A bicyclist rides near the Potomac River on June 7 in Washington as skies are hazy from Canadian wildfire smoke. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)
Excerpt from Speech of William Burns on July 1, 2023
My job now is to help President Biden and senior policymakers understand and shape a world transformed. And as the president reminds us, we are at an inflection point.
The post-Cold War era is over. Our task is to shape what comes next — investing in our foundational strengths and working in common cause with our unmatched network of alliances and partnerships — to leave for future generations a world that is more free, open, secure and prosperous.
That is a very tall order. Our success will depend on our ability to navigate a world with three distinctive features.
1. First is the challenge of strategic competition from a rising and ambitious China — and from a Russia that constantly reminds us that declining powers can be at least as disruptive as rising ones.
2.:Second are the problems without passports, such as pandemics and the climate crisis, which are beyond the reach of any one country to address and are growing more extreme and existential.
3. And third is the revolution in technology, which is transforming how we live, work, fight and compete, with possibilities and risks we can’t yet fully grasp.
Those singular challenges sometimes conflict with one another, with cooperation on shared global problems both more vital and more difficult, too often the victim of strategic competition. And the revolution in technology is both a main arena for that competition and a phenomenon in which some basic partnership is crucial to set rules of the road.
The most immediate and acute challenge to international order today is Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
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What’s more, we do not have the option of focusing on a single geopolitical pacing threat. We face an equal threat to international order and indeed to the lives and livelihoods of our people from shared or transnational challenges, of which the climate crisis poses the most clear and present danger. We can no longer talk about “tipping points” and “catastrophic climate impacts” in the future tense. They are here and now, imperiling our planet, our security, our economies and our people.
Last month in Washington, you could not see across the Potomac River from CIA Headquarters in Langley, Va., or take a breath without subjecting your lungs to hazardous materials because of smoke from hundreds of wildfires across Canada.
Climate change is the quintessential “threat multiplier” — fueling energy, health, water and food insecurities, setting back our progress on economic and human development, turbocharging what is already the worst period of forced displacement and migration in history, and further exacerbating instability and geopolitical tensions and flash points.
These two threats — geopolitical and transnational — are impossible to disentangle. Competition makes cooperation more difficult. But we’re going to have to have both. And we’re going to have to do both in the face of another immensely powerful force: a revolution in technology more profound than the Industrial Revolution or the dawn of the nuclear age.
Advances in computing-related technologies are leading to breakthroughs of remarkable scale and scope. In just the few months since the first public version of ChatGPT debuted in November, we’ve seen newer models outperform humans in graduate-level entrance exams, and in assessments of doctor-to-patient engagements in medical training programs.
We see this “hockey stick” trendline time and again, outstripping our expectations, imaginations and capacity to govern the use of enormously powerful technologies — for good or for ill. Nowhere is that more evident than in biotechnology and biomanufacturing — which can unlock extraordinary climate and health solutions and boost our economies, but whose abuse and misuse could lead to catastrophe.
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SOURCE: Washington Post, July 8, 2023 ~ “CIA Director Burns: What U.S. intelligence needs to do today — and tomorrow” ~ This essay was adapted from the speech CIA Director William J. Burns delivered July 1 for the Annual Ditchley Foundation Lecture in Oxfordshire, England. The topic was “A World Transformed and the Role of Intelligence.”
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