 Good afternoon. My name is Mona Yacubian. I'm the Vice President for the Middle East and North Africa here at the U.S. Institute of Peace. USIP was founded by Congress in 1984. We are a national, nonpartisan public institution dedicated to helping prevent, mitigate, and resolve violent conflict globally. I am both honored and thrilled to be moderating this afternoon's discussion on a compelling report that was recently published by the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University. Entitled the Ripple Effect, a U.S. diplomatic strategy for a changing world order, the paper calls for a new American approach to multilateralism in the context of an emerging and highly competitive strategic environment. China's steady rise as a global power, combined with more recent events, including Russia's invasion of Ukraine, highlight a number of profound shifts that are underway in our world. These include a system of global governance that's under extreme duress, an increasing diffusion of power that in turn has amplified the growing importance of middle powers, countries such as India, Turkey, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Japan. These countries can play more of a role in addressing geopolitical problems that threaten global peace and security. The report delves into the need for a commensurate shift in American diplomacy to more effectively engage with these powers while allowing for the fact that their individual and collective interests may not always align with ours. We've established a distinguished panel this afternoon to dive more deeply into the report and its fascinating insights. Ambassador Barbara Bodine is distinguished professor in the practice of diplomacy and director of the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown. Prior to this, she spent 30 years in the U.S. Foreign Service focused primarily on the Arabian Peninsula and greater Persian Gulf. Chester Crocker, to my immediate left, is the James R. Schlesinger Distinguished Fellow in Strategic Studies at ISD. He's previously served as Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, as well as the chairman formally of USIP's board. We're also delighted to have Dhruva Jayashankar, Executive Director of the Observer Research Foundation. In addition to authoring numerous books and policy reports focused on India's foreign relations and broadly on defense and security policy, Mr. Jayashankar writes a regular column for the Hindustan Times. A warm welcome to all of you and also let me also note we have a virtual audience attending as well, so welcome to those tuning in online. Barbara, I'd like to start with you if I could. Maybe say a few words about the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy as well as the report itself. What was the impetus for this report? How did you go about assembling the working group that contributed to it? Thank you very much. And thank you very special thanks to USIP for hosting this event and for you for chairing this panel. We very much appreciate this. ISD is a part of Georgetown. We were established in 1978 and part of our core mission is to try to bring scholarly theory and the realities of the practitioner world together for the benefit of each. Part of how we go about that is we have for several decades been hosting working groups such as the one that produced the ripple effect where we bring in scholars, think tankers, practitioners, NGOs, a very broad range of people to work through emerging diplomatic and strategic challenges. We kind of stay away from the issue du jour on the front page of the newspaper and we're trying to look at what's coming at the horizon. And clearly the Russian invasion of Ukraine has set off seismic changes and we wanted to really look at what are some of those long term ramifications and implications. And the fruits of all of that labor and Chet was a major drafter and Dr. McFarland from my staff was key to this. Is this report on the ripple effect? So actually Chet, let's turn to you as one of the lead authors of the report and I think there are lots of ways we should look at this. I want to try and for the audience and for this discussion set the context a little bit more. The report zeroed in on Russia's invasion of Ukraine and sort of noted it as Barbara has as well that it was a seminal moment and that it upended policymakers thinking. What's the significance of Russia's invasion? What are the trends that the report sort of zeroed in on that perhaps the invasion itself didn't beget but that were amplified by that particular event? Thank you very much Mona. I think you put it very well. The invasion of Ukraine was a catalyst and an accelerant for existing trends that were already in some cases visible but Ukraine was a pivot in many ways. And of course we learned a lot immediately when we began going around the world looking to get majorities and various institutions to isolate Russia if you will and to pursue our interests. And we found out that actually that wasn't quite the obvious slam dunk that you might have thought it would be. Why? Why was it not obvious to everybody, to every member of the UN that this should be condemned? Well there are some reasons and some of the reasons that we discussed in the working group were things like had we been paying attention to issues of really serious importance to other countries. In addition to ourselves and our NATO allies. Issues like for example climate funding, climate mitigation funding which has been much discussed at COP28. Issues like COVID availability of vaccines where we actually sharing, where we are organizing others to share. Issues like global governance which is a big one. Global economic and political governance. And I think I guess the way I would put it is that while we have been often doing a kind of pre-feaks diplomacy, many other countries in the world were doing a kind of a la carte diplomacy where they would choose their partners and their alliances and their relationships. Actually not alliances, just relationships. A la carte. And we were kind of in this pre-feaks mode. And that's just not the way the world is today. So that was another reason why the Ukraine invasion was kind of a good pivot. A third