Events

The European Commission’s Executive Vice President and Commissioner for Trade, Valdis Dombrovskis, discusses the trends and shocks affecting international trade, the value-added of multilateralism, and how economic security is enhanced by trade openness between the European Union and United States.The C. Peter McColough Series on International Economics brings the world's foremost economic policymakers and scholars to address members on current topics in international economics and U.S. monetary policy. This meeting series is presented by the Maurice R. Greenberg Center for Geoeconomic Studies.For those attending virtually, log-in information and instructions on how to participate during the question and answer portion will be provided the evening before the event to those who register. Please note the audio, video, and transcript of this hybrid meeting will be posted on the CFR website. 

Panelists discuss the trends revealed in this year’s AI Index Report, including technical advancements in AI, public perceptions of the technology, and the geopolitical dynamics surrounding its development.The AI Index is an independent initiative at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) that tracks, collates, distills, and visualizes data related to artificial intelligence. Its mission is to provide unbiased, rigorously vetted, broadly sourced data in order for policymakers, researchers, executives, journalists, and the general public to develop a more thorough and nuanced understanding of the complex field of AI.For those attending virtually, log-in information and instructions on how to participate during the question and answer portion will be provided the evening before the event to those who register. Please note the audio, video, and transcript of this hybrid meeting will be posted on the CFR website.

European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde discusses the state of the European economy, U.S.-EU economic cooperation, and the implications of international geopolitical conflicts on the global economy. This meeting is held in collaboration with the Peterson Institute for International Economics. The C. Peter McColough Series on International Economics brings the world's foremost economic policymakers and scholars to address members on current topics in international economics and U.S. monetary policy. This meeting series is presented by the Greenberg Center for Geoeconomic Studies. Zoom Log-in Information: https://cfr.zoom.us/j/84302229195 Passcode: 933295 Webinar ID: 843 0222 9195

Admiral John Aquilino discusses his work as commander of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, as well as the security challenges in the Indo-Pacific region, solutions to deliver integrated deterrence, and multilateral partnerships. Please note there is no virtual component to this meeting. The audio, video, and transcript of this meeting will be posted on the CFR website.

CFR experts discuss Iran’s attack on Israel and the escalation of the conflict. FROMAN: Well, thanks very much. Thanks, everybody, for joining. And thank you to our six senior fellows here who’ve …

