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On December 1, the Center on the United States and Europe (CUSE) at Brookings hosted a discussion exploring Russian power throughout history and how two of its most pivotal rulers—Josef Stalin and Vladimir Putin—defined Russian leadership and its role in the world in the 20^th and 21^st centuries. The discussion featured remarks by Stephen Kotkin, professor at Princeton University and author of the authoritative new biography, Stalin Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928 (Penguin Press, 2014).

In his book, Kotkin reveals Stalin as a ruler who is both astute and blinkered, diligent and paranoid, cynical and true-believing, charming and vicious. However, Stalin is more than just an eminent biography; it is a book about Russian power in the world as well as Stalin’s power in Russia, recast as the Soviet Union. Ultimately, Stalin offers an analysis of power—where it comes from, how it is utilized or squandered, and what its human consequences are.

Brookings President Strobe Talbott offered introductory remarks and moderated the discussion.  Prior to assuming the leadership of Brookings, Talbott served in the U.S. State Department as ambassador-at-large for the former Soviet Union and then as deputy secretary.

Audio

• Putin and Russian Power in the World: The Stalin Legacy

Transcript

• Uncorrected Transcript (.pdf)

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• 20141201_putin_russia_stalin_transcript

The flight of humans from Syria has been rapid, massive and dynamic. The number of refugees has grown from 26,000 in the first year of the war to almost 4.2 million now, four years later. It is time for bold action from the world to support Turkey and the other countries of the region hosting the vast majority of refugees.

None of Syria’s neighbors – the primary hosts of refugees – expected the displacement to reach such a scale, nor for the crisis to last this long. Many believed in the early days of the Arab Spring that the oppressive regime of Bashar al-Assad would be replaced by a reformist-minded, popularly-elected government - mirroring the transition that had just taken place in Tunisia and Egypt. Instead, Syria became mired in a civil war between an ever-growing number of opposition groups and the regime, whose repression of civilians, regardless of any involvement in the crisis, has forced millions to flee in terror on either side of the country’s borders.

Until recently, the overwhelming majority of the refugees were fleeing the indiscriminate attacks of the Syrian government. More recently, ISIS has been a significant source of terror, while even more recently Russia’s entry into the conflict has triggered another wave of flight.

Today, the refugee populations registered in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey total more than 4 million souls. Managing the presence of such large numbers of refugees has been costly on host countries economically, socially and politically. What was expected to be a temporary refugee influx has become a protracted crisis. With no signs of a resolution of the conflict in the foreseeable future, the refugees’ hope to return is diminishing.

The massive influx of refugees into Europe, often via extremely costly and life-threatening channels, reflects the despair and harsh living conditions that many refugees feel. Syrians constitute the majority of the 800,000 migrants that have crossed into Europe this year. As the crisis spills beyond Syria’s immediate neighbors, the EU is experiencing major challenges in managing a response. It is clear that attending to refugees is not only a concern of the immediate neighborhood – but that of a much wider region.

In looking at the challenges to Europe, it is important to underscore that neighboring countries have shouldered most of the burden of caring for the refugees, with inadequate assistance from the international community. Resettlement has been extremely limited, and roughly only a third of the pledges to U.N. response plans have been met.

Now is the time to adopt a comprehensive approach that will offer a better future for refugees and their hosts. Attention must be paid to two areas in particular: Education and access to employment. In this regard, it will be critical to move beyond a strategy focused on humanitarian relief to one explicitly structured around sustainable development and empowerment of refugees.

We need a globally-funded Recovery Program for the Middle East that brings about immediate action to mitigate the impact of the crisis on the economies and services of Syria’s neighbors. As part of that, we need to recognize the skills and income that refugees could contribute to the Turkish economy, if they were only allowed to do so. This program could not be carried out by the Turks alone, but would need the engagement of a range of actors – from the U.N. to the World Bank to the private sector and other donors.

Turkey and its neighbors have generously cared for more than 4 million refugees: But as the displacement crisis enters its fifth year, this burden needs to be shared out much more fairly and effectively.

Sadly, despite the desperate need for peace in Syria, we need to respond to the reality that Syrian refugees will not be able to return home for a while yet. As simultaneously the host of the world’s largest Syrian refugee population as well as host to the G-20 Summit, Turkey is in an ideal position to bring this reality to the attention of G-20 member-states – and leverage more resources to assist it and its neighbors to cope with the crisis.

G-20 leaders must commit to sharing Turkey’s burden and place increased emphasis on empowering refugees to shape their own destinies and become productive members of their host societies.