factor briefly. The world economic situation is changing dramatically. Now think about it, there are almost three and a half billion people living between Istanbul and Japan. And many of them are spending a fortune on infrastructure and they're also trading with each other and talking about all sorts of deals. I think we often assume that whenever our interest rates go up, all the countries that borrow in dollars are going to suffer deeply and go into debt. That didn't happen this time. We had problems but if you look at emerging markets around the world, they didn't suffer the way they used to. So something's going on in the world economy that we took our eye off the ball and we need to put it back on the ball. Chet, if I could, I'd like to draw you out further on one other driver that you all raised in the report, which is the global diffusion of power. And you've sort of talked about it, you've sort of characterized it. But maybe could you, for the audience, just give us a deeper sense of what that means. What does the global diffusion of power look like as a central feature of this changing world order we find ourselves in? It means that many countries have agency. There are many important countries out there that we often don't necessarily attribute importance to. Now, Dhruva will speak from the standpoint of India and other things he may want to talk about. And India is at the top of the list. But think of South Korea, think of Australia, think of Vietnam, think of Turkey, think of Israel, think of the Saudis. Lots of other countries out there that have real serious agency and can catalyze things to happen, can host things to happen, whether we like it or not. And wait a minute, that's not the way the world's supposed to work, right? We used to think that it was kind of automatic that our role is to decide what's going to happen. And the role of other people is to follow what we suggest is going to happen. Leaders and followers kind of world. Well, that's not that kind of world anymore. So, I mean, think Indonesia. So many examples of countries that are big time players in the international scene. To say nothing I've been to you, which is a bigger time. Well, exactly. So that's the cue to bring you in, Dhruva. And how does this shifting order look like from the vantage point of India? How did India view Russia's invasion of Ukraine? And maybe give us a sense of the... We've talked in our call before about a shifting kaleidoscope. How do we understand this emerging world order from the perspective of a middle power like India? Well, thank you. First of all, thank you to USIP and ISD for inviting me. Both are great institutions that I hold in very high regard. I'm also very honored to be here with two very distinguished ambassadors who've had long careers in public service. I come at this from somebody who is not a diplomat, who has spent some time in India and in the United States. And I'm not sure my perspective necessarily reflects that of 1.4 billion Indians, let alone the entire global south. But I will try to offer a few observations that I think might be relevant to this discussion. And I would also say I would encourage everyone to read the report, which I did. It was very insightful and I think a real attempt at trying to grapple with some very complex issues that are shaping the international order. I think one of the striking things about the international order that we live in today is that we don't really have a consensus for what it's called. Very soon after World War II, George Orwell coined the term Cold War, which seemed to have caught on. But there was a whole vocabulary that very quickly in the late 1940s became a sort of consensus in terms of how observers viewed this new post-war world. Containment was, you know, George Kennan famously wrote about it. Winston Churchill spoke about an iron curtain having descended upon Europe, the language of deterrence and mad and nuclear deterrence very quickly became part of people's popular understanding of the changing international order. And the fact is, you know, it's almost three, more than three decades after the end of the Cold War, we don't really have a sort of consensus. We call it the post-Cold War, but that's really defining what it's not, rather than what it is. That being said, it's interesting. I think there is a great general understanding that something has changed. Secretary Blinken spoke recently somewhere where he said the post-Cold War order has come to an end. So clearly there's a realization. But what exactly defines that order still remains to be seen. I think a few characteristics are worth keeping in mind. One is the manner in which the Cold War ended is really quite remarkable in human history. In the past, at least the recent modern history, new orders came up following the collapse of the old order in usually a very cataclysmic war. So, you know, the Napoleonic Wars resulted in what was known as the Concert of Europe. We had the Conference of Vienna and then the Concert of Europe. This is something that the late Henry Kissinger wrote about quite a bit. We saw after World War I the League of Nations, an attempt being formed under Woodrow Wilson to create a sort of new order that was not very successful. And then a sort of system in the post-Cold War, a post-World War II world, led by the United Nations, the Bretton Woods Institutions, and so forth. But the fact that the Cold War ended peacefully actually led to this sort of gap. And it appears to me a well-meaning attempt on the part of U.S. leaders in the 1990s, and many of you would have been observers of those developments, to bring in Russia, China, and many others into existing structures. So Russia was brought into the G7, became the G8. China was brought into the WTO. But what we seem to have underestimated is the degree of revisionism that countries like Russia and China had about this world order. That despite having benefited sometimes to a great degree from this U.S.