National Security

Panelists discuss the rise of cyber attacks during the race for a COVID-19 vaccine, the role of various actors in carrying out these attacks, and their geopolitical consequences.   ANDERSON: Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations Virtual Roundtable. Our topic today is “Cyber Attacks in the Age of COVID-19.” My name is Trisha Anderson and I’m a partner at Covington & Burling, practicing primarily in the area of cybersecurity and national security. We have a terrific set of speakers today. I will introduce them briefly and then engage them in discussion for about thirty minutes, and at 3:00 p.m. I will ask the operator to open it up to Q&A from the participants. So let me start with Theresa Payton, who is the CEO of Fortalice Solutions, a cybersecurity consulting company, and co-founder of Dark Cubed, a cybersecurity product company. She started her career in financial services, serving in executive roles at Bank of America and Wachovia, and she was the first female chief information officer at the White House under George W. Bush. She speaks and writes frequently on cybersecurity and data privacy and is the author of several books, including Manipulated: Inside the Cyber War to Hijack Elections and Privacy in the Age of Big Data. Next, we have David Sanger, who is a national security correspondent and senior writer at the New York Times. He’s been on three Pulitzer Prize-winning teams, and his newest book is The Perfect Weapon, which examines the emergence of cyber conflict as changing the nature of global power among states. He’s also the author of two New York Times bestsellers on foreign policy and national security, The Inheritance and Confront and Conceal, and for the New York Times, Sanger has served as White House correspondent during the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, among other roles. And, finally, we have Adam Segal, who is the Ira A. Lipman Chair in Emerging Technologies and National Security, and director of the Digital and Cyberspace Policy Program at CFR. An expert on security issues, technology development, and Chinese domestic and foreign policy, Segal is the project director for the CFR-sponsored Independent Task Force reports Innovation and National Security: Keeping Our Edge and Defending an Open, Global, Secure, and Resilient Internet. His book, The Hacked World Order, describes the increasingly contentious geopolitics of cyberspace. And before coming to CFR, Segal was an arms control analyst for the China Project at the Union of Concerned Scientists. He’s been a visiting scholar at numerous universities and writes for numerous publications, and his writing can be found now on the CFR blog Net Politics. So given that we only have thirty minutes, we’ll dive right in, and I think all of us that have lived through the last several months have seen, most notably, the increasing dependence of businesses, individuals, and governments on information technology to maintain our work, our social relationships, our governmental operations. So I’ll start by asking Theresa but, of course, welcome others to jump in, how this increased dependency on IT infrastructure has changed the cyberthreat landscape and, in particular, whether we should be thinking about new areas of vulnerability or new threat actors, or whether it’s really an intensified version of the existing threat landscape. PAYTON: Thanks, Trisha. Really, it’s great to be here with all of you and I’m excited to hear the dialogue that unfolds today. And I would say, to answer your question in a real simple way, it’s an all-of-the-above scenario. So it’s definitely accelerated existing forms of cybercrime but we’re also seeing new and different types of approaches leveraged by cyber operatives with nefarious intent, cyber-criminal syndicates and nation-states. I mean, really, the pandemic created that goldmine of opportunity for cyber crimes. So as businesses and organizations were sending employees to try to attempt to work from home and figure out this sort of interim new normal and were reimagining their operations, cyber criminals were reimagining as well, and at my firm our incident response line just started buzzing with calls. So what have we been seeing and, like, where do I think they’re going? Just real quickly, unauthorized logins, especially attacking any organization in the health care ecosystem. They were definitely being hit with sort of these unauthorized access points: remote desk protocols, remote logins, VPN access, as well as account access. We also saw business email account frauds resulting in wire transfer, monies going to the wrong place, really accelerate like a hockey stick. Ransomware attacks against all different types of industry verticals also went off like a hockey stick, and for the first time in a long time not only did ransomware increase, but my team and I have seen new deviants and new strains of ransomware that have not been previously identified either by law enforcement or by some of the larger security and product companies. And so that’s been really a little frustrating, really, for businesses. I think the other thing that was interesting about this is that the State Department noted, and we also track misinformation campaigns, that sort of this weird, almost like a collusion marketing effort by Russia, North Korea, Iran, and China to actually promote to their own citizens they were handling the pandemic very well, that the EU was not, that America was not, and promoting these misinformation campaigns including state-run media promoting the idea that maybe the U.S. military actually created COVID-19, and we needed to sort of explain that. The other thing I do want to mention is, you know, just in case people are thinking, well, maybe since you’re on the front end, you know, Trisha, and I know you deal with incident response as well in your role, that maybe we were just sort of seeing an anomaly. Towards the end of May, the U.N. disarmament chief actually said that they had seen a global increase in malicious emails of 600 percent just since the pandemic had hit. So if you think of that January through May time frame, and those are the ones that have been reported and identified. This is going to translate into not just short-term impacts for the pandemic, but as we start to reimagine business operations coming out of the pandemic there will be long-term impacts because businesses will be moving to contactless everything wherever possible, and as they implement these technologies in sort of a rapid innovative approach, that contactless, whether it’s Internet of Things, Bluetooth technologies, has inherent design flaws, which makes it hard to secure. And cyber criminals, nation-states, and cyber operatives with nefarious intentions will be ready to pounce. But other than that, everything is great. (Laughter.) ANDERSON: Adam or David, did you want to add anything there? SANGER: The only thing I’d add is this. You know, crises like this don’t tend to create new schisms but they tend to open up existing ones, and so we have seen new opportunities that are being exploited by the same old actors. One of the oddities is I think that the infrastructure has held up in the United States as well as it has, given the number of people who are working from home, though any of us who are out in rural areas, as I am right now, are seeing the strain on the cable networks and all that. What that does tell you, though, is that we have opened up new attack surfaces, because with everybody coming in from home, they’re coming in from systems that weren’t designed to handle this kind of traffic and weren’t designed necessarily for this level of security. Some of that’s going to be overcome by VPN and other technologies, but much of it won’t. And so you’re seeing some strange things happening. Intelligence officials tell me that they’re kind of stuck because they would have to go into the office in order to work on their classified systems. That’s a pain these days. So the reality is, of course, that a lot more information that ordinarily might be flowing over a classified system is probably flowing over an unclassified system, with people praying that there are not interceptions of it. I think it’s all made us more aware of what the vulnerabilities would be when we move to 5G systems if we’re reliant on Chinese or other supply chains. I think the last thing that’s really interesting about this particular moment is that we are beginning to see companies and the government recognize that we’re not going to get back to something that looks exactly like what we had before. So we have to think about internet security in a very different way if you’ve got to spread it out in such a broad way to everybody’s houses. You know, it’s the problem it had for a long time in my neighborhood in Washington, where only very senior officials would get secure systems, you know, run into their basements. Well, now a lot of people are going to have to have pretty secure systems as standard equipment into their basements. SEGAL: I’ll just add that I think, as David and Theresa have both said, it’s accelerating a number of discussions. And so, on the response to the nation-state attackers, I think we’re seeing many of the issues we’ve been talking about before come back up. So what type of attacks under COVID are beyond the pale and sort of international norms—are there certain discussions about attacks on health-care networks? Are those outside of international law, or how should states respond? We saw the Australian signals-intelligence organization basically threatening that they would respond with cyberattacks if they were going to disrupt. And we saw, you know, the FBI and CISA warning U.S. actors about attacks from nation-states. So I think the debate is happening—kind of replicating, reduplicating itself on what the norms of behavior should be in this space. And we clearly have—you know, we don’t have a lot of answers and we don’t have a lot of tools to try to shape that behavior. ANDERSON: So that brings us, I think, to a good topic to pick up on. And Theresa obviously mentioned the increased impact on the health-care industry with attempts to gain unauthorized access, but also efforts by nation-states to engage in misinformation campaigns. And it does implicate interesting questions about cyber norms and the extent to which that behavior is acceptable for states or other actors to engage in. It might be useful to talk about what some of the geopolitical implications are or are likely to be with respect to those types of activities, efforts—as we’ve seen, you mentioned, Adam, the FBI and CISA announcement about the Chinese efforts to hack into vaccine-related data. What does that mean? Are we entering into a competitive environment among states for a race to the vaccine or treatments? And how do you see that playing out? Adam or others, if you want to take that question. SEGAL: Yeah. I mean, I think, as you said, we’re clearly seeing a race for the vaccine and we’re seeing nation-states trying to, if not steal what their competitors are doing, at least have a better sense of where they might be in the vaccine production schedule. We’re seeing attacks on international organizations, so Russian and Iranian and North Korean attacks on WHO and other public-health agencies also for information-gathering. And then, as Theresa mentioned, we’re seeing the disinformation around the narrative of COVID and who is responding more effectively and less effectively and using it to bash geopolitical competitors. SANGER: The only thing I’d add to that is in our own reporting we have, of course, you know, recorded what you’ve seen from the U.S. government about increased attacks on those working on the vaccine. It’s not clear that that is necessarily for the vaccine itself. It may simply be, as Adam suggests, to understand where they are in the race. And remember, this is sort of a three-way race right now. It’s got a number of American competitors, a few Chinese competitors, including some backed by the PLA. So there’s very little doubt that the PLA would use units that it’s long used for these kind of purposes to make sure that they are where they want to be; and then the Europeans as well—Oxford, Sanofi, others—who are in this; and I think a really hard question for the offensive side of U.S. Cyber Command to go deal with and the NSA, because this is essentially industrial spying, but it’s also a national-security issue because it deals with the health of the entire country. And it may be a while before we’re able to sort of suss out what it is that is being done to defend many of these companies, but whether persistent engagement, active defense, as Cyber Command likes to call its offensive operations, are being used in what is also at least partly a commercial context here. PAYTON: Yeah, Trisha, the only other thing I’d add—I agree with what Adam and David both just laid out here. The other thing that I would add is don’t forget about the insider threat and the potential for insider threats. We have kind of the nation-states and cyber operatives, as well as cybercriminal syndicates want to be able to monetize anything they can get their hands on and certainly anything around supply-chain orders, you know, how things are going to unfold in, you know, kind of that intellectual property of the vaccines. That’s all information that could be monetized if they can get their hands on it. But the other piece is the insider threat. And although insider threat is more rare, when it does happen, because they’re on the inside, have authorized access, it can often be sometimes the most damaging type of attack that happens. We actually worked a case where the individual is in jail. This is in the clean-energy industry, where the engineer was actually taking information and selling the secrets to China, and they were an American citizen. So the insider threat is also just one other thing that I would add that’s a little harder to detect than traffic coming from, you know, different parts of the world and looking for tactics, techniques, and protocols. ANDERSON: So I’ll pick up on one thing that David said, which was—David, you alluded to, you know, there being some uncertainty about what the governmental response, in fact, is, in light of, you know, classified information, the fact that our military typically does not, you know, publicize its cyber—offensive cyber operations or its active defense. You know, what is your prediction, either David or others, for how the government is going to respond to some of these trends? You know, we’ve seen a little bit more public activity in the very—relatively quick announcement by FBI and CISA about attributing the attempted vaccine data hacks to nation-states. Is that sort of more of what we’re likely to see? What predictions do you have for the kind of governmental response that will unfold in response to all of this? SANGER: Well, we certainly have seen—and I think you have to give the Trump administration credit for this—more attribution of bad actors more quickly than we’ve seen in past administrations. It happened a little bit in the Sony case and so forth in the Obama administration. But early in the Trump administration North Korea was identified as the bad actor in one major hack, Russia in another. And you’ve seen as recently as recent—just the past few weeks, Russia named again for other attacks, mostly on email systems. The problem is that there’s no particular evidence right now that these name-and-shame efforts actually act as much of a deterrent. You know, we’ve been naming Russia since the 2016 election and it does not necessarily seem to have cut the level of their activity. So then the question comes: Could you see the United States intervene in the COVID case and in the vaccine case as the way it intervened in 2018 to send a shot across the bow of Russian actors who were beginning to look at the midterm elections? And you’ll remember at that time that Cyber Command, with NSA help, shut down the Internet Research Agency for a few days, sent some warning shots to members of elite hacking teams in some of the Russian intelligence services, and so forth. Easy to do for an election because in that case you’re protecting a clearly all-government function. A little more complicated in the American system when you’re stepping in on behalf of manufacturers. Who do you step in on behalf of? Do you protect Johnson & Johnson because it’s an American firm? Or one of the other American competitors? Do you do the same for other Western firms that are working perhaps outside the United States? This is pretty tricky territory. And usually we’ve not seen the U.S. use its cyber capability on behalf of American firms other than to block attacks. But the interesting question here is are they willing to go further. And we simply don’t know yet. ANDERSON: Adam, do you have any thoughts about it? SEGAL: I agree with David. I would—I would add that the—I think the other component on the Trump side which is also praiseworthy, although we’re not really sure what the effect is, is that the attribution is not happening alone. It’s happening, you know, with—usually with the Five Eye partners, but also the Dutch and others who I think are becoming more of leaders in this space. I think David’s right, though. We haven’t really seen a significant drop in activity, but it certainly helps create a sense of shared norms among the likeminded about what we might respond to. You know, on the defense side we clearly see, as you said, attribution happen faster with the FBI. CISA I think is doing a fairly good job of sharing information. But other than that I don’t—I don’t think we’re going to see a lot of dramatic change. We have a playbook, right? The Solarium Commission released its findings, you know, a very strong set of recommendations that have been, you know, floating in the air for a long time. But they brought them together. They issued a white paper that speaks to the pandemic in particular. So I think there are lots of things that people have on the table to do. IoT security, reappointing the cyber director in the White House in the assistant level, and the secretary of state level. So there’s lots of ideas out there. I don’t suspect we’ll see a lot of traction on that, though, on the domestic legislative side right now. PAYTON: You know, Tricia, David and Adam, they brought up something I think that’s really important, which is, you know, not only do you have sort of the separation of, you have the Five Eyes, you have our three-letter agencies and the federal government, and then you have the private sector, who’s largely on private sector infrastructure solving problems for the nation, but really in a private sector way. So where do the lines blur to protect and defend that information both nationally, and then also internationally with our allies. And many of the companies who are working on this here are global companies, not just American headquartered companies. And so I think one of the challenges we also have to look at here is that every dollar that is spent on securing the infrastructure and doing threat hunting, and trying to look for tactics and protocols, and looking for digital evidence that maybe there is a problem—every dollar and every resource spent on that is a dollar and a resource diverted for the race for the cure, for the vaccine, for better identification tests, for treating people who actually catch it. And so we really do have this dilemma where, you know, a dollar on security is a dollar diverted from the actual effort that we’re trying to undertake. And so who should bear the cost, as well as who should bear the burden of prioritizing resources to focus on that? So not only do we have the challenge of that’s a real gray area of protecting private sector endeavors using the Five Eyes, and the three letters, and the federal government, but also having the best and the brightest trying to secure the digital elements of this ecosystem is very, very challenging. ANDERSON: Agreed. Before we get to the Q&A section I did want to touch upon the issue of election security, which David touched upon briefly, drawing that distinction—interesting distinction between the government’s defense of the private sector versus its approach to defending an election. How do you see the leadup to November—the November elections playing out? Are the threat actors the same? Are they different? Are there different playbooks that we should be thinking about that they are likely to be using? Theresa or others, if you want to jump in