Are We Ready? | The Economic Security Challenge, With Jonathan Hillman

Speaker 1:
Three, two, one.

LINDSAY:
The world has turned dangerous. Is the United States prepared to meet the new challenges it might face? In this special series from President's Inbox, we're bringing you conversations with Washington insiders to assess whether the United States is ready for a new, more dangerous world. For decades, the United States government treated national security and economics as separate worlds, but the new era of great power rivalry is blurring the line between the two. Globalization deepened economic interconnections between countries, but that interdependence created economic vulnerabilities that rivals, and particularly China, are exploiting.

Speaker 3:
Because while the wars of yesterday were fought with tanks and guns, the wars of today are economic, and they are underway.

LINDSAY:
The United States is now looking to craft an economic policy fit for a world of geopolitical competition. Much of that debate is focused on the steps Washington should take to protect its lead in critical technologies by slowing Chinese innovation. Equally important, though, is crafting policies that build on American strengths to promote U.S. innovation. That raises critical questions about government's role in the market. Can Washington find the sweet spot that promotes economic security, without stifling growth and innovation? From the Council on Foreign Relations, welcome to The President's Inbox, I'm Jim Lindsay. Joining me today is Jonathan Hillman, a senior fellow for geoeconomics here at the Council. He recently directed the Council's independent task force report titled, "U.S. Economic Security: Winning the Race for Tomorrow's Technologies." You can find a copy of the report at cfr.org. John, thank you very much for joining me.

HILLMAN:
Thanks for having me.

LINDSAY:
Listen, where I'd like to start with is with a phrase, and that phrase is economic security. I don't recall reading much about it in the 2000s, 2010s, but now it seems to be a term that is dominating conversations here in Washington, DC. So, what is it?

HILLMAN:
Yeah, so economic security is, I think, dominating conversations in DC as well as in other capitals around the world. Governments seem to be intervening more frequently in the market, often in the name of national security, much more so than they have in the recent past. And on the one hand, economics has always mattered for security. Some of the very first GDP estimates, for example, were developed in Europe, and they were basically used to compare the ability of countries to field armies. And we've seen, I think, particularly since COVID, a greater awareness of supply chains and the risk that some of those supply chains can present, and now a desire to try to de-risk some of those supply chains.

LINDSAY:
Why don't you give me a couple of quick examples from the COVID era?

HILLMAN:
So the COVID era, I think, exposed some of the supply chains related to medical equipment. Hospitals were not able to get some of the protective gear that they needed. Certainly it exposed the shortage, at least initially, and then as it went on as production scaled, of vaccine. That was in high demand, and it mattered if you were able to produce that, and where you produced it, and whether you were willing to share with others.

LINDSAY:
And many countries weren't.

HILLMAN:
And many countries weren't. And then we had some surprises too, like shortages in semiconductors, that when a plant in Malaysia stopped working, that had a whole bunch of ripple effects that we, I think, weren't fully focused on in a world of just-in-time delivery. That a factory in Malaysia could shut down, and that could ultimately ripple through to having an auto manufacturing line in Detroit unable to work because of the-

LINDSAY:
If you can't get your chips, you can't build your cars.

HILLMAN:
That's right.

LINDSAY:
Okay, so my sense is if we were to have people from China, Russia, other countries around the world, they would say the United States has been manipulating markets and punishing them. So, what's exactly new here?

HILLMAN:
So I think there's certainly the use of sanctions has been a primary American instrument, a primarily tool of foreign policy. With mixed results, I think, arguably. I think more recent, though, are export controls that went much further than they have in the past. And so, you see that-

LINDSAY:
Well certainly on the financial side there was a lot of talk about the United States able to weaponize its dominance of international financial transactions to essentially create choke points in the international economy.

HILLMAN:
That's exactly right. And really a revolution, I think, in how the United States developed that toolkit after 9/11, more recently a willingness to use export controls on semiconductors, and related equipment and software. And now I think maybe more recent and still under-explored in the economic toolkit are these incentives that the government's using to try to enhance its alternatives to some of these foreign supply chains.

LINDSAY:
Okay, so the headline here is that the world is no longer flat, if I can borrow that phrase from New York Times columnist, Tom Friedman.

HILLMAN:
Yeah, the world is no longer flat. It feels more dangerous, and it feels like some of the interdependence that we allowed to develop, particularly in the '90s, is kind of coming back to haunt us.

