Social Issues

Renee Hobbs, professor of communication studies and founder and director of the Media Education Lab at the University of Rhode Island, leads the conversation on media literacy and propaganda. FASKIANOS: Thank you, and welcome to today’s session of the Winter/Spring 2023 CFR Academic Webinar series. I am Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach here at CFR.   Today’s discussion is on the record, and the video and transcript will be available on our website, CFR.org/academic. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.   We are delighted to have Renee Hobbs with us to talk about media literacy and propaganda. Professor Hobbs is founder and director of the Media Education Lab and professor of communication studies at the University of Rhode Island. Through community and global service as a researcher, teacher, advocate, and media professional she has worked to advance the quality of digital and media literacy education in the United States and around the world. She is a founding coeditor of the Journal of Media Literacy Education, an open-access peer-reviewed journal that advances scholarship in the field. She’s authored twelve books on media literacy, published over a hundred-fifty articles in scholarly and professional journals, and she was awarded in 2018 the Research Excellence Award from the University of Rhode Island.   So, Renee, I can think of no one better to talk to us about this topic, very important topic, that you’ve been researching and advocating on for over thirty years. So, let’s start by defining media literacy and propaganda and why it is so critical for all of us to deepen our understanding of these topics.   HOBBS: So happy to be here, Irina. Thank you so much for the opportunity and the invitation to a dialogue.   I’ll take about—I’ll take about ten minutes and talk about media literacy defining and propaganda defining, and then we can have a robust and vigorous exchange of ideas. I’m looking forward to questions and comments from everyone who’s joining us today.   Why don’t we start with the phrase media literacy because media literacy is best described as an expanded conceptualization of literacy. So just as we think about literacy as reading and writing, speaking and listening, media literacy includes critical analysis of media and media production.   So to be an effective citizen in an information age, reading and writing and speaking and listening is no longer enough. One has to be skillful at critically analyzing all the different forms and formats and genres that messages now come to us in, and one has to be effective in communicating using media, using digital platforms.   So media literacy is literacy for the twenty-first century. Now, media literacy is sometimes taught in schools and often taught in the home but maybe not taught enough. The best evidence we have in the United States is that about one in three American students gets some exposure to media literacy in their elementary or secondary years, and because of deep investment in media literacy by the European Union, the European Commission, and quite a lot of research work happening in the twenty-eight member states, there is a robust and global community of media literacy educators and they come from very different backgrounds and fields.   They come from psychology, they come from sociology, they come from journalism, they come from education, they come from the humanities, even the fields of art and design. So to be media literate actually includes, if you think about it, a lot of different competencies, not just the ability to fact check, and media literacy isn’t just about news and information because we use media for all kinds of purposes, right, as media inform, entertain, and persuade us. And so media literacy considers media in all its complex functions as part of daily life.   OK. So how about the term “propaganda”?   Irina, this is a much harder word to define and, actually, some people have quibbled with me about my definition of propaganda. But my definition of propaganda is rooted in a deep understanding of the way the term has been used over, well, 400 years now.   In its original formulation propaganda was spreading the Gospel, the good news, as the Catholic Church tried to spread its messages about faith to people around the world. In the twentieth century the term began to be understood as a way to unify people. Propaganda was a way to build consensus for decision making, especially in democratic societies.   And then, of course, during the middle of the twentieth century it took a darker turn as we recognized how Nazi propaganda was used to lead to genocide, right, to destroy—to attempt to destroy and to create mass murder. So the word propaganda is kind of loaded with that twentieth century history.   But, yet, when we lived through the pandemic—here you are. You lived through it, didn’t you? (Laughs.) You lived through the pandemic because you got exposed to what I would call beneficial propaganda—propaganda that told you to wear a mask, propaganda that told you to get vaccinated, propaganda that said use social distancing.   So to understand propaganda and all its complexities we could say propaganda is communication designed to influence behavior, attitudes, and values, and propaganda is a form of mass communication, right.   So it isn’t persuasion that just happens, you know, you and me deciding, you know, should we go for pizza or Chinese for dinner tonight, right. I’ll try to persuade you. You try to persuade me. When we do it to large numbers of people and we use mediated symbols we’re engaging in propaganda.   So propaganda is a really important concept. Its meaning is situational and contextual, which is why when I work with students I often talk about how our understanding of propaganda is inflected by our cultural histories.   So, for instance, when I’m working with educators in Croatia, having had a long history of influence in the Soviet and, you know, in the communist era, their understanding of propaganda is inflected by the exposure to state-disseminated messages. And so the meaning of propaganda in your country and your cultural context might differ.   In Brazil, Irina, the word propaganda just means advertising, right, and advertising is a type of propaganda. Diplomacy can be a form of propaganda. The actions of government, politicians, can be a form of propaganda, but so can entertainment function as propaganda and so can education.   So propaganda is a really rich concept. Why is it important? Why is it important that we use media literacy skills like asking critical questions about media with propaganda?   Well, because propaganda tries to influence us by bypassing our critical thinking and the best way that propaganda has tried to change our behavior and influence our attitudes is by activating strong emotions, simplifying information, appealing to our deepest hopes, fears, and dreams, and attacking opponents, and these four mechanisms of propaganda can be used responsibly or irresponsibly.   So we are vulnerable to the terrible side of propaganda if we aren’t vigilant.   FASKIANOS: Fascinating. So in terms of the literacy how are you teaching this? Are you teaching students how to discern between the propaganda that is the good propaganda and, I mean, what—how do you make that distinction?   HOBBS: Got it. So students—propaganda—there’s a bunch of big ideas about propaganda that are really useful to understand. One is propaganda is in the eye of the beholder. So I don’t try—I don’t tell students what’s propaganda and what’s information, right. I encourage students to engage in a process of asking critical questions to come to their own conclusions about that.  And just want to show you one tool I use, Irina, in my teaching, I call it the media literacy smart phone. I’m going to show it to you a little bit so you can see it. The smart phone has some buttons on it that invite you to ask these questions like this one. Reality check—what is accurate or inaccurate about this message? That’s a good question to ask when you’re trying to determine whether something is harmful or beneficial propaganda.   Or how about this one? Public gain or private good—who’s making money from this message? Answer that question and you can often gain insight on the difference between harmful propaganda and beneficial propaganda.   Or how about this one? What’s left out? You know, the best way to spot propaganda is to notice what’s missing, right, because all media messages have a point of view, right. All media messages are selective and incomplete. So to identify the point of view of a media message notice what’s missing, what’s not being said, what’s left out.  There’s the values check button, the read between the lines button, the stereotype alert button. Propaganda often uses stereotypes to create in groups and out groups. If you’re in the in group propaganda feels really good—(laughter)—and if you’re in the out group you are being painted as an enemy, a villain, a dangerous person. Solution’s too easy. And record—save for later, you know, with the world we live in where we’re constantly swiping, clicking, we’re devoting only a few seconds to media messages because we’re moving so fast through so many of them.   This button reminds us that we actually have to make choices about what to pay attention to, what to allocate our attention to, and that means we sometimes have to slow down, right. So learning to allocate your attention and decide which messages deserve your attention and which messages don’t, these are all media literacy competencies.   So we aren’t telling people what to think, right. We aren’t—we aren’t naming that’s misinformation, that’s malinformation. We don’t do any of that. What we do is invite people to ask critical questions like who’s the author and what’s the purpose? What techniques are used to attract and hold your attention? How might different people interpret this message differently? What’s omitted? What are the values presented?  We want people to think for themselves because media literacy is a literacy practice and when people have these habits of mind built in, when they use them automatically when they’re reading the news, when they’re being persuaded, when they’re being entertained, then this goes back to the Enlightenment, Irina. We trust that people can differentiate between quality and junk, right, when they put the cognitive effort, when they’re effortful and strategic. And this kind of work can’t be done by yourself. It has to be done with others.   I mean, think about that question, how might different people interpret the message differently. This is why discussion and dialogue are so critically important to analyzing propaganda and to developing media literacy competencies.   FASKIANOS: Great. Fascinating.   Let’s go to questions to the group. We already have a few in the chat. You can also raise your hand and I will go back and forth between. If you do write your question in the chat or the Q&A box, please tell us who you are.   So I’m going to go to the first question from Andrew Jones, who’s an assistant professor of communications at Davis & Elkins College in Virginia. Would you draw a distinction between propaganda and public relations or do you see the two terms as interchangeable?   HOBBS: Ha ha, great question. Of course, I’ve had vigorous discussions about this in—with my students and with my colleagues. In 1928, Edward Bernays wrote a book called Propaganda and it became a classic in the field of communication. He very quickly recognized that the term propaganda was so negatively loaded that he changed the name to Public Relations.   So the grandfather of public relations understood that the word propaganda and public relations are, I would say, kissing cousins. So I don’t generally differentiate because I like—I think there’s a lot of utility to using the word propaganda in its big tent meaning, right.   So we—what we don’t want to do is just have propaganda be used as a smear word. That’s the term Neil Postman talked about when he said, you know, that’s a shortcut to critical thinking, right. By labeling something propaganda or, i.e., bad now you don’t have to think about it. Now you don’t have to ask critical questions, right.   So we want people to—we want to do whatever we can to make people think. So advertising can be a form of propaganda, right, and education can be a form of propaganda and entertainment can be a form of propaganda, and to determine whether you think it’s propaganda or not you really have to look very carefully at the form, the context, the audience, the purpose.   You have to really look at the whole rhetorical situation, make that determination yourself. What do you think? Is propaganda and public relations the same or are they different?   FASKIANOS: OK. People are not raising their hand but they’re writing their questions. So the next question is from Chip Pitts, who’s a lecturer at Stanford University, and it kind of follows on to what we were just talking about, to distinguish between propaganda and truth or falsity if that distinguish is important.   HOBBS: Oh, that’s a great question. This goes back to the earliest definitions of the term propaganda when it has long been recognized even at the very beginning of the First—when the First World War happened and propaganda really was becoming a tool used by governments, right, recognized that propaganda works best when it uses truth, right.  So propaganda can use truthful information, half-truths, or lies and, of course Goebbels was famous for saying that the best propaganda is truthful, right. (Laughs.) So propaganda can be truthful and very, very dangerous, right. Very harmful.   And so I think it’s important to recognize that propagandists use—can use truth, half-truths, or lies.   FASKIANOS: Yeah. So how do you, though, distinguish or have people, if you’re not telling people—you know, you’re teaching students how to think critically, which is so important. But as we saw with January 6 there is a subset of people who do not call it an insurrection.  HOBBS: Right.  FASKIANOS: You know, so we do have different groups that have—are using a different basis—set of facts. So what do you do in that case?   HOBBS: So media literacy is really rooted in this idea that we are co-learners in the search for truth and that none of us have a handle on it completely and we all need each other to apprise the complexity of what’s going on in the world.   So dialogue and discussion becomes a really central pedagogy of media literacy with this idea that we want to engage with each other with—from a position of intellectual humility. When I come into the classroom and I decide you can only call it an insurrection and if you call it a riot there’s something wrong with you, then I’ve created an in group and an out group, haven’t I? And I’ve set up a hierarchy that says if you agree with me you’re right and if you don’t agree with me you’re wrong. I can’t really have a discussion, can I?   That discussion is going to be false or artificial. It’s going to be stilted. Some people are going to be silenced in a discussion where I set the terms of what truth is, and that’s the very phenomenon we’re trying to fight against, right.   But if I come in with these critical questions and put you in the position of having to say how are they grabbing my attention, what is true, what seems accurate and inaccurate, how are stereotypes being used, right, then you have to engage in some genuine thinking.   And so teachers take—in that position don’t take—choose to take—choose not to take the position of an authority telling people what to think but, really, as a co-learner guiding with critical questions for students to come to their own conclusions about that.   FASKIANOS: Mmm hmm. That’s great. All right.   So we do have a raised hand. I’m going to go to Beverly Lindsay. And, Beverly, if you could tell us who you are—I know who you are, but for the group.   Q: I’m Beverly Lindsay, University of California multi-campus.   I spent a number of years working in the Department of State, in particular the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, and I’m still doing some funded programs from them. And years afterwards I was able to speak with the late Secretary of State Dean Rusk. I wasn’t in the State Department when he was there so we’re talking about a more recent period.   One of the statements that he made to me was the best propaganda has no propagandistic values. Years later when I was an international dean at a former university the executive vice president and the provost said to me, because this is a university wide program, that getting a Fulbright was simply propaganda in developing countries.   So you had two different views from two knowledgeable people. How would you think we might think about those type of responses now? He valued the—if you got a Fulbright to Oxford?  HOBBS: I really love this question, Beverly, and I actually do—I do something on this with my students as we look at the Voice of America, right, and we look at, well, this is journalism, right, and it’s journalism that’s designed to bring diverse perspectives on world issues to people in countries where they may not have this kind of journalism and, at the same time, there is a distinctly American ideology to this kind of journalism, right.   And so there’s a very interesting way in which maybe both of those ideas, maybe both of those frames that you just presented to us, maybe both of them are true, right. And I feel like it’s quite liberating to acknowledge that there’s some truth in both of those ideas, right, that the best diplomacy doesn’t have a propaganda intent and that soft power in whatever form it takes is strategic and intentional and it’s designed to accomplish a policy objective.   FASKIANOS: Great. So I’m going to take the next question written. Oh, Beverly has raised her hand. So I think there’s a follow-on before I go to the next one.   Beverly, do you want to follow up? You’re still muted.   Q: Sorry. If someone has a Fulbright to University College London or Oxford or one of the redbrick universities in the United Kingdom why would that not be propaganda in one country and not in another? Are we assuming that the people in England are more sophisticated?   HOBBS: Hmm. I like—I can’t speak to the specifics of that situation but I do think that one of the reasons why we say that propaganda is in the eye of the beholder is that meaning is not in texts. Meaning is in people, right. So as we humans try to use symbols to communicate and express ourselves, right, there’s slippage—(laughs)—right, between the meaning I’m encoding as I’m using language and words right now, right, and the meaning that you’re interpreting, because I’m making my choices based on my cultural context and you’re making meaning based on your cultural context.   So that humility, the humility of recognizing that we’re imperfect meaning makers, let’s be in a position where, again, both points of view might have validity, and one of the pedagogies that we try to emphasize in media literacy is listening with genuine curiosity and asking good faith questions with genuine curiosity is more generative of learning than asking questions or using questioning as a mechanism of attack, right.   And so we can see in our public discourse right now that we all are—we all have learned very well, right, how to weaponize information, right—(laughs)—how to use it for powerful purposes. But when we’re talking about education we adapt this stance of being open to the multiple interpretations that exist in any given context. So that’s the only way I can respond to that question.   FASKIANOS: So I’m going to go next to Asha Rangappa, who’s a senior lecturer at Yale.   It seems that the question is source and intention, not truth. Russia can say something that is true, but if they do it by covering up that they are the source of that content—black propaganda—with the intention of causing division and chaos, that’s still propaganda. So can you talk about how Russia is using propaganda in the war—in their war with Ukraine?  HOBBS: Oh, absolutely. What a great question and thank you so much for pointing out a very, very important—there’s two really important ideas in your question that I want to just underline and amplify.   One is that to be critical thinkers about propaganda the first question we want to ask is who’s the author and what’s the purpose. So many propagandists try to disguise that authorship, right, and there are so many ways to do that.   It’s so easy to disguise your identity. You can use a technique called astroturfing, which is you can set up a nonprofit organization, give it a little bit of money, and it sends out the message, right, and you, the company or government, whatever you are, you have some distance from it.   There’s, of course, sponsored content. It looks like it’s news but it’s really funded. It’s really propaganda. It’s really a form of—it’s an influence operation. So the first thing we want to try to do whenever we can is figure out who made the message and what is the purpose, and that’s why your second point is so, so important and I want to amplify this idea, this question about intentionality—what’s the author’s purpose.   But there’s something complicated about that, too, which is that intentionality is fundamentally unknowable. (Laughs.) I mean, we can make inferences about intentionality. But that’s what they are. They’re inferences.   Now, that being said, of course, we definitely see the very many and very creative ways that Russia has been active in creating and stoking and leveraging in groups and out groups to deepen divisiveness in this country and all around the world and in Ukraine and well before even the invasion of Crimea.   The Ukrainians were very much tuned into this and some of the best work happening in media literacy education was happening in Ukraine even before Crimea because they were so clearly aware of how propaganda was being used to create division between Ukrainians.   So this is partly why one of the things we want to help students recognize is how in group and out group identities can be amplified or weaponized through the power of language, right, the words we use to describe others, right, through the power of symbols and metaphors, and this goes all the way back to George Orwell in the 1930s, who wrote brilliantly about propaganda, and said basically every time humans open their mouths they’re persuading, right—(laughs)—by the very word you choose, right.   Irina, you chose insurrection. I chose riot. In the very choice of language we’ve got a point of view there, right.   FASKIANOS: Mmm hmm.  HOBBS: As we have, like, heightened consciousness about that then that really helps us recognize the very subtle forms that propaganda can take, and I think in the case of the Russian propaganda we see some brilliantly devious and terrible ways that propaganda was used to divide Americans and to polarize, and the polarization that we’re now experiencing in our country was created intentionally and strategically and is still being created intentionally and specifically by a whole bunch of different actions, not actors, not just foreign agents, I might add.   FASKIANOS: OK. So I am going to Holley Hansen, who is a teaching assistant professor and director of undergraduate studies at Oklahoma State University, asks even if people are able to teach media literacy techniques to people how do you counter the impact of the algorithms in social media, especially when they seem to reward extremist messages?   HOBBS: Yeah. Great question, and this is absolutely huge. It’s why the media literacy community is really working hard on a concept we call algorithm literacy, right, which is understanding how increasingly the messages that are in your media environment are tailored in ways that reinforce your prejudices, reinforce your beliefs.  There’s a lot of really cool activities that you can do with this. We have—there’s lesson plans and materials, resources, on the—on our website at MediaEducationLab.com. But, you know, my Google is not your Google and my Facebook is not your Facebook.   So one activity that I always do at the beginning of every semester with my students is I have them—we have some—certain keywords that we might use. Like, we might put in country names like Finland, Slovenia, the Philippines, and now take a screenshot of what comes up on your Google, and my students—within the group of thirty students my students will have different results on Google and then they’ll be able to sort of unpack how their Google has been trained by them, right, algorithmically to present them with some results and to deny them some other results.   This is a big a-ha for students and I think for all of us we’re—it’s so easy for us not to be aware. Again, we tend not to notice what we don’t see, right. So we aren’t even aware often of how our—how algorithmic bias is influencing our worldview. That’s another reason why media literacy educators insist on using dialogue and discussion and why increasingly educators are bringing people together using the power of Zoom technology from different regions of the country, different states.   So my colleague Wes Fryer in Oklahoma is working with middle school students in New Jersey to bring Oklahoma middle school students and New Jersey middle school students together to have dialogue and discussion because we—the algorithmic biases are not—they are not just limited to individuals. They also exist within community context and cultural milieus as well.   FASKIANOS: Fantastic. Let’s go to Serena Newberry, who’s raised—has a raised hand.   Q: Hello. I’m Serena Newberry. I’m a Schwarzman scholar at Tsinghua University in Beijing.  And somewhat building upon the previous question on Russia-Ukraine propaganda in addition to the critical thinking questions that you mentioned earlier, how would we go about separating propaganda attached to existing institutions, be it an organization or a country, when there is bias attached to that nation or institution?  For example, you mentioned that the author changed the name of the book Propaganda to Public Relations because rather than trying to convince people of using their critical thinking skills that word had so many negative connotations attached to it. So how do we go about that when trying to move forward in foreign relations and building bridges in other ways?   HOBBS: Yeah. That’s a really great question and I’ll tell you my China story.  I had the opportunity to go teach students media literacy in China on several occasions now and the word propaganda is very complicated in that country, right. (Laughs.)   And so we came to the conclusion that understanding media messages in all their many forms was something that required people to evaluate different levels of—different levels of trust and trustworthiness and that whether—what you called it was less important. What the label is was less important than the reasoning process that you use to make sense of it.   In China it’s called moral education, right, and it’s done in schools and it’s a way to create patriotic values, to disseminate patriotic values, and in the United States when I got taught I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States that was also a form of moral education, patriotic education as it were, right.  And so I wouldn’t call that propaganda but I could see how someone might. And so I think it doesn’t matter what we call it. It matters that—what reasoning process and what evidence we use, what critical thinking skills we activate, in a dialogue and discussion.   FASKIANOS: So, John Gentry, adjunct professor at Georgetown University, has a question that also got an up vote—two up votes.   As I’m sure you know, the Soviets and then the Russians developed sophisticated propaganda mechanisms by what they called disinformation and active measures. They developed a doctrine known as reflective control designed to induce targets to make ostensibly independent decisions consistent with their interests.   How do you propose that targets identify and defend against such devices?   HOBBS: Wow. Yeah. That’s really a hard question because what is powerful about that framing is the way in which it is systemic, right, and that framing actually is really useful in understanding why people don’t act in their own best interest—(laughs)—right, sometimes—why sometimes people don’t act in their own best interests, right.   So I—what I appreciate about that observation, and this is—you’re acknowledging the way that sociologists have recognized that when propaganda is used in that way, systemic—in that systemic way it becomes actually really difficult or maybe even impossible for individuals to kind of work their way out of it or through it.  I think Jacques Ellul he defined—his framing for that—he called it sociological propaganda because of his sense that you couldn’t see the forest for the trees. So I think both the Russian framing of active measures and the way in which a whole worldview can be cultivated, right, that creates reality for people, and I think that’s partly why we value—we so much value freedom of speech and free markets as ways to protect us from the kind of abuses of power that are possible in more totalitarian or autocratic societies.   I think that’s why we so—we’re seeing countries, you know, sort of recognize and resist autocratic policies that allow one view of reality to be promulgated and all other interpretations of reality to be denied.   FASKIANOS: Mmm hmm. OK. So let’s go to Raj Bhala, who has raised hand.   Q: Thank you, and thank you for this wonderful presentation. So thought provoking.   So I’m asking you as a friendly member of the tenured professoriate like you, are we agents of propaganda, too? I have a new book coming out on the Sino-American trade war and I’ve often wondered have I fallen victim in researching and writing to propaganda from both sides. And, more generally, as you probably know from, you know, our careers, in our scholarship, in our teaching, in who we promote for tenure, the way we review their articles, are we also propagandists and even more so as universities get evermore corporatized with budget cuts?  HOBBS: Wow. What a—  FASKIANOS: And Raj is at the University of Kansas.  HOBBS: Raj, that is—thank you for asking that really, really great question, and this is a great opportunity to acknowledge the important work on propaganda done by Noam Chomsky at MIT, and in his book Manufacturing Consent he said that the information elites, and by that he meant the 20 percent of us who are knowledge workers and work in knowledge industries, he said we’re the ones who are most deeply indoctrinated into a system, an ideological system where propaganda—propagandists work their hardest on us and they don’t bother with the others because if they get us then they get the control. The control is embodied.   So I do think it’s very self-aware and reflective for all of us knowledge workers to be aware of how our own world view and understanding of the world has been shaped through communication—through communication and information—and the stance of intellectual humility is most urgent because—well, I think we’ve seen all around us the dangers of righteousness. What happens when you become too certain that your view of reality is the only view of reality, right? Well, bad things happen, right. (Laughs.) Bad things happen when you become too sure of yourself, too righteous, because you close yourself off to other ways of knowing and other sources of information and other points of view that may be mostly false but have a glimmer of truth in them and that’s the piece of truth you actually need to solve the puzzle, moving forward.   So the problem of righteousness, the danger of righteousness, is something that everyone working in the knowledge industries needs to be aware of and the stance of intellectual humility is so hard because we’re experts, right.  So it’s one of those things that we have to call each other out on and call each other into, right. Come into a place where we can accept that we might have a piece of—we might understand a piece of this complex problem but not all of it.   And my guess is, Raj, that in your writing and in your scholarship you adopt that stance of intellectual humility and that helps your readers recognize you’re offering them something but you’re aware that you don’t have the whole story, because that’s what we do, right, and that’s how we help each other to come closer to the truth.   FASKIANOS: So I’m going to take a written question from Skyler Ruderman, who’s at University of California Santa Cruz.   