and handle that question. PAYTON: Yeah. Just a couple of thoughts on that. You know, for starters, I think our dry run during sort of the caucus and what happened in Georgia and, you know, just sort of the primary elections, who needs hackers when you implement technology and people aren’t trained and they’re not sure what the process is, and we kind of trip on our own feet? So that’s unfortunate. Hopefully, lots of lessons learned there. I am very encouraged with all the work that DHS, CISA, and the states have done, and vendors, and the ethical hacking community have done. I’m very encouraged that a lot of work has been done to secure the elections. But the misinformation and manipulation campaigns are still a real challenge. I am seeing as far as tracking on COVID-19 on the antiracism movement, as well as all other kind of big social issues that are very important to the presidential election. The misinformation, manipulation campaigns attempting voter disenfranchisement. And the playbook has changed. I mean, I think the Muller report did a great job laying out the parts of the Russian operation that were known. I talk about in my book—I believe that some of that was designed to be found, and that was the part that, you know, they didn’t want to be found out, but if it had to be found out, you know, this was one operation. There’s others. But the other piece is there—we can’t legislate our way out of this issue with misinformation, manipulation campaigns. We can’t just count on the user and we can’t just count on big tech and social media to solve it. It’s going to be an international everybody’s got to be all in spotting and detecting and reporting misinformation and manipulation campaigns. They’re doing burner accounts. They’re taking true organic American citizens who are posting something and then amplifying it. They’re leveraging artificial intelligence chatbots that look like organic human-controlled behavior of accounts. And then once real humans start arguing with each other, they kind of move onto the next issue. So they’ve definitely changed their tactics. I believe the social media companies have done a really good job trying to combat this, but it’s going to take individual citizens, the international community, big tech. And I don’t think legislation alone is going to solve this issue. SANGER: I’ll throw in a few thoughts as we’ve began to work on this. I would agree with everything that you just heard about how they’ve got to go change the playbook. And they do have to change the playbook because the Russians understand that the same playbook is not going to work a second time. The U.S. is going to see them coming this time. Facebook will. Google will. Twitter will. So what have we seen happen? As Theresa suggested, we’ve seen more of a move to trying to convince individual Facebook users to pick up a meme so that it’s not coming out of the Internet Research Agency. It’s coming out of your neighbor’s house, right? And at that point, it’s protected First Amendment speech, right? It’s within an American citizen’s right, even if they are being duped by the Russians. They’re doing a very good job of just amplifying things that come up out of our own natural divisions. And then again, you know, I’m not sure that you can necessarily say that that is foreign interference. It’s foreign amplification of issues we have underway at home. It’s the infrastructure of the election system, though, that I think is changing to some degree. Obviously, the coronavirus issues are leading many states in a very patchwork way to move to more vote at home, vote by some kind of paper ballot that you would mail in. On the one hand, that’s good, because it leaves a paper trail. On the other hand, it puts a much bigger vulnerability aura around the registration systems, because this only works if the registration database and the pollbooks are all coordinated so that you’re mailing out the ballots to everybody who needs to have one mailed out. And if they mail one back in, they then can’t show up at the polling place and vote a second time. And the Russians understand, and others understand, that you don’t need to hack into that registration system all over the country. You just need to hack into the most vulnerable small parts of it and create the aura that you have done a much bigger hack. And that’s all it would take for President Trump or others to say: See, I told you the system was rigged. And you’ve already heard those words come out of his mouth more than once. So I think our focus ought to change at this point to making sure that those registration systems are really locked down. My biggest fear is that you could have a ransomware set of attacks, similar to those attacks you saw across Texas and elsewhere last summer, because most small towns and cities don’t have the money to put into this kind of security. They certainly don’t now that they’re dealing with reduced revenues because of COVID-19 and other issues. And again, all we have to do is lock up a couple of big cities—think about Baltimore and Atlanta and what they already suffered from—in order to create the impression that somebody has gone into the entire network of voting systems. SEGAL: I think everything’s been said. I’ll just add that I think David’s point about aura and impression is really the main one because in some ways it doesn’t matter what we do. We know there’s going to be some glitches that are going to be, as Theresa said, self-inflicted. And already the debate is about foreign interference. So no matter who loses they will be able to point to those events and say: We think those were, you know, foreign interferences and the process was rigged. And so in many ways it strikes me that it doesn’t matter that much what the outside actors do, the foreign actors do, to change their playbook. We’re already existing in an environment where it will be contested and contested in politically divisive ways.  ANDERSON: All right. Thank you, Adam. At this point we’re just past the 3:00 mark. So I will invite participants to join our conversation with any questions they may have. Just as a reminder, the roundtable is on the record. So, operator, if there are any questions could you please let us know? STAFF: (Gives queuing instructions.) Our first question will come from Kate Moore. Q: Hi, everyone. I’m Kate Moore from BlackRock. Thanks very much for your really interesting comments and insight today. One question I wanted to dig a little bit further into was the coordination between companies and the government. There were some comments made that there’s going to have to be better coordination going forward. But, you know, one complaint we’ve heard from a lot of companies has been that there are lots of independent operations, that the network is not necessarily connected, and that a global, or at least a national, infrastructure doesn’t exist for fighting cybercrimes. So if you guys could comment a little bit more on that, that would be helpful. Thank you. ANDERSON: Theresa, would you like to take this one? PAYTON: Yeah, I’ll start off, and I’m sure David and Adam probably have some insights here as well to help. But I don’t disagree with you. I think that is an incredible challenge that we face, because I work on incident response. And we have a really great relationship with FBI, which has their InfraGard, which can be sort of a local chapter where offices are and where headquarters are, as well as with DHS with CISA, they also have a team who will get involved in incident response. Both teams will brief companies proactively, put out indicators. They are putting out more joint bulletins, which is really helpful. And during an incident response, I oftentimes will ask the client, either we could do it for them anonymously or not anonymously, if we would have permission to get those entities involved during a ransomware event, or incident response. So I agree with you. I think it’s real challenging for a business to know, how do I get information proactively? Once I get it, how do I consume it and turn it into something actionable that I can actually, you know, just have it work and actually help protect and defend the organization. And when I have an issue, do I call my lawyer first? Do I call an incident response team first? Do I call DHS or FBI? And I think that is an ongoing challenge. I do see in my time in working in the cybersecurity space that the collaboration and coordination is better. But it is still confusing. ANDERSON: Unless there are other comments that David or Adam wanted to share, operator is there another question? STAFF: Yes. We will take our next question from Maurice Tempelsman. Maurice, please accept the unmute now prompt. OK, maybe the hand raise was a mistake. At this time we don’t have any other questions. ANDERSON: All right. Excellent. Well, that gives us a chance to get into supply chain issues, which I think is a really interesting topic, and it intersects in ways that—with the COVID-19 that we wouldn’t have anticipated, you know, when we were talking about supply chain more generally back even a few months ago. Obviously here in the U.S. there’s been a great deal of concern about supply chain reliability and vulnerability that’s led to efforts to relocate or regulate supply chains. And so my question for the panelists is whether you all see this trend as one that’s likely to continue, and relatedly whether we might see a parallel with data. In other words, a trend toward data localization increasing as well. SANGER: You know, I think we saw this already underway before COVID happened, but it’s really accelerated. Think about the 5G debate. So a year ago Secretary Pompeo was traveling around Europe trying to convince countries not to account Huawei as a supplier and saying that if they did they’d be cut off from U.S. intelligence. The Europeans basically called his bluff and began to sign up with Huawei, usually not on the core of the system but on the radio networks and so forth. And that’s where I think we’re headed until we saw COVID spread. And suddenly countries began to ask the question: Do I really want to be dependent on a Chinese network any more than I want to be dependent on Chinese suppliers for respirators, for ventilators, N95 masks? And you know, if you don’t want to be dependent on a Chinese supplier for your N95 mask, then it doesn’t make much sense to be dependent on a Chinese supplier for your power grid or for your 5G network. And so you’ve seen, particularly in Britain but not just in Britain, some rethinking of this. I don’t think it’s as much going to affect the localization of data. That was happening with Chinese regulation making companies localize the databases in China, and some by the Europeans and others. But now I think you’re going to see it much more with domestic supply. And here in the United States President Trump has certainly accelerated it with an effort to try to make sure microelectronics and so forth are being supplied domestically. I don’t think they’re going to manage to go revive a 5G manufacturing capability here. I think that may have to wait for the next generation. But certainly there is an effort underway. SEGAL: So, I mean, I think it’s also important to distinguish between what we think is going to happen to the supply chains. And I think there’s a greater focus now on the resilience of the supply chains. A lot of those are not going to be reshored, right. When you look at the surveys that the European Chamber and the Shanghai-American Chamber did, in most of those companies they’re still saying that they’re going to invest in China for the China market, and if they do relocate supply chains, it’s going to be to Southeast Asia, not back to the United States. So I think they are going to be able to do some resilience in the supply chains, but not necessarily move them back to the United States. The one thing I’d add to David’s narrative about what I think has shifted the debate on 5G is the most recent round of commerce sanctions, the May 2020 sanctions that are going to really focus on TSMC, the Taiwanese chip manufacturer, which allowed the British and the intelligence agencies to kind of reopen the debate and say, well, we’re no longer sure where Huawei is going to be able to supply its chips from. And so that adds a whole new level of insecurity, which allowed them to kind of open the door and reopen the debate, which then, I think, lets things fall into place with other—perhaps the Germans and the French as well. So I think, on that level, the tightening of the Commerce Department’s restrictions really was an important kind of move that shifts that debate. PAYTON: The only thing I would add there, Trisha—because I think David and Adam covered some really fabulous points there—is that this is absolutely the right time to take a look at your business continuity and resilience and incidence-response playbooks and update them and ask yourself the tough questions. How much redundancy do you actually have in both sort of the materials of the supply chain that you need? Because we had clients who were waiting on things that they had paid for sitting on planes. And when China decided that they needed it for themselves, they canceled the order, refunded the money, and kept the supplies. And this wasn’t just health-care supplies. So there’s sort of that physical element of the supply chain for whatever the core business is that you are in and whether or not you have redundancy in that. I would say the second piece is if you do find yourself leveraging different technologies that suddenly end up on sort of the kind of the bad list or this-could-be-bad list or the sanction list, what’s your go-to backup plan, again, from not just a cybersecurity perspective but a business-continuity and resiliency perspective? And so that would be the only other thing I’d add is just make sure you take a moment to take those lessons learned while we were in sort of the—I call every week a new normal. (Laughs.) So as we’re in sort of each pandemic week’s unfolding of the new normal, take those lessons learned and update those playbooks. ANDERSON: I’ll just remind participants that they should feel free to raise their hands to ask a question, if anyone is interested in asking a question. And we’ll keep going if not. STAFF: There are no questions at this time. ANDERSON: Excellent. So, Adam, I will turn to you maybe to speak a little bit more about the overall trajectory of, you know, how some of these phenomena that we’ve been talking about today will impact the broader U.S.-China tech war. A number of you have alluded to the kind of increased actions designed to tighten—by the U.S. government to tighten restrictions on Huawei or other Chinese entities. You know, where do you think all of this is headed, and what has been the impact of some of these impacts of the coronavirus on the U.S.-China relationship? SEGAL: Yeah, I don’t think we’ve seen the bottom yet. I think we’re waiting to see how the sanctions on Huawei play out. Is the Commerce Department going to allow some workarounds like it did for the first year and how the sales are going to work? We’ve seen some expansion of the sanctions to companies that are involved in surveillance and AI technologies. We see a lot of bills that are focused on Chinese students, and in particular some students that might have some connections to the PLA or the military-industrial base in somehow—in some shape or measure. So I think there’s still a lot of discussion going on among China hawks in particular about how you can cause more pain to Huawei specifically, and then to slow Chinese technology development more broadly. And then we have the question about, you know, how the Chinese are going to respond. You know, on the domestic side, we saw coming out of the two sessions a focus on technology infrastructure, so about 1.3 trillion (dollars) in investment on technology infrastructure. But it may be very hard for the Chinese not to retaliate if there’s real damage to Huawei, given how much in the Chinese press and coming from Chinese spokespeople about—talking about Huawei and the unfairness of U.S. actions. So, you know, we haven’t seen very much specific retaliation. You know, some outlets, like the Global Times, have, of course, suggested it. But that is still, I think, waiting in the wings for the Chinese to really consider. SANGER: Let me just add in one thought here. Let’s say that the Washington strategy is successful beyond its wildest dreams and that the United States, its NATO allies, and a handful of allies in Asia don’t go with Huawei. Huawei will still have probably 40 percent of the world’s communications, just because with China alone, and then states that are willing to go sign up, states that are developing nations, states that are taking this as part of Belt and Road, a fairly large number of nations will be on a Chinese Huawei-dominated network. And that won’t just be Huawei. And those that aren’t will still be using newly laid Chinese undersea cable, because while we’re laying some new cable, mostly by Facebook and Google and Microsoft and others, the Chinese are laying out new cable along the way, partly through a subsidiary of Huawei or what was a subsidiary of Huawei. So we’re going to have to, as Sue Gordon, the former deputy director of national intelligence put it, learn how to live in a dirty network. We’re going to have to learn how it is that we manage our communications knowing that they’re going to flow through Huawei networks even if the Huawei hardware is not present here. And I think that too much of the discussion that I hear, particularly on Capitol Hill, seems to suggest that if we can just ban Huawei from our networks and our allies’, we’ve solved the problem. And we haven’t. And this is where it rolls right into the encryption debate, because if you don’t have truly solid encryption, you’re not going to solve the problem you were intending to solve by keeping Huawei out. PAYTON: David, that’s such a great point. And Trisha, just to add a little bit more to what Adam and David said on this, this is where, from a development standpoint, whether it’s the mobile apps, the Web apps, whether it’s the communications themselves, focusing purely on the network is not enough. There’s multiple layers here that are being, you know, potentially overlooked that need to be secured. And so we need to be taking more advantage—this is where, if we can containerize our development and think about transactions as their own independent element, regardless of what the transaction is transported on, what it’s transported to, that actually helps us with mitigating the risks in this global supply chain we find ourselves in. So, you know, everything is not made in the same country anymore, whether it’s an Internet of Things device like Google Home or Alexa or your Ring doorbell. Everything is not all created in one country or even in one factory, right. It’s all distributed across different organizations, different companies. So the supply chain is very complex. The way you reduce your attack surface when you have a very complex supply chain is you actually look at the transactions themselves. So it’s encryption. It’s tokenization of each transaction, and when I’m done and I have what I need, I don’t ask for it the same way again. It’s all the different types of elements for the data and the apps themselves. And if we can start focusing on containerizing those and actually making each and—each one of those components more secure in and of itself, then we’re able to help whether it’s 5G and Huawei or any other part of the supply chain to actually have a more secure experience where we’re not relying on the human, the user, to, oh, make sure you have multifactor authentication; don’t forget, don’t click on links and open attachments even though it’s a core part of doing your job; you know, all those things that we put the burden on the user. You’re right, David and Adam. Just deciding who provides the 5G network doesn’t mean our job is done. There’s so much more to it. ANDERSON: I really like the phrase that David used, learning how to—learning how to live in a dirty network I think is really apt here. We’ve touched a little bit upon the governmental response to some of the cyber threats that we’ve been talking about, and I think—with Adam, who I think expressed some gloom or pessimism about the likelihood that we would see legislation. To the extent we have seen legislative efforts, they have really focused on the hardening of the network and exclusion of Chinese entities from 5G and the network generally. Is there—do you see any efforts, or do you have any thoughts about the role of government in terms of moving to that different strategy of learning to live in a dirty network? Or is that something that it’s just still lagging behind and we don’t really see the government yet taking action in that regard? SANGER: Well, I think governments are conflicted a little bit because of the encryption debate. So what’s the—what’s the fear of letting Huawei in? There are two fears. One is that they could shut a network down in time of conflict. And you can pretty well solve that by keeping their parts out of the network, although you’re, obviously, always going to have some Chinese components in it. The second fear is the one of interception of data. Now, I would argue the Chinese did a pretty good job intercepting data in the old, boring 3G and 4G worlds, right? I mean, Unit 61398 did a nifty job stealing industrial secrets when we weren’t even thinking about 5G yet. So we’re not going to solve that problem entirely. But the more that governments step out and say we can’t live with complete and total encryption because our law enforcement capability needs a way in, the more they are tripping on their own message about network security from China and others. And what I think I’ve seen in my reporting is that government officials do not like to see this correlation made. They want to think as if they can have their encryption debate purely in terms of law enforcement and being able to get into your iPhone or your network to find out where a missing child is, which is certainly a very reasonable argument about why they may want to do that. But they want to do that thinking that they’re not along the way compromising the rest of their network security, and of course, they are. SEGAL: I mean, I think we’re probably seeing some thinking in the Defense Department about operating in dirty networks. I think probably most of the thinking now on the—on the tactical or operational side is based on an assumption that, you know, the networks are not going to be as reliant, no matter who supplies them, as we think they’re going to, and you have to have redundancies and backups and analog and all these others things that are—that are going there. I think, as David said, at the policymaking or the kind of U.S.