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WOODRUFF: Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations. I am Judy Woodruff of the PBS “NewsHour,” and I am delighted to introduce our speaker this afternoon. I don’t think there could be a better time or moment for us to hear from the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Without further ado, please welcome Director John Brennan. (Applause.)

BRENNAN: Well, thank you very much, Judy. And good afternoon, everyone. It is indeed a pleasure to be back at the Council to compare notes on a remarkably complex and dynamic international scene. And I very much look forward to talking with Judy and Council membership on the many topics that are in the headlines. But I would first like to offer some brief opening remarks to kick off the conversation today.

Now, whenever I administer the oath of office to new officers at our headquarters in Langley, Virginia, I tell them that they are coming aboard at a critical moment in our agency’s history. In the 36 years since I first entered government, I have never been witnessing a time with such a daunting array of challenges to our nation’s security.

Notable among those challenges is that some of the institutions and relationships that have been pillars of the post-Cold War international system are under serious stress. As you well know, the United Kingdom voted last week to leave the European Union. Of all the crises the EU has faced in recent years, the U.K. vote to leave the EU may well be its greatest challenge.

Brexit is pushing the EU into a period of introspection that will pervade virtually everything the EU does in the coming weeks, months, and even years ahead. Euroskeptics around Europe, including in Denmark, France, Italy, and the Netherlands, are demanding their own referendums on multiple EU issues. This will surely make decision-making and forging consensus in the EU much harder.

No member state has ever left the Union, so Europe is entering a period of uncertainty as the U.K. and the EU take stock of the situation and begin staking out their negotiating positions. Discussions about how an exit will work will dominate the EU agenda in the months ahead. Negotiations for the exit agreement will not begin until the prime minister formally notifies the EU of the U.K.’s intention to leave, which Prime Minister David Cameron has said will occur under his successor. EU and member-state leaders, excluding the U.K., will be meeting in the coming days and weeks to begin laying the groundwork for those negotiations.

Now, regardless of what lies ahead, I would like to take this opportunity to say that the Brexit vote will not adversely affect the intelligence partnership between the United States and the United Kingdom in the months and years ahead. Indeed, I spoke to my counterpart in London early Monday morning, and we reaffirmed to one another that the bonds of friendship and cooperation between our services are only destined to grow stronger in the years ahead. These ties are and will always be essential to our collective security.

I presume a few of you have questions about terrorism and the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and Levant. I look forward to addressing them in the question-and-answer session. I know that our collective hearts, though, go out to the families of the latest victims of the horrific terrorist attacks perpetrated as well as incited by ISIL. The despicable attack at Istanbul’s international airport yesterday that killed dozens and injured many more certainly bears the hallmarks of ISIL’s depravity.

Let me take a few moments to say a few words about some less discussed but still some very important issues that we at CIA and our colleagues throughout the intelligence community are watching closely. I’ll start with the overarching challenge of instability which continues to grip large sections of the globe.

Global instability is one of the defining issues of our time, and its implications are hard to overstate. As instability spreads, extremists and terrorists are finding sanctuary in ungoverned spaces. Energy supplies are being disrupted. Political reform is suffering as too many governments opt for authoritarian measures at the expense of democratic principles and respect for human rights.

Most devastating of all, though, is the human toll attendant to instability. Last week the United Nations reported that the number of people displaced by global instability and conflict had reached 65 million, the highest figure ever recorded. In a host of countries, from East Asia to the Middle East to West Africa, governments are under stress, and civic institutions are struggling to provide basic services and to maintain law and order.

As governments in these regions recede from the center of national life, more people are shifting their allegiances away from the nation-state and toward sub-national groups and identities, leading societies that once embraced a national identity to fracture along ethnic and sectarian lines.

Nowhere is this trend more evident than in the Middle East, a region that I have studied closely for much of my professional life. When I lived there years ago, I liked to walk through neighborhoods and villages to observe the rhythms of daily life. I remember seeing people of different backgrounds and beliefs living side by side, secular and devout.

Today relations among these groups are too often marred by suspicion and distrust, and even outright hostility. Extremist groups have played a key role in fueling these tensions, luring impressionable young men and women to join their cause and spreading false narratives meant to divide and inflame. In some areas, a whole generation are growing up in an environment of militarism without a chance to develop the skills to contribute or even to engage in modern-day society.

The underlying causes of these trends are complex and difficult to address, and the long-term consequences of these developments are deeply troubling. Global instability is an issue that affects all countries, from Russia to China to the United States, and it must be met by (audio break) community. I am certain that this issue will loom large on the agenda of the next administration.

Another strategic challenge is dealing with the tremendous power, potential, opportunities, and risks resident in the digital domain. No matter how many geopolitical crises one sees in the headlines, the reliability, security, vulnerability, and the range of human activity taking place within cyberspace are constantly on my mind.

On the cybersecurity front, organizations of all kinds are under constant attack from a range of actors—foreign governments, criminal gangs, extremist groups, cyber-activists, and many others. In this new and relatively uncharted frontier, speed and agility are king. Malicious actors have shown that they can penetrate a network and withdraw in very short order, plundering systems without anyone knowing they were there until maybe after the damage is already done.

While I served at the White House, cyber was part of my portfolio, and it was always the subject that gave me the biggest headache. Cyber-attackers are determined and adaptive. They often collaborate and share expertise, and they come at you in so many different ways, with an ever-changing array of tools, tactics, and techniques.

Moreover, our laws have not yet adequately adapted to the emergence of this new digital frontier. Most worrisome from my perspective is that there is still no political or national consensus on the appropriate role of the government—law enforcement, homeland security, and intelligence agencies—in safeguarding the security, the reliability, the resiliency, and the prosperity of the digital domain.

The intelligence community is making great strides in countering cyber-threats, but much work needs to be done. As we move forward on this issue, one thing we know is that private industry will have a huge role to play as the vast majority of the Internet is in private hands. Protecting it is not something the government can do on its own.

Right up there with terrorism, global instability, and cybersecurity is nuclear proliferation and the accompanying development of delivery systems, both tactical and strategic, that make all too real the potential for a nuclear event.

Unsurprisingly, top of my list of countries of concern is North Korea, whose authoritarian and brutal leader has wantonly pursued a nuclear-weapons program to threaten regional states and the United States instead of taking care of the impoverished and politically repressed men, women, and children of North Korea.

So what else is there besides terrorism, global instability, cybersecurity, and nuclear proliferation that worries the CIA director and keeps CIA officers busy around the clock and around the globe? Well, as a liberal-arts guy from the baby-boomer generation, the rapid pace of technological change during my lifetime has been simply dizzying. Moreover, as we have seen with just about every scientific leap forward, new technologies often carry substantial risks, to the same degree that they hold tremendous promise.