-led international order, there has been a reason, and we can get into why that is, domestic politics, ideology, other reasons to overturn that international order. At the same time, as Ambassador Crocker mentioned, there has been this distribution of power. To just put a figure on it and to illustrate it, 30 years ago, the U.S. and its allies accounted for over 80% of the global economy. Today it is just a shade over 50%. And that represents the big shift. What's remarkable, I think, and I tell this to my American friends a lot, is that the United States share of the global economy has held relatively steady. It's been about 20 to 25% in this period. And so it's U.S. power, a lot of people describe, including in India, frankly, people describe the U.S. as a declining power. And I always have hastened to tell them the U.S. is not a declining power. In fact, I think the last 30 years have showed the resilience of the United States. Europe and Japan, on the other hand, particularly, have been, in relative terms, declining. And that gap has been really replaced by China, most first and foremost. India, to some degree. And other developing economies, including Indonesia, Russia, Brazil, many others. My final point on this, just bringing it back to the specific question, what does this look like from an Indian perspective? I think we're seeing an emerging order in which countries have agency, including India. India's own resources have grown significantly over the past few years. It's often overshadowed by China's rise, which has been spectacular over the past three decades. But India has grown significantly over the past few years. Today, India has global interests. I just came back from Mexico a little while ago, and you have Indian companies investing, and Mexican companies investing in India. You have India buying resources from Latin America, providing foreign assistance to Africa, playing a role in the security architecture in the Indo-Pacific. So that, I think, illustrates in some ways the kind of changing order that we are experiencing. At the same time, I think clearly we're in a world where the United States and China, in particular, have predominant power, are competing globally. And often, on an issue-by-issue basis, we are going to see countries having to make choices, having to work with one or the other. India, obviously, on most issues, I would say, is working much more closely with the United States today than certainly with China. But many other countries would try and leverage those relationships in a manner that was not too dissimilar to the early Cold Warriors. So let me start with that, but I think we're in for some very interesting times. So, Barbara, I'm going to come back to you, because I think one of the themes that seems to be emerging is we're in a new order, but we're not yet sure what it is or what to call it. Now, I'm not going to put you on the spot, Barbara, and have you coin for us now the term that's going to define the next order that we're in. But I have the word right here. I have it. I have it. Go. No, I don't. Go ahead, please. I think that what is clear is I think we often rely on old terminology, old ways of thinking about and trying to define this new order, and that's where and how we may get this wrong. Now, one of the ways we talk about it is that it's a multipolar world. So how should we define this? Is it multipolar? What do we mean by middle powers? The other term that's thrown around a lot, of course, is global south. And sometimes, I don't know if it's a... Yes, exactly. It could either be a rorsach test, or I'm not sure what, but some people love the term and embrace it. Others immediately have a reaction to it, all of which I think speaks to the fact that we really are in uncharted waters. But how should we think about this? Because terminology matters. Well, words matter, and I think the fact that at the end of World War II, when this new order, the new international order was being formed, the vocabulary seemed to have come pretty quickly and been agreed to and then became the basis of policy and actions. And I think the point that the post-Cold War era was always defined by what it was and we never came up with what it was. This is even more so, and we've got a lot of sticky words, old vocabulary that might have been accurate, but is less so. There's been a lot of talk about how the global south is one of the worst. I think it was Joe Nye pointed out that most of the countries in, quote, the global south are not in the south. So starting with that, it's a really bad term. We haven't quite figured that out. Even the west is not all in the west, so go figure. Multi-polar, I don't think is a particularly useful word either. We had bipolar, which has many implications. We had the romanticized idea of a unipolar world, which I think was more a figment of American imagination than reality. And then you've also, you know, is it a tripolar world? I think it is a, I'm going to get away from poles and polar, because the pole idea is one of camps, that you're with this pole or that pole. And what we're seeing is not multipolar, but what one person, not me, describes as multi-aligned, where countries shift their alignment, their partnership, their collaboration, based on an interest or an interest. For example, we don't have shared values with China, but we have a shared interest on climate change. Other countries where we may have shared values, but we may not have a great deal of shared interest on a particular topic. And so what you have is this kaleidoscope, and I like that word, this kaleidoscope of constantly shifting patterns and constantly shifting relationships. And I think one of the words, one of the new words of the year was situationship. And so I think we're kind of in a global situationship. You can Google the term and find out what I'm really talking about. The big change is this rise of middle powers, because back in the old days of poles, there was this concept of hedging. And we use it a great deal in our report, and I think it kind of speaks to the stickiness of words. But hedging has a duck and weave feel to it. And in my mind, I always come up with the vision of a hedgehog. What we have with middle powers, and middle powers are states that have sufficient economic stability, varying degrees of prosperity, but economic stability, they've moved out of poverty. They have political agency, they're able to define their own interests, and