-official point of view, no, I mean, U.S. officials always think they’re going to have their cake and eat it too—that we’re somehow going to achieve both, you know, perfect transparency into our opponents and complete security for us, and that somehow the other actors are not going to do things to prevent that. And so, you know, I think there is a kind of inability to see that others are just not going to passively accept how we shape those networks and they’re going to kind of operate in ways that are, you know, going to force us to be more strategic and make some difficult decisions, make some compromises about which things we’re willing to give up in return for what we think are either national security interests or law enforcement interests or widespread commercial encryption usage that defends, you know, more people. ANDERSON: So I’ll just invite participants, if there are any questions, to please raise your hands. I’ll pause for a moment. (Pause.) If not, then I will ask each of our panelists to wrap up by— STAFF: Trisha, we do have a question. ANDERSON: Great, OK. STAFF: If you don’t mind me interrupting. ANDERSON: Of course. Absolutely. STAFF: Take our next question from Josh Green. Q: Hi. This is Josh Green from S&P Global. I appreciate the comments today, though it does seem to paint a pretty bleak picture for the future. And I’m curious if there’s anything that’s giving you optimism about the path forward specifically around our ability to operate in a—in a secure environment. ANDERSON: That’s an excellent question on which we can end. So I’ll ask each of the panelists to give their thoughts on this question. Theresa, do you want to start? PAYTON: Yeah, sure. So what’s interesting is—thank you for asking that so we can end on a high note. Some of the things that I’m incredibly encouraged around is actually removing the friction of security for the user by leveraging technologies such as machine learning, artificial intelligence to actually do the behavioral-based analytics in real time and to be able to say: Does this transaction make sense, or is this transaction an anomaly where I need to actually layer back in more friction just to actually validate and authorize the user? So I think we’re finally at sort of the place where we have enough information about you, about how you do business; we have enough computer processing power and technology to actually start to make your interactions with technology more secure. So I see a lot of hope and promise there. We’re not quite there yet, but I do see a lot of hope and promise there, where things like implementing encryption for a transaction and the tokenization of that information in the moment that you need it being something that’s easy for a business to implement and easy for you to consume, and those are the key elements. And then to be able to use that behavioral-based analytics and machine learning to analyze a transaction in real time, and if something doesn’t look right about it ask more questions about it, and if it seems like the transaction is not legitimate to be able to actually stop it in its tracks. So there’s a lot of promise there. Also, some of the frameworks that have been rolled out, both the international frameworks but some of the ones rolled out such as NIST, some of the things coming out of Department of Defense, the FedRAMP certification for cloud, those frameworks are starting to pay off. I don’t want to see them used as checklists because checklists don’t stop bad things from happening, but they are starting to create a level of rigor and discipline that’s sort of like a basic pay-to-play that I think is incredibly helpful. So you put the two together, if we can always make sort of security be a warm hug around the user instead of an add-on, that’s a good day in my book. And we’re approaching that. SANGER: Oh, I’d add in that we’ve come a long way since 2016. The Russians may have done us an enormous favor, because while they created a fair bit of paranoia and so forth, I’m not sure at the end of the day they actually affected the outcome of the 2016 election. And I think it’s going to be hard for them to get away with things unseen except at the very last moment in the coming election. Every upside has got a downside to it, and the downside is that we have learned that the psychological benefits of interrupting a process, a network—as Adam and I were discussing earlier, just creating a perception hack can do a lot of damage. But we have a much more cyber-savvy electorate today than we had four years ago, and I think that’s going to be—make it easier for people to recognize that, in fact, they are hearing from a bot; that, in fact, the registration system may be messed around with by a foreign power or it may be a case where simply the state has made an error, the way Georgia made a series of errors in training the other day for the primary. So I think we’re a lot more savvy. That doesn’t mean we’re safe. SEGAL: I don’t think I’ve ever ended a cyber talk on a positive note, but I will—I will try. I think there’s lots of interesting things happening in the—on the public-private side, that we’re seeing a lot of groups like the Cyber Threat Alliance and others that are, I think, doing a very good job of popularizing, reaching out, benchmarking, providing guidelines, reaching new audiences internationally and domestically, and providing some of the solutions. I think also the efforts on the international level of the private sector to shape the norms discussion has been interesting. I don’t know long term how effect it has been, since states still say this is still a state realm. But they’re certainly, I think, affecting the debate and putting new ideas in the discussion. ANDERSON: Thank you so much, Adam. Well, we covered a lot of territory today, and I just want to thank all the participants for joining the Virtual Roundtable. And thank you so—(inaudible, technical difficulties)—to our speakers. (Audio break, technical difficulties)—and posted on the CFR website. So thanks again, everyone. SEGAL: Thank you. SANGER: Thanks. (END)

Speakers discuss the power yielded by foreign governments through large donations to U.S. universities, the proliferation of government-funded Confucius Institutes on campuses, and the potential threat to U.S. national security. BRIMMER: Good afternoon. Welcome to today’s—to today’s Council on Foreign Relations meeting, Foreign Money in U.S. Universities: Implications for Academic Freedom and National Security. My name Esther Brimmer. I’m executive director and CEO of NAFSA, the Association of International Educators. And I will be presiding for today’s discussion. Now, international cooperation has been a hallmark of academic research for centuries. The exchanges of students, and scholars, and ideas are fundamental to intellectual inquiry and to innovation. In the modern era, governments have made funding research a strategic priority. Indeed, massive investments in research helped the United States win the Second World War, win the Cold War, and launch the information age with the creation of the internet. Today research funding comes from many sources, public and private. The theft of international—intellectual property can have real national security implications. This is a bipartisan concern. Does it matter that foreign governments are funding research in the United States? What are the implications for academic freedom and national security? Well, today we have an outstanding panel to help us address these issues. On my immediate right is Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education. On his right is Ben Freeman, director of the Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative at the Center for International Policy. And on his right is Robert Daly, director of the Kissinger Institute on China and the United States at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for scholars. Welcome. So let’s begin by setting the stage for this issue. Dr. Mitchell, there is a long history of cooperation among higher education institutions and the federal government. What are the benefits and what has changed? MITCHELL: Thanks for—thanks for having me. Thanks for leading this discussion. Thanks to all of you for being here. A couple quick things. The American Council on Education, as I think many of you know, represents all sectors of American higher education—two-year, four-year, public, private. And so we’ve had a bird’s-eye view of these issues for over a hundred years now. And research funding from the federal government has been essential to the growth not just of the applied research endeavors that have done so much to change our economy and change the fabric of society, but the basic research. The basic research that is behind those applied advances that matter so much to us. Over time, the balance between those two has shifted some, away from basic research toward more applied research. There’s nothing wrong with that because, after all, the applied research is bread and butter for all of us, whether it’s the internet or developments in bioengineering and biotechnology. At the same time, I think that we all have to keep our eyes on the seed corn, on the ability of American universities to do the basic research from which those applied advances apply. The other thing that I would like to mention, Esther, is that in addition to research funding the federal government has been a very important contributor to international scholarly exchanges, where scholars from the U.S. go abroad and scholars from abroad, including China, come here. Student exchanges likewise. The Fulbright program, to do a headline that we all know, has been a federally funded program since its inception. And so as we think about foreign influence I hope that our conversation today would be one that would be broad, that would think about people, that would think about facilities, that would think about ideas, and would think about money. BRIMMER: Thank you. Ben, how large an issue is this? What do you see as the impact of foreign financial contributions to academic research, and why is the U.S. government concerned? Why now? Is it an issue of money or from whom it comes? FREEMAN: Great question, Esther. And thank you to the Council on Foreign Relations for having us. And thank you to my fellow panelists. I really think we probably would not be having this panel if not for the 2016 election, if the issue of foreign influence in American democracy hadn’t risen to the front pages of newspapers we, unfortunately, probably would not be here having this great discussion. And I say that as somebody who wrote a book on foreign influence before it was cool. (Laughter.) And my mother— MITCHELL: But the book is still available. FREEMAN: The book is still available. It’s The Foreign Policy Auction. My mother still hasn’t read it. So please, if you do, send a note to her. But that was written before 2016, before the issue came to the forefront. And I really think the 2016 election, though that was about election interference and not directly related to this topic, I think that very much opened everybody’s eyes to this sort of Pandora’s box of foreign influence. And people started looking at what other avenues of influence might be out there. People started paying more attention to the Foreign Agents Registration Act. People started paying more attention to foreign funding of think tanks. And then folks started paying more attention to foreign funding at universities too. And I really think foreign funding of universities, it’s sort of behind the curve in our understanding of how foreign influence works in America right now. And I think that’s an issue because this is actually a rather large space in terms of the size of it. Since 2013, for example, the Department of Education keeps records on foreign gifts. There’s over $12 billion of gifts in that database. And we have some recent examples that that number’s probably even low. There’s a lot that’s still underreported there. And to put that in perspective, the regular foreign influence industry, the Foreign Agents Registration Act registrants, that industry is about a $400 million a year industry. So when we’re talking about foreign funding of universities, we’re talking about funding that is five or six times greater than those FARA-registered firms. So I really think there’s a lot of questions about how much money we’re talking about. But I think it’s more about where is that money coming from. And we’ve all probably come to this issue in one way or another from our learning about Confucius Institutes’ impact on campus. And when we see that some of the biggest spenders on higher education are our frenemies, our near-peer competitors like China, and like Russia, and other countries, I think it is a concern about exactly where this money is coming from. And then secondly, are there any strings attached to that money I think is a very important question. BRIMMER: And we’re going to dig into more about funding for a variety of things including research on campuses and the implications for campuses, and also look at some of the responses, because we will wrap up by talking about some of the solutions and actions for dealing with this. But Robert Daly, for decades the United States has had clear mechanisms to manage classified research. But even now, non-classified research is considered sensitive. So what’s the stakes? What’s changed? Why—we used to care about the export of things and now we seem to care about the export of data. DALY: I think what has happened is that China has emerged as a peer competitor. And we now have a relationships with China that is competitive globally and across various sectors. And so now it is not just a question for some in Washington—although, this is in play. This is still under debate, and we don’t have clear policies yet. But a question about whether, as the National Security Strategy says, universities have become a vector for the loss of strategically significant information to China, not through intellectual property theft, or not through espionage in laboratories, but through normal teaching and research activities. This is the broad and potentially, if not framed properly, extremely dangerous accusation or realization. And if we think back—and to date, I still reject the idea that we’re in a cold war with China. But if you think back to the Cold War, I think it helps us to understand the concern. During the Cold War, you wouldn’t hear many people in universities, even very internationally minded sort of liberal academics saying that we should be training Soviet scientists in nuclear physics. Nobody thought that, because the threat was understood, and it was broadly socialized. So the argument now goes, it depends on your discipline, but something like: We’re competing with China to develop hypersonics. Why are we giving Chinese scientists, best and the brightest, Ph.D.s in aeronautics and astronautics? But it goes beyond that. It extends to the basic sciences because we—material science—because we don’t know where the clear breakthrough will come. So there are direct security implications, like, you know, for weapons development. But there’s also a concern that you hear expressed frequently but not universally in Congress—as I say, this is debated—that because China is a peer competitor and it wants what it calls comprehensive national power around the world—and there’s a belief in some quarters that that happens at our expense. And if you believe that, then anything that is to China’s benefit is potentially to our detriment. Why should we be training up the best and the brightest from a rival at all, is the most extreme version of these concerns. Now, I think that that is—basing our policy on those fears leads us to enormous acts of self-harm. So how do we find the right degree of vigilance that still preserves openness, internationalization, excellence of universities is a real policy dilemma. Because the risks are getting higher because of China. This is—the risks are real. But risk will never be zero. So how much risk can we tolerate is what we need to figure out in higher education now. BRIMMER: And let’s go to that question about how we preserve the vitality of the American classroom, for which one million students come to the United States to enjoy, and the vitality of the innovation system that we have that includes bringing smart people here? But of course, today’s—let me ask the question this way. Today’s December 10. It’s International Human Rights Day. And if we actually go to Article 19, it actually talks about the—everyone has a right to freedom of opinion and expression. This right includes the freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media, regardless of frontiers. So how do we manage security, and what do we need to be concerned about in terms of academic freedom on campuses? DALY: Well, I think it’s largely a question of enforcing and taking more seriously longstanding rules and practices on the American campuses that are often honored in the breach. You know, the concern with money is, to my mind, not so much where it comes from but, as you said, you know, how it was managed and how it’s used. And most departments, most schools have reporting requirements for faculty. You’re supposed to report all sources of money. But they don’t. And there’s an issue of university culture. University leaders do not like to say thou shalt not to faculty, because faculty are kind of unruly and they make that hard on you. So part of defending academic freedom and getting this right, academic freedom isn’t just about freedom of speech and freedom to conduct research. It’s also about freedom from American government management. It’s about academic self-governance. But this is going to require, in my view, universities to do a little bit more governing, and to get their own houses in order consistent with existing rules for vigilance, best practices to make sure that you know where the money’s coming from, that that’s all transparent, and to know that foreign donors in particular, but even American corporate donors, know that this doesn’t buy them influence. This is simply an investment in a university for the university to conduct its research and teaching activities as it sees fit. And so I think we—I think universities have it within their ken to solve this without government management, but they’ve been a little lax. BRIMMER: Ted, would—I know that ACE has been working with many of the leading associations in the field, including the Association of American Universities, AAU, and the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, and other mechanisms. Would you comment a bit about—on how the campus communities have responded in recent years? MITCHELL: Sure. And I think that we’ve done a lot of good work together on this issue. And so I think that the issue of laxity—I mean, we could debate sort of on a spectrum what lax is, but let’s not go there. I think more important is to step back and do a reset. I think that the academic community within the last several years—probably initiated by the 2016 election and thinking about foreign influence more broadly—the academic infrastructure has become more aware of the threats, whether those are threats from China on the sort of more pure espionage side, or capture of intellectual property, or the creation of mirror labs in China. You know, I think that the academic infrastructure has become keenly aware of that.  