Follow the link for a full transcript of "Global Threats Today: The 2024 Edition."

Illiberal Actors Are on the Move  |  Amichai Magen

Around the world, we are seeing a new axis of influence coalescing. Some have called it the "axis of misery" or the "axis of resistance." It is composed of Russia and Iran and North Korea, with a lot of Chinese involvement as well. It is transforming our international system in unbelievable ways. It is united by the desire to dismantle the liberal international order, and we're starting to see the nature and the interconnectivity of this new axis of chaos much more clearly. 

You see North Korean soldiers fighting for Putin in Ukraine. You see Putin helping the Houthis attack international Western shipping in Yemen. We see North Korean tunnel technology turn up in Lebanon with Hezbollah and then with Hamas in Gaza. The interconnectivity is something that we really need to know much more about.

Historically, emperors, kings, dukes, used to spend 50% of their resources on preparing for war or waging war. But in the post-Second World War era, we built a critical norm that we've called the liberal international order. And the miracle of the liberal international order is that we've managed to take global averages of defense spending from about 50% to a global average of about 7%. And the resulting surplus wealth has allowed us to invest in education, health, and scientific discovery.

What is at stake now is the possibility of a return of a norm where states are destroyed and disappear. And we have currently three states in the international system, at the very least — Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan — that are at risk of annihilation. To that end, we must articulate a positive strategic vision for the Middle East that will strive towards a two state solution, that would give the Palestinian people the dignity and the freedom that they deserve alongside a safe and secure Israel, and that will leverage the new spirit of cooperation that exists in the Middle East.

If we allow the norm of the non-disappearance of state to erode and collapse, we will go back to the law of the jungle, where we will have to spend so much more money on the wrong things. That is what is at stake in Ukraine, in the Middle East, and with Taiwan.
 

Challenges to Democracy Come From Within |  Didi Kuo

Many people think that the threat to democracy comes from outside our borders, particularly from countries like Russia and China that are asserting themselves in new and aggressive ways.

But the real threat to democracies that we're seeing across the globe is coming from within. Leaders come to power through democratic means, but then they begin to erode power from within. They attack the electoral system and the process of democratic elections, and they take power from other branches of government and aggregate it to themselves within the office of the executive. 

The good news is there are examples of countries like France, Brazil, and Poland where illiberal leaders have been stopped by pro-democracy coalitions of people who came together. These coalitions don't necessarily agree with each other politically, but they've come together and adapted in order to foreclose on these anti-democratic forces. 

That flexibility and adaptability is the reason democracies succeed. We see this over and over again in the the United States. When our institutions have become out of date, we've changed them. We extended suffrage, first to Black Americans who were formerly enslaved, then to women, then to Native Americans. We eliminating poll taxes and rethought what it means to have a multiracial democracy. We have a long track record of making changes.

Today in 2024, some of our democratic institutions are antiquated and don't reflect our contemporary values. This is a moment where we should lean into that flexible strength of democracy and think about institutional reforms that will both strengthen our system against illiberal creep and help us better achieve the ideals that we aspiring to as a people.
 

Ukraine Is Not Fated to Lose |  Steven Pifer

There's a narrative that's taking place that Russia is winning the war, Ukraine is losing, and it's only a matter of time. And it is true that Russia has captured a bit more territory than they occupied at the start of the year. But they've only achieved that at enormous cost.

As of September, the Pentagon says Russia had lost 600,000 dead and wounded soldiers. To put that in context, in February of 2022 when this major invasion began, the total Russian military — not just the army, but the total Russian military — was 1.1 million people. And the British Ministry of Defense earlier this week assessed that Russia now is losing 1,200 soldiers killed or severely wounded per day. You have to ask how long that's sustainable.

When I talk to Ukrainians, they still regard this war as existential. They're very determined to win, and we need to do a better job of supporting that. A stable and secure Europe is vital to America's national security interests, and you're not going to have a stable and secure Europe unless there's a stable and secure Ukraine. So we need to both provide them the weapons they need and relieve some of the restrictions we currently have and allow the Ukrainians to use those weapons to strike military targets in Russia.

