Security and Preparedness: Anne-Marie Slaughter

Good morning, welcome to another day in paradise. My name is Mike Sullivan; I serve as Director of Institutional Relations for Chautauqua Institution. And it is my pleasure to welcome you to the amphitheater at the start of the seventh week of our season. I have a few announcements before we get started today. Recordings of this morning's program will be available shortly afternoon at the Gazebo, located at the main amphitheater entrance. Additionally our short recorded interview with Anne-Marie Slaughter will be available in a few days as a free download from the institution's web by clicking on the podcast link on the main page at www.ciweb.org. I would also encourage all of you to visit a remarkable online archive of Chautauqua lecturers; it is called the Great Chautauqua Lecture Library.com. This is a web based repository of hundreds of lectures and sermons given in Chautauqua since the mid 1990s which you can download to your computer or iPod, and listen to at your leisure. The Great Lecture Library is up and running on a computer at the Gazebo and our staff is available to introduce you to the site. Anne-Marie Slaughter will be signing copies of her recently published book "The Idea that Is America: Keeping Faith with Our Values in a Dangerous World", today, at 1.15 pm in the Author's Alcove. This is located adjacent to Chautauqua Book Store and Bestor Plaza. Due to the intensity of Anne-Marie's schedule today we are unable to accommodate the traditional meet and greet session on the back porch. So I encourage those of you who would like to say hello to attend her book signing session at 1.15 this afternoon. And finally I out of respect for our guest and those around you please silence your cell phones and pagers, thank you. And this concludes today's announcements. Each week Chautauqua invites five distinguished speakers to address a chosen theme from diverse and far reaching perspectives. During this week devoted to the issues of security and preparedness, we will explore how individuals and governments decide on personal safety and security measures while maintaining an open civil society in an era where terrorist attacks, pandemic health threats and catastrophic natural disasters have become a reality society must address. Tomorrow we welcome the governor of the state in New York, Eliot Spitzer, on Wednesday, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor will return to offer her first lecture at Chautauqua following her retirement from the US Supreme Court, Philip Zelikow, the immediate past counselor to Secretary of State Rice, Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission and a professor at the University of Virginia will speak on Thursday. And Friday, we welcome Pulitzer, Polk, and Peabody award winning science journalist Laurie Garrett, who will address the issue of global health threats within the context of National Security. This morning's lecture is sponsored in part by the Margaret Miller Newman Lectureship Fund; an endowment held in the Chautauqua Foundation. Mrs. Newman who died in 1981, at the age of 93, was a granddaughter of Chautauqua co-founder Lewis Miller. She served as historian of the Smith Memorial Library and was prominent in the Historical and Preservation societies at Chautauqua in Western New York. Among other organizations, she was a member of the Chautauqua County Historical Society, the Chautauqua foundation, the CLSC, - Mrs. Miller's family. A number of them are in our audience today and thank them for their generosity and ongoing support of Chautauqua. It is now my great pleasure to introduce you to Anne-Marie Slaughter. Ms. Slaughter served as Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University where she is also a Professor of Politics and International Affairs. She also serves as the convener and academic co chair of the Princeton Project on National Security, a multi year research project into developing a new bi-partisan national security strategy for the United States. Ms. Slaughter came to Princeton from Harvard Law School where she was a Professor of International, Foreign & Comparative Law and Director of the International Legal Studies Program. Educated at Princeton, Oxford and Harvard in both international law and international relations, Ms. Slaughter's work at the juncture of the two disciplines help pioneer the current emphasis and cross fertilization between international relations and international law. She is the author of a new world order and more recently "The Idea that Is America: Keeping Faith with Our Values in a Dangerous World" published this spring. She is a former President of the American Society of International Law and currently serves on the boards of the Council and Foreign Relations in the New America foundation. Among other owners, Ms. Slaughter gave a set of millennial lectures at The Hague Academy of International Law in 2000 and won the Francis Deak Prize awarded to the American Journal of International Law in 1990 and 1994. I understand that Miss. Slaughter's aunt and uncle are a long time visitors to Chautauqua. So we are particularly delighted to welcome their needs to Chautauqua for her first week. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in a warm welcome for Anne-Maria Slaughter. Thank you. Our American security lies in our military strength, our economic prosperity, our innovative technology, our civilian expertise, our vigor and resilience and our ever renewing immigrant population. But above all our American security lies in our values. So what do I mean by our values, it is a word that has been over used and abused in our political process. We hear talk of values' voters, talking about one segment of the political spectrum. We are all values' voters. We may vote based on different understandings of the values we hold as a nation; but we all vote based on some values. The question is not whether our politics should be infused with our values. The question is what values? What values do we hold as a nation and do we stand for as a nation? What values as I argue is the deepest source of our security? I wouldn't have asked the question if I didn't have an answer for it. I argue that America holds to seven values; liberty, democracy, equality and justice. Now if you are disagreeing with me already I am in big trouble, because those four, I think if I woke any of you up in the middle of the night or if I went anywhere across this country and woke somebody up in the middle of the night and say "Quick, name me some American values". I hope I would get, oh yeah Pledge of Allegiance, liberty and justice for all, liberty and justice. I hope I would get someone thinking - Thomas Jefferson; you know that phrase; I got it "All men are created equal". I hope I would get equality. And I hope I would get democracy, that is fundamental to our understanding of who we are as a nation as the world's first successful, liberal democracy first democracy. So liberty, democracy, equality and justice, I think that is uncontroversial. The next three; tolerance, humility and faith. I am not sure that if I asked you to name me seven American values, your other three would be tolerance, humility and faith. I hope that in the course of our conversation, after this lecture, I can convince you that those are a good seven if not the only way you could formulate those seven, but liberty, democracy, equality, justice, tolerance, humility and faith. Before going into each value, and in the body of this lecture, I want to talk about how those values have some understanding of those values, even if it is a continually contested understanding, a continually debated understanding. How an understanding of those values advance our security. First, when our values mean something, when they are not just words that we mouth in political rhetoric, in Op-Eds, when they are not just words but rather standards that we genuinely aspire to meet as individuals, as citizens, as nation, standards that we genuinely aspire to meet. Then those values are the motivation and the metric of our politics and our society. They are the motor of progressive change in our society. I came in very late last night with the result that I will be reading to from my actual text. I would like to quote from Abraham Lincoln on what our values mean in our politics. Now Abraham Lincoln of course is more aware than probable any other American President of the gap between the statement; "All men are created equal" and the reality of slavery. He of course his presidency is defined by that gap. So he has thought a great deal about what it means to profess values but not to live up to them. And he writes, "The founders meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people, all colors, everywhere." In other words he said our history is a process of trying to live up to that maxim; trying to live up to those ideals but constantly falling short; just as we do in our own lives. We are human. We aspire, we are guided by our values, but of course we are not perfect, so we constantly fall short. But we succeed in some places and we try again in others. Our greatest patriots have been the men and the women, dark skinned, light skinned, and everything in between of every creed, color, faith, and ideology; immigrant born, native born, rich and poor, rural and urban, straight and gay, reformer and conservative, laborer and captain of industry. Our greatest patriots have been those people who have looked to our values, pointed out our short falls honestly, but then insisted of holding our government to its word. That when we take our values seriously as Frederick Douglas did, as Susan B. Anthony, did as Elizabeth Cady Stanton did, as Martin Luther King did, as countless other Americans have done. That insistence that our values means something and that we hold our government to what they mean. We may not agree on the precise meaning. But we agree on the broad meaning. That has been the motor of progressive change in our society. If you go back to the speeches of Frederick Douglas or Martin Luther King they did not turn their back on our values; they embraced them. But they said, "You talk of equality, you talk of democracy, you talk of liberty, you talk of equality; that's not my reality, make good on your values." But how will progressive change today help our security, because I came to talk to you about security. Well to start with; if we talk the value of equality seriously our first value go back to the Declaration of Independence; the first thing we said to the world; "All men are created equal," if we took it seriously then we would be serious about tackling the widening inequality in our own society today. We would be serious about recognizing that we are back to the Gilded Age. You will hear from Governor Spitzer tomorrow, I don't know what he is going to say, not withstanding the efforts of the New York Sun and other places to find out; from yeah, I truly do not know what he is going to say. But I have heard before. And he is most powerful when he talks about Gilded Age values, when he talks about the fact that we are now in a society where a certain portion of our elites have never flown on a passenger plane, have never stood in line and taken their shoes of, and