten days away. This is what’s going to have an impact on election day.

DIMOCK: Yeah. I was going to build on what she said about prices, and I agree you shouldn’t think of it just as the economy. It is specific to sort of inflation and prices but even there I think a lot of folks and a lot of coverage even misses what I suspect is really fundamental for a lot of the folks who are in that camp which is, yes, it’s about the price of, you know, the gallon of milk at the grocery store or those other transactional things. Those are visible. Those carry an outsized weight in people’s minds.

But I think the price surges in the last three years were just on top of this larger sense that for many Americans nothing—the fundamentals of the American Dream aren’t available, right? I will never in my lifetime be able to afford to buy a house.

So many Americans feel that way, right? I will never be able to afford to send my children through school. For a lot of us, probably a lot of us in this room, those are worries, right? But they’re not nevers, right? I will never be able to have security in my retirement. I may not even be able to retire. I am this close with one health care incident to my entire family being shut down, right?

That’s how lots and lots of Americans feel and that class divide in America—and I use that word with intent because America for most of its history, politically, or at least modern history, was sort of unique among major democracies in not having its political array fundamentally driven by class.

That’s why the polls got 2016 wrong, right? Education never mattered in American elections. Why would we weight a poll to education, right? Well, by 2016 it really mattered, right, and now it matters more and there’s just a huge swath of people for which—it’s not—I guess my point is it’s not just the consumer price inflation that’s been the focus of a lot of our attention.

That’s big. It’s important. But that was just on top of this enormous sense of just, you know, nothing works. Nothing will work for me. The entire system is rigged, right? I have no way of getting to anywhere near the American dream so why not, right? Why not choose something like this?

LUNTZ: This would be a great conference for you, saving the American Dream, because you have Democrats and Republicans. You got young and old. You got foreign policy experts and economic experts. Because we can tell you how bad it is but in the end we don’t do any good unless we give you solutions, unless we help you all find the results, and I don’t see that because too often I’m complaining about it and I’m not sufficiently focused on how do we fix this.

By the way, in terms of class I don’t call them middle class. I don’t call it working class, and the worst of all is blue collar. What the hell is blue collar? They don’t dress that way. People live paycheck to paycheck.

DIMOCK: Right.

LUNTZ: A quarter of Americans, almost a quarter, every week, every month, paycheck to paycheck. They wonder if they’re going to be able to pay their bills.

What do these candidates have for them and can they actually make it happen? I’m not hearing an answer. Trump comes closer to it. By the way, drink that wine because you’re going to need a lot more than that. (Laughter.)

It just—I know we’re on TV here. CFR, I never realized you guys are all drunks. (Laughter.) What are you—and it’s not for us, it’s for them. What are you going to do for them to make their life just a little bit easier and that does not involve yelling and screaming at Donald Trump?

It does involve listening and learning and speaking their language. I got screamed at but in a fun way at JFK. It was actually not—that’s not—it was actually really cool, by a couple African-American men, which is what woke me up to this because they came over to me and says, you’re wrong. She’s not going to win.

I thought for sure that Donald Trump is going to lose this election because of his debate performance. Talking about eating dogs and cats is not a good message usually to the public. It’s a better line than you give it credit for.

And they said to me, you don’t get it. You don’t understand. He hears us. The same people who hate him hate us. The same people who have been going after him have been going after us.

And I’m looking at them and I know their race and I know their age, and I’m dumbfounded because I’m not expecting it. And they say all their friends are doing this. All their friends are talking about it. Finally we’re going to put someone in the White House who understands and gets us. We’re victims just as he is. Done.

PARKER: Oh, well, I was just going to—what Frank was saying makes me think of—this was before Donald Trump was on the scene as a political figure. But in 2014 my editor sent me out to do sort of a voter voices where you talk to a ton of voters around the 2014 midterms. Like, drive the old Route 60.