LINDSAY:
Okay. So the task force that you directed focused on three critical technologies, artificial intelligence, AI, quantum, which I guess has to do not with just computation, but also sensing and biotechnology. So, give me the task force sort of sense of where America stands on those three critical technologies.

HILLMAN:
Yeah. So I think we're quite competitive across the board, but there are reasons for concern, and there are reasons why we came up with the recommendations that we did in the report. So in AI, I think we recognize there's a lot of U.S. investment from the private sector going into AI. So it's not that we have a lack of investment in that sector, but we do have supply chain risks that haven't been fully addressed. The CHIPS Act did a little bit to enhance our-

LINDSAY:
This was passed during the Biden administration?

HILLMAN:
Bipartisan legislation, but yes, passed during the Biden administration, and has helped onshore some production of semiconductors. Still more to do there, but there's a bunch of related components that you need to run an AI data center for which we have a great degree of reliance on foreign partners, and sometimes countries of concern like China. So in AI, really the main takeaway is we're strong on investment, but we've got these supply chain risks we need to address. In quantum, the Chinese have actually got ahead a little bit on quantum communications. The U.S., though, is still quite competitive in quantum computing. And this is an area, though, where there isn't, probably, enough private investment going into this technology, given the strategic stakes, so-

LINDSAY:
Can I just try... One second there, because I get a sense most people understand what artificial intelligence is, I think they understand biotechnology, but quantum computing, and what that means, and why it would be significant, I think is lost to most people, it's certainly lost on me. If you may give a little sense of why quantum is such a big deal?

HILLMAN:
So it's a big deal, and it's tough to appreciate because the computers that we're trying to develop don't exist yet. So basically, this report calls for more focus in developing what's referred to as utility-scale quantum computing, basically a quantum computer that can run processes more efficiently than today's traditional computers, so-

LINDSAY:
By many orders of magnitude is my understanding, is that there's talk about things that you could encrypt that you could never break, or if you have standard encryption, quantum computing could break them like that.

HILLMAN:
And this is one of the reasons why there's some urgency here, because cybersecurity experts warn about Q-Day, which is when traditional encryption becomes obsolete if someone were to acquire this capability.

LINDSAY:
Okay, so now I have a new acronym I have to keep in mind. Okay, Q-DAY.

HILLMAN:
Yeah, Q-Day. And you wouldn't want to live in a world where an adversary has that capability, I think, even for a few months. So, there's some urgency there.

LINDSAY:
Presumably they could just march around your networks?

HILLMAN:
Your communications, your financial systems, your military and intelligence-sharing apparatus.

LINDSAY:
You can't keep them out?

HILLMAN:
Yeah, it would be dangerous. All of these technologies, though, quantum included, are dual use, and so there's exciting commercial things that could be done too. And these can be combined as well, so using AI, and quantum, and biotech, you could discover new materials, for example.

LINDSAY:
Okay. Well, I didn't give you a chance to actually tell me about biotech. So, what's the status in the biotech industry?

HILLMAN:
So biotech to me, as someone who's not a biotech expert but has been thinking about this in terms of international economics and some of the security issues related to that, this was probably the most alarming of the three areas. Because unlike in other areas of the economy, like telecommunications, certain areas of finance, we actually see dependency increasing in biotech-

LINDSAY:
How so?

HILLMAN:
... in terms of U.S. companies continuing to outsource to China, our reliance on-

LINDSAY:
What are they outsourcing?

HILLMAN:
Everything from clinical trials to... We're also highly dependent on the production of raw materials that are used for basic drugs, things that might be in your medicine cabinet at home. So, both of those types of dependencies, quite alarming.

LINDSAY:
So in theory China could decide that it doesn't have a sufficient surplus to export, and all of a sudden medicines people may need for heart disease, liver problems, what have you, you can't get?

HILLMAN:
Yeah. And I think there's maybe even more concerning scenarios, if there were some type of contingency and we were in a conflict, or if the Chinese decided to weaponize that supply chain, like they've done with rare earths. Part of this is about planning for those worst days and not allowing ourselves to be exploited, or have that leverage held over us.

LINDSAY:
So let me ask you a question I often hear, which is, why does it matter which country leads in any of these technologies? Technology, historically, diffuses, you can't sort of keep it in a bottle. So, why is it important to be the country that gets there first?