Edward Alden, CFR’s Bernard L. Schwartz senior fellow, discusses U.S. immigration policy and how it is shaping political conversations in this election year. Ruth Conniff, editor-in-chief of the Wisconsin Examiner, discusses her experiences reporting on migrant stories, immigration policy, and border security. The host of the webinar is Carla Anne Robbins, senior fellow at CFR and former deputy editorial page editor at the New York Times.  TRANSCRIPT FASKIANOS: Welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations Local Journalists Webinar. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president for the National Program and Outreach here at CFR. CFR is an independent and nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher focused on U.S. foreign policy. CFR is also the publisher of Foreign Affairs magazine. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. This webinar is part of CFR’s Local Journalists Initiative, created to help you draw connections between the local issues you cover and national and international dynamics. Our programming puts you in touch with CFR resources and expertise on international issues and provides a forum for sharing best practices. We’re delighted to have over ninety participants from thirty-five states and U.S. territories with us today. We appreciate you taking time out of your deadline-driven days to join us for this discussion, which is on the record. The video and transcript will be posted on our website after the fact at CFR.org/localjournalists. We’re pleased to have Edward Alden, Ruth Conniff, and host Carla Anne Robbins to discuss immigration policy reporting. We’ve shared their bios with you, so I will just give you a few highlights. Edward Alden is Bernard L. Schwartz senior fellow at CFR, specializing in U.S. economic policy, competitiveness, trade, and immigration policy. He served as the project director of the CFR-sponsored independent task force, The Work Ahead, as well as one on immigration. Mr. Alden is also the author of Failure to Adjust: How Americans got Left Behind in the Global Economy. And his forthcoming book is entitled, When the World Closed its Doors: The COVID-19 Tragedy and the Future of Borders. And that will be out in December. Ruth Conniff is the editor-in-chief of the Wisconsin Examiner. In 2017, she moved to Oaxaca, Mexico to cover U.S.-Mexico relations, migrant caravans, and Mexico’s efforts to contend with the Trump administration’s border policies. She is also the author of Milked: How an American Crisis Brought Together Midwestern Dairy Farmers and Mexican Workers. Carla Anne Robbins is a senior fellow at CFR and cohost of the CFR podcast, The World Next Week. She also serves as the 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. And previously, she was deputy editorial page editor at the New York Times and chief diplomatic correspondent at the Wall Street Journal. So, Ted, Ruth, and Carla, thank you very much for being with us for this timely conversation. Carla, I will turn it now to you. ROBBINS: Irina, thank you so much. And, Ruth and Ted, it’s great to see you. And thank you so much for doing this. So I think I understand these things usually, but I am genuinely puzzled. So, Ted, can we start with a quick primer on current Biden administration immigration policy? You know, we heard there was going to be an executive order. You know, there was Title 42, then it went away. What is President Biden’s immigration policy and how does it differ, or doesn’t it, from the previous Trump policies? ALDEN: Thanks, Carla. Great, great to be here. Great to be with you, Ruth. It’s an excellent question. Just to start, I might note that immigration policy is a very, very big area, right? Most immigration in the United States are people who apply to come here legally, and they come, and sometimes they live and work here for a while, sometimes they make their lives here. The story of America is a story of immigration. So, you know, our lens has become very narrowed on the southern border, given our political debates, but it’s really important to keep in context the much wider picture of immigrants in the United States. But I will focus on the southern border, because I assume that’s why everyone is here. What President Biden would like is an orderly system on the southern border that allows people who are fleeing violence of one sort or another entry into the United States. Basically, his administration believes that immigration is positive for the U.S. He came to office very critical of some of the things that President Trump had done in terms of, you know, the remain in Mexico program to force migrants to wait in Mexico, or the family separation policy. The problem is that this administration—it’s hardly unique to the United States. Same thing is going on in Europe. Similar things are going on in Canada. Have been overwhelmed by the numbers of people seeking to leave their countries and make it into Europe or the United States. These are numbers that we’ve not seen. There’s really a global asylum crisis. What the Biden—and I’ll give the short version. We can go back on this. What the Biden administration tried to do back in the spring of 2023, it lifted—you mentioned Title 42. Title 42 was the COVID-era order that essentially permitted the administration to turn around anyone who crossed illegally and send them back to Mexico, with no consequences. Many people would try again. But it was, you can’t enter the United States because we face a pandemic, and you might contribute in some way. That’s a super simplified version of Title 42. Happy to go into more detail. The Biden administration knew when that was lifted that there were going to be a lot of people who’d been waiting to get into the country who were suddenly going to show up. And so they tried to craft a new approach that was designed basically to flip the incentives. To say, OK, under U.S. law, people have a right to come and seek what’s known as asylum. I mean, this is codified in U.S. laws. It’s an international obligation. If people arrive at the border of the United States and say: I’m fleeing torture, violence, threat of death for a variety of reasons, they have a right to have those cases heard, adjudicated in U.S. immigration courts. They have a right to seek protection. The problem is people have been arriving for some years, this occurred in the Trump administration as well, in such large numbers that the system just can’t handle it. So the Border Patrol essentially releases them into the country. They’re told to appear in court two, three, four years down the road. And for a lot of people, that’s a big incentive. So the Biden team, under Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas, tried to flip the script. They tried to say, look, we’ll make it easier for people to follow an orderly path. We’ll provide a way through this online app for them to get interviews at the legal ports of entry. We’ll create a new system to parole into the country up to 30,000 people a month from four countries—from Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba, and Nicaragua, if I’m remembering correctly. I think I got that last one wrong. From four countries who—you know, where, you know, they are countries that are really in crisis. So we’ll increase that flow. But if you arrive between the borders, if you come across at Eagle Pass in Texas or wherever else, the presumption is going to be that you will not be granted asylum and you’ll be turned back. The problem is the numbers have just overwhelmed those intentions. So Biden’s got this problem of a border that is perceived by the voters as out of control. And he doesn’t really have the means to do anything about it. He tried to reach agreement with Republicans earlier this year on a reasonably hardline bill that would have really raised the threshold for people seeking asylum. But when Donald Trump spoke up against it, the Republicans wouldn’t support it. So he’s a bit over a barrel. He is—you know, he comes from a party that is by and large pro-immigrant. The Democrats have strong pro-immigration lobbies in the party. But he’s got a situation at the border there that is perceived by voters as out of control, that is clearly a political liability for him. So he’s sort of caught between a rock and a hard place. ROBBINS: So, Ruth, this asylum process, and Ted also, this asylum process is intended, if it worked—and one of the problems, of course, is that we don’t have anywhere near enough judges and courts and people to sort this out. But the asylum process, and under international law we’re supposed to take people in who are fleeing, you know, genuine persecution. But the asylum process is supposed to sort out the people who we have an international obligation to take in from the people who want to come here for the reason that many of our grandparents came here, or parents came here, or some of us came here, which is for economic reasons. The country has made a decision that will allow in certain numbers of people who want to migrate for economic reasons. But under international law, we have an obligation to take anyone who was fleeing persecution. Do we have any sense, Ruth, what the percentages is? Last year the government reported that three million people sought to enter the United States. Of that three million people, do we know how many of those people had legitimate—potentially legitimate asylum claims, versus people who were economic migrants? CONNIFF: I don’t know the answer to that. Ted might. But I will say this, then I’ll go—I’ll kick it back to Ted for those specific numbers. Here in Wisconsin, where I am reporting on immigration, there is an enormous economic dependency on migrants both from countries that are potentially places from which you can seek asylum—in Central America, particularly Nicaragua—and a lot of people from Mexico. They prop up the dairy industry in Wisconsin. So the economic dependence on those migrants is a lot of what’s driving—employers want them to come. And in the dairy industry, the best number that I have seen very recently, the 10,000 undocumented immigrants who are working in the dairy industry in Wisconsin, they comprise 70 percent of the labor force. So our dairy industry in America’s dairy land would go under overnight without that labor force. So I feel like this is an important aspect of the conversation. When you sort of separate asylum and economic reasons, and there’s sort of this sense of, well, those economic reasons are maybe not so legitimate, or people are coming to take advantage of our economy, I feel like one of the really important things that local reporters can do is to get down to the community level, get down to the employer level, and talk to people like the dairy farmers in Wisconsin, who are utterly dependent on a workforce that is almost 100 percent undocumented, because the United States does not have a work visa for year-round farm work. We allow seasonal farm work, and we grant visas for that, but in the dairy industry where work is, you know, 24/7, 365 days a year, there is no category of visa—except for a few technical visas that people are able to apply for sometimes. So, basically, if you’re milking cows and you’re from another country, you’re unlikely to be here legally. And yet, the industry is utterly—and has been for decades—now utterly dependent on this workforce. So that pull factor from employers is as much of a factor as people seeking a better life, which they are. They’re seeking to make money here to send it back to their families, sometimes to build a life back at home and sometimes to move here. But that underlying economic structure is, you know, U.S. employers, particularly in agriculture, particularly in dairy, are very dependent on and really want these workers to come. ROBBINS: So that’s another—that’s sort of the converse side of the economic. There’s the economic push and then there’s the economic pull. But our legal structure is not set up to recognize the pull aspect of it. We have a sorting—asylum, economic migrants who can come in legally, but not—we don’t have a Bracero program, necessarily, in this way. So can you talk a little bit about the awareness politically in your state, Ruth, which is—you’ve got the politics of migration and then the economic reality. Because you have a dairy industry, and you can quantify it, but you’re not the only state in which migrants are doing jobs that other people don’t want to do. CONNIFF: Right. Right, right. There are not a ton of American workers lining up to milk cows who’ve been displaced by this wave of migrants taking their jobs. That is just not the reality. And, you know, you can talk to dairy farmers, and they will tell you they have tried really hard to find workers and we’re just delighted when they found seasonal migrant workers, mostly from Mexico, who were willing to move over from those seasonal jobs to work in the dairy industry. They were attracted to the year-round jobs. And the and the industry has become utterly dependent on them. As far as the politics goes, it’s very complicated. And, you know, in my book I talk to a lot of farmers who voted for Trump—not once, but twice—who did not like his antiimmigrant rhetoric, but who are basically conservatives. And, you know, his language about the forgotten men and women of America really resonated in rural Wisconsin with a lot of people. They felt sort of culturally represented by him, even though they’re heavily dependent on an undocumented workforce and, in fact, interestingly, have found a kind of shared agrarian past with their undocumented workers. And I write about these farmers who take annual trips to Mexico and who have found that, you know, it reminds them of their own youth in the ’60s in Wisconsin, when neighbors help neighbors and, you know, there was kind of this rural community and this, you know, attachment to small farm life. So that—you know, that is another pitch that I will make to local reporters. (Laughs.) Is really getting down below that 30,000-foot level. It’s fascinating to talk to people about their politics and what it really means. So the fact that these rural areas of Wisconsin went for Trump, you know, in 2016, and even bigger and 2020 even though Biden won the state, doesn’t really mean that their number-one issue is fear of immigrants. I mean, for one thing, we’re a long way from the southern border. So a lot of the hype about the danger of immigration is a little bit far away here. I think that there’s something that’s not so much intellectual, some buttons that Trump is pushing. And he did come here on Wisconsin’s primary election day and talk a lot about the dangers posed by immigrants and how he’s going to, you know, represent native-born Americans in repelling immigrants. And I feel like it was part of a—kind of a general pitch that he makes that excites the crowd. But I know from interviewing people in rural Wisconsin that the antiimmigrant aspect of it is not driving them. And in fact, there’s this complexity in the—in the dependence that they have on the very undocumented immigrants that he is, you know, talking about so viciously now in his campaign. So that’s kind of fascinating to me. I don’t know if it’s part of the reason that Trump only won 79 percent of the vote, even though he was the only candidate in the Republican primary here in April. That was—you know, there’s—one in five Republican voters in Wisconsin didn’t vote for Trump, even though they didn’t have another option. That was actually, you know, going to move forward to the convention. So I think some of that rhetoric might—there might be some backlash from that. But it is definitely the national Republican strategy to run against immigrants in 2024. And, you know, you see that in our U.S. Senator Ron Johnson, who went to the little town of Whitewater, Wisconsin—which Trump also mentioned when he was here on our primary day in April—where they claimed—and this is interesting, unfolding. Breitbart News, the right-wing website, claimed there was a flood of— ROBBINS: Can I stop you, because I want to tell the entire Whitewater story. So I want to do an entire segment on this, because I have a question about the Whitewater story, because it’s a fascinating one. And it’s not the Whitewater I grew up with, which is the Clinton Whitewater story. But we’ll do Whitewater in a minute, OK? (Laughs.) CONNIFF: All right. ROBBINS: So, Ted, do you know the number about the economic versus asylum? And if you don’t, I don’t want to put you on the spot. But it’s one— ALDEN: Well, not economic versus—so, just, three quick comments. One, I absolutely want to endorse Ruth’s point about the economic pull in all of this, right? The two big periods where we’ve seen very large numbers of undocumented migrants are the end of the ’90s and the current era, when U.S. unemployment is around 4 percent. And if you look at what happened under COVID, we lost about two million immigrants as a result of the closures during COVID; like if the immigrant population had increased along the pre-COVID trend lines, there would have been about two million more working-age people in the United States in 2022 than there were. So there is a big hole in the labor market, and this huge surge of people has filled it in. It’s not a small part of the explanation for why the U.S. economy is doing so well compared to all of its competitors around the world. Also, on a second risk point, there’s a lot of great stories out there. One of the first big immigration stories I did when I was working for the Financial Times back in the early 2000s, there was the first debates over immigration reform in the mid-2000s, so I went down and visited then-House-member, later Senator Jeff Flake, who is a Republican, on his family’s ranch in Arizona where they had 10,000 head of cattle. They hired a couple of dozen undocumented migrants every year to grow the crops that would feed those cattle in the winter, and he was the one who first sort of explained to me circular migration from Mexico. So there are so many good stories here. The question on asylum approval, there are sort of—if you come and seek asylum, there’s two hurdles you have to jump. First you have to persuade the asylum officer—usually at the border there—that you have a credible fear that you will be harmed in a way that’s protected. You’ll face, you know, torture, persecution, or death on account of your race, religion, belief, or membership in a particular social group. That’s a fairly easy threshold to cross. About 70, 80 percent of people who arrive are able to cross that threshold. Once you’ve done that, then you need to have a proper hearing in front of an immigration judge, which is an arm of the Department of Justice. The approval rate nationwide since 2000 is about 40 percent, so of those people who pass the credible fear threshold, about 40 percent are ultimately approved for asylum; the rest are not. It varies enormously depending on the part of the country you are in. But of course a lot of people who are not approved don’t necessarily go home. They just become—you know, we do not have the capacity in this country—Trump is promising to create it—to hunt those people down and force them to leave the country—so a lot of them remain anyway and become, you know, part of the ten and eleven million—you know, the numbers vary a little bit—of undocumented migrants living in the U.S. Those awaiting asylum are technically living here legally. They are under our protection, under our asylum. Those are not undocumented migrants. But if they lose their asylum case, refuse to go home, they then enter that larger undocumented population. ROBBINS: So I want to come back a little bit to you after we talk about Whitewater, and then to everybody here, you are journalists. I’m sure you have a lot of questions. So I’m just going to do one more round here and then throw it open to you guys. So, Ruth, you did some really great reporting debunking the so-called immigration crisis in Whitewater, Wisconsin, after Wisconsin politicians and Breitbart claimed the small town was suffering from a big-city immigration crisis, and was inundated, and there was crime, and all the terrible things that were supposedly going on everywhere. I live in New York, and I haven’t noticed it, but OK. So can you tell us quickly about that story, and can you tell us how other reporters who cover these local issues can bring these stories alive if they don’t have a Ron Johnson doing them the favor of sensationalizing them? (Laughs.) CONNIFF: Yeah, I mean, I think it was really interesting—I mean, that was an example—and I think there will be many more in this election year—examples of a small community that suddenly becomes a national talking point in a political campaign, and the national talking points get further and further away from the reality on the ground. So just contrasting those two things is an obvious assignment for immigration reporters right now. And I—in Whitewater in particular what was fascinating is there was a local police chief who had written a letter to the Biden administration asking for help in his community because they do have a lot of immigrants in the community, and they didn’t come in all of a sudden on a bus—as was implied by Breitbart, sent there by Joe Biden. You know, it was actually Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas, who has been sending busloads of migrants to other northern cities. But in this case, there were a group of Nicaraguan—mostly Nicaraguan migrants who had come to the area over time, and I went down to Whitewater and talked to local officials about what was actually going on. The police chief who sent that letter—which he never expected to become, you know, this huge flashpoint—really what he was talking about when he talked about the stress on the system there was the fact that Wisconsin, in 2007, took away driver’s licenses from undocumented immigrants. And so he had this huge surge in unlicensed drivers. And one of the suggestions that he made in a longer interview with a local news outlet was that Wisconsin restore driver’s licenses—(laughs)—to undocumented immigrants so that he and his staff wouldn’t be overburdened with dealing with people driving without a license. A lot of people are working on farms in that area—in Whitewater—which is no surprise to me because I’ve been writing about that for a long time—about the agricultural workers, and it’s very likely that it was because of those jobs that people came to that area. But, you know, within the community there’s a lot of volunteerism and a lot of goodwill towards—it’s a diverse community, it’s a community that has a University of Wisconsin campus—and people, you know, are doing their best to help out. So the level of, like, sort of fearmongering, and the idea of crime—which was really conflated with this unlicensed driving issue—all of that disappears—(laughs)—when you get closer in on the ground and talk to people about what’s really going on. And another issue, which is related to what Ted was talking about in Whitewater is the fact that people have to wait to be legally employed when they are here seeking asylum, as these Nicaraguan folks were, so they’re either not able to work at all, or they’re working off the books. But, you know, there’s been a report recently actually that talks about sort of progress in terms of employment, and income, and tax paying for people who come seeking asylum in the United States, by the Immigration Research Initiative, which is there in New York. And, you know, in Whitewater, as in other communities, there is this really rapid rise in income for people who are allowed to work. So the other things—besides giving people driver’s licenses—the other thing that people are talking about locally in Whitewater is why can’t people get work permits right away. And, you know, these are just sort of sensible reforms that would help alleviate some of the pressure on local officials. And then the other part of this story, which get a little bit in the weeds in our state is that Whitewater is a community that was left out of shared revenue between the state and municipalities. There is this kind of reshuffling of revenue, and Whitewater really got the short end of the stick of all the university property in that community. And so another issue for them was that some of the same politicians who were really beating the drum about these dreadful immigrants and the crisis they were creating have been withholding funds that would help that local community deal with that fairly easily, really. It really isn’t the crisis that it was presented as being. ROBBINS: So, Ted—and we already have a question, so I’m going to turn it over to the Q&A, but data is so essential, and you are a wizard with data. What data is important for people who are covering this to understand? Where can they find it? Ruth mentioned this report from the Immigration Research Initiative, which is really interesting because it does it state by state—you know, what wages are after the first two year versus what wages are after five years, as well as the tax contributions, which shows, you know, that people are actually giving back. And it is a state-by-state breakdown, and we’ll push this out to people. But what data—first, what data do you think is important for people to have who are writing about this topic? And where do you—where are the best places for us to go and find it? ALDEN: Yeah, I mean, it obviously depends on the specific story you are doing. I mean, a real go-to on most—if you are looking for national-level information on immigration, a real go-to is the Migration Policy Institute. They have a website—migrationpolicy.org. They are really the premier immigration-focused think tank probably in the world, in the United States, but they do a lot of work on Europe, and Latin America and elsewhere. And they have really good data on their website as well as analysis and articles. If you are looking particularly for, you know, data on sort of border trends, the court system, others, there is a great initiative out of Syracuse called the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse—or TRAC—and they do a regular series of publications which are really good on court cases particularly, trends at the border. The Department of Homeland Security has really good information on things like border apprehensions. Their website is reasonably up-to-date. They have what’s called an Office of Immigration Statistics that does a very comprehensive annual review and regularly updates a lot of the key data points on migration. And there are—you know, there are other think tanks and organizations very active on this. The American Immigration Council has a lot of good people working on these issues from a somewhat more pro-immigrant perspective. If you want to know where Donald Trump is getting his data and information from, you read the stuff from a group called the Center for Immigration Studies—CIS—which really provided the intellectual heft for a lot of what Stephen Miller did when he ran this issue in the White House for Trump, and a lot of the Trump administration ideas come out of them, or sometimes work being done at the Heritage Foundation. So there is lots of good information, most of in D.C., actually, if you want to understand at a national level what’s happening and how it might relate to whatever stories it is that you are covering locally. ROBBINS: And just to add on to this, if you haven’t looked at the immigration sections of the Project 2025, you should be because they’re not kidding around about this. You know, it’s pretty scary stuff, so—yes, I was an editorial writer for a long time so I say things—(laughs)—like “pretty scary stuff.” ALDEN: Well, it’s promising things that haven’t been done for a long time. You know, there hasn’t really been a mass deportation—correct me if I’m wrong, Ruth. I think you’ve got to go back to the 1950s to find the last time there was a sort of systematic national deportation effort, and the numbers were much smaller back there. ROBBINS: You’re talking about gathering people in large camps. ALDEN: Yeah, I mean—you know, he would like to use the National Guard to round up everybody living here without permission, which, you know, as Ruth suggests, would have pretty horrific economic consequences apart from the whole question of human rights. I mean, all these people have lived here for decades now, right? The family is here, the children are Americans because they were American born, so, I mean, the stuff that they are talking about is unprecedented, really. ROBBINS: Not to mention— CONNIFF: It’s—you know, and what I have found on that, with talking to voters, is that even though ICE raids in small towns in Wisconsin were really—added a lot of pressure to the lives of both farmers and their employees, and a lot of people moved on to the farm, and don’t drive, don’t go to stores anymore because of those days. I mean, there is a lot of—there is a lot of fear around deportation. But on the whole for the employers, the Trump era, the Trump presidency didn’t stop the flow of undocumented workers, and so in the end, you know, all of that risk and scariness was assumed by the immigrant workforce, and the employers really didn’t—in some ways they can say, well, he talks a big game, but it didn’t really make that much of a difference. ALDEN: I mean, that’s what the numbers suggest; that there were actually considerably fewer deportations in the Trump years than there were in the last four years of the Obama administration. CONNIFF: Yeah, so it didn’t hurt them—(laughs)—it didn’t hurt employers in their pocket then. ROBBINS: So Anne Braly, you have written a question. Do you want to voice your question, or do you want me to read it for you? (Pause.) So we have a question from Anne Braly, who is with the Chattanooga Times. ALDEN: I think she’s coming—she’s coming on here, Carla. ROBBINS: OK, right. Q: Yeah, sorry. I was trying to answer a question from one of my editors at the paper. ROBBINS: Don’t you hate that? ALDEN: That’s the life of a reporter. (Laughs.) ROBBINS: Don’t you hate editors? (Laughs.) ALDEN: It’s been a few years for me, but I remember it well. Q: Nothing like multitasking, I swear! (Laughter.) Well, anyway, you know, I was just thinking. You remember the CCC—the Civilian Conservation Corps, and I just didn’t know— ALDEN: No, even I’m not quite that old, but yeah. (Laughter.) Q: But I’m not that old to remember, either. ALDEN: Go ahead. Q: But I still see—around Chattanooga, I see, you know, walls and things like that that the CCC built way back when, and