So I drove it. I flew back from Indianapolis and I probably talked to, like, 200 voters and the one thing that came away was, like, a lot of these people were incredibly patriotic. I’d go to these houses and they were maybe a little—needed some upkeep, right? Like, they were crumbling in some cases but they’re all bits and pieces of Americana, right?

There were American flags or flower pots painted with the American flag. So sort of people—like, patriotic people and the thing they all said was, like, I did everything right. Like, I did what they told me. I put money away for my 401(k). I got a good job. I showed up and I worked from 9:00 to 5:00.

I bought a house that the bank told me I could afford, right, that was a good investment and, like, look at my block, right? Every single—you know, five of these ten houses on my block have been foreclosed upon, right? Like, and, you know, and same thing. Like, now I will not be able to retire.

There was also a sense of—as you mentioned, of victimization, right? Like, they might have been collecting unemployment or medical comp but that was very justified because they had a real injury, but their neighbor across the street was collecting it and didn’t deserve it and they were basically—and those clowns in Washington, in New York, like, ruined the country and not a single one of them has paid a price.

And they did not have the language then but what they were saying was, like, drain the swamp and burn it all down and—because there’s also this question is, like, is Trump—did Trump create—like, and I think Trump sort of harnessed something that already existed in the country and we just sort of—and he recognized it in a way that other people didn’t. But I think back to that road trip frequently as sort of like we could have—we could have predicted the rise of Trump in certain ways. It wasn’t, like, as gobsmacking as a number of people believe it to be.

LUNTZ: And one of the challenges—and this is not you, and this is not your newspaper.

PARKER: Maybe me.

LUNTZ: No, it’s not you, and it’s not my theory. I do not like doing this. But I watch some of the television coverage, and what they do is the show comes on, and: “If you thought you hadn’t seen everything from Donald Trump, watch what’s coming next.” The reporter or the host demonizes him before you even hear him, and that is exactly backwards, and that creates the problem. There was no way to hold him accountable when the person speaking seemed biased or seemed one-sided. You have to let these people be who they are, and then you make the judgment from there. They did it in the wrong order, and so Trump’s unhinged press conferences, they thought he was a victim of the people yelling at him because of the person who began the discussion by saying Donald Trump took ruinous to a new level. They were angrier at the reporters and at the media than they were at him. Those who tried to hold him accountable have completely failed because they’ve done it wrong.

DIMOCK: It makes him more authentic.

LUNTZ: Exactly.

DIMOCK: Yeah.

SUBRAMANIAN: Well, one thing you guys are kind of talking which I think kind of gets to this is that, you know, both are trying to run as a change candidate—(laughs)—when they’ve both been in office, right? And so, you know, polling told us over the last year or longer that they want—you know, people wanted a different candidate than Donald Trump or Joe Biden. And they got one, right, in Kamala Harris, but her mandate when she took the helm was to distinguish herself, to define herself, right? Voters wanted to hear more about who she is, what she stands for, and how she would be different from, you know, a Joe Biden administration. Has that been accomplished over the last few months? Has she been able to do that? Do voters—I mean, Michael, feel free to weigh in—do voters feel like—(laughs)—you know, she—that those questions have been answered?

DIMOCK: Probably not, no. I mean, I don’t know that she’s—it’s a hard—it’s hard to distinguish yourself from the administration you’re in. As much as she’s tried to say I am the candidate for change, we’re not going back—meaning back to Trump as an incumbent, sort of trying to run as if it’s 2020 rather than 2024—it’s very hard to disown those policies. I think she believes in those policies. I think—you know, and if you believe them, those policies will work for the Americans I just described but not in the next two weeks they’re not going to work for those voters. It’s a longer, you know, game plan. And that’s the pinch that she’s in, and I don’t know that she’s willing to sort of disown, you know, a set of policies that she—

LUNTZ: She hasn’t.

DIMOCK: Yeah.