taking virtually every thing else off, to go through an airport; have never taken public transportation, who live in gated communities and never see a homeless person on their street, who live in a completely insulated, gilded, world. I do not stand here to condemn their wealth, far from it. However that degree of inequality is immoral and it ultimately weakens the fabric of our society. I am pleased by your applause; but I just talk to your wonderful President before coming and he said that he urges the audiences to hold applause, not simply to allow more time to the speaker but more importantly so that you hear the entire argument and rather than the kinds of applause lines we all too often fall into in political discourse, where you applaud what you like and you don't listen to what you don't. I hope hold your applause please; I hope there will be time at the end. But if we were to tackle those inequalities, if we were to take seriously education and healthcare, the education and healthcare that are essential for all Americans to have a fair shot, to have the basic equality not of results but of opportunity that Americans mean when they define equality, if they had a fair shot, because they were going to get the education and be able to maintain the standards of health that would allow them to flourish. If we were to tackle that inequality, we would be such a stronger nation. Can anyone doubt that we would be stronger in the world with a better educated, healthier, happier, population? That is where our security starts and getting there requires that we take the value of equality seriously. In the world if we were to take the value of equality seriously and then be serious about tackling inequality, we would be on the cutting edge not simply of the wealth created by globalization and the huge income disparities created by globalization, but on the leading edge of doing some thing about it. And that is the problem for so many countries in this world. We see it here, we see the widening gap, we see people who feel that they have lost out to globalization, the globalization net creates greater income but it does not create a fair distribution of that income. That problem is greatly magnified in Africa, in Latin America, in parts of Asia. If America were to take seriously, not just the benefits of globalization and you must know that in many parts of the world, globalization is a synonym for Americanization; it's a synonym for unbridled rampant capitalism of the worst kind. It is a synonym for the disruption of traditional values like taking care of one another. If instead of standing just for that face of globalization, if we also stood for a serious commitment to make the wealth, but share the wealth of globalization, we would also be greatly empowered in the world. We would be seen in a very different like which is a deep part of our security. So we start our values, equality, if we live up to those values, if we take equality seriously, we would strengthen ourselves domestically and we would begin the process of once again being looked to in the world as a leader for equality and justice rather than a rapacious capitalist threat, which is how sadly so much of the world sees us. We would also be forced to recognize the glaring inequalities in the world at large, not simply within countries as we have just talked about, but between countries. By an accident of birth you are born in the United States, or those of you in the audience who may have been born abroad you have come to the United States and your life has been blessed enough to allow you to come to a place like Chautauqua in the summer and enjoy a week of this wonderful kind of intellectual stimulation and cultural stimulation. But by an accident you could have been born in Bangladesh. Were you have born in Bangladesh; of course your life would be very different, you would know an extraordinary poverty. But you would also be in a country where if the United States and China and the European Union [0:20:54] [Audio Break] at the rate that we admit it, your country will disappear. But you have no say globally in how to combat it. You have no ability to actually make your concerns heard and guarantee that people will listen to them and do what is necessary to actually protect your country. I choose Bangladesh because it is the both the poorest country one of the poorest countries in the world and one the flattest. It will be it is inundated by floods already and cyclones. It will simply be much worse [0:21:27] [Audio Break] lexicon; sounds a lot like "Taxation without Representation". It sounds like having decisions made for you, that directly affect your quality of life and you have no way of affecting them. Your life will be infinitely more affected by who America elects as President and what decisions the Chinese Leadership makes and who leads the European Union than by who leads Bangladesh. Now what we do about that? You know now here we are talking about philosophy [0:22:00] [Audio Break] give every person in the world an equal vote. We could; but it wouldn't work and even as great a man as Immanuel Kant; the greater the one of the greatest liberal philosophers of all time, looked at that and said, you know, trying for global government will give you a despotism worse than any system we have now. So we can't do that. And as a nation our leaders do have a responsibility to look to our citizens before they look to the welfare of the citizens of Bangladesh. And yet for our global security, for our ability to tackle global problems, to develop the global capacity, to meet problems of global warming, of epidemics, but also of global