I just didn’t know if possibly someone had considered the same type thing for some of the immigrants, you know, so to keep tabs on them, help them, put them to work—just a way to help them on their way to citizenship. What do y’all think? CONNIFF: I guess I think there is not a problem with employment for immigrants. And so I think this is the part of the conversation that I think is neglected in the very politicized conversation about immigration that we’re having as a country right now, is that, as I said earlier, the pull factor—the fact that there is a labor shortage and a lot of manual labor and, you know, really hard jobs like jobs on farms—employers are seeking this labor. So it might be that a Civilian Conservation Corps type effort would help, you know, politically, make people feel that there was something going on official. The other aspect of that that maybe would be an improvement over our current situation is that we have a very unregulated and—you know, ProPublica has recently done some very powerful reporting about deaths on dairy farms in Wisconsin and just how completely under the radar this workforce is because they are not documented. And there are no OSHA requirements, there are no housing inspection requirements, many of things that are required—worker’s comp—when it comes to a migrant workforce that has a temporary visa to follow crops in this country doesn’t apply to year-round workers on those dairy farms. And so people are ending up in some very dire situations, one of which, you know, led to the death of a little boy who was living above the milking parlor on a farm with his father, and was run over by a heavy skid steer, a piece of equipment used for scraping manure on the farm. There was nobody keeping tabs on him. So I think the idea that, yes, we have this immigrant workforce, and there should be some regulation, and there should be some safety rules, and we should be, you know, helping people is a really good idea, but the idea that there isn’t already enough employment for immigrants is simply not true. We just haven’t really acknowledged how dependent we are on those immigrant workers, I think. ALDEN: I might—I might just take this question in a slightly different direction. There is a very interesting program that I’ve been working on with my students here in Washington state. The Biden administration, about a year ago, launched a program called Welcome Corps, which allows American citizens to sponsor refugees, the typical path for refugees. And these are people who come from overseas, not people who arrive at the border—is that they are integrated into the communities through taxpayer-supported programs, a lot of them run by the churches. Canada, years ago, started a new model where private citizens—it could be family, it could be a group of teachers, could be retired people at my tennis club—decide they are going to sponsor a refugee or refugee family, and agree to take on some of the expense and effort of integrating them into the community. I think it’s a fabulous and interesting program that has a chance to do some of what you are talking about, Anne, which is sort of build these cultural connections between the arriving immigrants and the people who are already here. There may be in the communities that you are reporting in people who have sponsored refugees under Welcome Corps. It’s a new program and would be an interesting story in looking at how this has gone on this. As I said, I’ve had my student put together a handbook for the county that we’re in about resources available for people who want to sponsor refugees under this program. I mean, Canada is a very interesting case study because even though their levels of immigration and the number of refugees settling there are much larger then in the United States, the attitude is pretty positive. And I think the sponsorship program is one of the reasons, and the Biden administration has been trying to learn from that. So I think your point about ways to build stronger community that links, you know, longer-term residents with new immigrant arrivals is a really important one. I’m not sure the CCC is the right method, as you suggest, but I think it’s a good idea. ROBBINS: So we have ten questions, so we’re going to start going through them quickly. So we have a question from Jay Jochnowitz, who was the editorial page editor of the Times Union in Albany. Jay, do you want to ask your question? (Pause.) ALDEN: He is muted. Jay, you are muted. Q: There we go. ROBBINS: Great. Q: OK, I should correct. I’m now editor-at-large. I used to be opinions editor; I’ve semi-retired. Ruth, your explanation—I had not been aware of this—that there was not an option for a year-round visa for, you know, the agricultural industries. And, you know, that sounds like, you know, one of those things—when we write about the need for immigration reform it sounds like exactly what we ought to be talking about. You know, we hear this argument for E-Verify, for example, and, you know, that all employers should use that. Well, if they did, it sounds like the workforce would just dry up. So can you address that, and can you address how that might be reformed? And we’ve written about the driver’s licenses, we’ve written about the long wait for jobs for asylum seekers—work eligibility for asylum seekers. Are there other dichotomies, contradictions, et cetera, in policy that you’ve seen that you could talk about? CONNIFF: Well, that’s a big one, but—the lack of a year-round visa. Q: Yeah. CONNIFF: And there are—there has been a coalition of sort of big ag groups and immigrant rights groups trying to push for a year-round visa. The problem is that, ever since comprehensive immigration reform fell apart in 2013, 2014, it is hard to get one sensible piece of immigration reform done. It’s hard to get everybody on board because, of course, if you do something obvious, like allow employers to make their employees that they already have and have had for decades legal, then what about DACA recipients? You know, there is sort of a—I mean, I think is—in Washington this is sort of the political problem, is that getting everyone together again for a sensible immigration reform is really hard. And when they got close on making farm workers—year-round farm workers legal, there were a lot of immigrant rights activists who were worried that essentially it turned the employers into ICE agents. They would hold their employees’ documents and, you know, we’ve seen abuses with that. So there was kind of a feeling that maybe people, individually—these immigrant workers were better off with their fake documents because they could skate out of an abusive employment situation, and they weren’t—you know, they weren’t paying the price of losing their passport and their legitimate visa. And we see that with labor trafficking—a lot of labor trafficked. People are moved out of status by being moved from the state where they do have an H-2A visa to work on—you know, to pick crops. They are moved into a state where they are now out of status and their undocumented status gives the labor contractors and employers a lot of power over them. But, I mean, basically what we have is a vestige of the Bracero Program, which is what Carla mentioned from the 1950s when Mexican workers used to come up and pick crops, and there was a lot of free flow across the border. That still basically exists in the form of the H-2A visa program, except we have this militarized border now. And ironically, what the militarization of the border has accomplished basically is to keep people here who aren’t—who aren’t—you know, who are working year-round, for decades. Many of the Mexican workers that I’ve talked to in Wisconsin always have planned to go back to Mexico, but they are saving up money, and because it’s so expensive and so dangerous to cross back and forth, they are staying here for decades and just keeping their heads down, working around the clock, sending home money to their families. So I think those are all really important things to talk about, and I think the biggest—the biggest thing to just try to surface more is how much of our economy these workers are propping up. ROBBINS: Thanks. So we have another question from Annmarie Timmins, who is the senior reporter for the New Hampshire Bulletin. Annmarie, do you want to ask your question? (Pause.) Q: Hi. Can you hear me now? OK, thank you. Our governor, who with a group of thirteen, went down to the border to assess what he said was the crisis, has now sent fifteen National Guard troops, at the state’s expense, down to help Texas National Guard, and his sole argument is that he says he can track drugs right from the border all the way up to New Hampshire. He has no evidence of this. We can’t find any. I’m wondering how you—do you have suggestions on how to, you know, interrogate that? Is that—how do we look into that and say, yes, it is true, or no, there is no evidence of this? ROBBINS: Ted, do you have anything on that? ALDEN: Yeah, I’ve got—I mean, I would suggest that you look at some of the data on drug seizures at the border. I don’t have the latest, but I could probably dig up some stuff. The percentage of drugs that are seized at the border is infinitesimal, you know, in the order of 5 or 6 percent of the drugs that are smuggled across. I am certain it has become much worse with fentanyl, which is small and reasonably easy to smuggle. So the notion that any police or military force on the border is going to reduce the flow of drugs is ridiculous. On top of that, the mass—the overwhelming majority of drugs that are smuggled into the United States come through the legal ports of entry. And again, you can get data on that—you know, do some searches, you’ll find it. And most of it is coming through in trucks, or in private automobiles, or through the proper legal ports of entry. So even if you were able to stop the very small percentage that’s coming between the ports of entry, it would have no noticeable impact on the flow of drugs into the country. So, I mean, I think you have to call that what it is, which is pure political symbolism—the notion that fifteen New Hampshire National Guard agents are going to make any appreciable difference on the drugs flowing across the border from Mexico into your state is painfully ridiculous. ROBBINS: Yes, Euan Kerr is the morning editor of Minnesota Public Radio. Euan, would you like to ask your question? (Pause.) Q: There we go—sorry. Yeah, we’re doing a lot of coverage of climate change, and we have been looking at some material which says that projections show that the current immigration situation is just a tiny, tiny droplet against the wave of people that are going to be coming for so many different reasons. And I say this somewhat tongue-in-cheek but, you know, having the New York Times point to Duluth, Minnesota, as the best place to survive climate change— We’re very interested in what this is going to do and, also, the implication that in fact this could really benefit everyone, but only if it is managed correctly, and it doesn’t seem like there is any real desire to manage this situation properly. I’m just curious what you think about that. ROBBINS: There are no legal protections, asylum protection for climate migrants, climate refugees. That is not on the list of people who are forced from their homes because of—because of climate change. ALDEN: And Carla, you know, to put the two parts of this conversation together—Ruth’s focus on economics and my comments on asylum—you know the best evidence out there, the report that went into this in the most detail is a few years dated now, but most of the people arriving at the border don’t actually qualify under the normal asylum protection criteria. What’s happened is that, you know, historically the border wasn’t very well defended, and it was mostly young people coming from Mexico looking for work. The border is now much better defended, but there is this potential loophole with the asylum system because we’re required as a country, by law, to take these asylum claims seriously and vet them. So there clearly are people—I mean, places like Haiti, Venezuela, I think, you know, clearly a fair number of those people would probably qualify, even under traditional asylum criteria. Cuba is another big one. Cuba was actually the fourth in that list—I apologize—not Nicaragua. But a lot of people showing up don’t, but they’ve found that this is their easiest way to escape situations that are desperate. I mean, you have people who are walking across the Darién Gap between Panama and Colombia, right? I mean, incredibly dangerous journeys to make to the United States. And they are assessing that this is a better choice for them than staying where they are, which tells you something about how desperate their lives are. I mean, the climate change piece is a part of this, right? We live in a period right now—I think it’s one of the reasons that so many people are on the move globally—of significant disruption, right? We have a breakdown in political order. You go back thirty years, and the U.S. would have took care of what’s going on in Venezuela. We never would have allowed that to escalate out of control in the way it did because we saw our role more as one of maintaining order, for better or worse, in our hemisphere. And then climate on top of that is going to create lots of situations where you have, you know, hurricanes, droughts, floods, bad crops that are going to cause other people to say, the situation that I’m living at at home is untenable, and my best option is to try to get to the United States, or if you are in Africa, try to get to Europe. So I think your assessment is right. This is a problem that is going to get worse, and our capacity to handle it is hopelessly inadequate, in part because, in the Congress, the perception is that this is better as a political problem than as a legislative solution. CONNIFF: Well, no better example of that than, at the beginning of the conversation, you referenced the—you know, the Biden effort to push really a very tough immigration, you know, law through Congress and really giving Republicans pretty much everything that they asked for. But it’s better as a campaign issue than a policy issue, and so it’s very unlikely that anything is going to happen this year. ALDEN: Yeah, so it suggests, you know, the number of people arriving is likely to keep increasing, and our ability to handle it will not get any better; it might in fact get worse. So that’s a bad recipe. CONNIFF: I mean, I do think it’s important to keep in mind that our ability to handle it is probably quite a bit better than is currently being presented in the political campaigns and, in fact, you know, a large percentage of the people who are coming are keeping things going in our country, keeping the economy going—in construction, in agriculture, in hospitality, in food service—and really important, I think, for local journalists to continue to point that out. And in the face of this very dehumanizing kind of push to talk about immigrants as, you know, a disease, and an affliction and, you know, all the other dehumanizing rhetoric that’s just escalating this year—to talk to actual people about what their lives are like. And I think that’s—it’s powerful because you find people who are working really hard to just try to provide for their families and who are fleeing some pretty awful situations. And of course, you know, in a really big-picture way, we would think about what the United States is doing to help stem, you know, the flight of people who are fleeing those awful situations because really the only way—I mean, I think in Enrique’s Journey, which was just an amazing, amazing book about the little boy who came to find his mom in the United States from an impossible situation, you know, she concludes the book by saying, until we address that impossible situation at home, we’re really kidding ourselves just continuing to militarize the border because people will continue to come, and they’ll continue to get through. ROBBINS: So that transitions to a question for Ruth from Kassidy Arena—I’m induced to go for the Spanish pronunciation, my second language—who is the senior reporter for KTNE-FM in Nebraska. Kassidy, do you want to ask your question? It’s a really good reporting practice question. Q: All right. Hi, yes, it’s Nebraska Public Media basically. We went through a name change. But, yeah, so I regularly report on Latino immigrants in Nebraska, and Carla, you pronounced it perfectly—my name. So Ruth, I have come across many people when I’m talking to them, and they are OK with having their names being, you know, in the story, maybe because their understanding of press is a little bit different. Do you ever talk about the potential consequences of folks choosing to use their name, even though that’s within their right to have their name out there, but do you ever talk about those potential consequences of publishing that? CONNIFF: I think about it, and I did a story on labor trafficking recently where I interviewed somebody who was really afraid of the farmer who had abused him, and felt that he was still potentially a target for that farmer. And he asked that we use—we not use his whole name, and we didn’t. In my book, people were really proud of their stories, and they wanted their names used. And I felt like that was their right, to make that decision themselves. Many of them had already gone back home to Mexico so there was no issue for them. One of them is frequently in news stories and other media, has become kind of a spokesperson for the irrationality of the lack of year-round visas for dairy workers in Wisconsin, and so that’s—you know, that’s a decision that he has made to kind of be a public person. But I agree that there is something—there is a shift going on, and the dangerousness of the rhetoric, the demagoguery that we’re seeing now really should, I think, give reporters pause, and it’s important to stop and think about how you might be contributing to the targeting of people. I mean, part of the thing with our, you know, ten thousand immigrants who make up 70 percent of the workforce on dairy in Wisconsin is that everybody in town knows—(laughs)—that there are undocumented immigrants. You know, I mean, it’s not—it’s not like this super-secret situation, and so it just sort of points up in some ways how you’re not talking about something that’s not just a completely ingrained part of our society now, and so it’s peculiar that it can be flipped into this, you know, witch hunt, which is what—you know, when Trump talks about going door-to-door to grab people, I think that does escalate that fear, and I think that people have a right to step back from being public. So I don’t know if that totally answers your question, but I’ve done both things. I have used people’s real names; they wanted me to use their real names. I absolutely asked people. I haven’t tried to press upon them what the dangers might be. I kind of feel like people know their own situation, but I think that’s a legitimate concern. ROBBINS: Kassidy, you didn’t ask me, but I’m going to tell you, I mean, as a long-time editor, reporter, I mean, working in Central America, working in Cuba, places like that, I always warn people. And I remember the response from someone the first time people started talking to me on the record in Cuba, blowing me away, and I said to people—I was working at the Journal—I said, you know, the story is going to come out at 6:00 in the morning; 6:02 it’s going to be faxed back to the Ministry of Interior, and this absolutely valiant Cuban economist said to me, utterly contemptuously, we are not children. But she knew what she was doing. I think the average person probably wouldn’t know what they were doing, and I think, you know, I give people the right to do—you know, to do this even if it means I lose potentially an on-the-record interview. I mean, I don’t want to bear that responsibility because—and it’s going to get scarier. That’s basically sort of the way I look at it. So Pamela McCall, I apologize. I’m getting some of your titles wrong, so Pamela, I have you as the host of All Things Considered, KUER, NPR Utah. If I have your title wrong, please correct me. Q: No, you’re fine. That’s just great. Thank you so much for taking my question. And it’s basic in its nature. How are undocumented workers paid? How do they pay taxes? And is there a means of tracking their economic input to this country? CONNIFF: Well— ROBBINS: Ted, do you want to— ALDEN: I mean, I can start, Ruth, and if you want to go into details with some of the people you—they’re paid the same way the rest of us are, right? They’re—you know, they’re paid paychecks, their taxes are deducted. Most undocumented migrants pay tax. Certainly, there are some who are paid cash under the table. I haven’t seen really good estimates of the numbers. They pay into Social Security, though a lot won’t ever be able to collect out of it. There’s a huge surplus in the Social Security fund from undocumented migrants who have paid in, and they are unlikely to be able to collect. And, yeah, these figures have all been gathered. They are—another person who has done some good, some of the folks at the Cato Institute—David Bier and Alex Nowrasteh—have done some good research on the economics of undocumented migration. Gordon Hanson, who is now at Harvard, is an economist who has done some excellent work on this. So, yeah, there is good data on all this stuff, but in most cases it’s not a mystery. They get paid in relatively ordinary ways. Lots of people in the country have Social Security numbers, even if they are not legally resident. You know, they might have come as students and got Social Security numbers while they were students and not gone home. So there are a lot of cracks in the system. CONNIFF: There is a lot of money in the system, I mean, for people who will never take advantage of that system, too. I mean, people are having Medicare and Social Security taxes withheld from their wages, and they will never be able to draw from those systems, so that’s also an important data point, is sort of all of that money that’s getting paid in. People get fake documents. They buy fake documents, and there is kind of a don’t ask, don’t tell policy among employers who are—certainly with year-round agricultural workers—they are hiring them, they are looking at these fake documents and saying, I can now say that I have looked—(laughs)—and, you know, you have documents, and so, you know, it’s a well-understood system that, you know, doesn’t—it’s not for real. Q: If I might, when you said Cato Institute, do you know if there is any sort of breakdown per state as to the economic input that— ALDEN: Yeah, check the American Immigration Council folks. Q: OK. ALDEN: They have probably done this. There is one other organization—I will follow up with Irina and maybe she can share it—that does—I might be able to find it while we’re talking here—that does state-by-state breakouts. But, yeah, all that data is available. Just one other macro point here that’s important I think in the immigration debate. One of the challenges with undocumented immigration is that migrants are paying money into the federal systems—you know, tax, Social Security, Medicare—but a lot of the costs fall at the local level—education, for example—so the children of undocumented migrants, you know, they are in the public schools locally. That’s a cost for the state’s hospitals. That’s a cost for the state. So there is challenge in the sense that a lot of the revenue—the tax revenue they are generating is going to the federal government, and the costs that they impose are felt more at state and local levels. So this has been a longstanding tension with respect to undocumented migration. CONNIFF: This is also the report that I referenced earlier in the call, is the Immigration Research Initiative did a state-by-state breakdown of state and local taxes— ALDEN: Excellent. CONNIFF: —and earnings. And I’m just looking for the link. I’ll put that in the chat. Q: Yeah, thanks, Ruth, and Edward. Thank you. ALDEN: You bet. Thank you. ROBBINS: So Adriana Cardona, do you want to ask your question? (Pause.) Q: Can you hear me now? ROBBINS: Yes. Q: Yeah, so I just—I’ve been thinking a lot about this, and I’ve been talking to different experts. I’m eventually doing a story about this even though people, you know, kind of like some people are more afraid about this concept than others, but can you talk a little bit more about state-led efforts to pass—you know, to pass like their own work permits, proposals, and legislation, and if this—is this maybe like another route? Can we be talking about it more? I know New York has introduced a bill. California tried something similar—a different concept with undocumented students. Utah tried something similar to our guest worker program about ten years ago, but that needed like a waiver from the federal government. So given the inaction at the federal level, and all these nuanced policies, and all these issues that are happening like—I feel like is there a conversation that needs to be maybe more robust when it comes to states kind of like leading their own efforts even though it’s challenging, and like the Texas bill that criminalizes immigrants it could definitely be challenged because it, you know, oversteps federal immigration law? ALDEN: Do you want me to start with that, Ruth, or— CONNIFF: Yeah. ALDEN: Yeah, I mean, I cannot give you chapter and verse of all the state efforts; you’ve listed a bunch of them there. Probably the most famous one was SB 1070 in Arizona in 2010, which again essentially, you know, criminalized unauthorized presence in various ways, and empowered police to stop drivers and do other things. I mean, this is all a consequence of the failure that’s now gone on for about twenty years of the federal government to reform immigration laws. And the result of that is one of two things happens: one, the states perceive problems. Sometimes, you know, there are political reasons; sometimes there are legitimate reasons. And they attempt to encroach on federal authority. I mean, immigration, clearly an area of federal authority. The states pass laws that then are often challenged in the courts—you know, the ACLU and others challenge them, and sometimes they stand up, sometimes they don’t. I mean, Texas is trying—you know, trying to interfere in what is clear federal prerogative, which is control of who crosses the border, and it is being fought out in the courts right now. The other thing that happens because Congress is unable to pass laws, presidents then resort to executive orders. I mean, probably the most famous one is the DACA program, which was created by President Obama as an executive order. And when presidents use that executive power, it’s much more vulnerable to court challenges, right? If the Congress is acting, and it’s a law, then for the most part that tends to insulate the federal actions from court challenges. But if it’s just an executive action, then you are open to court challenges. So we have seen immigration fought out in every which way in the courts, including the DACA program, which so far survives but, you know, at some point somebody could take another run at it, and not clear what the future is. And so there are, you know, dozens of stories that come out of that—what the courts are doing, what the states are doing, what the fights are between the federal and state governments, what local governments are doing sometimes. I mean, mention Whitewater—the famous town in my day was Hazelton, Pennsylvania, where the mayor at the time, Lou Barletta, who later became a member of Congress, passed an ordinance making it a crime to rent apartments to illegal immigrants, as it was called in the land. That created a whole big national hype, launched the career of Kris Kobach, who is a notorious anti-immigration lawyer defending the town of Hazelton. So these are all the consequence of the federal government not doing its job and reforming and updating our immigration laws. And I think that will continue for many years, and there will be lots and lots of things to write about.  ROBBINS: Ruth, last word to you—we’re at four (o’clock), but we’d love to have your last words. CONNIFF: Oh, well, Ted just reminded me of a similar situation in Arcadia, Wisconsin, where there was a mayor who made English the official language, and really it was anti-immigrant. It wasn’t about undocumented immigrants or documented immigrants. There were a lot of immigrants in that community who were working at the world’s largest furniture manufacturer there. He was run out in a special election. It is a largely Latino town now, and that demographic shift is just happening all over rural Wisconsin. So it’s—you know, some of this stuff—(laughs)—is a backlash that, you know, is very—it’s an ugly, racially driven backlash, and a lot of it is failing on the local level. So that’s—you know, that’s helpful. ROBBINS: I just want to leave—and we have many more questions, which is a testimony to what a great conversation this has been. I want to thank Ted Alden, and Ruth Conniff, and all of you who asked questions. I apologize to Rose White, Janet Martin, Mark Smith, and the outstanding questions, but we will push out more information to you all, and I turn it back to Irina. FASKIANOS: Yes, and I echo that. I also want to just list Ted’s other affiliation. He is the Ross distinguished visiting professor for the College of Business and Economics at Western Washington University. So I didn’t mention that at the top— ALDEN: (Inaudible.) FASKIANOS: —and I wanted to do that at the end. (Laughs.) So he has dual roles. We will send out a link to the video, and transcript, and all these wonderful source resources that were mentioned during this call. So thank you all. You can follow our speakers on X at @EdwardAlden, at @RuthRConniff, and at @RobbinsCarla. And as a final note, we are holding now a CFR virtual media briefing at four p.m. This special session will feature six CFR experts in conversation on Iran’s attack on Israel this past weekend. CFR president, Mike Froman, will preside. We’re putting the Zoom link and passcode in the chat so you can get on, but from there, or if you want to email us, we can email it to you as well. Please reach out with your comments and suggestions. You can email us at [email protected]. Again, thanks to Ted, Ruth, and Carla for this terrific conversation. We appreciate it. ROBBINS: Great job. Thank you guys so much. ALDEN: Thanks. CONNIFF: That was fun, thank you. (END)

