On the Record

Demetre Daskalakis, deputy coordinator of the White House national monkeypox response, and Jeremy Youde, dean of the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at the University of Minnesota Duluth, discuss the emergence of monkeypox and other diseases, international responses, and messaging around health issues that especially affect the LGBTQ+ community. Jennifer Nuzzo, senior fellow for global health at CFR, moderates.

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FASKIANOS: Thank you, and welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations Social Justice Webinar series. The purpose of this series is to explore social justice issues and how they shape policy at home and abroad through discourse with members of the faith community. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach here at CFR.

As a reminder, this webinar is on the record, and it will be made available on CFR’s website, CFR.org, and on the iTunes podcast channel, “Religion and Foreign Policy.” As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.

We’re delighted to have Jennifer Nuzzo, senior fellow for global health at CFR, to moderate today’s discussion on infectious diseases. Dr. Nuzzo is a senior fellow for global health here at CFR. She’s also a professor of epidemiology and the inaugural director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University’s School of Public Health. Her work focuses on global health security, public health preparedness and response, and health systems resilience. In addition to her research, she directs the Outbreak Observatory, which conducts operational research to improve outbreak preparedness and response. And she advises national governments, and for-profit and non-profit organizations on pandemic preparedness and response, and worked tirelessly during the COVID pandemic to advise and tell people what was going on, to the extent that we knew, as we made our way through this two-and-a-half-year pandemic.

So, Jennifer, I’m going to turn it over to you to introduce our speakers.

NUZZO: Great. Thank you, Irina. Thanks for that introduction and thanks for organizing this webinar today. I’m very glad that we’re having this conversation. As someone who’s worked in infectious diseases for my entire career, I have found the last few years to be particularly staggering. I was looking, and as of today there are more than 616 million cases of COVID-19 that have been reported globally, upwards of 6.5 million diagnosed deaths that have been reported worldwide. At the same time, we are also seeing a global surge in cases of monkeypox, a disease that many hadn’t heard of prior to this past year. And now we are over 66,000 cases that have been reported globally, more than 25,000 of those reported here in the United States alone. At the same time, successive outbreaks of Ebola have been occurring, and we have measles once again on the rise. And now vaccine-derived polio circulating in countries where the virus had been previously thought to be eliminated.

So it’s really a staggering list of infectious diseases that have been occurring and continue to occur. So clearly, we’re at an important crossroads in terms of how we respond to these recurring hazards and infectious disease emergencies. But today we get to zoom out a little bit, and to examine factors that they may have all in common, and to try to understand what may be driving these—the recurrence of these events over and over again. So over the past few years we have seen the consequences of social, economic, and racial inequities play out center stage. These factors have underpinned not only our underlying vulnerabilities to infectious diseases, but also how effectively we respond to them. So that’s what we’re going to talk about today. And to help discuss these issues we are joined by two globally renowned experts who have a long history in working to address infectious disease threats and the disparities that accelerate them.

Our first panelist is Dr. Demetre Daskalakis. Dr. Daskalakis is the deputy coordinator of the White House national monkeypox response. Prior to this role, he served as director of CDC’s division of HIV prevention. And prior to that, oversaw infectious diseases for the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, which is one of the largest health departments in the nation and rivals the WHO in terms of staff and budgets. So Dr. Daskalakis is a leading national expert on many things, but also in particular health issues affecting the LGBTQIA+ communities. And he has worked clinically for much of his career to focus on providing care for these communities.

We are also joined by Dr. Jeremy Youde, who is the dean of the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at the University of Minnesota Duluth. Previously, Dr. Youde was an associate professor in the department of international relations at Australia National University in Canberra. Dr. Youde is an internationally recognized expert on global health politics. And he is a very prolific writer. He has written five books, and many chapters, and countless articles. I recently read a very compelling blog post by him on our own CFR’s Think Global Health. So really excited to get both Dr. Youde and Dr. Daskalakis’s perspectives on the issues in front of us.

So I will get the conversation started. We have a lot of great attendees, and we’ll have time for questions. But just to get the conversation going, let’s see here. Maybe first, if I could turn to you, Dr. Demetre. For those who haven’t been living in the monkeypox data as much as you have, perhaps you could just give us a quick summary of where we are and where you see us being headed.

DASKALAKIS: Thank you. And thank you for having me. I’m really excited to join Jeremy and to be a part of this discussion. So living in the data is, in fact, what I do. So I’ll tell you, so monkeypox—I’ll give a little key bit of background just for everyone to be level-set—is an orthopoxvirus, that is a virus that causes disease, transmitted usually from animals to humans. Usually, traditionally, not a lot of human-to-human transmission. This current outbreak in 2020, global in scale, with 66,500 cases reported internationally, actually demonstrates pretty good human-to-human transmission, often in the setting of close contact, often associated with sexual activity, and the majority of cases being among men who have sex with men—the vast majority, over 96 percent.

In the U.S., at this moment, we have 25,300 cases. I can tell you right up to the moment. And so we continue to see increases in cases in the United States, but we’re seeing a deceleration in the rate of increase. So cases are stilling being logged. We used to see kind of around four hundred cases per day. We’re now more on the order of two hundred or below and continue to see that trend going in a good direction with more data imminently coming to the website of CDC later on today.

Again, just briefly, the demographic, majority male, mainly men who have sex with men—the gay, bisexual, other men who have sex with men. Looking at the demographics, at the beginning of the outbreak in May, the majority of cases were among white men. And now we’re seeing about 68 percent of those cases are happening in Latino or Black men. From the perspective of that measure as well we’ve seen a significant increase in vaccinations. So we can talk—we’re going to talk more about that, I’m sure. But really with lots of strategies to increase vaccine supply. We are now well over eight hundred thousand vaccines administered. There is an inequity there as well. The majority of vaccines are going to white men. And we’re seeing Latino men and Black men in second and third place, respectively, in terms of vaccines administered.

Jennifer, I hope that that’s a good situation summary to start off with.

NUZZO: Yeah, great summary. Thank you so much. That helped kind of bring everybody to the same—somewhat same level.

Just a quick follow-up question for you. There have been a lot of headlines about the important progress we’ve made, and the fact that the global monkey—or, sorry—the monkeypox cases seem to be coming down in terms of numbers. Question: Are you seeing similar trends for all demographics? Or are you concerned that perhaps the large numbers are hiding increased transmission in other groups?

DASKALAKIS: I had to fix the mute. There we go. So I think what we’ve seen is that the declines are looking to be even across population. So that’s good news. Again, the vaccine equity is our main issue right now in terms of where we’re—where that’s stubborn right now, and really thinking about strategies to improve that. We had a lot of news today, which I’m sure we’ll be able to talk about some of the strategies that we have to address that. But so I think there’s no clear sign that the deceleration is different in different populations. Geographically, however, it is different. And so that’s, I think, one place where—the jurisdictions that have had the greatest and longest experience with this outbreak, so the most cases, are also the jurisdictions that have access to the most vaccines.

So whether it’s because of behavior change that we’re seeing, which is definitely something that we, I imagine, could talk about here as well, or natural infections plus vaccine-induced immunity, I think the places that have had more experience are showing deceleration faster. So New York, California, Texas, and Georgia are looking down, while some of the places where the outbreak is newer and they’ve also had less access and time for vaccines, those places are showing an increase. We’re going to get an update of this, this week. So this is based on data that’s about a month old. So soon we’re going to have a new view into how this deceleration or acceleration looks like, jurisdiction by jurisdiction.

NUZZO: Great. Thank you.

Maybe turn to you, Dr. Youde. You’ve been an important voice about the global dimensions of the monkeypox crisis. And I’m just curious where you think we are globally. And I referenced in introducing you that piece that you wrote on Think Global Health that I thought was—made a quite compelling argument about the role of WHO and where you see the response needing to go. Do you want to maybe elaborate on those points for people who haven’t had a chance to read your article?

YOUDE: Sure. Thank you for the question, and thanks for organizing this. I’m honored to be part of this event.

And, picking up on some of what you were talking about and what Demetre was just talking about as well, we do see these inequities that exist, especially when we’re looking worldwide. The World Health Organization did declare monkeypox a public health emergency of international concern. And while it doesn’t necessarily come with automatic funding or programmatic resources, it does raise the profile. It does put this on the global health agenda and say: This is something we need to be paying attention to. In the piece I described it as the WHO’s bat signal. We’re sending out the message: This is something that we need to pay attention to.

But one of the things I think is frustrating about the WHO response, and just sort of the global community’s response to monkeypox in general, is that monkeypox isn’t a new disease. This is a disease that we’ve known about in human cases since 1970. Laurie Garrett in her book, The Coming Plague, which came out in ’94—which is one of the books I think a lot of us who are probably about a similar age read in our early, formative days as we were coming into global health and global health politics—she talks about it in that book.

And if you look at the data that we have, we’ve been seeing increases in monkeypox cases in humans in countries where monkeypox was endemic for about the last decade or so. And so—but what really caught the international community’s attention was then when it came to the Global North, when it came to the industrialized countries. And that helps to reinforce some of these questions about what is the nature of our real concern about global health? Is it about health in this very broad mandate, like the World Health Organization has as part of its constitutional mandate, to be this international coordinating body? Or is the sense that we, in the Global North, want to keep the diseases from the Global South coming to affect us?

And there are similar sorts of issues when we’re looking at vaccine equity and vaccine access, when we’re looking globally. And, there have certainly been some problems here in the United States, getting access to the vaccine. But, I was able to get vaccinated against monkeypox. Yeah, I had to drive two and a half hours to Minneapolis to do it, but I was able to do it. And I was able to arrange it. People in countries where monkeypox is endemic have little to no access to these vaccines.

And it raises some of the questions then, again, about how the international system and the global health governance systems that we have in place—how they can address some of these equity challenges? Because in many ways, outbreaks like monkeypox, they glom onto the societal and social cleavages that exist, and help to reinforce and exacerbate them, but also provide this opportunity for us to really put some of our ideals and our promises around social justice, around a cosmopolitan view of understanding that we are all healthier if we are all healthier. And really put those into practice, if we have the political and economic will to do so.

And that’s where—that’s one of the areas where I get a bit concerned right now. I know we’re all exhausted talking about COVID-19 and about monkeypox, and all of these sorts of outbreaks. Jennifer, I know you’ve been doing a lot of this. Demetre, obviously, you’ve been on the frontlines. I’ve been doing some of this work as well. But when we lose that attention, sometimes we lose then that motive—that momentum in the political system to try to address some of these challenges and these shortfalls that we have identified.

So, I can be a critic of the World Health Organization, but I also recognize that the World Health Organization is a creature of its member states. And so, it’s really incumbent upon the member states to really put some action behind their words. And to say: If we want to have a more effective response, we need to build systems that are going to be able to respond better than this.

NUZZO: Thank you for that. It’s a good segue to what I wanted to talk about next, which is the title of this webinar being about social justice. And those who’ve worked in public health, the notion that social justice has a role to play in reducing our vulnerability to infectious disease is quite clear. But I’m aware, particularly over watching—(laughs)—the national political debate over the last several years that those outside of public health may not recognize the connection between our vulnerability to infectious diseases and social justice. And they may be dismissive of the idea that public health authorities should be engaged in the work of social justice.

So this is actually a question for you both. And maybe reflect on monkeypox or your long experience of other infectious disease threats that you’ve worked to address. And what would you say to folks that just don’t understand why public health should be concerned with social justice, and what role do you think it has to play going forward? And maybe we’ll turn back to you after Demetre.

DASKALAKIS: Do you want Jeremy to go or do you want me to go first?

NUZZO: Go ahead.

YOUDE: Go for it. Go for it. I’ll let you start.

DASKALAKIS: All right. So I’ll put my very strong HIV hat on, because that’s sort of where I come from. And I’ll start that this is a forty-one—a forty-two, almost, year-old lesson that I think we’ve seen play out over and over again, which is that really the social determinants of health are actually what drive infection. So there are countermeasures that can work. There’s vaccines. There’s drugs. There’s pre-exposure prophylactics, post-exposure prophylactics. It doesn’t matter. The social determinants are really what ultimately ends up blocking us from being able to implement the full vision of what we know we can from the perspective of medical technology and public health. And so I think that at the end of the day that implementation piece is so critical.

So much technology can exist, so many interventions can be designed, but they sit on the shelf unless there’s both the political and social will to move them forward. And so I think I should put that HIV hat there for a second, because in environments where there is less political and social will we tend to see HIV flourish. And in places where there is social and political will, we tend to see HIV not do so well from the perspective—or, in other words, we will do well because of less incidents and prevalence. So I think that sort of looking at that will is so critical.

I’ll give you a story from monkeypox which I think is really important, that is about the sort of CDC response. I got pulled in really early on, before the first case actually hit the United States. One of the very early conversations that we had with the response is that we need to expect that we’re going to have inequities that are going to be a part of this. And I think that’s based on lessons from COVID, and lessons from HIV, and lessons from so many other infections. I think we really worked to make equity the cornerstone of the response. But even when you do that, it is an all-of-society thing that needs to happen, and not just something that is mediated simply by a public health department or a public health agency. Over.

YOUDE: And if I can take that public health hat and HIV hat that you had on, and I’ll wear it myself. I got into this line of work through working on HIV/AIDS issues in Zimbabwe and South Africa, and seeing how those sorts of societal cleavages played a role, but then also how infectious disease outbreaks, and the spread of HIV was glomming into these other issues around democratization, around building societies that were going to be equitable, that were going to be able to fulfill the promises that governments had made to their populations. And seeing how a disease like this was thwarting that progress.

So it’s something that is not just unique to the United States. It’s something that we see globally. From a very instrumental perspective we can say, look, public health is ultimately a weakest link public good. Everyone is still at risk, so long as risks still exist. So we need to reach out to those places which might have fewer resources, which might not have the same sorts of ability to implement these sorts of programs, because ultimately that’s going to make us all healthier. And I think there’s elements and an important role for those sorts of instrumental views of public health.

But I also think about the recently passed Paul Farmer, and his notion of public health, especially his idea around the preferential option for the poor, which was kind of a double-edge sword. Because on the one hand he was saying, look, the people who are disenfranchised within societies, those are the people who are the most vulnerable to these infectious disease outbreaks. Those are the people who are at the greatest risk.