How do we start investigating internal propaganda when it is so thoroughly and casually disseminated throughout American mass culture and media, for example, the Department of Defense having oversight and script rewriting authority on movie production if the producers want to use military equipment or the ways twenty years ago consent was heavily manufactured with bipartisan support for the Iraq war in the major news outlets?   These things are easily written off, much like reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, as patriotic or nationalistic. So where do we start?   HOBBS: Wow. What a great—what a great question. Can I share my screen, Irina? Is that possible?  FASKIANOS: You should be able to. We’ll turn—  HOBBS: I should be able to share my screen. Let’s see.   FASKIANOS: There you go.   HOBBS: Can you see my screen right now?   FASKIANOS: We can.   HOBBS: I want to show you two resources that I think are really helpful for broadening our understanding of propaganda in just the ways that your question proposes.   One is: go explore my online learning modules on propaganda and check out propaganda in entertainment, right, or memes as propaganda, election propaganda, conspiracy theories, algorithmic personalization, and even art and activism as propaganda.   And then—let’s see if I can go back up here—and then go check out the Mind Over Media gallery. When I first started teaching about propaganda I was aware that my students live in a different media world than I do, right. I encounter some kinds of media and my students encounter different kinds of media because of what we talked about before—algorithmic personalization and this just gigantic flood of content that we get exposed to as creators and consumers.   So what I did was I created a tool that makes it possible for anyone anywhere in the world to upload examples of contemporary propaganda or what people think is examples of contemporary propaganda, and because I got some funding from the European Commission to do this work I have propaganda from a bunch of different countries and right now at the top of the list are these kinds of examples of different kinds of propaganda and, you know, some of them are really weird.   Like, for instance, this one, right. The person who uploaded this meme—the meme reads, for those of you who are not seeing the screen, remember when politics attracted the brightest and most intelligent—what the hell happened, right, and it’s got some pictures of politicians.   This person thinks this is propaganda because it attacks opponents and it attacks people who are Republican and it shows that Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln, and George Washington were good. However, it shows Trump as one who’s not very intellectual. And so some student uploaded this and I’m invited to rate this example, do I think this is beneficial or harmful. I think this is probably a little bit—no, I’m not sure how I feel. I’m going to be right in the middle here.   But take a look at the results, Irina. Twenty-seven percent of the people who’ve been to the website say they thought this propaganda was beneficial, 14 percent thought it was harmful, and then most of us are in the middle here. So it turns out that, in some ways, there is an opportunity to examine the stories we tell of the past and how they shape our understanding of the present day.   I’ve been doing that through recovering how propaganda used to be taught in the 1920s and ’30s in the years leading up to World War II as American educators began to be concerned about demagogues like Father McCoughlin (sic; Coughlin) on the radio, right, and the way in which the power of the voice coming—when the voice came into your living room it was a very powerful experience. It was so intimate. It was so personal. It had such an emotional power. And we realized that every generation has to address the emotional power of propaganda because the propaganda that you carry on your digital device, right, has got its own unique ways of bypassing your critical thinking and activating your emotions in ways that can be really, really dangerous.   FASKIANOS: So what would you say about TikTok?   HOBBS: Well, I’ve been fascinated. We’ve been using TikTok a lot in our education outreach initiatives and the project that I’m working on right now is called Courageous Rhode Island. It’s a federally funded project from the Department of Homeland Security and we’re using media literacy as a violence prevention tool to address the issues of domestic extremism, right.   And so we’ve been looking at TikTok videos that on the surface seem, well, quite entertaining. But then when you spend time, actually watching it—you watch it twice, right, and you start asking those critical questions that I shared with you earlier, then you really discover it’s, like, oh my gosh, this thing actually has a white nationalism agenda or an anti-trans agenda or a(n) anti—or a misogynistic worldview or an anti-Semitic worldview. But at first viewing it just looked like fun.   So we think it’s really important to take—to help slow down our encounter with TikTok, and when adults do that with teenagers and when teenagers do that with each other and when young adults do that with people of different ages it can be a mind-blowing learning experience.  And participants who are here in this call can join us on this journey. Every two weeks we have what we call courageous conversations. The next one’s coming up on April 4 and it’s called “High Conflict.” We’re talking about the media messages that put us into conflict with each other and what we can do about them. So TikTok’s one of those medium that can incite high conflict.   FASKIANOS: I’m going to take the next question from Pyonhong Yin (ph) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  Q: Hi. Can you hear me?   HOBBS: Yeah.   Q: Oh, OK. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for your very interesting talk.   So I am a Ph.D. student in political science at the University of Illinois and I’m currently working on a paper about the propaganda during the international conflict, and I just got a question from two professors in a different field in political science and they asked me whether—or do you think propaganda is costly.  Like, so because I think during the conflict the leaders they—you know, the people—they usually make some very aggressive statements, right, and sometimes they might make some empty threats. So, to me, I think it’s costly because if they do not follow their words then, you know, the public—the majority of the people they do not trust the leaders. But, yeah, but I—yeah, so this is the—just the question. Yeah. So do you think the propaganda is costly?   HOBBS: So that’s interesting how you’re using the phrase costly, right. The idea is does—you’re asking, in a way, what are the consequences of the use of propaganda, right, and I think it’s a really important question because, remember, propaganda can be used to unify, right. So propaganda can be a vehicle that people use to create consensus in a group, right, and that’s—coming to consensus is part of the democratic process, right.  That’s how we—we come to consensus because it’s an essential way of solving problems nonviolently. But as you’re using the term costly you’re imagining a person, a propagandist, who says one thing in one context for one audience and one goal and maybe has to walk that back in a different context or at a different time period, and then that may have a cost because people may lower—the trust might be lowered, and I think that’s actually, like, a very important calculus that politicians have to consider in their use of propaganda.   So I really appreciate the idea of the kind of—almost like the mathematical or the financial metaphor that’s behind your question. There is a cost because the cost is trust can be increased or reduced, right, and from a politician’s point of view that’s currency, right. That has real value.   But we often focus on propaganda that diminishes trust. I want to make sure that we don’t forget that propaganda can increase trust, right. So it works both ways—the cost and the costliness. And you can learn more about this in my book. I’m putting up a link to my book in the chat, Mind Over Media: Propaganda Education in a Digital Age.   I think one way to interrogate the cost issues is to look at different agents of propaganda. Look, for example, at how activists use propaganda. For instance, Greta Thunberg, the world’s youngest and most important environmental propagandist, right. She’s been very skillful in using her language, her imagery, her messaging, to increase her credibility, right, and to—and she’s very aware of how at certain times certain messages might have a cost, and we can go back and look at the history of her speeches and see when she’s made some mistakes, right—when her messages had a cost, right, that weakened her credibility.   And so I think being strategic—looking at that—looking at propagandists’ choices and the cost or the consequences or the potential impacts, very interesting strategy. So great question. Very thought-provoking question around that metaphor. Thank you.   FASKIANOS: So I’m going to take a question from Oshin Bista, who’s a graduate student at Columbia University: What are your thoughts on the tensions/overlaps between approaching information with generous curiosity and the inaccessibility of the languages of media? How do we make this form of literacy accessible?   HOBBS: Great, great question. You know, the reason why that’s such a good question is because there is a vocabulary that has to be learned, right. To critically analyze news as propaganda there’s a whole lot of words you need to know—(laughs)—right. There’s a whole lot of genres that you need to know, right, and that knowledge, for instance, about the knowledge about the economics of news. To understand propaganda as it exists in journalism you have to understand the business model of journalism, right, why likes and clicks and subscriptions and popularity are a form of currency in the business, right.  So how to make that more accessible? I think actually journalists and media professionals can go a long way and one of the groups that I’m paying special attention to are the YouTube influencers who are doing this work through messages that are entertaining and informational and persuasive.   For example, check out Tiffany Ferguson and her internet education series. She’s a twenty-three-year-old college—recent college graduate who’s been helping her audience, mostly teenage girls, I would say—helping her audience learn to critically analyze all different aspects of internet culture, right.  That is a great example of somebody who’s using their power as a communicator to help their audience be better informed and make better choices, and I feel like a lot of media professionals can play that role in society.   In fact, another good example of that is Hank and John Green, the quintessential YouTubers, right. So I think media professionals are really well poised to bring media literacy knowledge and concepts to mass audiences and that’s why they’re a vital part of the media literacy movement globally. Not just here in the United States but all over the world.   FASKIANOS: So we’re seeing in Congress, you know, Congress taking on TikTok and wanting to ban it, and Chip has—Chip Pitts of Stanford has a follow-up question: Beyond education for media literacy, what laws, regulations, norms can our government and others deploy to help control the worst harms—required content moderation, you know, applied young international human rights standards versus U.S.-style free speech, et cetera? So what is your feeling on that?   HOBBS: Yeah. Great question. Of course, we’re always—we’re often asked—some people think that media literacy is a substitute for government regulation. But we’re always very attentive to say, well, our interest is in focusing on what media consumers need to know and be able to do.   That doesn’t mean that there isn’t a role for regulation and, for example, I think one of the easy to document positive impacts of media regulation is the GDPR regulation, right, that Germany enacted. That actually—that benefited the entire world, right.   And so the question about content moderation and Section 230 and the appropriate ways to regulate social media these are complex issues that people—that we can’t solve that in two seconds and we, certainly, can’t solve it globally because we can’t.   But we can think about how different countries around the world, as they implement social media regulation, it becomes like little laboratories. Let’s—so as countries pass laws about social media let’s see what happens, right. Let’s see what the results are culturally, politically. Let’s see what the benefits of that regulation and let’s see what some of the unintended consequences might be.   So that’s the only way that we’ll design regulation that accomplishes its beneficial goals without its unintended consequences. So I’m kind of happy that states like California are regulating social media now, right. That’s awesome to see little laboratories of experimentation.   But I’m not prepared to tell you what I think the best approach to regulation is. I think we just need to be attentive to the fact that regulation will be part of the solution in minimizing the harms of communication in the public sphere.   FASKIANOS: Well, unfortunately, we have to end here because we’re out of time, and we have so many more questions and comments. I’m sorry that we could not get to you all.   We will send out the link to this webinar so you can watch it again as well as links to Renee’s book, to her community conversations. I see it, “Courageous.” I have it up on my screen now for the “High Conflict” event on April 4, and anything else, Renee, that you think. I especially love the questions that you showed us on your phone. I want to get those so I can share them with my family.  So thank you for being with us and for all of your great questions and comments. Appreciate it.   The last Academic Webinar of the semester will be on Wednesday, April 12, at 1:00 p.m. Eastern time. So please do join us for that. We’ll send out the invitation under separate cover.  And I just want to flag for you all that we have CFR-paid internships for students and fellowships for professors. If you go to CFR.org/careers you can find the information there, and you do not have to be in New York or DC. You can be remote, virtual. They’re great opportunities for students even if you are not in one of these two cities.   Please follow us at @CFR_Academic and visit CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for research and analysis on global issues.   Again, Renee Hobbs, thank you so much for this conversation, your research. We really appreciate it and look forward to continuing to follow the really tremendous work that you’re doing.   HOBBS: Thank you so much for the opportunity, Irina. I really enjoyed talking with everybody today. Bye now.   FASKIANOS: Bye-bye.   (END) 

Heidi A. Campbell, professor of communication at Texas A&M University, and Paul Brandeis Raushenbush, president and CEO of Interfaith Alliance, discuss the meeting of religion and digital culture, and its effect on religious communities. Carla Anne Robbins, senior fellow at CFR, moderates. Learn more about CFR's Religion and Foreign Policy Program.   FASKIANOS: Thank you. Welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations Religion and Foreign Policy Webinar Series. This series convenes religion and faith-based leaders in a cross-denominational dialogue on the intersection between religion and international relations. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president for the National Program and Outreach at CFR. As a reminder, this webinar is on the record, the audio, video, and transcript will be available on CFR’s website, CFR.org, and on the iTunes podcast channel, Religion and Foreign Policy. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. We’re delighted to have Carla Anne Robbins with us to moderate today’s discussion on Religion and Technology. Carla Anne Robbins is a senior fellow at CFR. She is also Marxe faculty director of the master of international affairs program and clinical professor of national security studies at Baruch College’s Marxe School of Public and International Affairs. Dr. Robbins is an award-winning journalist and foreign policy analyst. She was deputy editorial page editor at the New York Times, and chief diplomatic correspondent at the Wall Street Journal. So, Carla, thank you very much for moderating this conversation. I’m going to turn it over to you to introduce our distinguished speakers. ROBBINS: Thank you so much, Irina. And thank you so much for inviting me. I don’t know an enormous amount about this topic. I know a reasonable amount about the internet. My mother would say, she hopes I know a reasonable amount about religion as well, but not from an academic point of view. So, as Irina said, we’re going to have a conversation here for about twenty-five minutes, and then we’re going to turn it over to you all for questions and conversation. Dr. Heidi A. Campbell is professor of communication, affiliate faculty in religious studies, and a presidential impact fellow at Texas A&M University. She’s also director of the Network for New Media, Religion, and Digital Culture Studies, and a founder of digital religion studies at the university. Dr. Campbell’s research focuses on technology, religion, and digital culture, with emphasis on Jewish, Muslim, and Christian media negotiations. The Reverend Paul Brandeis Raushenbush is president and CEO of Interfaith Alliance. He’s an ordained Baptist minister, and a long-time leader in the interfaith movement, working to protect an inclusive vision of religious freedom for people of all faiths, and none—I love that, people of all faiths and none—in both online and offline spaces. Throughout his twenty-five years of ministry, he has maintained a presence in both IRL and URL spaces, including digital journalist at Beliefnet and HuffPost Religion. He has also served as senior advisor for public affairs and innovation at Interfaith America, and as associate dean of religious life in the chapel at Princeton University. So, Heidi, I’d like to start with you. As a now-academic, I know the scramble we went through taking classes online overnight at the start of the pandemic. And there’s been debate ever since in my shop about whether online education is worse, whether it’s better, or whether it’s just different from in-person classes. Can we start talking about that pivot point for religious communities and organizations? How hard was it to adapt? And is there a similar debate going on in your community? CAMPBELL: So, back in 2020, it was interesting to watch from my perspective of someone who studied religion and technology, especially the internet, for the last three years, that almost like an overnight change from, one week there was about a dozen people in my Facebook feed that were streaming their services, and the next week it was fifty. And then the next week it was one hundred. Religious communities experimenting with different ways to use digital technology in their ministries, and in their communities and communication, isn’t new. We have examples going back as far as the 1990s. But it being a widespread phenomenon rather than the exception to the rule, it’s been very new.  There was a lot of initial resistance in some groups because it was not just requiring them to learn a new thing on top of a very uncertain situation, but it was also asking them to rethink what it means to kind of create a worship environment, what it means to have religious gatherings. And so I think a lot of the debates have been over not just the instrumental use of the technology but now, a couple years on, what has it meant to how we change our ways of interacting to one another? I talk to pastors and rabbis all the time. And it’s been a strong learning curve, I think. And kind of three camps right now. There’s the people that are thinking, wow, this has been the best thing for us. It’s forced us to think outside the box and it’s been a positive innovation. There’s people that are now saying, well, we spent all this money and time getting up online. And people in our congregation, have a demand for this, so we feel like we have to keep going. And then there’s groups that are still what I would call technologically reluctant, or hesitant, in that they actually have access to the technologies, but for them religious experience and actions will always be embodied. And so they just can’t wait to get back to more of that traditional kind of space. So there’s still a wide range, but digital technology in the church and in ministry is here to stay. And our future is definitely hybrid. ROBBINS: Thanks. So, Paul, you were a very early adopter of this world. And then suddenly the world was where you were. Do you find that most people are just basically transferring what they did before online? Or do you see more and more people actually doing creative things? I would say among my colleagues, and I say this with love, that far too many of them still on Zoom look like they’re reading hostage videos. I mean, if you’d had a newspaper in front of them, you’d know they were in a basement somewhere. Are you seeing more creativity as time has gone by, or are people still more hesitant, the way Heidi was saying? RAUSCHENBUSH: Well, as Professor Campbell has said, this has really made plain some of the questions that were already present before the pandemic happened. It’s made us examine some important questions, like what does it mean to be embodied? The question of when ten Jews are online is that a minyan, is a question that no one has really quite answered. When two or three are gathered in Christ’s name online, is Christ there? And what does that mean about an embodied faith? They seem kind of glib, but they’re actually really important for how we view the body, what we mean by community. So I think there has been incredible innovation on many parts, but it does bring into question what does it mean to be a community. So when you have a community that is not geographically focused, what is that religious community’s responsibility to geography? Meaning, if the majority or even all of your congregation is online around the country or around the world, what does it mean for the local neighborhood that really needs a food pantry, or needs a place for AA to meet? The local responsibility. So these are big questions that are coming up for religious communities around the internet. I would say, I have seen incredible innovation. You can really tell, though. It’s kind of like the difference between when radio happened, or when TV happened, there’s all of a sudden TV evangelists who are, like, OK, I see what the possibility is here. I see what this allows me to do. My community, which is a more mainline Protestant liberal community, has not been that great at it, though there have been many people who have been good. You also see these new influencers, like TikTok pastors, and TikTok rabbis, who are really there. They have constituencies. Whether they’re communities, that’s another question. ROBBINS: So, Heidi, can we talk a little bit more? You’ve written about three common approaches, and you were talking about this. Can we talk a little bit more about the transformational ones? Are they using particular digital platforms? Have they come up with particularly cool ways of using, leveraging the technology so that it is a new experience, a truly religious experience, rather than just preaching at people? But using technology to have them truly experience the religion? CAMPBELL: Yeah, so during the pandemic, there were two innovative strategies. One was kind of a translation strategy. And that was people realized putting a smartphone up and trying to get the whole sanctuary or church wasn’t the best strategy. That just not transferring online. And so a lot of congregations decided, how we do actually restructure the front of our building? We saw a lot of churches and congregations actually go out of the church or synagogue building and go into maybe a fellowship hall, even into pastors’ homes, and making the sermon into more of a talk show format, or a fireside chat kind of format. And realizing in a time when people were feeling disconnected, maybe the service and liturgy needs to be changed to adapt to that sense of more need for community, more need for connection, more ability to address loneliness. Now, some of those experiments, especially the talk-show kind of format, have kind of transferred back to just streaming their services online. But there’s still a lot of churches that have now kind of added Sunday Bible study groups or discussion forums, or synagogues and mosques will have these community chat groups. And using some of those alternate paths. And the transformational, I would say that that was—when people were not just kind of looking at how do we get our services online, but really looking at, OK, what does the internet do well, and allow us to do internet well? And how do we actually leverage that for our community? And so here’s where you kind of see more creative forms of, whether it’s religious study or outreach. I’m doing a big study of churches in Indiana and how they were affected over a three-year period from the pandemic. And we heard lots of interesting stories about little rural churches becoming the internet hub for the community, setting up picnic tables outside. And now they run a kind of web hub kind of community center for people because that became a real need. And it became a gathering point just to decompress during the pandemic. So I think that there’s a lot of innovation. But most, the majority, I’d say, is going back to this kind of translate strategy. And we have to remember that the average religious congregation in the U.S. is sixty-seven people. So those churches, it’s usually the pastor and maybe one other person who had to work to get them online. And so if they didn’t have any technological training or technological resources, just the acting of getting their service online was a huge change. And it’s really only now that they’re starting to be able to think through what it would mean to experiment at a greater level, especially if our church is now going to be online and offline, this hybrid reality. ROBBINS: Thanks for that. So, Paul, I actually have two questions for you. My first question is, are ten Jews on Zoom a minyan? And I’m serious. And where is that debate taking place, for all of the questions that you raised? RAUSCHENBUSH: Personally, I think that there is no escaping it now, but I think understanding the depth of what we mean when we say that, and not doing it glibly. Not saying, oh, it’s just the technology. But rather understanding that our world has been radically transformed by the internet—radically transformed. At its root, we are different than we were thirty years ago. I don’t think we’ve begun to have that conversation in religious communities. There’s been no innovation or invention that is similar to the internet. We have not begun to delve into what it will mean for us. Eric Schmidt, one of the executives of Google said, “This is the first invention that humanity has made that humanity does not understand.” We don’t understand what is happening. And there has been very little theological reflection on that. And this is an unfortunate, unfortunate thing. I often introduce lectures about this saying, how many times have you heard a sermon about the internet, or a rabbi talk about the internet, aside from saying, well, you need a sabbatical. That’s not going to do it. We have deep questions. Today on the front of the New York Times, “it’s time to talk to your kids about the chatbots.” Well, we haven’t begun to talk to the kids about the internet. There are people, and religious communities could be doing this, could be offering a conversation about what the internet will mean, what it is doing already to us. Meaning, what does our body mean? What does it mean to be online? We don’t have those conversations, and it’s a real problem for religious communities that I’m shouting—Professor Campbell is one of the few people that’s been shouting it longer than I have. (Laughter.) But I’ve been shouting it since my beginning too, that this is really, really important. So, questions like, is ten Jews—I think rabbis are going to disagree strongly about that. The question that that begs is, what is the internet doing to us? And that’s the question I really want us to dive into. ROBBINS: So one of the things, and it’s always the conventional wisdom, is that too much of what has happened in our digital world has separated us rather than brought us together. What is the most creative use you’ve seen of online platforms that are bringing people together more? I would say from a teaching point of view, I love breakout rooms. (Laughs.) They have made me a better teacher. I am much less on transmit and much more on receive. That’s the one thing that Zoom has made me better as a teacher. So are there things that you’re already seeing that are going on, I’m going to ask both of you that, that you think that is easily leverageable, that makes the experience better? CAMPBELL: Well, I would say that, as someone who for thirty years has been following some of these trends, I actually see less innovation happening right now than I did ten years ago. Because the people who were doing it were doing it because they wanted to. And right now, we’re in this space of we have to do this and have to figure it out. But I think there still are some interesting ways that people are leveraging together. In these congregations that I study, one group has this weekly Bible study. And it’s for anyone who’s ever been part of the church. And some weeks there’s ten people, and some weeks there’s fifty people. And it’s become this kind of common thing. I’ve even had friends say, “oh, hey, I have to get off the phone because Zoom Bible study is starting.” And really seeing how can you actually just integrate it into the fabric of people’s everyday lives. Oftentimes I’ve found that religious organizations will say, OK, we need to use TikTok, or we need to use Instagram. And so they build some kind of tool and then it’s, like, if we build it, they will come. But the strategies that work the best is seeing how are you people in your congregation actually using the technology? And what kind of things do they need? Do they need community? Do they need support? Do they need teaching, or spaces for prayer? And matching what they need with what they’re already doing online is the best way to get these different innovations up and running quickly, I think. ROBBINS: Paul, anything to add on that? Something that you’ve seen that’s given you excitement about this, about the use of it? RAUSCHENBUSH: Oh, I mean, so many things. It’s amazing how people are reaching out. I mean, this is an incredible opportunity to be able to dive into areas of the world that you had no idea about, and that you’re no longer restricted because of geography or because of who you know. You’re allowed to expand. So the opportunities for learning about people of your own faith, different faiths. The experience of people in other communities. I for a while have done a little bit in the Metaverse. And the opportunity in the Metaverse to dive into experiences where you are kind of oddly embodied, but not really embodied, to but be able to meet people from around the globe who are in the Metaverse, who may actually say, hey, we set up a news broadcast of news from our country, and we’re inviting anyone to come by and let us translate it for you. The opportunity is to meet people and share in experiences. And, like anything, if you go in there ready to fight, and ready to judge, and ready to hate, then you’re going to have an experience. And you’re going to have other people experience you that way. If you go in there with curiosity, with real interest and love, the internet is an incredible—I mean, it’s amazing—there’s nothing like it. For what I do, which is largely interfaith work, you can build bonds. You can learn. You can grow. You can follow people from diverse traditions and learn so much about what they’re doing, in a way that was just not available to use before. So all of that is present. And then all of the opposite is present, too, because it’s people. And ultimately, we have to figure out how to navigate the internet in positive ways. And also almost thwart the internet’s effort to make us the product for commerce or for other kinds of purposes. We have to know what we’re up against, and then use it for ways that can be positive. ROBBINS: So, Heidi, and this is a perfect transition to this question—and then I want to turn it over to the group—can we talk a little bit about the downsides, and how much are the communities that you talk to aware of and coming up with strategies to deal with the rise of disinformation and the amount of hatred and alienation that is out there? I mean, the internet is very good for bringing people together but, as Paul alluded to, it’s also really good at spreading hatred and a huge amount of just bad information. CAMPBELL: Well, I think one of the challenges of the internet, and one of the things that’s always praised, is that it’s a space that we can all go to, and we can meet one another and have this global conversation. But internet is still an exclusionary space. It’s exclusive by the kind of technologies that you have and have access to. There are some places even still in this country where there isn’t WiFi access. And so depending where you are, you may think it’s an egalitarian and equal space, but it’s still a (inaudible) space in that perspective. And the other thing, and this is something that scholars found early on, that the internet is a place to build community. But because it’s so vast, in order to tame the space, as it were, people usually gravitate toward like minds. Interfaith work online is actually—like Paul’s—is really hard, because there’s, oh, I want to find all the people who think like me, so that we can have this shared conversation. And so it creates a kind of online tribalism. It doesn’t inherently create diversity. You have to actually design your space and kind of design how you’re going to run your events or your environment to create that. And so obviously, whenever you put people in the same mind, it’s easy to form an echo chamber of just, yeah, yeah, we all believe this. And there’s no external voice of accountability. And so that’s why we’ve seen, especially, whether it be the dark web, or these spaces where antisemitic voices or religious extremists emerge, it’s because, again, they find their tribe. But their tribe may be problematic. And again, while the internet gives us access to a lot of information it’s not like a peer-reviewed journal article where it’s been vetted by four or five people. And I’m always having to teach my students, how do you discern and how do you evaluate the resources that go to it? I can go to a website that looks like a full-on academic journal, but it’s just two or three people’s opinion. And so I think this is the challenge. There’s some innate things the technologies do really well. Like Twitter is really good for spreading information. Facebook is really good for building communities. Instagram is really good for collecting digital stories. But knowing what the technologies do well, as well as what kind of tendencies they can encourage away from communal accountability to an individual preference, is important. ROBBINS: So, Paul, final question by me before I turn it over. Heidi said that the internet was hard for interfaith work. Do you find it harder for interfaith work? Or are you leveraging it particularly well? RAUSCHENBUSH: Sure. I don’t want to put—I would never put words in Heidi’s mouth. I think she said that you have to work against some currents of the internet, which algorithmically encourage you to stay with people who are likeminded. And so I do think it takes intention. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not possible. I do think that what we also are up against as far as interfaith is intentional spread of disinformation about different religious communities, as well as the spread of hate. Intentional targeted spread of hate—37 percent of Jews say they feel harassed online. We’ve got close to that of Muslims, other traditions as well. These are things that are happening now, and they’re happening intentionally. And we have white extremists, largely Christian extremists, who are spreading manifestos. They’re finding the internet. They can share manifestos. They are broadcasting mass murders or either actually live or telling their community right before they do it. And they’re being supported in that effort. So this is the real downside of it. And so part of my role now at Interfaith Alliance, we put out a report on big tech hate and religious freedom, saying that actually the fact that big tech has not found a way to counteract hate in a productive way that safeguards freedom of speech actually curtails religious freedom, because religious freedom is both an online and an offline experience. And right now we are, again, experiencing something where there’s a case in front of the Supreme Court. And five justices said, I don’t understand the facts of this case. It’s so complicated. We’re in a moment, again, where the internet is such a very difficult thing that our Supreme Court justices are confused about the basic facts around the case. So we are in a very—one thing to remember, and Kevin Kelly has said this, the founder of Wired, that we’re in the beginning of this technology. This isn’t going to end. We’re in the very beginning of it. We’re in the throes of this technology. So if we haven’t figured it out yet, it’s OK. Now is the time to really lean in and say, what do we want this to be? And things are happening very fast. And so I encourage us to take it really seriously, especially in the interfaith community where you can do all the offline work you want, but one bad Facebook post because someone hasn’t thought about it can blow up six months of work. And so I just encourage anyone who does interfaith work to take the internet very seriously and train people up on how to be good interfaith citizens online as well as how we train people to be engaged in person. ROBBINS: Thank you for that. So we want to remind everybody about how to ask a question. And while we’re doing that also, we do have one question already in the Q&A. So I will turn it over to our operator host to remind people how to ask a question. OPERATOR: Great. Thank you, Carla. (Gives queuing instructions.) And we have some raised hands, so our first question will come from Don Frew from Covenant of the Goddess. ROBBINS: Thanks, Riki. FREW: Lower hand. There we go. Hi, hi. I’m Don Frew at the Covenant of the Goddess. And my own path, Wicca, was very much an early adopter of technology. A lot of the early religious webpages were Pagan. And then, conversely, with the pandemic, that really hit us a lot harder than a lot of other religious traditions, because when you’re casting a circle it’s not the same thing as going to a church. You can’t really do that online. Working magic online is not something that works very well. Both of you have focused very much on the internet and Abrahamic faiths, but what about the online experience of other religions, especially indigenous traditions? For many years, I served on the board of the United Religions Initiative. And we would go out of our way to try to connect board members, especially who were indigenous practitioners often in South America, to the board. And that meant getting them technology, laptops, and internet connection. And once that connection was over, we found that that then became a platform for various indigenous spirituality practitioners around the world to be able to connect using the technology that the URI had provided. So there’s been a real growth in indigenous networking using that kind of technology. Although, that hasn’t really been practicing the faith traditions online. That’s just been networking. So I’m wondering, can you say something about technology and non-Abrahamic faiths? CAMPBELL: Yeah. I mean, I remember back in the 1990s, I spent a lot a good deal of time in a techno-Pagan community. And this was in the 1996 to 1999 time period. And here these were people that kind of—where you had affiliations to Paganism in different kind of forms. And they wanted to see how could the internet, first of all, give them a community space because Abrahamic traditions, it’s easy to find an offline space to gather. It’s not so easy, especially if you live maybe in a more remote area of the world or community. So the internet became this great gathering space for Zoroastrianism, with all kinds of religious traditions. But also there was kind of a tension within some of those communities of like, OK, do we—again, do we just transfer our traditional practices to the extent we can or we feel we can online and try to go by a certain kind of tradition or dogma? Or do we try to innovate? In this techno-Paganism community I was studying, they were interested in saying, OK, how can we leverage what technology allows us to do and maybe create new ways to do spells and see if they work or not. And so I think that a lot of the early adopters were, again, smaller religious communities that didn’t have these offline spaces and allowed people to connect with them, but also there was just a sense of, do they follow the tradition or do they innovate. And we see both kind of digitally born religions as well as kind of reimagined forms of religious traditions as much as we’ve seen alternative or smaller minority religious communities emerging online. RAUSHENBUSH: I’ll just add, I think it’s really important for indigenous communities because of the importance of place and the land, and to make their own decisions around this as well as Pagan communities. And those that the question of whether or not ten Jews online is a minyan is very analogous to whether you can create a circle or these are questions that have to be developed by the communities themselves and they will be answered one way or the other. But the question of land and religion that indigenous communities often bring into the—is a really, really challenging one for the internet. ROBBINS: Riki, can we have Daniel Joranko next? Because he had his question in the Q&A. Daniel, do you want to ask your question? JORANKO: Yeah. Can you hear? ROBBINS: Yes. JORANKO: I’m putting out kind of a difficult question. But I worry very much about the internet. I mean, as Paul said, it’s this vast new thing and there’s a difference between technology as a tool, and a tool can very much work, and as a system, and I worry about the system and the amount of screen time that people are spending, the amount of emotional distress young people feel. As a person who works in interface staffing, just the busyness that is cause for people that are working in this field. People just seem more and more busy because you can get online and schedule thousands of meetings and there’s not a lot of reflectivity as much anymore. And so I almost worry that it’s making us collectively ill in a certain respect, and just your thoughts on that. I mean, again, I’m not proclaiming that. It’s more of a worry. So— CAMPBELL: Well, I like to think of the internet not just as a one village but actually this whole kind of new country, because the internet, we use it as this monolithic term. But I, as a researcher, think about it as internets. Everybody’s experience with the internet is different because it’s a network of networks and we choose which platforms that we spend time in and we choose which spaces that we have our interactions. So I could go to one space and just because of the—how I choose to—who I choose to interact with and the choices I make it can be a very positive experience and I can go to other places and it can be damaging and hurtful and dangerous. So I think the key thing is for religious communities to get a better sense about what are these spaces of the internet, and what spaces can be really, well, what I call cultured or cultivated to religious communities because it allows them to do those values of you building religious identity, giving accountability, providing community and care. And then also being aware of these are the spaces that you could happen into that may not be positive spaces. And I don’t mean to say let’s create ghettos on the internet, but it’s just a sense of awareness that it’s not just the internet that is problematic or system. It’s the people and I think sometimes we can see it just as a tool and it’s a neutral thing. But the technology is cultured by the people who live there and for the purposes that they use it for, and so we need to see that it’s the users that are actually bringing the negativity and the problematic, not the technology itself. They do encourage, again, more individualistic behaviors rather than communal, which is one of the challenges. But having this level of discernment and understanding about what these spaces are and how to use them is, I think, important. ROBBINS: Doesn’t it seem to be that religious communities can play a role if they are educated enough and not—don’t sound too nannying and actually educating kids on how to use the best and not fall into the worst? CAMPBELL: Yeah. I think that it’s important for religious communities to have a digital literacy kind of thing. We tell them how behave and what it means to live out our faith values in different spaces. Well, how do you live that out online, to treat the other as a friend rather than an enemy, and to show care and concern, and to call—speak truth to power as well. So I think, yeah, these are the things that—maybe education isn’t something that’s being seen as part of religious communities, but it’s the world they swim in, and especially for young people. And I think more seminaries, more religious institutions, need to have this digital literacy and digital understanding, not just the technical side but the cultural impacts in their training of future religious leaders. RAUSHENBUSH: Strongly agree. I’ll just say we assume that people understand the internet, especially digital natives, but the internet is hard to understand and it’s always changing. And so it is really important that we don’t assume that people understand the waters they’re swimming in but also recognize that water can be life giving but it can also overwhelm you. And so you need to really be thinking about how you’re interacting with the internet. But, it’s becoming less and less of an option. I mean, it might be a forced option for people who do not have access. But for those of us who are in urban areas it’s not an option and so it means that we—exactly as Heidi just said. We need to be very intentional about the way we show up. We need to tell our young people about disinhibition where you are more likely to do things online that you wouldn’t do offline and that’s because the technology affects us in a certain way, and, again, we’re at the beginning and there’s a lot of stuff that will be coming at us very quickly. One thing—I’ll just take the liberty to mention right now—the one thing that I’m very concerned about is AI and religious leadership. And someone is going to create—we asked—when I—this was ten years ago when I was at Huffington Post. We asked Siri about God, and at that point Siri said: I don’t talk about God; you should ask a human. Pretty soon we will probably have AI pastors. We’ll have AI rabbis. These will be invented. Someone will decide to invent it, and then AI pastors and AI rabbis will learn from the questions. They’ll have this vast library at their background. And so it’ll—this all will happen. How do we educate our young people about what that means and when they’re—my kids ask our Alexa, which we finally got this year, they ask them everything. They ask them everything. And so, people are going to ask about religious questions and we’re not ready for it. We’re not ready for it at all. ROBBINS: AI gods. Yes. So I suppose Lawrence Whitney is next. I’m taking Riki’s prerogative here. WHITNEY: Hi. Yeah. Thanks. Larry Whitney, research associate at the National Museum of American History and postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Mind and Culture here in Boston. Thinking about, historically, the invention of the printing press was a technology that had a profound impact on the future of religion, particularly in Europe and then globally, and transformed religion profoundly and provoked a lot of the same theological question—or analogous theological questions, I should say, to what the internet does, in terms of in that case it was about the meaning of text, and who was responsible and authoritative in interpreting texts and that sort of thing. And the answers to those questions as they emerged in history were, largely, independent of the individual answers that religious leaders and theologians gave to those questions at the time. So I’m interested in how you’re seeing religious leaders now responding to these theological questions, such as are ten Jews on the internet a minyan, or are baptism and Eucharist valid when performed over Zoom, right. Wrestling with those questions not just theologically but as having a profound implication for the future of their traditions. What decisions they make in answer to those questions now will have an influence on how their traditions—the viability of their traditions and how they evolve but also that that future is somewhat beyond their control and how that impacts their decision making about engaging with technology. Thanks. CAMPBELL: Yeah. I think in many respects with the internet we forget that that we’ve been here before. There is really nothing new under the sun because you can map the debates about positive and negatively about the internet from the 1990s directly on to the debates that were happening around the printing press. And it’s interesting, if you look actually back, the Catholic Church was not against the printing press when it first came out. They actually were very supportive, brainstorming about how they were going to be able to standardize priest education and sharing their teachings. And it wasn’t until basically people began to use it to critique the church that they went ah, oh, this—actually technology undermines our authority. And that’s really the base kind of thing for religious communities. They realize that with this smartphone I can do what you could do in a television studio fifty years ago. So individuals have become as powerful as religious institutions. So we see the internet is both challenging religious authorities because individuals have this ability to present themselves, but as religious authorities and groups become more literate there’s been a huge trend in the last decade to bring on not just communication directors but digital media directors, social media curators for religious groups, that then they say how they can actually use the internet to solidify their position and also be more of a kind of accountability or a critique of some of the narratives that are coming out. So I think religious communities, they don’t have to feel disempowered but they do need to say about having that digital expertise and bringing in digital create—what I call digital creatives and think of them as a partner and a collaborator rather than as a competition. And I think as groups begin to do that that we’re going to see a lot more creativity and fruitfulness come out of religious groups’ uses of technology. RAUSHENBUSH: The only thing I’ll add is I think that it is analogous but it is times a million or maybe infinity. The questions are the same. The pace is radically different. The scope is radically different. How quickly everyone has the ability to publish and be an authority, how communities were ruptured. These are all things that are happening much, much quicker and with much less time for traditional religious authorities to react. And the other thing that just was not a part of this is the AI factor, which is, the advent of artificial intelligence and what it means for religion, and how there’s just a different level of ability for truth to be chopped up in so many different ways and digested by machines that are not thinking with trained theological hearts or anything but aside from technology. So I do think the questions are similar and the pace is greatly—I mean, I can do something—while we’re talking here I could write something absolutely inflammatory or outrageous. I could threaten to—which I would never do but, people threaten to burn a Quran and all of a sudden immediately, within a minute, the world knows. The scope of that happens so fast. It flies around the world, and then things get initiated that are very hard to pull back in. And so we’re dealing with a question of factors of time and space that are greatly exaggerated and we have to keep that in mind as we imagine what religious communities can and should do, all of which are what Heidi mentioned. CAMPBELL: I would just jump in here to say I would totally agree that we have seen a total amplification in the time/space area, that while these things are not new it is a lot quicker and it can have much more of a global impact. And one individual can have a huge impact, which can give a disproportionate sense of how people think on a certain topic. So and I think it’s important. And there were chatbots back in the 1990s. I remember talking with them on MIRC before there was chat forums. But they were programmed and they had much more limitations. This new level of technology is a learning technology so it is actually growing. So no longer do the creators have control. So while the first generation was a competition between the individuals versus the community, now it’s the whole community in competition with the technology. So we’ve lost control to some extent of our own creations and that can have— RAUSHENBUSH: That’s what will be so interesting when that gets mixed in with religion and what will be the impact of that when that technology begins to intersect with religious morality and religious truth? ROBBINS: Interesting and terrifying. Jane Redmont? Whatever question you’d like to ask. REDMONT: One of the things I wanted to bring up is the issue of spiritual formation. Not spiritual formation on the internet, although some of us are doing that, but spiritual formation just like higher education or lower education, taking into account the new technologies and forming us spiritually as bodies, as minds, as users of the web in different ways. I think spiritual formation can take a whole different dimension. We need to learn inward disciplines as well as outward ones, both in the flesh and on the internet, that are, if you will, spiritual exercises the way Ignatius of Loyola had spiritual exercises, but the new version, a kind of hybrid version. Am I making sense to you? I’ve started doing that and working on that a little bit. But I don’t think we’re talking about that enough or doing it enough in our organizations. Never mind religious literacy, which I found we had too little of when I was a college professor. Any thoughts on that, Paul and Heidi and Carla, about this formation idea? And if you have a better word than spiritual formation please use it because it’s a narrow word. CAMPBELL: Well, since you referenced the Episcopal tradition, there’s a huge movement within the Episcopal Church coming out of Virginia Theological Seminary. They have e-Formations, and the one thing I really appreciate about that is a lot of what we’ve seen that’s come out of the pandemic is how do we leverage these tools for doing spiritual direction. I’m a spiritual director myself and I’ve been actually doing online direction since the very beginning. It wasn’t common till about three years ago. But we also need to think about not just how to leverage these technologies to create these sacred spaces or holy spaces but how is the shape of this culture that we’re in, what kind of traits and values is it cultivating in us, and how is that shaping our formation just by being in a digital space. And I think the realization, even for churches that say, hey, we don’t want to do digital worship, we don’t want to have digital tools, but they’re still being impacted by this culture that we live in, which is so enmeshed with the digital. And I think that level of values, education, mixed with digital literacy is so important to be what kind of spiritual beings are we becoming and is that the direction that we really want to cultivate in our communities. ROBBINS: That’s great. Thank you. I am not an expert on this but it seems to me that no one can wall themselves off from it and I think, Heidi, that’s sort of a fundamental point that is shaping our entire society. And if religion isn’t going to help and we in education aren’t going to help people wrestle with it, we are failing in our duties. Steve—is an Ohnsman? OHNSMAN: Yes, it is. Thank you. I’m a pastor at Calvary United Church of Christ in Reading, Pennsylvania, and we embraced a digital ministry immediately. We had already been doing some of it. So we did everything online for a while. But one of the big questions was: How do we do good works as a community of faith? And so I came up with this—I think it’s worked out really well because we have people all over the country who will tune in and be involved. And every two weeks I throw out a mission challenge and I ask everyone to do this wherever they are and then send me what they’ve done and then we post it anonymously. So and so, a person did this, this, this, this, and then what we’re basically doing—I’ll say, feed a family in the next two weeks and then everybody feeds somebody where they are, whether it’s through a food bank or a church program, and we’re doing the ministry together even though we’re really far apart and that’s been very cool. RAUSHENBUSH: Yeah. I’ll just respond to that because  I raised the question of commitment to locality and I think that that’s really interesting for those communities that are disparate to recognize that there’s still a need for immediate service. One other way to add to that would be how have you extended love on the internet. How have you shown someone love, or lack of judgment, or uplifted someone? When you come across a stranger how have you loved this stranger? I mean, using some of the Christian language. That could be translated to other communities, what are ways that the mandates of our traditions—ethical mandates—can be translated into life online? I mean, on average each of us spend eight hours a day online in various ways, three or four on social media. For young people, it’s much more than that. That’s the average of all Americans. So we’re spending all this time in online spaces. How are we exercising the mandates of our traditions. ROBBINS: I had wondered about how you bridge this, the online and the real world community—I’m still thinking of virtual communities as not as real—and what Steve Ohnsman was talking about is one fabulous way of doing that. Are there other examples of ways to—because you both began talking about the danger of losing contact with the community around you. Have you guys heard of other ways that the churches and other religious groups are finding ways of making sure that their communities remain intact or even grow even as they, perhaps, have services or Bible study solely online? CAMPBELL: I’ve seen a lot of interesting examples over the pandemic. I know that some congregations, I’ve heard them encouraging their people to get onto the Nextdoor app, which is about being in your local community and then to volunteer. Say, hey, I will pick up medicine for you or food or I can do this or that. And so really especially trying to help people who were homebound, elderly people during the pandemic, and using the digital tools to provide those connections. I also saw a lot of people, in  the Pinterest and Instagram community, people making a lot of very personal kind of encouragement posts and then sending them to specific people that either that they knew or had met online. But really trying to say how can we spread kindness and care, and so that’s what religion is truly about and not just some of the kind of more negative press that it’s often given. ROBBINS: Thanks. Riki, we have, I think, one more. OPERATOR: We do. Our last question will come from Albert Celoza from Phoenix College. CELOZA: This is Alberto Celoza from Arizona Interfaith Movement and Phoenix College. Is it the internet or is it the pandemic that has caused a decline in terms of religious participation or participation in religious services? Also, has the internet caused the increase in the number of nones, N-O-N-E-S? Any thoughts? CAMPBELL: I would say no, that it hasn’t—again, it’s kind of like the technology. It hasn’t started it. It’s just made it more visible and maybe made it more easy for people to leave their congregations. The rise of the nones was starting to be documented post World War II. After the big world wars, a lot of people were disillusioned with all kinds of institutions, and so we see that. But I think in an era of the internet where it allows you to express your opinion in the safety of behind the screen, I think a lot more people are feeling, hey, there are a lot of us that are nones out there or that we’re wanting to leave the church and so we’re done. And so it’s easy to—easier to self-proclaim that. It gives them more confidence to do that on surveys. And so, obviously, we have seen an increase but it wasn’t the internet that started it. It’s just facilitated something that’s already started in culture. That’s my opinion. RAUSHENBUSH: No, I think that’s right. I think that these were trends that were already in play before the internet and it has allowed, just as Heidi said. I think that there’s also ways that there are new communities forming that could be viewed as quasi-religious communities and many of the folks who have left traditional religion would not be themselves—do not call themselves atheists or other things. They find community in social justice movements. They find community in other—in arts movements. They find—so there is ways that—are ways that the internet has actually found—allowed people to find one another. Black Lives Matter could be an example of a movement that attracted a lot of people who might have not been involved in traditional religious worship. I think there’s a—there is a transformation and it’s—I really appreciate where that question is coming from and what we might imagine is what’s coming next and what are ways to—especially for someone like yourself who’s involved in interfaith work, how do we invite those people into questions of interfaith, questions that interfaith communities deal with, around meaning, around working together across lines of difference for social change and things like that. So I think all of those things are very, very interesting. I’ll just take a moment just to say one thing because we’re at CFR. I do think that there’s a massive implication for the internet and for religion vis-à-vis trans-global politics. These are—this is a way that religious communities are connected, so many different manifestations of religious communities across national boundaries immediately and in very intimate ways. Diaspora goes all different ways and religious communities are being mobilized across the globe. What happens, for instance, in India is not separated from the Indian community in America, or the Hindu community in America and other Indian religious communities in America. Likewise with Israel, Palestine, likewise with the war in Russia and the Orthodox Church in Ukraine. So I offer that just as a closing word that this is very relevant for CFR’s work, and so I’m hoping that there are also opportunities in the future to talk about specifically how it impacts foreign relations and international relations. ROBBINS: And also gives a voice to the voiceless and the—(inaudible)—if you look at what’s happening in Iran right now, the way it has— RAUSHENBUSH: Absolutely. ROBBINS: —given voice to women and to young people and, certainly, for unrepresented and suppressed communities—minority communities, religious communities. So not all is bad on the internet. There are other possibilities there. I want to thank you. We’re going to turn it back to Irina. I want to thank you, Dr. Heidi Campbell. Thank you, Reverend Paul Brandeis Raushenbush. We will share—Paul, you mentioned a report that you have just developed. We want to share that with everyone who’s attended today. Heidi, if there’s anything you think we should be reading and sharing we will share it with the group as well. And, Irina, back to you and thank you, everybody, for fabulous questions. FASKIANOS: I echo those thanks. It was a very smart and insightful conversation. So thank you. We will send the link to the video and transcript and Paul’s report. Heidi, anything you want to share. You can follow Heidi Campbell on Twitter at @heidiacampbell, Paul at @raushenbush, and you can follow Carla at @robbinscarla, and Carla is also newly co-hosting a CFR podcast The World Next Week. So you should tune into that. You can also follow us, CFR’s Religion and Foreign Policy program, on Twitter at @CFR_religion. And, again, please do email us, [email protected], with feedback, suggestions for topics or speakers, and any questions you might have. Again, thank you all for doing this, for the amazing questions and comments, and we hope you all have a great rest of the day wherever you are.