Central bank governors from some of the largest emerging markets discuss the economic outlook in their countries, how their banks have addressed global inflation, and opportunities for sustained economic growth. This meeting is held in collaboration with the Peterson Institute for International Economics. For those attending virtually, log-in information and instructions on how to participate during the question and answer portion will be provided the evening before the event to those who register. Please note the audio and video of this hybrid meeting will be posted on the CFR website.

CFR experts preview the upcoming World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) Spring Meetings taking place in Washington, DC, from April 17 through 19.   

Roberto Campos Neto discusses Brazil Central Bank’s priorities for the digital agenda in 2024, and prospects for Brazil’s economy. **For those attending virtually, log-in information and instructions on how to participate during the question and answer portion will be provided the evening before the event to those who register.** Please note the audio, video, and trapscript of this meeting will be posted on the CFR website. The C. Peter McColough Series on International Economics brings the world’s foremost economic policymakers and scholars to address members on current topics in international economics and U.S. monetary policy. This meeting series is presented by the Maurice R. Greenberg Center for Geoeconomic Studies.

The PBS series Changing Planet embarks on its third year of this seven-year project examining the issues facing the planet’s most threatened ecosystems. The “Coral Special” episode takes us to the Maldives for an in-depth look at coral reefs and the urgent efforts to help them survive climate change. In partnership with PBS and Conservation International, join us for a sneak preview of clips from the episode and a panel discussion with climate experts discussing efforts to save some of the most diverse and valuable ecosystems on Earth.  Please note there is no virtual component to this meeting.  Please note, CFR is hosting two special screenings on the evening of April 11. The Changing Planet: Coral Special will be held at CFR’s Washington, DC, office. Invisible Nation will be held at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg Center.  

CFR experts Steven A. Cook and David J. Scheffer join Amnesty International’s Agnes Callamard and Refugee International’s Jeremy Konyndyk to discuss the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

Eric Doucette, captain in the U.S. Coast Guard and visiting military fellow at CFR, discusses the primary missions of the coast guard including disaster management, protecting U.S. ports and shorelin…