LUNTZ: She was down, what, five points when she first got in. Then it’s four, then it’s three, then it’s two, then it’s one, then it’s dead even. Then she’s up one, she’s up two, she’s up three. She peaked at about three and a half. And what did that entire period have? Joy. What do you remember about her? She was dancing onstage. People at her rallies were dancing as well. Yeah, the Republicans made fun of it, but it was positive, and it was future-focused, and there was emotion and passion, and something that we haven’t seen in a long, long time—people who are happy.

And then she got dark. She let Trump determine the tone and the demeanor of the campaign. She went at him because her people said exactly what you said, which is that too many voters had forgotten Trump’s behavior, had forgotten the things that Trump had done, and did not fully understand the threat. And so she tried to be Donald Trump and nobody can be Donald Trump, and she’s come back. She’s fallen. She’s—they’re dead even now.

By the way, as a pollster I would tell you I don’t trust the numbers. I’m not making bets because I don’t know what the turnout is going to be. I still don’t know, and people call me all the time and say, how should I bet. I’m not answering that question. (Laughter.)

I do tell them where they can get marijuana, for the record. So that’s—I figure—by the way, I think it’s really smart that the Democrats put marijuana legalization on so many state ballots. The problem is the voters are usually asleep or they forget—(laughter)—so it doesn’t actually work.

She had the answer and then she went Trump, and that’s been, I think, a fundamental and potentially fatal mistake.

PARKER: Although there was also an argument—and you guys as pollsters would know better—but that some of that initial bounce had had nothing to do with her. It was this collective sigh of relief from Democrats and she was just—she was getting back up to the levels that Biden should have been at as, like, a baseline Democratic candidate, right?

So, like, her gains were not actual gains. They were, like, gains getting her back to, like, the bare minimum to possibly be competitive with Trump.

LUNTZ: She was ahead.

PARKER: I mean, the ahead might have to do with your theory but, like, part of the catching up was just, like, no longer hemorrhaging the groups that Biden should have never been hemorrhaging in the first place.

SUBRAMANIAN: One thing I do want to address because this is CFR is how much foreign policy has factored into this—(laughter)—which, you know, obviously at different points we’ve had some flash points with Ukraine, with Gaza. But now, like, how much can this affect voters, especially in states like Michigan where a few hundred thousand votes matter in this election and which way the state’s going to go.

So, I mean, I’ll let you guys talk. But how much are we seeing foreign policy and even, Michael, just, you know, compared to previous elections?

DIMOCK: Yeah. I mean, I don’t—I think Frank’s prefaced the answer but, yeah, it’s not completely zero. When there’s deep, deep uncertainty overseas it does affect the American public mood, right, and when you have multiple things going on at the same time in Ukraine, in Israel, Gaza, and, you know, whatever is happening with China on any given day, that even adds to that sense of out-of-controlness, you know, and then that America can’t get control over it. Yeah, it raises people’s anxieties, right, and it feels out of control.

And that works against whoever the incumbent is, right, because the incumbent’s dealing with an ambiguous, hard-to-tackle set of issues, and there is no straight path through it, right? And the challenger can be much more clear cut about it: Oh, make Europe pay for Ukraine so we don’t have to, you know. I’ll just go give them a stern talking to and fix the problem, right? I mean, challengers can say that because they don’t own it, right—(laughs)—and they’re not in the middle of it. So I would say it does matter because it’s another headwind that whoever the incumbent was was going to face in this situation—the incumbent party being Harris’ party—is sort of owning that sense of unease.

And then the other factor in it is that an American trait when things are going to hell overseas is they can get even more focused on we need to fix things here at home, and that focuses even more attention on this issue of prices, and affordability, and how am I getting by, and why are we all paying—why are they all paying so much attention to the well-being of other people around the world. And then that just compounds that other headwind that the incumbent party was going to face in this space.

So the second part of your question is for most Americans it’s just a general story like that. There are populations who care deeply about those foreign policy situations. In a super, super close election, there is a lot of focus on whether those small populations will be mobilized or change their minds over it. That’s a really hard one to get to. I don’t know if your reporting has seen anything on that.