Confucius Institutes. The academic infrastructure has similarly, I think, really awakened to the need for oversight for these and other arrangements. And so you’re seeing, with the help of other associations—not just in the U.S., but internationally—you’re seeing the transparency card being played in very important ways. So from the Hague we have a list of—a checklist, really—for institutions worldwide on how to manage their relationships broadly with China. We’re taking that up. In fact, I’m meeting with the head of Universities Canada later this afternoon, with my colleague Brad Farnsworth. And we’re going to be talking about the implementation of those guidelines. So I think the first thing is: Do universities get it? Yes. Universities get it. Second, are universities trying to do all that they can to staunch the flow, the inappropriate flow, of information and data? I think we’re working on it. I think we’re getting there. Are institution—then, number three—are institutions concerned that there is a line that you cross between legitimate kinds of limitation and the limitation on core academic freedom and core international exchange? I think yes is the answer to that too. And we need to negotiate where that—where that line is, what crossing that line means for an institution, for an individual researcher, or even a faculty member who has some kind of exchange relationship. Last thing I want to say, and I’m taking advantage of having the mic on, is that I think when we think even in the narrow sense about China, but in the broad sense about the international training of scholars, in the past we had a somewhat easy solution to that problem: Keep them. And I don’t want us to lose sight of that as a real potential for us as we go forward. We joke sometimes when the door is closed and the lights are off about stapling a green card to the student visas of the most active researchers in even sensitive fields. DALY: I’ve heard members of Congress advocate that in the past year, and they weren’t joking. MITCHELL: And the lights were probably on. DALY: The lights were on. MITCHELL: Yeah. Yeah. but I think as we talk about this, I think we should—we should remember that the reason that people are drawn to America is because, Esther, of this tremendous intellectual vitality that you’re talking about, and the academic freedom that’s involved and inherent in the academic enterprise in America. And add to that the capitalist enterprise that allows people to monetize many of their discoveries in a way that they can’t do in China, in Saudi Arabia, in—you know, you name—you name the country from whom we’re drawing very, very intelligent people. FREEMAN: Can I just piggyback on that too? Because I think one of the most important issues when we’re talking about this is to not label all foreign funding as being bad, as being nefarious. And I think this is true across all the different areas of foreign influence research. And I mentioned all the other different areas too. I don’t think all foreign funding to think tanks is bad. I don’t think all registered foreign agents are bad. There are plenty of examples where foreign—I would dare to say that most foreign funding is quite beneficial to both us and to the countries that are giving that money. So I think it’s important, even though I threw out that $12 billion figure, I think most of that money is probably for very good purposes that most Americans would appreciate. BRIMMER: And precisely as we go into a knowledge economy where the innovation and the exchange of ideas are crucial to the actual value we’re adding to the economy, the fact that we have such a vibrant system for innovation is extremely important, perhaps even more important than it’s perhaps ever been. So what are some practical next steps? Indeed, leaders on campuses have been very active. Do we have enough communication across campuses? I know at NAFSA we work with many people who are in international offices. There are, of course, the legal offices that handle export control issues. Do we have enough communication among key actors, or are there more things we could be doing to help support that cooperation? MITCHELL: So I’ll take a first shot at it. I think the easy answer is no. We can always—we can always do more. And it’s one of the reasons why I’m so pleased that we have a robust partnership across the leading associations in American colleges and universities who are talking about the same issues, who are working together on both position papers to help educate people on campus and off campus, but also these kinds of work-throughs. We worked together on a document on Confucius Institutes that we disseminated broadly across the institutions that have Confucius Institutes. And the response that we’ve gotten is that that’s been very, very helpful. So we need to gather the learning. We need to synthesize it. And we need to disseminate it as broadly as we can. And that’s a project that will never be over. We need to keep responding to changing circumstances. DALY: I think your question also takes us off campus, however. You’ve mentioned several times, I think appropriately so, the innovation system. And that’s really what we’re talking about here, the universities as a key component in this. But it also affects national laboratories, corporate laboratories, who are having a lot of their cooperation and investment with China called into question, as to whether this is, in fact, undermining American security. And here, I think that we need the corporate and national laboratories, and the universities, to work with government, to work with Congress and the executive branch to try to define as narrowly as possible the areas which really have a discrete, describable national security component, rather than to cast broad aspersions about universities giving knowledge to the world, including to our enemies. And there are a couple of pieces of draft legislation in the Senate and in the House, that I don’t think have moved much over the past year, that have frameworks for this. I know that the Office of the Science and Technology Policy Advisor is interested in this as well. And the general bumper sticker approach that we’ve begun to hear—and this, I think, was Secretary Gates’—was small yards, high fences, to try to define not broad disciplines but subdisciplines and actual emergent technologies as narrowly as possible, and then build a high fence around them. And these draft legislation calls for things like a rulemaking body such that scholars from countries of high strategic concern—and that means Iran, China, Russia, Cuba, North Korea—could not study those small fields beyond a certain level, whether it was postdoc, or however it was defined. And this needs to be done not just for universities, but for corporations as well, so that they know that opening up an R&D center in China, or letting a scholar of Chinese origin, or Iranian origin, work in our R&D center in the United States is not going to be cast as an act of treason. And so I think this is becoming better and better understood on the Hill and in the executive branch. But we also, just to support what Ted just said, need to remember that the internationalization of American universities, until very recently, was seen as a vector for our influence of the world, right? We seem to have forgotten about that, that soft power piece. Two weeks ago, just to give you one example, the FDA approved the first Chinese cancer drug for use in the United States after clinical trials. And if you go back and if you look at that Chinese lab the physicians who came up with this drug, they were almost all American trained. And they’ve had hopscotch careers where they were back and forth. And, yes, the company that will manufacture this drug, although they may license it in the United States, is Chinese, it’ll be curing cancer in America. We’re talking about curing cancer. And that’s a credit to what we achieved. And we need—there are lots of stories like this. There are actually more stories of that kind than there are of people actually stealing from classified labs in American universities. And we need some sense of balance. BRIMMER: Indeed. Indeed, we find that just as we talk to our members that, indeed, the benefits are—that we’ve seen for decades—are still very much the case. Both the—both the innovation, but also contributions to local communities, through innovations from international studies and scholars. But just to follow up on your point, to share with the group, just the update overnight on what’s going on down the road at Capitol Hill. Indeed, Congress this week is finalizing the National Defense Authorization Act. It does—and we understand from the markup last night—it does include elements of H.R. 3038, which is the Securing American Science and Technology Act of 2019. I know maybe you’ve all been involved in that. DALY: Which the AAU and the APLU and ACL support, right? BRIMMER: They do. Exactly. Exactly. So we were all waiting to see if it was in there. We understand that it is in there. And just to—just for members to know that it would establish within the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, they would lead an interagency working group of federal science, intelligence, and security agency sets. That’s one component. And the other would be a national academies led national science, technology and security roundtable. So that’s our understanding of what’s in the legislation at the moment. So we’ll see if that moves. Obviously the NDAA is something that does—we do expect to be a must-pass legislation. So we’ll be keeping our eyes on that. So that’s an important element about some things are happening in Congress. Are there other things that should be happening either in Congress or with the executive—the executive branch as well? I mean, one question is, you know, if funding for research—maybe to go back where we started—if funding for research, federal and state funding, were higher, perhaps back to the levels it was a decade, might there be a different conversation about the reliance on foreign funding? What do you say? FREEMAN: Yes, tentatively, though I think even in that hypothetical situation I don’t think anybody would reject a good foreign funding source. So even if we had those higher levels of domestic funding, I still think there would be a search for foreign funding too. And again, that’s not necessarily, I think, good or bad. I’ll leave that there. BRIMMER: Are there other aspects of work that the executive branch could be involved in? DALY: I think the executive branch right now could be convening. And I think that we need to make sure that academia is well-represented in these panels. You don’t just want the security agencies involved, because the security agencies always want risk to be zero. And the real question—the broad question, I think, that is raised for us by the rise of China in particular, but not just China, is how confident are we living with the vulnerabilities and the weaknesses that have always been inherent in our greatest strengths? Namely, openness, internationalization, academic self-governance, you know, political-cultural academic pluralism. There are vulnerabilities there. And they’re actually getting more worrisome as China gets more powerful, because China does play in this space. There’s no question about it. But if we can’t reduce risk to zero, are we going to have the confidence to go forward and, again, to out-compete, to out-innovate and, as you suggest, to reinvest I think is the right broad approach. MITCHELL: Go. FREEMAN: Yeah, I think another issue for the executive branch is on the transparency side of things. I mentioned some issues with underreporting of this information. And we know a lot about where some of this money is coming from, and that sort of thing. But the Department of Education has recently started investigations of six universities. And their preliminary findings show that $1.3 billion in previously unreported foreign funding. And to put that in perspective for those six universities, one of which is my alma mater Texas A&M, that those universities have previously reported about $1.8 billion. So we’re talking nearly half of the money that DOE could track was previously unreported. And I think we need to have a serious conversation about why that was happening. And DOE and others can, I think, do more for education on that front. And I think organizations like those of my fellow panelists here are doing just wonderful work on that and educating institutions about how to properly report. But I think that’s definitely an area for improvement because at the end of the day, for me, one of the most important issues is just having the public know where this money is coming from in the first place. MITCHELL: So if I can—I do need to add onto the Department of Education’s work on foreign gift reporting. I think that it is absolutely true that institutions have paid, hmm, maybe second-tier attention to the gift reporting requirements. And so we’re coming to terms with that. And the investigations will be somewhat helpful in that. But I also think that the companion piece to transparency is clarity. And without clarity, transparency is a shot in the dark. And that’s been the problem in this foreign gift reporting realm. The Department of Education has systematically refused to provide guidance to institutions about how to fill out the forms. And so while it’s been a second-tier issue, bad on us, there has also been a massive absence of clarity about the meaning of the law in its application. The law itself is actually rather broad. FREEMAN: Very broad. MITCHELL: Very broad, right? It’s $250,000 of gift, contract, or other transaction. What the heck does that mean? I’ll give you an example. There are a couple of foreign students attending university in the United States—a couple. And they pay tuition. Is that tuition payment an exchange under the law? Depends how you read the law. The Department has recently extended what it calls guidance that basically said: Oh, no, 250(,000 dollars) is wrong. It’s zero. Any dollar has to be reported from any foreign source for any purpose. I guess that’s clarity. (Laughter.) But that’s not going to lead to the kind of transparency that will be actionable on the campus basis. So forget my gripes about the Department of Education for a second. We have a seven-page letter if you would like to read it to the Department on this section of the law. But let’s step back. Transparency, absolutely. Clarity has to be the other hand in the handshake. And that’s why it’s so important from a process side to engage the security agencies, the federal funding agencies, congressional committee staff, and the academy in developing guidelines that can be clear enough to provide real guidance to campuses, so that we, in turn, can be transparent about what’s happening on our campuses. FREEMAN: Can I just piggyback on that piggyback? BRIMMER: Actually, we’re coming up on 1:00. MITCHELL: Oh, sorry. BRIMMER: I’m going to open the floor to members for questions. But you can fold your comment in, because I’m sure we’ll get questions on what you say. But we know a tight ship on timing here. So it is 1:00. I invite members to ask questions. Remember, this is on the record. Please wait for a microphone, and stand, and identify yourself, and ask one question. Who’d like to start? Please. Q: Hi. I’m Nelson Cunningham, McLarty Associates. Full disclosure, I’m on Esther’s board at NAFSA, and so— MITCHELL: How’s she doing? Q: Great. (Laughter.) Great. We just had the retention conversation the other day. Great. (Laughter.) BRIMMER: Thank you. Thank you. Q: So I have a window on these issues from the NAFSA perspective. And we—in the last year and a half, we’ve advised two of America’s research universities on their China strategies. My question is this, and it goes to Robert Daly’s comment, that certainly in the ’60s and ’70s we would not have wanted to educate Russian scientists on nuclear physics—Soviet scientists on nuclear physics. But we have another example in our history where we benefitted hugely from foreign contributions, and that’s in the ’30s and ’40s, when we took the German, and the Hungarian, and the French, and the Polish scientists to America and made them a part of our fabric and benefitted hugely from that. So is the answer maybe not, gee, we’re just suspicious of foreign governments, but knowing the people better? Who is going to be part of the system that’s sending us and who is, frankly, fleeing the system from which they’re coming, so that we can then—we can make them—we staple the visa to their diploma, and they’re ours forever? DALY: So this is the policy dilemma. I lean toward the approach that you’re suggesting. However, these people you’re describing, whose intentions we need to discern, there are a lot of them. (Laughs.) You know, we’ve got about 350,000 just Chinese students here now. And frankly, our—the agencies that would be involved in this, trying to make these distinctions, simply don’t have the capability. There’s no way they can find out who these people are and were in China. So this is where the policy discussion comes it. You know, we have this instinct that says: Every foreign student who gets a Ph.D. in a STEM field should be a green card stapled to their diploma. Well, that sounds clear, but security immediately says: If you do that, you are showing them the broad and easy road for espionage into the United States, because you’re guaranteed to go in under deep cover, learn science, and then you can send everything right back to China. So where do you—how do you have that discussion? And this is why I say it comes down in the end, in part, to doing what we can to determine who these people are. That’s limited. But you’re really left with faith in the system and faith in the values. It’s—while mitigating whatever risks you can, you either, you know, believe in this process that you’ve just described as one of the very engines of our national strength, or you don’t, right? So you’re going to end up taking some risks. What worries me in the conversation in Washington right now is that security is in command, especial in relation to China. And so in describing, you know, challenges or threats to the universities, we need skepticism about Chinese claims. We need vigilance. But there have actually been very few demonstrable harms to United States security that have come through the universities to date. Legitimate skepticism, but very few demonstrable harms. And that’s not to being weighed against the benefit we’ve had over the past forty years of all of China’s best and brightest coming here to build the United States as Americans. That’s really missing from this discussion. And actually, it’s not just STEM students. It’s also award-winning short-story writers, and designers, and you name it. And so it’s an unbalanced conversation right now. What’s the right amount of vigilance that values openness becomes the question. But that’s not the form in which most leaders are asking the question right now. Q: Hi. Jeff Bialos. I’m a lawyer in Washington. Hi, Esther, and a pleasure to be here today. And, you know, I ascribe—I agree with a lot of what you just said, Bob. And I think the transparency focus of the panel is great. But two comments and one question, which is, look—and this comes from the perspective advising people in