Because we have to ask ourselves: what does an emboldened Vladimir Putin do if he wins in Ukraine? I don't think his ambitions end with Ukraine, perhaps not even with the post-Soviet space. There's going to be a much darker Russian threat hovering over Europe if Putin wins. So let's not count the Ukrainians out.
 

China Isn't Going Away Anytime Soon  |  Oriana Skylar Mastro

There is a lot of discussion right now about the fact that the economy in China is slowing down and its demography is undergoing significant changes. What I'm here to tell you is that the challenge of China is not over, and is not going to be over any time soon. China has built power in a different way than the United States, and we have to reassess how we understand that power if we want to effectively deter, blunt, and block them from acting out in ways that threaten our partners and allies.

Since the 1990s, China has developed a significant amount of political, economic, and military power. They've gone from having an economy smaller than France’s  to the second largest in the world. They've gone from not being involved in international institutions to a great degree, not even having diplomatic relations with major countries like South Korea, to now having stronger and greater diplomatic networks, especially in Asia, than the United States.

What we really need to understand is that the U.S.-China competition is not about the United States or about China; it's about the rest of the world, and how the rest of the world sees us and how China interacts with us. The balance of power is shifting, and we have to be a lot smarter and a lot faster if we want to make sure it shifts in favor of our interests.

The United States hasn't had a comprehensive strategy towards the developing world in a long time. And we are running out of time to get that balance right in Asia. We don't have the right stuff. We don't have it in the right numbers, and it's not in the right place. Some of this is about deterring war over Taiwan, but it's also about generally maintaining peace and stability in Asia.
 

We're Doing Better (But Not Enough) on Climate Change |  Marshall Burke

Many people don't recognize how much progress we're actually making on climate issues. Emissions have fallen by 20% since 2005. We're actually speeding up the amount of substantial progress being made in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and dealing with the core climate change problem, which is the human emission of greenhouse gasses.

In the United States, the Inflation Reduction Act and the subsequent implementation of various rules the Biden administration has championed has given a huge boost in transitioning our economy to greener energy technologies, transportation technologies, and other kinds of infrastructure. We're moving a lot of cash to get that done, and the president is trying to get as much of it out the door as he can before his term ends.

Globally, the progress has been less rapid. Emissions are roughly flat. But overall, we're still making progress. I co-teach an undergraduate class on climate change, and we've had to update our slides on how much warming we're expecting over the next century. We thought it was going to be four degrees Celsius. Now we think it's going to be something between two and three degrees Celsius.

But the flip side of that is that we're still going to get warming of two to three degrees Celsius. We're already experiencing warming of about a degree Celsius, which is about two degrees Fahrenheit, and it's projected that we're going to get another three to five degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century. That is a lot of warming, and we are not prepared to deal with it. We need to do much more on mitigation and much more on adaptation if we're going to meet the realities of living in a changing climate.

So we've had progress on the one hand, but there's still a lot of work left to do in the coming decades.
 

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Li went on to outline three steps the world should immediately take to mitigate the worst of the climate crisis, for the “cost of inaction will be an order of magnitude higher than the cost of action.” He suggests the following areas of action: 1) All countries must target more ambitious policies to cut emissions; 2) There needs to be a focus on climate finance; 3) Technological innovation and diffusion must continue. In order to address this crisis, countries large and small, wealthy and poor, must work together – Global threats like climate change demand global cooperation. Li concluded his remarks with a call to action, he encouraged everyone to “speak up, hold our leaders accountable, help us make more meaningful progress on this climate crisis.”

For more details on how Li suggests tackling the climate crisis and why it’s so important to do so, watch the recorded event here: 

“The pessimism that flows from our analysis, our observation, and our lived experiences can — must, and should be — overcome by the optimism of our thought, our action, our creativity, and our courage,” Naidoo said. “This is a moment for brutal honesty.”

He said that’s why his talk was titled “Creative Maladjustment,” a concept put forth by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to link the internal struggles of individuals to the social forces around them. Naidoo said, “There are some things in our society and in our world that make me proud to be maladjusted.”