PARKER: Yeah. So, very briefly on sort of everything feeling out of control, this was when Biden was still the nominee at the top of the ticket. But a Biden ally, someone in his administration, told me, like, when things feel out of control, also voters want, like, a strongman; like, they—

DIMOCK: That’s true, too. Yeah.

PARKER: —gravitate towards strength, which would benefit Trump.

But for the populations—I have a colleague on the White House team, Yasmeen, who has spent a ton of time in Michigan, and her view that those communities—who could be decisive in an election that will be decided, you know, in three states by 40,000 votes spread across them—that it is—it is a problem for Harris. She is not doing as bad with Arab Americans as Biden was. They give her a little more credit. But she still is not doing necessarily as well as she needs to be doing for a race that could be that close.

And it’s interesting when we sort of started talking about the blue wall. The conventional wisdom—but based on some reporting—was that, like, Pennsylvania was going to be her toughest state, right, and she had to choose Josh Shapiro. And then about two, two-and-a-half weeks ago, I started hearing her toughest state in the blue wall will be Michigan, and in part driven by those concerns over what’s happening in Gaza—although just recently there’s now some thought it might be Wisconsin. (Laughs.). But I do think—the short answer’s, like, I do think that particular issue matters in certain states in an election that will be so close.

LUNTZ: And the votes that really matter now, the three—the four—we talked about young women. That’s her advantage. That’s her ace in the hole.

For Donald Trump, he’s getting a higher percentage of young African-American men than any Republican has. And the question is, is it going to fall back to the upper teens or is it going to go to the upper twenties? Because that matters in Georgia and North Carolina.

Second are Latinos, and that’s probably the biggest group that’s up. Republican—the Republican presidential candidate normally gets just over a third of that vote. Trump is getting a little over 40 percent of that vote and she’s in the mid-fifties, which has never happened before, and that impacts Arizona and Nevada.

And then the third group are organized labor—union members. If you’re a government union you’re totally Democratic, both the leadership and the rank and file. Same thing with the teachers unions. Among those who work with their hands, which normally is—and that is the blue collar. Those are the paycheck to paycheck people. You work with your hands.

That’s why the teamsters did not endorse. It’s why some other unions have been really frightened because the leadership is solidly Democrat and the membership is a majority Republican. If you take out the teachers unions and government unions Trump could actually win a plurality of organized labor, which has never happened before, and that’s Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

There’s a lot of—I don’t believe the number. I just don’t believe that he’s doing as well as some people think he is and I believe that the early voting is not an indication, simply Republicans wanting to get rid of this administration just as Democrats voted early in 2020.

That said, people who don’t look Republican are voting for Trump. I’ve not seen that before. You can all hang yourself now. (Laughter.)

SUBRAMANIAN: There’s a few more things I wanted to get through but I do want to open it up for questions. I’m sure we have lots.

Yeah?

Q: Hi. Zach Keck.

Thanks for being here. My question is a little broader but I think relevant for the election. So in my lifetime no recessions have started on the watches of Democratic presidents and it’s been over a hundred years since a Republican president has not started a recession or recession hasn’t started under a Republican.

Yet, the American people trust the Republicans year—election after election more on their economies. So, like, why is that and, like, what can Democrats do to better sell themselves on the economy?

LUNTZ: Fix education and people will know the truth. I mean, this is literally—if we want to address this we got two things that are right out front and center and number one is education. If we continue to allow young people to graduate and they don’t know who the vice president is, they don’t know who their two senators are, don’t realize the difference between the Declaration and the Constitution, they don’t appreciate the Bill of Rights—if we let them graduate without knowing civics then it’s our own fault that our country is going to hell.

If you want people to know the facts behind this teach them economics but we don’t, or we teach it but they don’t learn it and learning is what’s important.

Second is social media, and I don’t know where this organization stands on this. I know you cannot regulate it because you cannot regulate free speech and I get that, and that’s probably the right course. But you can keep thirteen-year-olds off it. You can keep fourteen-year-olds off it. Get it to the point where at least they’re adult enough that they can process fact from fiction and they can differentiate.