the university context with respect to the Huawei thing, because there’s a bunch of—you’ve talked about transparency and policies, but there are laws and rules now that unfortunately or fortunately, as the case may be, with Huawei, and 5G, and procurement bans, export control rules. And maybe if you can give some sense of, you know, the tensions I’ve sensed in the academy over this, and what to do. And some universities seem to have backed away entirely from some of those. It’s not just one company. It’s a range of these companies. Second, just on your point, Bob, look, I think what we’re facing today is a subset of a broader issue, which is I think we’re heading toward techno-nationalism, a sort of—sort of a twenty-first century Cold War approach toward China. If you look at what we’re doing in 5G, if you look at foreign investment rules, if you look at the Commerce rules that will come out at some point which will broaden export controls to cover a bunch of dual use situations, that’s going to make it worse. And so that’s the question, I think, that’s not so easy to answer. MITCHELL: I’ll take a shot. So I think that there is a—I want to go back to the—sort of the will of the university. And as reluctant as I am to try to put all of our institutions into one bucket, I think that there is real respect for the security issues that are at hand, and a real desire on the part of university leaders to be responsive to that, and to find this balance that we’ve—that we’ve talked about. Huawei is a really interesting case, because I think that there is, in some institutional settings, Confucius Institutes might fit here too, there is an attempt actually to overshoot the target. And we talk about small yards. I think that that needs to be a lesson on the university side too. And whether it’s specific laws, or specific companies, or even specific countries, I think we need—we need to make sure that we are not overshooting the mark because of a fear that at some point we’re going to be called into account for something that we didn’t know we were going to be accountable for. DALY: And it’s a dynamic situation, as you mentioned. The relationship is still unfolding. We don’t know where this goes. One of the things—and I’m sorry, this is a bit of a soapbox comment—but it seems that in our concerns about China—we’ve got, you know, justified concerns, justified skepticism. But we’re going into a defensive crouch about all this. And I feel like saying, you know, chest out, folks. This is still the United States of America. Invest, compete, let them eat our dust, and cooperate when we can. Where is this spirit? We seem to have very suddenly lost all of that in our discourse and in our fear about China. And we had that as our leading attitude not very long ago. And I’m not sure why we threw it overboard so very quickly, just as a matter of the culture in which we discuss these issues. MITCHELL: Bravo. BRIMMER: Please. The microphone’s behind you. Q: Thanks, hi. I’m Danny Weitzner. I teach in the computer science department at MIT. I really appreciate the nuanced perspectives of all of you. And I guess I want to ask about what happens when we get beyond the small yards with tall fences, because my sense is we largely know what to do in those cases, or at least know how to figure out what to do. But it seems like the bigger problem is really that we are stuck in a kind of a Cold War competitive model, a national security competition model. But really, what we’re concerned about underneath, it seems to me, is economic competition. And we’re worried, whether or not it’s actually said, exactly to your point, we’re worried that may we are not going to do well enough, or maybe we need to put our thumb on the scale of that—of that—of that competition somehow. And so it feels to me as if the core product of universities, at least technical universities, is well-trained scientists and engineers. And they are not in the little yards with the tall fences. They’re just—the most valuable thing we can send back to China is a well-trained scientist. It doesn’t matter what’s in their—it doesn’t matter what intellectual property is locked in their heads, right? What matters is that they can produce ten times that over and over. So I’m just wondering how you think we’re going to arrive at an actual strategic view on that question. Do we want to train these people or not? We can’t train them and remove 35 percent of their knowledge because it’s one of those fenced off yards. We just can’t. And we shouldn’t, I think. So I’m wondering where we go in the open part of the world that you’ve all eloquently described as critical to what we do in this country. And, by the way, I think critical to our ability to have a—the extent to which we have a collaborative relationship with China, which we—it seems to me, we have to in some part. Unless we want to have a much more tense relationship. That it’s actually going to be those people who we send out fully empowered back to China who will be the ones who we can talk to and who will, perhaps, be the other side of that dialogue. So I’m just interested in the strategic view of, I guess, the harder part of this problem. (Laughs.) BRIMMER: Thank you. Feel free to jump in. MITCHELL: I’ll start, if you guys would take my back. (Laughter.) You know, tell you, Bob mentioned values a little bit ago. And when talk about stapling green cards and so on, I think underneath that really is a different aspect of the chest out thing. If we really believed in the system that we enjoy and the system that we’ve invested in for a couple hundred years, then we have to believe that that has carrying power and strength. And so you talk about the 35 percent that we want to remove, well, what about the 35 percent that we just put in? And is there a way that we can emphasize that 35 percent in ways that we maybe aren’t yet. Maybe we’ve gotten too technical in the way we’re training scientists. Maybe, you know, in your department we should sit down and talk about how we’re talking to postdocs about the nature of their work, how it fits into the development of a free people, and where there are limits and lines about that. And so I mean, I am totally with the chest out. And it’s not just about the chest out on the economic competition. It’s the chest out about our way of life. FREEMAN: Right. And I think I’ll piggyback on that to say I think part of this equation has to be not just what happens in the classroom but the entirety of their experience while they’re here. And when we’re sending folks back to China who have probably never seen some of the things they’ve seen on a college campus. (Laughs.) In many ways. DALY: Good, bad, and indifferent. (Laughter.) FREEMAN: But that’s certainly an experience that they’re not going to get in China. And for us, I think there is an immense value for us to export that back to China, and to have that cultural experience, to have that exposure to human rights, and have that nonacademic education I think is immensely valuable, and it has to be part of this equation. DALY: Your university has actually made some key moves. It was the president of MIT who I think was the first, or one of the first, to publish a letter in the spring sort of standing up for internationalization. And that was an important backlash. I think there is a next step that the universities could take collectively. And that is, as I said, the demonstrable harms to our security are not being weighed against all the gains we’ve had from foreign, especially Chinese, students coming in. Somebody needs to describe, or capture, or quantify that. I’ve been looking—I can’t find data on how many American physicists of Chinese origin are working, or doctors of Chinese origin. It’s very tough to find this stuff. And universities would know the proper methodology to present the benefits that you were talking about that we can put out against, yes, espionage. Yes, subterfuge. Yes, influence. These things are happening. But we need this other measure. And that’s something that universities could do. And I think that may be a next step. BRIMMER: Two things on that point. One, I’ll say that associations, including my own, is actually—is highlighting what some of the benefits are. And indeed, the benefits of having students and scholars here in the United States, being—making contributions in their classrooms, in laboratories, and even to their local communities. And I think that many of the work that we’re seeing is probably helping get the word out. And then also want to comment both—we talked about the letter from the president of MIT, and other presidents have also become really very active in encouraging students and scholars to come and participate. I would note also that we are receiving questions online as well. And one is also from a university president. So I’d like to share the question, from Mark Schlissel, who’s the president of University of Michigan. And he asks: Rather than focusing on keeping research secret, how do you view calling for a national security strategy and establishing a set of priorities around investments and research pitched as national competitiveness. Comments? MITCHELL: Good idea, Mark. (Laughter.) FREEMAN: I also support. DALY: I’m not quite sure I understand the proposal, as he’s just—so can you give us that again? BRIMMER: I’m just reading—just about it. Rather than focusing on keeping research secret, how do you view calling for a national security strategy and establishing a set of priorities around investments in research pitched as national competitiveness? DALY: Ah. Yeah, well, competitiveness policy is a big issue. This is also related to something that is now being debated. Senator Rubio has proposed essentially an American industrial policy. The competitiveness policy and industrial policy are closely related. Americans tends to be strongly opposed to industrial policy, except when it works. (Laughter.) And the Republican Party, frankly, sees this as a violation against sacred market orthodoxy. So this is a political discussion about planning, which tends to be government led. And that’s going to be a very—it’s a reasonable proposal, but it’s going to be a partisan fight. MITCHELL: Let me add to my “yes” to Mark. I think that it’s a—I think it is vexed, to be sure. I would see a national competitiveness research agenda, I hope, as additive to the work that we’re already doing. I started off my comments talking about the balance between applied and basic sciences. And the last thing I think any of us would want would be for such an enterprise to be funded to the detriment of other areas of research. If we can do that in a targeted way, I think we’ve done a different version of the chest out strategy. If you’re in a car race. And let’s just for the moment put aside all of the other metaphors. If you’re in a car race, there are two ways to win. One of you put brakes on the other feller and the other is that you put your foot on the gas and go faster. And I think that this suggestion is a part of a put your foot on the gas strategy, to take this vast research enterprise that we have and to put it to work in the places where we think it needs to be aimed. BRIMMER: Thank you. There was a question, gentleman at this table, and then the lady over there. Q: Thanks. Jeremy Young. I’m a journalist at Al Jazeera. Focusing less on science and more on political science, I’m wondering whether foreign governments are funding institutes, scholarships, faculty positions, public-facing reports at universities in order for their narrative to win out sort of in the intellectual debate that’s taking place in these academic spaces. And then, Ben, if this is a phenomenon that’s taking place, I’m wondering if you think it’s a positive one, as you talked before, or whether it’s negative, or somewhere in between. FREEMAN: Yeah, I think it’s a great question. What we’re seeing more and more as we look through Foreign Agent Registration Act filings is that registered foreign agents are meeting with folks in academia more and more. They are meeting with professors on college campuses. In fact, there’s an example for Saudi Arabia where the national security director of a program at Syracuse University was a registered foreign agent for Saudi Arabia. That’s not my original reporting. I wish it was, sorry. (Laughs.) But we are seeing this interaction more and more. I think there are a lot of issues to unpack there. I don’t think it’s all nefarious. But the issue that I have is when a foreign agent produces something—like an op-ed, or a report, or talking points, anything like that—they have to put on there what’s called a conspicuous statement that says, by the way, I work for this firm. We’re working on behalf of the government of Saudi Arabia, for example. Whereas, if they’re simply consulting with a university professor who might write a report, or who they might just simply help write that report, there’s no disclosure there about that relationship. And so I think in terms of academic transparency, I would hope that then the folks on campus that are having these meetings would report that would disclose that. There’s nothing requiring them to, though, now. So I think this is kind of a—it’s an interesting intersection of the sort of wild west of FARA regulation in the wild west of foreign funding at universities, too. BRIMMER: But to what extent do universities own conflict of interest standards and other existing standards help in that area, to differentiate between normal research and issues that are of concern from any type of donor? FREEMAN: Yeah. I think it’s sort of incumbent on the universities now for those conflict of interest standards to really pan out. I would very much love to not have to report on this. And I’m sure you would like not to as well, if these disclosures were met. There’s really no—there’s no set of common, you know, governing regulations for this right now. And I think we’re sort of figuring this out. And this nexus I think is something we’re going to see and hear a lot more about going forward. BRIMMER: The lady there, yes. Q: Thea Lee with the Economic Policy Institute and also the U.S.-China Economic Security and Review Commission. Thanks to the panel. I actually want to follow up on the last question, because I think the question about sort of trying to stifle research is not quite as interesting or relevant in this context as the question about whether there’s an influence of foreign money, both positive and negative. There can be self-censorship that happens. If you get a large grant, you know, then does the research on, let’s say, Xinjiang, or on Taiwan, or other issues that are sensitive get influenced? And of course, that’s not just with foreign governments. That’s also with corporations. A lot of the places that universities receive their funding could come with some implicit strings attached, if not explicit strings attached. And I guess one question—I think it follows up on something that Esther raised earlier—is you know, have we made ourselves vulnerable by underfunding our own universities and our own research? And to the point that Ben said, where you know, when somebody comes along and dangles a million dollars, or a couple million dollars, it becomes very hard to turn that money down, even if there’s a sense that there might be, you know, some limitations on academic freedom. And I think another issue it’s kind of related to is, you know, the presence of foreign-born students in a university. And we certainly see that with respect to the Hong Kong protests that are happening, whether it’s in Australia or other places, that there can be some pretty rough conflicts between students around some of these issues. MITCHELL: Look, these are—these are—I think as you said quite well, these are issue that are not limited to foreign funding of research. There’s not limited to research. They’re not limited to foreign funding. They really span the entire exchange that universities engage in, between their core enterprise and people who would like to support it one way or another. Goes all the way to tuition dollars. And you mentioned foreign students, it’s true about domestic students as well. I think that these are—these are tricky issues. They are issues that do not lend themselves well to the blunt instrument of either state or federal policy. But they really do depend on a set of values and ethics at the institutional level. That’s an infuriating answer for lots of us who spend our time in the world of—in the world of policy. But it does mean that transparency is important. It does mean that when people cross a line, that needs to be exposed. And there need to be sanctions against individuals and institutions.  We could put it into another frame and talk about admissions. We could talk about endowed chairs. This really does go across the work of a university. And I think that we need to train people as we think about leadership in these institutions to make hard decisions, sometimes decisions that on first glance run against the self-interest of the institution but in the long run are exactly what the institution needs. We have leaders in our—in our enterprise who have turned down endowed chairs in one area studies field or another, because they are clearly about supporting one narrative and suppressing another. That’s a right decision, even if there isn’t a $3 million endowment for the institution. I will end by saying that it is also absolutely true that we are underfunding American higher education. We are underfunding our private institutions. State legislature after state legislature has cut funding for state institutions. Our famous land-grant institutions are suffering mightily. And so we need to provide the support that our nation deserves for those institutions. BRIMMER: Yes. We have about four minutes. Yes, please. Q: The follow up is—that’s, I think, exactly right—but around transparency or regulation, because individual universities have a hard time making some of those decisions, does that lead to a policy recommendation that the government should play a role in requiring the transparency and also maybe putting some limitations? FREEMAN: Thank you for the original question too. And I think the answer is yes. I think because when we’re looking at this money I think we’d be naïve to believe that this amount of money wasn’t at least designed to buy influence, on some level. And it may not be bad influence. That may be the Norwegian government wanting us to do more deforestation research. It’s not necessarily nefarious. But it is designed to buy influence of some sort. And once we acknowledge that, I think then it becomes important to have transparency about that, and for the government to require that transparency. And right now, I’m amazingly going to loop back to the point I was going to make, to piggyback onto Ted’s piggyback earlier. (Laughs.) Which is—which is about I think what the government can do a better job of is in the statute itself—the statute is so broad right now that it shares the same problem with the FARA statute right now. That to qualify as a foreign entity you might think, well, it’s just foreign governments. It is, but that’s not it. Foreign corporations. Well, it’s that too. It can literally be just a foreign individual. So it can be a foreign parent who is paying their tuition for their child at a university. I run a transparency program. And I’m sorry, but I don’t want to know about that. (Laughs.) I really don’t care about that level of transparency. And I think the problem that creates is a firehose in the data and in the information that actually impedes transparency. I want to know about these nefarious actors. You know, I know want to know about some of these hostile foreign governments and what they’re doing. I care a whole lot less about what some parent is doing to fund their kid’s education. BRIMMER: We have about two minutes. Do we—yes, last question. Q: Good afternoon. I’m Herman Cohen. My career in the foreign service was on Africa. And of course, African has the opposite problem. They send students here who don’t want to go back. For example, there’s an association of Nigerian medical doctors in this country. And there are ten thousand of them. And they’re badly needed in Africa. But my question is, how important to university finances are foreign student tuition? MITCHELL: You can start. FREEMAN: Well, I defer to you. MITCHELL: Well, thank you. You’re all looking at Esther. (Laughter.) BRIMMER: I was going to say, I will add a comment at the end, but our panelists first. (Laughs.) MITCHELL: So foreign student tuition is certainly an important factor in institutional finance. It varies institution to institution, institution type to institution type. So when we look at Esther’s reports, and see where—whether the enrollment is going up or down, that matters to our institutions’ bottom line. But it’s not just the bottom line. A healthy institution is one that represents the diversity of opinion and background that our students will encounter as they go forward in their—in their lives. That certainly is important when we think about racial diversity. In a global world, I would argue, and our institutional leaders argue, it’s equally important about developing a kind of global citizenship and global perspective that our international students bring. BRIMMER: And just to comment particularly on their contribution, NAFSA actually does compile the international student economic value tool. And of course, we recognize the important intellectual and cultural contributions of international students and scholars, but the financial contribution is significant. About $41 billion worth of value is contributed by international students and scholars to the United States, accounting for about 458,000 jobs. International education is the fifth-largest service export of the United States. It is extremely important to the United States economy as well. So we are coming up on 1:30. Again, we know that the Council on Foreign Relations is rigorous in its time management. I would like you to please join me in thanking our outstanding panel for addressing the issues this afternoon. (Applause.) (END)

