How to Fix Five Big Challenges Facing the World
How to Fix Five Big Challenges Facing the World
At Stanford's 2025 Reunion weekend, scholars from the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies shared insights into what can be done to address climate change, AI competition with China, Middle East security, democratic backsliding, and the war in Ukraine.
October is known for being a spooky season, and there’s no shortage of pressing issues in the world to keep people up at night. From active conflict zones to economic uncertainties, it’s no surprise if many people are feeling a little frightened.
To help explain and contextualize some of these pressing, interconnected, issues, a panel of scholars from the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies spoke to a packed auditorium of alumni during Stanford University’s 2025 Reunion Homecoming weekend. Marshall Burke, Colin Kahl, Or Rabinowitz, Larry Diamond, and Steven Pifer shared what their research says about climate change, AI competition between the United States and China, the security landscape of the Middle East, the global showdown between autocracies and democracies, and the state of Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine, respectively. Michael McFaul, director of the Freeman Spogi Institute, moderated the discussion.
Keep reading for highlights of each speaker’s takeaways on what can be done to address these challenges. The remarks below have been edited for length and clarity. The entirety of the panel can be watched above.
The Realities of Climate Change
MARSHALL BURKE
What You Need to Know:
To stop climate change, we have to get emissions down to zero. Right now, we're at 50 billion tons of carbon per year. But in most of the major economies around the world, that trend has been going downward for decades. The data tell us that carbon emissions in the U.S. peaked twenty years ago and have been steadily decreasing since. We project that emissions in China will probably peak around this year, and then will also start to decline. Does this mean we’ve solved climate change? No. But those are facts we need to celebrate and build on.
What Can Be Done:
Environmental policy isn’t just about protecting the environment; it’s also about protecting us from things in the environment—dirty air, dirty water, a changing climate. When we dismantle initiatives and programs that regulate these things, we hurt ourselves.
So we shouldn’t self-sabotage the policies we already have that are working. Solar is now the cheapest form of energy that humanity has ever created, and it’s an incredibly effective technology. In the United States, it is sometimes half as expensive as natural gas. We shouldn’t be dismantling the infrastructure we have to capture, store, and distribute that energy.
We also need to learn from policy elsewhere in the world. China has become a real leader in clean tech innovation, and it’s where a lot of the world's action is happening in terms of clean technology relevant for the energy transition. We need to lean into that and learn from it.
The AI Race Between the United States and China
COLIN KAHL
What You Need to Know:
We often talk about the AI race like it’s a singular sprint to the frontline, or a race to achieve artificial general intelligence or artificial super intelligence. We’re judging whether the United States or China is ahead based on that criteria.
But in reality, this is a multi-dimensional race. It’s a race to get AI systems into our government apparatus, in particular into our national security agencies and our militaries. It’s a race to integrate AI across the economy. It’s a race to translate AI-enabled breakthroughs in science and technology into actual physical things. And it’s a race to diffuse the technology around the world and whether or not that technology stack will predominantly be an American stack, or if those models, chips, data centers, and digital infrastructure will be made in China.
If we don’t get those frameworks right, it’s entirely possible that the United States could win the race to the AI frontier and still lose the race to China on AI.
What Can Be Done:
Right now, there’s a lot being done by the current U.S. administration to de-regulate AI. We’ve seen huge capital influxes into building very large data centers fueled by enormous amounts of energy. But there’s very little being done to prepare Americans for the effect that AI is going to have on our democracy, on our labor force, and on our lives. There’s no strategy for diffusion other than to ‘unleash the market.’ We need to be thinking about all of these aspects.
The United States and China also need to have an adult conversation around the risks of artificial intelligence that both countries face. These models are going to provide enormous amounts of technical uplift to non-state actors who could threaten our critical infrastructure, our health, and our safety. That's not something either the United States or China has an interest in. We may not be able to agree on whose interests and whose values they should be aligned with, but even in this time of intense competition, we need to be able to discuss and develop governance standards for this technology. As concerned as we are about the race to the frontier, we also need to make sure that fervor doesn’t send us down a race to the bottom.
Colin Kahl
The Nature of Security in the Middle East
OR RABINOWITZ
What You Need to Know:
The events that have unfolded in the Middle East these past few years are not discrete, disconnected occurrences. What happened on October 7 is part of a regional war that Iran was involved in from the start. The whole issue of Iran's nuclear weapons and the efforts that have been made to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons is not happening in a vacuum. But we too often either overlook or ignore that context.