they know how they want to implement those interests. And they will work with whom ever is appropriate, necessary, useful toward that interest. And you see it a great deal in the Gulf, where the Gulf states work with Russia on oil policy, they work with China on investment, they work with us on security. They're not ducking and weaving. We've used the word a great deal, it's agency. I will define my interests, I will define my values, and then I will go and find the partners to work with. And so, unfortunately, I not only do not have a new word for global south, I don't like polarity, but I will go with multi-aligned. And I think we need to come up with something that captures this new middle power agency, and how that is what is defining this new world order, is the middle power. Not the three great powers, but the middle powers are the drivers. So, that brings me to want to sort of turn the discussion now a bit more. We're sort of setting the context a bit now, try to understand better. Let's start with from a U.S. perspective the opportunities and the challenges inherent in this new order that's emerging for the U.S. And Chad, I'd like to start with you on this question. I mean, how should sitting here in Washington, D.C., across the street from the State Department, what are both the challenges and the opportunities? And I think there are probably equal amounts of both. But what's your sense on that? There certainly are plenty of challenges. I don't necessarily envy my successors who are sitting over in that glorious piece of architecture, not this building, but the one over there. I don't envy them. A number of reasons for that. One reason is that a lot of the countries that we're talking about in the so-called global south, which is not all in the south, are autocratic countries. Not all of them, but a lot of them are. And there's nothing that autocrats like better than poking their finger in the eyes of us in the West. That's the way they get domestic buy-in. Poking your finger in the eye of the West is really good domestic politics in many, many countries. And I think we should recognize how often we've seen that recently. Just think about MBS in Saudi Arabia and the pleasure he takes in welcoming Vladimir Putin. It's just extraordinary when you think about sticking their finger in our eye. And he's not doing that because he doesn't want our defense equipment. He's doing it because it's good domestic politics in Saudi Arabia. You're a Middle East expert. You tell me if I'm wrong. I have a sense that that's the reason. And I see it in lots of other parts of the world where it's good politics to... So that means we're running against a kind of reflex action where countries are saying, don't tell us how to vote in the UN. We have our own agency. And by the way, we're not dependent on you anymore. If you look at our aid program in country after country after country and compare it to what it used to be, relatively speaking. We don't have that kind of independent or dependence relationship with many countries. So you combine that with the fact that there's a kind of geopolitical trend where invading a neighbor, whether it's Hamas invading Israel or Russia invading Ukraine or Venezuela threatening to take over two-thirds of Guyana, you name it. That reflex is out there. And we might not like it. We don't like it. But the fact is, what are we going to do about it? We've got to stop it in its tracks. And how many places do we have to stop it? And can we stop it by ourselves? So it's a real challenge. Having said that, there are opportunities. I think really serious opportunities because many countries want what we have to offer still. And we have things to offer that nobody else has to offer. It's in the defense sector, in the security sector, of course. Also in the corporate sector and in the economic assistance sector. So there's many types of countries which look to the U.S. still as a kind of balancing factor or as a key partner. And I would suggest that that might be true even in India. I'm going to stop there and turn the floor. So you keep teeing up Dhruva, which is, you're making my job a lot easier. I do think it's, again, this idea of not just the increased agency of middle powers, but the obvious desire to pursue the self-interest of each country. And in the case of India, Dhruva, I think we also should talk about, you sort of touched on it, the globalization that this is all taking place in. You are leading the U.S. branch of the largest Indian think tank, correct? And you talked about all kinds of engagements bilaterally between India and other countries. Help us understand then in a more cohesive way how India is projecting its influence in this globalized, multi-aligned world that we find ourselves in. And again, from the perspective of India, where are the opportunities and what are the challenges? So I would, I'll try to weave in a few different things. I mean, I think just taking a step back, the most important thing that will define the international order in the foreseeable future, the near future, I can't tell the long term, will be global competition between the United States and China. If you think what keeps the most people up in Washington late at night, and yes, there are immediate crises in Gaza and Ukraine and places, but what is the long-term challenge keeping most people up? It is global competition between the United States and China. And it's no longer relegated to the East Asia, the Indo-Pacific. It is playing out now on a global scale. And in almost every domain, not even traditional military domains, it's playing out in terms of competition over electric vehicle supply chains, over semiconductors, over international financing and lending terms, over international institutions. And that, by the way, the same thing is animating folks in Beijing as well. So this, I think, is the single thing that is... Now, in India, we had a bit of a learning curve around this. After the global financial crisis in 2008-2009, India saw an opportunity to work with China to establish better... and other developing economies to establish better bargaining terms in this changing international order. This was saw the first... This period saw the first