Matthias Matthijs, senior fellow for Europe at CFR, discusses U.S.-EU relations and diplomacy in conversation with Mark D.W. Edington, bishop in charge of the Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe. Learn more about CFR's Religion and Foreign Policy Program.   FASKIANOS: Welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations Religion and Foreign Policy Webinar Series. This series convenes religion and faith-based leaders in cross-denominational dialogue on the intersection between religion and international relations. I am Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach here at CFR. As a reminder, this webinar is on the record and the audio, video, and transcript will be available on CFR’s website, CFR.org, and on the iTunes podcast channel, Religion and Foreign Policy. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. We are delighted to have Mark Edington with us today to moderate today’s discussion on “The Dynamics of the European Union.” Bishop Edington is charge of the Convocation of the Episcopal Churches in Europe. He has worked as an ordained Episcopal Priest, a higher education executive, social entrepreneur, writer, and editor. As a member of the founding board of three NGOs, Bishop Edington has a deep commitment to civic engagement with foreign policy and interfaith engagement in both dialogue and service. He writes frequently on issues at the intersection of public policy and religion, and has studied European integration and post-Cold War European security, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. So I’m going to turn the conversation now over to Bishop Edington to introduce our speaker and stimulate the conversation before we go to all of you for your questions and comments. So, Bishop Edington, over to you. EDINGTON: Thank you so much, Irina. And welcome, everybody. Whatever time zone it is where you are, you are in the right place at the right time for a conversation about the future of the European Union. And I am delighted and a little bit intimidated to welcome as our speaker Professor Matthias Matthijs from the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins. That is a thing to admire, and I say that as a proud graduate of the Fletcher School, Matthias. So I’m delighted that you’re here with us. We have a lot to cover, Matthias. We’ve been given a very expansive, not to say vividly vague, title to cover today, which is “The Dynamics of the European Union.” I know that you teach courses on comparative political economy and an advanced seminar on topics in international political economy, and you’re doing work all the time on the subject of the European Union. For those of us who are joining us online, if you’re looking for an advanced seminar on the current and future of the European Union, you couldn’t do much better than to simply read Matthias’s recent essays in Foreign Affairs, because they have really covered a lot of the essential questions that I think we’re going to raise today. So, Matthias, I’ve got three specific questions I want to ask you, but before I get to them I want to ask you to set the table for us. There are a lot of forces shaping the dynamics of the European Union today. We know about the war in Ukraine, but it really points to a larger question about the future of territorial integrity in Europe. We’ve learned about energy dependence in Europe, and we’re thinking about what that means for the future of Europe’s economies. We now have this new topic of the Windsor Framework, which seems to maybe be the end of the end of the Brexit story. And I know something that you care a lot about is the elite consensus, or lack of consensus, about what direction European integration should head in in the future. So with all that on the table, tell us what you think are the principal forces shaping the dynamics of the European Union for the foreseeable future. MATTHIJS: Thank you, Mark. And thank you, Irina. It’s a pleasure to join this CFR series on Religion and Foreign Policy, and international relations. So thanks for this opening question. You’re always at a risk by starting out by saying that we kind of live at a watershed moment in European integration, because I feel like there’s been so many of those perceived moments in just my own lifetime. And history does seem to be moving very fast occasionally. And I think the last year or two, that’s definitely been the case. That said, I think to understand the dynamics of the European Union, as our brief for today, I mean, you kind of start with where it started. So I think it started very much as this political peace project, with American support, that was hoping to make war between France and Germany, these two mortal enemies, historical enemies on the European continent, who had three wars over the period of seventy years, between 1870 and 1945, and of course two had then led to world wars, and were always at the heart of this conflict. And so you have to start by kind of looking back and seeing what an extraordinary achievement that was, right? I mean, it is very hard to imagine today war between those two breaking out again, even though, of course, they have very bitter differences occasionally on matters of policy. So why is this invasion of Ukraine so important for today and for the European Union? Because it does go against this whole idea of the EU as a peace project, right? One of the first NATO secretary-generals was Lord Ismay, a UK diplomat. And he was asked, famously, what NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, was for. And he said, it’s to keep the Americans in, the Germans down, and the Russians out. So sort of the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down. I think the German down was the last one. And so in many ways, what it didn’t succeed in was all of this. I mean, in the end, the Americans have been trying to leave first the Middle East then, of course, Europe. I’m old enough to remember any kind of pivots to Asia as the defining agenda for American administrations. It started actually with the first Clinton administration in the early 1990s already, right, where they wanted to focus much more on Asia, and then, of course, were dragged back into Europe because of the Balkan wars. Then the Bush administration, who wanted to focus much more on China, and then 9/11 happened. A brief reset under Obama, but he wanted to do and he started doing the pivot to Asia. And then, of course, Trump tried to do the same thing. So we’re now in the midst of this conflict where, for better or worse, American policymakers find themselves drawn back into the European theater, very much against their will, in a way, even though this administration, the Biden administration, in many ways, has a team that can rise to the occasion, right? So we can talk about that part. So going back to the European Union, I think what people have rightly been worried about is that it was seen as a project adrift, right? And so if you look at the last fifteen years, roughly starting exactly fifteen years ago. I mean, the spring of 2008, after the failed attempt to have a constitution for Europe, which was rejected first by French voters and then by Dutch voters, that seemed to be the biggest crisis at the time—which, in hindsight, seemed like a storm in a—a tempest in a teapot, as our British colleagues would put it. We’ve had one crisis after another. The Eurozone crisis, the debt crisis of 2010-2012. Migration crisis. Crises over—of course, the first crisis over Ukraine in 2014, over Crimea and over the Donbas, with a very, in hindsight, tame response, even though there were sanctions then as well. Struggles with democracy and populism, just like here, with Hungary, with Poland, with countries that were kind of on an illiberal track. And then, of course, the pandemic, right? And so it has been kind of extraordinary, I think, that in the last few years slowly a new elite consensus—and, of course, I forgot Brexit, right? The vote to leave the European Union by the UK, which was completed by 2020-2021. So what I think has been extraordinary in the last few years is that there is a new emerging consensus around more EU sovereignty, more EU strategic autonomy that’s emerging. The problem with the concept is that it’s vague. It’s ill-defined. And it means different things to different elites in different countries in the EU. It means different things to the Poles, to the Spaniards in Madrid, to the French in Paris, to the Germans in Berlin. And elites interpret these things differently. That said, it could be a glue that brings the EU elites closer together around this. So the idea from the pandemic that there needs to be more EU solidarity. And they set up a kind of massive fund, which is basically richer countries supporting poorer countries in their recovery from the pandemic. There’s been a lot of solidarity with Ukraine when it comes to military support, when it comes to sanctions. And even there, despite Orbán’s sometimes huffing and puffing, they’ve moved forward with American support. And I think American leadership has been key here. And in a way, the fact that the United Kingdom has left, for better or worse, probably for worse definitely on the UK side but also from the EU side because it makes the EU less influential. That’s undoubtedly the case. But it does make finding consensus easier within the European Union context. And so it’s held together. You could say it’s stronger. The European Commission, which is the executive arm of the European Union, was seen to have lost out to the European Council, which represents the heads of state or government from the EU. That was ten years ago. Now it’s very clear that the Commission can act. They can do a lot of things. They can finance weapons to be send to war zones. They can issue debt. They can do sanctions, right? They can use the EU market as a strategic tool in promoting human rights and its own democratic values. And also, it’s clearly still a haven for refugees and migrants because a lot of people want to come to Europe and want to reach these shores. But it’s also raising issues on how they govern this space together. So a lot to cover there, Mark. Happy to go in the direction you want to take me. Despite all the crises of the last ten years, where it did sometimes seem that the fabric of the EU was unraveling, whether it was over the euro, over migrants, or over Brexit, it’s kept together. And arguably, it’s emerged a lot stronger and a more unitary actor as a result. EDINGTON: That’s a great start. So thank you for that. We’ve got eight minutes remaining before we open for questions. And both you and I have seen the list of participants, so we know there are going to be questions. What I’m going to do is collapse two of my three questions into one, and then I’ll have one question for you at the end. The two questions that I’m collapsing into one: You talked about how the European economic area, as it first was under the Treaty of Rome, was a project to assure peace between France and Germany. So let’s talk about France and Germany. Let’s talk about Olaf Scholz’s Zeitenwende, which you’ve written about. And you’ve been pretty sanguine about how Chancellor Scholz has managed that transition in Germany’s thinking about its role in Europe and the world. Maybe a little more sanguine than, let’s say, the Economist, which has sort of seen him as speaking a lot but not delivering greatly on especially spending in Germany about defense, and providing materiel to Ukraine. So address that, if you would. And also, address President Macron’s dreams of sort of independent and autonomous Europe on matters of security and defense, which kind of ended, most hilariously, with Macron at the end of an extremely long table kind of alone and facing down President Putin. Not even in France, where I live, would you have many commentators who feel Macron’s been successful in his objective, but I think it’s still very real for him. I think he still has that view. So give us your sense right now of Germany, and France, and their ways of playing into the future that’s emerging in Europe. MATTHIJS: Yeah. These are excellent questions. They’re hard questions. So let’s start with Germany, right? For somebody who’s been a student of Germany and German politics for over twenty years, I judge what Germany and Scholz, and the Scholz administration, has done by what the realistic alternatives were, not by what some idealized version of a German response would have looked like, right? Which, the idealized version is they cut themselves off completely from Russian energy on day one of the war, they spend massive amounts in defense and build up their own military at record speed, and then at the same time, every single potential weapon that they have lying around they send to Ukraine. I mean, here is a country that has a deeply pacifist tradition. The two leading parties in this government, the Greens and the SPD, have long traditions of pacifism for the Greens, and of probably a romanticized version of Ostpolitik, the opening to the east, to the Soviet Union, that Willy Brandt started in the late 1960s—early 1970s. And honestly, even in 2017 they were still very much talking about the 2 percent defense ratio that NATO is imposing is ridiculous. These were some of the language that they were using. I have been very critical of Germany in previous pieces, especially during the Merkel era where they were too dependent on Russian energy. Somewhat naïve, right? Always putting economic interests before their own values, and so on. So by any of those standards, I think they’ve moved remarkably fast. Was some of it forced their hand by Putin cutting off gas? Absolutely. And oil. But nobody asked them to spend an extra 100 billion euros on defense. Where it actually is going to go and in reality that remains to be seen. I think when it comes to defense don’t be surprised that decades to hoping to keep Germany down—(laughs)—are now going to take a while to make Germany a kind of real actor in defense policy, right? That said, I think if they’re in the corner—and Germans are slow to do this, but once they do, the ship has turned. I think Zeitenwende is real, even though Scholz absolutely has a communications problem. When it comes to Macron, I agree with you. In the end it’s been very ham-fisted, the French approach to Eastern Europeans, especially Poland and the Baltics. They almost can’t help themselves. But it reminds me of Chirac’s famous line during the Iraq War, where he said over the Polish and Eastern European support for George Bush at the time that they missed a very good opportunity to shut up because they weren’t members of the EU yet and they should know their place, and so on. And Eastern Europeans have always felt this, sort of an almost second-class citizenship, the way the French treated them. And I think that was a mistake then. And I think many of us, and I include myself in this, in Western Europe, never took the obsession that Poland and the Baltics had with Russia seriously enough, right, because it clearly wasn’t something emotional. It was something very, very real. And so that said, is there an alternative for European strategic autonomy? I don’t think so. I mean, in the end we will be in a world where the Americans want the EU to be a more reliable actor. The Europeans should want to be a more reliable actor because they may not always be able to rely on the United States. And in the end, when it comes to dealing with China, when it comes to dealing with Russia and other things, there are so many things that since the EU is shrinking as a percentage of global GDP, of the global world population, they’re going to have to act in concert on. EDINGTON: OK. The last question I’m going to ask you, just before we open it up to questions, has to do with refugees, which you spoke about in your initial remarks. And I was really glad to hear you speak about them. So a little bit about what I do in Europe. I’m responsible for twenty-one different communities that are spread throughout Europe that right now are twenty-one refugee service communities. It’s what they’re doing. A little more than a year ago, there were 7.7 million refugees in the European space. And that was an issue of itself, with lots of people writing about it. The world of Angela Merkel and opening the doors of Germany to serve refugees and welcome them. And there was this sort of pushback politically about that. And we can say that one of the consequences of that has been a rise of anti-Islamic sentiment, Christian nationalism, various other things that are distasteful, at least. Now there are almost 15.8 million refugees in the European space, largely driven by this miserable war in Ukraine. They are very different refugees from the 2014-2015 wave of refugees that came into Europe. They are largely Christian. They are largely women. They are easily trafficked, which is an issue. And they, unlike the first wave of refugees, have a fairly easy ability of moving back and forth from the places where they’ve been received as refugees, back to where they’ve come from. And realizing that economies have been destroyed and cities have been destroyed. And so there’s this movement back and forth that we see in the work that we do. One of the weird failures, to me, of European integration is the lack of a European-wide capacity for charitable work. There is no European way of forming a charitable entity. That is still a nationalized problem. So my question for you is, how do you see the refugee moment that we’re living in, with this large number of refugees in Europe, shaping the political economy of the European Union in the future? How do you see it driving local politics, especially around the rise of the right? And what do you think are the options available to European states seeking to manage this problem? MATTHIJS: Yeah, you’ve saved the best for last, if you will, because any question of refugees, migration, by definition there’s no easy answers, right? This is a problem that any rich—and especially Western countries—will struggle with. It’s a massive problem for any administration in the United States. Part of the reason I think many of us have seen these kind of global surveys that were done by how the U.S., China, and Russia are perceived in the rest of the world since the beginning of the Ukraine war. I think what’s kind of to be expected was that when it came to the developed world, to developed countries, mostly Western countries, the image of the U.S. had improved, and the images of China and Russia had deteriorated, and Russia quite dramatically. I think that’s fairly normal, to be expected. What is, I think, more surprising is that the exact opposite had happened in the rest of the world In the developing world, in the Global South, for lack of a better term, first of all, they don’t see this as a conflict that’s theirs. They see it as white people fighting white people in Europe. Nothing new there, especially if you look at recent history. By recent history, I mean the last 200 years. And they also see the immense solidarity with Ukrainian refugees. And they immediately contrast this with non-Western, non-white, non-Christian refugees back in 2015. With the exception, of course, of Germany, that kind of under Merkel took this extraordinary gamble to integrate well over a million Syrian refugees, who were mostly male, mostly young, and, of course, mostly Muslim. And many of them kind of low-skilled, or with not a ton of education. And that’s been a great success story, which I think has been underreported. The German story of integrating Syrian and other young Middle Eastern refugees has been amazing. There’s been a lack of violence. That’s kind of the dog that never barked, in many ways. And I think people who are in favor of this policy are even surprised by this, who downplayed these threats. EDINGTON: That’s true. MATTHIJS: When it comes to refugees from Ukraine, you’re absolutely right. The EU doesn’t have a way to set up an EU-wide charity and to organize this. This remains a national issue, which is hard because given geography there are states that are on the receiving end of a lot of immigrants, Southern Europe and Eastern Europe. And then most of these people, many of these people, want to travel on to Western Europe where standards of living are even higher. And that’s where often there’s pressure to bring back internal borders. There’s a reason why the EU hasn’t been able to solve this, because I think many leaders just don’t want to be part of the solution, because it would mean taking in more refugees, which would be hugely unpopular in their own countries. And that’s especially true in Western Europe. And they have in mind this threat of right-wing populists. And this is the last thing I’ll say on this—where Vladimir Putin interestingly plays up this. So that’s where this weird connection between Putin’s rhetoric, nationalist rhetoric, Christian nationalism. I am the last thing that stands between you and us being overrun as a civilization by the Global South, by Muslims, by—and so on. And so you see this in the language of Orbán. Weirdly enough, the Polish leadership talks this stuff. Of course, they vehemently disagree with Russia on the Ukraine issue. But it’s something where many right-wing leaders always found some inspiration, right? Is this kind of protecting of European values—and by which they mean Christian values. EDINGTON: Yeah. Thank you for that. I’m going to apologize to our participants for trespassing on the time they have to ask their questions. And I’m going to ask our colleague Rivka Gross at the Council to moderate the questions for us. Rivka. OPERATOR: Thank you, Bishop Edington. (Gives queuing instructions.) We will take our first question from John Pawlikowski from the Catholic Theological Union. PAWLIKOWSKI: Can you hear me? EDINGTON: Yes. MATTHIJS: Yes. PAWLIKOWSKI: OK. My question is, given the growing secularization of many European countries, do you see any constructive role that religious institutions can play in the further integration and development of the European Union? We tend to concentrate on the negative, with Orbán and others, and Christian nationalism. But is there another side to the religious institutions in Europe at present? MATTHIJS: Mark, can you answer that first, and then I’ll give some thoughts? EDINGTON: Sure. I can make an effort of an answer. So, John, I think it’s a really good question. And what I’d say, living in Europe as I do, and doing the work of a church in Europe, is for lots of reasons of history the place of the church as a source of providing social welfare, let’s say, has been fairly constrained by governments, especially in Western Europe over the past decades. That has to do with a history of, I’d say, frankly, injury on the part of the church to civil society. And also a sort of crisis of confidence of the role of the church in culture in Europe. Having said that, religious communities still play a significant role in providing assistance to refugees and especially to recent arrivals in Europe. And that is certainly true among Islamic communities in Europe, and especially in France, which has the largest Islamic community of any country outside the Islamic world. It’s also true in Germany, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, places where my communities were. There are ways in which communities at the local level provide assistance in terms of language training, job skills training, helping people navigate local refugee systems. So, yeah, there is a positive role. I don’t think, and this is a personal view, that there’s a prospective role for most religious communities in terms of public advocacy or a voice in the public square. That tends to be a source of some suspicion. And remember that I live in France, and I see that from the perspective of somebody who lives in France, where there’s just an allergy to voices that come from a religiously informed perspective. But I think in terms of providing assistance to those in need, yes, there’s very certainly a role for religious communities in the future. MATTHIJS: Yeah, I would agree with everything Mark said. Also, don’t forget that certain parts of Europe, I think especially Southern Europe, that tend to be more traditional, more Catholic or more Orthodox, in the case of Greece, that went through a period of austerity and structural reform where, for better or worse, this is moments when civil society, in this case including church organizations, religious organizations, step in and have provided some of these social services to people. But it’s not just social services, right? There is a great need for spirituality, I think, in some of these countries. The more, I hate to say “traditional,” because it seems like traditional is backward and secular is somehow progressive. And I don’t mean it this way. But in both Eastern and Southern Europe, the role of religious institutions is still stronger because church attendance and things like this are higher, especially in more rural communities and so on. It's harder for me to think of a role for religious institutions in West and Northern Europe, because, again, if I think back of my own childhood in Belgium, when we did our holy communion, in a small town of twenty thousand people, there was about 150 who did their communion. The whole town came out to watch them. The last time I was back there were three, and this was mostly because grandma and grandpa insisted on it. This was not something these kids actually wanted. So it’s changed quite dramatically. That said, there is still a kind of moral authority that comes with this. And clearly, if the EU pushes too much into a secular direction—meaning where there’s no role for spirituality, for religion, the backlash tends to come from more traditional communities and religious communities. Something that then the Euro-skeptic parties tend to play into, because they tend to be the ones that have a bigger role, or at least are more open for a bigger role, for religion the way it was traditionally practiced in these structures in these countries. OPERATOR: Our next question is a written submission from Michael Strmiska from Orange County Community College, who goes back to the issue in Poland. He writes: One of the justifications for the illiberal tendencies in Hungary and Poland is Christian nationalism. Can you say anything about how the EU is responding to this factor? MATTHIJS: Yeah. This is one of the toughest issues that the EU has had to deal with, is the kind of illiberal backsliding—and it’s not just anti-secular, pro-religious, right? I mean, it’s more anti-democratic, anti-rule of law tendencies that, of course, started with Orbán in 2010, but you also saw in Poland with the Law and Justice Party, PiS Party, coming to power in 2015 under the tutelage of Jarosław Kaczyński. So one thing to say that’s, I think, important to understand the strength of both Orbán and Kaczyński and their parties, is that they are social welfare parties, right? They do provide in many ways a lot of services for people who are in need. So it always reminds me of the shock and horror many Westerners, Americans, Western Europeans had when Hamas won the first free elections in the Gaza Strip and did very well in the West Bank back 2006. It's because they were, de facto, the welfare state for many of these people. And were delivering social services. So people were able to set aside illiberal tendencies, violent tendencies, in many ways. So I think that can also be applied to the conflict of Northern Ireland, for example. But so in the case of Hungary and in the case of Poland, the voting public that is attracted by Orbán’s message very much buys into this we want to keep Hungary for the Hungarians. And that means a certain white Christian identity that they want to protect from supposedly what they call the real, anti-Hungarian tendencies coming for the EU. That said, what’s changed in the last few years, and I think where both Orbán and Kaczyński are more on the defensive now, is that the economic climate has worsened. So you have higher inflation, which is true everywhere. True in the U.S. True in the UK, true in the EU. But it's even higher in places like Hungary and Poland. And why? And that’s, in many ways, the ironies of recent history, because they’re not Eurozone members. And so, what was a great strength for Poland and Hungary ten years ago, meaning they weren’t members of the Eurozone. They could devalue vis-à-vis the euro. They were growing faster. They were attracting investment because international investors were worried about Eurozone countries. It’s now the opposite. They’re not protected by the umbrella of the Eurozone and the European Central Bank, which makes them, funnily enough, more reliant on EU funds. So there is this contradiction at the heart of Orbán’s regime and Kaczyński’s regime in Poland, is that they facing higher inflation than the rest of the Eurozone, which means they have to raise their interest rate faster. Which also means that they face pressures, capital outflows, which means they have to protect their currencies, which also means they have to raise interest rates even faster. Which makes it very expensive for them to issue new debt to finance these programs, these welfare programs, that keeps their voting public afloat. So they switch to being reliant on EU funds, which have come in quite significant increases since the pandemic because of next-generation EU, 800-billion-euro fund that was set up to help these economies recover from the pandemic. But these funds come with strings attached. Are you following the rule of law? Are you respecting religious freedom? Are you respecting the separation of powers and the independence of the judiciary, and things like this? So interestingly enough, I think we may have seen the peak of what some of these illiberal regimes are able to achieve within the European Union, now that they have to kind of go along with what Brussels is demanding when it comes to reforms. That said, another side of your question, of course, addresses this discomfort that some people have with the European construction. This was not just an issue for Hungarians under Orbán. This is something Silvio Berlusconi raised when he was prime minister of Italy. Many of his party felt strongly that the EU should stress its Judeo-Christian heritage. Other conservatives in other parts of Europe have always been deeply comfortable with this kind of technocratic progressive discourse of the European Union, and say that it’s just basically creating what was often known as this democratic deficit in the EU, right, is that the EU becomes this regulatory state that manages things very far from people removed, but has real consequences for the day-to-day lives of people. And then the idea is, well, can countries still decide for themselves? That’s where I think the states’ rights discourse in the United States is relevant. I mean, it’s gotten a bad name, a bad rap, if you want, the idea of states’ rights, because it’s often used by very unsavory characters to promote very unpalatable agendas—be it getting rid of science education or things like this, limiting the rights of people, whether it’s Ohio, Alabama, and Texas, or something like this. But that said, the original idea of states’ rights is that even within the United States, with fifty states, there are different preferences of voters. There are different tradeoffs that people are willing to make whether it’s on economic policy, whether it’s on social policy, whether it’s on ethical issues. And a lot of people in EU member states feel the same way. I mean, Poland and Hungary may be more conservative on certain issues, while the Netherlands, Sweden, and Ireland may be much more progressive. These sorts of things should then be decided at a more local or at a more national level. But if the EU is going too far is imposing certain values, this may be a step too far. EDINGTON: I just want to add really quickly a couple of ideas about Christian nationalism, because I think it’s such a powerful question. One is, churches, religious communities, are a lot like political societies, in that they