Yanzhong Huang, senior fellow for global health at CFR, and Rebecca Katz, professor and director of the Center for Global Health Science and Security at Georgetown University, lead the conversation on global health security and diplomacy. FASKIANOS: Welcome to the final session of the Winter/Spring 2024 CFR Academic Series. I am Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach here at CFR. Thank you for being with us. Today’s discussion is on the record, and the video and transcript will be available on our website, CFR.org/Academic, if you would like to share these materials with your colleagues or classmates. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. We are delighted to have Yanzhong Huang and Rebecca Katz with us to discuss global health security and diplomacy. We circulated their bios in advance, but I will give you some highlights now. Yanzhong Huang is a senior fellow for global health at CFR. He is also a professor and director of global health studies at Seton Hall University’s School of Diplomacy and International Relationships—sorry, Relations. Dr. Huang has written extensively on China and global health, and is the founding editor of Global Health Governance: The Scholarly Journal for the New Health Security Paradigm. And he is author of—his most recent book is Toxic Politics: China’s Environmental Health Crisis and Its Challenge to the Chinese State (2020). Rebecca Katz is a professor and director of the Center for Global Health Science and Security at Georgetown University. She previously served as faculty in the Milken Institute School of Public Health at the George Washington University. Dr. Katz’s work primarily focuses on the domestic and global implementation of the International Health Regulations, as well as global governance of public health emergencies. And her seventh book is coming out next week, I believe on Monday, and it is entitled Outbreak Atlas (2024). So you should all look for that. Dr. Huang and Dr. Katz coauthored a Council Special Report entitled Negotiating Global Health Security: Priorities for U.S. and Global Governance of Disease, so we did circulate that in advance. And I think we will begin with Dr. Katz to talk a little bit about global health security and diplomacy, and some of the findings from your report. So over to you. KATZ: Thank you so much, and really appreciate the opportunity to speak with everybody today about global health security and diplomacy. I could note—a quick disclaimer that like many people in Washington I wear multiple hats, including one that works for the United States government, but I am speaking today only in my academic capacity and not representing anybody else. So we are—we’re living in interesting times in the global health security and diplomacy space, and just the work of global governance of disease. As we speak, negotiators are working through what is hopefully a final agreement on amendments to the International Health Regulations. And in about a week, yet another version of possible text of a proposed pandemic agreement will be circulated to member states in advance of the resumed—the INB, Intergovernmental Negotiating Body, negotiations that are now scheduled, I believe, starting the 29th of April, where they may possibly finalize substantive negotiations in advance of the World Health Assembly. It is not a surprise, though, that the negotiations themselves have stalled, and they’ve stalled primarily over issues around access and benefit sharing, and the relationship between developed and less-developed countries. There are significant remaining redlines, including related to the way that pathogens are shared or the information around pathogens is shared. It’s related to the production of medical countermeasures, access to medical countermeasures. There continues to be an evolving power dynamic at this time of call it strained geopolitical tensions. And there are some real questions about the future of multilateralism and just the global governance of the disease space in general. So while this is all sorting out, the world is also working on questions like how do we fund pandemic preparedness and response. So there are questions around the World Bank’s Pandemic Fund, and the breadth and scope. There’s the role of what is the evolving role of the more horizontal entities like the Global Fund. There is limited response funding in general and overall kinds of shrinking budgets. In the academic space, there is a really interesting space set evolving looking at predictive analysis, and some of the technologies and scholarship that’s coming out to think about how do we predict and adapt, both from surveillance and thinking about the evolution of outbreaks. There is the rise of wastewater surveillance. And as the disease threats continue to evolve, we’re also looking at these threats as part of the climate crisis, and a community that’s very keen in looking at the role of artificial intelligence and changing biothreat landscapes. So there is—there’s a lot of movement. There’s a lot of things that are going on. But at the same time, there is diminished interest of governments as competing priorities reenter the fray, and increasing challenges thinking about response capacity in an age of mis- and disinformation and eroding trust in science. So, all this is to say that the space is challenging. It’s dynamic. There is a tremendous amount of work still to be done. Which is one of the reasons that we need to be thinking about how do we use all the roles and approaches that are available to us, including enhanced efforts to focus on the role of diplomacy. I am delighted to see the launch of a Foreign Ministry Channel for Health last month, and we’re now seeing ministries of foreign affairs around the world organize—better organize to address these health challenges. So not all the challenges are easily solvable, but heartened to see this coordinated effort. We’re trying to more fully realize diplomacy for health. There are—there is a lot—there’s a lot of swirl, but why don’t I stop there and turn to my colleague Yanzhong. HUANG: Thank you, Rebecca. Thank you, Irina, and for the Council for invite me to speak at this important event. Thank you for participating. And Rebecca just talked about this progress for the ongoing negotiation over the Pandemic Accord; the need to better organize to address the challenges we are facing. When we’re speaking of the challenges, you know, we—you might have—if you read just the CFR Negotiating Global Health Security—I’m seeking to advertise that one more time—(laughs)—you know, we basically talk about all those different global health security challenges, which are real. We already in the United States experienced a major global health crisis, that officially is not over yet, but—(inaudible). All of the important threat—serious threat we are facing, you know—mind you that COVID caused more than 7 million deaths, right, more than 700 million infections. That 700 million is a clear underestimate, right, because to my knowledge, right, in China alone they have more than 1 billion people infected, right? And now WHO is talking about Disease X, you know, the name given by WHO scientists to an unknown pathogen which they believe could emerge in future, maybe. So it could be, you know, anything, right, with pandemic potential. Like, it could be Zika. It could be Nipah. You know, or it could be another coronavirus, you know, that could cause a serious international epidemic or pandemic. You know, and unfortunately, Rebecca just mentioned climate change is the major contributor to this increasing risk, right? Warmer temperatures can affect the transmission dynamics of pathogens. But the climate change alone could also cause direct loss of life and morbidity, right? The projection is that by the end of this century the millions of heat-related death could be comparable in scope to the total burden of all the infectious diseases. And we also face the threat of antimicrobial resistance, or AMR, which is one of the top global public health threats. The estimate is that bacterial AMR is directly responsible for 1.27 million global deaths and contributes to 4.95 million deaths in 2019. So you combine those two and it’s, like, pretty much close to the COVID death in three years, right? And then there’s the problem of food insecurity. You know, we are facing a global food crisis. This is the largest one in modern history. We talk about nearly 350 million people around the world experiencing, you know, the most extreme form of hunger right now, right? And then—and finally, last but not least, the threats of violence and revolution, you know, that presents new risks to global health security. You know, last time the Council had an event, you know, we saw the former national security advisors participating, speaking, and weighing the—they were asked: Is there an issue that’s on your mind that’s not in the news all the time? I remember former Secretary Condoleezza Rice, you know, said that I worry that we are not paying attention to things like synthetic biology, which could have a huge impact on things like pandemics. So, all the threats call for good health governance, right, global/national level, you know, giving it, right, this—the implication. But I want to emphasize that geopolitics actually are complicating, not undermining, this prospect, right? When you talk about, certainly, right, the armed conflicts, right, worldwide, you know, they can lead to widespread displacement of populations, wide destruction of health-care infrastructure, disruption of supply chains of essential meds and medical equipment, and also increase the risk of the infectious disease outbreaks, right? And certainly, civilian population will bear the brunt of all—most of those impacts, right, that we saw, right, in Ukraine, Syria, now in the Gaza Strip. Sometimes this—that is of particular importance to global health security, the issue of lab safety, right? You know, laboratories taken over by warring parties or in areas under direct attack risk releasing the dangerous pathogens that could start an epidemic, not a pandemic, right? We all—you might recall in April last year, the WHO said, there was a high risk of biological hazard in Sudan’s capital, Khartoum after one of the warring parties seized a lab, holding measles and cholera pathogens and other hazardous materials. Rebecca talked about misinformation and disinformation. You know, the—in a way, the wars and conflicts also encourage, right, disinformation/misinformation, right? For example, the wars in Ukraine, right, they essentially reduced Russia’s incentives to participate constructively in global health governance, right? Russia, in order to justify its invasion, launched a disinformation campaign claiming the United States was secretly aiding Ukraine developing biological weapons. You know, that conspiracy theory sort of echoed, you know, by the U.S. Five Eyes and in China, right? The wars, of course, also exacerbate the other global health issues like food security, right? We know the war in Ukraine, combined with the COVID pandemic actually disrupted the supply chain, fueled inflation, and aggravated the food insecurity problem. But, I think it’s equally important when we look at the issue of how geopolitics or geopolitical tensions actually curbs the prospect of international cooperation addressing all the threats we just talked about, right? Because geopolitical tension, rivalries between nations, can hinder international cooperation and funding for global health initiatives like disease surveillance, sample sharing, vaccination campaigns, research and development of new treatments and preventive measures. Just to use my familiar area—(laughs)—the U.S.-China geopolitical competition, as an example, most certainly U.S.-China geopolitical competition is not new, right? But it is only recently that China became so-called America’s most consequential geopolitical challenge, right? You know, that sort of leads to zero-sum thinking even by the international cooperation over issues like the probe of the COVID-19 pandemic’s origins, sample sharing, supply-chain resilience. And in fact, during the beginning stage of the pandemic we saw China basically threaten to use this leading—the status of being a leader in pharmaceutical—active pharmaceutical ingredients manufacturing to sort of—like as a weapon, right? When the Xinhua News Agency said that—because the U.S. instituted travel bans on China, basically, China at that time was unhappy and said, you know, here we decided to ban our export of APIs to the U.S., so we are going to be plunged in the what they call the sea of COVID, right? So this is an example of how even the medicine could be weaponized during—as a result of geopolitical tensions. And then if you also look at how this U.S.-China geopolitical rivalry could be combined with the lack of personnel—personal exchange, right, sort of deepened by these mutual misunderstandings and misperception, you know. So, you know, now we’re seeing that even after almost the end of the pandemic, right, that the two nations still have no serious discussions over public health issues, even though we think, like, China is actually one of the biggest risk factors. But there is just not much enthusiasm in supporting, like, a serious dialogue with China on cooperating on disease surveillance, sample sharing—not to mention, like, co-development of vaccines or therapeutics. And finally, I want to add that these geopolitical factors could influence the availability and affordability of health-care services and medical supplies, particularly in developing countries or regions affected by conflict or economic sanction. That sort of leads to disparities between North and South in access to essential health care and drugs. Again, the U.S.-China geopolitical competition during the COVID, when China launched this—the so-called vaccine diplomacy or mask diplomacy, the U.S., you know, sort of viewed that as a threat; they—it launched its own mask—vaccine diplomacy. You know, this competition sort of mitigated this so-called vaccine apartheid between the developed world and developing countries; but it also meant that, you know, the vaccine diplomacy would prioritize those countries that’s viewed as strategically important, right? That, in turn, exacerbated the global disparities in access to the vaccines—(all the ?) COVID vaccines—(inaudible). So, to address these challenges, I think we need to have a global health détente with geopolitical rivals. We need to embed the health diplomacy in a multilateral instead of a bilateral framework, right, and support WHO Global Health and Peace Initiative—the GHPI—to better address the underlying diverse critical health needs in fragile, conflict-ridden settings. So, with that, I can stop there. (Laughs.) Thank you. FASKIANOS: Thank you both. Appreciate it. Let’s go to all of you for your questions and comments. (Gives queuing instructions.) OK, so with that, let’s go to the first question. I’m going to go to Mojúbàolú Olufúnké Okome to ask her question. Q: Thank you very much. I’m Mojúbàolú Olufúnké Okome. And I teach political science at Brooklyn College. I’m also Nigerian. And the pandemic showed a lot of the fault lines in terms of the global governance arrangements for health issues, because there were—I mean, the vaccine—the disparity in access was profound for Africans. And, you know, the lucky thing is that not as many people as could have died, died. But I’m just wondering, because we’ve had the HIV/AIDS epidemic, we had Ebola, what is the learning from that? And how come we had all these challenges with the pandemic that we went through, the COVID-19? The other thing about it—that I want to talk about is food. And then there is—I don’t think the problem is insufficiency of food in this world, but distribution equitably. So, what would it take? I mean, and there are all these really heartbreaking photos and, you know, documentaries and reports. What is it going to take to solve this problem and make things equitable so that lives are not being lost unnecessarily, and then health challenges that come from malnutrition are not generationally affecting human populations? Thank you. FASKIANOS: Who wants to go first? KATZ: I will, very briefly and inadequately, try to address the question around vaccine equity. And then—and then I will—I will punt on food security. Since that’s more of Yanzhong’s expertise. I think the point you bring up is critical. And the issues of vaccine nationalism, of vaccine inequity are what is driving current discussion, debate, the feelings around global governance of disease and the effectiveness of it at all? It is—it is the issue that prompted the beginning of a negotiation for a new—(inaudible). And it is—but the solutions are why nations are actually stalled right now. I think your question around what have we learned, well, I think what we have learned is that there’s—whenever anybody talks about future of global governance of disease, you could probably count the number of times somebody says the word “equity.” Yet, operationalizing that is extraordinarily complicated. And unfortunately, we haven’t seen it yet. And I think that you can see that with, you know, the mpox outbreaks and the number of cases that were—you said, you’re from Nigeria—the number of cases that were in Nigeria, the number of cases that have been in the DRC. And the, I think it’s fair to say, insufficient amount of medical countermeasures that have reached populations in sub-Saharan Africa, just for mpox. So, I think there is—there is certainly widespread understanding, realization that we need to fix this—we need to fix this. Because we can’t—we can’t actually talk about we’re all in this together, disease spreads, knows no borders, we all need to work together, and then have situations like you did during COVID where populations just didn’t get access to lifesaving vaccine. So but now getting to the point of trying to figure out how we solve that is exactly what is—what is causing the discord in Geneva right now. And I’m not sure there’s an easy answer for you on how it’s going to be solved. HUANG: Well, I have—(laughs)—well, I really agree with Rebecca, right? There’s no easy answer, right, to all these questions that the professor just raised, you know, that—like the vaccine aspect, right? We know many of the low-income countries, right, that the vaccine—the vaccination rate was even low—very low even by the end of the COVID pandemic. But you know, there’s, like, multiple factors that contributed to that. Certainly, vaccine nationalism is one reason. But you know, even weighing we have all these vaccines available, right, they—the COVAX did a very good job of trying to reach this segment of the population, but then there’s the other issues, right? The shipment, right? How do we make sure they ship and distribute these vaccines in a timely manner? That’s become another issue. And so, I think, well, at this moment the solution that—for the—I think the transport technology for the vaccine technology, that is important. Now, I believe that the Pandemic Accord will talk about—is talking about that in the negotiation. But in the meantime, I think we should also invest to make sure those countries, especially with the manufacturing capacity, will repeatedly sort of have that—some investing there, like their capacity to manufacture the vaccine, right, to sort of—to scale the access. You know, that could be one of the solutions. Then, speaking of the lessons we learned from the pandemic, certainly what we have, right, the—(laughs)—I think it’s fair to say we know the problems, right? The experts—the global health experts, public health experts—they know where the problems are. It’s just that, you know, many of the issues—(inaudible)—only, you know, that it can easily slow them down. For example, we know that the WHO—(inaudible)—by strengthening its capability, enforced by the International Health Regulations. But in the—(laughs)—international system, where anarchy is the rule of the game, you know, that, yeah, I think much of this improvement will be still, you know, state-centric, that—and driven by national interest, just like we saw during the pandemic. Essentially, the IHR was talking about avoiding the disruptions in trade, disruptions to people’s movement, essentially tend to be ignored, right, by the nations there. But there’s another issue, is the lack of coordination. When states tried to use to institute all the travel, you know, the trade barriers, you know, they—there was no, like, coordination, no cooperation. You know, that sort of created this little tragedy of common situation, that then everybody actually was hurt. Finally, the issue of the food insecurity. Well, this is, again, not something new, but that clearly the pandemic, right, exacerbated the problem, in part because of the—this disruption of the supply chain. But in the meantime, there’s some other issues that, you know, could exacerbate that problem. Yeah, like in particular countries like North Korea, for example, we know that in this country—what is arguably the world’s most isolated state, right—they say—the people say—suggested a situation where it’s the worst, right, it has been since the 1990s, you know. But you know, people—the North Korean government certainly could blame the international sanctions. But in the meantime, the government mismanagement, right, is also to blame. In actually still—better still in the pandemic 2020 that cut off, right, the virus supplies, and that is also to blame. You could also talk about the—(inaudible)—killed more by starvation. Is this part of the humanitarian warfare, and especially, you know, in the war setting, where the humanitarian aid is twisted into the conflict by the—(inaudible)—and warlords that seeks to control the food supply as a means of increasing their military and political power, right? So, you know, that—the deliberate use of starvation, this the term we use, kind of war by starvation, right, that’s also was exacerbating in those that conflict zones. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to go next to the Fordham IPED. Q: Hello. I’m Genevieve Connell with Fordham Program for International Political Economy and Development. Thank you for being with us today. And my question is: During the COVID-19 pandemic we saw dissent where many people blamed China for the pandemic, which has catalyzed racial violence against people of Chinese or Asian descent in many cases. What implications do such social upheavals and demonization of a specific group have on global diplomacy and our ability to collaborate in future health response efforts? HUANG: Well, I’ll try to be—(laughs)—to be the first, whether Rebecca could weigh in. Well, this is, again, not something new, right? During the SARS epidemic, you know, that you also saw that the Chinese were sort of, like, blamed, you know, for sort of causing epidemic. You always, you know, target the certain group of people to blame. You know, you could—(inaudible)—like, historical, that could be traced—there’s a pattern there, right, that during the Bubonic Plague, for example, European Jews were blamed, right, the—for causing the pandemic, you know, that sort of to enforce to them to migrate towards Eastern Europe. You know, that certainly sort of the—poisons the atmosphere for tackling the crises, especially, like, when there’s intertwining geopolitical tensions between China and the United States. You know, that—remember that—and also, you have internal politics by the way, the Trump administration trying to find a scapegoat, right, for its mismanagement of the crisis, you know, that China become an easy one. So he sort of, like, started to talk about, you know, this is sort of a China virus, or kung flu, right, the thing that only—that sort of intoxicated the atmosphere of cooperation with China, making it even less willing to cooperate with the United States, especially on issues like the origin probe. So now, you know, we’ve seen how that—we were probably—given this sort of lack of cooperation, China, you know, really probably we are never going to find where that virus actually come from. But in the meantime, you know, also this created—sort of contributed to, like, a more divisive society in countries like the U.S. given this anti-Asian sentiment. Rebecca? KATZ: You know, I don’t have too much more to add, except that I just—it’s an interesting question. And I actually would put it back to you a bit too. That I think it’s important to separate out the challenge—I bucket the challenges slightly differently. So the challenges of the types of stigma and bias that might arise for subpopulations within our own country. And we’ve, as Yanzhong just mentioned, we’ve seen that over and over and over again. And so you think about the types of ways that that can be addressed, and people can be protected, and how we can think about, you know, it’s not really a vulnerable population, but populations at risk of inappropriate stigma. So I think there’s that question. And then there’s—I bucket into a separate issue of how the government response and dealing with other countries, and the geopolitical tensions that might arise, and how that affects the response into a different category. And that’s—and Yanzhong already kind of addressed some of those—some of those challenges along the way. But none of it—none of it is easy. And it’s often not done sufficiently. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to take the next question from a written question from José David Valbuena. He’s an undergraduate student at Buffalo State University. And the question is, what are the potential risks and limitations of implementing economic structuralism to improve global health security? HUANG: Define economic structuralism. KATZ: Yeah, I was going to say, I’m not sure how to answer that because I’m not sure what your—what you want us to get at? FASKIANOS: All right. So, José, I think if you’re in a place where you can—you can join in live, or unmute yourself, why don’t you do that? And if not, then we’ll move to the next question. KATZ: Here he comes. HUANG: To use that—something like the Marxism sort of argument, the economy, right, just determines the—(laughs)—almost the upper infrastructure, or whatever. If that if that is the case, right, there, you know, they—I think, you know, a single focus on economic development certainly does not help, right, in improving public health, even though a well-developed economy, you could find the policy high correlation, right, between the, like, high level of economic development improved, right, the health-care standards and, like, the average life expectancy increased. But in the meantime, the single focus on economic development could hurt the public health and global health, you know? One of the examples is urbanization, the industrialization, like, the—could, right, the—sort of make us more likely to be exposed to those dangerous pathogens that increase the likelihood of a dangerous pathogen of jumping species to human beings, you know, then start a—potentially, right, that if it obtained that capacity for efficient human-to-human transmission, right, the potential for a pandemic. KATZ: I think I just saw a note that he’s going to reframe the question, but maybe talk about economics, just one point I would love to be able to add to maybe help frame some of the—some of that discussion with a little bit of data. When we talk about what do we need for health security—and we can talk about the threats, and Yanzhong was talking about, you know, the challenges of urbanization and globalization—(inaudible)—land, and the competing challenges of looking at economic development and—but I do want to note—so one of the things that our research team has been doing for about a decade is trying to figure out what it costs each country to be able to develop their capacity to be able to prevent, detect, and respond effectively to public health emergencies, based off of their international legal obligations and then also looking at each region in context. And it—just so everybody has a number in the back of their head, the number that we currently have is approximately $300 billion that would cost at the global scale for every nation to be able to build sufficient—and sustain—sufficient capacity for health security. That’s in addition to approximately $60 to $80 billion that’s required at a global scale for things like research and development, and supply chain, and manufacturing. So just to note, we have approximately $380 billion problem. And we are definitely not spending that right now. And if we think about it as a problem, the pandemic itself cost—well, we’re not exactly sure what it cost—but somewhere around $15 trillion dollars. So $300 billion dollars sounds like a lot, but it’s actually very little if you’re looking at your return on investment for being able to address a future pandemic. But it’s a lot in the world of public health, where there’s very little money, and there’s shrinking budgets, and there’s shrinking opportunity for nations to be able to actually invest themselves, as well as international financing. So I’m using—I’m using the question as an opportunity to just throw that out there, so folks understand. HUANG: Yeah. I forgot to throw out, again, with the pandemic example, right, that the countries that are most developed, doesn’t necessarily mean that is the most—or, the best prepared for a pandemic, right? Before the pandemic, there was Global Health Security Index, that showed the U.S. was one of the best prepared. But as it turn out, it was the worst—one of the worst hit by the pandemic. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to take the next question, raised hand from Braeden Lowe, who also wrote his question. But why don’t you ask it? And if you could identify yourself, that would be great. Q: Yes. Can you hear me? FASKIANOS: Yes. Q: Perfect. My name is Braeden Lowe. I’m a graduate student at Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, studying international trade. My question is, how effective have multilateral development banks been in the development of health infrastructure in countries that need them? And could there be a greater role for them in the future, such as maybe development banks that are focused primarily on the development of medical infrastructure, and facilities, and the development of medical technologies? Thank you. HUANG: Rebecca. KATZ: Yeah. I mean, Braeden, it’s an excellent question. And I think that the history of the development banks has been mixed over—pre-pandemic and in the current situation. Let me start with—well, so, yes. The banks have been involved in developing health security capacity and including medical countermeasures—less on the medical countermeasures, more on mostly national capacity and regional capacity. And some have been more involved than others. The Asian Development Bank was really engaged for a long time. ASEAN was really the driving factor for coordination in that region. The Inter-American Development Bank has been engaged. IMF had programs. So there have been programs. And prior to the pandemic, the World Bank had something called the PEFF, the Pandemic Emergency Financing Facility, that they stood up both for preparedness as well as a response window. That came under a decent amount of criticism because the triggers for using that mechanism were so stringent that it basically became not helpful. And while the Bank and IMF and the regional development banks did assist throughout the pandemic, you could have a pretty lively debate on how effective they were, how fast they got into the game, where they could have done more. I think the general lesson is everybody could have done more. But where we are right now is that the G20 High-Level Independent Panel—well, the G20 appointed a high-level independent panel that was—that came up with some proposals for how to better position the world for being able to support national-level development of pandemic preparedness and response. And the recommendation was to use the World Bank as the mechanism for that. So about a year and a half ago, the World Bank—the World Bank board approved the creation of the Pandemic Fund. As I mentioned before, we have about a $300 billion problem. The first round of funds that was given out over the summer was for $337 million dollars. So we got a—$337 million dollars went out on a $300 billion problem. And there were—and that went to thirty-seven different countries where there were proposals, however, from—there were 600 proposals that were submitted. And these thirty-seven went out. So the next round is out right now. And the plan is for the Pandemic Fund to provide approximately $500 million dollars in this round. But, again, so it kind of—it depends on if you’re a glass half empty, glass half full kind of person, and whether you think that the banks are super engaged in doing all that they can, or if they’re really—if there’s a lot more that they could do. And that’s not even getting into all the other mechanisms that that they have contemplated and thought about in terms of being able to use to help countries, particularly being able to mobilize resources quickly. FASKIANOS: Great. Thank you. I’m going to take two—combine two written questions. The first is from Nicole Rudolph, who is an assistant professor at Adelphi University. Who is leading initiatives to integrate health security with climate resilience efforts? And then there’s a question from Izabella Smith. I don’t know her affiliation. How do you deal with the mass politicization of health safety, specifically before and after COVID-19? KATZ: Easy ones, right? (Laughs.) FASKIANOS: Yeah, very easy. (Laughs.) KATZ: Well, Yanzhong, why don’t I—why don’t I do a really quick answer, and then and then turn to you, particularly on the health and climate space. Except for, Nicole, I would say that I’m glad you’re working on this. We’ve always considered one health and climate as first principles of health security and health security threats. So they are, in our head, completely intertwined, and really need to be addressed that way. I think to Izabella’s, man, how you deal with the politics? It’s—we are in a really, really complicated environment right now. I’m a public health professional. Before the pandemic, most people did not know we existed. (Laughs.) And maybe that was OK. It was difficult because there was no money, but we were kind of quietly left to do our job. And we were most successful when people didn’t know we existed. What happened during the pandemic, particularly in the United States but also around the world, we saw the—a lot of these issues have always been political. They had never been partisan before. They became very partisan. And there was a tremendous amount of backlash against public health officials. There are—there are academic efforts underway to help and capture the—just the type of backlash that existed. The fact that there are academics who are measuring—there is categories for how many public health officials were threatened with gun violence and didn’t get support from their local law enforcement. And the fact that that number is so large, that there is a category for counting it, gives you a sense of the type of backlash that’s been experienced. I think what we’re seeing right now—I can talk to the United States—but a massive movement to roll back public health authority legislation and regulations. There are state legislatures across the country that are stripping their governors of emergency powers and putting that authority into the state legislative branches, which is basically going to make it almost impossible to take rapid action in the—in the next event. And, you know, there will be a next event. So it is—it is really difficult. We are seeing the—based on the vaccine—the increase in vaccine hesitancy, and in part due to the rise in mis- and disinformation. And now we’re seeing measles outbreaks across the country. And, you know, situations where the current public health officials are not taking scientifically based action to stop those outbreaks. So we’re—it’s rough out there. Let me just put it that way. As well—at the same time that people are quitting in droves because people did not sign up for this. So just that. HUANG: Yeah— FASKIANOS: So before—Yanzhong, before you—before you weigh in, and I’ll give you an opportunity. Rebecca, this is a group of professors and students. And so what would you advise—what’s the call to action for this group to—you know, to help, you know, push back on or help sort of make—to ensure that guardrails remain? KATZ: I don’t have any—I don’t have a great one-liner on that, right? Except there is, how do we—how do we rebuild trust in science, in public officials, in governance? There is a need to raise public literacy. And so I start there. There are a lot of folks who are working on how do we counter mis- and disinformation. I think those are two very different things. There is—you know, there’s a need to—you know, it’s everything from being able to do the policy surveillance of what’s happening in the world, to being able to—all the way towards advocacy and trying to help, you know, get programs and policies sufficiently implemented. But I think also just having kind of a strong evidence-informed voice. I wish I had a great, better answer that said, if you just pushed this button or did this thing, it would all be better. But I don’t. And I think—I think this is why a lot of people in the community are really struggling with how do we—how did we get here, and how do we fix it? FASKIANOS: Great. Yanzhong. HUANG: Well, I—just follow what Rebecca said, I think trust is, like, the key, right? You know, our colleague Tom Bollyky, his research has just already, like, demonstrated how important trust is in fighting the—dealing with a public health crisis, like COVID-19. You know, and to the question, actually, the challenge is how to build the trust, right? You can talk about maybe better transparency, better accountability. But you know, I think in a country like the U.S. which is so divided now, I think in order to rebuild that trust it’s very important for the—these different groups, like even—like, I’m talking about, you know, the two groups, they need to be able to have a dialogue, basically, need to speak with each other. There needs to be able to build consensus. But maybe I’m asking for the impossible. But the—so when we talk about politicization, I want to also add that it’s not just happened at the national level; it certainly has been—this past pandemic has shown that this also occurs at the international level. In fact, you know, I think, you know, we never have, you know, a public health event that has been so politicized as the COVID-19. You know, just to give you an example, the SARS, right, when we talk about the origins of SARS, you know, people never thought of, like, politicizing the origin probe. But it’s become a big issue during the COVID pandemic, in part because this is, like, the first time we’re seeing, like, ideology being encouraged by the pandemic response. This entire response to the pandemic is sort of framed as a competition between authoritarianism and liberal democracy, right. And also, geopolitics, like, again, right, the tensions between U.S.-China sort of also was driving, right, the global pandemic response. So I think, you know, in order to sort of—we need to start to depoliticize—(laughs)—this process of depoliticization. We need to reduce the geopolitical tensions. But in the meantime, we need to start the—sort of have—investing in those trust—or, confidence-building measures like having, like, a track-1.5 dialogue between the two countries. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to go next to JY Zhou, please. Q: Hello. FASKIANOS: Yes. Thank you. Q: Hi. Awesome. Well, my name is Chris Nomes. I’m an intelligence analysis student at James Madison University. And my question is about threats to global health. Specifically, do we—do we face any risks, like, from our adversaries or from lone groups that want to purposely tear down global health? Are there any risks? And how do we counter those risks, if they exist? HUANG: That is Rebecca’s expertise. (Laughs.) KATZ: I got it. Maybe I got it. I mean, I think—listen, you know, when you start the question you asked about threats to global health. And immediately I start making lists of, like, oh my gosh, right, how are we going to talk about the signal—the, what, 90,000 signals that WHO received this month and the, you know, 300 that they’re investigating, and then the thirty, like, field investigations are happening in a given month, and all the—all the emerging infectious disease challenges, including, you know, H5N1 in cows in the U.S., to mpox, to, you know, again the long list of infectious disease challenges that nature throws at us every day. But your question then pivoted to talk more about the threats of deliberate biological events. And that is definitely a thing. I mean, so let’s just say that. That is a thing. That is an area of work. I will say that for about fifteen years I supported the U.S. delegation for the Biological Weapons Convention. So there are—there are people who get together often and work through trying to assess what that threat is and how it’s best addressed. There are—there are mechanisms for trying to investigate allegations of deliberate biological weapons use, and the use of the UN Secretary-General’s Mechanism. And there are now a lot of folks who are deeply concerned about how AI is changing the threat space. And so, you know, in this forum, I think the answer we can give you is, yes. It is a threat. It is a thing. And there is a world of people who work on this, including within the intelligence communities around the world, to better address that threat and then feed that into response and planning efforts. I will say, though, that in the—in the event—the challenge is if there is an actual event, the response may not be very different from a naturally occurring event, at least not initially. And putting attribution assessments aside, and any kind of political response you might have. But that that’s the other thing that is trying to be sorted out, is that, you know, if you are in the midst of a response to what looks like a naturally occurring event and suddenly there is information there or an entity claims responsibility for having released an agent, how does that change? What stakeholders now need to be involved? And also, who—how is that managed at the national, regional, and international system? So, basically, you opened a can of—a huge can of worms for me. But I think the answer is, yes, it is a—it is a thing. And it is a thing that there are—there is a community of people who think very deeply about it. HUANG: Yeah. I’ll just—you know, I think what the problem we’re dealing with, like, deliberate-caused outbreaks, right, the challenge here is that this is not like a war against, you know, terror, because we are facing—we don’t know, actually, even who actually started the attack, right, whether it’s from individuals or states, because in part of this—(inaudible)—of the biological weapons or the use of, you know, the dangerous pathogens, you’re not going to find out whether, like, something unusual is happening. And here, right, a large number of people flooded the ER rooms complaining about the same kind of acute symptoms. So the logic of, like—of deterring such an attack would be different from logic of deterring, like, a nuclear attack, right? Because we have to rely on the building of the health infrastructure, greater trained health professionals, you know, the so-called deterrence by denial, in order to sort of decentivize the potential perpetrators from giving up such an attack. FASKIANOS: (Off mic.) HUANG: Irina, you are on mute. FASKIANOS: I am muted. And how long have I been doing this? (Laughs.) We’ve had a lot of questions and written and raised hands that we could not get to. So I apologize to all of you. Rebecca, I want to give you thirty seconds to talk about your book, Outbreak Atlas. KATZ: Oh, yay! (Laughs.) Sure! I was telling folks before we started the webinar, in academia we write a lot of words, and often we write words and they’re, you know, meant for four people in the world to read. But we put a book together that is designed for hopefully addressing some of the public literacy issues that we brought up earlier. For years we had been supporting public health emergency operation centers around the world in helping provide information about kind of all the activities that happen in an outbreak response. And what we’ve done is we’ve taken that and we’ve written it for a public audience. So, it is illustrated. It has 120 different case studies. Anything you ever wanted to know about what happens in an outbreak, or every epidemiologic term that you heard your grandmother talk about that you’re, like, wait a second, is that right? So we’ve written it all out. If anybody’s interested, Outbreak Atlas. And it comes out on Monday on Amazon, and all those other places. So I’m really excited. FASKIANOS: Great. Fantastic. And, Yanzhong, is there anything you want to highlight that we’re doing at CFR in the global health space? HUANG: Well, thank you, Irina. Thank you for your patience of staying through that one-hour conversation. So, yeah, we are facing a lot of threats. We are—you know, we are aware of many of these challenges we are facing. We know the loopholes in the global health governance areas. It’s just that, I think the—(laughs)—the challenge is how to fix them; you know, don’t expect those negotiations in Geneva can you solve all the problems. The problems are going to rise up all the time in many decades to come. But if you want to learn more about this area, in addition to reading Rebecca’s Outbreak Atlas, read our—this is more CFR’s Negotiating Global Health Security. Thank you. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Thank you both. So you can also follow them on X, formerly known as Twitter, at @YanzhongHuang and at @RebeccaKatz5. This is the last webinar for this semester. Good luck with your finals, and everything that comes with this lovely month of April and May. And for some of you who are graduating, you can learn about CFR paid internships for students and fellowship for professors at CFR.org/careers. We’re open right now. We’re accepting applications for summer internships. And they can be virtual. So that’s always a plus. And they are paid. Please follow us at @CFR_Academic, visit CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com—and I’m going to really highlight; I do it every call—but our ThinkGlobalHealth.org site, which provides a forum to examine why global health matters and to engage in efforts to improve health worldwide. So, if you’re interested in these issues, you can—you should go there. We hope to be a resource for you all. Again, good luck with your finals. Enjoy the summer. And we look forward to reconvening in fall 2024. So thank you, again, to Dr. Katz and Dr. Huang. (END)