HILLMAN:
So I think what these three areas have in common, AI, quantum, and biotech, and why the co-chairs felt pretty strongly that this should be part of the scope, is the dual-use potential of all of these, right? And so AI-

LINDSAY:
Explain dual use for me, just for people who aren't up in Washington lingo.

HILLMAN:
Yeah. So I mean, this is a set of technologies that will allow you to do great things commercially, but also could be used for great harm, or for military capabilities. And so in the realm of AI, we've got lots of potential promise for increasing productivity, but we've also got capabilities that could be used for drones, and cyber war, and other military applications. And so, we felt like the national security stakes were quite high in these three areas. You could imagine other areas too, you could imagine robotics, or fusion, but these three felt like they were pretty significant.

LINDSAY:
Well, I understand. I mean, there are lots of different technologies you could explore, and I know you as a project director want to have a concrete, discreet product, and not be writing from here until the end of the decade. But as I look at it, one of the other things I hear a lot about in terms of the importance of leading in a technology is something called standard setting. Can you just help me understand exactly why it is that being first to a technology, or leading in a technology, allows you to set standards? What does that mean, and what are the consequences of being able to set the standards?

HILLMAN:
Yeah. So I think standard setting can happen in at least two ways, it can happen through top-down entities, right? So through international organizations that exist for that purpose.

LINDSAY:
And there are a number of organizations that decide those issues.

HILLMAN:
Yeah, there are, and the United States needs to remain active in them, and support its companies as they remain active in those organizations. But there's also another type of standard setting, which is almost more organic, kind of bottom-up approach that the Chinese excel in, which is basically you sell products, and if your product becomes the sort of default, if you're very successful at diffusing that product, then you're more likely to get foreign markets, and ultimately the world, to accept the standards that you're embedding in those products.

LINDSAY:
Okay. So for decades, the American approach on economics was, let the free market operate, that will produce the greatest prosperity. That actually succeeded, it produced significant prosperity, though not equal prosperity, certainly across this country. But one of the consequences is that by becoming more integrated, you create these vulnerabilities, that making the world flatter also means there are opportunities for people who may specialize in a critical technology to withhold it, weaponize the technology, as they say. We're now sort of concerned about that, because we like it when we can weaponize things against others, we don't like it when they can weaponize things against them, that's natural human reaction. So, what precisely is the U.S. government's role going forward? And I ask that against the backdrop of a great deal of skepticism many Americans have about government intervening in the economy.

HILLMAN:
Yeah. So we offer, at the very end of this report, some sort of guiding principles for using economic security tools, and not everyone may make it all the way into that section, but I think it's worth reading, because basically-

LINDSAY:
Some of us skipped to that section first, so...

HILLMAN:
Well, we talked with a few dozen former officials who sat in seats where they decided whether and how to use sanctions and other economic instruments we were looking at, and we tried to abstract from that some lessons and some questions to ask. And so basically, we've come up with a series of questions that, if you're a practitioner, you should ask yourself before pulling the trigger. And one of those, the first one, is, is there a market failure or a market impediment to begin with? So we're not advocating that the U.S. government intervene in all cases, in fact it should ask very carefully whether its intervention is needed because the market isn't delivering a certain outcome.

LINDSAY:
And let's establish, the market's not always right, there are lots of market failures.

HILLMAN:
There are, and this is not new in economics. Even relatively free trade-oriented economists will acknowledge that there are market failures, and in those cases you do need to have some government-

LINDSAY:
I took courses on market failures more than 40 years ago, when I was in college. So again, not a new problem.

HILLMAN:
Yeah, not a new problem. And so we're not throwing out the bulk of the U.S. model that, as you said, has worked, overall, quite well. We're just trying to get a better sense for, in these instances, particularly where there's a national security threat, how should the government intervene? In this report, we're trying to do that also with an eye toward, how do we mobilize some of the strengths of that U.S. approach, the private sector, private capital, so that the U.S. government could use a finite amount of public resources, and hopefully mobilize larger amounts of private capital.

LINDSAY:
My sense is, you've already alluded to one problem, which is that what might make market sense, or may make financial sense to a company. For example, to offshore production, rely on a foreign supplier, may be good for the individual company, may be great for its shareholders and increasing its net profits, but for the country it could be a bad decision because it creates this kind of vulnerability.

HILLMAN:
Exactly. And you can look at some of these industries, for example the U.S. doesn't have a lot of production capacity for some of the chemicals and gases that you need to make semiconductors, and a lot of that was offshored for those types of reasons several decades ago.

