Inside CFR Events (Video)

The Future of Kashmir

Ted Koppel discusses his distinguished career and the changing nature of journalism and social media. The Distinguished Voices Series focuses particular attention on the contributions made by a prominent individual at a critical juncture in the history of the country or the world.

Panelists discuss the political stalemate in Venezuela, the spillover effects of the humanitarian crisis, and the scenarios and policy options the United States should consider as the regime of Nicolás Maduro continues to threaten regional security.

Connecting the World: The Internet's Next Billion Users

Panelists discuss the U.S.-China technology competition, including China’s advances in the field, U.S. universities’ competition and collaboration with China, and the concerns of the U.S. business community in relying on technology supply chains based in China. The C.V. Starr & Co. Annual Lecture on China was established in 2018 to honor the trailblazing career of C.V. Starr and the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of C.V. Starr & Co., Maurice R. Greenberg.

Speakers discuss the FRONTLINE documentary “The Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia” as well as U.S.-Saudi Arabia relations. This film captures the rise to power of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and his policies over the past two years, including his handling of dissent, vision for Saudi Arabia’s future, and ties to the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Watch the full documentary here: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/the-crown-prince-of-saudi-arabia/

Alice C. Hill and Leonardo Martinez-Diaz discuss their new book, Building A Resilient Tomorrow: How To Prepare For The Coming Climate Disruption. Decision-makers at all levels of government and business have been actively seeking ways to help communities build resilience to the impacts of climate change. In their book, Hill and Martinez-Diaz offer concrete, actionable policy recommendations and behind-the-scenes stories from their personal experiences in the U.S. government. 

Alice C. Hill and Leonardo Martinez-Diaz discuss their new book, Building A Resilient Tomorrow: How To Prepare For The Coming Climate Disruption. Decision-makers at all levels of government and business have been actively seeking ways to help communities build resilience to the impacts of climate change. In their book, Hill and Martinez-Diaz offer concrete, actionable policy recommendations and behind-the-scenes stories from their personal experiences in the U.S. government. 

German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz discusses fighting climate change in multilateral settings, European economic developments, and German economic policy. ALLEN: Good morning. Thank you all for being here today. And we welcome you to today’s Council on Foreign Relations meeting with Olaf Scholz, the finance minister from Germany. I’m Thad Allen, a member of CFR’s board of directors and a senior executive advisor at Booz Allen Hamilton. I’ll be presiding over today’s discussion. And at this point, I’d like to invite Mr. Scholz to the podium to give his remarks. SCHOLZ: Thank you. Thank you for the kind introduction. Ladies and gentlemen, I’m happy to be here at the Council on Foreign Relations today, and I look forward to be a frank and lively discussion with all of you. I want to use my opening remarks to address a topic that concerns all of us around the globe with increasing urgency, tackling climate change. This year, millions of people, young people in particular, have taken to the streets to remind us of the urgency of limiting global warming. But at the same time, we have seen pushback from those who refuse to grapple with the reality of climate change, who question the science, and who deny the need to take action because they find it inconvenient. I would like to respond to them by quoting one of your founding fathers, John Adams. “Facts are stubborn things. And whatever may be our wishes, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” Manmade climate change is a fact. Another fact, the global community hasn’t done enough so far to limit global warming. None of us, including Germany. Speaking for Germany, I can say we want to change that. To this end, the federal government has recently laid out its multibillion-euro climate strategy for the next decade. As I like to point out, to those that always insist that Germany should be spending more to combat climate change, Germany is investing fifty-four billion euros in the period until 2023. And if you look at the next decade, until 2030 we are in the region of one hundred and fifty billion euros. When we undertake such a massive task, there is one central question that we need to answer: What’s the point? Why do we bother when at the same time new coal-fired power plants are being built in other parts of the globe? When, as in Germany’s case, our share of total global emissions is about 2 percent? My answer is threefold. Firstly, it is the right thing to do. As industrialized countries, we have emitted the bulk of mankind’s greenhouse gas emissions until now. Now we need to acknowledge our responsibility and start leading the fight against climate change. Secondly, we can do it. We have the necessary technological and financial capacity. Germany prides itself on its engineering. If we can show that it is possible to reduce emissions significantly, and be all the more successful for it economically, others will follow suit. We can lead the shift to a low-carbon global economy. And thirdly, it is an opportunity. Yes, making this transition requires a big effort now, but ultimately it will strengthen our industrial base. From battery-powered vehicles to hydrogen fuel cells, we are seeing climate- friendly technologies improve to the point where they are becoming commercially viable, similarly to what happened, for example, to wind energy. The fight against manmade climate change will become a business opportunity. And in a country which prides itself on its business instincts, in a country of dealmakers, I say if you do not join in the fight against climate change you are voluntarily forgoing a great deal. Ladies and gentlemen, the fight against climate change will be the defining issue of the coming decades for all of us. Climate policy will shape all policy areas, economic policy in particular. By the way, we are also seeing this trend at the IMF. Tomorrow, on the margins of the current IMF and World Bank Group meeting, we will be having a special meeting of the coal