Until we make that decision—and the last thing I’d say to the moms out there, because dads aren’t going to do this. To the moms, take the phone away from your kids. Get them off social media, and if you choose not to do this because you don’t want to have the crap of them yelling at you, I hate you, then don’t be surprised if you raise a kid that’s actually addicted to this crap.

Q: Hi. Chloe Demrovsky.

Trump made a play in the crypto space by announcing his investment there. I’m curious how you think this plays with the younger male voter, which we haven’t talked about quite so much, and whether these sorts of niche plays in key areas really matter. Thank you.

DIMOCK: You know, we just did a project on crypto, both sort of whether people say they’ve invested in it and how they’ve done if they have, which is more not so good than good, or—(laughter)—but—or less well than they thought they would, I guess is a better way to put it. But one crosstab we did have in there is, is it correlated with the political sphere? And the answer was no. You know, there wasn’t a correlation between crypto and preference or partisanship, despite that really strong correlation with—you know, with young men, which is really overwhelming.

So, yeah, I have been told by a lot of people that crypto was the hidden factor in this election and that the—(laughter)—Trump was going to win 90 percent of the crypto vote, and that was really what all the reporters in D.C. were missing. But I’ve not seen evidence of that. (Laughter.)

PARKER: I will say one thing that’s—like, it’s sort of on a nonreported gut level it feels like, oh yeah, young men, crypto. But for—I trust what he said—(laughter)—but, B, what’s interesting is if—Trump did that not because he was making a play for young men; he did that—and this is also a helpful way of understanding Trump—he did that—because he had been very opposed to cryptocurrency, right? Like, he has said it’s like—it’s like air and it’s not—you know, it’s hurting the—all these things. And then a group of bitcoin mining executives went down to Mar-a-Lago for a private meeting, and several hours later he announced a changed stance on crypto.

So, you know, there was—it may help with young men, it may not, but there was no political strategy. It is—the way to understand Trump, which can be confusing, is that he is almost entirely purely transactional, right, and he’s a salesman, and he is trying to get—he is trying to win over whoever is in front of him. He is trying to win, like, the hour, the minute, the day.

And when Trump was elected, I worked for The New York Times. I had covered Trump. And they had myself and a few of the other reporters who had covered him come down and do a brown bag for sort of, like, the whole D.C. bureau. And you know, all of these editors for the first year or two—and this is not unique to the New York Times; it happened everywhere—but, like, would ask, you know, well, Trump did this, which makes no—you know, is it—is it like Schumer or McConnell, he’s playing four-dimensional chess? And the answer is no, almost never, right? Like, he is just trying to win you over, which is why he will say—like, he will have DREAMers in the Oval Office and he will say, like, you are the best among us, right? Like, you—you know, you’re valedictorians, of course you deserve to stay. And then I’m being slightly hyperbolic, but he’ll have sheriffs in the Oval Office and he’ll be like, you know what, there’s some DREAMers; we could deport them. Because he is just trying to win over whoever is directly in front of him, and in certain moments there’s a public outcry because people realize he said two wildly contradictory things, right, that, like, he is so proud of overturning Roe and also that he is going to, you know, support the Florida amendment that increases the ability to get an abortion later term, and there’s an outcry. And whenever there is an outcry, he does always—almost always retreat to where his far-right base is. But the strategy is much more transactional.

LUNTZ: And it is easy to get away with it. And I think Paul Simon wrote the best words—it was in “The Boxer”—“A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.” And that is what’s been happening over not just the last few months, but the last few years.

And so Trump can serve food at a McDonald’s, which was brilliant—although I did note that E. coli came right after. (Laughter.) Only Trump would have this happen. But if he’d been smarter, he would have gone to Chick-fil-A. Something for you to ponder.