LINDSAY:
I would also say there seems to be at least two other reasons for renewed interest in the United States government being active here. One is that worldwide, we're not talking about flat markets, we're not talking about sort of a free market being allowed to operate in a number of other countries, not just Chinese, intervene in the market, provide substantial subsidies to create national champions that give them an upper hand in competition. But I think also there's more renewed interest in this topic because, when I go back to when I was a kid the whole notion was NASA created all these great things for the country, it was a lot of government investment producing things. Well, for a kid, the big payoff was Tang, which, I don't know if they make it anymore, but when you were... In the 1960s, it was a great thing to drink. But nowadays, a lot of the innovation is privately funded, driven by commercial considerations, not by national ones. Tell me a little bit about that.

HILLMAN:
That's right, yeah. So I think the government has gone from being the innovator in those cases, to being more of an adopter of innovation from the private sector. And so, we certainly see that in AI. The government still has an important role to play though, and still historically has provided a significant amount of funding for basic research. And the partnerships that that enables between the private sector and universities are incredibly important, so I don't want to suggest that the private sector is the only place where innovation is happening. But I think we do see this in these three areas, in AI, quantum, and biotech, we see a lot of the investment that does exist coming overwhelmingly from the private sector.

LINDSAY:
So John, I want to talk a bit about what the United States should be doing in each of these three sectors, so let's begin with AI. And what I really would like to focus on is not what the United States should be doing to slow innovation in China or to keep China from getting technology, I've done a number of episodes on that. I'd like to get your sense of what do you think the United States should be doing proactively here at home to be able to either maintain or expand its lead in AI? What are the sort of important policy takeaways?

HILLMAN:
Yeah, so there's, I think, a couple different categories of recommendations. I think we've got roughly two dozen or so, not just for AI, but across the three tech areas. But I think the first category is, let's call it a version of kind of onshoring and friendshoring, which is, having identified these supply chain risks, we do need to invest in moving some production to the U.S., or building extra production in the U.S. and among partners and allies. We're not suggesting that the U.S. produce everything, that's not-

LINDSAY:
So you're not arguing for autarky?

HILLMAN:
No, we're not, we're not. And we're doing this while keeping in mind the government has finite resources. It's not realistic to try to onshore everything, and probably not even preferable from a just strategic perspective. You want to have some diversity, some resiliency in your supply, your sources of supply. So, that would include things like the boards that semiconductors are mounted on, I referred to some of the gases and chemicals that are used. It includes things like some networking equipment that's very important, optical networking equipment for data centers, some power equipment as well. So those types of things that you need to run a large data center, we're arguing that a little bit more of that needs to be made in the U.S. and then among, let's call it trusted sources of supply.

LINDSAY:
Well that raises the immediate question, who qualifies as a trusted source of supply? Because I can understand you and say, "Well, American alliance partner, Japan, Australia, Germany." But a lot of these things are produced in other countries, can you rely on a Vietnam, a Malaysia, an Indonesia? How do you think about that? So, who qualifies and how do you decide?

HILLMAN:
Yeah. So, we try to name specific partners where they have a strength that we feel like would compliment what the U.S. is trying to do. So it's not just working with partners and allies for the sake of doing it, but in a very practical way. For example, Japan does produce some of those chemicals and gases, and-

LINDSAY:
We're a leader in that business.

HILLMAN:
What's that?

LINDSAY:
They're a world leader in that business.

HILLMAN:
That's right, that's right. And they've pledged a large amount of money to invest in the U.S., that seems like a natural overlap in interests and capabilities. At the same time, there are also some single sources of supply that are in relatively safe places, that probably still need some additional diversification. There's a single company in Finland that produces a mirror that's very important for quantum computing, and Finland is a close partner. But, to have a single point of failure like that is probably not the safest approach.

LINDSAY:
But that actually creates some diplomatic challenges, because for the Finns, I would imagine, if you are the world leader in this, what's in it for you to give up that world leadership? They have their own economic security to worry about. So, presumably there'll be a quid for a quo.

HILLMAN:
Yeah, I think it's an interesting place to start a negotiation. You could imagine them having some incentives, either from a trade perspective, to have some type of production in the U.S. or elsewhere. So we tried to be very specific about, here are partners that have a capability.