But also, we need to think about our programs, we need to think about our interventions putting those people first, thinking about equity. Putting that not as an afterthought or something that we think about five, six, seven steps down the road, but it needs to be central, and it needs to be core. Because, again, if we’re not taking equity seriously and we’re not really putting this into everything that we’re doing, then we’re just reinforcing these sorts of divisions and, again, providing these opportunities and these outlets where diseases can thrive.

And so, to just cosign what Demetre was saying we can have all the technologies we want. And I have all my criticisms about the way that the access to pharmaceuticals and drug interventions exist on a global level, and questions about compulsory licensing and all these sorts of things. Those are all important, but those are secondary in a lot of respects if we don’t have the underlying core infrastructure in place. And that core infrastructure, even if it’s not touching us in a direct way, does have an effect on our ability to stay healthy.

DASKALAKIS: Could I—this is a fun one. Could I keep going a little bit longer on this?

NUZZO: Please do, yeah.

DASKALAKIS: This is a great, stimulative conversation on this. And along with what ends up being both the foundation of the issue as well as the deeper foundation, the way that all of these social issues interact with stigma, like I think we’ve seen in fast-forward with monkeypox. Like all the things that we saw with HIV and other infections and COVID—today, for instance—this is a really good example. So, we’re giving the vaccines and right now they’re going on people’s forearms. Which means that literally some people will have a mark on their forearm. So talking about stigma—literally stigma.

And so, we changed it so that individuals can elect to get the vaccine on their shoulder or on their back. So we have people who want vaccines but are saying, I don’t want to be marked by this. I don’t want to have the sort of—someone know that I am someone who’s potentially identifying myself as part of a group at risk. And so it interacts exactly with the social determinants.

Whether it’s poverty, transportation, racism, all of it interacts in a way where these sort of more brass-tacks economic issues interact with these very profound stigma issues and create barriers where even if you do have great access—I’ll give an example again. [The] Ryan White [program] is really great access for people for HIV medication, but we still don’t have everybody in the country—(inaudible)—right? So why is that? It’s partially access, but it’s also that the systems are built to sort of maintain structures of stigma and structures of inequity that are really hard to overcome, even with things that provide access.

NUZZO: So I was actually going to ask you about stigma. So thank you for segueing to it. And I seems to me that—and I don’t have the HIV hat to wear, like you both do. But studying events that we typically think about in the field of health security—which is a field that sort of struggles to incorporate the forty-plus year lessons that HIV has learned—is that it is clear that stigma is an issue in nearly every single event. Any time we have particularly a new infectious disease, or something that’s unusual, society seems to look for some group to blame.

But what it seems, though, is that while there’s an increasing recognition of the importance of stigma, it doesn’t seem like we have great strategies for addressing it. And I guess I’m wondering, do you agree? And also, what practically can and should we be doing to address stigma? I really saw us struggle with this. I mean, we had a recognition of it as being important in monkeypox, but I feel that the absence of clear ways to deal with it really led us to struggle to talk about monkeypox, and who was at risk, and how people could protect themselves. So what should we be doing going forward not just for monkeypox but future threats, so that we don’t get hobbled by—first of all, that we can minimize or tackle stigma, but also don’t get hobbled by it? Whoever wants to chime in. (Laughs.)

DASKALAKIS: So this is back to the HIV hat. This is the tightrope that we walk every day in HIV. And I think that the lesson actually—well, one of the first lessons that’s important, sort of sitting on the government side of the world, is that government needs to lead, and governmental public health needs to lead, so that its messaging does not propagate stigma. That’s very important. Because whether people like governmental public health or not, or have complaints about it, ultimately people do look to governmental public health—like CDC, local health departments—to really fine-tune their own messaging, and then translate that messaging not just to another language but translate it so the populations that people work with actually understand.

And so I think monkeypox was actually a kind of exciting example, where from the very beginning of the response it was a how can we take an anti-stigma stance in how we messaged it? And so the balance really then depended on the data. And so that’s what was really important. So it was starting with imperfect data, and as the data became more and more clear, making sure that the messaging evolved in a way that addressed what you were actually seeing epidemiologically without necessarily—without creating a scenario where you’re pinning infection, a virus, on a population.

Let me give you an example since, Jennifer, you say your HIV hat isn’t as strong as ours. So in the ’80s, when HIV started, before it was HIV it was gay-related immunodeficiency. So that lesson was the lesson that was so important in the work that we did with monkeypox, to start off by saying: This is a virus that can affect anyone. But we’re seeing this virus more in this population. As opposed to saying: This is this population’s virus. And so it’s leading by that example. And it’s one of those things that we can raise up and say: We have learned the lesson from this forty-two years ago, and we’re not doing it this way again.

And so with that said, I think that there’s a lot of strategies that can address stigma. And a lot of that has to do with communications, using trusted messengers. So, that has been a really important part of this as well because, again, working in public health I would love if everybody listened to public health data. So providing good communications to individuals who are trusted messengers is really important. And also, part of the propagating stigma is also being clear about what data is, things that we fully know and things that we’re still learning. Because that really allows that risk communication so that you don’t over-select or too rapidly move a response into what population, as opposed to being broad.

So as you learn more data—so, for us, our guidance started off in one place about safer sex and safer gathering. As we were seeing that this was not moving throughout the different populations, it got stronger and stronger. And we really started the conversation by saying that this is guidance that’s going to change as we learn more. I think that we do have stigma mitigation strategies. But stigma’s a stubborn thing. I’ll give it over to Jeremy.

YOUDE: Yeah, I would agree with everything that you said. And especially being—having that level of humility. We are still learning about this. Things are going to change. Things are going to evolve but building those sorts of trusting relationships. The other things that I would emphasize, and I think these complement what you were saying quite well, is empowering communities to speak to each other. I think one of the things that we’ve seen here in the U.S. around access to the monkeypox vaccine, and the relatively high rates of vaccination that we’ve seen, has been people talking to other people. Men who have sex with men talking to other men who have sex with men, and this becoming part of the conversation.

Even if it is something at the level of, where were you able to get access to it? When supplies are limited. Just building that sort of awareness within a community can be incredibly important. I think it’s also important to make sure that we do have targeted messages. Not blaming messages, but understand that the message that just says, everyone is at risk for HIV or everyone is at risk for monkeypox, ends up falling flat and doesn’t really strike anyone. And so having that sort of targeted outreach plays an important role.

But going back to this point about empowering the affected communities, one of the most powerful things that I think that I’ve seen in the work that I’ve done is looking at the Treatment Action Campaign in South Africa, and the work that they did, especially in the late ’90s and early 2000s, with the T-shirts that just in huge, bold letters across the chest said: HIV positive. And just having people going out there, wearing those T-shirts. The image of Nelson Mandela wearing one of those Treatment Action Campaign T-shirts is just incredibly important because, again, it’s helping to remove some of that stigma. It’s getting people who are trusted, who are respected, coming into the conversation.

OK, if he’s involved in this, if he’s saying this is an important issue, maybe this is something that I need to be paying attention to. But also just trying to make that sort of availability, so that people are willing to share their experiences, or talk about what’s going on, or what worked, or what didn’t work for them. Again, these all play really important roles. It’s never going to be perfect. It’s something that we do need to keep at the forefront when these sorts of outbreaks happen. And you see some of this in some of the broader conversation around even what we call diseases, the names that we use.

The fact that there is a very strong move away from geographically located names for diseases, because we don’t want to stigmatize those particular communities or people who happen to be coming from those areas. Even something like that can play a really important role in helping people to think, this is something that I need to take seriously if I’m in the United States, I need to take this seriously. Even though we’re talking about something like monkeypox, which isn’t a geographic designator but there aren’t a lot of monkeys roaming around in Minnesota. But it’s something that they should be taking seriously, because of these effects and these sorts of community-based responses that help to try to destigmatize things, encourage people to get access to vaccines, or treatments, or other sorts of options that are available to them, and start to have those conversations to empower communities.

NUZZO: That’s great. I’m going to turn over to questions. And maybe participants can start putting their hands up. But while that’s happening and before I turn it over for that section of the conversation, one last question to you both. Which is, I am deeply worried that we respond to these events as these one-offs. We have an emergency, we get emergency funding, then perceptions of the emergency being over, the funding disappears, and it’s gone. And we saw that happen with COVID, where the money went away and then states had to let go their pandemic hires. And guess what? They weren’t there when monkeypox happened.

So I guess the question is, how do we move away from sort of seeing these as just one-off emergencies, and moving towards a role where we create a durable sort of permanent system that’s in place to snap into action anytime there’s an event, which is happening—which we’re seeing—these events are happening with an increasing frequency?

YOUDE: I’ll jump in first, Jennifer. It’s like you’re reading the paper that I’ve been working on throughout the event today. And that’s part of my concern about WHO designating this to be a public health emergency of international concern, when we’re talking about monkeypox or COVID-19 for that matter, is the emergency framework. Public health, when it’s doing its job, we don’t know about it. It’s something that—where we’re essentially trying to stop things before they reach that level of public consciousness, or stopping it really, really early in the process.

And so the emergencies, they get the attention for global health but they don’t necessarily get the long-lasting system. It becomes, like, OK, whew, we got through that. We can move onto the next thing, or we can just not pay attention to global health again until the next system comes up. But at a very fundamental level we have this organization. We have the World Health Organization, which has this constitutional mandate to act as this international coordinating body for health—cross-border health issues. And it has a smaller biennial budget than many large hospital systems here in the United States.

So how is it going to be able to do that sort of work when it has so few resources? Plus, given the way that the WHO is funded, it only has control over about 20 percent of its budget. The rest of it is coming through these voluntary contributions, which are generally specified for specific purposes, which may or may not align with the purposes that the WHO itself would put in place.

So I think that one of the things that happens there is it behooves us, it behooves the member states to actually—to put some diplomatic and political capital behind this, to actually move on this. I have no doubt that in a few years’ time we will have some sort of after—some sort of response that will look at the response that WHO made to COVID-19. And it will bemoan the failures. And it will talk about all the things that need to change. And then it will gather dust on the bookshelf. And we will get similar sorts of things for monkeypox.

And what we haven’t had is a country or a group of countries, or some sort of person with high stature, really glom onto this and be like, yes. We need to do this. This is our potential roadmap for trying to address this in the future. I—nerding out in the global health politics world—I had this idea that someone like a Helen Clark, or an Angela Merkel, someone who knows international politics, who knows the systems, who has that sort of diplomatic experience, but also is concerned about issues around health, that could be the person who could help to inspire some of these actions, and could get the attention of world leaders in a way that civil society organizations often aren’t able to do. Which is not to say anything bad about those organizations, just that there are structural problems getting the attention of world leaders, and having that sort of concentrated attention.

So I think we—ultimately, we need a champion. We need a person, or a country, or a group of countries who are willing to really champion this, and go to the mat for trying to make these sorts of changes, so it isn’t just emergency, after emergency, after emergency, but something that is going to be more long lasting, that is going to provide that sort of infrastructural support, and make sure that we aren’t just lurching from here, there and everywhere, but actually can have some sort of coordinated response and something that is a bit more forward-thinking. But it’s a challenge.

NUZZO: Demetre, the bullets of your bio—(laughs)—are a list of the emergency, after emergency, after emergency. So I know you have first-hand perspectives of this. So any hope we can fix it?

DASKALAKIS: Sure do. (Laughter.) So, my perspective may be very domestic, but I actually think it’s not. I think when I start talking, I think it’s going to seem as if there’s also infrastructure that needs to be leveraged internationally that’s similar. Which is, I always think about what actually worked. And so one of the things that I think we’re seeing over and over again, whether it’s COVID, or monkeypox, or other outbreaks, is leveraging systems that already exist, and really figuring out how to support those systems during peacetime as well as wartime, so that it stays warm for a response. And that’s a very public health—it’s a very sort of operational, public health example.

So I’m talking HIV. I’m talking chronic infections. I’m thinking domestically, we have this excellent—I think the HIV Epidemic Initiative, it’s not nationwide yet. It hasn’t been resourced to do that. But, if it were, that is a really sort of important way to be able to create and maintain an infrastructure. So thinking about sort of chronic diseases like viral hepatitis, having an infrastructure that could potentially lead to curing more people with viral hepatitis creates a system that then could be used for care and other public health delivery of countermeasures.

So thinking about things that—what can we do to sort of do our peacetime work, which is around chronic infections like virus hepatitis and HIV, and what can we—and STIs, which are out of control in the United States, mainly because they’re under-resourced—but what can we do sort of to maintain sort of those systems, so that when we flip the switch from peacetime to wartime that we can pivot those resources to do the work? I’ll give an example from the research universe—monkeypox, as an example. Right now, there are studies that are going on for monkeypox vaccines and for monkeypox therapeutics. And they’re built on the networks of HIV investigators. So, HIV Vaccine Trials Network and AIDS Clinical Trials Group are currently the people that are doing those studies. And sort of research funding potentially being a bit more flexible, that pivot is possible.

But what if we had similar models sort of in the operational world of public health, where you have sexual health clinics or STD clinics that are doing HIV/STD work during peacetime, but can flip into monkeypox vaccines and testing in wartime? And so it’s investing in a chronic infrastructure to be able to make it translatable into an emergency response, in a nimble way, I think is really important. And of course, I back up Jeremy. That idea of political will and leadership is really important in making sure that this sort of moves forward in a way that works. But, I mean, I say this domestically, but then one can conjure PEPFAR in terms of an infrastructure that works.

So that—they have been leveraged. And so what if we worked harder to make sure that they were resourced adequately during the peacetime, so that during wartime they flip and are flipped more effective? And by the way, that HIV positive T-shirt has influenced my career, Jeremy, in terms of seeing people who were willing to put on a shirt that really works against stigma. My favorite being Annie Lennox, who I met with that T-shirt on, and I was very excited, as a fan. But definitely an important thing to reclaim that stigma. Jennifer, thank you.

YOUDE: And if I can build on what Demetre was saying, think about the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014, and the cases that popped up in Nigeria. That led to all sorts of concern. Now you’ve got someone who has Ebola in Lagos, a city of twenty million people, and just not a city that necessarily has the sort of infrastructure in place that you’re going to think, oh, we’re going to be able to contain this. But they were able to repurpose existing programs. They were able to use measles control programs and other sorts of programs. And, using the word that we have all become way too familiar with over these past two and a half years, they pivoted, turned that into doing the surveillance and doing the contact tracing for Ebola, and were able to stop the spread, and being able to prevent that from spreading rampantly throughout one of the largest cities in the world.

