Former CIA Director William J. Burns to Keynote 2025 Hagel Lecture

With his recent role as the head of the U.S. intelligence community, Burns offers intimate insight into how world leaders think — and how their interactions with U.S. intelligence could result in shifts to global stability.

By Sarah Steimer

This year’s Hagel Lecture, to be held Wednesday, April 16, will feature former CIA Director William J. Burns — who left his post on January 20 — in a discussion that will explore how international leaders will respond to American leadership, disruptions to the U.S. intelligence community, and how this might affect safety across the globe. Registration for the event, which is free and open to the public, is open now. 

For the fourth installment of the annual lecture series, Former Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel will discuss these issues with Burns, in an event moderated by Prof. Robert Pape, Director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats.

“There is an amazing overlap between his experience at the highest levels in foreign policy, international security affairs for our government, and also the issues we are most concerned about,” Pape says. “He is incredibly well positioned to help us understand what's occurring, which, at this point in time, is incredibly valuable.”

Burns served as CIA director from March 2021 to January 2025, previously serving as U.S. deputy secretary of state from 2011 to 2014 and spending 32 years in the U.S. Foreign Service. He was president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace from 2014 to 2021 and ambassador to Jordan from 1998 to 2001, assistant secretary of state for Near East Affairs from 2001 to 2005, ambassador to Russia from 2005 to 2008, and undersecretary of state for Political Affairs from 2008 to 2011. He received three Presidential Distinguished Service Awards and the highest civilian honors from the Pentagon and the U.S. Intelligence Community. He also authored the 2019 book, The Back Channel: A Memoir of American Diplomacy and the Case for Its Renewal.

Because of his very recent experience interacting with foreign leaders — particularly Russian President Vladimir Putin — Burns brings unparalleled insight into how top leaders think, and whether President Trump's initial approach to foreign policy is going to make the world a safer or more dangerous place. As Pape notes, much of Burns’s career was spent meeting with world leaders and assessing their reasoning to help guide future policy decisions.

Previous iterations of the Hagel Lecture focused on U.S. foreign policy with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in 2019, former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul in 2023, and Former DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson in 2025. This year’s lecture notably comes at a historically unusual time.

“We've never seen an administration come in and make so many fundamental changes — to our relationships with our allies, with our enemies, with the different ongoing conflicts and fights and wars that we’re involved in — as the Trump administration has already made in its first three weeks in office,” Pape says.

The event will be held at the David Rubenstein Forum, while also available for online streaming. Pape urges physical or digital attendance for anyone, underscoring the urgent necessity of understanding where stability and instability lies across the globe, whether for those in the university with research agendas, students embarking on their studies, organizations with international business, and beyond.