BRIC summit. It saw India and China working together in climate negotiations, for example, while India at the same time was improving relations with Washington with the United States. What happened, though, and I think India learned this in some ways the hard way, was that China, for its own reasons, wasn't really willing to give much space to India or other developing countries as well. China was looking at things from its own perspective. And, I mean, you can run down a very long list of issues, vaccine diplomacy, you know, when COVID broke out, international order, the United Nations, security issues. Initially, China sent naval flotillas to the Indian Ocean under the guise of anti-piracy operations. But now it's established a base in Djibouti. This is really part of a larger term plan to show a sort of a military presence, its ability to project power globally. So I think India has learned that, you know, whether it was on regional security, on international institutions, on international economics and trade, China actually wasn't really interested in sharing space with anybody. And so this has actually now led to a situation where India's doubled down on its relationship with the United States. It established arguably a closer relationship to the U.S. than it's ever had. So I wonder whether, you know, part of me, other countries have experienced similar things. Australia had a very similar debate in discussion. Japan had a similar debate in discussion a little earlier. And I think we're starting to see some of that play out now in Europe, for example. Yeah, Italy stepped out of the Belt and Road Initiative. But, you know, I mean, I used to go to Brussels quite often about 10 years ago, and people were very open to, you know, China is not a threat. Yes, we don't like everything that they do. But, you know, it's good for business. It's good for our, you know, automated. Today there's serious concerns. What does it mean to have a closer relationship with China? So I think this is where it's going to go. And just bringing it back to the theme of the global south. You know, I would, in defense of the term, I do think there is something there. These are countries that, despite a lot of other differences, and the differences are often pointed out. And by the way, I found that the term global south has more acceptance in the global south than it does in the global north. But, broadly speaking, I'd say there's three things in common that countries of the global south have. One is a post-colonial history or memory. In some cases very distant, 200 years ago, in the cases of some Latin American countries, 20 years ago in some other cases. Secondly, late development. This was really post, you know, after the 1960s and 1970s. And as a combination of those two factors, it means not being, a feeling of not being adequately represented at international institutions. And these are, you know, whether you're talking about Columbia or India or Malawi or Vietnam, that's one thing that all, these are common traits that all these countries have. And that has led to some collective feelings. The international institutions need to be reformed so they can be better represented at these institutions. That they need to be equity when it comes to energy security, food security, health security. That their concerns need to be kept in mind. And this played out in the immediate wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. That debt financing needs to be more sustainable. That climate financing and climate justice needs to be taken more seriously. So if you look at what collectively these countries have been asking for, it largely flows from those conditions. So that's, Barbara, I would like to bring you in on exactly this point. And Druva has enumerated a number of sort of global governance challenges. But how, from your vantage point, maybe from this 100,000-foot level, how would you characterize global governance challenges in this emerging order, this multi-aligned order with middle powers asserting their agency, et cetera, and perhaps, and we'll get toward this in a little bit, but perhaps a lot of the international institutions no longer really fit for purpose with respect to power dynamics and the challenges that countries face. Yeah, I do want to do one little point on something that Chet made, is that there are countries who, as you put it, like to poke us in the eye. But to kind of go to the broader point, they're not trying to push us away. And I think that that is a very important balance that they will assert agency, which they have every right and proper to do. But they're trying to create space with other powers, not necessarily push it. It's not the old 1960s anti-Americanism. It's, we just want a little bit of breathing space. We want to be dealt with as a partner, and so we're not going to, if we disagree with you, we're not doing it just to be peevish and petty. We're doing it because we've defined our interests differently and so please accept that. International institutions do need to change, and I think this description of the global south and a shared world view and a shared perspective is something that we need to take into account. The conventional large multilateral institutions, the UN, everything that came out of World War II, are too large, too unwieldy. They can't be eliminated. Mr. Bolton notwithstanding. You need that convening space, that ability to debate, even if it's something as salutary as, guess what, not everyone's going to sign up for our Russia resolution. But what you're seeing is greater regionalism. It's either issue specific institutions or it's regionally specific institutions where there is a shared view and a shared identity, but not necessarily within each of these groups a unanimity or a monolithic set of policies. I think one of the things that we have to be careful of when we're looking at how we deal with this regionalism or this issue specific organizations is that we don't fall into the trap of deferring to the largest or most powerful within. The GCC is greater than Saudi Arabia. ASEAN is greater than Indonesia and on and on. And we have an interesting challenge or opportunity to go back to your question of how do