terrorism, of nuclear proliferation, of the rise of new powers, of the health of the global economy, for all those problems we must work with other nations. And to work with other nations we have to at least listen. When they say, "You are making decisions that affect our government, the lifestyles, the lives, the possibility of lives for all our citizens, you must hear us; concretely." That would mean in the first instance, serious reform of the United Nations. And I mean serious reform, I don't mean talking about it, I don't mean tinkering around the edges, I mean the United States taking the lead and saying, all right, we created the United Nations in 1945. We signed the charter in San Francisco. It was created for the world of 1945 for the victors of 1945, Russia and China and Britain and France and the United States. They were also had been the great powers and were coming back. It was created for a world of fewer than 60 nations. Today, it's 2007 or I think the first president who could possibly say this is going to be 2009, Republican or Democrat. 2009; the world looks very different. There are over a 190 nations and you know what, much as we would like to believe it, France, Britain, Russia, China and the United States are not the only powers in the world. We the United States recognize this and we are prepared to make room at the table. We are going to be serious about reforming the Security Council and making room for other countries so that this global body is genuinely global; so that it has real legitimacy. And if we fail, if we fail having genuinely tried because we have never genuinely tried; the last round of UN Reform the United States said well, we would like to see Japan on the Security Council but nobody else. China shot down Japan and we said "gee that's a pity". We have never really tried to do this, but if we try and we fail, then the United States has to take the lead in creating a new global institution that is genuinely global and as representative as possible. That is what taking equality seriously would mean in the world; and if we did it, imagine a United States President that looked at the world and instead of saying "You threaten us" and "We are the greatest power in the world and we are going to stay the greatest power and we are going to do everything for our security and forget your security", or "Forget what you care about". Instead we said, "We are a great nation. And as a great nation that was founded on the principal of No Taxation Without Representation, as a great nation that was founded on the idea of democracy, we are going to do what we can, to get the best facsimile of representation at the global level that we can. We are not creating a world government, but we are going to take seriously representation of the six billion and counting people on this earth." That's what taking equality seriously would do. How about justice? We are not doing well on that justice meter these days. I wrote my book out of a combination of anguish and outrage. The anguish came from being in the Copenhagen Airport the weekend that the Abu Ghraib photographs were first made public. I was flying to Warsaw for a global meeting, and I am half Belgian, I have spend my life going back and forth to Europe, showing that passport, that blue passport and feeling pride not feeling perfection; believe me my Belgian relatives have been pointing out the faults of this country for a very long time. And I have many heated debates and but my standard position is when I am here I am often critical about our government and when I am abroad I am often defending our government; even though I am always saying we are far from perfect. But as an American I looked around and every place I looked, every news stand, every magazine from American magazines, to Polish, to Danish, to magazines all over the world; and on the face of every single magazine was some picture from Abu Ghraib. And the most frequent one is the picture that is now plastered in downtown Tehran. It is the picture that is this hideous caricature of the Statue of Liberty; of a man standing on a box hooded with a chord running from the bottom of his gown, being threatened with the electrocution. I like to believe I do believe that he was not in fact electrocuted, although our troops have actually used electric shocks in some cases. But the point was that was the symbol of our country. And for the first time, I showed my passport and the woman on the other side looked at me and she looked at my passport and she knew I was an American, and it did not mean to her what it has always meant to me, the country that came to Europe, that fought two wars, that makes mistakes, but that stood for good in the world. To her she looked at me and she looked at those pictures. And I thought; all right that's the anguish. But I thought you know; it's all right. We are America. We go through these things and we are going to fix it. And the President said; this is not who we are. And I believed him and I thought all right, heads are going to roll. Not just the people who did it. But the people who allowed it to happen all the way up the chain, because frankly, you put 19 year olds in a situation without guidelines and with encouragement to soften people up, and they are the people who have seen their buddy shot by people who look like the people they are interrogating; and I am not surprised at what happened. And I thought; we were going to do what America does, which is to acknowledge our errors and then make good. In fact I just watched the movie Rules of Engagement where the marine captain says, "You know the marines don't have the luxury of