And it must be remembered: The majority of Syrians want to go home. Eventually they want to be able to contribute to rebuilding a stable and democratic nation for themselves and their families. But peace cannot be served while al-Assad drops barrel bombs on his people and ISIS beheads journalists on the steps of Palmyra. Our leaders must focus on a sustainable political solution to this conflict as the end goal of any plan for the region.

This piece was originally published by Hurriyet Daily News.

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In a world where borders matter less and where seemingly faraway threats can become immediate problems, the fight against poverty is no longer a matter of just doing the right thing – it is a matter of doing the smart thing to ensure security at home and abroad. As seen across the globe, by exhausting institutions, depleting resources, weakening leaders and crushing hope, extreme poverty fuels instability that often leads to armed conflict and can be a breeding ground for terrorists. The reverse is also true: insecurity stemming from conflict and demographic and environmental challenges makes it harder for leaders, institutions and other stakeholders to address poverty. Simply put, poverty is both a cause of insecurity and a product of it.

To explore this tangled web, in August 2006 the Brookings Blum roundtable discussed the challenges and possible solutions with a diverse group of leaders, including policymakers, business executives and academics, and developed recommendations for change.

1. Global Poverty, Conflict and Insecurity

• Susan Rice, The Brookings Institution, "Global Poverty, Weak States and Insecurity"
• Edward Miguel, University of California, Berkeley, "Global Poverty, Conflict and Insecurity"

2. Operating in Insecure Environments

• Jane Nelson, Harvard University, "Operating in Insecure Environments"

3. Keynote Address: "Achieving Peace in an Inequitable World"

• James D. Wolfensohn, Chairman of Citigroup International Advisory Board and Former President of the World Bank

4. The Role of Leadership in Overcoming Poverty & Security in Africa
   Chaired by: Mary Robinson, Realizing Rights: The Ethical Globalization Initiative

• Robert Rotberg, Harvard University, "The Role of Leadership in Overcoming Poverty & Insecurity in Africa"

Leadership Presentations:

• Mohammed Ibrahim, Chairman, Celtel International
• John Kachamila, Former Minister, Mozambique
• Ketumile Masire, Former President of Botswana

5. Resource and Environmental Insecurity

• Colin Kahl, University of Minnesota, "Demography, Environment and Civil Strife"
• Anthony Nyong, University of Jos, Nigeria, "Resource and Environmental Security"

6. Keynote Address

• Kemal Dervis, Administrator, United Nations Development Programme

7. Youth and Conflict

• Henrik Urdal, The International Peace Research Institute, "The Demographics of Political Violence: Youth Bulges, Insecurity and Conflict"
• Marc Sommers, Tufts University, "Embracing The Margins: Working with Youth Amidst War and Insecurity"
• Jane Nelson, Harvard University, "Operating in Insecure Environments: The Youth Demographic"

8. Transformational Diplomacy and the Route to Security

• Jennifer Windsor, Freedom House, "Breaking the Poverty-Insecurity Nexus: Is Democracy the Answer?"

Presentations:

• Philip Zelikow, United States Department of State
• Madeleine Albright, 64th Secretary of State
• Mary K. Bush, Chairman, HELP Commission
• Lael Brainard, The Global Economy and Development Program, The Brookings Institution

Choosing a health plan on one of the new public or private exchanges is no easy task. That’s especially true for those with medical conditions who want to be very sure the plan they enroll in will provide the services they need.

This challenge is not unique to buying health plans, however. It’s always hard for consumers to buy complex and technical services or products when they have little or no expertise in the field. Health insurance can be especially daunting, with so many factors to consider, and even the terminology can be confusing.

Standardizing choices and terms can be helpful to a point. Grouping health plans according to premiums and out-of-pocket costs – bronze, silver, gold and platinum plans – has worked well in the public exchanges. But standardization will always be in tension with innovation, and the reality is that most exchanges will carry a larger inventory of plans than what the typical consumer wants to scroll through. So the question of “choice architecture” – how the plans are filtered or screened – will come to the fore. 

Consumers will have many questions.  What is the price? How do I assess the trade-off between lower premiums and higher cost sharing? Is my doctor in the plan’s network? Are the drugs I take in the formulary (whatever that is)? Things can get real complicated real fast, and it can feel like there are too many, not too few, choices. No wonder some call that “choice anxiety”.

But that view overlooks how technology is likely to reduce choice anxiety in health care, just as it has for other complicated searches.  It used to take a librarian to find an obscure article or a travel agent to plan a vacation. Today a few keystrokes on Google locates the article, and Travelocity makes vacation planning a cakewalk, with everything from on-time flight arrival data to pictures of hotel rooms and customer reviews arranged by star ratings.