And I think that’s the sort of thing, you know? If we have these sorts of structures in place, we can adapt them. Even if they are for one purpose, they can be adapted for other purposes. And so it’s not that we need to recreat the wheel each time, it’s that we need to figure—we need to make sure that we’ve got enough wheels out there, essentially.

DASKALAKIS: And that goes for surveillance. Maintaining good surveillance systems for chronic things means that when an acute thing comes up, that good surveillance already exists there. So not only for an operation, but also for being able to understand what’s happening with the threat. I like to call it keeping the system warm, if you think of sort of the stuff that’s happening. So when you have to heat it up, you’re not starting from—it’s not a TV dinner you’re taking out from frozen. It’s thawed already. You can move quickly.

NUZZO: It’s really hard to build capacities in the midst of an emergency. So thank you for those thoughts.

I am going to give others a turn to ask questions and turn it over to the question-and-answer session now.

OPERATOR: Thank you.

(Gives queuing instructions.)

Our first question comes from Mark P. Lagon from Friends of the Global Fight against AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria.

LAGON: Hi, there. Thank you for this really thought-provoking forum. I come from a perspective working in the health field, but also background in human rights. I was an adjunct senior fellow at CFR, and president of Freedom House.

I wonder, to take some of the points that Jennifer Nuzzo has been making and posing to you, to move to pandemic preparedness. If you have—we’ve seen that AIDS confronts one with very clear human rights and equity issues, particularly for stigmatized populations. You have a kind of a reprise with monkeypox. There was a lot of discussion about in terms of the impact of COVID and equity on vaccines. As the international community has moved to form a fund housed at the World Bank, how do you embed preparation for pandemics to have a human rights or social justice perspective? Activists really had to push hard to get two voting seats for civil society on the governing body of that fund. Thank you.

NUZZO: Anyone want to take that on? (Laughs.)

YOUDE: Sure. I’ll offer a few thoughts. I think this is something—again, this is something to be thinking about at this early stage. As these sorts of systems are being designed, as they’re being set up, keeping these sorts of elements important and at play. But I also think it’s important to make sure that there are multiple channels for this communication to happen. That there’s one thing to talk about formal board seats, and those are obviously important to have people at the table for these pandemic financing facilities through the World Bank and other sorts of organizations. But also make sure there are other opportunities, because new organizations may pop up. They may change. Depending on the particular circumstance or the particular outbreak that we’re talking about, there may be other groups that are being mobilized and being affected by this.

And so, there needs to be a certain level of nimbleness that needs to go into this. I think it’s also something that puts a lot of—we need to put pressure on our leaders to really put their promises into action, to make sure that this isn’t just something that we have as a tick box exercise. Oh, yes, equity is important, we need to address this. But actually, that there is this ongoing pressure and this sort of check of what are we actually doing here? Are we reaching out to these communities that are being affected? How can we better do this? And so I—again, there’s an interesting moment right now that we can hopefully seize to make sure that this is something that really does get instantiated within these systems. And I hope we don’t let that moment pass. I hope we don’t decide to just we’ll go back to existing systems.

Because that’s the other thing that goes along with this. It does challenge the status quo. It does challenge the sorts of standard operating procedures that we have in these organizations. And that can be challenging. That can be a difficult sort of conversation to have. And we have to be willing within our international organizations and other sorts of responses, we have to be willing to have those conversations. We have to be willing to challenge ourselves and to criticize ourselves, and to then make changes that are going to be effective.

LAGON: Thank you.

DASKALAKIS: I don’t have almost anything to add to what Jeremy said. I think there really—again, the political will is important. And just we’ve all experienced that U-shaped curve of concern, right, where when things are very exciting everyone is very worried and engaged, and then when it fades away, resources fade away. And what that means is the infectious disease comes back. And so it’s really—whether it’s the same or a different infectious disease, sort of keeping that momentum and having it really come both from the political piece, from organization, but also from the side of advocates and activists is really critical to keep the—to keep the energy moving and the momentum moving. We have to make sure that we come to a better place.

Every event, you learn more. And so I think that even if we take a quantum leap in what preparedness looks like, whatever the next event will challenge that level of preparedness and will require us to then—to really develop systems that are—that are updated based on the experience. So I think moving the needle anywhere, but moving it in a coordinated way because of that will and that strategy is the most we could hope for and the most we should expect. Or the least that we should expect, the minimum, of being able to move to a place where we have something that is better than how we found it, and potentially more resilient in terms of a—monkeypox is minor compared to COVID, after COVID.

NUZZO: Yeah. I mean, I think the more we have these events the more we learn, though it does feel to me a little bit like the more we have these events, the more we learn the same things over and over again. (Laughs.) And particularly when we’re talking about these inequities. And Jeremy pointed out about the stark inequities in terms of who’s able to access vaccines in the globe. And that was clearly something that we saw throughout much of COVID-19, still see it today. We saw it during the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, in terms of who had vaccines and who didn’t.

So I guess the question—and I recognize that we have just about ten minutes left, and the CFR rule is we always end on time. So I’m going to—(laughs)—I’m going to be aggressive about that. But just on that point what do we need, I think, to put into place? We talked about how there’s a pandemic fund now, which is important. But aside from money, and maybe it’s just money, what else do we need to kind of create structures to address these inequities globally? Given, Jeremy, you also made the important point about—I’ve been struck by how hard it’s been to contain monkeypox here in the U.S.

But let’s say we’re successful, we’re still going to have challenges as the virus continues to circulate. So we need to make progress globally. And we need to have systems in place such that every time these emergencies happen, we don’t keep learning these same lessons over. So maybe just two or three minute each, your takeaways on what you would do to fix these problems if you were deemed in charge of the world.

YOUDE: A little new world, just like that. Money is obviously important. The amount of money that we spend on development assistance for health has gone up dramatically since the early 1990s, but it still pales in comparison to the level of need. So there is just a basic resource need. The second is that we need to make sure that systems that we are building are not for specific diseases, but are things that can be flexible, things that can be adapted. We don’t want to just say: Now we’re going to set up all these monkeypox surveillance systems, when that may or may not be what is going to be the next big outbreak. So we need to have things that are going to be able to be flexible like that.

Third, we need to have—we need to have a better sense of just our—I guess our international community’s willingness to engage with global health. We have the international health regulations. So we do have an international treaty that’s supposed to govern how states respond to infectious diseases and their outbreaks. But the willingness of states to abide by that varies quite dramatically. And so we need to have a big of a come-to-Jesus moment about what are we actually willing to do, when push comes to shove?

And then last thing I’ll say is that I do think we need to have a conversation around access to pharmaceuticals and vaccines and other sorts of medical interventions like that. Because we know that there are inequities, and we know that oftentimes the communities that have the least access are the communities that have the highest rates of incidence or are in the most need of these sorts of things. And our structures are not really well designed for getting people access.

Even though there are things like COVAX, even though there are things like PEPFAR, and all these other sorts of programs, which have done tremendous work, they are still falling short. And so we need to—we need to have a better sense of what—how do we actually put these sorts of things into practice? How do we actually make sure that these scientific breakthroughs that are so invaluable are reaching all the people that need to be reached?

DASKALAKIS: Ditto, I’ll start off. So that makes my job a little bit easier, because I think what Jeremy said is really important. I’ll say again, I think in my hierarchy the first and most important thing is consistent political will, because I think that that then drives a lot of what happens beyond that. So I think that that really jives really well with what Jeremy said, in terms of that sort of commitment. Money is very important, I think, but it is not the only thing that drives us into preparedness. So I think that having that commitment.

I also would like to think about that investing the money in things that keep the system warm. So I’ll go back to that sort of statement, or like thinking about investing in the diseases that we still haven’t finished. We still are working—we’ve got HIV, we have hepatitis, malaria internationally that we’re worried about. There are a lot of areas that we could invest to create systems that are infrastructures that keep it warm for operation for pandemic.

I cannot say it loud enough that what Jeremy said about flexibility is right. You can’t really build the infrastructure on chronic disease if it’s not flexible to move to another acute event. So it needs to be something that is both creates and maintains the infrastructure, but also has the ability—everyone’s favorite word today—to pivot into the emergency response zone. So very important.

I think also workforce and data. I think that it is important to remember that we talk about giving patients trauma-informed care, but we need to give our workforce trauma-informed care. COVID has been hard. Monkeypox has been hard. Our next challenge will be hard. And sort of how can we support the workforce and then also continue to mentor it to be able to do the work? Data also is so important. A commitment to share data, and to have data that is accessible for decisions, even if it is imperfect.

And then finally, the realization—and it goes back full circle, Jennifer, to your first question—about our—or, maybe second question—about the social determinants. There’s only so much that public health can do. There is an all-of-society need to address the core drivers of so many of the inequities. We can’t solve everything through public health. We can get closer to health equity, but ultimately the goal is that as you access is really to go into social justice, which is not just public health but really an all-of-society endeavor to try to improve the environment so that we don’t have fertile ground for these pandemics to blossom and grow.

NUZZO: Thank you. There’s a question that just popped up in the Q&A box. And we just have a few minutes. It’s about the privilege of good information and how we address misinformation and disinformation, which likely leads to fragmentation.

I will just chime in, having done a lot of communication over the past two years, I think that this is not a problem that public health can solve. I actually think the drivers of this are much, much larger. And I think we need an all-of-government approach to this that includes the potential regulation of the platforms. But I’m curious if you all have any quick comments to add to that.

DASKALAKIS: I mean, I just agree with you. (Laughs.) It’s definitely much bigger. There are things we can do, like monitor social media and make sure that our messaging is one way. But ultimately this is an issue that’s bigger, that requires not just the public health lens to address.

YOUDE: And, at the same time, we also can recognize that those trusted outlets, those can be really important tools. So, churches in sub-Saharan Africa played a really crucial role in many parts of helping to decrease HIV stigma, helping to get access and information out there about testing, about protection, about these sorts of things. I mean, that can also be the flipside, though. If you got these trusted sources that are peddling this misinformation, then it becomes this much bigger issue that goes beyond what public health can do. So I guess it’s—part of it is just figuring out where those allies exist, be they in government or outside of the government, and what sorts of connections they might have with populations.

DASKALAKIS: And to your earlier point about building those connections prior to events, so those relationships exist and you’re not trying to forge them in the midst of a crisis.

NUZZO: Well, really, thank you both. I wish I could appoint you both in charge of the world, because if I was asked who should be in charge of the world you would both be on the top of my list. But I am very glad that you continue to do the work that you do and contribute in important ways. And have both been really guiding voices as we continue to experience these events. So thank you very much for that, and really thank you to our participants for attending and the thoughtful questions.

FASKIANOS: I second that. Thank you all. And we appreciate your taking the time to do this. I hope you will all follow their work. For Dr. Daskalakis, you can follow him at @dr_demetre. Dr. Youde is at @jeremyyoude. And Dr. Nuzzo is at @jennifernuzzo. Pretty easy. So we also encourage you to follow CFR’s Religion and Foreign Policy Program on Twitter at @CFR_religion and write to us at [email protected] with any suggestions or questions. We want to help support the work that you all are doing. And we hope you will join us for our next Religion and Foreign Policy Webinar on the Politics of Religion and Gender in West Africa, on Tuesday October 11 at 12:00 p.m. Eastern time.

So thank you all again for being with us, and thank you for your public service. We appreciate it.

Christopher M. Tuttle, senior fellow and director of the Renewing America initiative at CFR, leads the conversation on the U.S. midterm elections and beyond.

FASKIANOS: Thank you, and welcome, all, to today’s session of the Fall 2022 CFR Academic Webinar Series. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach here at CFR.

Today’s discussion is on the record. The video and transcript will be available on our website at CFR.org/academic, and as always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.

We’re delighted to have Christopher Tuttle with us today to talk about the U.S. midterm elections and beyond. Mr. Tuttle is senior fellow and director of the Renewing America initiative at CFR. He’s also a managing director of CFR’s Corporate Affairs Program and a senior adviser for the Council’s external affairs efforts in Washington. From 2015 to 2019, Mr. Tuttle served as policy director of the majority staff of the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations under Chairman Bob Corker, and prior to that, he was director of CFR’s Washington Program and Independent Task Force Program.

So, Chris, thank you very much for being with us today. It would be great if you could talk a little bit about the Renewing America initiative, and also, talk a little bit about the midterm elections. We are about forty days and a few hours out from the elections on November 8, and we would love to hear from you your analysis of the lay of the land and what it portends for governance in the U.S., as well as how we will be viewed in the world.

TUTTLE: Absolutely. Thanks, Irina. It’s great to be here. Great to be speaking with you all today.

As Irina mentioned, I’m Chris Tuttle, and before digging in on today’s specific topic, I would like, as Irina mentioned, to begin with a plug for the program I run at CFR, the Renewing America initiative.

But you all know the Council on Foreign Relations is obviously a foreign policy organization, but we have a keen understanding of the reality that U.S. power, our place in the world, and our upward trajectory over the past century have been powered by our domestic strengths.

And right now, some of our most important national security threats come not from without, but from within. So we’re looking at nine specific domestic issues that underpin our strength and our power in the world—and really the future of the United States in the twenty-first century—and the future of how the world’s going to look in the twenty-first century with a strong U.S., hopefully, still leading the way.

So the nine issues are democracy and governance, education, energy and climate, the future of work, immigration, infrastructure, social justice and equity, and trade and finance. And I’d commend to you our website, please check it out. We’ve got a Twitter feed as well that just went up yesterday, actually, so please follow us on Twitter. And we’re going to post the website to the chat, or you can just google, CFR Renewing America.

So thanks, Irina, for indulging that pitch and now onto today’s topic, the midterm congressional elections and beyond.

I thought I’d start with the House of Representatives. Right now, the partisan balance in the House is 221 to 212—that’s 221 Democrats to 212 Republicans. That’s a very tight—very tight—very tight margin, and that’s not much of a majority, historically speaking, in terms of party breakdown.

What that means, though, for midterms is that Republicans need to gain only six seats to take control of the House, and Democrats are facing some pretty heavy headwinds, which I’m sure you’ve been reading about, as people have been covering, sort of, the horse race. The first headwind is structural. On average over the past seventy years or so, a sitting president’s party has lost an average of more than two dozen house seats during the midterms.

On top of that, inflation has been at forty-year highs. The economy has had two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth, and certainly related to this, President Biden’s job approval rating right now is at a pretty dismal 43 percent. Also, many Democrats are retiring leaving open seats that are always more difficult to defend than if an incumbent were still running.