hiding of mistakes. We are forced to air them so that we don't make them again." But we didn't do that. We didn't do that and the next thing I knew a year later; our Vice President was openly talking about torture. That's the out rage that is the out rage and it is not partisan outrage. It is not because I am on one party and I look at my government of the other party. It is outrage as an American, as somebody who believes that we stand for justice, and who cannot bear to see our moral capital, our power, squandered, stolen, taken from us from all of us. If we are serious about justice, we will prosecute Abu Ghraib as it should have been prosecuted, we will stand before the world and we will say, "We were frightened. We were badly frightened after 9/11, just as we were frightened after World War II and we interned 3000 Japanese Americans whose crime was to be a Japanese American, just as in World War I we went after German Americans. We were frightened. We are human. Other nations; similarly when they are frightened they make mistakes. But we have made mistakes and we are going to rectify those mistakes, we are going to close Guantanamo, we are going to close secret prisons, we are going to negotiate a code of rights for any detainees; whether they are terrorists and they do need to be interrogated, or whether they are regular war criminals in different kinds of war. We are going to have rules and we are going to stick to those rules." The title of my book, The Idea that Is America, is taken from a letter that Captain Ian Fishback, a West Point graduate, a military man who has fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, wrote to Senator John McCain who had been a prisoner of war. He wrote a year after Abu Ghraib and he begged for standards. He begged for standards governing interrogations, because he said without them we are going to get these horrible abuses. And at the end he said, "I would rather die fighting than lose even the smallest part of the idea that is America." Now if a military man writing to another military man can say our values are the source of our strength, our values are what we who are on the frontlines fight for, besmirch those but you have destroyed us. If a military man writing to another military man can stand up and say that, surely we can say that as the American people, not on a partisan basis but on a national basis. If we lived up properly to the value of justice we would also live up much better to the value of tolerance. I told you I chose tolerance as my fifth value. Its not getting nearly enough play in my book these days. But you need only go back to the puritans, to the stories of how we moved from a theocracy, because say what you like about Massachusetts Bay Colony, it was the theocracy. And Hutchinson was expelled from Massachusetts Bay Colony for the crime of thinking differently about her relationship to God and God forbid, as a woman, actually daring to hold meetings in her house. I put it to the women in the audience to imagine which of those was worse. But point being, we went from a theocracy to a sort of 13 colonies who had people from all different sects, every conceivable different kind of Protestant sect, Catholics, Jews; they had to learned to live together. That was the virtue of tolerance. Without tolerance there is no democracy. Tolerance would mean accepting people among us, Muslim Americans, any kind of hyphenated Americans among us and not automatically demonizing them listening to them. It would not necessarily mean liking them. Tolerance is the virtue for the strong, not the weak. It is easy to demonize. It is hard to stand up and listen to somebody who looks different from you, who has been raised differently from you, a woman for instance who perhaps wears a veil and you think, why is she doing that, and surely that's a sign of oppression, to listen to her account of why she chooses to veil and to engage with her and to respect her views even if you don't agree with them. If we lived up to justice we do a far better job of living up to tolerance, because we would have to treat all prisoners regardless of what they look like, equally. That would mean that we have to think about Muslims among us and in the world differently; that would mean we would stand for a nation of tolerance in an age of extremism. That is another part of our national security, because the threats we face are threats of violent extremists; who yes, right now are mostly concentrated on one fringe of Islam. But over history they have been in Christianity, they have been in Judaism, and I need only ask you to remember Oklahoma City, to see in our own society today a bombing that killed more Americans than anyone until 9/11, through a fringe, fanatical set of beliefs armed with a violent weapon. So standing for tolerance in an age of extremism is a fundamental part of our security. Those are the ways in which standing for our values would motivate progressive change and progressive change living up to equality, living up to justice, living up to tolerance and I could go on, will strengthen us domestically and strengthen us abroad. Now let me talk about how values are the source of our power in a more profound way. I have said if we lived up to our values, it would do wonders for our reputation abroad, for how others see us abroad, and at a time when our standing abroad is lower than at any time in my adult life, it is it seems obvious to me not that we should win some kind of global popularity contests, but that if we cannot convince human beings around the world that we exercise our power for good, they are prey to those who encourage to take up