He does that at the same moment that he’s saying, they go on strike, fire them. That’s his initial inclination, is to fire the people who he needs to vote for him. But then he goes and serves at a McDonald’s those very same people. That’s your hypocrisy.

Q: Hi. My name is Hall, a Chick-fil-A fan since, like, ’99. (Laughter.)

I’m going to ask a fun one here, immigration. I’m an immigrant from Canada, so I feel like I can ask this. To what extent have Democratic—historic Democratic constituencies have become more restrictive feeling against immigration, and why is that so? And could you possibly frame how big of a fix or small a fix that has put Kamala Harris in?

LUNTZ: I never heard this before until this year, that I would have thought that the Democratic Party would have embraced immigration. It gives them more voters. Tends to give them more voters, that it’s more people who are economically challenged.

In my focus groups this year, the Democrats were saying: They’re taking my jobs—they’re taking our jobs. They’re getting our benefits. We don’t have enough money to help us in those difficult times and now more money goes to them.

You have hotels that are completely filled with people who came across the border. You have hospitals that are jammed up and I’m hearing as many Democrats saying, this is not America and this is not fair. I never heard that before until this election cycle.

PARKER: And that was also sort of to the—to Frank’s point the counterintuitive point of you watched the debate and you thought, you know, talking about eating your neighbor’s cats and dogs was not a winning message.

But from Republicans and Democrats I heard that, like, they thought why there was not a bigger bump after the debate was because, again, that—like Trump had focused on immigration. Maybe not quite the way his campaign would have chosen but he had focused on, like, a sense that transcends political party and has not necessarily been fair but, like, that your community is changing, right? That it looks different, that it feels different.

You mentioned hospitals being jammed up in Springfield, Ohio. There’s reports that you can’t—not a report to people eating cats and dogs but there’s reports that you can now—there’s a long wait to go to your doctor. Where you should just be able to call and get an appointment that now you have to line up several hours before, and that is a very visceral thing that you hear from voters of both parties.

DIMOCK: Yeah, and I would only add on the—even migrant populations it’s more divided. But I just—we always want to caution there is no Hispanic voter or Asian-American voter. You know, when people came to America, why they came, how they came, what their economic circumstance—I mean, there’s so much diversity in these populations and a lot of the trends, even the Hispanic support for Republicans, that’s a long-term trend over decades of generational change, migration—changing migration patterns.

I mean, some of these things move faster and slower in any given four-year cycle but, you know, there’s a stereotype or a caricature or even an expectation I see among many Democrats that we can count on this cohort of—this segment of the population to vote at least 80 percent for us. That was a bad sort of assumption to be making for a lot of decades now and if they’re still making it they shouldn’t be.

SUBRAMANIAN: And, you know, Donald Trump harnessing—going to what you’re saying, Ashley, that your beautiful towns are changing, right? That something that’s in—you know, Springfield being indicative of something that’s happening across the country regardless of if you’re in a blue city, red town, red city, whatever, it’s harnessing that feeling that people are experiencing, right?

Q: Hi. Lauren Racusin, Bloomberg Associates.

In an attempt to look ahead, what does the Republican Party look like after Trump?

LUNTZ: (Laughs.) Don’t look at me. (Laughter.) J.D. Vance did really well in the debate, really well, and I’ve been pretty critical because he seemed to say things that were mean to people, that he did these characterizations, obviously, cat women and—but there’s other things that he said that I thought was unnecessary and I really feel like the—when I was a kid, when I was eighteen, nineteen, twenty, making the decision where I would align with the Republicans were kinder and gentler—this was in Ronald Reagan’s era—and the Democrats are the ones that yelled and shouted and were mean.

And I thought J.D. Hayward—J.D. Vance was problematic. And then I saw the debate and I was shocked at how good he was at explaining his point of view. Whether you agree or disagree there’s a real substance there, that he was a better defender of Trump than Trump was, and that Walz, who was supposed to be this great communicator, this happy-go-lucky guy, was really out of his element in that situation.