Susan Rice discusses her new book Tough Love: My Story of the Things Worth Fighting For, which is a look back on her dynamic career in public service.   (Applause.) HAASS: Well, you brought your crowd. RICE: I guess so. (Laughter.) HAASS: Well, good evening—oh, afternoon. I apologize. It’s dark, it throws me off. RICE: It’s still good evening? HAASS: It is good evening, OK? RICE: Good evening. I’ll say it with confidence. (Laughter.) HAASS: Do you want to do the introduction? RICE: Sure. (Laughter.) HAASS: OK. Welcome to the Council and to the twenty-fourth Term Member Conference. For those of you who don’t know me, besides being fortunate, I’m Richard Haass. I’m president of the Council. And we’re thrilled that so many of you are here tonight for this session, for the subsequent session, and for tomorrow’s panels and breakouts. And before I introduce Ambassador Rice I just want to say a few things about your program. This is the Stephen M. Kellen Term Member Program. And it provides people such as yourselves, young professionals form all sorts of fields, the opportunity to develop your interest in foreign policy and international relations. Do it lots of way. For us, it’s an important part of our mission. People think of us as a think tank, or a publisher, or an educational institution. But I like to think we’re in the talent development business. We have close to, what, seven hundred fifty or eight hundred term members. Every years we have five military fellows. Something like 60 or 70 percent of our military fellows have gone on to make admiral or general. We have all sorts of international affairs fellows. I don’t think you were one, were you? But Condi Rice—for example. Condi’s first experience in government was at the Joint Chiefs of Staff as a Council international affairs fellow. Samantha Power worked for this young senator named Barack Obama. And the rest, as they say, is history. So the IAF has been a great program for introducing people to government, and vice versa. We just got a big grant and we’re going to be able to start for the first time a paid internship program. So we’ll have over a hundred interns a year. And we’re really excited because regardless of means or background we’ll be able to get people to apply. And over the course of a decade, that’s a thousand more young people. RICE: Will they all be based at the Council or will you farm them out. HAASS: They’ll be in the Council in New York or Washington. So we’re really—so, again, this is an important part of what it is we do. It’s all made possible, this program, the term program, by the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation. And Andrew Gundlach, who’s a member of the family and a member of the Council, has been great. I want to thank also—where’s Nancy Bodurtha, is she here? And Meaghan Fulco. Is Meagan here? Yeah. (Cheers, applause.) They organized this. And Nancy in particular I have to thank, because she basically oversee the membership process. So you owe it all to her. (Laughter.) And we’re hoping that more than three hundred term members will be here between today and tomorrow. And tonight your immediate reward—not after this event but after the next event on the Middle East, is a reception. And we will accept drivers licenses or anything else as proof of age. (Laughter.) So Susan Rice—Ambassador Susan Rice—full disclosure, we’ve known each other a long time, friends. But more important for our purposes tonight, she served, as you know, first as the U.S. perm rep, permanent representative to the United Nations in the Obama administration, and then she went on to be the national security advisor. She’s a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a former term member. So you too—you too! (Laughter, applause.) Could be sitting in that chair. And she was appointed assistant secretary of state and confirmed as assistant secretary of state for African affairs, at the age of thirty-two. Youngest assistant secretary in American history. So those of you who are thirty-three and have not yet made assistant secretary—(laughter)—I don’t know what you’ve been doing. RICE: Richard, I think I’m the youngest regional assistant secretary. I think Dina Powell was younger when she got hers. HAASS: OK. Thank you for that clarification. Who knew? Dina, actually. Dina’s on my cellphone calling me now. RICE: Dina knows, right? (Laughter.) HAASS: Complaining there. Susan has done many things, but most recently produced this. (Applause.) RICE: Thank you! HAASS: Title is Tough Love: My Story of the Things Worth Fighting For. Just came out last month, early October of this year. RICE: Yeah. HAASS: And she’s traveling around talking about the book and all sorts of related issues. This meeting is part of what we call our Distinguished Voices Series here at the Council. It’s the one part of the Term Member Conference we will do on the record. Just this week we had another Distinguished Voice meeting in Washington with Ted Koppel. So it’s been a great week for us. RICE: Selling a book too? HAASS: No. RICE: OK. (Laughter.) HAASS: No. He was just here out of the goodness of his heart. (Laughter.) RICE: Hey, that is why I’m here. Because I wanted to spend time with you guys, quite honestly. Because you’re not paying me anything. You’re not buying my books. By the way my books are for sale here. (Laughter.) But, yeah, they didn’t buy them, which is what I usually look for. But anyway. (Laughter.) HAASS: That’s why we—we’re a nonprofit institution. (Laughter.) So we’re going to have a conversation. You can see it’s going to be difficult. I’ve already lost control. And then we’re going to turn it over to you all. But let’s talk about your career, because it has been a career of public service. You didn’t go to Goldman Sachs, and you didn’t go to a law firm. And my favorite two-word question, how come? Why did you go in the direction you did? RICE: Well, I did go to McKinsey and Company for a couple of years after I finished my Ph.D. in international relations. But the backstory really is who I am and where I came from. I was born and raised in Washington, D.C. (Cheers.) Yeah. HAASS: Home of the Nationals, yeah. RICE: That too. That too. (Applause.) In a family where really public service was the family business. My father had been an economist and served at the Treasury Department, and the World Bank, and ultimately was a governor of the Federal Reserve. My mom never was in government, but she spent her whole career—the bulk of her career working on public policy, particularly access to higher education for low-income people. And her greatest achievement in my judgement was being deemed the mother of the Pell Grant program. She was instrumental in getting that program established and sustained, which has enabled eighty million Americans to go to college. HAASS: My first job in Washington was working for Senator Claiborne Pell. RICE: There you go. So Lois Rice and Claiborne Pell were in lockstep, working hand-in-hand. But I was raised in an environment where the business was government, and policy, and how to make a difference. And I came from parents who really had service in their souls and instilled that in me and my brother. And the service didn’t have to be in government. It didn’t have to be in uniform. It didn’t have to be formal. But it had to be about doing something broader than myself and contributing in some way. And so I just had a passion for it. And at one point I thought I might want to run for office. But being from Washington, D.C., the prospects of that were— HAASS: Lots of electoral votes. RICE: Yeah. Well, a lot of votes in Congress, more relevant. But I also discovered at an early age that I could serve by working in the executive branch. And I had early opportunities to do that. And one thing led to another. And you know, I’m here. HAASS: Now the book—I want to talk about the book for one second before I go to policy issues. The book is surprisingly personal. We learn about—a lot about your kids. We learn about your marriage. We learn about your folks. And I should say that I knew your mom from my time at Brookings. There’s a lot about that. We learn about your blood pressure. We learn a lot about you. Why did—what are you hoping people take away from the book? RICE: Well, I’m hoping that people will see a career and a life in service, but also a background and an upbringing that’s somewhat unusual for a person in the roles that I’ve been in. I’m the descendent of slaves from South Carolina on the one hand, and of immigrants from Jamaica who moved to Portland, Maine on the other hand. And both sides of my family prioritized education, and prioritized service, and worked to bring each subsequent generation a little bit higher. And I learned a fair bit from my experiences being part of that family and my upbringing in Washington, D.C., but also from my service that I think is relevant to anyone who wants to compete and thrive in unforgiving environments. And if they’ve been knocked down, as I have on a couple of occasions, then to know how to get back up. So I wanted to share that experience. And I also, frankly, wanted to tell my own story in my own words because for a long period of time in the second term of the Obama administration, after I’d become a nationally known figure because of my role going on the talk shows following the Benghazi terrorist attack, I’d sort of been characterized and mischaracterized on various sides of the political spectrum, at a point in my life when my job was to represent the United States and to speak for our country, and our president, and not for myself. So I in essence had to sit there with my mouth shut while people defined me for me, which is the exact opposite of how my parents raised me. And so this was my chance, in part, also to tell my own story in my own words. And that’s also why I—it’s as personal as it is, because I felt to do that faithfully and credibly it had to be. HAASS: Since you raised it, you’ve changed the order of my questions. RICE: Sorry. HAASS: No. I’m just a—you know. RICE: You’ve already admitted to losing control. HAASS: That’s true. (Laughter.) Since you raised Benghazi, let’s raise it, but not dwell on it, in the sense of other than the lesson of being careful before you agree to do all five Sunday shows— RICE: Which is a lesson. HAASS: Which is a lesson. (Laughter.) RICE: And since you know my mother you would not get surprised by the revelation that my mother told me not to do it. HAASS: Always listen to your mother. RICE: And that’s the lesson. That’s the overarching lesson of the book, is always listen to your mother. (Laughter.) HAASS: What else, though? I mean, Benghazi was brutal for you. I mean, it was a—you know, you were—it was your moment, shall we say, in the arena, and then some. So how do you come away from it? How did it change you? It obviously had impact on your career and the rest. Obviously, it had impact on your family. And you now have three—what, three, four, five years of hindsight looking back on it? So what’s your take on it now? RICE: Well, how did it change me? I think it frankly made me tougher and wiser. And it made me also— HAASS: Can I just say—does everybody—when I say Benghazi, does everybody know the story, or do we need a thirty-second recap? Want to give a thirty-second recap, because you were in the middle of it? (Laughter.) RICE: It’s actually refreshing that I have to give a thirty-second recap. OK. September 11, 2012. Our diplomatic facilities in Benghazi sustained a brutal terrorist attack. We lost four Americans including our ambassador, Chris Stevens. On the Sunday following that Tuesday, I was asked by the White House to go on all five Sunday shows to talk not only about what had happened there, but also what had happened around the Arab and Muslim world, where a number of our facilities had come under either siege or protest. And also, because this was about ten days before the opening of the U.N. General Assembly, and I was the U.N. ambassador, to deal with some of the issues that were coming up in relation to that. I went on the Sunday shows and I provided to the American people the best information that we had at that time. Talking points that I used were developed and approved by the intelligence community. And they were our best unclassified rendition of what we understood to be the case. I knew them to be accurate, because I was a consumer of all of our intelligence and had just had the latest the day before. And I went out and I shared that message. And within about ten days the intelligence community revised its assessment and indicated that despite what—the information they’d given me and members of Congress that had been shared with the public, there was some new information that changed the substance. But this was in the middle of President Obama’s reelection campaign running against Mitt Romney. It was a political hothouse. And I was robustly attacked for lying. I was accused of being, you know, literally a liar, incompetent, untrustworthy, a whole bunch of other epithets. One member of Congress who just announced his resignation this week called for my resignation, Peter King. And it was just a—you know, it was a hothouse. And the crazy thing was, it persisted beyond the election. And so my integrity was impugned and, you know, my intelligence as well. And it was painful. So how am I different? I think I’m tougher and wiser. Tougher because you either endure that or you don’t. (Laughs.) And I wasn’t prepared to be taken down by something that, frankly, wasn’t my fault. We’ve now had eight congressional committees review all aspects of Benghazi. And every one of them, including the great Trey Gowdy’s one, concluded that neither I nor anybody in the administration had deliberately misled the American people. And yet that stigma is still attached to me by some—except those of you good people who don’t know what Benghazi is. So bless you. (Laughter.) HAASS: It’s the ignorance is bliss rule of— RICE: So that—so the last point is, you know, as this continued in a sustained way, and as I was—after President Obama was reelected—being one of at least two people who were being seriously considered for the job of secretary of state, I decided in December to withdraw my name for consideration for secretary of state. Not because—actually, because the Democrats controlled the Senate—not because I thought I couldn’t get confirmed, but because I thought it would be a long and bloody battle, and that it would be costly to the president’s second-term agenda and also to my family. HAASS: And you ended up— RICE: So I ended up being national security advisor, which was a great outcome. HAASS: Which was pretty cool. RICE: Yeah. (Laughter.) HAASS: Talk about that job. You in your book and most people who have looked at it always hold Brent Scowcroft to be the gold standard, the model. Why is that? What was it about the way he ran it? And I should—full disclosure—I worked for— RICE: You worked for Brent. (Laughs.) HAASS: For four years. He was—he was the only person to be national security advisor twice. He did it for President Ford in the latter part of his presidency, and then he did it for President Bush 41 for all four years, so. RICE: So I think that, first of all, Brent—most people look at the—when they talk about the Scowcroft model, they’re talking about his second shot at it. So maybe if we all had a second shot we’d get it right. (Laughter.) Not me. HAASS: (Laughs.) So who are you supporting? RICE: Not me. That’s—(laughs)—anyway. (Laughter.) What made—what made, I think, Brent—and I’ll let you elaborate on this. I think first of all, he’s a man of enormous experience, and intellect, and integrity. And he ran a very tight, very small by today’s standards, national security council staff that played the very traditional role of coordinating, rather than implementing or even necessarily to a great extent, formulating policy. Now, the problem with that model in today’s context is that it’s completely, I think—I don’t think it can be reconstituted. So many things have changed. For one thing, we now have, you know, cable news of all different flavors twenty-four/seven. Social media, which has changed entirely—excuse me—the pace and the substance of what a policy team has to deal with you. We now have something called homeland security, and we’ve folded in the Homeland Security Council. And we have the National Economic Council, which until last week or whenever was shared with the National Security Council. And so there’s been a ballooning of the apparatus of the NSC, which actually in my tenure we tried to pare back carefully, not for any political purpose but for the purposes of efficacy. And yet, you know, what Brent had that was correct was a notion that when the NSC is optimizing it is playing primarily a coordinating function and eliciting the most out of the agencies as possible. HAASS: The only caveat I’d probably say is there was a lot of formulation, it’s just the formulation never got in the way of the coordinating. So Brent was—pushed his own views. Those of us on the staff did. But we never let the advocacy role interfere with the coordinating role. So we would go to the president and say: This is where the interagency is, this is where we come out, and why, and let the president decide. RICE: And I think, at least in the NSCs I worked in—I worked in the Clinton NSC as a staffer and then obviously in the Obama NSC as the national security advisor. I think that piece of it I feel like we did a decent job of. I think the part where we were criticized, at least in the Obama administration, was for being very hands-on in our dealings with the agencies. And frankly, as I say in the book, we were serving a hands-on president and that’s what he expected and demanded. And quite frankly, given the alternative model that’s been demonstrated of late—(laughter)—I would take that as preferable. HAASS: One of the advantages historians have over journalists is time. And they get a little bit of a—hopefully with distance comes perspective. Not always, but it can. So now it’s been three years, essentially, since you stepped out of government. What is your now reading? If you had to describe the Obama foreign policy legacy what do you think of—what do you think it is? RICE: Well, it’s—I don’t have a soundbite for it. But what I’d say is I think we effectively leveraged our alliances and partnerships to address key global concerns, and concerns that affected the United States. Whether it was working to negotiate and agree the Paris Climate Agreement, or the Iran nuclear agreement, or the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or the coalition to fight ISIS, or to sustain ours and NATO’s involvement in Afghanistan, or to fight the Ebola epidemic. We effectively brought allies and partners together to address those complex challenges and did so even as we had to confront many of them simultaneously. And I think if there’s a hallmark, it’s that we did not at any stage lose that