arms against us, to encourage them to resist anything that we want to do, to cripple our ability to lead and solve our problems. But there is a deeper way that values are the source of our security. This year as every year, I sat at the Princeton graduation we set up on the dais and look out at the parents and the relatives and the friends and the graduates. And the Princeton valedictory speaker was an absolutely extraordinary young man. He is an economist, he graduated this year, next year he will finish his PhD in economics. He is already conversing with noble laureates and publishing papers in top economics journals. He is a young man so talented that when the list of his accomplishments was read out at the last faculty meeting, there was a deep and fairly miserable hush. Academics, what do we have, our currency is how smart we are, and when you tell us that here is this 22 year old who will be a PhD at 23 in one of the toughest disciplines, you can imagine. But I will tell you the story, not just to talk about what smart students we are educating, but because he got up and he said, "Princeton has had such a profound effect on me." He said "It's not the friends that I have made, the people I know, the people I have been exposed to, although that is huge. It is not even the extraordinary opening of my mind and the knowledge that I have acquired over my four years here. It is that Princeton has shaped my aspirations. It has shaped who I want to be as a human being. It has shaped my aspirations because of its ethic of honesty, its ethic of service, Princeton and the nation's service and the service of our nations, its ethic of decency, its ethic of standing for something bigger than myself. And I listened to him and I thought, "Yes." That is the role that America played for so many human beings in so many countries since our founding. It is that we were able to prove that it was possible to establish a government based on the consent of the governed. They worked. If you go to Daniel Webster's speech on the 50th Anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill, when he laid the corner stone of the monument that is still there today, what he said I will read it to you. He said he exults, "In the conviction of the benefit which the example of our country has produced and is likely to produce on human freedom and human happiness, the example the benefit that the example of our country has produced on human freedom and human happiness." He said "Our success has demonstrated to all people that representative and popular governments are compatible not only with respectability and power, but with repose, with peace, with the security of personal rights, with good laws and just administration". Now that's extraordinary. He didn't say, "Hey, we are number one, we are the greatest nation in the world and you would do well to follow our example." He didn't say that. He said, we have proved it can't be done. It's kind of amazing in 2007 to read that, because you think of course it can be done, we know it can be done. What we can't understand is why other nations just want to do it faster? But when the founders designed our constitution nobody knew whether it could be done. And they understood that it was our blessing to be able to demonstrate it could be done. And demonstrating that it could be done meant that individuals around the world changed their aspirations. We, the values we stood for and demonstrated could in fact succeed, shaped the aspirations of people all over the world, of the democrats fighting to achieve a measure of popular government, of human rights activists, of people fighting poverty, injustice, inequality. And a particularly opportune example is the impact that it used to have on the Arab world. There is a wonderful book called "The Wilsonian Moment" written by a Harvard Historian Erez Manela and he writes about the power of Woodrow Wilson all over the world and particularly in Arab nations. He says that in the summer of 1918, when the allied victory was on the horizon, the reporting on the United States and Woodrow Wilson in many Arabic language outlets in the press grew increasingly laudatory, said that the Arabic press reported on Independence Day celebrations in the United States on the fourth of July. It said a major article in Al-Ahram noted that while many nations marked their independence on a certain day, the American celebrations on the fourth of July were unique; that we were not concentrating a battle, moments of violent upheaval, like the Bastille in France, or the taking of Rome. But we mark the signing of the Declaration of Independence, an event characterized not by violence, but by the affirmation of high and universal principles. The implication was for readers in the Arab world, that only a 142 years this is 1918 they are writing, since we had signed the Declaration of Independence. The Americans had come to lead all peoples in prosperity, education and culture. And that if in fact a government could be achieved, like the American government, based on liberty and democracy and equality and justice and flourish, that was should be the aspiration of Arabs world wide as well. Now that's a very different vision of how we were seen than the way we are seen today. But even more recently, if you read Lawrence Wright's wonderful book "The Looming Tower" - the History of Al Qaeda, he describes a Muhammad Qutb one of the founding fathers of the Islamic extremism, coming to New York in the late 1940s. And he describes how Qutb had once seen the United States as standing up for resistance groups, for anti colonialism, how they had looked to the United States as a beacon, as shaping their aspirations. But that after that we had supported Israel they felt betrayed and equally importantly, when Qutb came to New York he didn't see an affirmation of high values. He saw an incredible materialism and he saw inequality, he saw urban living in the late 1940s and today. My point is not that we should not have supported Israel, that's not my point. My point is not that we are not going to wipe out materialism, but my point is that when we hold to our values, when we talk about them, but essentially when we live them. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "America, America put your creed into your deed". When we do that, we shape peoples' aspirations and there is no greater power. I know that as an educator, I know that as a parent, we should know that as a nation. Finally, values are the source of the world's security. The values that we talk about, the values of liberty for all human being consistent with sufficient liberty for their fellow human beings to survive; what our founders actually called not just liberty, but order Liberty, the combination of liberty under the rule of law. Democracy, the right to govern yourselves, doesn't mean one man one vote, one women one vote, if you notice if you notice in this country we don't have one woman or man one vote, if you live in some states your vote counts much more than if you are do in others and a majority of Americans elect a President, that President's not elected until the electoral college has voted. So when I say democracy there are many, many different ways to achieve a representative government. But we cherish the idea that all human beings should have some thing to say about how they are governed, justice, equality, tolerance. Nations that are organized on those principles are nations that are better able to deliver life liberty and the pursuit of happiness to their citizens. They are more peaceable nations, that is not that they don't go to war, democracies clearly go to war, but they are far or less likely to go to war with one another. That all doesn't mean that they are going to live in harmony either, just look at we and the French, we are two great liberal democracies, we fight all the time, but not with arms. And now that Sarkozy is coming to Vermont we know if there could be another era for [0:46:42] ____. But the idea that a world of liberty under law, a world of liberal democracies, of countries that are founded on those values and have governments designed to secure those values, to themselves and their posterity, that that would be a better and safer and more prosperous world. That is not George W. Bush's idea, or just George W. Bush's idea, it is Thomas Jefferson's idea, it is Abraham Lincoln's idea, it is certainly Woodrow Wilson's idea, it is Franklin Roosevelt's idea, it is John F Kennedy's idea, it is Jimmy Carter's and Ronald Reagan's and Bill Clinton's idea. All those presidents have stood and said that they stand for a world of countries based on liberty under law; that that would be a safer world for us and for all countries. Now today all of the presidential candidates, as best I can follow or at least all that have a chance of actually winning the presidency, subscribe to the view that America should stand for these values and that a world that was organized according to these values would be a safer world, all American presidential candidates, right and left. As I said all presidents, right and left, not all but the majority and certainly our greatest presidents. The one promise the voters are less sure which is very interesting, here you have a case where actually there is agreement among the presidential candidates and there is agreement among the presidential candidates and the sitting president. There is violent disagreement on how you promote those values. We will come to that, but there is agreement that we should stand for those values. But back in March, a poll conducted by the third way found that respondents favored protecting the security of the United States and its allies over promoting freedom and democracy by a margin of three to one. And among Republicans, a more recent poll says only 16 percent supported basing US foreign policy on spreading democracy. Now that's extraordinary, right? Just look at President Bush and look at the basis of his policy and only 16 percent of Republicans agree. And polls vary, we know that. But I have not found any polls that don't confirm the point that we should be we should forsake values in our foreign policy, we should stick to defending ourselves, promoting our security. Indeed I have personal experiences recently because in a review of my new book, I would subtitle as Keeping Faith with Our Values in a Dangerous World, a blogger, as required, wrote for the American Prospect which is not exactly the Nation, I mean the American Prospect is a fairly mainstream democratic publication. He wrote, "I am fed up with values." Okay, I am fed up with values. What he meant and I agree with him, was that he wanted a foreign policy based on competence and consequences. He wanted to look to what the consequences would be; forget all that value stuff in between. Recently the Center for New American Security opened in Washington, also a more Democratic but nevertheless bipartisan group of people, Republicans and Democrats on the Board of Trustees and working there and their First Paper called The Inheritance; the opening line is "We need a foreign policy based not on ideology but on pragmatism." Look, I am all for pragmatism. I am all for good consequences and I am certainly for competence. But if we think that American