For example, he said it’s not wise or healthy to “adjust” oneself to racial segregation and discrimination, or economic conditions that take necessities from the underprivileged only to luxuriously benefit the wealthy. “If anybody thinks that COVID was the worst disease you lived through, I submit to you that the worst disease we face as humanity is a disease called ‘affluenza.’ Affluenza is a pathological illness where rich and poor alike have been led to believe that the most important thing to give you a decent meaning in life is more and more material acquisitions.”

Intersectionality, culture, creativity

Naidoo said that humanity needs to embrace the idea of ‘intersectionality,’ or recognizing that all these different social and environmental issues are interconnected. One can’t just focus on oneself without considering how everything is tangled up together, so we have to address challenges in more unified ways.

‘Cultural emergence’ — the process of letting diverse cultural perspectives and voices guide us in finding solutions — is another important concept, Naidoo said. Societies can benefit from listening to indigenous and ancient knowledge and understanding their traditional practices and wisdom. Such communities have been living in harmony with nature for centuries, and much can be learned from them, he said.

Another transformative concept is ‘artivism,’ or where arts and activism come together as social and cultural movements. Facts and figures (while critically necessary) are useful, but ultimately, people also need storytelling, music, and the visual arts to drive home the urgency of the environmental crisis and spur constructive action. “We need to reach people’s hearts and bodies as well as we do their heads,” he said.

He explained that people are overstimulated with the constant onslaught of information every day. So, art has the power to move and have lasting effects on cultures that get deeply entrenched, so long as this dynamic is used in positive ways. 

New paths forward after conflicts

“We need to redesign much of the current system that we have, whether it be economics, whether it be energy or transportation. And so, the notion of creative maladjustment is a clarion call,” said Naidoo, who also referred to the military build-ups in the U.S. and elsewhere. “Sadly, we are spending even more money on military expenditures.”

He quoted President Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell address in 1961: “‘In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.’”

Naidoo spoke of lost or hijacked opportunities for true societal change after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the protests against the Iraq War in 2003, the economic crises of 2008-09, the Arab Spring movements in the early 2010s, and the emergence from the COVID global pandemic in 2020. “These were moments where we could have learned a lot.”

For instance, he said, in the post-COVID era, the conversations among those in power were about system recovery, system protection, and system maintenance when what was actually needed was system innovation, transformation, and redesign. He cited a 2002 RAND study commissioned by the CIA that concluded that the biggest threat to peace, security, and stability in the decades ahead will not come from terrorism or conventional threats but from the impacts of climate change. 

“If you look at the Syrian war and some of the conflicts in Africa now, the hand of climate change is alive and well in many of those conflicts. Within this context, we have to recognize that we are dealing with a particular unique moment in history where we've seen a convergence of multiple crises,” Naidoo said.

‘Knowledge that resonates’

On messaging, a new approach needs to be considered, he said. “Sadly and somewhat ironically, it’s the likes of Steve Bannon and Donald Trump who appear to better understand this truth.” We don’t need to lie, Naidoo said, but we just need to communicate thoughtfully and impactfully and not send a barrage of communications exclusively rooted in science and jargon while ignoring the heart and human emotions.

“Our challenge is to center our narratives in a way that not only speaks to the head but also touches the heart. By blending the power of evidence with the art of storytelling, we can create profound impacts on individuals and communities. We must strive to communicate knowledge that resonates with people’s emotions, values, and aspirations,” Naidoo said.

Michael McFaul, director of FSI, said, “Kumi gave a fantastic Payne lecture this week at FSI, one of the most thought-provoking talks I have attended in a long while. His unique set of experiences, coupled with his deep convictions, reflective mind, and unique ability to touch both the mind and the heart, make him a special leader in the world — exactly the kind of person for whom the Payne Lectureship was intended.”

“We're thrilled to have Kumi in residence with us at CDDRL this year,” added Kathryn Stoner, the center’s Mosbacher Director. “The insights he shared on transformative change and the climate crisis are invaluable, and his call for creative maladjustment challenges us to rethink our strategies, inspiring us to pursue a brighter future.”