Expect technology to have the same dramatic impact on buying health coverage in the near future. There are several reasons for this:

The presentation of consumer information will get better. When large new markets for products and services are created and the demand for buyers’ information rises sharply, the incentive for entrepreneurs – both for-profit and nonprofit – to provide customer-friendly information also rises. We’ve already seen this in parts of the health care market where there has been plenty of choice. Millions of federal employees have for many years been able choose among a wide range of plans with differing benefits.  Many have turned to the highly regarded Consumers’ Checkbook to help them understand and readily compare plans in the federal program.

Checkbook has launched a similar comparison tool for the  Illinois exchange and recently won the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s (RWJF) first "Plan Choice Challenge," a nationwide competition to design a technology application that helps people choose their best health plan options.

Navigation technology will make searches simple and quick.  Most consumers don’t want to spend a lot of time comparing plans; they want to find the best buy for their situation as quickly as possible.  That’s why brokers have traditionally encouraged employers to offer their employees a carefully limited set of shopping choices, but we expect plan navigation technology to constantly improve the shopping experience in ways that will help customers search a larger inventory and still make choices more easily.   Stride Health, a San Francisco startup and finalist in the RWJF Challenge, has developed a recommendation technology that searches massive data sets on networks and formularies in seconds to help consumers find a “match” that fits their budget and health care needs.  (Full disclosure – author Joel Ario is an investor).  

Stride is one of more than 40 “web brokers” that has met federal consumer protection and privacy standards enabling it to work with the federal exchange to enroll subsidy-eligible individuals in coverage.  Expect increasing collaboration between public exchanges and private vendors, with a surge of apps and gadgets to make navigation easier and easier in health exchanges.

Technology will allow choices to be tailored to medical history.  Advances in technology won’t just make it technically easier to pick and choose by price and reputation. These advances will also empower Americans to base their choices on their likely medical needs. Today, tailoring your coverage to your medical condition usually means trying to get a doctor– or several doctors– to help you figure out what you should look for in a plan. Even with that help, for the average person it’s still a hit-or-miss proposition. But new forms of choice technology are beginning to utilize questions about medical history to guide buyers towards the plans that are most suited to their condition.  

Checkbook and Stride already allow consumers to enter more detailed health histories and get more sophisticated assistance, and this will only improve as exchanges publish more data in machine readable formats.   Expect more and increasingly sophisticated customized navigators, especially as patients get more access to their electronic medical records.  Also expect sellers to respond with products than bundle services to meet the new demand.

Does this mean that an iPhone app will be all that’s needed to ensure that every consumer can find his or her perfect plan? Not quite.  Health insurance marketplaces will continue to present thorny regulatory challenges.  Insurance regulators will need to guard against unfair practices, such as insurers’ designing benefit plans to drive away applicants with certain health conditions; privacy concerns will be raised whenever apps ask for medical history; and new forms of provider integration will test antitrust doctrine.

But one thing is clear. Improving technology will soon make picking the right health plan a far more precise and simple process – easy enough for many of our children to do on their smart phones or whatever gadget comes next.

Last month, we experienced yet another breakthrough in the epic battle of man against machine. Google’s AlphaGo won against the reigning Go champion Lee Sedol. This success, however, was different than that of IBM’s Deep Blue against Gary Kasparov in 1987. While Deep Blue still applied “brute force” to calculate all possible options ahead, AlphaGo was learning as the game progressed. And through this computing breakthrough that we can learn how to better leverage the data revolution.

In the game of Go, brute-force strategies don’t help because the total number of possible combinations exceeds the number of atoms in the universe. Some games, including some we played since childhood, were immune to computing “firepower” for a long time. For example, Connect Four wasn’t solved until 1995 with the conclusion being the first player can force a win. And checkers wasn’t until 2007, when Jonathan Schaeffer determined that in a perfect game, both sides could force a draw. For chess, a safe strategy has yet to be developed, meaning that we don’t know yet if white could force a win or, like in checkers, black could manage to hold on to a draw.

But most real-life situations are more complicated than chess, precisely because the universe of options is unlimited and solving them requires learning. If computers are to help, beyond their use as glorified calculators, they need to be able to learn. This is the starting point of the artificial intelligence movement.  In a world where perfection is impossible, you need well-informed intuition in order to advance. The first breakthrough in this space occurred when IBM’s Watson beat America’s Jeopardy! champions in 2011. These new intelligent machines operate in probabilities, not in certainty.