LINDSAY:
What are the things the United States can do here at home? I mean, I take the point you want to have reliable, secure supply chains, that really means something on the order of friendshoring with some onshoring. But, it's going to be more than that that the United States should be doing.

HILLMAN:
Yeah, absolutely. We've got a set of recommendations focused on enhancing U.S. security around critical minerals, and so we identify about a dozen that are important for these three areas of technology, for which the U.S. is reliant on one source for 65 percent or more of its supply, China in most cases. And there's a whole bunch of actions that the U.S. can and should take domestically, everything from continuing to map and explore, to recycling, and using new technologies that could maybe eventually someday replace the need to mine some of these minerals. So, there's a lot that could be done there domestically. We've also got some recommendations on what the U.S. government should do internally in terms of improving inter-agency coordination and those sorts of things, but that might not be exactly where you wanted to go here.

LINDSAY:
Well, I'm not asking you to give me a wiring diagram of how, but my sense is you want to, in essence, put someone in charge, in government, of these issues.

HILLMAN:
Yeah. So I think we, in talking with companies and former officials, detected a couple of challenges here. One is that this toolkit is spread across agencies, and so that's just a natural challenge. It seems like maybe the critical mass of capabilities resides at commerce, and so we thought that that could be the place that hosts an economic security center. In talking with companies, we also detected a reluctance just to share information with the government on some of these issues. And you need-

LINDSAY:
Well, a lot of it involves proprietary information.

HILLMAN:
It does. And so there's an interesting model here, where what Treasury has done for cybersecurity cooperation, and it required some legislation. But it basically gives companies the ability to share information more freely, and to receive information from the government. And so we think there's a similar opportunity here, where there could be some protections provided. Just, again, considering the innovations happening in the private sector, they have the visibility into the supply chains. It's going to be hard to work without them.

LINDSAY:
And I imagine you'll get criticisms that a government agency, however well-intentioned, can't understand the ins and outs of such a vast array of industry, particularly ones where the technology could be changing by the moment.

HILLMAN:
It's a big challenge. And one of the characteristics we imagine could exist in this economic security center are some flexible hiring authorities, so that we could-

LINDSAY:
What is a flexible hiring authority? Because I think most people who don't live inside the Beltway have no idea what that term means.

HILLMAN:
So it's an easier avenue for getting outside technical expertise, and to maybe get people who would come into the government for some period of time who had been in industry, and who have those experiences and expertise.

LINDSAY:
Okay. A couple of other things that the report talks about in the area of artificial intelligence that I think we're sort of exploring, has to do with issues related to the energy infrastructure in permitting, but also the issue of talent. Talk to me about both of those.

HILLMAN:
So on the permitting side of things we did focus primarily on, what do you need inside a data center? So the supply chain piece of that, we recognize that the United States has investment to do and modernization to do in its broader grid infrastructure, and that's incredibly important. It just wasn't the primary focus of this effort. And then on the talent side, look, we need to continue to train the people who are going to be working on frontier models, as well as the people who are going to be building the data centers too. So it sort of runs the gamut there of talent, both on the sort of PhD side as well as the tradesman side.

LINDSAY:
But it seems to me that we're going in the opposite direction on that score. The Trump administration has cut a lot of research and development funding that goes to universities, the administration has moved to tighten requirements on people coming to American colleges and universities, as far as saying that foreign student enrollment in the United States was down something like 17 percent, comparing 2025 to 2024. How do you maintain a talent pipeline, when the United States historically has benefited from basically getting the world's best and brightest? If you look at leaders across the tech sector, a lot of them weren't born in the United States.

HILLMAN:
I think there's a sort of broad, or there was broad recognition among the task force members that this is a really important issue. In fact, so important that I think we recommend that it be the subject of a future task force study.

LINDSAY:
Keeping yourself employed?

HILLMAN:
Yeah, I think it's for someone else. But, we do in each of these three areas highlight some of these talent challenges and bottlenecks. And so, agree entirely that this has to be part of the U.S. answer, and has to be part of the U.S. competing.

LINDSAY:
Any other recommendations specific either to quantum computing or to biotech?

HILLMAN:
So yeah, on the quantum side, one of our big recommendations is for the Department of Defense to use its procurement power to incentivize companies to basically accelerate their timeline in developing one of these utility-scale computers. So it doesn't mean picking a single company as a winner, but it means inviting them to compete and using some benchmarks that DARPA has established to gauge their progress toward that ultimate goal. But it was just another way of thinking, "Okay, how can the government use the powers it has to try to accelerate some progress here?"