we both operate in a multi-aligned world and how they will have relations with Russia and China, which we may not always like, but they still want to have relations with us. It's not an either or. It's not a with us against us. And also have the nuance of dealing with each of the member states in their uniqueness. So just to kind of default to my part of the world, dealing with Doha, not as a subsidiary of Riyadh. Oman is not a subsidiary of Abu Dhabi. And this extends to all the others and also within issue specific. So for a diplomat, you have to be both multilateral and extraordinarily good bilaterally simultaneously. And that's going to be, I think, great fun but a great challenge. So you're actually bringing us to, you know, the third kind of round of questions I wanted to raise before we turn it to the audience, which is recommendations. And how do we, so we've kind of laid out a context, we've talked a bit about both challenges and opportunities. And Barbara, I want to stay with you because the paper talks about something called the variable geometry. Am I getting that right on how? Another term that needs a new name. But I think you were sort of circling around that just now. Now, maybe can you talk a little bit more about, as we think about recommendations, as we think about, okay, what's the way forward? Now from an American perspective, you're a retired American diplomat, how should the United States think about the ways in which it pursues its diplomacy to be as effective as possible in advancing U.S. national security interests in a world such as the one that we've all just been wrestling with? Yes. I feel like we should have Miriam Webster here to help us with, you know, coming up with a whole new vocabulary. The variable geometry was a very awkward term, but at least the way I understand it or the way I will choose to define it is this developing the comfort and the confidence to work with different states as they have these shifting interests. We have core interests. We have core values. We have some core friends. And we need to recognize and hold on to that. We also have regions that are important to us and issues. And it can be kleptocracy. It can be climate change. It can be migration. It can be any number of things. Where we will need to work with states where the value system may be slightly different, where we will disagree on another issue. But this issue, this time, this place, and this time, this place may be, you know, five, ten years, we need to work together. We worked with the Soviet Union on non-proliferation. Despite our differences, we still work with the Russians on space. We have had this variable geometry for a long time, but we need to recognize it. As I said, we had a romantic idea about the unipolar world, and what we did with it was invade Iraq, which might not have been the best use of that particular power moment. But we need to sort of come back to dealing laterally with states as partners. So, Chet, I'm going to come to you, actually, because I think Barbara has laid out the challenge well, but let's maybe drill down a little further. What does a new diplomatic toolkit look like? And what skill sets need to be better cultivated in our young diplomats to operate more effectively in this very complex environment? Well, I'm glad to be asked for recommendations. I only have seven, and there'll be about 20, 30 seconds for each one. Yeah, I think one of the things I would focus on is the question of timing and the opportunity. Right now, we are in a very, very complicated and dangerous international situation. This is not the moment to begin building the bricks of a new international institution or international order. We have to wait till these wars are over, both for regional and for global reasons, before we can begin to stitch together something like a proper terminology for what Barbara has described as multi-alignment variable geometry. I'm not going to further go into that word thicket. I think Barbara has done it very well. But I don't think this is the moment to do it. So my first recommendation is not now. Don't try and give some kind of major speech whether you are this president or the next one, whoever that turns out to be, about how we're now going to define a new world order. This is not the right time for it. We've got to get some things under control in the Middle East and globally. You know, the meeting in San Francisco with Xi Jinping and Biden was interesting, but that's not the beginning of a new world order. It's sustaining a tolerable level of coexistence. So that's recommendation one. Recommendation two is we need to expand our portfolio of useful relationships with other countries. Expand our portfolio of relationships. We should be looking at what some smaller countries do very effectively. Countries like Qatar, countries like Switzerland, just to think of a couple, and they're not the only ones. Singapore is another one that makes a very special practice of building multi-stakeholder alliances and relationships with lots of other players. But why do they do it? They do it to create space so that people can communicate and solve problems. So that's a second or a third recommendation. We need to do a lot more training of our diplomats in multilateral affairs. Training, and not just training them, but actually giving them good jobs. Assigning them or recruiting them and assigning them to multilateral diplomacy. And related to that, and this is something I feel strongly about as a former assistant secretary of state for a regional bureau, we need to connect regional bureaus in our state department with functional bureaus in our state department so that they can actually foresee what's going to happen and be able to link together the issues and the interests, whether it's value-driven or interest-driven. We've got to enable the African Bureau to take that example and understand why COVID access was so darn important. And so that kind of thing needs to be brought together. So I'm up to recommendation number six, I think. UN reform, okay, yeah. Let's get India a permanent member of the Security Council and let's do it after the Ukraine war is over. Yeah. Let's draw you out a little bit further on this. I