Panelists discuss the extent of disinformation, its impact on democracy, and what can be done to prevent, mitigate, and stop its spread. THOMPSON: Welcome to today’s Council on Foreign Relations meeting on “Stemming the Tide of Global Disinformation.” I’m Nicholas Thompson. I’m the editor-in-chief of Wired. I’ll be your moderator today. Let’s get crackin’. Rick, how are you? STENGEL: Good. How are you? THOMPSON: Great. You have just spent the last three years writing about disinformation. He has a new book; it will be available later. You spent the last three years thinking about disinformation. Tell me how your thoughts deepened as you went along, because we all know why disinformation’s a problem. There’re some obvious reasons why it’s a problem. But now that you’ve spent more time thinking about it than anybody else, tell us what you learned that we don’t know. STENGEL: I don’t think I’ve spent more time thinking about it than the president has. (Laughter.) What a way to begin! THOMPSON: Yeah. (Laughter.) STENGEL: The other false premise of your question is that my thinking has deepened about it. So my book, Information Wars, is about the time I spent at the State Department countering disinformation, countering Russian disinformation, countering ISIS propaganda. And I had never really seen it before. I’d been a—I was editor of Time for a bunch of years, had always been in media, and after the annexation of Crimea by Putin in 2014, we saw this tsunami of disinformation around it, you know, recapitulating Putin’s lies about it, and it was a kind of a new world. And the idea of disinformation as opposed to misinformation is disinformation is deliberately false information used for a strategic purpose. Misinformation is something that’s just wrong, something that we all, you know, can get in the habit of it. And I saw this whole new world being born. I don’t mean to steal your thunder with the question, but inside we were talking about whether there’s more disinformation relative to correct information now in history than ever before. I don’t know the answer to that, but what I do know is it’s easier to access it. And once upon a time the Russians, who pioneered something called “active measures,” which was their idea that warfare, the future or the present of warfare is about information, not just kinetic warfare. The way they used to do it in the ’50s was they bought out a journalist in a remote newspaper in India to put out a false story about something and then the Russian media would start echoing it and then it would get into the mainstream. Now, they hire a bunch of kids to work in a troll farm in St. Petersburg and put it up on social media with no barrier to entry, no gatekeepers to prevent it from happening. And I don’t know the answer to whether there’s more of it, but there’s easier access to it. And I do think as we approach 2020, part of the other problem of disinformation is it’s not just a supply problem; it’s a demand problem. People want it. You know, confirmation bias means we seek out information that we agree with. If you’re likely to think that Hillary Clinton is running a child sex trafficking ring out of a pizza parlor in Washington, D.C., you’re likely to believe anything and seek out information that confirms that. That’s a problem, and that’s a human nature problem. THOMPSON: Paul, let me ask you a variation on this, having just listened to Rick. You’ve just published a report on this very topic. You could have written reports on lots of topics. BARRETT: I suppose. (Laughter.) THOMPSON: You’ve got a varied career. Look at the man’s bio. You know a lot of things. Why are you so worried about disinformation right now? BARRETT: Because it is a foot in the land, it is pervasive, and without a good distinction between real facts and fake facts, we can’t run a democracy in an effective way. People can only make honest political choices with real information. And I think we have at key moments and in key pl

Panelists provide first-hand accounts of the 1986 Reykjavik Summit with U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and discuss how the Cold War–era meeting shaped future U.S.-Russia relations and efforts to dismantle nuclear weapons programs.  WALLANDER: Good evening. Welcome to today’s Council on Foreign Relations meeting, Eyewitness to History: Reagan and Gorbachev at Reykjavik. I am Celeste Wallander, president and CEO of the U.S.-Russian Foundation. And I will be presiding over this fantastic event his history. I am going to introduce our speakers using the titles they held at the moment of that historic event. (Laughter.) You have their bios, and they are well-known to you. But I thought it would be nice to remind you, because we are with eyewitnesses to history, from which perch they were witnessing that history. So, first, we can Steve Sestanovich, who was senior director for policy development on the National Security Council. Ambassador Roz Ridgway, who was assistant secretary of state for European and Canadian affairs. And Kenneth Adelman, who was director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Some of those titles—in fact, all the—all the titles still exist, but I’m not sure all the agencies do. (Laughter.) So it’s a good thing we have these witnesses to history, so we don’t lose those important elements of U.S. foreign policy. So I’m going to start—I thought we would start by stepping back a little bit and thinking about what was—what the United States was trying to deal with in terms of priorities and challenges that were posed, generally, in the Soviet relationship, but priorities for the United States and the Reagan administration at the time. And I wanted to ask Roz if you would start with that kind of strategic context for our members and our colleagues. RIDGWAY: I think at the time, starting in 1985, when we were in Geneva, the United States had for some time been looking for a dialogue partner with the Soviet Union because so many of the issues of the day, not just arms control but the regional issues, the Afghanistans, the Central Americas, even the question of how to build an embassy and have it not so wired that you couldn’t talk anywhere except maybe in the garden out in back, and even then it was questionable. (Laughter.) Just a number of large issues and small irritants that had come together to clog up the dialogue with the Soviet Union, and a sense, I think, throughout the United States government, all agencies, that somehow had to be found to have a dialogue partner. But of course, we had to wait for that person to emerge on the Soviet scene and be willing, in fact, to meet with the United States at an appropriate level. And so by 1985, with Gorbachev in place, with Margaret Thatcher telling the world that he was somebody that we could all work with on the issues that were of concern, we went off to Geneva for the president to meet Gorbachev for the first time. And I think it was at that meeting, at the first summit, that so much of what was successful about Reykjavik, and I’m among those who say in retrospect Reykjavik was a success, that the—that the necessities for successful Reykjavik were in large part put in place, starting with the relationship between Reagan and Gorbachev. The two men met as equals, very much an objective of President Reagan who was determined to treat Gorbachev with the respect of a head of a state, even though people back in Washington were still, for the most part, calling him names and the like. They met in a private conversation. They emerged from that, I think, feeling quite good about their ability to talk with each other. And then off-program, marched down to a cabin by the water that had been set aside with a fireplace and a fire going. And the two of them walked off and talked. Came out and announced they had agreed on two summits. One in Washington and one in Moscow. Which surprised everyone. It was probably the last item on the age