But interestingly, it’s not just national issues as a factor coming into play this year. Many voters are also concerned about local issues. Crime, the way COVID and other issues have been handled in the school districts are a couple of examples, and those are also likely to weigh on the Democrats in a way similar to the dynamic that put Glenn Youngkin into office as governor of Virginia last year.

But for the Democrats, it’s not all bad news. Biden’s approval rating, though still pretty problematic, is actually up about six points from where it stood in July, and there are indications that abortion, in the wake of the Dobbs decision, may be a more significant factor than many prognosticators first guessed.

For the House, this all adds up to basically kind of the following: the red wave that everybody was talking about during the summer—saying that the Republicans were going to be swept into control of the House with a twenty-five- to thirty-five-seat pickup—may not, in fact, materialize. Regardless, however, the numbers are still not great for Nancy Pelosi’s hopes for her House team.

Right now, The Cook Political Report, which I commend to you—if you follow elections closely you may already be aware of it—but The Cook Political Report right now rates 192 seats as solidly, likely, or leaning Democratic. Conversely, it rates 212 seats as solidly, likely, or leaning Republican. That leaves 31 seats as toss-ups. Assuming those numbers hold, Republicans only need to get six of those seats to gain control, which is a pretty likely scenario.

Moving onto the Senate, it’s a little bit different story. As you all know, the Senate is split right now fifty-fifty. Senate races tend to be more candidate-based than House races, which are often more party or national dynamics-based.

In the—if you want to do the math on this, Democrats are defending fourteen seats this year and two are rated as toss-ups—that’s Rafael Warnock in Georgia—and he’s currently leading well within the margin of error about 0.3 percent over Herschel Walker—and Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada, where the Republican is leading just by 1.7 points.

Republicans are defending twenty-one seats in the Senate. One of those is rated as a toss-up—that’s Ron Johnson in Wisconsin, and he’s ahead just slightly 1.5 percent—that’s based on the RealClearPolitics polling average. And one of the Republican seats is rated to lean Democratic. So that’s the seat in Pennsylvania where Senator Pat Toomey retired. And right now, you’re probably seeing Dr. Oz and Fetterman going at it regularly. Right now, Fetterman is up by about 4.7 percent.

So you can game out all the possibilities alike based on that, but it’s going to be a dog fight for the Senate, and we could very well end up exactly where we are today at fifty-fifty when all is said and done.

So one note about the rest of this Congress, you know, it’s—time is growing short, and the Congress is about to go home to spend time with their constituents as the election approaches. But there is an order of business that may actually end up getting done that’s pretty important before the end of this year. It may—it, likely, will not be before the election. It will likely be in a lame duck session after the elections.

But I think that it’s worth mentioning— probably the most important couple of pieces of legislation, I think, that could move in this Congress are a couple that reform presidential elections and transitions. As I mentioned, they’re just about done for this two years, but they’ve got a couple of bills pending to change current statutes to prevent what happened in late 2020 and early 2021, where we came close to the invalidation of a presidential election, which would have created a full on constitutional crisis.

The House passed its version of this legislation last week, and the Senate has similar legislation that was—it was negotiated on a much more bipartisan basis in the House, but it’s very similar. The cosponsors in the Senate are wide ideological range. Chris Murphy of Connecticut sort of on the left to Lindsay Graham of South Carolina on the right, and this just—Mitch McConnell just signaled his support for this legislation, as did Chuck Schumer, yesterday. And it passed the Senate Rules and Administration Committee yesterday by a wide bipartisan margin.

So this will likely—the Senate version—also known as the Electoral Count Reform Act—will likely pass during the lame duck session that’ll be held probably sometime in November, early December, and then, it will mean—because the House has passed its version; the Senate will pass its version—they’ll have to get together in a conference committee to come up with a compromise version, but it’s actually something that can move.

And I’d be happy to go into further detail about that, but it’s a very important piece of legislation. You may have read—I wrote a piece on this. I think it was in the read ahead, but I encourage you to follow this because it really is an important piece of reform legislation that’s got bipartisan support, and it can actually move the ball forward. And it is potentially an existential issue for the country.

So moving onto the Congress yet, we’re just getting ready to conclude the 117th Congress. We’re going to be going into the 118th Congress in January. What’s in store?

I thought I’d start—because we’re the Council on Foreign Relations—with foreign and international policy. If you are a fan of bipartisanship, there is a lot to like about the incoming Congress and about this current Congress.

When you look at issues—when it comes to China, when it comes to Russia/Ukraine—there is wide bipartisan agreement on how to handle those issues. On trade, there’s wide bipartisan agreement. Now those of you who might be supportive of freer trade may not like what that bipartisan agreement is, but right now we’ve got both parties who are pretty—they have pretty skeptical views of trade, and that’s anomalous.

In the past you’ve had Democrats, who have been in Congress anyway, broadly pretty skeptical of trade. You’ve had Republicans who have been more supportive of free trade agreements. That all changed with the onset of sort of the new Republicans, Donald Trump, that kind of thing. So there’s widespread skepticism on trade, and I’d be happy to talk about that during the Q&A.

Bipartisanship, for better or for worse, is alive and well in foreign policy, and there are some notable exceptions. You can—we can roll through those if you would like. But really, on the great big issues that are confronting the United States, there’s widespread agreement.

So assuming we have a Republican House, legislatively there’s not much in the realm of what might get done. Republicans are likely going to pass Republican bills like those proposed in their newly released Commitment to America, which Kevin McCarthy introduced last week. It’s sort of their agenda for Republican control—their legislative agenda.

But they’re likely to pass Republican bills, bipartisan majorities, and they’ll die in the Senate. Even if Republicans do win the Senate, they won’t have sixty votes to overcome a legislative filibuster that would be by the Democrats. One can also expect with the Republican House takeover a multitude of congressional investigations into the COVID pandemic, the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the FBI’s handling of recent matters, among many others.

Senate Democrats, should they keep their majority, will continue to face an uphill climb to get much of anything through. Not only will they not have the votes to overcome a Republican filibuster—or even if they are able to go nuclear and eliminate the legislative filibuster entirely, which is unlikely, most legislation they pass will not move in the House. Even using the budget reconciliation process, which requires only fifty votes in the Senate, Democratic moderates like Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona may not be supportive.

As far as the political dynamics are concerned—so what is this sort of portend for our politics? I’m afraid they’re unlikely to improve any time soon. I’ve written about this. If you’d like, you can go to, again, Renewing America. I think they’re likely to get worse. I think that Republicans may take from these midterm elections the message that Trumpism remains their path to victory.

And some Democrats, in the wake of losses, may push for the party to live its values and go further left. Similar to the way that we saw on the Republican side, when Republicans who were losing elections—say after 2012 when Mitt Romney lost—a lot of Republicans said, well, we just didn’t run far enough to the right. We need to go further to the right in the future in order to win.

So you may see a similar dynamic emerging more and more. The nascent sort of harder left edge within the Democratic Party could actually take on more power, and that will probably be a pretty tough dynamic because you’ve got Trumpy Republicans and a further left Democratic Party. So the clashes will continue and are likely to get worse.

So if you combine this with what likely will be actions by the president to try and do by executive fiat what he probably won’t be able to do legislatively, and the reality that the presidential campaign will begin de-facto the day after the midterms conclude—and we have a recipe for a pretty tough time ahead, I’m afraid.

So with that, I’d be happy to talk about any of these issues and beyond, and would also be pleased to provide advice on Washington careers, political work, anything else you’d like to discuss.

So thank you.

FASKIANOS: Great. And I do think we should take you up on that at the end of this, but we will first go to questions.

Thank you, Chris, for that overview—I think, a little depressing—just the conflict will continue, but good news that there’s bipartisanship on foreign policy issues, for sure.

So, to all of you now, if you can click the raised hand icon on your screen to ask a question on your iPad, or you click the more button to access the raised hand feature. So when you’re called upon, accept the unmute prompt, and please state your name and affiliation followed by your question. You can also write your question in the Q&A box. If you do that, please include your affiliations so it gives us context as to where you are in the world.

OK, so I’m going to go first to a written question from David Caputo, who is the president emeritus of Pace University.

Please comment on the apparent under polling of uneducated white males and what it means for the races you’ve cited.

TUTTLE: Yeah, it’s a good question. I think that there is a dynamic within certain parts of the polling public, where they just don’t want to talk to pollsters, you know.

They watch cable news. They think, boy, these people do not understand me, and I don’t want—there’s a certain social stigma attached to some of what they may think about certain issues.

So I think that that is a potentially real issue out there. Polling has become enormously more complicated than it used to be. It’s tough to reach people. The proliferation of cell phones and getting rid of landlines, it has become harder and harder to poll, and I do think that that is potentially a real issue—where you could see some surprises based on that under polling of those populations, where, actually, the numbers that I read off earlier in some of the close races and some of the others could actually turn out being some surprises—probably more likely for the Democrats. The Democrats would probably be more likely to be surprised. Republicans are talking about this as a potential factor—that there is under polling of certain populations that tend to vote more Republican.

So that would be my comment on that.

FASKIANOS: Thank you. Let’s go to Babak Salimitari, who has a raised hand.

Q: Hello, can you hear me?

TUTTLE: Hi, Babak.

FASKIANOS: We can, Babak. Please state your affiliation.

Q: Hi. My name is Babak. I’m from UCI. I’m a master’s student there now.

My question is pertaining to immigration and the situation at the border right now, and what affect that would have on congressional races in the border states like Arizona and Texas? Right now, there’s, like, 8,000 illegals crossing the border every day, and the Democratic Party has been pretty mum about this situation until, say, like, Ron DeSantis buses them over to Martha’s Vineyard, and then that’s when the headlines come out on MSNBC and whatnot over the situation at the border.

Why isn’t the party taking a stronger stance on confronting this situation and preventing people from crossing the border illegally?

TUTTLE: Let’s see. As far as why the party isn’t taking a stronger stand, they’re in a tough spot. They’ve got, I think, broad swaths of Democratic base voters who think that the Republicans are overdoing the illegal immigration thing and are generally supportive of immigrant communities that make up a sizeable chunk of not necessarily their voters, but a sizeable constituency for their—for Democratic base voters. So in other words, Democratic base voters, the people who are going to turn out during midterm elections, tend to be more concentrated, and they tend to be more to the left. And they have pretty much been reluctant to take actions that they view as unfair to various people who are coming to the United States to seek asylum, that kind of thing.

It’s a big motivator for Republican voters, particularly in voter states—or in border states. They see—they see illegal immigration as a real problem. You could see that during the Trump era. That was a big issue for Republican voters. But I think that the Democrats are in a tough spot when they’ve got a lot of their base voters and a lot of their members of Congress who think that U.S. immigration controls have been too stringent, I think, in the past, and sympathize with a lot of the folks who are crossing the border illegally. That’s sort of my take on it.

FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to go next to Amalia Frommelt, who is a graduate student at NYU—New York University.

In the context of the most recent attempt to overturn the presidential election and also recognizing America’s historical disenfranchisement of voters that are not white men, what is the greatest threat to the future of free and fair American elections? And have these historical and contemporary events influenced these threats?

TUTTLE: Yeah, I think they have influenced these threats. My concern—my biggest concern is that we’ve got not just sizeable, but a majority of Republicans who still think that the election was invalid. But we also have, on the flip side—and you saw this in 2016—significant parts of the Democratic Party in 2016 said that Donald Trump was not a legitimate reelected president. And I do have concerns that this fall may see the same with—the Democrats have been very, very concerned and very public about some of the different laws that have been passed in different states when it comes to voting, and ballot access, and that type of thing.

I am not convinced that that will have a major—that those will play a major role in the midterm elections, but that won’t, I don’t think, stop some within the Democratic Party claiming that the elections this fall are not legitimate. So the biggest threat I see is that you have potentially both major political parties claiming illegitimate elections, and once you start claiming illegitimate elections, people—it’s less surprising when people use undemocratic means to accomplish their ends. And that’s enormously problematic for the United States. There has been a lot of talk about potential civil war and that kind of thing. I don’t think we’re there, but I do think that these elections stand to continue not just sort of the political discord, but also for people to sort of step out of the margins of political discourse in a way that is potentially quite dangerous for the United States.

FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to take the next question from Michael Leong, a graduate student at the University of Arizona who has his hand up.

Q: Hi, there.

TUTTLE: (Inaudible)—your profile picture.

Q: Oh, sorry about that.

TUTTLE: No, it’s OK.

Q: All right, so hi there.

So I just have a question because, as you discussed, with the Republican Party taking that message that Trump is and remains their path to victory, and because of that, potentially Democrats moving further to the left, that means the polarization is going to become more severe. But is there going to be a path for both parties where basically American political—the political sphere to move back towards the center where it’s not so polarized?

TUTTLE: Yeah, so I’m hopeful on that front. I wouldn’t call myself optimistic, but I am hopeful. There are signs within the Republican Party that maybe the Trump era is just beginning to sunset. There are some indications of that. For example, if you look in New Hampshire, there was a sort of more moderate—I wouldn’t even say more moderate because I don’t think the Trump phenomenon is necessarily political so much as it is rhetorical and personality based. But you had a Republican who was not a Trump Republican; in fact, you had several in the primary, and what occurred was Trump—one of the candidates was very pro-Trump, and if you took the candidates who were not, you know, Trumpy candidates and you added up all their numbers, they actually—if it had been a single sort of non-Trump Republican, that person would have won.

The leading non-Trump Republican also received a lot of funds from various Democratic senatorial—or Democratic committees to—or excuse me—the leading non-Trump candidate was sort of torn down by an ad campaign by some of the Democratic committees, and that put the Trump person in the best place to win. So, in other words, those two bits of sort of—those two problems where you had several non-Trump candidates plus the Democratic Party acting to try and get—to knock down the leading non-Trump candidate in order to get—to be able to run against the Trump candidate. So I think there are signs. That’s kind of a long way of getting to I think there are signs within the Republican Party.

And you saw this in some other areas as well. You saw it in Maryland where the Democratic Party, the various Democratic entities were supportive of the—in one way or another, supportive of a Trump candidate getting the nomination because, you know, politics—you knew that person is easier to run against. I don’t think we’re there yet, though, on the Republican side.

On the Democratic side, I think it’s a little bit tougher. It is, I think, hard to see a Democratic Party that doesn’t continue moving leftward, and you—I think that Joe Biden, although he ran very much as sort of a moderate, uniting figure, that governance has not really been that way. And I think that he is having to cater to his left flank pretty often. So he has sort of become an outsider, I think, within the base of the Democratic Party, and I see that as continuing to be a rising force within the Democratic Party.