cover a broad spectrum of ideas. And so in the same way that there are some conservative elements of churches, especially in Poland and less so in Hungary, that are happy and supportive of this Christian nationalism thing, there are many voices within churches and religious communities that oppose the idea of Christian nationalism, my own church strongly among them. So don’t fall into the easy trap of thinking that all churches, especially all religious communities, sort of fall into that sort of thoughtless track. Because it is certainly the case that some of the most important voices against those ideas come from within communities of faith. The other thing, you mentioned, Matthias, in your earlier comments about Putin’s use of rhetoric around spirituality. And I think that’s actually really important when you think about popular views of what’s going on in Western Europe, as far as Ukraine goes. I’ve had this strange experience of I would just wade out into protests that I see in the streets of Germany and France. And I talk to people about what do you feel is at stake for you? And one of the things I think Putin has got right, actually, that we struggle to get right, is a language around the idea that what’s happening in Ukraine is about more than just economic arrangements, or political structures, or sort of abstract theory. It’s actually about how we make meaning as citizens in a society. And that is an inherently spiritual conversation, whether we like that word or not. That’s what meaning making is, ultimately. And it is a little worrying to me that in this moment of—Europe is professedly secular. I know. I live there. I have my life there. It is what it is. But we’ve lost our ability to speak in those terms or to articulate that language. And this is ultimately a struggle about how we are to make meaning as citizens in a society. So I hope—I’m a reader of Charles Taylor—I hope that we will find ways of articulating that without feeling that we are caving into—or, sliding back into a kind of confessionally identified politics. So that’s all I’ll say about that. OPERATOR: Our next question comes from Dr. Heather Laird from the Center for Muslim Health and Islamic Psychology. She writes: Students in the U.S. are not regularly exposed to thinkers like Hamann and other conservative scholars, leaving them only exposed to liberal secular thinkers, which sounds like what you are describing is similar in Europe. However, in terms of interfaith experiences in America, we have been able to create bridges to work together. It sounds like you are indicating that this is different or not the case in Europe. Is this correct? What is needed to change this? MATTHIJS: It’s a difficult question. It’s definitely different in Europe in the sense that I see very little interfaith dialogue. I mean, I have lived in the United States myself for twenty years. And in general, I think this is especially true amongst the most educated parts of society, the elites, for lack of a better term, where it’s almost looked down upon if you are too religious. It’s almost an admission of something you need—it’s become very kind of materialistic and so on, right? That said, it’s different for younger generations, right? I feel like younger generations, students especially, are definitely more open to this, right? To interfaith exchanges, to learning honestly about different faiths, whether that’s Islam or that’s Buddhism, Hinduism, broader Christianity, the strands within Christianity, and so on, right? It’s more like the Baby Boom generation that was still very much raised within Christian faith, where this was the pillar of their society—I mean, even when I was growing up, everything was happening around these pillars, right? You either were part of—in Belgium, you were part of a kind of Christian pillar, a socialist pillar, or a liberal pillar. And they had different vacations. They went on different camps together. The whole society, the kind of day-to-day life, was organized around it. Most of that is gone, but it has made younger people much more open to learning about completely different experiences, especially from the immigrant communities. So it seems to me youth culture is much more open to dialogue than I think sometimes we take from older generations. And that’s something that shows up in voting patterns all over Europe, right? I mean, it really is overwhelmingly an older population that votes for these kind of very conservative parties. But when there is a younger population that’s more conservative, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re conservative on the point of view of what religion means for them. But Mark may have more ideas of this. EDINGTON: Matthias, I certainly—I agree with everything you said. In fact, I think at least in France, where I live, there’s a kind of generational shift happening right now in terms of the openness to conversation about the role of faith in individual life, in societal life, in community life. Young people are actually interested in and eager to have those conversations and questions. And I’m sure you know, there’s been some friction within the schools, within educational systems in France, about the legitimacy of those questions in the context of public education. Of course, it used to be the case that in a very secularized France, that the schools could essentially control kinds of information the students were receiving on these matters. And now, in the age of social media, that is completely gone. And so there’s a feeling as though there’s a need to, in some way, respond to this. At the same time, France has had these extremely tragic instances of violence and assassination against public school teachers on matters that were essentially religiously defined. So that tends to stiffen, let’s say, the ability for this discourse to take place. I would agree that I think the interfaith conversation in a European context is less thickened, let’s say, than it is in the United States. At the same time, the ecumenical conversations, or the conversation among churches of the Christian tradition in Europe, is much thicker in Europe than it is in the United States. Most religious traditions in the United States—and here I’m quoting a scholar in my own tradition—are essentially Euro-tribal denominations, right? We brought them with us from Europe. Those have real significance historically, culturally in the context of Europe. And so since the Second World War, especially the formation of the World Council of Churches, the habit of ecumenical conversation has been much deepened, and especially conversations between the Vatican and Protestant traditions matches that description as well. Interfaith relationships are more difficult. And they’re essentially aligned with the issues that we talked about earlier about refugees and the growing population of Islamic folk in Europe. And how that conversation now takes place is, churches like mine are trying to take a leading role in that. But it is difficult to get started, often. OPERATOR: We have no participant questions at this time. Bishop Edington, do you have any further questions? EDINGTON: I do. So I have a question. Matthias, if I can, I’m going to return to an earlier question I had that I wanted to leave aside for our participants to take part in. So I know that you’re interested in what has been described in your bio as the collapse of—or, maybe we might want to say, the erosion of the elite consensus around integration of Europe. Can you say more about that? And do you distinguish between the view of elites and the broader public? Are publics following that trend? Or are they not? A simple thing that I would identify, having first come to Europe many years ago as an undergraduate student and now living there, is the euro. You know, I don’t have to change my money every time I cross a national border right now. And I cannot imagine European publics easily going back to a previous world now that they’ve become used to a single shared currency across national borders. So can you say a little bit about what you’re working on in the case of this consensus? MATTHIJS: Yeah. Yeah, so with collapse of elite consensus, I see the great ten years of consensus on European integration from 1985 to 1995, right? Which also, I think, is often forgotten, was a unique period in history where the Soviet Union was about to end, Germany was about to reunify, the whole world seemed to be moving—and this was the kind of peak of the third wave of democratization. The whole world was moving into a direction of market liberalization, deregulation, and, of course, democratization. China was moving in that direction. Russia was moving in that direction. And so it’s in that moment that Europe agreed on and put in treaties the single market, Single European Act, the euro with Maastricht, and, of course, enlargement, right? So not only was it decided that markets and making markets, creating this kind of more perfect single market—which in the United States we’re nowhere near close to because every state has its own licenses for services. Every state has different standards sometimes, and there’s all kind of protectionist barriers when it comes to public procurement for states, and that you can give priority to your own citizens, and so on. So Europe actually took this way further than the United States ever dreamed on. And this was within a union of sovereign states, not within a federal state like the United States. So that’s for the single market. The single currency, and I agree with you. Most people don’t want to go back to it. But it did take away much of kind of national discretion when it came to monetary policy, exchange rate policy, and financial policy. Where they could give priority to their own banks, and so all these things from a market perspective were great. But from a political perspective, were second-best, because in general, national elites want to control these things because they want to funnel it into certain projects, and so on. And enlargement then meant that this consensus was pushed on to a much more heterogeneous union. So the beauty is, this consensus worked. Late 1990s, early 2000s, all the way into 2008, this seemed to deliver the goods in faster growth. There was convergence in living standards between north and south, between east and west. Until it starts to unravel. And so I see the euro crisis, the refugee crisis, all as kind of symptoms of that previous consensus that was so hard to change, because it was according to treaties that you could only change by unanimity. So the collapse of elite consensus, if you look at the big four, the four G7 countries, I summarize as exit, voice, and loyalty, the way Albert Hirschman described it ages ago in a different context. The UK chose exit. They didn’t want to have anything to do with that project anymore, for better or worse. And we can get into that another time. (Laughs.) The Germans stayed loyal because the status quo was working for them, and they were doing very well by the early 2010s. And then different kinds of voice from Italy and France. France wanted more voice at the EU level. Italy wanted more discretion at the national level. So that, I see as the last crisis. The last ten years of crisis, where basically the four key capitals of European integration, the four G7 countries, all looked in different directions. There wasn’t this national consensus, the way there was, uniquely, in the late 1980s, early 1990s. So I see now, in the last two or three years, a crystallization of a new consensus around resilience, around sustainability, around fighting global warming together. About building up joint defenses together, building more fiscal capacity. And I think it’s easier, because of the exit of the UK. It’s easier because of German loyalty to the previous system, and thanks to the Zeitenwende, is changing rapidly. And in the end, by default, you end with a sort of Franco-Italian compromise, where there is going to be some more discretion on certain things that are important, because different countries want to make different decisions at the national level, and more European solidarity. So we see the kind of the germ, the embryo, if you want, the beginnings of this new consensus around more EU sovereignty that gives more voice to the EU and to the national level at the same time, that kind of in a way responds flexibly to some of these legitimate demands of its—of its people. And so there is hope that makes me partially optimistic about the next decade, because elites seem to be pointing in the same direction. It doesn’t mean they agree on everything. But so that’s how I would see the last decade of crisis, as kind of the limits in this kind of market first, politics second, right? In Foreign Affairs, I’ve called this economics—in the end, put politics before economics. And I think they’re starting to do that again, as the previous consensus has kind of run out of steam. OPERATOR: We have a written question from Sana Tayyen from the University of Redlands. She writes: Do the Europeans expect more of an active role from the United States in the European refugee crisis? How involved is America in the refugee crisis in Europe? MATTHIJS: That’s a good question, Sana, because this was very difficult during the Trump years, right, where they limited to a kind of ridiculously low number on how many refugees the United States would take in, to the point where Canada was taking in more. And it’s not clear to me—and I think Mark has addressed this when it comes to Ukrainian refugees—that Ukrainian refugees don’t want to leave Europe. They don’t want to go to the United States. I mean, I’m sure some do, and they could well find their way, but many of them want to stay in Poland, in Romania, in Moldova, because it’s easy for them to drive back and forth to check on their house, to check on family members, to check on loved ones who stayed behind. And because they still very much hope that they’re going to go back. It’s very different from Syrian refugees who are younger, who are planning to start a new life in Germany. They learned the language. They got educated. They get jobs, and things like that. I think it’s frustrating for European elites the way the migrant and refugee conversation has taken a kind of very negative turn in the United States, which is after all a much more Christian country, or a much more religious country, in broader terms, than Europe is. EDINGTON: Thank you for that distinction. (Laughter.) MATTHIJS: And so it is striking, how the United States talks a great deal about how Europe should be doing more, but on that front, the EU is really bearing the brunt of this. So the U.S. has sent a lot of weaponry, a lot of aid, a lot of advice, and a lot of military skills and know-how to Ukraine directly. The lion’s share, by any means. But also, let’s not forget, and I think it’s something European leaders are very quick to point out, not a single American consumer is really suffering from this war in a way that in Europe they are when it comes to rationing heating, when it comes to much higher oil prices. In the end, did gas prices go up in the U.S. last year? They did. But they came down very rapidly, right? And it was nowhere near to some of the gas price we’ve seen in the last twenty, thirty years—some of the spikes that we’ve seen there. EDINGTON: I totally agree. I think the role of the United States in the European migrant and refugee crisis has really been through private charity and through 501(c)(3)s, it’s been through charitable foundations that have European partners that are working with them to provide for the needs of refugees in the European space. It hasn’t been a direct government-to-government kind of assistance. I think largely U.S. officials have, in those conversations, simply pointed to the issues in Latin and South America to say, look, we have our own proximal refugee issue that we need to deal with. So what I observe is a lot of the assistance that has come, has come through private and charitable channels. OPERATOR: Our final question is a follow-up from Michael Strmiska. He writes: Returning to the refugee situation, how are European leaders, political parties, and public responding to the accusation that their open door to Ukrainians reveals a racist, Christian bias? MATTHIJS: Yeah. I mean, and a sexist bias, let’s not forget. I mean, women and children seem to be a lot easier thing to do than young, unmarried men from the Middle East. They don’t really have a good answer to it, right? They start by saying, look this is right next door. This is immense solidarity with the Ukrainian people. Of course, Poland has taken the lion’s share, as has Hungary and Romania. Places that were very hesitant to take in Muslim migrants. And so, yeah, I think people kind of shrug their shoulders and say, it is what it is. It’s easier because they’re more “likeminded,” whatever that means, even though they are very much aware of the double standard that they’re applying. I think the justification they find is that they hope this will be temporary, that this will be temporary relief for maybe a year, maybe two years. But that said, also don’t think that there’s not slowly fatigue sinking in with that as well. EDINGTON: Absolutely right. MATTHIJS: In certain schools in Warsaw, for example, where half the kids are Ukrainian, where they don’t speak Polish and things like this, I mean, this is a huge adjustment. This is all fine for a few weeks, maybe a few months. But once you get into the next school year and things like that, especially for certain local communities, this becomes more of a burden. So we have not great numbers on this, because it was 4.5 million, at some point it was 2.5 million. And there is some back and forth. But I’m going to let Mark have the last say on this. EDINGTON: (Laughs.) Well, thanks. Michael, I think I would say it is certainly the case that publics and governments are aware of that dichotomy. I think there’s no doubt that there’s an awareness of that, to more or less—to greater of lesser degrees. Certainly, Germany was remarkably charitable in receiving as many refugees as it did, and under incredibly generous conditions. Finding places for people to live, helping them get sorted out with job skills, and enter the workforce. So I think it’s not a simple dichotomy here. But I would also add just this, in conclusion. When I speak to people in Europe about this, what I hear, in so many words, is not that their experience with Ukrainian refugees is, oh, well, they look more like me. It’s rather that their country looks more like mine. I can imagine if what’s happening now in Ukraine can happen there in Europe, it could happen to my country too. And that is especially true in the Baltics. It’s true in Poland. It’s true in Slovakia and Moldova. So it’s a much more immediate sense of the threat of instability, of the threat of territorial integrity being violated, because of the nature of the conflict that’s creating these refugees. FASKIANOS: Well, we are at the end of our time. That is a great way to close this very rich conversation. Thank you both, Matthias Matthijs and Bishop Edington. We appreciate it. If you would like to follow Matthias on Twitter his account is @m2matthias. And Bishop Edington is @markedington. We also encourage you to follow CFR’s Religion and Foreign Policy program on Twitter at @CFR_religion. And also please do write us at [email protected] with any suggestions or questions. We hope you will join us for our next Religion and Foreign Policy Webinar on religion and technology on Thursday, March 23, at 2:00 p.m. Eastern Time. Again, thank you both. We really appreciate it. And thank you all for your questions and participation in today’s discussion. EDINGTON: Thanks, everybody.

CFR President Richard Haass leads a conversation on expanding the idea of citizenship and ensuring the survival of American democracy. His new book, The Bill of Obligations: Ten Habits of Good Citizens, is a guide for elected officials, government staffers, and their constituents across the political spectrum to heal divisions and safeguard our country’s future.  TRANSCRIPT FASKIANOS: Welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations State and Local Officials Webinar. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president for the National Program and Outreach here at CFR. We are delighted to have participants from forty-eight U.S. states and territories with us for today’s discussion, which is on the record. CFR is an independent and nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, publisher, and educational institution focusing on U.S. domestic and foreign policy. CFR is also the publisher of Foreign Affairs magazine. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. Through our State and Local Officials Initiative, CFR serves as a resource on domestic and international issues affecting the priorities and agendas of state and local governments by providing analysis on a wide range of policy topics. We are pleased to have CFR President Richard Haass with us to discuss citizenship, civic responsibilities, and how to protect the future of American democracy. You have his full bio, so I will be brief. Dr. Haass is in his twentieth year as president of CFR. He has served as special assistant and senior Middle East advisor to President George H.W. Bush, and held various positions in the Defense and State Departments during the Carter and Reagan administrations. He is the author or editor of fourteen books on U.S. foreign policy, one book on management, and his most recent book on American democracy entitled The Bill of Obligations: Ten Habits for Good Citizens. Richard, thanks for being with us. Thank you for creating this initiative for state and local officials. If you could begin by giving us an overview of your book and more specifically why the focus on obligations rather than our rights. HAASS: Well, first of all, Irina, I’d like to know what are the two states not represented in this call. Clearly, you’re not doing your job. That’s very upsetting. Second of all, I want to thank everybody for what they do day in, day out. I’m a great believer in public service. I worked on the Hill and I was lucky enough for work to work for four different presidents. I also have some sense of what public service demands and requires. So thank you, again, for what you are doing, and thank you for giving us this hour here today. I wrote this book about democracy, putting obligations at the center. Just want to clarify for the record it doesn’t mean I’m not concerned with rights; of course I am. Rights are central to the American experiment. Indeed, as I expect all of you know, we only got the Constitution ratified when the Bill of Rights was added. Several states conditioned their ratification of the proposed Constitution on the adoption of a Bill of Rights. The reason is the entire context was still, you know, the breakaway from Britain, I mean, was still fresh in people’s minds, and the contrast between the totally or woefully inadequate Articles of Confederation and the new Constitution was great. And quite a few people were worried that the contrast was too great and we were creating too powerful a federal government, too powerful of an executive. Hence, the emphasis on rights. And again, rights and freedoms are fundamental to this or any democracy. And, you know, again, just so you don’t think I’m not concerned about rights, you know, what Lincoln described as our unfinished work remains unfinished. The reality with rights doesn’t always match up, say, to the Declaration of Independence—which, by the way, we celebrate the 250th anniversary of which in three years. But even if somehow we were able to close that gap and we no longer had any issues with—essentially, if Lincoln’s unfinished work were to become finished, it still wouldn’t be enough for American democracy. Think about it. You know, rights inevitably come into conflict with one another—a mother’s right to choose versus the rights of the unborn; someone’s rights to acquire arms under the Second Amendment versus someone else’s right to public safety; the right not to get immunized or wear a mask versus the right to health and so forth, public health. And so, again, rights alone do not provide the basis for a functioning government. Former Justice Breyer, Steve Breyer, wrote thoughtfully that the toughest cases and the most important cases that came before the Court—before the highest court—were not rights versus wrongs, but were rights versus rights. And when you have rights clashing, in the absence of compromise one of two things tends to happen. One is you either tend to have gridlock. You know, we’ve seen an awful lot of that. Or, worse yet, things have the potential to generate into violence, particularly if it becomes an all-or-nothing situation and the side that comes away with nothing, or comes away with what they believe to be too little, they then feel that the system doesn’t offer them enough and they’re prepared to go outside the system. And that’s the road to ruin and the road to violence. So I’ve argued for rights in two contexts. One is what we all owe one another and the other is what we all owe to this country—to the government and to the nation—as a way of not substituting for rights but complementing them, almost two sides of the citizenship coin. We need rights. We need obligations. And American democracy will only realize its potential if both sides of the coin are developed. FASKIANOS: Thank you, Richard. So we have a diverse group of state and local officials on this call. What role do they play in encouraging the kind of citizen participation that you put forward in your book? HAASS: Well, all of them—all of you directly or indirectly are where you are because of citizen participation. Either you were voted for directly or you were appointed by someone, I expect, who was. So participation is essential to democracy. Ideally, it will be informed participation. It was Ronald Reagan—I think it was his farewell address—who argued not simply for patriotism, but for informed patriotism, very much in this—in the tradition of Thomas Jefferson, who wanted informed citizens. And that would be the way to hold elected and appointed officials accountable. That would be the basis for people understanding when they were to exercise the right to vote how to exercise it in a way—in a manner that would be in the best interest of the country, as well as their ow personal best interest. So one thing I believe that people in public life have a right—I mean, have an obligation to do is to promote civic participation. We can talk about it in detail, but among other things the right to—the right to vote. I believe the right to vote should be readily exercisable. Obviously, there has to be integrity, but also I believe there has to—voting should not be, you know, made difficult with hurdles that are not, I believe, germane to the integrity of the—of the process. I think people in public life can model certain behaviors that are essential to a democracy. One is compromise, which is essential, as you all know better than I do, to get things done. Civility; people in public life can model civility. It also turns out to be pretty practical. Again, I feel a little bit like I’m preaching to the converted here. It’s taking those coals to Newcastle. But you know, the person you’re disagreeing with today—which is Thursday—on one issue might be the person you need to work with tomorrow on a totally separate issue. So civility—or—incivility tends not to be persuasive. Plus, it can—it can poison a relationship, so even when there is a potential for getting something done together that potential has been eliminated. I think people in public life have the obligation to reject violence for political ends. I think they have the obligation to respect norms. You know, one of the most fundamental is conceding when one loses an election, the so-called peaceful transfer of power. It’s at the core of the legitimacy of democratic systems. Again, you’re part of government service, so by doing what you’re doing you’re generating or modeling respect for working in government, which I think is wonderful. We’ll talk about it more, I expect. But particularly for those of you who have influence or oversight of public school education or public education at the higher level, I believe mandates for civics are vital if our democracy is to survive another 250 years. So I think you’re all in a—in a pivotal position to make an extraordinary difference when it comes to the trajectory of democracy in the United States. FASKIANOS: So, Richard, picking up on that point, you wrote this book because of—I don’t know if you’re still disclosing the school—the undergraduate who did not know anything. Why don’t you tell— HAASS: Irina, I want to interrupt you. You’re getting my books confused. That was the reason I wrote the last book, which was— FASKIANOS: Oh, that was the reason you wrote the last one. That’s right; I am. It’s been a long day. But if you could talk a little bit about why this is important because of the K through twelve curriculum and what—teaching civics. HAASS: Well, I’ll talk about it both K through twelve as well as higher ed. Americans are not born knowing about American history or American government or about democracy. Nobody is. So we have to teach it. We can’t just assume the transmission happens by itself genetically or simply because we somehow breathe it in. Doesn’t happen. And so we have got to make a conscious effort to transmit—to teach the narrative. I think it’s particularly important in the United States because unlike, say, Japan, which is a robust democracy, but Japan has a society which is homogenous in many ways. We are many things; we are not homogenous. I happen to think it’s one of our strengths. We’re a country of immigrants. We’re, in some ways, the most heterogenous democracy in the world when it comes to country of origin, when it comes to religion, when it comes to race, you name it. But as a result, those same features can become ways of pulling us apart. So, again, what brings us together is the idea of Americanness. And that was—that was central to the founding of this country—that this was a country founded on ideas, wasn’t founded on other attributes. So, again, it’s incumbent upon us to teach these ideas, to transmit this narrative. What’s so important about middle school and high school is it’s one of the very few things pretty much everyone in this country has to do, which is go to school through the age of 16. It could be public school, which is mostly is. It could be private school. It could be religious school. It could be homeschooling, what have you. But that’s our best opportunity to cast the widest net. And I believe that, you know, all of us would consider teaching young people how to read and count and think critically, how to access technology, get on the internet, and so forth, all that’s central. Why is this any less central? Why is it any less central to prepare people for their life to come as a—as a citizen? And so I would think that this ought to be required in all of our schools. It’s there for some. Usually it’s half a year, I don’t know, but you know, it’ll vary according to what state or city you’re from. Many states in the country it’s half a year, one or two it’s a full year, some nothing at all. And also, the content and quality of what is offered varies, shall we say, dramatically. It’s actually even worse, oddly enough, at the college and university level. I lost count; I think it’s about four thousand two- and four-year colleges in this country. Only a handful require that as a condition of graduation you take civics. Don’t get me wrong, virtually every university and college in the country offers civics or something close to it. But they’re not required. So depending upon the—how a student navigates his or her distribution requirements, they can easily graduate from school without having been exposed either to the basic documents, the basic history, or really any understanding. And I think it’s particularly critical there because, if you think about it, the average