A Conversation With National Security Advisor Hamdullah Mohib of Afghanistan

U.S.-Turkey Relations: The Shifting Nature of Two NATO Allies

Foreign Minister Jaishankar discusses Indian foreign policy under a newly re-elected Modi government. WISNER: Ladies and gentlemen, good evening. My name is Frank Wisner. I am a(n) international affairs advisor with a law firm, Squire Patton Boggs, as well as a former ambassador to India myself. I am really pleased today to be able to welcome all of you to a conversation with India’s distinguished minister of external affairs, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar. It’s a privilege for all of us, Minister, to have you with us today, and I look forward to the conversation that’s going to follow. We will start with a bit of time between the two of us to get the conversation going, and then it’s my intention to open it to the floor. And the floor in this sense is a rather broad one. We are linked to the rest of the nation—audio link, and so there will be questions coming in from around the country. So when we get to questions, please state your name, keep your question short, limit it to one question if you don’t mind, and we’ll be able to accommodate a lot. The minister’s answers, from my experience, are usually extremely—very sharply to the point, and we will get to many of you today. But again, Minister, a warm welcome to you. It is really a privilege to have you here. The time is right. The last days have underscored the importance of the relationship that has been developing between this country and India, a relationship that is of vital importance to Americans. We need to understand, in terms of the maintenance of the global balance, the ability of a balance of power to be achieved in the world between great powers, the future of your often troubled region, the economic opportunities that lie before India. But we are here today as well in light of the fact that your prime minister has returned to office with a(n) outstanding majority which has given him extraordinary capability to shape an agenda and be able to carry that through your legislature. But enough about India and the United States. I also want to just say a quick word to all of you about the minister. I’ve had the privilege of knowing you, sir, for some time. I’ve regarded you for many years as one of India’s foremost strategic thinkers, a very skilled diplomat. I first watched you negotiate the Civil Nuclear Agreement which was a tough negotiation; complex technically, fraught politically. I’ve watched you as ambassador in Washington where you made a real mark as foreign secretary guiding the hand of Indian diplomacy. And now—I can’t remember if there is an exception, I didn’t do my research well enough—but I think you are the first career officer in the diplomatic service—not? JAISHANKAR: No, Natwar Singh. WISNER: Natwar. Of course Natwar. That’s right. I should know that. Well, but it’s still an extraordinary honor that a career officer in the service should end in the political position that you are now engaged in. So let me begin, Minister, with a question. This is a decisive moment for India. The prime minister, when he cleared the election, turned to the nation and said that this was a time for all Indians to join in building a strong India. But to get there, India is going to need the sinews of a great power. The sinews of a great power include a strong economy, defense, intelligence, the capability to develop scientific knowledge. As you, today, look out at the future of Indian power and India’s emergence as a great power, what are the challenges, and how do you and the prime minister see India begins to cope with them so we can measure where you are? JAISHANKAR: Well, thank you. Let me begin, Ambassador Wisner, by first of all telling you how pleased I am to be here, to be here at the CFR, and it’s really wonderful to see so many old friends with whom I’ve had good conversations over many, many years. To turn to your question, you know, I think anybody who is looking at Indian foreign policy today needs to look at Indian domestic policy. They need to look at it becau

For further reading, please see the CFR In Brief “Trump’s Iran-Saudi Arabia Dilemma” by Philip H. Gordon, the CFR blog post “Scale and Nature of Attacks on Saudi Oil Makes This One Different” by Amy M. Jaffe, and the CFR quiz “See How Much You Know About Saudi Arabia.”