That being said, perfection remains important, especially when it comes to matters of life and death such as flying airplanes, constructing houses, or conducting heart surgery, as these areas require as much attention to detail as possible. At the same time, in many realms of life and policymaking we fall into a perfection trap. We often generate obsolete knowledge by attempting to explain things perfectly, when effective problem solving would have been better served by real-time estimates. We strive for exactitude when rough results, more often than not, are good enough.

By contrast, some of today’s breakthroughs are based on approximation. Think of Google Translate and Google’s search engine itself. The results are typically quite bad, but compared to the alternative of not having them at all, or spending hours leafing through an encyclopedia, they are wonderful. Moreover, once these imperfect breakthroughs are available, one can improve them iteratively. Only once the first IBM and Apple PCs were put on the market in the 1980s did the cycle of upgrading start, which still continues today.

In the realm of social and economic data, we have yet to reach this stage of “managed imperfection” and continuous upgrading. We are producing social and economic forecasts with solid 20th century methods. With extreme care we conduct poverty assessments and maps, usually taking at least a year to produce as they involve hundreds of enumerators, lengthy interviews and laborious data entry. Through these methods we are able to perfectly explain past events, but we fail to estimate current trends—even imperfectly.

The paradox of today’s big data era is that most of that data is poor and messy, even though the possibilities for improving it are unlimited. Almost every report from development institutions starts with a disclaimer highlighting “severe data limitations.” This is because only 0.5 percent of all the available data is actually being curated to be made usable. If data is the oil of the 21st century, we need data refineries to convert the raw product into something that can be consumed by the average person.

Thanks to the prevalence of mobile device and rapid advances in satellite technology, it is possible to produce more data faster, better, and cheaper. High-frequency data also makes it possible to make big data personal, which also increases the likelihood that people act on it. Ultimately, the breakthroughs in big data for development will be driven by managerial cultures, as has been the case with other successful ventures. Risk averse cultures pay great attention to perfection. They nurture the fear of mistakes and losing. Modern management accepts failure, encourages trial and error, and reaches progress through interaction and continuous upgrading.

Today, the Center on the United States and Europe (CUSE) at Brookings hosted Georgian Defense Minister Irakli Alasania for an address on Georgia's vision for Euro-Atlantic integration during a period of increased insecurity in the region. In his remarks, Minister Alasania shared his insights on the upcoming NATO summit and Georgia's approach to enhancing its relations with the West while attempting to normalize relations with Russia to lower tensions still simmering from the war six years ago.

Minister Alasania said that his country's "path toward NATO and European integration is unchanged" and offered next steps on "how we're going to make sure that the credibility of the west, the credibility of NATO as an organization will continue to be relevant to safeguard the values that we all cherish: freedom, democracy, and a Europe whole and free."

"We are acting like a NATO country," he said. Continuing:

We are acting like a European country, because we believe that our future is within Europe. And we regard ourselves as a future member. And this is why we are preparing ourselves institution-wise, in terms of freedom, in terms of democracy, and the military capabilities when ... the historical opportunity will open up to Georgia to join NATO and the EU.

The defense minister added that "We are looking at the future." We:

cannot be dragged back to the confrontation of the early 1990s. And we want to make sure that our policies, our economic policies, our foreign policy, [are] specifically working to make sure that the Georgian people who elected us are now moving closer and closer to the European way of living standards. And this only can be done if the efforts that Georgia is making will be validated, will be appreciated by the NATO and the European countries.

One of the things we are looking forward to is the signing of the association agreement. The next step obviously is the NATO summit. And what the NATO summit will decide is how effectively they can assure the allies, but also the partners, like Georgia.

On Russia, Minister Alasania spoke in both hopeful and realistic terms, saying that:

We are now approaching foreign policy and specifically the issue with Russia with a rather mature approach. We don't have any illusions that Russia will change its behavior or policies toward Georgia's territorial integrity or NATO aspirations. But we do hope the diffusion of tensions, the decrease of the military rhetoric between the two countries, will serve Georgia's interests best.

And it will give us more space to develop ourselves, to develop our relationship with the Abkhazia and South Ossetian areas. This is the cornerstone of our policy actually. Be uncompromising on the territorial integrity. Be uncompromising on NATO aspiration, membership in NATO and the EU. But at the same time be sure that we are not going give a pretext to anybody in the region, specifically to Russians, to attack us politically or otherwise.

Listen to audio of the event below or on the event's web page to get the full conversation, which was moderated by CUSE Director Fiona Hill.

Audio

• Georgia's Euro-Atlantic Aspirations and Regional Security