In that one moment Vance is now the heir apparent. Doesn’t mean that you won’t have a Nikki Haley again and other Republicans from across the country but in looking at these Senate races and these House races there is a brutality. It’s not just me, excuse me—it’s brutal that’s going on in the Republican primaries, a viciousness I’ve never seen before, and it’s going to take at least one election cycle for that to get cleared out.

PARKER: I think—I will say it’s a good question because I think newsrooms will assign beat reporters to cover just that, what does happen to the Republican Party post-Trump. I think the Vance we saw in that debate was—I don’t want to quite say compassionate conservatism but it kind of was more of that, right, and Vance has done other sides.

So my view is also that what happens to the future of the Republican Party is in some ways—and it’ll be a battle no matter what but in some ways contingent on what happens in this election and if Trump wins and if there’s a clear sense of the grievance and anger and someone wants to continue that on as an heir apparent.

And, again, a cautionary tale is only Trump can be Trump, right? Like, when J.D. Vance has done Trump stuff, like, it was very off putting for you. J.D. Vance on that debate was sort of the J.D. Vance of Hillbilly Elegy.

And so, again, I do think it depends on if Trump wins or not and if he loses there—you know, Ron DeSantis can’t be Donald Trump, right? There may be more of a move to the different versions like the J.D. Vance version of the Trump Lite and a Nikki Haley version, and if he wins you could see, like, the Don, Jr., version of Donald Trump.

LUNTZ: God help us. (Laughter.)

SUBRAMANIAN: Let’s go to the back.

Q: Hi. Krista Auchenbach. Thank you for this.

I have, hopefully, one or two straightforward aspects of a question. Given the way in which fear has been monetized in media where is polling on things like campaign finance reform, considering that we’re seeing some pretty impressive numbers on fundraising?

And then one of the debates and rumors kind of within this town is the role that Silicon Valley is playing and how does polling show up in terms of where Silicon Valley is going for the candidates?

DIMOCK: I can take the reform one.

You know, the public’s take right now is one of pretty broad despair about the state of democracy. You know, Frank opened with that, I think, and there’s a lot of skepticism that we’re capable of meaningful reform of that and I think that skepticism comes from two places. One, this sense that the partisan gap is so big that would never be able to find, you know, a way to get past meaningful reforms, and the other is I think—and there’s been some conversation about this recently—you know, Americans don’t really see the mechanisms for meaningful change.

So like campaign finance reform that’s going to require a constitutional amendment. Well, OK, then just give up. It’s, like, wait a minute. This country’s amended its Constitution a lot of times and when you poll on it you find majorities of Republicans and Democrats like the idea, and you find a lot of politicians who say they would support it. The question is would they really—could the public really push something like that through in a meaningful way.

But any reforms whether, you know, agree with them or disagree with them, like, around finance, around, you know, Electoral College reforms, around, you know, the structure of primaries even, you know, the people know these things are problematic. They know they’re contributing to what’s ultimately a toxic and dysfunctional electoral structure. Right now they feel impossible to people even as they support them.

LUNTZ: Seventy-two percent of Americans, almost three out of four, are mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. Back in 1992—very few of you are old enough to know where that comes from—in 1992 it’s 46 percent and I thought, oh my God, half of Americans are mad as hell, and now it’s three out of four. How much worse can they get?

The second one, which is even more frightening, is that 31 percent of Americans—less than a third—believe that their country is invested in them and that is horrific. How much money does this country spend on education, roads, bridges, highways, Social Security, Medicare? All the things that this country does for us and we think that the country doesn’t matter—doesn’t care about our success.

And the third one is that more than four out of five believe this is the most divided we’ve ever been. All the money that goes into politics goes to push those opinions. That’s why I had to get out of politics. Every ad that they put out now is a negative ad. Every ad is an attack ad and there’s no semblance of proper behavior. It’s just slam the person until they can’t get up again.