freshman’s eighteen. Well, they’ve got the right to vote already. They’re going to spend four years on campus and they’re going to be acting out politics on campus. And then they’re going to leave campus, and for the next however many years that they have in their lives they’re going to have the opportunity to vote. And again, we want them to vote and we want them to get informed as a runup to their voting. And civics, it seems to me, is part of that. When I say civics we can talk about the content, but it is history. And I more than understand how complicated that is, how politicized in some ways that’s gotten. There’s the basic documents I want people to be exposed to. There’s basic facts that are central to American history. And just to be clear, I don’t want to impose and I think it’s a mistake for anyone to impose a single interpretation of history on a young person. I think people ought to be exposed, again, to the basic documents, to the basic events and facts, and then they ought to be exposed to the serious representative schools of interpretation of that. I also think in this day and age we need to make information literacy part of this. New Jersey has done it. I’m hoping other states do it at the high school level. But we need to teach young people to become critical consumers of information. They’re being flooded. They’re being—and we live in this age of, if you will, unlimited information thanks to the Google machine and much else, but the problem is a lot of it’s misinformation. So how do students, how do they discern what’s a fact and what isn’t? How do they tell the difference between facts and opinions? How do they test what purports to be fact? What kind of behaviors—for example, I’m a big advocate of multi-sourcing information rather than single-sourcing. And so I think all this needs to be taught in our middle schools, obviously in our high schools, and at the college and university level. That’s the way we tool up Americans in order to fulfill the obligations of citizenship. And we just cannot assume it somehow happens otherwise. Indeed, we should assume it doesn’t happen otherwise. FASKIANOS: So your first obligation is to be informed. And Christina Jones, who is a councilmember in Raleigh, North Carolina, asks: How do you define “informed”? So if you can dig into that a little bit more, that would be great. HAASS: Actually, it’s a great question. It’s, obviously, subjective. But I would say, you know, inform—and it’s separate—it’s also separate from the question of how does one get informed. But I think what I would count as informed is I think people need to know something about American democracy, something about American history, how American government is structured, how it operates. So just kind of that’s the backdrop. We can—we can go into greater depth if people want. And then I also think being informed means understanding what the issues are and the consequences—you know, the choices and the consequences of those choices. So, to take an issue that Congress is going to have to take up in the not-too-distant future, something like the debt ceiling. And so the issue is, you know, what is the debt ceiling? What is Congress being asked to vote on? What happens if they—if they vote an increase in the—for the increase in the debt ceiling? What happens if they refuse to vote an increase in the debt ceiling? So that, to me, is an example of being informed about an issue. It doesn’t say which way to vote; I just want people to understand the choices, what is—what each choice holds within it. What are the—what are the consequences? What it involves. And then, hopefully, they can themselves make—reach an informed opinion and advocate for it or write their congressman or what have you about the way they would like that individual to vote. So I think there’s a combination in being informed—which is sort of understanding, if you will, the democratic basics in this country—and then one has to add to that a layer of being knowledgeable about some of the basic issues that are before us, be those issues domestic or international. And then the whole process of, you know, getting and staying informed. Again, some of the basics are a one-time thing to become, you know, familiar with them. You don’t have to read the Federalist Papers once a week and the rest, though every now and then a reading of the Constitution or the Declaration or Lincoln’s farewell address—I mean, Gettysburg Address and the rest is not a—not a bad thing to do. And by the way, if you’ve never read or haven’t read in a long time the Articles of Confederation, I recommend it. It really is a stunner. Out of all the things that surprised me in writing this book, the inadequacy of the Articles of Confederation I had forgotten. It’s quite stunning, quite stunning that anyone thought it could conceivably be a blueprint for anything other than total failure and inaction and, essentially, chaos. But I think there’s—again, you know, one needs to familiarize oneself with the basics, which is largely a one-time thing. I think then, again, one has to familiarize oneself with the issues, and I think there’s certain sources to go to. I’m not big on social media, just to be clear. Keyword there—the operative word—is “social.” That’s not—if it were serious media, it would be called “serious media.” So I think one has to go to serious media to get informed on the issues. I think it’s important to multi-source it rather than just put all your eggs in one basket. I think information literacy becomes part of it. So it’s not simple. It’s got a lot of dimensions to it. But again, it’s essential to fulfill—to check the box of being an informed patriot. HAASS: Irina, you’re on mute. FASKIANOS: We want to hear from you, your questions. There’s several now in the Q&A box, which I’ll read, but please we also hope that you will raise your hand. You can click the “raise hand” icon on your screen. You can, when I call on you, accept the unmute prompt and please state your name and affiliation. Of course, there’s also the written feature, too. Include your affiliation. And we like to have this be a best—a forum to share best practices, so please do that as well. So there is a written question from Hilary Ram: How do we inform citizens, indeed, but how do we do this with the death of local journalism? This seems to be our biggest challenge, getting the facts out to the public. And then there was a follow-on comment: Also, the term “journalist” has a wide range of definitions, so.  HAASS: Indeed it does. Look, I think you put your finger on one of the things that worries me, which is the shutting down of a lot of local news outlets. And you know, any number, of course, is largely economic, the breakdown of the advertising model. I understand. But it’s a real loss in this country. It’s a real loss because, you know, I grew up reading national papers but always reading a local paper, and it has a granularity that I think people—you know, I’m hoping some wealthy Americans decide that this is an area they could make a contribution in to sort of subsidize. I think that would be great. When people of means ask me what they can do, that’s always towards the top of my list. We actually do a program like this for local journalists where we try to beef up some of their access to information and analysis about the world on issues that might affect people in the area where they—where they publish. But it’s a real problem. You know, I don’t have great answers about what one does with the closing—you know, there’s still some papers. There’s still, you know, radio and so forth. But it’s a problem. And I think, you know, this issue of how we revive local media I think ought to get more attention than it does because there’s no way the big national media can do this, and they don’t. And it’s a real problem. And here I am in New York, which is not exactly a small town, and the coverage of New York City is really inadequate in the big papers. If you read—you know, I read among other things the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, which are both published here, but there’s very little coverage with any depth about New York City. I don’t feel particularly well informed. And then so the question is, do I have to go to other, much more specific type of vehicles? And the answer is yes if I want to—if I want to—if I want to actually know what’s going on in the City Council or City Hall except for, you know, the very infrequent story usually written at 36,000 feet or about one particular issue. I would never get that from the major—the major outlets. So we pay a price here for not having really good local media or, you know, sufficient local media anymore. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Our next written question comes from Julia King and I don’t have her affiliation: This is an essential conversation. Do you have thoughts about how to have good-faith conversations around these challenging topics? It’s so easy to fall into angry discourse these days. And of course, we’ve seen the anger directed at election officials and school boards and those—and the like. So what can be done? HAASS: Well, again, I think, you know, I have several obligations that are relevant to that—things such as civility, commitment to nonviolence, and openness to compromise. And I call upon in the book religious authorities to use the authority of the pulpit. I’m not asking any minister or priest or rabbi or mullah or anybody else to take a stand on this or that policy issue, but this is—this is not policy to rule out political violence, to call for civility, to talk about being open to compromise. Who better than a religious figure and a religious authority could call for being sensitive to the common good? The last I checked, the notion of being one’s brothers’ and sisters’ keeper is rather basic to scripture. So religious authorities need to step up, I believe, and play a role here. I also think, you know, my hat goes off to a lot of these officials who are either getting verbally abused or in some cases physically threatened. I thought some of the secretaries of state who stood up through the electoral process a couple years ago, I talked about them in the book. That, to me, is a perfect example of putting the country before party or person. It’s the right thing to do. It’s not the easy thing to do. It’s anything but the easy thing to do. It’s courageous, it’s principled, and my hat goes off to them. So, again, you know, that’s the kind of behavior we need to see more. It’s the kind of behavior that John F. Kennedy wrote about in Profiles of Courage, people who did the right thing—in some cases compromised, in some cases refusing to compromise against all sorts of illegitimate pressures. But I don’t have any easy answers to you. Again, you know, this is a book where I write about obligations. And a lot of things won’t get better until more Americans get involved in the process of politics, and show up to vote in an informed way, and reward certain behaviors and penalize others. And all I can say is that that’s not hopeless because our elections in recent years, particularly national, have been sufficiently close—either the vote for—the electoral vote for president or the overall vote, say, for Congress—that actually a rather small number and percentage of Americans could have an outsized impact. So I don’t think this is in any way—in any way hopeless. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to go to Bryan Barbin, who has a raised hand. And please identify yourself once you unmute yourself. Q: My name is Bryan Barbin. I’m deputy secretary for taxation in Pennsylvania’s Department of Revenue. My question relates to compromise in your book. I thought your book had—I liked it because if you don’t have an opposite duty for every right, then the right is only as good as force allows. So it’s the duty that allows the rights to go to everybody. But my question on compromise is, we know that compromise is best understood by the most people if it’s explained, but what are your suggestions, basically, for someone in my position or in any state agency to do a better job of maybe explaining that compromises that happen happen because they’re the better alternative—either the better alternative short term or the better alternative to build on? But how do we go about doing that, educating on that? HAASS: It’s a great question. In my experience, it requires—you know, real estate has three laws: location, location, location. I think compromise has three words: either explanation, explanation, explanation; or, repetition, repetition, repetition. The more complex and more controversial something is, the more one has to talk about it before, during, and after the compromise becomes a fact. I remember when I—see, go back here now about thirty years, when I worked for President Bush the father. And when he announced—you know, he went from “read my lips: no new taxes” to, obviously, agreeing to tax increases as part of a compromise, and it hurt him badly politically. But I think one of the reasons it hurt him badly is he came from the school of thought which was just do the right thing and don’t worry, and I thought that’s inadequate. I think, yeah, it’s necessary to do the right thing, but particularly when it’s complicated and controversial. In this case, it was obviously controversial because he went against what he had promised. He needed to do a heavy, heavy amount of work of explanation, and he didn’t—gave one speech, wasn’t one of his best speeches to say the least, and that was it. And it just—you know, the lesson I took from that is there’s no—there’s no substitute for frequent education and explanation. I don’t—I think the good news is I’m not familiar with the Pennsylvania Department of Revenue, as best I know. If that changes, I’m sure you’ll be the first to let me know. But I watch what some of the state and city agencies do here. I’ve got—one of my kids works for the Department of Sanitation here in the city of New York and I see what they do on social media. It’s quite creative in terms of explaining certain policies, particularly where they’re innovating things like on composting. And they go to great length and so forth, and at least—so far, at least, they’re beating their metrics. And so to me, you know, you have to go think about all sorts of distribution systems, all sorts of social media, and so forth, as well as townhalls. I mean, different parts of the public, different age groups, people of different backgrounds absorb information different ways. For all I know, there’s a role for YouTube Shorts. I’m not a big fan of TikTok, but maybe YouTube Shorts. Or maybe there’s things on Facebook or Twitter or other social media. There’s, obviously, PSAs. But I would just think that finding all sorts of ways to reach people, doing the explanation. It’s not going to be perfect, but again, it certainly can’t hurt and it can help. And I don’t know, but that’s kind of where—but you know, I can hear in your voice a little bit of frustration, and I get it. As someone who tries to explain foreign policy issues and choices and compromises, it’s tough because it’s really—it’s not hard for those who oppose compromise, rather than characterize things, they caricature them or they make it sound so simple. Well, you know, and the word “compromise” has become something of a dirty word: Why did you sell out? Why didn’t you hold firm? And what you say is exactly the smart thing to say. Well, here were the—here were the real alternatives. You could have held out, but then this would have been the consequence. So compromise got me the best possible outcome that was available—not the best imaginable outcome, but the best available outcome. But it’s hard. And in an age of single-issue politics and social media, you’re going to get some heat. And I think all you—you know, that comes with the territory. And all you can do, again, is spend a lot of time explaining and repeating the explanation. FASKIANOS: So I’m just going to read a comment from Joseph Gacioch, who’s a city manager in Ferndale, Michigan: We will roll out our first community civics local government education program in the spring. Local government literacy is so important to civility and an informed community, and in local government our resources are waning every year. I like what you suggest and require civics as K through twelve. I posit state legislature should prioritize their budgets the same way and help fund experiential civics through the local government lens. Which I think is fascinating. HAASS: Love that. Look, could I just say something? FASKIANOS: Yes, absolutely. HAASS: It was Justice—it was Justice Brandeis, when he was on the Court, and one of my favorite phases—phrases of American political history is Brandeis’ phrase, which should appeal to all of you, as states as being the “laboratories of democracy.” The best ideas in the country tend to travel to Washington, and states become the place where, basically, you can test-drive ideas. And you can introduce programs at the state or local level—states, but essentially—and you can show it works. I love the idea, and I—of multiple boards of education, whether it’s statewide, citywide, what have you—countywide, what have you, experimenting here and trying various approaches, see how they work, talking to various experts. And I want to work with—I’ve already spoken to several governors about helping them develop programs both for civics and information literacy. But I think this is the way this is going to happen in this country. We’re going to show that certain things are really effective and popular and just good, and more and more—what I’m hoping is we create a kind of positive competition where people start saying: Hey, they got that at that school. They got that in that city, that state. Why don’t we have it here? So I think the idea that you all are going to innovate something on civics at the local level I think is fantastic. FASKIANOS: I’m going to go next to David Lovlien, who wrote a question but you’ve also raised your hand. So I think you should ask it yourself. And identify yourself, please. Q: Thank you, Dr. Haass, for being with us today. I appreciate and value your time. I am a first-time, 25-year-old county commissioner representing District 3 in Merrimack County, New Hampshire. I want to be a good leader for the people that I serve. Dr. Henry Kissinger has said America needs more serious leaders and that the quality of leaders in America has diminished over time. How can I be a more serious, high-quality political leader? Thank you. HAASS: Well, first of all, I appreciate the question coming from your since I’m married to someone who went to the University of New Hampshire. So I’ve got connections to your state. Look, I think the fact that you’re asking the question is—suggests to me that you’re already on your way. I’m a great believer that the best way to learn about leadership is through history and biography. My single favorite book for people in government is a book called Thinking in Time. It was written by two professors. I used to co-teach it with them years and years ago, a guy named Ernest May and another named Richard Neustadt. It’s called Thinking in Time and I think the subtitle is The Uses of History for Decision-Makers. Irina can circulate a link. But it’s the whole idea about how to use history to help guide you for decisions that you’re confronted with now. I’ve written a book called The Bureaucratic Entrepreneur, which again was designed to help people in the public sector make better decisions, and to implement them more efficiently and effectively. So I think there’s—you know, there’s literature out there, if you will—the Neustadt-May book, my book—which deals with almost mechanics and how to—the intellectual side of things. But I love the idea, essentially, of reading history and biography because—of people who faced the challenges of leadership, whether at the, you know, federal level, the state level. A lot of—even the corporate level. There’s a lot of—a lot of similarities. There’s a lot of good literature on decision-making and so forth. But that’s—and at some point, there’s no substitute for experience and learning from it. You know, you’re going to make mistakes, and the real thing is to set up, you know, mechanisms so you learn from them. And then, you know, I’m a great believer in not repeating mistakes. You will always make mistakes. I just want to be innovative and make new ones. I hate repeating the same ones. But, again, I can’t think of anything better than, you know, some of these books about leadership, particularly in the public sector. And then, you know, there’s just so much good—you know, the Doris Kearns Goodwins, the Michael Beschlosses, the Walter Isaacsons, the Jon Meachams. You know, we’re blessed in this country with some sensational historians and biographers. So I would—I would just—you know, almost any of the great names of American history, I would read some of those. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to take the next written question from Gail Patterson-Gladney, who is a councilmember in Poughkeepsie, New York: As a county commissioner, I would like to invite middle and high school students to attend county commissioners meetings. Besides reaching out to government teachers, do you have any suggestions on how to involve students in county government? HAASS: I love that idea. One of the things I recommend in The Bill of Obligations, I have a section on—the last section on the book is where to go for more, and I have all sorts of things to read and so forth. But the last bit is to get people to see government in action. You know, it could be as simple or not so simple as being on a jury. One thing I recommend to every young person and not so young person, if you’ve never done it in your life, is to attend the oral arguments at the Supreme Court. It’s an amazing experience. To see politics in action at the local level, the state level, the federal level, watching hearings. I mean, CSPAN’s OK, but it’s more fun to do it in person. You know, but I think—you know, to go to the National Archives. I love the idea where people can—it becomes a physical, if you will, experience. I think for the kind of thing you’re talking about—and, by the way, I know Poughkeepsie very well. I am at that train station with enormous frequency, since I have home not far from there. What I would recommend is creating arrangements with administrators or teachers for internship programs. You know, we have an internship program here, and we probably bring in, I don’t know, 125-130 interns a year at the Council on Foreign Relations. That’s a sensational program for getting people, you know, into the—for me—into the foreign policy, international world. They learn things, some of which are specific to that. Some of the things you learn are useful for any—for any job. And we have others—there’s other sorts of programs. There’s a program here called Global Kids for high school kids who—again, it’s like a three-week boot camp every summer which exposes them to international things. But I would have some kind of an arrangement with schools. Maybe they could get some—you know, a course credit or whatever it happens to be—for students to intern in various agencies or offices, or at a minimum, short of that, at least to see—to go see a hearing. Just to get a sense, and maybe spend a few hours getting a talk or two about how local government affects their lives. But I think—what I think is important for young people is to give them a sense that what government does matters. Also, to give them a sense that it’s a potential career path, that it’s something that they could do which would be really, really interesting and might make a—might make a difference.  But I would think some type of—creating those kinds of bridges, so to speak, whatever the word is—between local schools—you could also do it at the high school. I mean, at the college level near Poughkeepsie you got Bard, obviously, and some other schools. But some sort of program I think would be—you know, I think it’s a great part of a civic—it’s not a substitute for civics education, but it’s a component of a civics education. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to go next to Dennis Mandsager, who has a raised hand. Q: Can you hear me now? HAASS: Yes, sir. FASKIANOS: We can. Q: OK. Thank you, Dr. Haass. Much appreciate this event. I’m retired Navy, but I got this invitation because I’m on the Iowa Civil Rights Commission. And there’s been a flurry of bills that some organizations say are really targeting the LGBTQ community. For example, a proposed constitutional amendment to prohibit same-sex civil unions and marriages. There’s a proposal to eliminate gender identity as a protected class. There’s a bill that has passed both houses that says there’s no transition medical treatment available for anybody under the age of eighteen. There’s a bill that says your ID card must reflect your gender at birth.  And often, the people in favor of these bills use religion or the Bible as their primary argument. My church, for example, the Lutheran Church, says we should respect same-sex marriage, but we don’t have to honor them. And my church also supports statutes that prohibit discrimination against same-sex marriages and civil unions. But most of these bills are voted on along party lines. And you have referred to compromise a number of times today. How does a good Republican, a good Democrat, a good commissioner deal with this battle over gender identity and various LGBTQ+ issues? HAASS: It ain’t easy, because these issues, for some people, are seen as absolute for, you know, you mentioned religion or scripture. If people derive their position from scripture, or their interpretation of scripture, to be more accurate, there’s probably not a whole lot of give in it. And, you know, you mention the idea about transitioning not until the age of eighteen. Well, that, in some ways, represents a compromise. I’m not saying it’s right. I’m just saying that where one sets an age level. We’ve had it—you know, we’ve had compromises on abortion. You know, what’s—in terms of the timing of when abortions are allowed or not. We now see differences between and among the states. So even these totally—you know, some of the most difficult issues we find in our politics, there is an element of compromise there. But at the end of the day, these are issues that have been brought into the political space. I think it’s legitimate for them to be brought into the political space. Societies have the right to define themselves and to say certain types of behaviors are or are not permissible. That’s, in part, what defines societies. If these—whatever the standards are or whatever the rules are, we have ways through legislation they can be, in a sense, taken into the political marketplace. And we then have the courts, because courts can sometimes say that certain things are against other rights. And there is a struggle—there is a struggle there. For individuals who feel strongly on this side of an issue or the other, there’s political involvement. So for those who think certain things ought to happen, and those who think certain thoughts ought not to be allowed, that’s the political marketplace. And that’s where you organize, you support candidates who agree with you, you try to educate, your vote, what have you. So I don’t think we can ban these things. I’m not even sure we should ban these things from the political arena. In some cases, though, getting compromise is going to be brutally difficult. Again, I have no illusions here. I’m many things. Naïve is probably not among them. And no one has to treat them like any other political issue. And, you know, the iron law in American politics is what tends to prevail is not overall numbers but intensity. And those who fight for or against certain issues and bring to it great political intensity often have an outsized degree of influence or impact in the political space. And then, again, for those who don’t get the political outcome they want, then besides just the next election, then there are always options through taking cases to the courts. Q: Thank you very much. FASKIANOS: OK. Thank you. There is a comment—there are a lot of comments in the Q&A box. So you should—people should look at that. We will send out the list of the books that Richard has mentioned. So we will do that in the follow-up note, with the link to this event as well.  HAASS: Irina, can I mention something that we haven’t mentioned? FASKIANOS: Yes. Yes, please do. HAASS: Am I allowed to do that? FASKIANOS: Absolutely. HAASS: So we’ve talked about some of the things that can happen at the state and local level that can make a real difference. And I talked a lot about civics education. I’ve talked a lot about modeling certain behaviors. One thing I’d just like to throw out there is public service. That I’m a great believer in it. And the reason is clear. I think right now, in this country, this society is too divided. We don’t have a sufficient number of shared or common experiences. We’re too divided by geography, class, educational—levels of educational attainment, gender, race, religion, politics, what cable station we watch, what radio station we listen to.  And I think that is bad for the fabric of American society. I’m not saying everybody has to agree. That’s never going to happen. But I worry about the degree to which increasingly we don’t know a lot of our fellow citizens and we’re not used to interacting with them. We’re all living in our own, to use the phrase, ecosystems. And I don’t think that sets the stage for a functioning democracy. I think it sets the stage for—potentially for gridlock, or violence, or you name it.  So public service, it seems to me, is one of the ways we bring people together from different backgrounds who would otherwise not get together. And don’t get me wrong, I am not—repeat, not—advocating for anything mandatory at the state or federal level. I think that would be an error. But I think we ought to incentivize it. And I know California’s doing an awful lot. Maryland’s looking into it. But there’s an awful lot of progress. It needs to be incentivized, paying people for the work they do. It’s not going to make them rich. They’re not going to make Fortune’s, you know, wealthiest 100 list. But it’ll give them something. We can also condition loan guarantee forgiveness—student loan guarantee forgiveness—a degree of it can be conditioned on public service.  I think employers, like they now give certain preferences to veterans, might be persuaded to give certain preferences to people who perform certain types of public—same thing for universities. I can imagine admissions counselors would say if you’ve had one or two years of experience in a gap year working at whatever, we will consider that a major plus when we consider your application. I also think this kind of service, these government programs, might give some people an interaction with the government that’s more positive than they ever imagined. So I would just say—I would just urge people to think about it, in the context of your city or state, whether there’s a potential role greater than what you already have for various types of public service that would actually do good for communities or for certain objectives in your—in your city or state. But would do a lot—do a lot of good for the society and do a lot of good for individuals. This could be a great way to train them and so forth, to make them more attractive to future employers, or what have you. So it’s just one of the things we haven’t yet had a chance to do. But I think there’s a real opportunity at the state level. And this, to me, is not a Republican or Democrat thing. I think this is actually something that there ought to be a degree of bipartisanship on. And obviously there’ll be compromises to be made about what the incentives are and what sort of programs count as legitimate public service. Fair enough. So but I think it’s something worth pursuing. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Next question from Megan Huether has a raised hand. Q: Yes. Thank you for the opportunity. This has been wonderful. I serve on the Board of Aldermen in Manchester, Missouri, in the suburbs of St. Louis, where I hold a nonpartisan office. And what you’re saying, and the whole topic, is resonating with me. And I’ve really been spending a lot of time thinking about local governments and neighborhoods being kind of the unit of political change that can help us overcome this polarization and isolation that we have. You know, as leaders, you were talking about how can we be good leaders and encouraging civic participation, providing on-ramps for people to come in and get involved in their local government so that they experience that ownership and practice these obligations that you detail in your book. One of the experiences that I’m finding is that, you know, when I welcome people and encourage their participation, there’s a reluctance to participate because of concerns that I think are filtering down to the local nonpartisan level from higher levels of government, where they do not want to participate in the divisiveness. I’m wondering if you have, you know, reflected upon this problem, and how kind of that polarization is causing people really to not take part more civically. And if you have advice as we engage in those conversations, or inspirational examples of, you know, communities that have been able to overcome that. Thank you. HAASS: No, it’s a wonderful question with a lot of insight. And I think—first of all, I think you’re spot on. I think a lot of younger people who hopefully are idealistic—if you’re not idealistic when you’re young, when are you going to be—are turned off. And the word “politics” has become something pejorative in this country. Oh yeah, that’s just politics. And it’s seen as divisive, or unproductive, or ugly, or whatever. I don’t know a way to ban that, and that gets at a lot of my obligations. And those are behaviors, norms, and civility, and compromise. All I think you can do is two things. In our civics education, we can encourage certain behaviors. One of the things I like when we teach civics is to do things like debates or have mock Congress, mock city hall, mock state legislature, mock Supreme Court, whatever, mock constitutional convention, in ways that give students the chance to participate. And the teachers can step in and moderate, if you will, you know, blow the whistle, almost like a sporting match, and say: Hey, you know, John just said these things to Mary in the following way. Let’s just put aside the issue we’re debating. Let’s just talk about what just happened. So I think there’s things we can do if we structure the education so it’s not just about content but it’s about behaviors, it’s about tone, it’s about style, it’s about civility, and the rest, I think, would be one thing. And then, you know, you all are in positions. You run your office. You’re involved in a hearing or you’re involved in what have you. Well, again, you set an example every day by what you do and how you do it. And that, to me, is one of the most important things of leadership, is the example you set. Now, I deal with foreign policy all the time. And people say, how should the United States go about promoting democracy? And I say, oh that’s easy. I don’t need people from the State Department preaching it. I need people from the United States day-in, day-out, demonstrating that democracy delivers, that it’s an attractive form of government that makes people’s lives better. If we do that, people around the world will get the message loud and clear. If we fail to do that, they will basically say: Hey, this democracy ain’t so hot. We don’t need it here. And that’s why I think, you know, you all have a degree of influence over your immediate situations. And if you can make those, you know, better, and if you can find colleagues who you can work with across the political aisle, then it sends a powerful message that, you know, partisan differences are not insurmountable. FASKIANOS: I’m going to try to squeeze in one last question from Katherine Castrejon (sp). I might be mispronouncing that. And please be brief. Q: OK. Hi, everyone. My name is Katherine Castrejon. I work for a state senator here in California. I just wanted to ask, this is—like, politics have been very controversial in the past few years. And I believe that voters are hesitant in voting in these—in this time of year. So what would you recommend to, I guess, kind of help those younger voters to continue voting? Thank you. HAASS: Sure. Well, part of a civics course would be to show how voting matters, how small numbers can have unbelievably large impacts. If one looks at presidential elections, a couple of thousand votes in a couple of states has often swung—you know, made the differences. In congressional races, small numbers, again, can decide the difference not just in that race but in the overall balance in a state legislature or in the Congress at the federal level. And I would constantly remind people of how what government does, and how it does it matters. There’s almost no aspect of our life, for better or worse, that’s not affected by government. So I would want to basically get students—give students the appreciation that government matters. And even when you disagree with what it’s doing, that there’s ways of potentially weighing in or getting involved that would change it.  That it's not some impersonal, inanimate force. Or, in politics, there’s very—there’s almost nothing that’s inevitable or baked into the cake. And I want to give students the sense of possibility, that political involvement has with it the possibility of making a difference in good ways in their lives, and in their communities, and in the country. And basically saying, you should—you know, whether it’s limited to being an informed voter or you make a career choice to get involved in politics in whatever way, or at whatever level, or in public service whether it’s the military or law enforcement or what have you, that this can be a really important and satisfying—and satisfying path. So I think one just has to continue to reinforce the message of possibility. FASKIANOS: I am sorry that we could not get to all the questions, both raised hands and written questions. There were a lot of good resources shared in the comment section, which we will—we will pull together, aggregate for you all, and send out a link. Richard, thank you, again, for doing this with us. Thank you for this book, The Bill of Obligations, and all the others that you have written. Dr. Haass is on Twitter. You can follow him at @richardhaass. And you can subscribe to his weekly newsletter on Substack, Home and Away, by going to richardhass.substack.com.  You can also follow the State and Local Officials Initiative at @CFR_local. Please visit CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for more expertise and analysis. Again, we will circulate a link to the webinar and transcript, but you can also send us an email to [email protected] with any suggestions for future topics, speakers, and the like. We want to support the important work that you are doing in your communities. So again, Richard Haass, thank you for this. Thank you for the State and Local Officials Initiative. And thanks to all of you for taking the time today to be with us. HAASS: Thank you, all. Thank you, Irina. (END)  

Chris Li, director of research of the Asia-Pacific Initiative and fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University, leads the conversation on U.S. strategy in East Asia. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Welcome to today’s session of the Winter/Spring 2023 CFR Academic Webinar Series. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach at CFR.  Today’s discussion is on the record and the video and transcript will be available on our website, CFR.org/academic, if you would like to share it with your colleagues or classmates. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.  We’re delighted to have Chris Li with us to discuss U.S. strategy in East Asia. Mr. Li is director of research of the Asia-Pacific Initiative, and a fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, where he focuses on U.S.-China relations, Asia-Pacific security, and technology competition. Previously, he was research assistant to Graham Allison in the Avoiding Great Power War Project, and coordinator of the China Working Group, where he contributed to the China Cyber Policy Initiative and the Technology and Public Purpose Project, led by former Secretary of Defense Ash Carter.  Chris, thanks very much for being with us today. I thought we could begin with you giving us your insights and analysis of the Biden administration’s foreign policy strategy in East Asia, specifically vis-à-vis China.  LI: Great. Well, first of all, thanks, Irina, for the invitation. I’m really looking forward to the conversation and also to all the questions from members of the audience and, in particular, all the students on this seminar. So I thought I’d start very briefly with just an overview of how the Biden administration’s strategy in the Indo-Pacific has shaped up over the last two years, two and a half years. What are the key pillars? And essentially, now that we’re about halfway through the first term—or, you know, if there is a second term—but President Biden’s first term, where things are going to go moving forward?  So as many you are probably familiar, Secretary of State Tony Blinken laid out essentially the core tenets of the Biden administration’s Indo-Pacific strategy, of which China, of course, is a focal centerpiece. And he did so in his speech last summer at the Asia Society, where he essentially described the relationship between the U.S. and China as competitive where it should be, cooperative where it can be, and adversarial where it must be. So sort of three different pillars: competition, cooperation, a sort of balance between the two. And in terms of the actual tenets of the strategy, the framing was three pillars—invest, align, and complete.  And so briefly, just what that meant according to Secretary Blinken was really investing in sources of American strength at home. Renewing, for example, investment in technology, investment in STEM education, infrastructure, and many of the policies that actually became known as Build Back Better, a lot of the domestic spending packages that President Biden proposed, and some of which has been passed. So that first pillar was invest sort of in order to o compete with China, we need to first renew our sources of American strength and compete from a position of strength.  The second element was “align.” And in this—in this pillar, I think this is where the Biden administration has really distinguished itself from the Trump administration. Many folks say, well, the Biden administration’s China policy or its Asia policy is really just Trump 2.0 but with a little bit—you know, with essentially a nicer tone to it. But I think there is a difference here. And I think the Biden administration’s approach has really focused on aligning with both traditional security partners—our allies, our alliances with countries like the Republic of Korea, Japan, the Philippines—but also invigorating those nontraditional partnerships, with India, for example.   I think another part of this strategy, another part of this dimension, has also been reinvigorating U.S. presence and U.S. leadership, really, in multilateral organizations. Not only, for example, taking the Quad and reestablishing some of the leader-level summits, the ministerials, proposing, for example, a COVID cooperation regime among new members of the Quad, but also establishing newer frameworks. So, for example, as many of you have read about, I’m sure, AUKUS, this trilateral security pact between Australia, the United Kingdom and the U.S. when it comes to sharing of nuclear submarine technology. That’s been a new proposed policy. And I think we’re about to see an update from the administration in the next couple of weeks.  And even with elements of the region that have been unappreciated and perhaps under-focused on. For example, the Solomon Islands was the focal point of some attention last year, and you’ve seen the administration propose the Partners in the Blue Pacific Initiative, which seeks to establish greater cooperation among some of the Pacific Island nations. And there was actually a summit hosted by President Biden last fall with leaders of the Pacific Island countries. So that alignment piece I think has really been significant as a cornerstone of the Biden administration’s Indo-Pacific strategy.  The third element, of course, competition, I think is the most evident. And we’ve seen this from some of the executive orders on semiconductors, the restrictions on advanced chips, to elements of trade, to even sort of advocacy for human rights and greater promotion of democracy. You saw the Summit for Democracy, which has been a pillar of the administration’s foreign policy agenda. So that’s basically what they’ve done in the last two and a half years.  Now, in terms of where that’s actually brought us, I think I’ll make four observations. The first is that, unlike the Biden—unlike the Trump administration, where most of the policy pronouncements about the People’s Republic of China had some tinge of inducing change in China—that was the phrase that Secretary Pompeo used in a speech on China policy—I think the Biden administration largely has said: The assumption and the premise of all of our policy toward China is based on the idea that the U.S. government does not seek fundamentally to change the Chinese government, the Chinese regime, the leadership, the administration, the rule of the Chinese Communist Party.  So that is both a markedly important difference, but it’s also a part of the strategy that I believe remains ambiguous. And here, the problem is, you know, invest, align, and compete, competitive coexistence, where does that all actually take us? And I think this is where analysts in the strategic community and think tank world have said, well, it’s great to invest, of course. You know, there’s bipartisan support. Alignment with partners and allies is, of course, a pretty uncontroversial, for the most part, approach. And competition is, I think, largely a consensus view in Washington, D.C. But where does this actually take us?  You know, for all of its criticisms, the Trump administration did propose a specific end state or an end objective. And I think the Biden administration has just sort of said, well, it’s about coexisting. It’s about just assuming to manage the relationship. I think there are, of course, valid merits to that approach. And on an intellectual level, the idea is that because this is not necessarily a Cold War 2.0, in the words of the Biden administration, we’re not going to have an end state that is ala the Cold War—in essence a sort of victory or demise, you know, the triumph of capitalism over communism, et cetera. In fact, it’s going to be a persistent and sustained rivalry and competition. And in order to harness a strategy, we essentially need to manage that competition.   So I think that’s—it’s an intellectually coherent idea, but I think one of the ambiguities surrounding and one of the criticisms that has been proposed is that there is no clear end state. So we compete, we invest, we align, but to what end? Do we just keep—does the administration continue to tighten up and enhance alliances with partners and allies, and then to what end? What happens next? And sort of where does this lead us—leave us in ten years from now? So I think that’s the first comment I’ll make about the approach to the Indo-Pacific.  The second is that one of the tenets, of course, as I describe, is this compartmentalization of compete, cooperate. In essence, you know, we will compete—we, being the United States—with China on issues of technology, issues of economics, but we will also cooperate on areas of shared concern—climate change, nonproliferation. I think what you’ve seen is that while the Biden administration has proposed this idea, we can split—we can cooperate on one hand and also compete on the other—the People’s Republic of China, the Chinese government, has largely rejected that approach.   Where you’ve seen statements from senior officials in China that have said, essentially, we will not cooperate with you, the United States, until you first cease all of the behavior, all of the negative policies that we don’t like. In essence, if you will continue to sell arms to Taiwan, if you continue, the United States, to restrict semiconductors, to crackdown on espionage, to conduct military exercises in the region, then forget about any potential cooperation on climate, or forget about any cooperation on global health, et cetera.   So in essence, being able to tie the two compartments together has prevented a lot of what the Biden administration has sought to achieve. And we’ve seen that very clearly with Special Envoy John Kerry and his relentless efforts to conduct climate diplomacy. And I think largely—for example, last summer in the aftermath of Speaker Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, you saw a lot of those collaborative efforts essentially derailed. That’s the second comment I’ll make, which is while this approach, again, logically to most Americans would seem sound, it’s actually met a lot of resistance because the Chinese reaction to it is not necessarily the same.  The third is I think we’ve seen increasingly, even though there has been an increased alignment since the Trump administration with allies and partners, there’s still a degree of hedging among countries in the region. And that makes sense because from the perspectives of many of those leaders of countries in the region, the United States is a democratic country. We have an election coming up in 2024. And there’s no guarantee that the next president, if President Biden is no longer the president in 2024 or even in 2028, will continue this policy.   And I think all of you, as observers of American politics, know the degree to which American politics has become largely one that is dysfunctional, is almost schizophrenic in a way. And so one would imagine that if you are a leader of a country in the Asian-Pacific region, to support the Biden administration’s engagement, but also to maintain a degree of strategic autonomy, as this is often called. And so what I think we’ll continue to see and what will be interesting to watch is how middle powers, how other countries resident in the region approach the United States in terms of—(inaudible). I think India will be key to watch, for example. Its defense relationship with the United States has increased over the years, but yet it still has close interests with respect to China.  The final comment I’ll make is that on the military dimension I think this is another area of concern, where the Biden administration has said that one of its priorities is creating guardrails, constructing guardrails to manage the potential escalation in the event of an accident, or a miscommunication, miscalculation that could quickly spiral into a crisis. And we needn’t—we need not look farther than the 2001 Hainan incident to think of an example, which was a collision between a(n) EP-3 aircraft and a Chinese intelligence plane. And that led to a diplomatic standoff.  And so I think the United States government is very keen on creating dialogue between militaries, risk reduction mechanisms, crisis management mechanisms. But I think they’ve encountered resistance, again, from the People’s Republic of China, because the perspective there is that much of the U.S. behavior in the region militarily is invalid, is illegitimate. You know, the Chinese government opposes, for example, U.S. transits through the Taiwan Strait. So the idea therefore that they would engage and essentially deconflict and manage risk is sort of legitimizing American presence there militarily. And so we’ve encountered that obstacle as well.  So I think going forward on all four elements, we’re going to continue to see adjustment. And I think, as students, as researchers, I think these are four areas where there’s fertile room for discussion, for debate, for analysis, for looking at history. And I look forward to a conversation. Hopefully, many of you have ideas as well because there’s no monopoly on wisdom and there are many creative proposals to be discussed. So I look forward to questions. I’ll stop there.  FASKIANOS: Fantastic. Thank you, Chris. That was great. Now we’re going to go to all of you.  (Gives queuing instructions.)  Our first written question comes from Grace Wheeler. I believe a graduate student at the University of West Florida. Kissinger proposed the future of China-U.S. relations be one of coevolution instead of confrontation. Is it still realistically possible for the future of China-U.S. relations to be one of cooperation instead of confrontation?  LI: So terrific question. Thank you for the question. It’s a very interesting idea. And I think Henry Kissinger, who I know has long been involved with the Council on Foreign Relations, has produced through his many decades,strategic frameworks and new ways of thinking about cardinal challenges to geopolitics. I have not yet actually understood or at least examined specifically what the concrete pillars of coevolution entail. My understanding on a general level is that it means, essentially, the United States and the People’s Republic of China adjust and sort of mutually change their policies to accommodate each other. So a sort of mutual accommodation over time to adjust interests in a way that prevent conflict.  I think on the face—of course, that sounds—that sounds very alluring. That sounds like a terrific idea. I think the problem has always been what would actually this look like in implementation? So for example, on the issue of Taiwan, this is an issue where the Chinese government has said: There is no room for compromise. You know, the refrain that they repeat is: Taiwan is an inalienable part of Chinese territory. It is part of sovereignty. And there is no room for compromise. This is a red line. So if that’s the case, there’s not really, in my view, much room for evolution on this issue, for example. And it’s an intractable problem.  And so I don’t necessarily know how to apply the Kissinger framework to specific examples. And, but, you know, I do think it’s something worth considering. And, you know, I would encourage you and others on this call to think about, for example, how that framework might actually be adapted. So I think it’s an interesting idea, but I would—I think the devil’s in the details. And essentially, to think about how this would be applied to specific issues—South China Sea, human rights, trade—would be the key to unpacking this concept.  I think the second part of your question was, is cooperation possible? And again, I think, as I stated in my remarks, the Biden administration publicly says—publicly asserts that they do seek to maintain a space for cooperation in climate, in nonproliferation, in global health security. I think, again, what we’ve encountered is that the Chinese government’s view is that unless the United States ceases behavior that it deems detrimental to its own interests, it will not pursue any discussion of cooperation.   And so I think that’s the problem we’re facing. And so I think there are going to be discussions going forward on, well, given that, how do we then balance the need for cooperation on climate, in pandemics, with, for example, also concerns about security, concerns about military activity, concerns about Taiwan, et cetera? And I think this is the daily stuff of, of course, the conversations among the Biden administration and senior leadership. So personally, my view, is I hope cooperation is possible, of course. I think there are shared issues, shared vital interests, between the two countries and, frankly, among the global community, that require the U.S. and China to be able to work out issues. But I’m personally not optimistic that under this current framework, this paradigm, there will be a significant space open for cooperation.  FASKIANOS: Thank you. Going next to Hamza Siddiqui, a raised hand.   Q: Thank you. Hi. I’m Hamza Siddiqui, a student from Minnesota State University, Mankato.   And I actually had two questions. The first was: What kind of role does the U.S. envision Southeast Asian states—especially like the Philippines and Vietnam—playing in their U.S. strategy when it comes to Asia-Pacific security issues, specifically? And the second is that for the last few years there’s been some discussion about Japan and South Korea being formally invited to join the Five Eyes alliance. And I wanted to get your take on that. What do you think are the chances that a formal invitation would be extended to them? Thank you.  LI: Great. Thank you for the question. Two terrific questions.  So, first, on the role of countries in Southeast Asia, I think that under the Biden administration they have continued to play an increasing degree of importance. So you’ve seen, for example, even in the Philippines, which you cited, I think just last month Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin made a visit there. And in the aftermath of the visit, he announced a new basing agreement. I haven’t reviewed the details specifically, and I’m not a Philippines expert, but in short my understanding is that there is going to be renewed American presence—expanded American presence, actually, in the region.   And the Philippines, just based on their geostrategic location, is incredibly important in the Indo-Pacific region. So I think that the administration is very active in enhancing cooperation on the defense element, but also on the political and economic side as well. So with the Quad, for example, in India, you’ve seen cooperation on elements of economics as well, and technology. I think there’s an initiative about digital cooperation too. So I think the answer is increasingly an important role.   On Japan and Korea, there have, of course, been discussions over the years about expanding the Five Eyes intelligence alliance to other countries in Asia as well. My assessment is that that’s probably unlikely to occur in a formal way in the near term. But I could be wrong. And that assessment is primarily based on the fact that the countries that currently are part of the Five Eyes agreement share certain elements of linguistic convergence. They all speak English. There are certain longstanding historical ties that those countries have. And I think that to necessarily expand—or, to expand that existing framework would probably require a degree of bureaucratic sort of rearrangement that might be quite difficult, or quite challenging, or present obstacles.  I think what you will see, though, is enhanced security cooperation, for sure. And we’ve seen that even with Japan, for example, announcing changes to its military, its self-defense force, and increased defense spending as well in the region. So I think that is a trend that will continue.  FASKIANOS: Next question I’m taking from Sarah Godek, who is a graduate student at the University of Michigan.   What do guardrails look like, from a Chinese perspective? Thinking how China’s foreign ministry has consistently put out lists of demands for the U.S. side, I’m wondering how guardrails are formulated by Wang Yi and others.  LI: Great. Thanks for the question.  So I guess I’ll step back first and talk about what guardrails, in my view, actually entail. So I think the idea here is that in the event of a crisis—and, most of the time, crises are not planned. (Laughs.) Most of the time, crises, you know, occur as a result of an accident. For example, like the 2001 incident. But an accidental collision in the South China Sea between two vessels, the collision accidentally of two planes operating in close proximity. And as Chinese and American forces operate in closer proximity and increasing frequency, we do have that risk.   So I think, again, the idea of a guardrail that essentially, in the military domain, which is what I’m speaking about, entails a mechanism in place such that in the event of an accident or a crisis, there are ways based on that mechanism to diffuse that crisis, or at least sort of stabilize things before the political leadership can work out a solution. In essence, to prevent escalation because of a lack of dialogue. And I think for those of you who’ve studied history, you know that many wars, many conflicts have occurred not because one power, one state decides to launch a war. That has occurred. But oftentimes, because there is an accident, an accidental collision. And I think many wars have occurred this way.  So the idea of a guardrail therefore, in the military domain, is to create, for example, channels of communication that could be used in the event of a conflict. I think the easiest parallel to imagine is the U.S. and the Soviet Union, where there were hotlines, for example, between Moscow and between Washington, D.C. during that era, where the seniormost national security aides of the presidents could directly reach out to each other in the event of a crisis.   In the China context, what has been difficult is some of those channels exist. For example, the National Security Council Coordinator for Asia Kurt Campbell has said publicly: We have hotlines. The problem is that when the Americans pick up the phone and call, no one picks up on the other side. And in short, you know, having just the structure, the infrastructure, is insufficient if those infrastructure are not being used by the other side.   I think with respect to the U.S.-China context, probably, again, as I mentioned earlier, the largest obstacle is the fact that guardrails help the United States—or, in the Chinese perspective—from the Chinese perspective, any of these guardrails would essentially allow the U.S. to operate with greater confidence that, in the event of an accident, we will be able to control escalation. And from the Chinese perspective, they argue that because the United States fundamentally shouldn’t be operating in the Taiwan Strait anyway, therefore by constructing that guardrail, by, for example, having dialogue to manage that risk, it would be legitimizing an illegitimate presence in the first place.   So that’s always been perennially the problem. And I think the argument that the United States has made is that, well, sure, that may be your position. But it is in your interest as well not to have an accident spiral into a conflict. And so I think we’ve seen not a lot of progress on this front. I think, for example, in the aftermath of Speaker Pelosi’s visit, there—you know, a lot of the defense cooperation ties were suspended.   But the last comment I’ll make is that that doesn’t necessarily mean that all dialogue has been stayed. There are still active channels between the United States and China. We have embassies in each other’s countries. From public remarks, it seems like during moments of enhanced tension there are still ways for both governments to communicate with each other. So I think the good news is that it’s not completely like the two countries aren’t speaking to each other, but I think that there are not as many channels for reducing risk, managing potential crises, in the military sphere that exist today, that probably should exist.  FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to take the next question from Michael Long. Let’s see. You need to unmute yourself.  LI: It looks like he’s dropped off.  FASKIANOS: It looks like he put down his hand. OK. So let’s go next to Conor O’Hara.  Q: Hi. My name is Conor O’Hara. And I’m a graduate student at the Pepperdine University School of Public Policy.  In one of my classes, titled America’s Role in the World, we often talk about how America really does not have a comprehensive understanding of China. Not only China’s military and state department, but really China as a society. How can Americans change that? And where does America need to focus its efforts in understanding China? And then also, one other thing I think of, is, you know, where does that understanding begin? You know, how early in someone’s education or really within, say, the United States State Department do we need to focus our efforts on building an understanding? Thank you.  