ability to rally people to join with us on things of various kinds of consequence. HAASS: Do you think it’s fair when people look at the non-use—the non-physical response to Syrian use of chemical weapons, the non-follow-up of the intervention in Libya after Gadhafi was removed, as some would argue—and I would argue; I’m one of those some sometimes—that Obama introduced elements of retrenchment which this administration had magnified dramatically, but that he is to some extent going to be understood historically as a president who began a process of American pullback, after George W. Bush was very much going in the other direction. Some would say that George W. Bush was guilty of overreach, but Obama introduced a degree of underreach. RICE: I would put it—no, I wouldn’t subscribe to that, in your terms. But here’s what I would say: I treat in the book, Tough Love, both Libya and Syria in some depth. And I think, you know, President Obama made the decision to intervene in Libya. It was a tough call, but that’s what he decided to do. In my judgement, that was the right choice. It was a relatively economical and, in terms of human lives, low-cost way to protect civilians and address an immediate humanitarian imperative. Where I think we made—where we fell short in Libya, and I say this quite frankly, is that the United States working with NATO, working with Arab countries, working with the U.N., where I was at the time, did not have sufficient focus and sustained involvement in the follow up in trying to see if we could enable the—or support the Libyans in building a unitary country. It had never been anything but a one-man show. It didn’t have the institutions of state. And because—and this is my own opinion, as I write—because I think there was a lot of division and ambivalence within the administration about the wisdom in the first place of becoming involved in Libya, and then a year later because of Benghazi, which sort of exacerbated things, the appetite in Washington for being as engaged as I think we should have been, in retrospect in the aftermath, was lacking. And then in the second term, we came back to it with more sustained focus and attention, but I think arguably that was too late. And so my critique of what we did on Libya is that we failed to be as engaged as we could have been in the aftermath. I don’t know that that would have enabled Libya to become, you know, a functioning country, but we really won’t know because I don’t think we fully tried. Syria, I think, is different. And I fully recognize that many people think that, you know, by not using force without congressional authorization to respond to the chemical weapons attack that we somehow signaled that we were abandoning the Middle East. I think it’s much more complicated than that. And I don’t know if—can I spend a few seconds just? So there are three aspects in my judgement of the challenge we faced in Syria. One was the chemical weapons. Two was the question of to what extent should the United States get involved directly militarily in the Syrian civil conflict on the side of the opposition with the aim of toppling Assad? And three was the fight against ISIS. So President Obama decided clearly and quickly that once ISIS emerged that we had to take that fight to them, but did it by, with, and through partners, in the terminology of the Defense Department. So that was the Kurds, and the Arabs in Syria, and the Iraqi Army as it was reconstituted in Iraq. On the chemical weapons thing, though, which is the one that I think gets the most attention, as you know, he had—President Obama had decided to strike, and then decided to pull back and seek congressional authorization prior to that. And he did that because he anticipated that this military involvement could well extend beyond a handful of strikes, that it could become a more extended thing. And he felt that after Iraq, and Libya, and Afghanistan, that he would be wise to have the backing of Congress, and through Congress the American people. As I write in the book, I was the only one of President Obama’s senior foreign policies advisors or members of the principals committee that argued at the time that we should go ahead and strike without congressional authorization. And I did that not because I disagreed with his logic, but because I really believed we weren’t going to get congressional authorization. And I ironically, maybe my cynicism was born of my experience less than a year earlier following Benghazi. But I figured that the Republicans weren’t going to give him anything he wanted, even if they agreed that it was right. And the Democrats on this would not be supportive because they didn’t want to have to take a vote in favor of another conflict in the Middle East. I also write in the book that I think I was right on the politics but wrong on the policy, in the sense that, you know, we didn’t get the authorization but in failing to get the authorization we ended up negotiating with the Russians, with the U.N., with others to achieve the removal and destruction of 1,300 metric tons of chemical weapons. Now, we thought at the time that that was the entirety, or almost the entirety. And then we saw in the—clearly in the early stages of the Trump administration that it wasn’t. And so President Trump took President Obama’s strike list off the shelf and employed it in a night of strikes, which I supported in 2017. And then he did it again in 2018. And nothing happened—i.e., there was no diplomatic follow up, nothing on the ground changed. I and others probably felt good for a few hours. But whatever chemical weapons were there are still there and probably more. So the reason I think I was wrong on the policy is I’d rather than 1,300 metric tons out and destroyed than zero. But neither is a satisfactory outcome. HAASS: We will not debate on just soliciting and eliciting— RICE: But if that leads to—if the conclusion from that is retrenchment, then I think you got to look at the entirety of it. We had more—we left the region with more forces in places than when we went there. We engaged in the Iran deal, which I don’t think I would call retrenchment. We—you know, we remained in Afghanistan. I mean, you can—we put more forces back in Iraq when we had to because of ISIS. But what President Obama’s view was, was the Middle East, is you know, a place where you can put infinite quantities of resources and not necessarily get altogether clear-cut outcomes. And he did effect the rebalance to Asia, which I think was a net positive. And I think in some quarters that was viewed as also a retreat from the Middle East. So debate me. Come on, man. (Laughter.) HAASS: OK. Happy to. I think it’s seen as retrenchment because one was Libya, you talked about. I think Syria, we should have used military force. And indeed, I wouldn’t have been satisfied with a couple of cruise missile strikes. I would have said: Take out the Syrian Air Force. That was our moment. The Russians weren’t in yet. And I thought it would have underscored the importance that people can’t use chemical weapons with impunity. I think you all ran into trouble when you said Assad must go, and the gap between your rhetoric— RICE: I agree with that. HAASS: —and then your lack of follow up created a gap. Afghanistan you built up, but the whole idea was to get out after eighteen months. So it signaled that we weren’t going to stay, even though that was changed. Iraq we talked about— RICE: But although that was changed. So we stayed in Afghanistan because conditions necessitated it. HAASS: But the original decision that was announced was the eighteen month. RICE: Yeah. HAASS: I’m just saying—I didn’t say a withdrawal. I said a retrenchment. I think it was retrenchment. (Laughter.) And I think it did signal—look, I think what this administration did with the Kurds, I think what the previous administration did with the chemicals, I think both signaled a certain lack of American dependability. RICE: But didn’t President Bush negotiate an arrangement where we would withdraw from Iraq by the end of 2011? HAASS: He did. He did. And— RICE: And was that retrenchment? HAASS: If you ask me, yes. RICE: OK. I—you know, if not committing to stay indefinitely in these Middle East conflicts is retrenchment, then I’ll grant you that. (Laughter.) HAASS: Yeah, well, then there’s ways—but there’s ways of staying at a cost that I would argue, you know, is warranted. And that’s part of the dialing of foreign policy. And it’s part of the problem with the language of forever conflicts. You know, we stay forever in Europe. We’ve stayed forever in Korea, at least up to now. And the question is, how do we design presences and activities—you know this—at a cost level that’s commensurate with the interests? And like everything else in life, it’s compared to what? That’s all. (Laughter.) RICE: We should have set this up like this. HAASS: No, but this is your book. I get enough time to hawk my books here. I have the home-team advantage when it comes to books. Was that your biggest disagreement with the Obama administration? The reason I’m—in terms of Syria? I’m curious. I think it will be useful for people here. You’re in an administration. You’re in an organization. If you disagree, how do you handle it? How do you decide when you disagree with the boss, when you disagree with the consensus? I thought it would be useful for people to hear from you about how you play that hand. RICE: Well, in my view, you shouldn’t be serving if you’re not willing to give your honest and best advice. And you probably shouldn’t be serving whomever you’re serving if he or she doesn’t want your honest and best advice. And fortunately, I’ve been privileged to serve secretaries of state in the younger part of my career and presidents who I think genuinely wanted and expected the best unvarnished advice from their advisors. At the end of the day they’d take their own counsel, make their own decision, and in my experience own their decisions. But I think—you know, when one finds themselves in a situation where the overt or subliminal message is you should dare not disagree, one, you’re not contributing and, two, you’re in a bad situation. And the outcomes are going to be of a lower quality, I fear. HAASS: Do you have in your mind a sense—there’s disagreements and there’s disagreements about what the criteria would be that a disagreement reached a scale that you would have to resign? RICE: Well, I think you know it when you see it. In my case, the Syria chemical weapons thing was not such a point for me, where I felt that I had to dissent. And dissent to the extent that I departed. And the reason for that is because I was essentially making a political judgment rather than a policy judgment. In that case I didn’t view myself as the political expert in the White House. There was one case that I do write about in the book which is, you know, nobody would imagine, where I actually was prepared to resign. Did you get to this part about—(laughter)— HAASS: Now, that is a—(laughs)—that’s a truly trick question. The answer is yes. RICE: (Laughs.) HAASS: (Laughs.) But I don’t want to— RICE: So— HAASS: This is a spoiler alert. I don’t want to—(laughter)—I don’t want to ruin it for the rest of you. RICE: I’ll let you and everybody else off the hook. So this was in 2014, when we were wrestling with the Ebola epidemic. And as you may recall, it was—you know, it was a terrifying time when the disease was raging through West Africa. It had begun to spread through travel to the United States, to the United Kingdom, to a few other places. Lawmakers here were freaking out and demanding the closure of the border. You know, governors were preventing people with dark skin who came from the African continent from coming through, you know, Newark Airport or what have you. And the pressure on President Obama to limit the prospect of Ebola getting to our shores was enormous. And one of the proposals on the table was to—I’m going to oversimplify, but basically to restrict the ability of anybody who had traveled to the three affected countries to come to the United States. And not only would that have made it impossible for American health workers or American military personnel who we’d sent to support the logistics of the response effort to come back to the United States, but what it would have meant was that all legitimate travel from that region would have been cut off, which would have been the economic death knell for the countries of West Africa, plus it would have grossly stigmatized West Africans here in the United States, who are an important and vital community, not least in our health-care sector. So when this issue came up, I argued very strenuously that we could not do this, that we had to find a better way to screen people coming in so that we didn’t prevent them—everybody from coming. And there was a point where I wasn’t sure how the president was going to decide. And I knew, and I said to myself at that moment, if he were to make the wrong decision, this would be a point where I would have to part company. He did not make the wrong decision. As usual, he applied reason and science and resisted the political pressure. But it was for me a brief white-knuckle moment. HAASS: One last question, then I’ll open it up, which has also to do with Africa, but it’s a different question. You were the assistant secretary years before. When you look at the demographic projections, an enormous share, percentage, of the demographic increases in the world over the next couple of decades are going to happen in Africa. And the question is, what is—given that, plus climate change, plus poor governance in some places, what’s the optimistic case? Because when you look at Africa, what is it—how is it you avoid getting extremely worried? Or is it more conditional? Here’s what we have to do so the bad case doesn’t happen. What’s your take on it? RICE: Well, I don’t think, just because it’s growing fast in terms of population, that, you know, it is necessarily likely to be a bad-case scenario. First of all, the optimistic case is it is a continent with enormous human capital and talent and a continent with enormous resources and capacity for growth. It's also—many of these countries are among the fastest-growing in the world. HAASS: Yeah, sure. RICE: And, you know, what Africa, in my judgment, needs most at the moment is younger and more effective and committed leadership. That’s the biggest change or challenge that we face. And, you know, Africa is, as you know— HAASS: It’s hard to generalize. RICE: —fifty-four countries, right? So you can’t paint it with a single brush. And I think there’s a lot of, in the long term, in my opinion, reason for optimism. But, you know, we do have forces working the other direction. We still have conflict. We have environmental pressures, including climate change. But I also think there’s a great capacity for sustained growth and for growth that’s—you know, from which the benefits are broadly shared. So I’m not a pessimist in the long term at all. But I do think we’ve seen periods where the leadership deficit has been greater than others, and this is one of them. HAASS: Let’s open it up then. Again, you know the rules. Raise your hand. Let us know who you are and where you’re hopefully employed. And if you say you’re a consultant, we’ll know the truth. (Laughter.) Keep it short. And Ambassador Rice, as you can tell, is succinct and to the point. Yes, sir. Q: Hello. My name is— HAASS: Oh. (Laughs.) We’ll get you next. Q: OK. My name is Paul. I’m an officer in the United States Army. It’s a pleasure to be here tonight. And thank you very much for your thoughts. I’d like to pick up this thread on retrenchment or overreach. And really what seems to be at stake right now is when we would use military force and for what purpose. On the one hand, you talk in your book about norms, the responsibility to protect. On the other hand, maybe we’ve seen this administration, the use of force for strictly state interest. So in your experiences, when should we or ought we use military force, and for what purpose? RICE: Yeah, that’s like the textbook question to which I’ve discovered, over the course of my career, there is not a cookie-cutter answer. Obviously, when our direct interests and security are implicated and we need to, you know, act to defend ourselves or our people or our allies, that’s an obvious one. You know, and that can take, you know, the form of a state threat or a nonstate threat. But the harder question, as I’ve seen in different forms throughout my career, comes in the form of what do you do in a humanitarian crisis? In what context should the United States, and/or the United States in partnership with others, intervene for a primarily humanitarian purpose? And now we know that humanitarian purposes can range from combating disease to, you know, intervening to try to topple a dictator or, you know, proximate threats to civilians. And I think the answer in that case is each circumstance is different. And there isn’t, in my view, an easy doctrinal answer to that. And I actually don’t write about the responsibility to protect in those terms because, as much as it—(inaudible)—bit more complex. And even though I’d like to be able to think that we have the capacity to act in a manner consistent with our values and principles and save human lives where we can, my conclusion is sometimes we can, at an acceptable risk and cost, and sometimes we can’t. And we have to look at each in its context on the merits and in the broader scheme of what else we are engaged in, because our capacity is not infinite. And not every situation, in my judgment, lends itself to what, in moral and humanitarian terms, we might feel compelled to do. HAASS: You didn’t write about it in this book. Have you written about either Rwanda or Somalia, talking about— RICE: I did write about it in this book. HAASS: You did? (Laughter.) RICE: Sorry. You busted yourself that time. (Laughter.) I write at length about Rwanda and Somalia as a—(laughter)—as kind of fundamentally informing my— HAASS: OK. (Laughter.) RICE: —development as a policymaker. HAASS: OK. RICE: (Laughs.) HAASS: Yes. I did bust myself. Q: Hi. I’m Omeed Malik. I’m not a consultant. I run a small firm called Farvahar Partners. Ambassador, thank you for your time. I’m just curious. Do you have any sympathy at all for the current administration’s policies towards China? RICE: You had to use the word “sympathy.” (Laughter.) HAASS: Agreement. RICE: There was a—let me—I think that we face a significant and urgent challenge from China, particularly in the economic realm and with respect to technology, and that, while past efforts in the Obama and Bush and prior administrations to deal with them have yielded some results, they have not tackled the fundamental problem, which is, you know, that China is poised, through its capacity and its policies, to be a major economic threat. The question is, how do you deal with it? And so I agree that we have a challenge. I think we’re dealing with it almost altogether wrong. To me, for the United States to be maximally effective in pressing our economic agenda with China, we ought to be doing it in lockstep with our allies and partners—the Europeans, others in Asia, Canada. HAASS: Would that mean being in TPP? RICE: Absolutely. And instead we have isolated ourselves, not only by withdrawing from TPP, but by starting trade conflicts with our close allies, like Canada on steel and aluminum, and Europe in much the same vein, so that, rather than bringing these countries to join us in a concerted effort to compel China to change the rules in a direction that we think is fair and levels the playing field, we’re fighting this basically with one hand tied behind our backs. And we’ve, I think, way overemphasized tariffs as a tool to our own detriment, as well the detriment of the global economy. And I’m very much concerned that political pressure is going to mount on the president, now that we’ve gone down this road in a fashion that I wouldn’t have recommended, but we’re way down it, to cut a deal that, you know, may boost exports of agricultural products and maybe some manufactured goods, but doesn’t get to the fundamental concerns that we have about China’s, you know, structural threats. And then, on the security side, I don’t think we have approached that appropriately either. You know, there used to be a time when we had a security track and an economic track, and we worked pretty hard to keep those parallel rather than intersecting. And now, you know, for example, we offered to trade off concerns about