mean, here's one very specific recommendation that the report makes, which is that India should become a permanent member of the UN Security Council. Will that help solve this challenge? What more needs to be done to make these multilateral and international institutions fit for purpose and frankly more reflective of the times that we find ourselves in? Well, I was actually going to, you know, hearing all of this and reading the report, I was thinking a little bit about sort of how do you rethink the very concept of diplomacy for this changing world, the one we don't yet know how to define. And I was thinking a few things. You know, obviously, you know, I think India sees itself as having a strong case for a permanent member of the UN Security Council. Not just India, it's working with a few other countries. It's called the G4, Germany, Brazil, Japan, and India have been working together. But, you know, I think beyond that, a few things are happening. So let me say, sort of group into two points. One is, I think, already we're seeing a host of new institutions taking shape, somewhat organically, that are setting standards that will have a very long knock-on, set of knock-on effects. And these are things that sometimes don't get that much attention. I'm not talking about BRICS and things like that that do get the attention. But organizations like GPAI, which is a global partnership on artificial intelligence, the Artemis Accords, which is setting new standards for space exploration and cooperation, the Mineral Security Partnership, which is about how countries can work together on critical mineral supply chains. I mean, these are all U.S.-led initiatives, by the way, which have incredible buy-in from allies, but also a lot of partners. India's a member of all three of the organizations that have been mentioned. But these are actually doing the work, the hard work of setting the standards in many critical areas of the near future. So we're going to start seeing some organic institution-building where the traditional multilateral institutions have not been as successful. There's now been a very concerted effort this year. And India has pushed this through the G20 to widen the mandate of the World Bank, to better allow it to meet some of the needs, particularly climate financing needs to be there to work with the private sector in blended finance and other mechanisms. So the thing is that the project of institutional reformation is under way, sometimes in ways that don't get the necessary attention that they deserve. But I also want to address, since we're here, a few thoughts briefly on how to think through diplomacy. And I realize I'm saying this on sharing the stage with some very experienced diplomats. But it's occurred to me, just as an observer and as a well-wisher, just a few thoughts, pretty for the United States. Diplomats are the eyes and ears of their government in post. And in the old days, you would be sent out on a posting. You were there for three years. You had very limited contact with your home country. You would travel back maybe once or twice in the middle of your posting. But you were the eyes and ears of your government. When I was living in Delhi, I would see diplomats from various countries coming in for one year or two years. It's been half the time in training, a lot of time on home leave, on personal leave. And by the time they'd started to figure the place out, they were shunted off to their next posting. And so it was very basic. And this is not just with the U.S. Foreign Service. I see the same thing would apply to the Indian Foreign Service. I think we need to be in a place where four or five year postings are more common. The topics that diplomats need to be focused on, it used to be a lot of emphasis on arms control during the Cold War, on missile technologies. That was something that a lot of diplomats became well-versed in, sanctions later. But today it's subjects like health security, it's vaccines, it's semiconductors, it's battery technology. And these are things that diplomats need to become well-versed in. In fact, our partner organization, ORF, in India, has started something, they started last year or two years ago, called the Forum for Future Diplomacy, working with the foreign ministries of, let me see if I can remember this, India, UK, Australia, UAE, and Japan. Precisely to train diplomats, it's like a two-week course in India on how to sort of think through some of these issues. A third thing, and I know this is a congressional-funded institution, but I do think the delay ambassadors confirmed is a net loss for the United States. It's something that, in India, there was no ambassador for two or three years, and it's not a big deal in some ways, Ambassador Garcetti's doing a great job, but it's something that is easily exploited by the US as competitors to say, look, the US doesn't care about you. And while obviously the Senate needs to do its job in due diligence and all that, I think a system whereby you have faster confirmation processes would do a lot to at least not weaken, unnecessarily weaken the US footprint abroad. Two other quick thoughts. One is a lot of the institutions, not I wouldn't say at the State Department or in what we think of as diplomacy, but are parallel to that, were designed for a particular purpose, often during the Cold War, but today no longer seem to serve that purpose. And I'm thinking USAID, Voice of America, the Peace Corps, Radio Free Europe, the IVLP program, and these became sort of a do-good public diplomacy kind of function in the immediate post-Cold War period. But I do think some of their purposes need to be rethought a little bit in a much more competitive environment. How can they be the best use of taxpayer money to advance American objectives? And finally, just bringing you back to this institution a little bit, there was a book that was written by an academic, Richard Stanford named Alexander George and he came to Washington in I believe the early 90s, somebody may recall here, and he wrote a book called Bridging the Gap. And it was basically how can the academic community actually help policy makers? And he listed out a few things that could be done. I think he was at