Younger voters, if you look at polling, tend to be more supportive of the issue set of sort of the hard left, and the sort of Democratic Party of prior administrations. If you look at sort of some of the economic policy, you look at some of the former Treasury secretaries, for example, in the Democratic Party; their style of sort of governance, their style of managing the economy, that kind of thing, are going away in favor of a more left-trending line.

So I think there are signs of hope on the Republican side—small signs—of getting sort of out of the Trump era. But I think the Democratic Party is probably, for the next several years, going to continue to trend leftward.

FASKIANOS: Thank you. A question from Todd Barry, who is an adjunct professor at Hudson County Community College in New Jersey.

What is the likelihood that Republicans, in control of Congress, would cut off funding for Ukraine, and that this would lead to a peace agreement?

TUTTLE: Great question. I actually think—and this speaks to my bipartisanship question in terms of Russia-Ukraine. You are seeing signs among some of the sort of harder right members of Congress to pull funding from Ukraine and not support—not continue to support Ukraine. They are not within sort of the mainstream foreign policy leaders within the—with the Republican Party. I don’t think they are going to get much in the way of traction.

If you look at those who are really sort of foreign policy leaders within the party and have influence on sort of the party—the party leadership in the House and in the Senate, I don’t see that happening any time soon. Mitch McConnell, I think, is committed to continuing funding for Ukraine. Jim Risch—there was just a hearing this morning where he’s the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—is all in favor of continuing to support Ukraine. And like I said, foreign policy leaders in the House—folks like Mike Gallagher—very much are supportive of continued funding for Ukraine.

So I think there are signs of that, but I think it’s premature to think that there is going to be any massive erosion of Republican support for Ukraine and continuing to stick it to Russia. That’s an excellent question.

FASKIANOS: Great. Next question, I’m going to go Isaac Alston-Voyticky, who is a graduate student at CUNY School of Law.

Q: Hello.

So I already—I already had my introduction. My question is how do you feel the delegitimization of election results immediately prior to and during the election process will have an effect on election turnout for the two major political parties in the upcoming midterms as well as the current tertiary parties?

TUTTLE: So give me a little bit more on that.

Q: So a good example was the—in California, probably the most prominent one. He called it like twenty-four hours that he was—that he—because he knew he was going to lose, so he said, oh, the election result, it was fake, right? Obviously, this is, you know, like a fraudulent election, and the—the tempo out there is that when that happens on a consistent basis, it effects the electoral—kind of election results because like in turnout it says, well, if it’s already fraud, why am I going?

TUTTLE: Yeah, yeah. So I think it remains to be seen, Isaac. I don’t know that there’s a—and we’ll need some empirical data, I think, to really be able to judge that. I will say that there is a lot more absentee, and a lot more early voting than there has been in the past. That certainly weighs in favor of it having a lesser effect. But without empirical data, it’s hard to know. Those are individual decisions that people are going to—to be making, and I would hesitate to sort of weigh in on that without a closer look at—a closer specific look at that dynamic.

FASKIANOS: Great. So we have a written question from Mike Nelson who is an affiliate adjunct professor at Georgetown University who is noting that digital technologies have transformed our elections over the past fifteen years. Obama beat Hillary by using MeetUp to organize at the grassroots. Trump weaponized Twitter. Biden used Zoom from his basement. (Laughs.) I like that characterization. And what’s new this year, do you think? What will it be? Will it be disinformation? TV—will TV be a critical factor? Are you hearing anything on that front?

TUTTLE: I’m not—not specifically. I mean, TV is always a critical factor in elections. I think that you can look at—I remember looking at polling numbers for various members of Congress I’ve worked for, and you can actually see, if we do a line, of when they went up on TV and the numbers go way up. So I think TV continues to be powerful.

And I think social media—that’s probably, I’m guessing—the trend of the line is downward for TV; more for various social media—type stuff that you mentioned. I don’t know that there is anything particularly new for the midterms, but social media is always evolving. It’s always seemingly gaining more and more influence, but it’s also becoming more diffuse. So the platform of yesterday is no longer the platform of today because it has been—you know, there are two or three more platforms.

So I’m not aware of anything particularly new. You may be, and I’d be happy to talk about that. But I don’t have any sense of what sort of the new thing is, the thing that we’re going to refer to as sort of the big thing in 2022—what was able to move a particular election. And I think 2024, it remains to be seen. It’s possible that there is a social media platform out there that I haven’t heard of that may actually be the next big thing. And right now, it’s not much, but two years from now it might be the next big thing.

FASKIANOS: Right. Is there concern about interference from Russia, China in the midterms?

TUTTLE: There’s always concern about that. We have, I think, done a reasonably good job with our intelligence agencies, with different efforts that have been undertaken to protect our elections. It’s still tough, though, because you have elections that are administered not just at the state level, but at the local level. Now that makes it tough for us to sort of harden our targets because they are so diffuse. But it also makes it harder for the other side because the targets are so diffuse. But I think that’s always a concern. It will continue to be a concern, and it’s not just Russia and China; it’s the Iranians, the North Koreans. There are any number of state threats out there, and if you put a state threat up against a county clerk in Wausau County, Wisconsin, that is—or Marathon County, Wisconsin—excuse me—that’s pretty asymmetric. The question is whether or not they can do that wholesale, and the question also is how much are we digitalized, and how much do we rely on internet for our elections. And that is why paper ballots are still important because they are really hard to—they are really hard to mess with if you are a state actor.

So I think those are critical questions and one that our intelligence agencies and FBI, and others, and state officials in particular are—and state and county officials are looking at very carefully and working hard to harden themselves against potential attacks.

FASKIANOS: Thanks. I’m going to go next to Fordham University. I don’t know who has the raised hand, so please announce yourself.

Q: Yes, good afternoon. My name is Javier Mendez. I’m from Fordham University. I’m a first-year undergraduate studying business administration.

And my question would be regarding the impact that the natural disasters had on the Caribbean Basin, for example Hurricane Fiona’s devastation in Puerto Rico—and the subsequent congressional debates regarding an amendment to the Jones Act, and the near future of—twelve hours—Hurricane Ian’s impact on the west coast of Florida, and the subsequent government reaction to that devastation. How would that affect the results of the upcoming midterms, specifically in these states and regions where the Hispanic population is so great and they tend to—(inaudible)?

TUTTLE: Right. So the question is how will the—the more specific question or the more current question is what effect might the natural disaster that’s heading toward Florida right now have on the midterms?

Q: Yes, and—between that and the debate regarding an amendment to the Jones Act stemming from Hurricane Fiona in Puerto Rico.

TUTTLE: OK. So on the hurricane that’s heading toward Florida right now, I think that, obviously, the response is going to be critical. We saw the reaction during the hurricane that hit New Orleans back in 2005 that that provoked a lot of sort of—that provoked people to take action politically—basically saying the Bush administration had mishandled it.

The story was a lot more complicated than that; I mean, any federal disaster is going to be the responsibility of the federal government, but primarily the state and local governments. But I think that if it is perceived as being mishandled, and there is sort of a blame game on what happens there, it could potentially have some marginal impact on the midterm elections.

I’m not as familiar with the Puerto Rico case, so I’m a little reluctant to weigh in on that and the Jones Act. But I’d be happy to look into it if you wanted to send me a note. My email is on the CFR website. I’d be happy to look into it further. But I’m sorry that I don’t have a great answer for you at the moment.

FASKIANOS: But I would note that we are seeing cooperation between—at the federal and obviously the state and local level with President Biden and Governor DeSantis. I think that they are working together on this issue.

TUTTLE: Yeah, it appears—it appears that way, so, that will—but if things really go south, sometimes the blame game commences, and you could see some potential political conflict come from that.

FASKIANOS: Yes. So the next written question from Hannah-Grace Henson, who is an undergrad student at Drexel.

If the Supreme Court rules that election results can be overturned by state electors, what do you see happening during the next presidential election in 2024?

TUTTLE: Good question. (Pause.) I think it is—it’s an—it’s an open question. The answer is I don’t know. I think that over the past—even during the Trump period when it came down to it, there weren’t state officials who were willing to bite the bullet and send forward electors who were not reflective of the popular vote. I think that is likely to hold with maybe an anomaly or two, but I don’t—from my vantage point, I don’t see state officials who will be willing to do that.

Trump—the Trump in 2020 worked mightily on state officials to do so, and they did not. And when they didn’t, Trump and his supporters tried to put forth slates of alternate electors. That’s one of the things that is addressed in the Electoral Count Reform Act and the legislation that’s moving through the House.

But I actually am not as worried about that as some.

FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to go next to Arjun Chawla. Please pronounce your name for us since I did not do so correctly.

Q: So are you able to hear me?

FASKIANOS: Yes.

TUTTLE: Yes.

Q: Thank you both for the time. My name is Arjun Chawla. I’m a graduate student at Georgetown University.

My question is I’d love to get your thoughts on—and if you look back at 2016, there was potential for an interference in the United States presidential election, and then ahead to the 2020 presidential election, there was potential news coming out about Hunter Biden, and that was not announced until after the election if—whatever those investigation findings were.

Now coming up to the midterms—still this is not a presidential election—there is the lawsuit against—well, New York against Trump as well as the January 6 hearing going on. I’m curious. I know this is not a presidential election but in regards to the midterm, what effects do you think both of these events would have on the midterms?

TUTTLE: Yeah, so on the Hunter Biden stuff and—wait, what was the second you mentioned?

Q: The Trump lawsuit from New York—

TUTTLE: You’re talking about the lawsuits as well as the January 6.

Q: And the—sorry, and the—

FASKIANOS: Right, the New York State—

Q: Correct, in relation—

TUTTLE: The Letitia James, right, yeah.

Q: Exactly. Ahead of the midterms.

TUTTLE: So, yeah. So I think that it may have some marginal impact, but I don’t think—I think a lot of the people who are voting in midterm elections have already sort of—are already part of a camp, OK? So if you are part of the Republican camp, you are seeing this Hunter Biden stuff, and it may intensify your feelings about how this wasn’t reported, and you are concerned about what’s on the laptop. If you are part of the Democratic camp, you see the January 6 stuff, and you see the January 6 committee hearings as well as the Letitia James actions up in New York, and you are already in that Democratic camp, and it may harden—it may intensify your feelings. How much effect that actually has on the independent voters that vote in midterms, and they’re typically—it’s typically a smaller number than would vote in a presidential election, I think it’s hard to say.

I think that of those three, I think the January 6 committee, for those who are paying attention to it and to news surrounding it, is probably the most persuasive in terms of changing your opinion, one way or another. But it may have just changed your opinion on Trump. And part of the effectiveness of those hearings was you had a lot of people testifying who were long-term Republicans who had been staff for Donald Trump. And so it wasn’t necessarily—it was harder to make the case that this was entirely cooked up by the Democratic Party because you did have all these Republicans testify. So the question is, how much January 6—the January 6 committee and their actions might actually be able to steer independent voters? I think it remains to be seen. I think the numbers are probably fairly small.

Q: Thank you.

FASKIANOS: Thank you.

Mark Diamond, who’s a senior lecturer at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Do you see any shifts in voting patterns of faith-based communities such as Evangelical Christians, Orthodox Jews, Muslim-Americans, and others?

TUTTLE: What were the groups?

FASKIANOS: I think— Evangelical Christians, Orthodox Jews, Muslim-Americans, and others, so really just faith-based communities. I think those were examples.

TUTTLE: Yeah. I have not seen numbers on this. My guess is of those groups the one most likely in a midterm to shift a bit I think may be the Evangelicals. I think that there are some probably—like I said, I don’t have polling numbers on this, but anecdotally speaking, I think that Evangelicals in some cases have been increasingly skeptical of Trump and I think everybody on my side of the aisle—I was a longtime Republican staffer—were quite surprised when the Evangelical community turned out pretty strongly for Trump. So the question is, is that population moving? My guess is there are signs of that. And the other question is, does it affect their vote in midterm elections? I think probably in a lot of cases—Trump is not on the ballot and Evangelicals tend to vote pretty widely for Republicans, so they’re going to probably continue to vote for Republicans. So I don’t think it’s going to necessarily change their voting patterns during a midterm election, but I could see potentially some shifts when it comes to a general election and a primary in two years, for the Republican presidential primary.

FASKIANOS: Great. I’m going to go to Derek Kubacki.

TUTTLE: Hey, Derek.

Q: Good afternoon, sir. How are you doing?

TUTTLE: I’m OK. How are you?

Q: All righty. Derek Kubacki, academic adviser at UTSA, coming back for another master’s as well, in global affairs this time around.

Question is—it goes back to—it’s not necessarily with the midterms themselves but it goes back to what you talked about with the Electoral Count Act that they’re looking at doing. The House side include provisions for up to one-third of both chambers. The Senate bill is one-fifth, or essentially twenty senators. When we look at the likelihood of any potential challenge to a future election, which could conceivably come from either side of the spectrum, are those numbers really worthwhile? Do they really mean a thing when you’re going to have some sort of majority that’s going to be able to hit that threshold—I believe it’s eighty-seven in the House and twenty in the Senate—or is this simply just a speed bump or—to potentially looking for an amendment to the Constitution to outright abolish the Electoral College?

TUTTLE: Yeah. So I think that changing the Electoral College, for a wide variety of reasons, is not in the cards, so I would set that aside. I will say that the House version does have that higher threshold of one-third; the Senate has a one-fifth threshold. I don’t have any inside information on this but they knew that they were going to have to go to a conference committee and it’s awfully convenient—(laughs)—that there’s one-fifth and there’s one-third; meeting in the middle might mean a quarter, OK? So I think that it’s going to be enormously challenging. I don’t think it’s a speed bump, but I think it’s going to be very challenging to get those kinds of numbers to object to the certification of a state’s results. There was only—basically there were two objections I think that were raised—I think it was Arizona and Georgia in 2021—and the pressure was huge. You saw it—you’ve seen different efforts both in the House and in the Senate to object, but they haven’t been able to find a partner, and that’s just with one to one. The last time I think was Barbara Boxer who objected to Ohio’s results and she had a variety of Democrats in the House who were willing to go along with that. But I think that’s a—it’s a pretty heavy threshold. I think it’s much more—even at a quarter, it’s a pretty high threshold, and I don’t think you get there. I think it makes it significantly more difficult to object.

FASKIANOS: Thank you. I want to take another question from Todd Barry on—again, from Hudson County Community College. Will the Republicans craft a stimulus bill for the economy?