Huawei, which are essentially security concerns, for some benefit on the economic side. You know, we talked about, you know, an approach to North Korea that might be dictated by our economic interests. To me that’s completely backwards and has left us, you know, without, you know, coordination in an effective way with China on these critical security issues like North Korea. We’ve jettisoned the cooperation agenda altogether, where we were actually getting important things done on climate, on nonproliferation, on nuclear security, you name it—development—and we have, you know, seemingly underemphasized other aspects of our security concerns in the cyber realm, in South China Sea, et cetera, et cetera. HAASS: Let me give you a backwards-looking question about China. The argument is that we were right to bring China into the WTO when we did near, what, seventeen, eighteen years ago, plus or minus—but that along the way, both forty-three’s administration as well as the Obama administration didn’t monitor it closely enough and we didn’t adjust the terms. So now the whole idea of integration of China is somewhat discredited, but the problem was not with integrating China but with how we went about it, that we weren’t tough enough as China began to grow and evolve. RICE: I think there’s an argument for that. I don’t think we were wrong to try to integrate them. And I also don’t think, by the way, that, you know, there’s going to be—that we can effect a clean, great decoupling either. I think that, you know, that’s smoking dope. (Laughter.) HAASS: Which is—I don’t even know if it’s legal or not in this state. (Laughter.) But yes, ma’am. Microphone’s coming toward you. Q: Hi. Casey Deering. I’m with the Department of Energy. Thanks for the conversation tonight. I wondered if you had any thoughts in particular with the current rhetoric that’s been going on about how we can improve public trust or enhance public trust in civil servants, especially those of us who work in national security and in the foreign-policy arenas, with a lot of the rhetoric around deep states and conspiracy theories. RICE: I’m really appreciative of that question. The first thing we can do is to stop denigrating them. And, I mean, I—this—there’s no issue of the moment about which I’m more angry than the demonization of our civil servants, Foreign Service officers, career military. I mean, it’s literally everybody in law enforcement, in the intelligence community, the national-security community, State Department, that have been painted with a single brush because they are patriots, because they are professionals, because they actually take seriously their oath to the Constitution. HAASS: But they have acquitted—I mean, the Bill Taylors of the world, they’ve acquitted themselves sensationally well. RICE: Extremely well. And the answer—the other side of the answer to your question is, on the one hand, we need our leadership to stop degrading and denigrating people, and frankly, aided and abetted by half the Congress. And we need these patriots who have come forward to get the visibility that they didn’t ask for but now deserve to show the American people just the quality and the integrity of the people who are working for very little money every day out of commitment to country to serve. So I think, in a(n) ironic and backhanded way, we’re going to have a moment where these extraordinary civil servants, and Foreign Service officers, and military officers are going to have an opportunity to show the country and the world the extraordinary quality of the people who do the jobs like yours every day. HAASS: Someone from this side of the room— yes, sir. Q: My name is Olivier Kamanda and I work at Facebook. About a year or so ago on a different social media channel, a former Obama communications director submitted a tweet, said—excuse me—who wants to run for Senate in Maine? There will be an army of supporters with you. Eleven minutes later you wrote: Me. So the question is, when? (Laughter.) RICE: And the short answer is, not now. (Laughter.) So do you we have—can I just tell this funny story behind this? (Laughter.) It will take a couple minutes. So this whole thing was—I’m walking in the Phoenix Airport, I’m getting on a plane. And as I’m walking through the terminal to get to my gate, there’s Susan Collins on the television screen giving her speech about how—you know, after an hour—she’s going to support Kavanaugh. And I get to my gate, and I’m actually on the phone with my husband asking—because I wasn’t able to stop and listen to what was going on—what did she say? And he said, she’s going to vote for him. And I said, damn it; I’m going to run against her in Maine. And my husband says, no, you’re not; hell, no. (Laughter.) And I just laughed and said—because I wasn’t being really serious. So then I’m standing in line—this is one of those Southwest flights where you line up, and I’m number one in the whole aircraft—never before or since—(laughter). And I’m on my phone, and I’m reading Twitter trying to, you know, see what’s going on and reaction to Collins, and I see this tweet from my friend and colleague, Jen Psaki. And something happened as I’m reading it, and I just—(laughter)—hit the M button and then the E button—(laughter)—and SEND. And then I—you know, I wasn’t really—I was not very serious. I get on the plane and my phone starts blowing up—(laughter). First it’s my husband saying—(laughter)— HAASS: The record will show you said nothing to us. (Laughter.) RICE: (Laughs.) And then—and then it’s my press aide calling me saying my phone—her phone is blowing up, what the hell is going on? And I realize I’m about to get on a cross-country flight. If I don’t say something between now and when I get off this plane, it’s going to be crazy. So then I write a follow-up tweet saying, you know, well, I was really disappointed in Collins, and I’m going to think very seriously about it, and—you know, Brett Kavanaugh is a bummer, and you know, boom. (Laughter.) And then I get on the plane. And so when I land there’s still some hullaballoo that I’ve created, but it was at a level reduced from had I not sent the second tweet. And then I actually really thought about it because I figured I’d, you know, opened my big mouth; I’d better give that some real consideration. And we haven’t talked about my background, but Maine is a place where I have deep ties going back over a hundred years. We have a home there that, you know, we have had for a long time. It’s where my mother’s family is from. And it’s not a thought that I hadn’t considered previously. It just came out spontaneously. But the bottom line is we have a daughter who is a junior in high school who devoted eight years of her life to a mother who was working pretty hard: in New York when I was at the U.N. when my family stayed in Washington, and then when I came back to Washington to be under the same roof, working pretty crazy hours. And this was not the time for me to again uproot her or absent myself to move to Maine to run for office. So the answer is not now. I don’t know if it will—if it will ever be yes. I don’t know if it will be Maine. I don’t know if it will be the Senate or if it will just be that I get to continue to maintain my freedom and tweet at will. (Laughter.) HAASS: Thank you for that definitive answer. (Laughter.) Yes, Ma’am—all the way in the back, over here. Q: Hello, Ambassador Rice. I’m Latoya Peterson, co-founder of Glow Up Games. One of the questions I had for you is building on the earlier question about China, which is about the perception of soft power and how America is being perceived in the world. In the world that I come from, in gaming, there was recently a point where an e-sports player was penalized for speaking out in favor of the democratic protests in Hong Kong. And one of the things that was so chilling and that a lot of the media picked on was that this was a comment made in America, but they were being punished so severely because of the economic investment that China has in the gaming industry. So it’s interesting to me to see how an ideal like democracy wouldn’t be defended on our own soil, and so what have you seen in the changes, I think globally, around the perception of American ideals like democracy? HAASS: First of all, before you answer, you’ll also get a chance to ask a version of that question because Adam Silver is going to be here in the not-too-distant future and will be talking about how the NBA handled the Houston Rockets. And again, the issue—and we’ll actually—also we’re planning an event at some point about American films and the question of how—their freedom for content; if you want to market in China, what sort of compromise—so I think this is a—this is a big and growing issue. I didn’t mean to— RICE: No, no, it’s good to plug Adam Silver. You know, I think this is going to be a bigger and bigger challenge, particularly for American companies, but also for American policy. And my own view is that, you know, companies need to be aware of the world in which they are playing; that, you know, China is becoming more and more aggressive and assertive in this whole realm in trying to shut down anything that they don’t like with respect to speech and democratization, human rights. They are being extremely extraterritorial about it. And they are going to punish people. And my view is that, you know, the companies that are going to succeed—if they are American-based companies or originally American companies—are the ones that aren’t going to take that crap, that aren’t going to be intimidated. Now there are going to be some that feel that they have to compromise, and I think that was interestingly the challenge that the NBA wrestled with, and went back and forth, and finally landed on, you know, the right place. But— HAASS: At some potential financial cost to the NBA. RICE: Yeah, and they’ve eaten it. Now if they were to go, you know, try to tack back in the other direction, they’d risk, frankly, alienating their American customers. HAASS: And their players. RICE: So I think they figured it out. But, you know, I think before you end up in the kind of challenge that the NBA had, you know, you need to be mindful—big companies and small companies—about how this is going to play out. And, you know, for some of our tech companies that are, you know, prepared to make arrangements or cut deals with China that enable them to have some access on terms that, you know, they would never get away with back here, and then, you know, have hesitations about partnering with the U.S. government on certain things, I think there is a certain irony there that I think needs some careful consideration. You know, there are—we are increasingly facing a world where China is compelling companies to embrace a national identity at a time when, you know, we’d been moving away from that. And as far as I’m concerned, you know, the American companies need to know who they are, so— HAASS: Since you mentioned China, a real—imagine you were still in your old job. You had the events of the last few days, weeks, and months in Hong Kong. What would you be doing now to try to influence the trajectory of events? You know, I was at the White House during Tiananmen—during that time and how we tried to balance it then, tried to preserve a relationship, at the same time stand for human rights. How do you—how would you handle this? RICE: I mean, that’s what I’d be trying to do right now, but with the emphasis on standing for human rights. And we’re not. We’re silent or we’re worse. We’ve basically said—if the reporting is to be believed—to Xi Jinping that we’re going to keep quiet on Hong Kong and largely, from the White House, at least, we have. I think that’s a grave mistake and, you know, in many ways we’re paying the price because of—a perception that the Chinese are stoking is that we’re behind all this, which of course we’re not. But we’re not actually speaking out and standing up in a way that, under almost any prior administration, I think we would have in defense of free, fundamental values and principles that are really not ambiguous at this point. HAASS: I think I know the answer to this question, but if you were still in your old job, would Mr. Erdogan have had the experience he had yesterday? RICE: No. How about you? HAASS: No. (Laughter.) See? We can agree. Yes, Ma’am, on the front row. RICE: More often than not, I would think. HAASS: Yeah, probably more often—we’re going to over, I’m going to warn—we have our—I think the schedule is we’ve got this meeting, and then we’ve got a half-hour break, and then we’ve got the Middle East meeting. Do you have a few minutes? Can we— RICE: I got about five or ten minutes. HAASS: OK, we’re going to go to 6:05. We’re going to take five minutes of your social time because having Susan Rice here is too good of an opportunity to miss. Q: Thank you, and what a great opportunity. Thank you, Ambassador. You’ve talked—you oversaw— HAASS: Please introduce yourself. Q: My name is Vanessa Fajans-Turner. I work with the Earth Institute at Columbia. You oversaw a great period of action on climate change as a national security threat, oversaw a report that identified it as such, and increasingly we’re seeing opportunities and moments when international intervention in the right to protect could feasibly apply to things like fires in the Amazon, et cetera. Was there ever a moment during your time when there was some sort of conversation about potential intervention, or engagement, or going against national interests because of climate or environmental issues? RICE: Not that I can think of in those narrow terms, but I think, you know, as we wrote in that report—and it was sort of a theme during the Obama administration—we saw climate change as a national security threat, in part because it was a force multiplier for all these other threats: for droughts, for floods, for famine, for conflict, and displacement. And so, you know, we did find ourselves looking at questions of intervention for those effects—second-order effects of climate change, you know. When you—you know, when you intervene following a massive cyclone in the Philippines, for example—which we did—or in the Clinton administration in Mozambique to deal with the consequences of flooding—but no, not something as narrowly defined as you put it, but I could see it becoming a real question in the future. HAASS: Actually, I ended up writing a piece arguing that Brazil had an obligation because the Amazon was of significance not just to Brazil— RICE: Of course. HAASS: —but to the entire world, so— RICE: But try telling Bolsonaro that. HAASS: I did. I got a protest in this job from the Brazilian government. RICE: Did you really? HAASS: Yeah. (Laughter.) It’s one of the few protests I’ve gotten in my private capacity. Yes, sir. RICE: Well, that’s interesting, though, that they—they come—Brazil is coming to you—not China—Brazil is coming to you to protest a public statement you make as a(n) independent commentator. HAASS: Yes, Ma’am. (Laughter.) RICE: I don’t think that would have happened years ago. Go ahead. Q: Hi. Jay Hallen from Capitol One. Thank you for being here. I wanted to ask you about, in 2016, if you could walk us through when and how you learned about Russian interference in the election, and the discussions and options that you and President Obama discussed. RICE: Yeah. I walk you through that in depth in the book—(laughter)— HAASS: Yeah, it was really one of the best parts, so—(laughter)— RICE: Well done. So I really—I do spend time on that, and I’d commend it to you because it’s not something I can give you a two-second answer on. We learned about it in the starkest terms, as I write, in early August of 2016 when what we learned was that what we were seeing had been directed from the highest levels of the Russian government. And then I talk through all of the considerations we had in trying to prepare to retaliate, harden our systems, provide adequate information to the American public, et cetera, et cetera. And I also talk about, you know, where I think we got it right and where I think we missed a few things. So I’d encourage you to read it. HAASS: Based on the latter where we think—you think we missed a few things, what would you now be signaling the Russians or anybody else? Here we are, we’re literally fifty, fifty-one weeks away from our next election. What would you be signaling now? Is there—obviously we take all sorts of steps to protect ourselves, make ourselves less vulnerable. We can never be invulnerable. What do we do—what tools do we have for deterrence? RICE: Well, I think we—and I write about this—we obviously still do have economic— HAASS: Sanctions. RICE: —tools for deterrence which we employed, at the end of the Obama administration—and I argue that in retrospect I wish we had employed even tougher economic penalties. We weighed the question of whether to impose sweeping sectoral sanctions on Russia, going after the energy sector, other sectors. And we held back from that for a couple of reasons, even as we did impose some significant sanctions. One was because they would have had a(n) immediate adverse effect on our European partners, almost commensurate with the negative impact it would have had on the Russians. And at the time we were trying to maintain European unity around the Ukrainian-based sanctions, which were not by any means a guaranteed outcome. The Europeans were—some in Europe were getting nervous about maintaining sanctions on Ukraine. And the other concern we had, as I wrote, is that we had an incoming administration that was arguably already signaling to the Russians that they were going to take care of the sanctions, so to speak—undo them or roll them back. And that also played into our thinking. But I think that is a tool that we have underutilized still to this day with Congress and the administration not employing the economic tools that are at our disposal, so I think we could make them feel more pain, but the other thing we can do is more on our side. As I write in the last chapter of the book, I truly believe that our domestic political divisions are at the moment our greatest national security vulnerability, and for many reasons, but the most obvious being that our adversaries, including Russia, are doing their utmost to increase and exacerbate those divisions, and can discredit democracy, weaken us as a global rival and player without ever firing a bullet if indeed they take their efforts to the ultimate extreme, which is what they are trying to do every day on social media by playing in the most raw of our political fault lines, whether it’s on race, or immigration, or guns, or what have you. And so I think there’s more to this than I can say in the time we have, but there is a great deal we need to do, all of which can’t be accomplished before next election cycle, but to be far more witting of what is being done to us, and how we make it feasible for adversaries to do that and to take the kinds of steps that are in our capacity to take to begin to address and to heal those divisions. HAASS: I want to thank Susan for three things: one is for being with us tonight and getting us off to such a start—the Term Member Conference—a former term member, who better? Secondly, for her many years of public service. It is a—it’s the best thing you can ever do, but it’s also the most demanding thing in many ways that you can ever do. RICE: It is the best thing. I would highly, highly recommend it. HAASS: Highly recommend it. Find a way to do it. You will benefit from it as will your country. And then thirdly, I recommend that all of us read the book. (Laughs.) (Applause.) RICE: One point of seriousness on that. I do hope you will read it, and not least because many of you are at stages in your careers where I was during a large portion of this book. You know, I made the transition—I was young as an assistant secretary, I was young as an NSC staffer—I started at twenty-eight on the NSC—and then at thirty-two I was an assistant secretary. And then at thirty-six I had exhausted my runway in the area of expertise that I had worked in which was Africa, so then what do you do? And, you know, the insights I try to share as to how I managed that challenge may be relevant to a number of you. HAASS: The book I should say is on sale. The premium is not excessive—(laughs)—but again, thank you for doing this. RICE: Thank you, guys. HAASS: Good luck with it, and— RICE: Thank you. HAASS: —you’ve got a short break, and then you come back at 6:30 for a truly depressing session on the Middle East. (Laughter, applause.) (END)