Whenever we talk about nuclear weapons in the Middle East or the Iranian nuclear program, we have to remember that rallying cries like, ‘Death to Israel, death to the U.S.,’ aren’t just propaganda; it’s part of the plan for some of these actors. We have to keep that context in mind.
What Can Be Done:
Looking to the future of negotiations and normalizing relations, I would advise the United States to be very wary of supporting the Qataris, the Turks, and any regime that identifies with more radical influences like the Muslim Brotherhood. They may seem like your friends, but we know from history they are not. We know this from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the U.S. backing of the Mujahideen. We know that this is what happened when the Israelis supported the groups that eventually became Hamas in the 1980s. It's always a bad idea to align yourself with the forces that support jihadist versions of the Middle East.
Or Rabinowitz
The State of Democracy Around the Globe
LARRY DIAMOND
What You Need to Know:
There is an emerging axis of autocracies that is waging an all-out onslaught to extinguish democracy as a viable system and tarnish its value, appeal, attraction, and momentum. These players have diverse interests, but they do interact. Russia, China, North Korea, Iran: we see all sorts of authoritarian alliances form amongst them. And frankly, we are currently losing the battle for the global narrative to that axis.
The Chinese and Russian propaganda machines are massive, and they are accelerating disinformation across social media. And it’s working. We’re starting to lose our self-confidence and belief in our own values.
In our economics, we’re seeing similar erosions in the principles of market capitalism that are likewise dangerous to democracy. Current trends in the concentration of wealth and income are inconsistent with the preservation of a healthy capitalism and a healthy democracy, and that needs to be addressed.
What Can Be Done:
It's game-on in terms of a global struggle for democratic systems, values, and ideas. We need to wage that struggle with conviction, resources, ingenuity. There needs to be more education, especially for young people, on why democracy is a better system, why freedom matters, why the road to autocracy doesn't stop at a certain point, but ends in perversity.
We need to go full-in again on rebuilding the architecture of promoting democratic values, information, and institutions. The U.S. Agency for International Development should be revived in a new form. We should continue to fund the National Endowment for Democracy. And we should recreate the U.S. Information Agency so that we can better engage in this battle for information—truthful information—and democratic values, narratives, and ideas in an energetic, principled, and resourceful way.
Larry Diamond
Russia’s Ongoing War Against Ukraine
STEVEN PIFER
What You Need to Know:
Unfortunately, the Russian-Ukraine war is likely to go on for some time. But at the same time, the narrative that Russian victory is inevitable is also not correct. Russia today occupies about 19% of Ukraine's territory. That's one-third less than what Russia occupied in spring of 2022. And to maintain that, the Russians have paid a horrific cost: well over 1 million Russian soldiers killed or wounded in action in Ukraine.
Now I'm not saying that the Ukrainians are winning. But they have some advantages. One, they are motivated in a way, they're defending their homeland, that the Russians are not. Two, they're fighting this war largely on the defensive, from prepared positions. Three, they've shown some incredible innovation. Ukraine is producing well over 100,000 drones per month, and those are responsible for about 80% of the Russian casualties. Ukrainians increasingly have the capability to bring this war home to Russia; don’t underestimate them, and don’t count them out.
What Can Be Done:
President Trump has a real opportunity to mediate an end to this war, but the negotiations have to get serious. Right now, Vladimir Putin is stringing the whole process along. He still thinks he can achieve his goals on the battlefield. Trump has to disabuse him of that notion and persuade Putin that he's going to fail on the battlefield.
President Trump should make it very clear that if Putin persists in this war, the economic, political, and military costs are only going to grow. And he can do that; he has lots of leverage that he's not yet used. He can tighten sanctions on Russia. He can prioritize arms shipments through what the Ukrainians need. And he can work with the Europeans to move to use frozen Russian central bank assets. That could potentially put $160 billion into Ukraine’s economy and give them the funds they need to buy the arms they need for three years.
That would then confront Putin with the prospect that he's going to have three more years of grinding warfare without much gain and potentially crippling losses. That has a chance of really changing Putin's perspective. But to do that, Trump has to adopt a very different approach from what we've seen over the past eight months.