a USIP if I recall, yeah. And I think it's worthwhile thinking how can the academic community and ISD and USIP are perfectly situated for this. How can they use some of the big ideas in academia, the kind of large data sets that are gathered? How can that be put towards how can that be made useful for policy makers? So those are my thoughts. Can I make one very small point? Yes, and then I want to open it up to our audience. Yes. That this report in these working group series are part of a Carnegie Bridging the Gap. There we go. ISD has been working on Bridging the Gap with these reports bringing academics and practitioners together. So that's what we do. So thank you for endorsing us. There we are. So I'd like to bring members of the audience and if you have a question, just raise your hand. We have mics around. We can get to you. Those online, please use the chat box on the event page. Questions? From the audience. Yes, please. In the front row. Hi. I don't think it's on. You're good. Hi, I'm Chris Inman. I'm the Senior Program Officer on the Program for Violent Extremism here at USIP. And I primarily work in Africa except now with Sarhang in Iraq. And I'd like to know more about I really agree with the need to bridge my work on a functional team with regional colleagues. But it's not that common. And I'm curious if you have thoughts on how we can reform this within our embassies not only within the same embassy but in a place like the Sahel where the crisis the multiple crises are very regional. Are there additional reforms that we can do to be able to more effectively address regional problems? Who would like to take that? Do you want to start chat? Yeah, I think you put your finger on a real serious challenge which is connecting the dots in our diplomacy. And some of our embassies in Africa are tiny and some of them don't have ambassadors in them. So we recently read about there was a coup d'etat in Niger there was no ambassador there an ambassador arrived a few weeks after the coup d'etat, brilliant brilliant. And quite often the people who actually have any staffing capacity in these small posts or DOD or the intelligence community or USAID not mainstream state people political, economic, cultural officers. So that's a problem and it's a problem also if the folks back home in the regional bureau in that funny building over there are not doing the connecting of the dots either. So I think you put your finger on a serious issue. So from one of our virtual audience members there's a question that actually was going to be a question I was going to ask if we didn't have others. So let me ask it which is and maybe we'll start with you Dhruva on this how will the BRICS plus expansion affect its influence when each power is individually increasing in global prominence? So is it diluting its effect? Are they actually going to be working at cross purposes over time? How do we understand that? I fall into that view and I've been getting that question a lot, surprisingly amount a lot of times. I was a view that sort of BRICS well let's take a step back. BRICS was created at a particular point of time. It started off really as a Goldman Sachs report in 2004 BRICS members they started meeting the leaders from the four countries at a ministerial level. In 2009 they finally bumped it up to a summit and this was really in the wake of the global financial crisis and again with a very specific purpose which is to reform multilateral financial institutions so that those countries which were slightly better off after the global financial crisis in relative terms could have a greater interest in those institutions. The net result was what was called the BRICS New Development Bank, NDB which has done something, it has a headquarters in China it's lent about $9 billion since its creation but I think it's reached its limits and partly because of the ownership structure and China's wish to take a leading role in it. An expanded BRICS actually dilutes it further it has countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran on it which if you can get them to agree on things that would be great I'm a bit skeptical Ethiopia, Argentina which may have pulled out under the new president the UAE so I think for China and Russia it serves a particular purpose it's to show that they're not isolated that they have friends they like the nice photo op for the other countries I think it's a useful talk shop for India they find it's useful to engage with all of those countries but if you look at what the common agenda is it's a pretty diluted common agenda there's some talk today about finding non-dollar means of trading that is one area of some common concern it's sometimes mistranslated in the press as the BRICS seeking a shared currency which again I'm not sure how that's going to happen but I won't say BRICS is useless but certainly I don't think it's what the sum of its parts are anywhere close to it Chet did you want to come in on this particular question? Very briefly the problem with the BRICS is that there's no mortar and you need mortar to build something to go with your BRICS and as you said Drew I think exactly right you dilute when you expand you dilute the coherence if there is any but I think we should relate to the way the US should relate to the BRICS as an entity but also individual members and just see where they're going if they can make progress on some practical issues like Groova mentioned that's great let them do it I don't see it as a threat So we are coming toward the end of our time I think we could go on for for quite some time more I think we've only just begun to scratch the surface on this very very rich paper that you've written for those of you who are here with us there are copies of our very distinguished panel for leading this discussion and what I hope we can do is dig deeper into some of the issues that we started to surface and perhaps have additional discussions and learn more together on this All of you here in our audience in the room please join me in thanking this excellent panel for a terrific discussion Also announced there will be a reception on the second floor Thank you to join us and enjoy a beverage and a little light bite So thank you