TUTTLE: Unlikely. It remains to be seen what’s going to happen with the economy generally, if we are going to tip further into a recession. Now I know there’s a question about whether or not we’re actually in a recession. Traditionally, the definition has been two consecutive quarters—the traditional shorthand definition has been two consecutive quarters with negative economic growth, but I think it remains to be seen how much the economy is going to slow down based on the Fed’s necessary actions to curb inflation. With inflation numbers being what they are, and with Republicans having stated over and over and over again that the COVID stimulus was—and not just Republicans; some Democrats too saying that COVID stimulus was actually enormously problematic in terms of the current inflation picture. I think it’s going to be pretty challenging for Republicans to say we need economic stimulus. Inflation is still, I believe, above 8 percent. It’s hard to see how Republicans who are big believers that additional government spending can be inflationary, it’s hard to see them being supportive of some sort of stimulus package.

FASKIANOS: So we are almost out of time, Chris, and I just wanted to draw upon your time working in the Senate. You mentioned that it’s unlikely for much to get done with the filibuster in place. Can you talk a little bit, from your perspective having been there, how important it is to have that sixty-vote threshold, and just having worked there back in the teens and now we’re in the 2020s, just the comparison of where we are now—(laughs)—and life in Congress from a staffer perspective, and any advice you want to give to students about public service, given this partisan environment that we’re in. (Laughs.)

TUTTLE: Sure. Well, we have two minutes so I think on the filibuster, the filibuster is a long story, but if you want to take a short snippet of that long story: In 2005, it was Republicans who wanted to get rid of the filibuster in order to get federal judges through, and then in—and that was stopped; there was a bipartisan gang that stopped that effort. In 2013, Harry Reid, because Democratic judges weren’t getting through, actually did away with the filibuster for those judges, and then in 2017, Mitch McConnell, previously a strong supporter of the filibuster—Harry Reid had previously been a strong supporter of the filibuster—changed it for Supreme Court nominees. Mitch McConnell and the Republicans changed it for Supreme Court nominees. And now we’ve got—and during the Trump administration he was constantly calling up Mitch McConnell saying, why can’t you get rid of the legislative filibuster? I want to get things done. So the rogues’ gallery of people who had been supportive or opposed the filibuster over time has changed based largely on who happens to be in power.

I would say that I think the filibuster is an enormously important and positive thing for the country; a lot of people disagree with me. But I think that it is important to consider that we right now have a country that’s roughly split fifty-fifty and if you start passing legislation wholesale that 50 percent of the country disagrees with firmly and then it switches to a new Senate and that legislation is then repealed and different legislation is put in, we’re going to be whipsawed not just in terms of what laws are on the books but also you’ll have the other half of the country dissatisfied with something that’s being passed. So I think it’s an important moderating influence. I think that a lot of my Democratic friends would have preferred that the filibuster still be in place when Brett Kavanaugh was nominated. So I think that the filibuster—it’s a really important part of moderating the actions of government to have more consistency and more incremental change, which ultimately turns out to be more durable and easier to live under for the American people.

And I think we’re out of time but I’d be happy to talk a little bit about Washington careers.

FASKIANOS: Just give us a couple minutes on Washington careers.

TUTTLE: Sure. So I would say, in terms of Washington careers, they can be enormously helpful, enormously beneficial not just for you but for the United States. And I think one of the best places to start—and I’m, of course, biased—is in Congress because Congress forces you to work together with folks from the other side. And I don’t think there’s enough of that in our culture these days. There’s not enough—there are not enough Democrats with Republican friends, there are not enough Republicans with Democratic friends. You’re forced in Congress to know people and work with people from the other side.

The other thing is you’re also forced in Congress to deal with people from all over and—I mean your constituents. So if you work for a member of Congress in a good office, the single most important stakeholder, the single most important person is your customer, the constituent. And being in a congressional office and talking to people who are living their lives is really important for connecting our government to the American people. It doesn’t sound glamorous to be sitting on the phone listening to somebody tell you about how their Social Security check was $24 short last month and can you help them, but it gives you a really good perspective on why democratic governance is so important.

So I would encourage those of you—you have a small window to work on Capitol Hill. Nobody wants to be a thirty-year-old, thirty-five-year-old staff assistant answering phones and writing constituent mail. So you have a narrow window between sort of college graduation, maybe twenty-six, twenty-seven, to get your start on the Hill. So I’d encourage you to take a look at that as a career path.

FASKIANOS: Wonderful. Well, I’m sorry we went over a few minutes, but I wanted to close with that, give some people some career advice.

So, Chris Tuttle, thank you very much for this hour, and to all of you for your questions and comments. We put in the chat there the link to the landing page for Renewing America; it’s CFR.org/programs/renewing-america, and the Twitter is at @RenewingAmerica. So you should follow the work that Chris is doing there on the very important nine pillars of what we need to focus on here at home. And again, I hope you will join us for our next academic webinar on Wednesday, October 12, at 1:00 p.m. (EDT) with Mary Elise Sarotte, who is the Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Distinguished Professor of Historical Studies at Johns Hopkins, on Russia’s global influence. You can also follow us @CFR_Academic. Visit CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for research and analysis on global issues. Again, Chris Tuttle, thank you very much for this conversation; we really appreciate it.

TUTTLE: Thanks, Irina. Always a pleasure. Good luck to everyone.

FASKIANOS: Thank you.

(END)

Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis discusses the role of Greece in the European Union, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the economic and physical security of Europe following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the relationship between Greece and the United States.

Adil Najam, professor and dean emeritus of the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, leads the conversation on climate justice.

FASKIANOS: Thank you. Welcome to today’s session of the Fall 2022 CFR Academic Webinar Series. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach at CFR.

Today’s discussion is on the record, and the video and transcript will be available on our website, CFR.org/academic. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.

We’re delighted to have Adil Najam with us to talk about climate justice. Dr. Najam is professor of international relations and Earth and environment and dean emeritus of the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. Previously he served as vice chancellor of the Lahore University of Management Sciences in Pakistan, and as a director of the Boston University Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future. He has also taught at MIT and Tufts University and served on the UN Committee on Development and on Pakistan’s Advisory Council on Foreign Affairs. Dr. Najam was a coauthor for the Third and Fourth Assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, and has served on various boards and written over a hundred scholarly papers and book chapters.

So, Dr. Najam, thank you for being with us today to talk about this very important topic. Can you talk a little bit about what climate justice is, and why it is so important for international relations?

NAJAM: Thank you. Thank you, Irina. It’s wonderful to be here. It’s wonderful to see a lot of participants here. So I’m looking forward to this conversation. I want to just maybe sort of frame a few ideas in the next ten, fifteen minutes on global climate justice. And I purposely added the “global” to it. I am very happy, and I hope we will have a discussion also and questions on domestic climate justice, because climate justice is not simply a global issue. It is a live issue in many countries—all countries, actually, including in the United States.

I want to focus on the global aspect partly because I think we in recent years don’t focus enough on it, and because I think it’s about to hit the ceiling. I think we will hear a lot about it in the coming months in this year and going forward, including because of Pakistan, which is where I’m from and where I was literally sort of two days ago. And this background you see behind me is Lahore University of Management Sciences. And I say that because of the massive floods that you and your viewers have been reading about. In many ways, that has brought not only for Pakistan but for the world this issue of global climate justice back into focus, as the UN secretary-general came to Pakistan, and all that.

If you allow me to just share a few slides to say a bit about what climate justice is, I’m hoping you see a black screen now, and you see my name sort of coming up. If people are seeing that and they are seeing my slides. I won’t go into the details of sort of who I am. You have done that. But I wanted to use this to contextualize a couple of questions around this. And the first one of this is about what I was just saying, which is we are beginning to sort to think again about what the climate is telling us. Not want we want from the climate, but we are now at a point in climate change reality where the climate is giving us signals, and it is giving us signals about justice.

The second is, just to raise a few questions and thoughts about what I call the age of adaptation, which essentially—I’m assuming all your viewers know the difference between mitigation and adaptation. We have been fixated, as we should have been, about mitigation, which is what can we do to keep climate change from happening. The fact is, we have failed. The fact is, we are now in what I call the age of adaptation where, at least by my calculation, about 2.5 billion—2 ½ billion people—are now having to adapt to global climate change, including, for example, the thirty million Pakistanis who were displaced in these recent floods.

And what that means for climate justice is that in the age of climate adaptation, justice becomes much more of an issue. Because let’s just put it up there to think about what that means as individual countries, beginning developing countries now, the impacts are happening on the people who have very little and sometimes nothing to do with causing the problem. And then the argument becomes, well, you have a fingerprint. You live in Boston. You have been emitting many times more than, for example, your brother living in Pakistan. And yet, the impacts there are happening to people who have got nothing to do with it, and that’s the justice argument, right? And that leads to what we call sort of talks of reparation. That leads to loss and damage, which is a language that you hear a lot about.

And finally, this question of why is climate now and in the future essentially a justice issue? And I would add, you know, essentially is the key thing that I mention there. It is good to see people on Zoom, though Zoom is not essentially my favorite medium. I think the only good thing it does is we can change our backgrounds. That was me teaching my class on sustainable development last year. But that’s not the point. The point I want to come to about climate justice is the following: That, as I said, we are coming to a head. I think you have done this literally at the point when we are coming to a head. And the reason we are coming to a head is, A, the age of adaptation I talked about and, B, sort of where we are in this post-Paris, the climate agreement, world.

And there were two essential things that came out of that. One was this number. And if you count the zeros there, I don’t know how many of the people sort of, find it easy when there are that many zeros, but that’s 100 billion. That’s the number that came out of Paris, saying that’s the amount that will be invested in developing countries in particular, per year, on climate adaptation as well as mitigation. I’ll only put the point out there, why this is a climate issue. It hasn’t materialized. The last couple of climate negotiations were entirely about that. And therefore, you have a lot of countries that are now beginning to face the impacts saying: We in good faith went and started doing something about this issue that wasn’t even of our making on this agreement that the world would come together. And the world hasn’t come together.

The reality of climate is even more stark. These two numbers that you’re all familiar with, 1.5 and two (degrees). The fact of the matter is, I know of no science at this point where 1.5 (degrees) can actually be achieved. I hope I’m wrong. I hope I’m wrong. I think we cling to the hope, but just from a reality perspective 1.5 (degrees) is nearly out of the game. And two (degrees) may be very closely coming to the game. And that is making a lot of countries very scared. If you remember why 1.5 (degrees) came, it is that Paris actually wanted a two-degree target. And then the small, especially island, states said: By two degrees we aren’t there. It’s existential for us. We are underwater, or nearly underwater.

So what I’m trying to set up here is that there’s a moment that we are in global affairs where this issue of climate justice is just boiling. If I—if you will allow me just a bit—you know, we often talk about 2020 because of COVID as a year like no other. Let me remind us what else was happening other than COVID in that year. Why it was really a year like no other. January 2020, hottest January ever—ever recorded since we started recording. February, second hottest ever recorded. March, second hottest. April, second hottest ever. May, hottest ever. You see the pattern here, right?

And you remember seeing these. You might have tweeted about it. By July, no one was tweeting about it because the cat was more interesting—the dancing cat. And we had started getting used to this, you know, just barrage of climate data coming every month. Eight out of those twelve, as far as I can tell, records have been broken since then. Why am I putting this as climate justice? Again, you have a lot of places in the world—floods in Pakistan being one, heat in India being another, floods in Bangladesh being another—all across the world who are now seeing that impact in the age of adaptation.

I’ll give you just two very quick other pictures, and then come to the climate—sort of, you know, open up very soon. And why I mean—why I state that we are in the age of adaptation, right? I hope people can see this. I some years ago decided I’m not going to put future data on climate. This is recorded, past data for every month ever since we started keeping climate records. So this is not about what will happen. This is about what has happened. And this ends around 2016. You can take it to 2022 now. And it starts touching 1.5 (degrees) even more. Touching 1.5 (degrees) doesn’t really mean that the barrier has been crossed because sort of, you know, that’s the way sort of it’s counted. But you see the pattern again.

And you see, again, for a lot of countries—and it’s not just countries. For the poorest people in the countries. This is true about the Pakistan floods, for example. If you look at the floods, it’s not the affluent in Pakistan whose homes get sort of blown away. It is the poorest. So essentially what we are seeing is that the poorest people, the most vulnerable people around the world, are paying the cost of our inaction—my inaction, other—(inaudible)—inaction, right? Now, you might be saying, that’s fine, but I don’t live on the planet. I live in a particular place. So choose your place. Same data. For every point on Earth that we have data for, ever since we have data on climate.

So what I’m trying to say is the age of adaptation is here. Just look at that picture. Choose the place you are interested in, and you start seeing that pattern. And if we are in the age of adaptation, once people start seeing impacts, right, they’re starting to see impacts. As soon as you start seeing impacts, you start demanding a very different sort of action. And that’s where—that’s where climate justice comes. Let me show a quick map. This is actually an old map, 2014. But the interesting thing—the reason I still use is it’s from Standard & Poor’s. It’s from a rating agency of risk. And if you look at that map, and you look at the red countries where the impacts are the most immediate, and you start thinking about where the emissions are coming from, this tells you what the climate justice argument globally is.

One very last—one very last point, and then I move to you. That while it is a global issue, it is also a domestic issue. And again, we think of climate justice by linking it to other justice issues, as we should. I’m only putting one picture here. What happened in the age of adaptation that makes it a justice issue? One of the things that happens is it immediately changes from an energy issue—a primarily energy issue, to a predominantly water issue. When you’re thinking about mitigation, right—mostly when we talk about the climate, we talk about how we can reduce emissions. And as soon as you talk emissions, you’re essentially talking energy. You’re essentially carbon management, right? You’re bringing down carbon emission. Most of them are in energy. And therefore, a lot of our policy is about that.

As soon as you start talking age of adaptation, a lot of it is about water. What do I mean by that? Think about impacts. When you think about what’s happened, not just in Pakistan. I’m using the Pakistan example because I’ve just come from there but think about wherever you are. A lot of the immediate impacts are about water. Water rises, sea-level rise. Water melts, glaciers. Water disappears, drought. Water falls from the sky like no one’s business, extreme events. That’s what a flood looks like in a country like Pakistan, but it’s not just Pakistan. It’s many other countries.

