The United States commands extraordinary resources across every dimension of national power, yet in recent years it has struggled to achieve many important foreign policy aims. This paradox raises a key question for Americans and the world: What can the United States actually do with the power it has? What are the qualities of American power? How might the United States use the power it has to better effect?

During the last decade, scientists, policymakers, industry, and civil society have debated how to govern AI in the face of its potential to reshape economics, politics, science, and society. One of the first and most important rounds was settled in California with SB 53, the first law in the United States specifically governing frontier AI. How will California’s implementation impact the statute’s efficacy? How might California’s approach influence other jurisdictions engaging with or implementing a “trust but verify” framework? What steps can be taken to strengthen effective, reliable, frontier AI policy implementation in California and beyond?

Adapt or die? Governments at every level face an expanding trust deficit. Existing processes for democratic engagement, no matter how well-intentioned, are often ossified or captured. Deliberative democracy practices have been shown to produce positive community outcomes and reduce polarization, yet new innovations like emerging technologies haven’t been widely integrated into actual decisionmaking processes. Those technologies provide opportunities to scale democratic processes and to bring in more voices but also open new questions. How can emerging technologies be effectively integrated into deliberative democracy practices? How must institutions overcome concerns about whether their algorithms accurately represent community voice?

In the aftermath of World War II, U.S. policymakers linked domestic institutions and international order, weaving. Of late, and particularly in the wake of the financial crisis of 2007/2008, policymakers—Republican and Democrat—have struggled to draw a compelling link between the domestic and the international. The strategic imperative is clear: the resources needed to power success in the twenty-first century are dispersed around the globe. This conversation will consider the 2021 Inflation Reduction Act, the centerpiece of the Biden Administration’s domestic and international program and the hinge between them, which sought to kickstart the move towards the kind of green energy transition in a way that would bring jobs to the post-industrial heartlands. What worked? What might have worked with more time? And what other examples are currently being developed, including in the United Kingdom and China, to link place and foreign policy?

California is at once an icon and an economic engine, a source of soft power as well as technological innovation. It has one of the largest public university systems in the world and is the largest producer of agriculture in the nation. Its policies—on a huge range of issues from AI safety to climate change to agricultural production—have historically had extra-jurisdictional impact within the U.S. and abroad. How do these pieces come together, and what role do West Coast institutions have to play at this moment of geopolitical disruption?