Alina Polyakova
Thank you so much, Elina, it’s so wonderful to have you with us. Thank you for those really warm words and the introduction and thank you everyone for joining us tonight for CEPA’s 20th birthday, what an amazing, amazing evening this is going to be. Ladies and gentlemen, we have an incredible program planned for you tonight, honoring true global leadership, freedom, and courage. You know, I was reflecting on the last 20 years of this amazing institution, all the work that we have done, and the two words that kept coming back to my mind were “foresight” and “innovation.” So 20 years ago, in 2005, just remember where we were. I think at that time, few thought the European security was something that we ever would have to think about again, and certainly ever worry about. Europe was stable and boring. That’s what a friend of mine told me back then. So the idea of establishing a new institution focusing in European security was not only counterintuitive, I think some may have even thought it was a little crazy, but the word that I would use is “visionary.” And as I look just ahead at the founders’ table at Larry and Wes, the co-founders of CEPA, Larry Hirsch, the Chair of CEPA’s Board of Directors, and my predecessor and former member of CEPA’s Board as well, Wes Mitchell, I just truly want to thank you both for having the vision and the foresight to establish this amazing institution. Thank you and I’m just so proud to say that CEPA has truly remained an embodiment of that initial spark. We have always been ahead of the curve in so many ways. This institution was the first to identify arenas where geostrategic competition would unfold, from the Black Sea to the Baltic to the Arctic, and indeed, today, all of Europe is ground zero for great power competition. We were first to emphasize the threat of Russian propaganda to dividing our allies, and we now see China copying and improving on Russia’s toolkit. CEPA raised the alarm bells on the Russian threat and Putin’s imperial worldview when most look to Russia as a potential partner. And very unfortunately, today and in hindsight, CEPA was right. We were proven right, unfortunately, in 2014 and again, in 2022. Of course, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine focused not just CEPA, but the entire world on how fragile our collective security actually is and how regional conflicts are now increasingly global. Indeed, everything is interconnected, and the outcome of Russia’s war against Ukraine will certainly determine Beijing’s designs on the Indo-Pacific and far beyond. But I think this tragic moment in our recent history has also shed light on the opportunities that we have before us to take advantage of innovation, innovation for defense, which Ukraine is proving every single day in the battlefield, and the opportunities that technology has to offer for our collective prosperity. Again, CEPA started to pay attention, paying attention to autonomous systems and drones when we launched our defense tech initiative in 2020, again, when very few were paying attention, there’s a theme to this speech, and we established what is now our fastest-growing body of work on Digital Innovation and Technology Policy long before everybody had ChatGPT on their phones.

So the intersection of tech and security now animates everything that we do at CEPA, because tech companies are now defense companies and defense firms are now tech firms, and in the race for tech innovation, our greatest advantage over China are our allies. The US is the dominant global leader in innovation, but we can’t go at it alone. We’ll need Europe, we’ll need our allies across the world to work hand-in-glove to lay the foundation for a global digital infrastructure that runs on Western tech and not Chinese tech. Looking back, so many of CEPA’s ideas have now become policy. And looking ahead, I am incredibly confident that this institution’s mission and vision will continue to define national security and foreign policy for generations to come. So if you allow me just a quick personal note. You know, there’s not a day that goes by where I don’t feel truly humbled by the privilege of leading this amazing institution, and that’s really because I was a child who grew up behind the Iron Curtain in Soviet Ukraine, and my family came to this country with two suitcases, and I didn’t speak a word of English, and I never, in my wildest dreams imagined that I’d be standing here today addressing this incredibly distinguished group and being the head of this premier institution. Thank you. Thank you. So I just want to thank my board for continuing to trust me with this incredible honor. Larry, George, Victor, and Bob, and, of course, Molly, our International Leadership Council, led by General McMaster. The lights are so bright, I don’t know where everyone’s sitting, General McMaster and Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer and our Business Leadership Council and all the founding members that have been able to join us here today. This celebration, of course, would not be possible without our sponsors this evening, Google Auterion, Global Atomics Aeronautics Systems, Lockheed Martin, Meta, George Casey, Ambassador Eileen Donahoe, Ambassador Bobby Mandell, Mitzi Perdue, and the Howard G. Buffett Foundation and our partners who are here today as well, Airbus, Apple, Amazon, the Ax:son Johnson Foundation, the Hirsch Family Foundation, American Rheinmetall Defense, the US-Russia Foundation, RTX, it’s so wonderful having all of you with us. And thank you so much to many of our friends who are here today, including members of Congress who braved the shutdown to join us, so thank you for being here, truly appreciate it. Many distinguished officials and former heads of state, members of Europe’s diplomatic corps, our colleagues from the White House, our Ukrainian colleagues who traveled all the way from Ukraine to join us here tonight, as well as our Japanese colleagues who came all the way from Tokyo, but especially, but especially the CEPA team, who worked so incredibly hard to bring this evening together, because at the end of the day, we’re a people institution, and is the people who have made this institution what it is from the very, very beginning.