And again, if it becomes water, it immediately becomes something that affects the poorest people, the most vulnerable people, the most marginalized people, and those who have historically been least responsible. To give you just a picture of what a flood like this means in Pakistan, this is from 2010. But if you look at that blue squiggle, that’s the area covered by the flood. That blue, the dark blue and light blue, is the severe and very severe. I put that on a map to scale of the U.S. to give a sense of what is covered like what you see in that picture. It’s up from Vermont down to Florida. I put it on the map of Japan, it covers the whole country. I put it on a map of Europe, Denmark to France.

And the point of that is now you are in this moment that I’m talking about where it becomes a justice issue because within developing countries there is this immense pressure of climate being see as a reality, right? And that pressure then starts pushing domestic politics, and domestic politics start pushing international politics. So that’s my context of climate justice, as we see it.

FASKIANOS: Thank you very much for that sobering overview. And I think the slides that you showed really bring it to life and make it so much—you see it really so starkly. So thank you for that. So now we want to go to all of you for your questions.

(Gives queuing instructions.)

So now I’m just going to go to questions and see—we have several raised hands. OK. So I’m going to take the first question from Fordham University. I don’t know who’s asking the question, so please let us know who you are.

Q: Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for the discussion. My name is (inaudible), representing the International Political and Economic Development—I’m part of that program.

And my question is just in regards to what we’re currently seeing. So I’m originally from South Africa and the just transition was a very topical point when it came to climate change and climate adaptation. And there was a push for the emerging markets to actually adopt renewable energy, moving away from coal. However, we see that recently, with the Russian and Ukrainian war, there has been an increase in demand and exports from Africa to the northern regions for coal. And you see that certain regions, such as Germany, has started powering up their coal-powered station, due to the lack of energy that they’ll see from the Russian nation.

So my question is, what is the impact of what we see with this event being the war, and the impact on the increase in coal? And what does this mean for climate adaptation? Especially from regions from Europe, where African regions will be looking to them to actually see them adapting this change in climate and energy, I guess.

NAJAM: Irina, do you want to take a few questions and then come back, or? Whichever way you want.

FASKIANOS: I think we should just go—let’s go through them one at a time.

NAJAM: Sure. Sure. Thank you for that question. It has many layers. I’ll pick up on a few. And the first one is that you are exactly right. In a world that is crisis prone, in a world that is turbulent—we saw that with COVID, we are seeing that with the economic turmoil of COVID that still continues in all sorts of ways, and we’ve seen that with the war in Ukraine—climate comes as this sort of—you know, we used to say climate is a threat multiplier. And now I think climate is the threat, and everything else is multiplied.

And so we should expect that climate is going to be exacerbated by all these other things, and these other things are going to be exacerbated by climate. So what you are talking about in terms of energy is one issue, but as I talked to my friends in Africa, it is not just energy. Food, for example, is going to be hit equally hard. So in terms of energy, in terms of the Ukraine war, we see that not just in Africa but in other parts of the world. We see it in some places in coal. We see it all places in oil prices. But what is—what is hitting Africa particularly hard, for example, is food.

Now, what does that have to do with climate adaptation? What it has to do with climate adaptation is that it comes at a time when the stress on food production—because, for example, water stress is already there, right? So that’s the multiplier thing. One of the most difficult things I find in my work for policymakers is that they want clarity. And I keep telling them, there isn’t clarity. There isn’t going to be clarity. This is why the floods, for example, were important. Immediately the question is, but how do we know this is because of climate? We’ve had floods before, right? Or we have had droughts before.

And what is now becoming increasingly clear is it’s not like climate is going to give you a new set of issues. It is going to take the issues and do two things. One, the magnitude increases. And two, the frequency goes berserk, because whatever you thought was a twenty-year flood or a fifteen-year drought, now you have no way of doing it. And that creates an uncertainty for developing countries. But the justice question really—the justice question is that whose fingerprint is on it? And that’s the one that I would say you should keep—it is not going to be made for good politics. What I say is coming, I am very scared, because the politics it leads to is the politics of division.

Till now we’ve had the politics on climate mostly—you know, even if it’s ineffective—it’s about mostly in the form of let’s all come together, it’s a common problem. What you saw in these floods—and the reason I keep mentioning it—one important thing is the UN secretary-general goes to Pakistan and for the first time clearly says: This is because of climate. That means, you know, this is coming from the top. You hear it at the top, and that is going to lead to a divisive politics.

FASKIANOS: So there’s a written question from Mark Hallim, who’s a doctoral student, global security student, at the American Military University.

How can climate change be achieved without leadership, political will, and development by nation-state leaders?

NAJAM: (Laughs.) Not easily. Not easily. (Laughter.) Not easily. The fact, Mark, you said, right?

FASKIANOS: Mark, yes.

NAJAM: Mark. The fact, Mark, is that we have been kicking this one down the road. And that’s why we are confronting it. Till now—you know, I’ve been on this thing for at least thirty years. I was at Rio in 1992. I’ve been following the climate for nearly at every COP, at least until Copenhagen. And it’s not that the issue is new. We knew this from the beginning. The hope, the hope—because those of us who work on climate are essentially optimists. We want this problem to be licked. The hope was that we won’t come to the age of adaptation. The hope was that we would do enough on mitigation, right? What is adaptation? It’s the failure of mitigation. We would do enough that we wouldn’t come to this point of finger pointing. And therefore, it is going to become more and more difficult.

Now, interestingly, again, if—the most important thing that’s happened in climate justice, to answer your question, this last week—I still haven’t read the exact document. But for the first time a country, in this case Denmark, has said that they are going to acknowledge the principle of loss and damage. Now, this is huge. For those of us who study—so, I’m assuming all of our audience are people who study this. Loss and damage, what’s loss and damage? You know, it’s just words. But it is more than words, if you take it seriously. Loss and damage means that if there is loss to someone or damage to someone, those who are responsible for it will somehow pay for it.

We don’t do international relations like that. There are nearly no other areas in which we have things like that. I think what Denmark is trying, to answer Mark’s question, is saying: Let us restart, rethinking how we do climate assistance and climate aid, to address loss and damage. The challenge—the reason I’m scared about this is, imagine—you know, not even imagine. You don’t have to imagine. Just remember what happened in the summer. You had about twenty countries that had potentially climatically induced massive events—whether they were of heat, whether they were of fire, whether they were of drought, right?

You get a planet where you see more and more of these things happening. It is not just the appetite for assistance. It is simply the capacity for assistance that will go. One last line, because I want to hear from others. And at the same time you have climate justice issues within developing countries, right? Now you have to choose between climate justice within the U.S. and countries elsewhere also pushing. That is why I’m insisting that it doesn’t make for pretty politics.

FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to go next to Isaac Alston-Voyticky, who has raised your hand.

Q: Thank you very much. Can you hear me?

FASKIANOS: Yes.

NAJAM: Yes.

Q: Great. So I’m actually a CUNY law student.

And I am working on kind of the intersection between technology and environmental change. And I have kind of a combination question. First, what are your predictions for the combination of sea level rise and tides for mean higher high-water levels? For example, can we predict that higher sea level will actually have an effect on tidal highs and lows outside of the traditional modeling? And then, as a follow up to that, are there any models or maps out there which illustrate combination climate data. One of the most annoying things I find in my research is that, for example, NOAA’s sea level rise and tidal flooding can’t be compounded on its interactive map. They don’t show what will happen when sea level rises and tides also happen. So I don’t know if there’s anything out there.

NAJAM: Isaac, I’ll be honest. I don’t know the answer to that, to the technical part of that. But the question is very, very good from a policy side. And I’m particularly happy that you’re coming from a law direction to this. So what policymakers often want, and they are also disturbed, just like you are, they want clear answers, right? I’ve been working on this for years. And they say, well, tell us what climate will do to my agriculture. I say, I don’t know. I wish I did. I wish I could tell you it will be ten times worse, this or that. Because then at least you would have something to plan with. The thing about climate change is not just the climate, it is the change.

What makes it scary is that we don’t know what the change will be. But let me—let me, in not answering your question—not knowing the answer to the technical part—I have not seen those maps either. And I do not know what the combination is. There are many people I know who are as worried about that combination as you are, particularly in small island states. Because what people are realizing is that it’s not going to be one thing at one time. You get here, and you get hit there, and then you get hit in the face again, right? And again, just because of what—where I’m coming from, I’ll give you the Pakistan example.

These floods that you’ve been hearing about, actually, the flood isn’t that bad. Pakistan is used to floods, and it isn’t that bad. Something happened there which was in some ways synonymous to what you are talking about. What happened is that six weeks before the floods, there was massive heat and near drought, which means you essentially get a clay soil, right, that has been totally depleted. Three weeks before what we call the floods, there was massive rain—monsoon which was seven times the expected normal—seven times. And those were the first pictures that came. And again, that is clearly because of climate. Seven times doesn’t happen.

You know, and they came. And what that meant was on totally dry land they created this sort of lake effect, the type of picture you saw. And then came a flood which was higher than usual, but would have been manageable. Why am I giving you this example? That’s the one punch, two punch, three punch, much like your tides. Now, if you are a small island country, that’s what you are worried about. You are worried about that even if sea level rise on its own you can deal with in adaptation, you can prepare for. What happens when that happens, and the tidal change happens? It is the uncertainty—what makes climate particularly unpredictable is the uncertainty of what we are seeing, not simply the magnitude of the change.

Now, and this is particularly true for sea level rise. I am an optimist still. I think we are a wise enough species, particularly for sea level rise. We are able to change our life patterns and where we live. We have technology in many places to deal with it. But the reason we worry about is not because sort of—you know, it’s not like Hollywood, where New York will be half underwater. I really don’t think that will happen. I think we will get—come to our senses well before that. But it is this one-two-three punch of multiple climatic events happening together. Sorry I don’t have a technical answer to your question, but it is a very good question.

FASKIANOS: I’m going to take the next question from Molly O’Brien, who’s at George Mason University.

Climate change demonstrates the complex ways in which food, energy, and water are interconnected systems. What are the most promising approaches you’ve seen to addressing climate change from a nexus perspective, rather than addressing distinct aspects of food, energy, and water individually?

NAJAM: Thank you for that. I have seen some promising discussion, even if not fully implemented yet. You know, I’ve talked about—and I’m glad you talk about this. So as I’ve talked about this age of adaptation, there is a—I don’t know if it’s an opportunity—but there is—there is a hidden opportunity in that. And the hidden opportunity is that adaptation is essentially development. Show me any adaptation activity, and I will show you a development activity. I’m particularly talking about developing countries. And it is particularly about food, water—in particular about food and water. Food, in many ways, is nature’s way of packaging water.

And so that’s—the nexus is the answer. Now, one of the things—I’ll give you one example of work that I had done many years—a few years ago. Again, in Pakistan, where we looked at potential climatic impacts on agriculture. This is a mostly agriculture country. And what we found—we were only looking at certain crops and certain parts of the country. So it’s not for the entire—but still for a country that majorly depends on this. The finding—I may be slightly off on the numbers, but I’m trying to recall—was that yield could go down by about 12 percent, right? Twelve percent is huge, if countries’ economies are depending on something.

The interesting thing is not that. As I said, the number may be slightly off, somewhere in that range. What was interesting was that with adaptation interventions, good management, agricultural management, water management, better water use efficiency, better use of various technologies and so on and so forth, there could be a net benefit, even after accounting for climate change. And what that means is that there may be an opportunity around the world, if we take the nexus approach—and this is why sort of moving simply from carbon management to what you’re calling the nexus approach is not only a good answer, it is the only answer.

And again, we see this not only in developing countries. We see this as countries think about net zero. I want to come to net zero again, because I’m not fully a fan of it. But the good thing about net zero is that it says: What can we do as a system rather than as a one-point lever on carbon going up and down? So short answer to your question is, what you’re calling the nexus approach is the only approach to adaptation. And in fact, having the most vulnerable countries start focusing on that food-water nexus, rather than only on emissions, is a good thing.

You know, Bangladesh can bring its emissions down to zero. World emissions aren’t going to see much of a dent, right? But if Bangladesh starts focusing on food and water, it can make an actual difference on the type of impacts that 200 million people will face.

FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to take the next question, raised hand, from Evaristus Obinyan.

Q: Can you hear me?

FASKIANOS: Yes. Tell us your affiliation, please.

Q: I’m Dr. Evaristus Obinyan. I’m a criminologist. (Laughs.) As you can see, I’m not in the science field, but I’m very interested in this particular issue. I’m a professor at the Middle Georgia State University in Macon, Georgia.

Now, I—listening to you intently, I thought I heard you say stop it from happening. But after I’ve seen the digitized presentations, I realized that you were—you wanted to use it—it’s sort of happening or deteriorating. Because you are saying that to stop the—this from happening—you know, absolutely, it’s already happening—to stop it from deteriorating. Now, some say, like myself—I said nothing works. This is just the story of the planet. It has to go through this major evolution. How, then, can we stop the deterioration? Maybe, actually, it won’t matter really, or maybe we can use science and technology to manage or attempt to mitigate the natural planet evolution.

FASKIANOS: Thank you.

NAJAM: I hope I got the gist. I think I did, but if I failed—if I missed something, my apologies. There are two central points I want to pick up from that. I am not as pessimistic as you seem to be. I do think things work. I think—first of all, you’re right. You’re right, what we are seeing is a deterioration. Our efforts to try to mitigate have not yielded. And despite the fact that we have much higher interest in climate, and despite the fact that people sort of want to do the right thing, the fact of the matter is that line about emissions is just going upward, and upward, and upward. So that’s a reality. You are exactly right.

But I am not going to extrapolate that into the belief that we can’t do anything. I think we have been reluctant to change lifestyle. And despite the fact—you know, we are an amazing generation. We are—my generation was amongst the first generation in the world which had more food than the world needed. And yet, people were hungry. We have more technology, better science than ever before. And we had more money, and yet people were sleeping poor.

So the question is not of the ability to do it. The question is of willingness to do it. I mean, I have—I have faith in our species. I believe that it is a race between human knowledge and human wisdom. I think we have the knowledge to lick the problem, without creating lifestyles that are extremely uncomfortable. I’m not sure we have the wisdom to do it in time. We keep seeing that again. So I’m not willing to give up and say, well, this is inevitable. This is not inevitable. This is a choice. We make the choice. And I hope we can make an alternative choice.

Now, the question then is, how will we do that? And I know it’s going to sound glib, I think at least theoretically the answer is what we've had for a number of years, which is sustainable development. But we need to look at this growth model again, that growth for its own sake as a goal keeps too fixated on this constant growth pattern, as opposed to moving towards a lifestyle that is comfortable and yet that doesn’t kill the planet that has given you this amazing sort of set of resources.