Panelists discuss the escalating economic and political situation in Haiti with a focus on the humanitarian crisis, how the destabilization of the region has impacted Haitian people both domestically and across the diaspora, and policy options to help de-escalate and stabilize the nation.If you wish to attend virtually, log-in information and instructions on how to participate during the question and answer portion will be provided the evening before the event to those who register.Please note the audio, video, and transcript of this hybrid meeting will be posted on the CFR website. 

Panelists discuss new and emerging commercial defense technology, current opportunities and challenges in defense innovation, and the future landscape of national security. For those attending virtually, log-in information and instructions on how to participate during the question and answer portion will be provided the evening before the event to those who register. Please note the audio and video of this virtual meeting will be posted on the CFR website.

The United Nations recognized rape as a war crime in 2008 through the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 1820. Despite this step, sexual violence remains a widespread practice in wars and conflict zones globally. Panelists discuss the extent of sexual violence used as a tool of war and policies that can address it and help prevent future atrocities. The Arthur C. Helton Memorial Lecture was established by CFR and the family of Arthur C. Helton, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who died in the August 2003 bombing of the UN Headquarters in Baghdad. The Lecture addresses pressing issues in the broad field of human rights and humanitarian concerns. The audio, video, and transcript of this meeting will be posted on the CFR website. **For those attending virtually, log-in information and instructions on how to participate during the question and answer portion will be provided the evening before the event to those who register. Please note the audio and video of this virtual meeting will be posted on the CFR website.**

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger discusses developments in the tech industry, implications of geopolitical conflicts on global trade, and leadership lessons learned.

The CFR luncheon event held in conjunction with the International Studies Association featured a discussion on Foreign Policy in the Age of Artificial Intelligence on Thursday, April 4, in San Francisco. The conversation featured Rachel Gillum, vice president of ethical and humane use of technology at Salesforce; Andrew W. Reddie, associate research professor of public policy at University of California, Berkeley; and Carla Anne Robbins, senior fellow at CFR. James M. Lindsay, senior vice president, director of Studies, and the Maurice R. Greenberg chair at CFR, moderated the discussion.

With RealEcon, CFR is creating an initiative to study and debate the role of the United States in the international economy. The launch event of this multiyear, multifaceted initiative will explore what the challenges are for U.S. leadership, what is at stake for American interests, and what new approaches would be helpful to rebuild an affirmative consensus on American economic leadership. Chair Jared Bernstein of the Council of Economic Advisers discusses the future of U.S. economic leadership as CFR launches its new RealEcon initiative. Immediately following the conversation with Chair Bernstein, there will be a panel discussion on the new initiative. Members may bring a guest to this event.

In a collaboration between CFR and Open to Debate, panelists debate whether or not Congress should stop funding the war in Ukraine. Open to Debate is the nation’s only nonpartisan, debate-driven media organization dedicated to bringing multiple viewpoints together for a constructive, balanced, respectful exchange of ideas. Open to Debate is a platform for intellectually curious and open-minded people to engage with others holding opposing views on complex issues.