LINDSAY:
And what is your response to people who are hearing you, saying, "We don't want the government picking winners and losers. Every time the government creates rules and says it's not picking winners and losers, that's effectively what it's trying to do."

HILLMAN:
So I would point to the fact that we're in a bigger competition here, in which we've got a strategic competitor who, the hand of the state is very visible.

LINDSAY:
Yes, I think we can say that about China.

HILLMAN:
Yeah, and we don't need to copy their playbook, we need to do what works for the United States. But in this quantum example, just to run with that, there's a set of companies who could plausibly compete, if DOD were to offer this procurement opportunity. And so the government wouldn't be saying, "Okay, one of you, we choose one of you to go do this project," but to try to create a process through which all of them, or some subset of them, would be incentivized to invest more, and to try to deliver on these milestones.

LINDSAY:
Anything else specific to biotech?

HILLMAN:
Yeah, we need to have some capacity to produce some of the raw materials that we need for drugs. Part of that could be done by cooperating with partners and allies, but part of that's going to have to be a U.S. domestic footprint. And the commercial realities on that are pretty challenging, so the government's going to have to provide some incentives, whether they be tax credits, or grants, or some other creative financing, maybe stockpiling in a way that incentivizes companies to produce more here. But, that's just not going to happen without those incentives.

LINDSAY:
Jon, I want to come back to the question of whether or not the United States government is capable of doing what you're asking it to do. One doesn't have to be a cynic to pose that question, political dysfunction seems to be the mood of the day here in Washington. We just come off a forty-three-day government shutdown, but you're asking government to do big things. Is Washington capable of doing big things?

HILLMAN:
I think we're asking the government to, in many cases, enable the private sector to do big things. And so yes, you do need a functioning government for that to happen. But we're not expecting the government to have all the expertise, or to take on all of the responsibility of this, but rather to look to places in the private sector where there are established leaders who are doing these activities, if not closely-related activities, and to try to build on those strengths that already exist rather than to create something from thin air.

LINDSAY:
But Jon, how do you prepare the American public, or maybe the political elite, for the fact that some of those rules, some of those bets, aren't going to turn out well? I look at the Chinese model, and it seems to me that the Chinese government, you have the heavy hand of the state, it's directing companies to do things. Some of those choices work out well, many of them fail. That's actually not really that different from what you might see in Silicon Valley, where I hear that the phrase is, or the motto is, "Fail and fail fast, because that'll get you onto the next winner." But it seems to me that for the U.S. government, when you push policies or push private sector development and it flops, and we have examples of it, Solyndra under the Obama administration, which was a solar panel company, if my memory's good enough. But, that became just political fodder for the president's critics. How do you do this when you know you're going to have some failures, and people are going to try to make political hay out of it?

HILLMAN:
Yeah, this is something where I think the U.S. model doesn't have the insulation that the Chinese have. They can fail, and they're-

LINDSAY:
They can waste.

HILLMAN:
Yeah, and they do, and they do quite a lot. And the fact that the ghost of Solyndra still haunts us however many years later, I think is a reminder of that. I think there's at least two things that can be done, one is that, let's be realistic about how we sell these things, and let's also communicate some of the risks that are involved so that we're not promising only upside.

LINDSAY:
It's very hard to get politicians to only promise... Or to promise more than the upside and brace people for potential downside.

HILLMAN:
Yeah, it is. And then the second part is, where you can, try to create an environment where multiple companies can compete toward providing something, whatever it is, so that you're not maybe as visibly associated with having picked company A, B, or C, but you created an environment that gave them the ability to do something that they may have not been able to do without that.

LINDSAY:
So don't pick, but encourage?

HILLMAN:
Encourage, accelerate, prod, but where you can, a group of companies and not a single one.

LINDSAY:
On that note, I'll close up this episode of The President's Inbox. My guest has been Jonathan Hillman, senior fellow here at the Council on Foreign Relations. Jon, thank you very much for joining me.

HILLMAN:
Thanks for having me.

LINDSAY:
Today's episode was produced by Justin Schuster, Molly McAnany, Marcus Zakaria, Director of Video, Jeremy Sherlick, and Director of Podcasting, Gabrielle Sierra. Our recording engineers are Jorge Flores and Brian Mendivez. Production assistance was provided by Oscar Berry and Kaleah Haddock.