FASKIANOS: Great. Thank you. I’m going to take Ivan Ramirez’s question, from the University of Colorado, Denver. And he’s originally from Ecuador.

When I think about and discuss climate justice, I focus or relate it to health, existing disparities, and how climate exacerbates inequities. From your perspective, how is health being leveraged in the climate negotiations, as it relates to climate justice?

NAJAM: On that last part, unfortunately it’s not. Unfortunately, it’s not. It’s a beautiful question. Thank you very much for asking that. And health is just one of the areas, like many that, you know, the first question pointed out about that, about—from South Africa. This is the nature of not just climate, but of the development. That once one thing goes wrong, there is a cycle of other things unraveling. Again, since today I’ve been talking about floods in Pakistan, right now the biggest issue in Pakistan is actually not water. It is dengue. It is the mosquito. It is health, right? So that is one way in which climate events trigger.

The other and more important way to answer this is, you know, you’ve noticed that I talk about ourselves as a species. I hope other people do too. I think it is useful to think of ourselves as a species, amongst many, on this planet. If you think about that, one of the things that happens is you realize we’re not the only species adapting to climate change. That’s why dengue is happening in Pakistan, even in the north, next to the Himalayas. It shouldn’t. It’s a tropical disease. So the mosquito also changes when the climate changes. And that is what’s called vector-borne disease.

So amongst the scariest things in the science, and amongst the things that we actually know much less about—because we’ve been focused on carbon—is what is going to happen on vector disease? But just about all climate scientists are worried about if the climate changes, it is not just what happens to humans or, you know, the big sexy species like panda bears and polar bears. But what is going to happen to disease vectors? And disease starts moving to places where it wasn’t endemic. Which means those places are not ready for it. And again, we are still struggling to come out of COVID.

Now, COVID wasn’t because of this, but people who study Ebola have been—started worrying about that, that disease vectors move. Dengue is probably amongst the one that is talked about the most, because here is a tropical, maybe equatorial disease, that has been moving upwards, both in South Asia and the Mediterranean. So the health impacts are, in fact, one of those big ones, though they have not been talked about as much as climate change. Which is not to say that people are not interested in it, it is just that we don’t know enough about it. But people are worried about it.

The justice issue of all of these things—I don’t want us to lose the justice aspect. The justice aspect essentially comes from the fact that those who are most vulnerable, those who are most likely to see the impacts, are not the ones who are most responsible for creating this. That’s the dynamic that creates that divisive politics of injustice.

FASKIANOS: Let me go next to Gary Prevost, who’s raised his hand. And if you could—there we go.

Q: Gary Prevost, College of St. Benedict in Minnesota.

As I understand it, you’re basically suggesting that the resource allocation in the coming years needs to be much more on the side of adaptation than mitigation, especially in the global south. Does this mean that, say, the $100 billion a year, if it could be achieved, that would be used in the global south would be primarily more traditional development aid for the—in all of the fields that we’ve talked about, and not so much to create green energy in the—in the south? And that in the north it would still continue to be the focus on mitigation, since we’re the ones creating the carbon footprint. Am I understanding your basic argument that way? And then finally, if it is going to be traditional—more traditional development aid, do you think that’s going to make it easier or harder to achieve it politically from the global north countries?

NAJAM: Gary, that’s a brilliant question. And you’ve really sort of unwrapped what I’m saying, what I was saying politely you have said more bluntly. And you’ve also highlighted, very, very politely and diplomatically, why it is very, very difficult. So the easiest part of your question is the last part, will it make it easier or more difficult? Clearly, more difficult. Will it even be possible? Probably not.

So when I say that’s what—if I think that’s what should happen, that doesn’t mean that I think it will happen. Because we don’t have any models of massive reparations or, you know, international affairs doesn’t work on your fault, you pay me. There isn’t an international environmental court, or any court, that is going to do this. So how is this going to happen, except through goodwill? And at the scale, that goodwill there is no evidence we will be seeing.

But let me first come to your question, because your—the way you framed it, which is—which is kind of right. Kind of right. So I do think that going to the old essential principle that no one else talks about these days, but which was part of the original UN agreements on climate, et cetera, which is common but differentiated responsibility. I wish we had taken it more seriously. The idea of common but differentiated responsibility was: Global climate change is all of our responsibility, but it is a differentiated responsibility.

Those who have had high emissions already have a high responsibility to bring them down. Those who have low emissions now have a responsibility to try to keep it lower and not go on that same trajectory by using better technology, et cetera. And those who have historical high responsibility for emissions should help create the conditions that whatever impacts happen are not catastrophic. So which meant that all countries should do something, but different countries should do differently.

In a way, if you are a developing country person, as I am, one of the arguments that comes to mind, and many people say it out loud, is that the north, if you will, the industrialized countries, have been pushing developing countries to do what they were supposed to do. We aren’t really cutting our emissions that much, but why don’t you do it, Bangladesh? Bangladesh, you do EV policy. Bangladesh, you do solar policy. Or Pakistan. Or Papua New Guinea, or Burkina Faso, or whatever. I do think that it will be better, rather than pushing them only on emissions—because, you know, their emissions aren’t that much—so it is to bend the curve so that their future emissions are restricted, I understand that, right?

But it’s not really solving the problem. Now that we have adaptation looming at us, I do think it is the right policy to have countries, especially with large vulnerabilities and large populations, get ready for the hit that is coming, that is already there. I don’t see that easily happening, but I do think that that is the right thing. Now, you have rightly exactly pointed out the argument from my climate friends usually is: But that’s not climate. That’s just development. That’s what they wanted to do anyhow, right? And the argument is, you’re trying to divert our climate money to your traditional development agenda.

I understand the argument. I don’t agree with it, because, A, I hope it is not traditional. So let’s take a country that’s not a developing countries, the Netherlands. If there’s any country in the world that is historically prepared for climate impacts, past climate impacts, it is the Netherlands. How did it do that? Infrastructure. So I understand a lot of adaptation investment will be infrastructure. A lot of adaptation expenditure will look like traditional development. But I hope it is not traditional development. I hope it is sustainable development.

And you are exactly right. I think one of the reasons we haven’t gone back—(audio break)—that route is because my old friends, people like myself maybe, who come to the climate side look at adaptation as somehow a dilution, even stealing climate money for development. And that is why—Irina has heard me say this before—climate is not, must not be, cannot be seen as the opposite of development.

FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to combine two written questions from Leda Barnett at Our Lady of the Lake University, who says: You’ve discussed insights on shared governance via COP and the shortcomings of multilateral diplomacy. We should continue that, of course, but do you think approaches like sanctions or smart power would be effective? Are there examples of this being used effectively? And then Diamond Bolden, who’s an undergraduate at Xavier University of Louisiana: U.S. is not impacted as much as other countries. However, we contribute to it. What policy can we implement to progress on environmental justice? Or I guess, she meant to help progress on environmental justice.

NAJAM: You know, because of, again, the recent events, I see a lot of anger in a number of developing countries. That’s what I’m trying to bring here that, you know, there’s something growing out there. And a lot of it, you’ve seen that in major newspapers, New York Times, Washington Post, sort of, you know, people from developing countries are writing op-eds about reparations, about—some compare it to slavery and payments have to be made, and all that. Logically, I partly sympathize with that. But I am a realist enough to recognize that’s not how politics happens.

So sanctions on who, right? (Laughs.) Are we going to put sanctions on floods? The flood isn’t going to—just because I tell it to stop, going to stop. So I’m sure you don’t mean that. Are we seeing sanctions on rich countries or rich people to pay? That sort of power dynamic, I don’t know any example in history where the weak can impose sanctions on the rich, on the strong. Now, one of the things, by the way no one has pushed me on this. You should. I keep talking north and south, but it’s not just north and south. It’s not rich countries, poor countries. It’s rich people, poor people. The same flood in Pakistan, you know, people ask me, is your family safe? Yes, they are. I come from middle class, affluent enough. The flood impacts the poorest people in Pakistan. And the richest people in Pakistan also have high emissions, right? So it’s not as stark as that.

And this goes back to the last part of the second question you asked. Yes, the U.S. has higher emissions but, again, the question that hasn’t come, the U.S. has serious environmental injustice questions of its own. It doesn’t mean that all of the U.S. is equally responsible. And as the climate changes, it is the poorest and most vulnerable in the U.S. who are going to be impacted. Again, the reason I keep saying I am particularly worried about this is as that happens whatever will there might be amongst my U.S. friends to talk about global climate justice, they are going to be distracted immediately by the most real, much more close, much more visible impacts of climate justice within the country.

I’ll take a slight detour, Irina, but I think it’s a relevant one. This is from Professor Bullard’s work many, many—thirty years ago. You know, when he used to point out—this is not about climate, but it’s very much related—take a map of the U.S. And on that map, put a pin on wherever a superfund, most hazardous waste dumps are. And what you have just created is a map of the poorest African American communities in the U.S. OK, that’s the environmental justice question here. So just—it hasn’t come up, but I don’t want to sound as if this is simply a north-south issue. Within the south, within the north, and then within the north-south, because climate is not looking at those borders. Those are our creations, not the climate’s.

FASKIANOS: Yes. I’m going to take the next question from Keith Baker, who has a raised hand.

Q: Can you hear me?

FASKIANOS: We can.

Q: Hey, yeah. I’m Keith Baker. I work for Dallas College. I teach accounting and finance.

One of the things I’ve noticed of the last several years is that rural water systems in the United States are deteriorating at a very rapid rate. As a matter of fact, some ones I’m personally aware of, because I have some friends who work in the education industry for teaching water treatment plant people, is that they’re sending out notices to very large populations of people that says it’s not safe to drink this water. It’s not safe to bathe in this water. Do not get this water in your eyes. Oh, by the way, extended exposure to this water in taking a shower might give you cancer.

Now, if that’s happening in rural America, that means that some of the other infrastructure problems that we have, like in the Dallas area where I live where we’ve had these what I call downpours that have increased in intensity in the last several years, where our water runoff system has been overwhelmed. And neighborhoods that are a good hundred feet above the normal floodplains coming from creeks are having waters back up from the storm sewer system being overwhelmed, and starting to see some houses flooded that you would have never seen flooded twenty years ago or thirty years ago.

NAJAM: So, Keith, this goes back to my previous point that climate doesn’t discriminate, in this sense. Now, the map I showed there is greater vulnerability in certain parts of the world, but all parts are vulnerable. The distinction also is that if you are in a richer country, you at least theoretically have the ability to deal with it. Like hurricanes, I mean, the same hurricane comes to Haiti and then to Florida. We here in the U.S. have a greater ability to—to just to be able to buy our way out of the impacts. We can build better. We can move people. We have the resources.

And therefore, one of the things you always notice about with hurricanes is that when they hit the Caribbean the headlines are about how many lives lost. And when they hit our shores, the headlines are usually about the economic cost of that. That’s a good thing. I hope for every country it’s only an economic loss, right? But you are exactly right, now the—again, from a political point of view, as these things that you are describing in rural America, and some of it very scary from what you say, as that happens countries are going to find it more and more difficult. They’re already not inclined to support other countries for environmental justice, for climate justice. And if the pressure from within their country is higher, they’re going to be less and less inclined.

And this relates, for those of you who study geopolitics, not even climate, what that means is that another fault line in a very fractured world appears. So you already have a world, in terms of geopolitics, that seems to be fracturing in various ways, and you have various pulls and pushes. In comes climate, just like we saw in COVID, right, when we thought vaccine diplomacy from different countries. That reaction is also going to exacerbate. But that’s the multiplier.

FASKIANOS: So I’m going to take the next question from Jeanie Bukowski, who is at Bradley University, and sitting in now with her undergraduate class. Thirty-four students, science and politics of global climate change.

Could you talk a little more about how individuals, especially young people, can take action on climate justice?

NAJAM: I hope I’m amongst friends. (Laughs.) I’ll tell you what I tell my students and what I tell my kids. The good news is that we have now the type of—particularly in the U.S., but all across the world, actually—all across the world, all across the world, particularly in the young, there is a very heightened sense that this issue is real and that something has to be done. A lot of that has been channeled at you guys, meaning my generation, haven’t done what you were supposed to do, which is exactly correct.

But not enough—as, you know, my grandmother used to say, point one finger at someone and at least three point back at you. Not enough is being spent on what we are doing with our own lifestyle. And I think sort of that—the reason why we keep talking more about it but the graph on actual emissions doesn’t shift we need to interrogate, right? And some of those easy answers don’t really work.

So, for example, and I hope I am among friends so I’ll be blunt. It is—it is nice not to have a car and say, OK, because I don’t have a car therefore I don’t have emissions. But if you’re using a lot of Uber, those are your emissions. Those are not the emissions of that car—the Uber driver. When you get UberEats to deliver food, those are not the emissions of the restaurant. Those are your emissions. When I get Amazon packages three times delivered to my home, the world’s statistics might count them as China’s emissions, because something was created in China, but those are my emissions, right?

And ultimately, it is this question of lifestyle. And what I was saying earlier about we are—we have the technology. We have the knowledge. I am not sure we have the wisdom. And ultimately, that wisdom will come individually. I do not see scientifically any way—absolutely we are running out of time. I’ll be absolutely blunt. We are still living the dream that somehow I won’t change anything I do, but by corporations doing it or governments doing it there will be a magic wand by which this will be solved. I just do not see the math. And therefore, responsibility does begin with the letter I, me.

FASKIANOS: I think that is a perfect place to end this discussion. So thank you for that. Adil Najam, this was a terrific hour. And there are so many questions—good questions and comments, both raised hands and in the Q&A, I regret that we could not get to all of them. But we’ll just have to have you back. So thank you very much. Appreciate it.

NAJAM: Thank you for having me. Good luck to the planet, everyone.

FASKIANOS: Yes, exactly. We all—we all have to think about the “I” of what we are doing, for sure.

The next Academic Webinar will be on Wednesday, September 28, at 1:00 p.m. Eastern time. We are hosting Christopher Tuttle, who is the senior fellow and director of the Renewing America initiative here at CFR. In the meantime, I’d encourage you to follow CFR at @CFR_Academic. And you can visit CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for research and analysis on global issues. Thank you all, again, for being with us today. And we look forward to you joining us again next week on September 28.

So thank you, again. And thank you, Dr. Najam, for this hour.

NAJAM: Thank you all.

(END)

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