Moisés Naím, distinguished fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, leads the conversation on authoritarianism. CASA: Welcome to today’s session of the Winter/Spring 2024 CFR Academic Webinar Series. I’m Maria Casa, director of the National Program and Outreach Department at CFR. Thank you all for joining us. Today’s discussion is on the record, and the video and transcript will be made available on our website, CFR.org/Academic, if you would like to share them with your colleagues or classmates. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. We are delighted to have Moisés Naím with us for a discussion on power and authoritarianism. Moisés Naím is a distinguished fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and an internationally syndicated columnist. Dr. Naím’s experience in public service includes his tenure as Venezuela’s minister of trade and industry, director of Venezuela’s central bank, and executive director of the World Bank. He has held appointments as a professor at IESA, Venezuela’s leading business school, and Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Naím is the host and producer of Efecto Naím, an Emmy-winning weekly television program on international affairs that airs throughout the Americas on Direct TV. He was the editor in chief of Foreign Policy magazine for fourteen years, and is the author of many scholarly articles, and more than ten books on international economics and politics. Welcome, Dr. Naím. Thank you very much for speaking with us today. NAÍM: Thanks for inviting me. Delighted to be with you. CASA: You have been reflecting on the nature of power, authoritarianism, and autocracy for many years, and have written a series of books that focused on these themes. Could we begin with you telling us a little bit about your current thinking on the subject? NAÍM: Of course. I am as concerned, as many other people are, about the fact that democracy is in retreat and authoritarianism is moving. This is not just an opinion; this is solid data from Freedom House, which is an institution that analyzes and surveys the world in terms of its propensities towards freedom or not. And in the most recent report about the state of freedom in the world, they show that it has—global freedom has declined for the eighteenth consecutive year. So for every year in the last eighteen years, democracy was declining and authoritarian regimes, of different stripes and forms, were taking over. Political rights and civil liberties were diminished in fifty-two countries, and the fact is that the majority of the people in the world today live in authoritarian regimes, or regimes where the checks and balances that define a democracy are not functioning—fully functioning and are limited and constrained. This is a very complex, surprising world in which a lot is happening for the first time—or a lot that we believe is happening for the first time, in fact, has happened before. I have here a phrase—a couple of phrases by European thinkers in the 1930s. After the First World War and before the Second World War, they saw it coming. They did not know exactly what form would it take. But José Ortega y Gasset is a famous Spanish thinker of that time, and in 1930 he wrote a book, and one of the phrases in the book is, “we don’t know what is happening to us.” And that is exactly what is happening to us—that we don’t know what’s going on. We know that something big is going on, but we don’t know exactly how is it going to affect our jobs, our companies, our politics, our life, our society, and so on. Another politician, at the same time—an Italian this time—in the 1930s, wrote a book. Antonio Gramsci was his name. He was in jail for political reasons, and Gramsci wrote, “the old is dying and the new is yet to be born. In this interregnum, monsters are hatched.” I repeat: “The old is dying and the new is yet to be born. In this interregnum, monsters are hatched.” And we have the same feeling now, that first, yes, there is a lot that we don’t know, and that surprise us all the time, and happens for the first time. It’s almost—I wrote a column recently about that, the unprecedented planet, in which a lot of things were happening for the first time, typical in most—a well-known example of this is climate change, right? It’s creating all sorts of unprecedented situations and points of view. I have been tracking the world from this perspective, as you said, for a long time, and there are two books of mine—or three books of mine that I think do not answer all the questions, but do answer most of the important questions of our time. They are thirty years in the making. There was one in 2005, another ten years later, and another ten years. The first one is Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy (2005). And the book showed how, at the time in which everyone was globalizing and—going global it was called—very fashionable. The group that—you know, that took most advantage early on and were early adopters were criminal cartels, and they were very good at using borders as ways of leveraging their capacities, possibilities, and goals. So Illicit—the role of illicit, the role of criminalize, and governments is something that I’m sure we’ll have speak today. But looking at this, what’s happening was also that the governments were waging war on all these criminal activities, in the trafficking of people, of drugs, of narcotics, of money, of weapons, of—even human organs, and art, and everything else. And governments were losing this battle. You know, they won some skirmishes here and there with the cartels and the criminals, but all in all, they were losing. So that led me to my following book, The End of Power (2013), in which I analyzed—I started with thinking that this is a government thing only to discover that this was happening everywhere; not that power was disappearing, but yes, power was more constrained. People that had power had now more limits, more restrictions on how it can use power. And the central theme of that book was that, in the twenty-first century, power had become easier to obtain, harder to use, and easier to lose. And that is directly relevant to the subject of authoritarianism that we’re discussing here. Ten years later, I wrote a book called The Revenge of Power (2022), which is what we’re—those who have power in massive quantities, what we are doing to limit the erosion of the power, and the ways, and the sharing of power, and the distribution of power, the sources, the origins, the usages, the possibilities of power at this time. And I came up with the idea, recognizing that what the revenge of power is is that some authoritarian regimes were using the three Ps to retain government. The three Ps are populism, polarization, and post-truth. The three are very well-known characteristics, but they have acquired unprecedented potency under the new circumstances, and they define very quickly what are the new breed of authoritarian regime that appear to look like democrats, but in fact, they are undermining democracy from the inside. We have a long list of leaders that were elected, some in fair and free elections; others by just stealing the elections, but once they got in government, they started limiting, constraining, and diminishing the powers that constrain, the power of the public chief executive. So that is a context in which we are moving. And one of the themes that I would like to—hope to chat with you all has to be with what I mentioned before: the criminalized nature of the state, and how this is related to authoritarianism, and to globalization. Let me stop here and start the conversation, Maria. CASA: Oh, thank you so much for that introduction. Now let’s open it up to questions. (Gives queuing instructions.) We’ll start with a raised hand from Carl Gilmour, an undergraduate student at Stanford University. Carl? (Pause.) We’ll give Carl another second—otherwise we can come back to him. Well, let’s move on to a written question. It’s from Michael Strmiska, professor of world history at SUNY Orange in New York state, who writes, “I see a dilemma with the need to restrict communications and mis- and disinformation from extremists and authoritarians, though this would seem to mean a restriction of free speech. However, free speech is never an absolute right. What can governments do to prevent authoritarians and extremists from taking power through manipulation of the information and social media sphere? I no longer believe the argument that the solution to hate speech or other such disinformation is more speech because, with social media, lies and hate can be spread at lightning speed in great mass and force. NAÍM: Well, the question has many good answers embedded in it. It’s hard to disagree with the professor’s perspective, and his caution. We have been surprised by what’s happening in social media and how that has changed a lot in the world of politics and so on. That, we should remember, was driven by technology. It was driven by all sorts of innovations. I think his question is the question for our time: how do we protect free speech and democracy while at the same time limiting the impact of the wrongdoers, or the people that are abusing the system, or using the system for very nefarious goals. We don’t know; nobody knows. That question is at the core of the great debate of our time. All I want to stress—perhaps in addition—is that expect surprises, and it’s very likely that the surprises will come more from the world of politics and from the world of technological innovation. But we don’t know what those are. CASA: Next we’ll go to Buba Misawa, who is professor of political science at Washington and Jefferson College. Please go ahead, Buba. Q: Can you hear me? CASA: Yes. Q: OK. Professor Naím, that was a great conversation you started. But let me ask a simpler question, and I know, between you and Gramsci you can answer. Why are we attracted to this new model or this old model of authoritarianism? Is it because democracy has failed, or why? NAÍM: Another great question at the core of a lot of the debates that are going on, so thank you very much, Professor Misawa. The answer has a lot to do with the underperformance of governments and the—you know, broken expectations. The expectations of people—very justifiably—grow much faster than the capacity of the state to respond to their needs, and hopes, and ambitions, and expectations for a better life. That is happening. That was also always happening, and somehow I think the famous professor identified it, that the gap between the expectations of the voters, or the people, and the capacity of the state to deliver on that, that has always existed, but now it has been amplified with technology, and with the globalization, and with all kinds of new ways of doing things, and changing the regime. The essence of the story is that we will have to deal with the non-performance of governments, and what is happening is that we need to—I don’t think we have to relaunch everything and throw the baby with the bath water, but capitalism in the twenty-first century and democracy in the twenty-first century need adjustment. The world and assumptions that were—on which these were based are no longer with us, and we have not replaced them yet. And that’s where Gramsci is so relevant, you know. In this interregnum—he called it—a lot of very bad things can happen, but also very good things can happen. But the essence of the story is that expectations are making governments very hard to function and very—there is a need to—as I said, and I’m repeating myself—there is a need to adjust our capitalism and democracy that we have until now to the new realities. And we all know the long list of new things that are happening that need a response; climate change being, you know, very important in this story. CASA: Our next question is from Bernard Haykel, professor at Princeton University. Q: Thank you, and I hope you can hear me. Thank you, Professor Naím. I’m a great admirer of your work. NAÍM: Thank you. Q: I have two questions, so one is that you have different petrostates, both of which are authoritarian, but they deliver very different goods and services to their populations. So take, for example, the UAE or Saudi Arabia, on the one hand, and Venezuela, on the other. So what accounts for that difference? And the second is that in countries like the UAE and Saudi Arabia, they tell you, you know, we’re a tribal society. If we had democracy we would have inefficient government, we would have chaos, we would have Islamists who would come to power, as you can see, for example, in Kuwait where they have a parliament. And so, therefore, there is an argument that authoritarianism is really the best way to contend with the global problems and with providing services to their populations. Thank you. NAÍM: Yes, yes, Professor Haykel, that’s absolutely right, and we don’t know—there is a respect for authoritarianism that is essentially grounded on the performance, and so we now give very—a lot of importance to governance and to the capacity to govern. And they are doing a good job down there in the Gulf countries, surely. But it is so specific—their set of circumstances, their origins, their history, their society, the geopolitics, their economy—is so specific to them that it’s hard to replicate elsewhere. We have not seen it. And then we don’t know how resilient these governments are like that without starting in the route of repression in, you know, the underlying assumption in this conversation. The elephant in the room, of course, is the capacity of these governments to be repressive, and then what happens. We saw, for example, the admiration for the Chinese model and its capacity to build infrastructure and to build all kinds of things. And it was presented to us as an example to follow. And remember the Beijing Olympics. It was this perfect display of organization and performance, but we—as you know now, that China has been entangled in all kinds of problems and all kinds of difficulties. So yes, we need to look at other examples, but remember the context and understand that this is a picture in a moment, but over time the sustainability of this governance is going to change. CASA: Our next question is a written one from Rodrigo Moura, who is an undergraduate student at the University of Essex. He asks: You have mentioned the three Ps that authoritarians use to gain and consolidate power and influence. What about money? How do you see the use of economic incentives by authoritarian regimes, mainly abroad, to gain influence? NAÍM: Yes, there are two themes there. One is the economic performance of a nation and a regime, and can it provide the prosperity that people need, want, and fight poverty, and fight inequality, and so on. That’s one dimension on the theme of power. The other dimension on the theme of power is one that is a very complicated one, and it has to do with money and politics, and how money can replace the will of the voters. And we are seeing that even in democratic societies in which money defines political outcomes with the negligible contribution of participation of the rest of the people. So money has many dimensions, but the two main ones are that money and politics, and the necessity to provide for a better life for as many of the people in the country as possible, and those are two challenges that a lot of governments are not meeting. CASA: Our next question—let’s take our next question from Lindsey McCormack, a graduate student at Baruch College. Lindsey? Q: Thank you. Professor Naím, I have a question—a follow-up to your piece in El País from—it was included in the background materials for this webinar. You discussed how today’s dictators don’t really have an out like maybe a generation ago that they could, you know, take a lot of money, and go somewhere and retire in luxury. (Laughs.) That was a very interesting point, and you suggested that’s a reason—a reason it can be so difficult to transition away from authoritarian regimes, that essentially their leaders are trapped in the situation of their own making. And I was wondering if you have any idea what to do about that? It wasn’t a good situation in the past where you could steal a bunch of money and go to the French Riviera, but at least it gave an out and the possibility of change. NAÍM: Yes, that’s a very thorny issue, as Ms. McCormack indicated—as she—as you mentioned. The challenge here is what do you do with dictators. And most of them cannot run the risk of not being in power because if they are not in power, they are in jail. So government is not just for service or for corruption, but also for protection. And unless you can provide an exit ramp out, it’s going to be very difficult for these people to go anywhere because no other governments would protect them as much as their own government and their own—typically their own military. So that is going to be with us for a while. An international coalition of democracies could do something, but as we know, multilateral work is as desirable as it is often ineffective—too ineffective, in fact. That’s a good question. Thank you. CASA: Our next question is written. It’s from Alfredo Toro Carnevali, professor of political science at Montclair State University. He writes: I was perplexed by the speed with which Ecuador, a relatively stable country a few years ago, was overtaken by organized criminal organizations from Mexico and Armenia, competing for access to the port in Guayaquil. How could this happen so quickly and so dramatically? What can Ecuador do? Could you comment on this? NAÍM: Yeah, it’s an incredible situation. Ecuador was one of the most stable of countries in that tough neighborhood of high political volatility and instability. And then it fell into the trap that met—so many other countries in that neighborhood are having, which is being complacent with the presence of drug cartels and criminals, and that have infiltrated the government, have infiltrated society, that have access to huge quantities of money. And we saw, you know, the globalization of organized crime because a lot of these things—for example, you saw a lot of the Mexican cartels operating in El Salvador—in Ecuador, sorry—and that is part of the answer. It was—it always existed, but never at the speed and scope that it exists now. CASA: We’ll take our next question from Björn Krondorfer, director of the Martin Springer Institute and an endowed professor of religious studies at Northern Arizona University. Björn? Q: Can you hear me? CASA: Yes. Q: Yeah. I brought my question. It’s about the role of religion in authoritarian regimes. We see this with white Christian nationalism in the United States, with Putin’s embrace of Russian orthodoxy, in Orbán’s Hungary—I mean really across the world at different—in different religious traditions. What is your sense of the religious power or the religious force in relationship to political authoritarian power? NAÍM: Thank you for the question, Professor Krondorfer. The magic word in global politics or politics today, everywhere, is legitimacy, legitimacy, and legitimacy. There is a huge deficit of legitimacy in which governments are not legitimate, either because they acquired power through sham elections or because they had a coup. But the need to have legitimacy, to be respected, to be recognized as a valid regime is there. And one of the tools for legitimacy is religion, as you well said. And yes, in the same way that money in politics is a very important thorny issue, money in religion to fund and support a specific government is also a big issue for which we don’t have a lot of good answers. But yes, your point is excellent. CASA: Going back to Carl Gilmour, who is a student at Stanford University. He has written his question: Many journalists appear to perish or become confined when confronted with the consequence of publishing truth to the people that expose the abuse of power. What is your recommendation to these beacons of truth when weighing the heavy cost of careers in journalism? Do you foresee that there will be any remedy to this assault on free speech or censorship through fear and violence? NAÍM: Yeah, what a problem, right? And we know that, you know, there are governments, there are countries that have the most journalists in jail. Turkey, Mexico are horrible situations in terms of persecution and the repression of journalists. And I don’t have any answer other than admiring, recognizing, and honoring the work of these journalists who every day go out in the street, not knowing if they’re going to go back at home later in the evening. It is a global situation. We are already seeing how some of these authoritarian regimes are using them—captured journalists—are using them as exchange in deals. There is a very well-known journalist from the Wall Street Journal that has been incarcerated unjustly in Russia, and he is just one of the most visible ones, but for each one of them, there are hundreds that are being repressed everywhere. And trying to generate—the most important prescription is to continue to generate visibility and don’t let them disappear from our information ecosystem. CASA: Our next question is from an executive-in-residence at the IESE Business School, Alex Wallace. Alex? Q: Hello. Thank you for this; so interesting. I wonder if there are any examples of authoritarian regimes where the populace is actually thriving and/or the standard of living is high. I looked at the World Happiness Index, and America is pretty far down there. There’s probably one or two above it that are not democracies. I just wonder if there is any place where authoritarianism has actually not been bad for the populace. NAÍM: Well, yeah, of course, Ms. Wallace. That’s very important. What we don’t know is for how long and how sustainable, you know. Look at the sustainability of these things, and it’s not clear that they are—in the long run, they will have the same format or the same face. But yes, there are places—Hungary is an example of places where the economy is doing relatively well, but that needs support and subsidies. And at the same time, there has been some progress. And let’s not forget the progress that had been taking place in China where literally millions—hundreds of millions of people were lifted out of poverty. And that is a performance that is unrivaled in terms of success. But at the same time, as I mentioned in my answer to another question prior, is that now the highly admired system in Russia is beginning to crack. CASA: We have many, many written questions, but we would love to hear your voices, so please don’t be shy and click the raise hand icon if you would like to ask your question orally. In the meantime, we’ll take a question—a written question from Chip Pitts, who is a lecturer at Stanford University. He writes: I worked with a number of NGOs concerned about the expansion of unchecked surveillance technologies by governments and companies, surveillance capitalism. What’s your view on the trends regarding surveillance and how excesses can be corrected? NAÍM:: They are horrible. The threats regarding surveillance are horrible. And becoming more common around the world. Again, China is probably the world champion in terms of surveillance. But it’s also in Switzerland you can find it, and other European countries. Even in very well-functioning democracies you see these technologies that are being used. And, you know, there’s a violation of privacy. There is use to repress movements and organizations. And, again, the only hope we have, I think, is two. One is having a knowledge and understanding, recognizing, keeping in mind that this is happening. Don’t forget that this is going on. And the second is that, again, I think the world of technology may give us some positive surprises in terms of how to protect ourselves from this excessive, abusive, authoritarian kind of behavior in terms of surveillance. CASA: Our next raised hand is from Katie Laatikainen, who is associate professor at Adelphi University. Katie. Q: Hi. Thanks very much. I also wrote my question in the Q&A. I’m interested in what you think an international order premised upon authoritarianism would look like. For most of the post-World War II era liberalism and liberal concepts, universal human rights, rule of law sort of defined the operating system of the—operating system of international relations. Given what you’ve said about authoritarianism and the internal and domestic focus of it, what would be the elements of the operating system if there’s a shift toward authoritarianism as the operating system in international relations? Thanks so much. NAÍM: Mutual protection. What these countries that are authoritarian and beginning—we have evidence they’re working together internationally to ensure that they are protected. That they will not have some color revolution, or some invasion, or some other social political dynamic that puts them at risk. So each one of them has a dense web of international connections with likeminded governments. And we should expect more than that. But always remembering the phrase that says that countries don’t have friends, they have interests. And so the interests of these authoritarian governments are converging for now. But we don’t know if there’s going to be—what’s going to happen in reality there. CASA: Our next question is a written one. It comes from Patrick Duddy, senior advisor for global affairs at Duke University, and former U.S. ambassador to Venezuela. He asks: Dr. Naím, could you cite a recent example of a situation in which the international community or local democracy advocates have been able to rollback authoritarianism and restore democracy? NAÍM: Yes, first, let me say hello to Patrick, who’s an old friend of mine. Nice to hear from you. Yes, fortunately, we have examples. I think the most recent example is Guatemala. Guatemala had a government that essentially was voted out of power. But NGOs, and civil society, and the media, and the private sector, and the church, they all got together in a fantastic way and were able, with the support of the United States, by the way—with an important role on the part of the United States. The leadership was, in Guatemala, and Guatemalan democratic politicians were so successful. And so, yes, there is hope. And there’s always opportunity that a good leader, together with a good organization and the support of the international community, can stop the decline towards the autocracy in some—and protect democracies. CASA: We’ll take our next question from Andrea Cuervo Prados, who is adjunct instructor at Dickinson State University. Andrea. Q: Hi, Mr. Naím. Thank you so much for your insights and knowledge. I also wrote my question on the chat, and it is related to Colombia. I would love to hear your thoughts about that country, about Colombia, which right now seems to be moving to an authoritarian regime, recalling some of the initial stages you know very well, Venezuela live under Chavez tenure. So what’s your view on the Colombian case? And do you believe an authoritarian regime is emerging in Colombia? Thank you. NAÍM: Yes, I am worried, and I think there is—there are good reasons to be worried about what happens in Colombia. Colombia used to be a solid democracy. Colombia showed the way on how to combat drug trafficking, how to reclaim neighborhoods that were untouchable by the police and others, because they were controlled by the drug traffickers. So there was a long list that make Colombia a country worth looking at. But then a combination of toxic polarization in which the country were—like many others, by the way—got entangled in all kinds of highly polarizing debates, behaviors, created—weakened the state in Colombia. And now they have a president that is surely frustrating the hopes of the people that voted for him. And he is displaying behaviors that are not democratic. And all, you know, in the mix of showing and trying to present himself and his policies as democracy. But they’re not. So, yes. But at the same time, perhaps the good news is that what’s remaining of democracy in Colombia, and especially in the legislative branch, can curtail and limit the advances—the antidemocratic advances that that are taking place there. But it’s worth watching and crossing fingers. CASA: Our next question is from Jose David Valbuena, an undergraduate student at Buffalo State University. He asks: How does the rise of authoritarianism in certain countries affect the global balance of power? And what implications does this have for international relations? NAÍM: Yeah. Well, the central answer there is the hegemony, and the nature of hegemony, and who has it, and how it sustains it, is a central theme. Hegemony and, you know, dominate—the idea that, for example, the superpowers, that the United States, will continue to be a hegemon, I think it’s true. It will continue to be the hegemon, probably more than anything in some areas of the military, of military affairs, of military organizations. But yet, the hegemony will be—is on—is on the plate to be debated, discussed, eventually adapted at what are the realities of geopolitics in these times. CASA: Let’s see. We’ll take our next question from Rita Kiki Edozie, who is a professor and associate dean at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Q: Thank you. And thank you, Dr. Naím. Very interesting conversation. So about a year and a half ago, you participated in a debate around the same subject, you with Julian Waller. And your thesis was, of course, the rise of authoritarianism; and Julian’s thesis was that authoritarianism would not emerge in the U.S., despite, you know, your thesis about sort of Trump’s authoritarianism. And that’s because the U.S. had institutions at the national, local, and institutional level that sort of—would mute or, sort of, soften the blow of authoritarianism. Assuming both of you are right in that, you know, both there is an authoritarianism on the rise but so is there a pushback against authoritarianism, especially in the U.S., my question to you is: Don’t you think that democratic regimes are sort of embedded with the contradictions of authoritarian thrusts and pulses as well? And that, you know, they go one in hand, and we ought to acknowledge how they sort of coexist together? Thank you. NAÍM: Yes, Professor Edozie. I think the answer to that question will hinge quite a bit on the results of the U.S. elections this year. I do believe that Mr. Donald Trump is a threat to democracy in the United States, in a variety of ways. Because democracy is not just what happens when you go to vote, as you know, but is what happens in between periods in which—the days in which you go to vote, in which you really want the checks and balances to be autonomous, independent, objective, honest, and incorruptible, and all of that. And that is not what President Trump showed us in his time in government, nor what he’s saying these days. So I think whatever generalization one wants to make at this point, it has to be centered on the consequences at home and internationally of an electoral win by Donald Trump, if that happens. CASA: Our next question is a written one. It’s from Harry Mellor, political science student at Wheaton College, who writes: I was wondering what your thoughts were regarding whether the current Russian state reaction to recent terrorist attacks may be employed or used by the Putin regime to push an anti-Islamic authoritarian view, similar to the U.S. during 9/11. Or, in relation to earlier questions, used to bolster the hegemony of Russian Orthodoxy? NAÍM: Yes. I think Putin is already doing it. Of course, he has mentioned a little bit the Muslim theme, but mostly he’s blaming Ukraine. And he’s using the attack to show that—essentially arguing, which is not true, that the attack—the terrorist attack was, you know, the doing of the Ukrainians. And, again, we live in a world in which there are millions of people that don’t know who to believe, what to believe, and where to—you know, how to think about these issues. And I think this is an example. CASA: We’ll take our next question from Susan King, dean at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Susan. Q: Hi. Just to clarify, dean emeritus. So I’m no longer sitting dean. I want to ask a question with that plays off what you’ve just said about the U.S. And you’ve talked about the importance of government. There’s been a lot written just recently about the pandemic sort of overhang, that there’s PTSD, you know, in many communities; and that, reviewing it, that many felt the ambiguity of the guidance that they got has left people really desirous of more clear answers, and some worry that will lead to authoritarianism. Do you see the COVID experience, the pandemic, as sort of a backdrop for the United States elections? NAÍM: I don’t know. That is high expectations, right? Is assuming the government agencies in the United States are infallible and knew what they were doing. And the fact of the matter is, that they were doing it for the first time, without precedents. They surprised us—the scientists surprised us when they came up with a vaccine in record time, because everybody had been saying it takes a couple of years or more to get a vaccine through the system. Well, the scientists collaborating internationally were able to do it. But what I don’t think is that one should expect governments to have that capacity of dealing with a pandemic of the global scale and doing everything effectively, or doing things in service of certain ideology or political interests. I think there was room for mistakes and an ignorance about how to deal with the situation and doing as much as possible with the information they had. And the political context. Just remember the debates and how difficult they were. And the long-term consequences of COVID, of course, there is—long-term COVID is an issue and is becoming an important issue. But there is a new pandemic which is mental health, as you know. The global—the world has seen an increased level of mental health problems. And the United States is significantly there. CASA: Our next question is a written one from Alex Beltran, an undergraduate student at University of Houston-Downtown: I would like to ask you about your thoughts regarding Mexico and its current national issues, where there is a president who attempted to eliminate several national agencies including the ones in charge of elections. In addition, the current president is very clear on letting the corruption of cartels continue. Is Mexico on its way to becoming more authoritarian? Considering they have elections soon it might be early to talk about that. But I would like to hear what your—what you understand about the subject. NAÍM: Well, I understand that, yes, it’s too—in a normal democracy, it’s too early to be—to talk about what’s going to happen, because you don’t know who’s going to win. In the case of Mexico, everybody knows now who’s going to win, because there’s going to be an election that is heavily influenced by government intervention in favor of the candidate of the government. So that’s one thing. And the government of Mexico, and in particular President López Obrador, are important examples of what I call political necrophilia. You know, necrophilia is this perversion that some human beings have, you know, a strong attachment to cadavers—that they like cadavers. Well, there is a political manifestation of that, people that are deeply, deeply attached to bad ideas, ideas that have been tried and tested in the country once and again, in different countries, with different circumstances. Ideas that always end in more corruption, more inequality, more poverty, and so on. And President—if you look at the initiatives of President López Obrador, you will see that there are all kinds of examples of political necrophilia in which he is doing things that have been tested in the past. And there are clear mistakes to do it again that he’s undertaking. CASA: Our next question comes from Michael C. Davis, professor of law and international affairs at Jindal Global University. Michael. Q: OK, can you hear me? CASA: Yes. Q: OK. I’ve just written a book on Hong Kong called Freedom Undone. And one of the things I constantly run into in talking about the book is a criticism, well, it’s pointless to talk about Hong Kong. China’s not going to listen. And so you’re just—it’s a waste of our time even to host an event on it. And so the question I have is, does—in the cases like this, where a very successful authoritarian regimes is in charge, what’s the best response when you’re told that sort of naming and shaming really doesn’t matter, you’re just going to be called anti-China for this, and they’re going to ignore it? NAÍM: Well, but the rest of the world is not. The rest of the world will clearly benefit from a group of independent, objective, reliable, trusted analysts, professors, journalists, politicians, policymakers that said that—you know, that put the light on what’s going on. As you know better than I, this—recently there was already the decision to pass the law in Hong Kong that clearly curtailed any hopes of a more democratic—to retain some of the Hong Kong’s democratic values, and behaviors, and institutions. So it’s already happened. But I think there is the possibility that you find people that understand what’s going on, and how this backsliding towards authoritarianism in Hong Kong can be—still being formed, or used to be—to inform the rest of the world how to think about China, by the way to look at how they have dealt with Hong Kong. And then the next stage of the conversation, as you know, will have to do with Taiwan. President Xi Jinping constantly repeats that there is no debate there. Taiwan is part of China. And it will become integrated with China. And that creates, of course, all kinds of anxieties because of the role of the United States in the treaty. There is a mutual protection military treaty between China and the United States, as you know. So don’t stop it. Don’t leave it there. Insist. CASA: Our next question is written one from Hunter Shields, undergraduate student at Davis and Elkins College. He writes: If social media acts as a significant factor in the spread of authoritarian government models, does it become the responsibility of nonauthoritarian governments, who may see how such systems can cause chaos, to censor or limit the exposure of authoritarian ideals? Would censoring authoritarian governments make the nonauthoritarian governments act in the same way as they—as they try to maintain the political status quo? NAÍM: Well, I don’t know that censoring is for anything that I would ever recommend. But there is no doubt that we need a regulatory system that, for example, to contain the spread of disinformation that is now happening and that he’s being, as the question said, you know, there’s a lot going on there. And it’s important that the fight is—continues, the fight against misinformation, distortion, lies, hate continues. That we will need to find ways to contain that. CASA: Our next question is a written one from Wilson Wameyo, a graduate student at the Jagiellonian University in Poland. He asked: How is the new conflict between Russia and the West emboldening authoritarian leaders in Africa and South America? NAÍM: Yeah. That is the fear. And that is why so many leaders, so many democratic leaders, are saying that the outcome of the war between Russia and Ukraine, as a result of Russia’s invasion, will define the prospects for democracy around the world. If Ukraine falls, you know, loses the war, and it becomes a province of Russia, all bets are off in a variety of ways. I don’t think that will happen. But I also think that a victory of the Ukrainian forces is—at this point, is on the table. So negotiations will ensue. And let’s hope that through these negotiations one can preserve the independence of Ukraine, and also stimulates the creation of an international coalition, prodemocracy coalition, that has some tooth and can work on that in support of countries that are fighting the good fight in terms of protecting democracy. CASA: Our next question is a written one from Azzedine Layachi, professor of politics at St. John’s University: You said earlier that we need to adjust capitalism and democracy to the new reality. First, what are some of the specific dimensions of this new reality? Second, what kind of adjustments do you suggest? NAÍM: Well, it’s obvious that the economy as it now works is not aligned to the realities of climate change that we’re facing. The climate emergency requires action and requires sound economic thinking, and action, and policies. Inequality. Inequality around the world has increased in significant ways. And, again, the economy, as it now stands, is—has a peaceful coexistence with inequality that has to be shattered. And if—you know, the fight against monopolies, the concentration of power, and all that has to be very effective. The whole regulation of free speech and speech in general, and disinformation and all that, has to be aligned to democracy and to what we have as a democracy political system. So there is a list of things that can be done, but that require political will that he was going to be very hard to get. CASA: Our next question comes from Mietek Boduszynski, associate professor of politics at Pomona College. The question is: From a U.S. foreign policy perspective, can the logic of great power competition be reconciled with democracy promotion? NAÍM: It depends how the promotion is done. Remember that under the banner of democracy, you know, promotion a lot of bad governments have been maintained. I understand the question. It’s a good question in terms of how to make it possible for democracy in the United States—for the United States to be effective at democracy promotion. I think that is going to be reviewed and is going to change. And I think the way we have been thinking about foreign aid is going to be adjusted. CASA: Our next question is from Diego Abente Brun, professor of the practice and program director, Latin American and hemispheric studies at George Washington University. He asks: Why are some authoritarian Latin American leaders popular—AMLO, Bukele, Milei, and so on? How can we restore faith and trust in democracy? NAÍM: Fandom. In my book, The Revenge Of Power, I talk about the new quality that has politics. You know, you always wanted a politician have to have some sort of attractiveness, the magic, that magnetism that attracts followers. Now it’s more than that. Now it’s a fandom. And it has to do with identity politics. It has to do with how do you feel you belong to a group that is like you and you are like them. And all of that has is having immense political consequences that we have not seen before? CASA: Thank you. I don’t know if we have—maybe we have time for one more question. We’ll take it from Robin Bittick, professor of political science at Sam Houston State University in Texas. Democracy is about self-rule and majority voting. Yet, populism employs something that can be—implies something that can be democratic but can become authoritarian. What can be done to ensure democracy does not result in suicide? NAÍM: Wow. Well—(laughs)—but I understand the feeling, you know, that democracy will be underperforming in some areas that are critical for people. And, again, performance and transparency are two important conditions for all of this. Transparency, and paying attention, and participating. CASA: OK. We have many more questions. We’ve covered an enormous amount of ground. So I’d like to thank you so much, Dr. Naím, for your time with us today. And to all of you, for your questions and comments. The final Winter/Spring Academic Webinar will take place on Wednesday, April 10, at 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time. Yanzhong Huang, senior fellow for global health at CFR, and Rebecca Katz, professor and director of the Center for Global Health Science and Security at Georgetown University, will lead a conversation on global health security and diplomacy. In the meantime, I encourage you to learn about CFR paid internships for students and fellowships for professors at CFR.org/careers. Follow @CFR_Academic on X. And visit CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for research and analysis on global issues. Again, thank you all for joining us today and we look forward to you tuning in on April 10. (END)

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