I was with my students over the last few days and they’re watching this and I’m showing them black and white because that’s meant to cause fear. Grainy because it’s meant to create doubt. The words on the bottom of the screen—horrendous, evil, destruction—all the most negative words you can possibly have—manipulation underlined, italicized. Every possible way to create these ugly perceptions and half of those people are going to win in the end.

I’d love it if they could get control of money because all it does is it makes our situation even worse. But the Supreme Court won’t let it happen and I don’t know how to get around that.

DIMOCK: Constitutional amendment. (Laughs.) See, he says it’s impossible.

LUNTZ: You think thirty-eight states are going to pass it?

DIMOCK: There are majorities in fifty that want it, so—

LUNTZ: Good luck.

DIMOCK: No, I know. (Laughs.)

LUNTZ: Let me know how it works out for you.

DIMOCK: I know. No. No.

So what I—you know, why is it impossible? Is it just that the political machine won’t let it happen?

LUNTZ: All the people who got the money want to continue to spend that money—

DIMOCK: Right. Exactly.

LUNTZ: —so they’re going to spend money against these reforms.

DIMOCK: Yeah.

SUBRAMANIAN: Do you guys—I know there was a second part of the question about Silicon Valley and their role in this election and, I mean, we could just start with Elon Musk but—(laughter)—do you guys have anything you want to add on that front as well?

DIMOCK: I don’t really, no. (Laughter.)

SUBRAMANIAN: All the way in the back.

Q: Thank you. Hi, there. Kelly Trubko (ph). Thank you so much.

So gender has come up a few times in the conversation tonight and I was wondering for the historians in the room including among you, maybe even polling, how workers basically got constructed to being men because—and how the Democrats have not been able to reclaim workers because it strikes me that a worker is a mom, maybe who’s married, maybe it’s a single mom, and has to go to work and then has the second shift, and then if she has a pregnancy she did not plan maybe has to cross state lines to get reproductive care.

And so I’m kind of wondering about the claiming of workers and partisan alignment and how, like you said, Trump could get a plurality of working folks when that may not be the party that is most likely to represent their interests well. Thank you.

LUNTZ: I want to walk right into this—(laughter)—because at this point I don’t care anymore. I got sick back in 2020. It happened again earlier this year. So I didn’t die so I don’t think I’m going to die here.

Whenever there’s a conversation about the gender gap it’s always a focus on women. Why are women voting this way? Why do women not like X or why do women endorse this?

I’d say probably the stories when the focus is gender gap is two to one female over male. So I just did a focus group of that gender gap from the male perspective, men who had voted for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden and are now voting for Donald Trump.

And they’re not voting for Trump. The voting—and they’re not voting against Harris. They’re voting against the perception that they see that the Democrats have changed and they use the Harris campaign as an example.

Look at her ads. What do you see in them? Very excited, professional, driven women who are looking forward to taking control. Where are the men?

And the men see this. The Harris campaign, when she surrounds herself she surrounds herself with really successful women. The best speech—the two best speeches, I thought, at the Democratic convention—I was there—was Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey. Brilliant and incredibly well delivered, articulate, powerful.

Where are the men? So what’s happened now is that men feel ignored, they feel forgotten, and, frankly, they feel betrayed. And so to win them back, which Harris has to do some of this, she has to find a way to speak to them.

But she’s not doing it because she’s focused on younger women. The gender gap is two sides of the same coin and she’s chosen the female side, which I get. He’s chosen the male side, which I get, because he’s not going to appeal to most women and that’s why we’re at a fifty-fifty standstill.

And the gender gap is biggest among younger voters. The older that you get the more that the genders—I’m sure you saw this in your polling—the more that the genders come together. So the gap is not that big among men and women sixty years of age or older but among eighteen- to twenty-nine-year-olds it’s a chasm.

SUBRAMANIAN: Do you want to add anything? (Laughter.)

LUNTZ: That’s smart, by the way.

SUBRAMANIAN: Well, I think we have to leave it there. Thank you, guys, so much for your insights. (Applause.)

(END)

This is an uncorrected transcript.