LI: Great. Well, thanks for the question. It’s a great question. Very hard challenge as well.  I think that’s absolutely true. I think the degree of understanding of China—of actually most countries—(laughs)—around the world—among senior U.S. foreign policy practitioners, I think, is insufficient. I think particularly with respect to China, and also Asia broadly, much of the diplomatic corps, the military establishment, intelligence officers, many of those people have essentially cut their teeth over the last twenty-five years focusing on the Middle East and counterterrorism. And that makes sense because the United States was engaged in two wars in that region.  But going back farther, many of the national security professionals before that generation were focused on the Soviet Union, obviously because of the Cold War. And so really, you’re absolutely correct that the number of people in the United States government who have deep China expertise academically or even professionally on the ground, or even have the linguistic ability to, you know, speak Mandarin, or other countries—or, languages of other countries in East Asia, I think is absolutely limited. I think the State Department, of course, has—as well as the intelligence community, as well as the Department of Defense—has tried to over the last few years reorient and rebalance priorities and resources there. But I think it’s still—my understanding, today it’s still limited. And I think there’s a lot of work to be done.  I think your question on how do you understand China as a society, I think with any country, number one, of course, is history. You know, every country’s politics, its policy, its government is informed by its history of, you know, modern history but also history going back farther. And I think China is no exception. In fact, Chinese society, and even the Communist Party of China, is deeply, I think, entrenched in a historical understanding of its role in the world, of how it interacts compared with its people, its citizens, its foreign conflicts. And so I think, number one is to understand the history of modern China. And I think anyone who seeks to be involved in discussions and research and debate on China does need to understand that history.  I think the second point is linguistics is actually quite important. Being able to speak the language, read the language, understand the language is important. Because so much of what is written—so much of our knowledge as, you know, American think tank researchers, is based on publicly available information in China. And a lot of that primarily is in Mandarin. So most speeches that the senior leadership of China deliver are actually in Mandarin. And some of them are translated, but not all of them. A lot of the documents that they issue, a lot of academics who write about—academics in China who write about foreign policy and international relations, write in Mandarin.  And so I think that an ability to be able to read in the original text is quite important. And in fact, you know, a lot of the nuances, and specifically in the Communist Party’s ideology, how it sees itself, its role in the world, a lot of that really is best captured and best understood in its original language. Some of the—you know, the ideology, the campaigns of propaganda, et cetera.  And I think the last part of your question was how early. I am not an education scholar. (Laughs.) I don’t study education or developmental psychology. But, you know, I imagine, you know, as with anything, linguistics, language, is best learned—or, most easily learned early on. But I think that does not mean that, you know, someone who’s in college or graduate school can’t begin to learn in a different language. So I’d answer your question like that.  FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to take the next written question from Lucksika Udomsrisumran, a graduate student at New York University.  What is the implication of the Biden administration’s three pillars of the Indo-Pacific strategy on the Mekong and the South China Sea? Which pillars do you see these two issues in, from the Biden administration’s point of view?  LI: OK. I think, if I’m understanding the question correctly about South China Sea, you know, I think in general the South China Sea probably would most easily fall into the competition category. There are obviously not only the United States and China, but other countries in the region, including the Philippines, for example, are claimants to the South China Sea. And so I think there’s always been some disagreement and some tensions in that region.  I think that that has largely been—the U.S. response or U.S. policy in South China Sea is just essentially, from the military perspective, has been to—you know, the slogan is, or the line is, to fly, sail, operate, et cetera—I’m not quoting that correctly—(laughs)—but essentially to operate wherever international law permits. And so that means Freedom of Navigation Operations, et cetera, in the South China Sea. I think that, of course, raises objections from other governments, mainly China, in the region.   So I would say that probably belongs in the competition category. And we spoke about earlier the idea of managing some of the risk that occurs or that emerges when the PLA Navy and the United States Navy operate in close proximity in that region. So from that perspective, if you’re talking about risk reduction and crisis management, that actually could fall into collaboration or cooperation. But I think primarily it’s competition.   FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to go next to Joan Kaufman. And, Joan, I know you wrote your question, but if you could ask it that would be great.  Q: Yes, will. Yes, certainly. Hi, Chris. Really great to see you here during this talk.  LI: Yeah, likewise.  Q: A proud Schwarzman Scholar.  I wanted to ask you a question about Ukraine and China’s, you know, kind of difficult position in the middle almost, you know, as sort of seemingly allied with Russia, or certainly not criticizing Russia. And then just putting forth this twelve-point peace plan last week for—and offering to broker peace negotiations and a ceasefire for Ukraine. You know, there’s no love lost in Washington for China on, you know, how it has positioned itself on this issue. And, you know, frankly, given China’s own kind of preoccupation with sovereignty over the years, how do you see the whole thing? And what comments might you make on that?  LI: Right. Well, first of all, thanks so much, Joan, for joining. And very grateful for all of—all that you’ve done for the Schwarzman Scholars Program over the past. I appreciate your time very much.  The Ukraine problem is an incredibly important one. And I think absolutely China is involved. And it’s a very complicated position that it’s trying to occupy here, with both supporting its security partner, Russia, but also not directly being involved in the conflict because of U.S. opposition and opposition from NATO. So I think it’s—obviously, China is playing a very delicate balancing role here.  I think a couple points. So the first is that I think my view is that, for the Chinese leadership, Ukraine—or, the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a deeply uncomfortable geopolitical situation, where there is essentially not a—there’s no good outcome, really, because, as you mentioned, Ukraine is a country with which China has diplomatic recognition. It recognizes it. It has an embassy there. And the Chinese foreign ministry, Chinese foreign policy, has long very much supported the concept of sovereignty, and being able to determine your own future as a country. And I think, in fact, that’s been one of the pillars and one of the objections to many American actions in the past. So on one hand, it says: We support sovereignty of every country, of which Ukraine is a country that is recognized by China.  And on the other hand, though, Russia, of course, which has had long complaints and issues with NATO expansion, is a partner of China. And so it’s obviously supporting Russia. It has alignment of interests between Russia and China in many ways, in many dimensions, including objections to, for example, U.S. presence in Europe, U.S. presence in Asia. So it’s a delicate balancing act. And I think from what we’ve seen, there hasn’t been sort of a clear one-sided answer, where you’ve seen both statements, you know, proposing peace and saying that, you know, all sides should deescalate. But on the other hand, the U.S. government, the Biden administration, is now publicly stating that they are concerned about China potentially lending support to Russia.  So, you know, in short, I think it’s very difficult to really understand what exactly is going on in the minds of the Chinese leadership. But I think that we’ll continue to see sort of this awkward back and forth and trying—this purported balancing act between both sides. But I think, you know, largely—my assessment is that it’s not going to go very clearly in one direction or the other.  I think the other comment I would make is that I think, from Beijing’s perspective, the clear analogy here is one for Taiwan. Because—and this has been something that has been discussed in the think tank community very extensively. But the expectation I think among many in Washington was that Ukraine would not be able to put up much resistance. In short, this would be a very, very easy victory for Putin. And I think that was a—you know, not a universal consensus, but many people believed that, in short, Russia with all of its military might, would have no issues subjugating Ukraine very quickly.  I think people have largely found that to be, you know, a strategic failure on Russia’s part. And so today, you know, one year after the invasion, Ukraine is still sovereign, is still standing, is still strong. And so I think—from that perspective, I think this—the war in Ukraine must give many of the leaders in China pause when it comes to thinking about a Taiwan continency, especially using force against Taiwan. Because, again, I think the degree of support, both militarily, politically, economically, for the resistance that Ukraine has shown against Russia among NATO members, among other Western countries, I think has been deeply surprising to many observers how robust that support has been. And I think that if you’re sitting in Beijing and thinking about what a potential response to a Taiwan contingency might be, that would absolutely inform your calculus.  FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to go next to Lindsey McCormack, a graduate student at Baruch College.  How is the Biden administration’s compete, cooperate, limited adversarial approach playing out with climate policy? What are you seeing right now in terms of the Chinese government’s approach to energy security and climate?  LI: Yeah. It’s a great question. Thanks for the question.  You know, we mentioned earlier, you know, I think the Biden administration’s approach has been, you know, despite all of the disagreements between the United States and the Chinese government, there should be room for cooperation on climate because, as the Biden administration says, the climate is an existential risk to all of humanity. It’s an issue of shared concern. So it’s one that is not defined by any given country or constrained to one set of borders. I think it’s largely not been very successful, in short, because China has not seemed to display much interest in cooperating on climate with the United States. And, again, China has largely coupled cooperation, linked cooperation in climate—or, on climate to other issues.  And so, you know, I think it’s been reported that at several of the meetings between Secretary Blinken, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, and their Chinese counterparts, the Chinese officials had essentially given the American officials a list saying: Here are the twenty-something things that we object to. Why don’t you stop all of these, correct all of your mistakes—so to speak—and then we’ll talk about what we can do next. And so I think, again, that—you know, that, to me, indicates that this framework of compartmentalizing cooperation and competition has some flaws, because the idea that you can simply compartmentalize and say: We’re going to cooperate at full capacity on climate, but we’re not going to—you know, but we’ll compete on technology, it just—it actually doesn’t work in this situation.  I think the other comment I’ll make is that what the Biden administration has done is—which I think has been effective—is reframed the notion of cooperation. Where, in the past, cooperation was sort of viewed as a favor that the Chinese government did to the Americans, to the American government. That if we—if the United States, you know, offered certain inducements or there were strong elements of the relationship, then China would cooperate and that would be a favor.   And I think the Biden administration has reframed that approach, where cooperation is now presented not as a favor that any country does to another, but rather sort of is shared here. And that this is something of concern to China, to the United States, to other countries, and so all major countries need to play their part, and step up their game, to take on. I think, unfortunately, it hasn’t been extremely successful. But I think that there—I hope that there will be future progress made in this area.  FASKIANOS: Great. I’m going to go next to Jeremiah Ostriker, who has raised—a raised hand, and also written your question. But you can ask it yourself. And you have to accept the unmute prompt. Is that happening? All right. I think I might have to read it.  Q: Am I unmuted now?  FASKIANOS: Oh, you are. Fantastic.  Q: OK. First, I’ll say who I am. I am a retired professor from Princeton University and Columbia University and was an administrative provost at Princeton.  And our China policies have puzzled me. I have visited China many times. And I have wondered—I’ll quote my questions now—I have wondered why we are as negative towards China as we have been. So specifically, does the U.S. foreign policy establishment need enemies to justify its existence? Is it looking around the world for enemies? And why should we care if other countries choose to govern themselves in ways which are antithetical to the way that we choose to govern ourselves? And, finally, why not cooperate with all countries on projects of common interest, regardless of other issues?  LI: Great. Well, first of all, thank you for the question—or, three questions, which are all extremely important. I’ll do my best to answer, but these are very difficult questions, and I think they touch on a more philosophical understanding of what is American foreign policy for, what is the purpose of America’s role in the world, et cetera. But I’ll try to do my best.  I think on the first part, does the United States need enemies, is it looking to make enemies? I think if you asked any—and these are, of course, my own assessments. I think if you asked any administration official, whether in this current administration or in previous administrations—Republican or Democrat—I don’t think anyone would answer “yes.” I think the argument that has been made across administrations in a bipartisan fashion is that foreign policy is fundamentally about defending American interests and American values. In essence, being able to support the American way of life, which obviously is not necessarily one clearly defined entity. (Laughs.)  But I think, therefore, all of our policy toward China is sort of geared at maintaining, or securing, defending U.S. interests in the region. And where the argument about your question comes into play is that I think a lot of—the Biden administration, the Trump administration, the Obama administration would argue that many of the concerns that the United States has with China are not fundamentally only about internal issues, where this is a question of how they govern themselves. But they touch upon issues of shared concern. They touch upon issues that actually affect U.S. interests.   And so, for example, the South China Sea is, again—is a space that is—contains much trade. There are many different countries in the region that access the South China Sea. So it’s not necessarily just an issue—and, again, this is Secretary Blinken’s position that he made clear—it’s not just an issue specific to China. It does touch upon global trade, global economics, global rules, and global order. And I think this is the term that has been often used, sort of this liberal international rules-based order.   And while that’s sort of an amorphous concept, in essence what I think the term implies is the idea that there are certain standards and rules by which different countries operate that allow for the orderly and for the peaceful and the secure exchange of goods, of ideas, of people, of—so that each country is secure. And I think this—again, this broader concept is why I think successive U.S. administrations have focused on China policy, because I think some of, in their view, China’s behaviors impinge on U.S. interests in the region.   I think the second question is why should we care about how other countries govern themselves? I think in a way, the answer the Biden administration—this current administration has given to that question is: The U.S. government under President Biden is not trying to fundamentally change the Chinese system of governance. And I think you’ve seen Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken say that publicly, that they are not seeking the collapse or the fundamental change in the Communist Party’s rule of China. So I think in that sense, they have made that—they have made that response. I think, again, where there are issues—there are tensions, is when actions that the Chinese government take then touch upon U.S. interests. And I think we see that in Taiwan. We see that with economics. We see that with trade, et cetera.   And then finally, why not cooperate with every country in the world? I think obviously in an ideal world, that would be the case. All countries would be able to only cooperate, and all concerns shared among different nations would be addressed. I think unfortunately one of the problems that we’re seeing now is that large major powers, like China and Russia, have very different worldviews. They see a world that is very different in its structure, and its architecture, and its organization, than the one that the U.S. sees. And I think that’s what’s led to a lot of tension.  FASKIANOS: So we have a written question from Julius Haferkorn, a student at California State University and Tübingen University, in Germany.  Ever since the escalation of the Ukraine war, there are discussions about the risk that, should Russia be successful with its invasion, China might use this as a template in regards to Taiwan. In your opinion, is this a realistic scenario?  LI: Great. Thanks for the question.  I think there are definitely analogies to be drawn between Ukraine and Taiwan, but I think there are also significant differences. The first is the relationship between Russia and Ukraine is one of two sovereign nations that the United States and international community recognizes. I think with Taiwan, what has—going back to our history question—Taiwan is a very complicated issue, even with regard to U.S. policies. The United States does not recognize Taiwan formally as an independent country. The United States actually does not take a position on the status of Taiwan. Briefly, the One China Policy, as articulated in the three communiques, the three joint communiques, essentially says that the United States government acknowledges the Chinese position that there is one China, and Taiwan is part of China, et cetera, et cetera.  And that word “acknowledge” is pretty key, because in essential its strategic ambiguity. It’s saying, we acknowledge that the PRC government says this. We don’t challenge that position. But we don’t necessarily recognize or completely accept. And, obviously, the Mandarin version of the text is slightly different. It uses a term that is closer to “recognize.” But that ambiguity, in a way, permitted normalization and led to the democratization of Taiwan, China’s economic growth and miracle, its anti-poverty campaign. So in essence, it’s worked—this model has worked for the last forty-something years.  But I think that does mean that the situation across the Taiwan Strait is very different, because here the United States does not recognize two countries on both sides of the strait. Rather, it has this ambiguity, this policy of ambiguity. And in short, the only U.S. criterion for resolution of issues across the Taiwan Strait is peace. So all of the documents that the U.S. has articulated over successive administrations essentially boil down to: As long as the resolution of issues between Taiwan and the PRC and mainland China are peaceful, then the United States is not involved. That the only thing that the United States opposes is a forceful resolution—use of military force, use of coercion. And that’s what is problematic.  I think what you’ve seen increasingly over the last few years is a sort of—it’s not a formal shift away from that policy, but definitely slowly edging away from that policy. Now, any administration official will always deny that there are any changes to our One China Policy. And I think that’s always been the refrain: Our One China Policy has not changed. But you’ve actually seen within that One China Policy framework adjustments, accommodations—or, not accommodations—but adjustments, recalibrations. And the way that the successive U.S. administrations defend that or justify it, is because it is our—it is the American One China Policy. Therefore, we can define what that One China Policy actually means.  But you have seen, in essence, greater increased relations and exchanges between officials in Taiwan, officials in the United States. I think it was publicly reported just a couple weeks ago that some of the senior national security officials in Taipei visited the United States. Secretary Pompeo at the end of his tenure as secretary of state changed some of the previous restrictions on—that were self-imposed restrictions—on interactions between the government in Taiwan and the government in the United States. So we’re seeing some changes here. And I think that has led to—or, that is one element that has led to some of the tensions across the Taiwan Strait.   Obviously, from Beijing’s perspective, it sees that as the U.S. sliding away from its commitments. Now, on the other hand, Beijing, of course, has also started to change its policy, despite claiming that its policy is exactly the same. You’ve seen greater military incursions in Taiwan’s air defense identification zone, with planes, fighter jets, that are essentially flying around the island. You’ve seen greater geoeconomic coercion targeted at Taiwan in terms of sanctions. So you’ve seen essentially changes on all sides.  And so the final point I’ll leave here—I’ll leave with you is that the refrain that the United States government articulates of opposing any unilateral changes to the status quo by either side, to me, is actually quite ambiguous. Because there’s never been a status quo that has truly existed. It’s always been a dynamic equilibrium between Taipei, Beijing, and Washington, D.C. Where Beijing is seeking to move Taiwan toward unification. Taiwan, at least under its current leadership, under Tsai Ing-wen, is obviously seeking, in a way, to move from at least—at least to move toward de facto or maintain de facto independence. Whether it’s moving toward de jure is a topic of debate. And then the United States, of course, is enhancing its relationship with Taiwan.  So there’s never been a static status quo between the three sides. It’s always been a dynamic, evolving and changing equilibrium. Which is why the concept of opposing unilateral changes to the status quo, in my view, is almost paradoxical, because there has never been a status quo in the first place.  FASKIANOS: There has been some talk that Kevin McCarthy, the speaker of the House, is planning a trip to Taiwan. Given what happened with Speaker Pelosi, is that a—what do you think of that musing, to go to Taiwan, to actually do that?  LI: Mhm, yes. I think that’s obviously been reported on. I think it’s an area of close attention from everyone watching this space. I haven’t seen any reports. All I can say is based on what I’ve seen reported in the media. And it seems like, based on—because of domestic preoccupations, that trip, whether it happens or not, is right now, at the moment, on the back burner. But I think that if he were to go, I think it would certainly precipitate a quite significant response from China. And I think whether that would be larger or smaller than what happened after Speaker Pelosi’s visit, I think is something that is uncertain now.  FASKIANOS: Thank you. We’ll go next to Autumn Hauge.  Q: Hi. I’m Autumn Hauge. I’m a student at Minnesota State University, Mankato.  So my question is, since a focus of the Biden administration’s foreign policy is the relationship between the United States and China, and another focus is to invest and grow a presence in the Indo-Pacific region, specifically looking at the relationship between the United States and the Micronesian country of the Republic of Palau, whose government has openly shared their support for Taiwan, do you think that the United States’ long history with the Republic of Palau, and their connection to their support—the Republic of Palau’s support to Taiwan, halters the ability for the U.S. to grow a positive relation with China? Thank you.  LI: Great. Thanks for the question. It’s a great question.  I am not an expert on Palau or its politics. I do know that Palau has enhanced its exchanges, it relationship with Taipei, over the last few years. I think we saw Palau’s president, I think, visit Taipei. I think the U.S. ambassador to Palau actually visited Taipei. And there have been increasing—during COVID, there was a discussion of a travel bubble between Taiwan and Palau. So there’s definitely been increasing exchange.  I think in general this has always been a key obstacle to U.S.-China relations, which is any country that still recognizes the Republic of China—that is the formal name of the government currently in Taiwan—I think presents a significant issue. Because for the PRC, recognition of the One China—what they call the One China Principle, the idea that there is one China, Taiwan is part of that China, and the legitimate government of China is the People’s Republic of China, is a precondition for any diplomatic normalization with Beijing. And so I think certainly, you know, there are a small handful of countries that still recognize the ROC, but I think that they—you know, for those countries and their relationships with the PRC, of course, that’s a significant hindrance.  In what you’ve seen in the U.S. government in the past few years is that for countries that derecognize Taipei and sort of switch recognition to Beijing, the PRC, there’s been discussion—I think, there have been several bills introduced, in essence, to punish those countries. I don’t necessarily think that those bills have ended up becoming law, but I think there is, given the current political dynamics, the sort of views on China in Washington, D.C., there is this sense that the U.S. needs to support countries that still recognize Taiwan, the ROC, and be able to provide support so that they don’t feel pressured to switch their recognition.  My personal view is that I think that that is, on the whole, relatively insignificant. I won’t say that it’s completely not significant, but I think that in general issues around the Taiwan Strait, cross-strait relations, I think military issues, I think political issues related to exchanges between Taiwan and Beijing, I think those issues are much more important and much more critical to driving changes in the relationship across the Taiwan Strait.  FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to try and sneak in one last question from Wim Wiewel, who’s a student at Portland State University.   Given your pessimism about cooperation combined with competition, what do you think is the long-term future for U.S.-China relations?  LI: OK. Well, thanks for the question. I’m not sure that I can provide a satisfying answer. And, in fact, I don’t have the answer. You know, I think if anyone had the answer, then they should immediately tell the Biden administration that they’ve solved the problem.  Even though I am pessimistic about this current framework, just because of its demonstrated effects, I still think that in general the likelihood of a real war, which I think people have floated now—you know, Professor Graham Allison, who I used to work for, wrote a book called Destined for War? I still believe that the probability of all-out great-power conflict in a kinetic way, a military way, is still relatively low. I think that there are significant differences today compared to the era during World War I and World War II era.   I think that the degree of economic interdependence between China and not only the United States but the rest of the world, I think is a significant gamechanger in how countries position themselves vis-à-vis China. I think Europe is the great example here of how there are many countries that invest, have business relationships, have trade with China. And so therefore, their policy on China has been a little bit more calibrated than what the United States has been doing.   And so on the whole, I think most people still recognize that any great-power war between the United States and China would be utterly catastrophic. And I think that despite all the tensions that exist today, I think that that recognition, that consensus is pretty universally held, that a great-power war between the U.S. and China would be extremely bad. I think that is—that is probably something that is understood by Republican administrations, Democratic administrations, folks in Beijing, folks around the world, in the region. And so I think that, hopefully, that idea, that despite disagreements, despite political tensions, the need to prevent all-out global conflict is quite important, is a vital interest, I think, hopefully, to me, provides some optimism. And hopefully we’ll be able to continue to carry our relationship with China through.  And I’m hopeful especially that all of you students, researchers, who hope to study, and write about, and even perhaps participate in American foreign policy, will continue to think. Because so much of the future of the U.S.-China relationship and U.S. foreign policy is going to be determined by your generation. So with that, I guess this would be a perfect place to stop. And I thank you for the question.   FASKIANOS: Absolutely. Well, Chris, this has been fantastic. I apologize to all of you. We had many more—many questions in the written part and raised hands. And I’m sorry that we could not get to all of them. We’ll just have to have you back and continue to cover this issue. So we really appreciate your insights, Chris Li. So thank you again.  The next Academic Webinar will be on Wednesday, March 22, at 1:00 p.m. (EDT). Brian Winter, editor-in-chief of Americas Quarterly will lead a conversation on U.S. relations with South America. And in the meantime, please do learn more about CFR paid internships for students and fellowships for professors at CFR.org/careers. You can follow us at @CFR_academic, and visit CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for research and analysis on global issues. And I’m sure you can also go to the Belfer Center for additional analysis by Chris Li. So I encourage you to go there as well.  Thank you all, again, for being with us, and we look forward to continuing the conversation on March 22. So thank you, all. Thanks, Chris.  LI: Thank you.  (END)