Payne lecturers are chosen for his or her international reputation as leaders, with an emphasis on visionary thinking, practical engagement, and important perspectives on the global community and its challenges. As the Payne Distinguished Lecturer, Naidoo is also teaching a seminar to the Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy and mentoring undergraduate and graduate students across FSI’s centers.

When I arrived at Stanford in September 2022, I’d just stepped out of a product manager role at a large government contractor. My career had focused on providing policymakers with the best open-source information possible around a myriad of foreign policy issues. Over the preceding years, that work had become increasingly intertwined with artificial intelligence (AI), not just as a subject of analysis but as a critical tool in the analytic process. In enrolling in the Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy (MIP) program, situated in the heart of Silicon Valley, I hoped I could better understand AI and how it would reshape geopolitics. 

My timing was serendipitous. Just as I settled in, OpenAI unveiled ChatGPT, and the world changed. It was a whirlwind period of wild speculation, anxiety, and excitement. To cut through the noise, I sat in on an advanced course on machine learning and enrolled in the Computer Science department’s core course, Programming Abstractions, to build my programming skills. Blending my policy framework development in MIP courses with technical study at Stanford’s renowned Computer Science department was exactly what I hoped Stanford would provide. 

What I didn’t expect, however, was how differently I was starting to think about my future after the program.

The Entrepreneurial Leap

The original plan for MIP was to get smart and then apply what I learned within an established organization, like my former employer or the government. I began to wonder if, rather than providing information to decision-makers as I had previously in my career, I could combine my product management experience and burgeoning CS competency in a different way. Could I attack the same problems I’d been working on for years, but from the bottom up? Could I use technology to empower the broader public to become more resilient to misinformation and polarization?

The approaching summer seemed like the opportunity to test my product ideas and the possibility of starting a business around them. MIP’s summer funding made it feasible to take advantage of that opportunity while still paying my rent. It also added helpful structure to my plan, requiring me to record my hours and find a mentor to oversee my progress.

My former colleague, David, with whom I have a strong relationship built on trust and shared vision, agreed to be my mentor. He had recently launched his own company in a related space and was able to share a wealth of experience and insights.

The Summer of Coding and Discover

Summer came, and I dove headfirst into coding, dedicating countless hours at the corner desk of my Hoskins apartment to building something tangible that embodied my vision. I also began immersing myself in the Bay Area’s tech ecosystem - attending AI seminars, venture capital events, and networking with founders.

The results of those first weeks were encouraging. I prduced a working prototype that used AI to identify misleading information online and, by referencing trusted sources, provide missing context and corrective information to the reader. It was real progress toward a world where we no longer rely on ineffective fact-checking after readers are exposed to misleading information and form their opinions. Instead, AI could help every news reader spot deceptive content in real-time - during the opinion formation process.

Despite my progress, I realized that if I were going to keep up with the pace of the hyper-competitive AI startup field, I would need a partner.

Finding a Co-founder 

With a working prototype of my Critical Reader Google Chrome extension, I felt ready to seek out an experienced partner who could help scale my vision. Y Combinator’s co-founder matching platform was my arena. It was a whirlwind of meetings and ideas, but eventually, I connected with the former CTO of a successful startup, who shared my commitment to revolutionizing digital information sharing.

We hit it off and decided to test our partnership with a 30-day trial. We examined my prototype critically and decided to pivot towards a simpler, more marketable product. In a few weeks, we had a minimum viable product ready and began user testing. As expected, the feedback was a mixture of praise and criticism, but it was energizing to have the critical data we needed to iterate and improve.

Beyond coding, we invested considerable effort into refining a mutual vision and business strategy. We began exploring non-profit frameworks and various hybrid business models that could achieve the scalability of a for-profit enterprise while preserving the principles that motivated us.

Renewed Vision 

In a few short months, my curiosity had evolved into a venture with real users and a business model. I had also changed. The experience developing financial forecasts and strategic plans significantly enhanced my professional toolkit and gave me first-hand experience with the reality of starting a business. 

Now, as I enter my penultimate quarter at Stanford, I am able to develop products and explore partnerships with a newfound clarity of purpose. My summer of entrepreneurship added a new dimension to my MIP experience and has set the stage for what comes after the program ends.