Thursday, Dec. 4, the Global Research Institute hosted the College of William and Mary’s Chancellor Robert M. Gates ’65 L.H.D. ’98 and Howard Buffett in conversation about this year’s Gates Forum topic: Innovative Approaches to Security Assistance.
The Global Research Institute, founded in 2008, works broadly to bring academics, practitioners, staff and students together to research global issues.
George and Mary Hylton Professor of International Relations and GRI Director Michael Tierney ’87 and General Peter Chiarelli opened the talk by explaining the importance of Gates Forums.
“The idea behind the Gates forums is clear: to produce original research and action plans that senior policymakers use to redevelop U.S. foreign policy toolkits for the 21st century,” Tierney said. “Over the past four years, we’ve partnered with the Gates Global Policy Center to tackle key issues in U.S. foreign policy and national security.”
College President Katherine Rowe remarked on the advancing research capabilities of the College as a recently designated R1 institution and the GRI’s part in making that possible.
“Over the last quarter century, the Global Research Institute has generated more than $100 million in external funding in service of high-impact research,” Rowe said. “Thousands of undergraduate students have joined in that work: graduate students, faculty, neighbors, partners around the country and beyond. I want you to know this is the place to come if you want to be applying data and analyzing it in a robust and well-informed way.”
Rowe then introduced the conversation’s moderator, Thom Shanker, a former editor for The New York Times and current director at Project for Media and National Security, as well as Gates and Buffett.
Soon after Gates graduated from the College, he began a notable career of service and institutional advancement both in and out of the government.
“Chancellor Gates has served under eight U.S. presidents,” Rowe said. “He is the only Secretary of Defense to have served under presidents from different political parties, something that we think is a powerful example of the kind of leadership we care about at William and Mary. We need that bipartisanship every year, every decade. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in recognition of his devotion to U.S. service members and commitment to the American people.”
Howard Buffet, an American businessman, philanthropist, conservationist, farmer and son of the prominent investor and philanthropist Warren Buffet, currently heads the Howard G. Buffet Foundation, which stands as one of the largest private charitable foundations in the United States.
Shanker began the talk with an open-ended question aimed at Gates regarding his time as Secretary of Defense. Gates presented the value in non-military centric forms of power, naming that as the main mode through which the United States won the Cold War.
“The reason, frankly, that we started these forums here at William and Mary was the belief that we have to reform and change all of these non-military instruments; they’ve all outgrown their use-by date,” Gates said. “They need to be changed; they need to be reformed, restructured, repurposed.”
Gates continued by addressing the cost of not cooperating with the private sector.
“By failing to reach outside the government to potential partners, we have denied ourselves in many respects the kind of expertise and commitment and personal passion about these issues,” Gates said. “The only way we can begin to compete with China is to leverage not only the capabilities that we have inside the government but the remarkable capabilities we have outside the government.”
Buffett seconded this opinion.
“Businesses can support what our humanitarian efforts aren’t,” Buffett said. “At the end of the day, I think there’s a lot of opportunity to do that if you’re innovative and creative. You can’t get stuck in a paradigm where it’s just the way everybody does things.”
Both Gates and Buffett continued discussing the economic drivers of the United State’s military and the country’s declining geopolitical power. The war in Ukraine represented a particular focal point through which to explore this declining power, conveyed first by the sequence of photographs taken by Buffett’s team and subsequently by Gates and Buffett’s responses to Shanker’s prompts.
“There’s only one thing happening today that I believe can lead us into World War III, and that’s the Russian invasion of Ukraine,” Buffett said. “For anything to work at the end of the day, Ukraine has to win this war.”
Shanker used this moment to transition into discussing the Superhumans project, which is supported in large part by the Howard G. Buffet Foundation. Superhumans works with those affected by the war in Ukraine to help provide prosthetics, reconstructive surgery, rehabilitation and psychological support services.
Buffett positioned humanitarian work as a crucial component of Ukraine’s survival through increasing morale in such a long-standing conflict.
“There’s a huge psychological and moral standpoint to war, you have to keep your population somehow, number one, surviving, which in a lot of places in Ukraine is a challenge in itself,” Buffett said. “You also have to keep them standing behind the government. You have to have them believe in what you’re doing. [They] have to believe that the freedom and the democracy that they’re fighting for, that your friends and your relatives are dying for, is worth it.”
Gates supported these remarks, emphasizing the importance of quick decision making in his role as secretary.
“Speed was of the essence, and so I met with that team every two weeks to figure out: what are the bureaucratic obstacles, what’s in the way?” Gates said. “Because while you fool around with bureaucracy, kids are dying.”
When Shanker took time to field questions from the audience, the conversation closed by circling back to public-private partnerships with an emphasis on crucial work being done by students.
After the talk, Lucas Fernandez ’28, part of this year’s Global Scholars Program led by the GRI, shared some thoughts on whether he thought universities should play a larger role in hosting conversations about national security challenges.
“Definitely, especially now with the rise of different media platforms and artificial intelligence and emerging technologies,” Fernandez said. “There’s so much more of a chance for misinformation and disinformation, and universities need to play a bigger role in making known to, especially the younger population who was growing up with those media changes and technological changes as well, the true nature of geopolitics and world situations because it can get easily mixed in to the wrong information spaces.”