security is going to be safeguarded by going back to an era in which we really didn't care how a government treated its own citizens as long as they were our friends, the famous quote attributed to various different people in the Roosevelt Administration, "He may be a son of a bitch, but he is our son of a bitch", excuse my language. Is that really what we are going back to? Is that we were going back to? That hey, we don't care what you do to political opposition, we don't care what you do to your own people in terms of giving them basic human rights, just sell us oil, just stand with us, just do what we want you to do. You can do whatever you want otherwise. That was Kissingerian statecraft. Revolt against that view led Jimmy Carter and human rights which is now espoused by any president. It also led to the neo conservative revolution; the backlash of values that we have seen in this administration and the way they have been pursued, its origins was a sense that I share which is we are the United States of America. We must stand for our values. Let me close by pointing out these are not just American values. And if we want to stand for our values and in fact work toward a world of liberty under law for all people, we would do well to remember what our founders knew so profoundly. They are universal values. They are enlightenment values. They are the faith of the enlightenment philosophers that all human beings wanted and were entitle to; a measure of liberty, of democracy, of justice, of equality, of tolerance; of the ability to worship the god of their choice in the way they choose. America was just demonstrating that it can be done. That you can organize a government based on those values. But they are not "our" values or if they are our values they are our values in the same way that they are British and French and Polish and Japanese and Botswanan and Brazilian and Costa Rican values. They are the values of all human beings and all countries have the right to try to achieve them in their way and all countries have some thing to learn from the way other countries have sought to implement those values. That's the conversation we need to be having globally. How do we advance those values, not because we are American, they are our values and you should subscribe to them. But because they are human values and how do we collectively as the nations that have succeeded in organizing our governments to achieve those values; how do we help those and other governments stand for those values? But how do we at the same time actually meet the threats that face all of us regardless of whether it's a dictatorship or a democracy? How do we work with one another consistently with advancing those values globally? It's got to be a global conversation but it has to start with a national conversation. It has to start with a national conversation about what those values mean. It has to be a bipartisan conversation. I found, that people looked at the title of my book, The Idea that Is America: Keeping Faith with Our Values in a Dangerous World; many people in the left say, "Uh-huh, you have talked about values and faith. That sounds like George W. Bush. I don't want to read your book. Why should I read your book? You are talking about values and faith", that's them. People on the right look at the title and say "Oh well that kind of sounds like value language I am comfortable with. I am not going to read your book. You are Democrat. Why should I read your book?" My guess, being hit on both sides is a good thing, but I was hoping that in fact it would be the start of a national conversation between Republicans and Democrats about what these values mean as Americans, about how we disagree but also where we agree, a contested conversation. I was hoping it would be the beginning of a movement towards renewed civic literacy, toward the idea that we don't just have cultural literacy. You remember the cultural literacy books that came out about a decade ago; but a renewed civic literacy, where we can be certain that our children and our fellow citizens have read the Federalist Papers and the Declaration of Independence and The Gettysburg Address and the "I have a dream" speech. That those are our common heritage and we can talk about what what did our presidents mean, what did the founders mean, what do we mean? That is the conversation of democracy. I am very happy then to be talking to you about our security, because the conversation of democracy that must take place domestically and globally, they must take place based on their values, is a conversation that happens right here. I read this morning at the breakfast in the wonderful Athenaeum hall; "Every man has the right to be all he or she can be, to know all that he or she can know." What a wonderful idea to animate a place like this. You have the right to be every thing you can be and to know every thing you can know. So I hope you will continue a conversation about security throughout the week. It's been an enormous honor to be asked to introduce you to this week. As was said my aunt and uncle have been coming here for many years; unfortunately they are coming later in the summer. But I always heard about Chautauqua as a storied institution. I am convinced that I want to come back. The rest of this week you will hear many other speakers talking about different facets of our security, about the rule of law, about global epidemics, about national security strategy. But I hope you will remember at the end of the week where we started; that our deepest security lies in our values and in our individual and collective commitment to make them real. Thank you.