It's now my pleasure to introduce you to Philip Zelikow who currently serves as the White Burkett Miller Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Dr. Zelikow is the immediate past Counselor of the United State's Department of State where he worked for two years as a Senior Policy Advisor to Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice. Before his appointment as Counselor, Dr. Zelikow was the Executive Director of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, better known as the 9/11 Commission. He was the member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board from 2001 to 2003; he was also the Executive Director of the National Commission on Federal Elections Reforms chaired by former Presidents Carter and Ford which led to the Help America Vote Act of 2002. He also served as the Markle Foundation Task Force on National Security in the Information Age. Dr. Zelikow received his MA and PhD degrees in international Law and Diplomacy from Tufts University's Fletcher school. He has co authored many books, including The Kennedy Tapes with Ernest May, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed with Condoleezza Rice and America and Russia, memos to the President with Robert Zoellick and then finally the 9/11 Commission Report. I am really delighted to have Dr. Zelikow with us, please welcome Philip Zelikow. I was talking with my wife a little bit about today's talk and I looked out at the amphitheatre last night after it had emptied, following the performance of Barrage. And I said okay, this is a beautiful place. So tomorrow morning, people are going to say, we go out on the lake or we listen to a talk about globalization and civilization. And I thought this is a big hall and there are only going to be 35 people here. So I am both surprised and flattered, so many people would discard so many of the temptations in this lovely place to come hear a talk on such a philosophical subject but one that I hope I can convince you as important. I am honored to been invited to give an address here at Chautauqua. This place is one of the landmarks of where and how Americans have come together to talk about their ideas. It is a place, where for more than 100 years; people step away from their day to day concerns, nourish the spirit and think big thoughts. In that tradition, my talk today reflects upon America's place in the life of the world. Not just America really, but the place of other peaceful and wealthy nations like ours. Earlier this year the Director of National Intelligence; retired Admiral Mike McConnell gave his annual assessment to the Congress. This assessment which is a carefully edited bureaucratic consensus document set the scene by observing that globalization is "The defining characteristics of our age". True, the end of the Cold War opened up an age of fully globalized interaction; in commerce, politics, culture, technology and more. Unprecedented forces are in motion. Pollsters recently approached citizens in half a dozen wealthy countries; and asked them whether they had positive or negative views about globalization, this defining characteristic of our age. Their views were negative. Except in Germany, the issue was not even close. In America about 18 percent had a positive view of globalization. 48 percent were negative, the rest were unsure. In Britain the negatives out numbered the positives by more than three to one. And these are the countries that are supposedly benefiting, as most economists would tell you, from globalization. So why these negative attitudes? My guess is that although fears about outsourcing or job insecurity might be on the surface, such strong worries come from concerns that are wider and deeper. Chautauqua's theme this week is security. This is usually seen in conventional terms like security from terrorist attack. But I believe these worries about globalization arise not only from these surface insecurities, but from a deeper sense, that in some uncovered way, hard to express; people fear that they are being swept along by forces that are beyond their control beyond their country's control, or even beyond their understanding. The leading American political candidates in both parties support an open world and full American engagement to shape it, both parties, all the leading candidates. So these candidates need to find a way to come to terms with the apparent fact that the public and the people of other leading countries are so negative about the defining characteristic of our age. These are not new concerns. Let me take you back more than a 100 years. During the 19th century, when Chautauqua was founded, new ideas, industrial capacities and new forms of commerce were rapidly transforming the most developed countries in the world. Global empires extended their reach with astonishing ease, carrying their political rivalries to new corners of the earth. Populations expanded faster than ever before. Millions of people were in motion; leaving the countryside to settle in the industrializing cities, or leaving their country behind for new continents. Everywhere traditional beliefs and ways of life were battered and eroding. Trying to make sense of what was happening around them, figures and public life wrote, spoke, argued about where and how to lead their societies. They had concepts of civilization and what it meant to behave in a civilized way. Audiences at Chautauqua gathered to hear them. But as the century closed, amid fresh celebrations of progress, many prominent thinkers and politicians thoughts the worlds they valued were decaying, descending into a kind of anarchy. From every point on the political compass they wrestled with questions of political identity, moral and religious belief, national power and purpose, economic opportunity, justice, equality and freedom. One of the most thoughtful and literate men of that age, was Henry Adams renowned man of letters, whose father, grandfather and great grandfather had all lived at the pinnacle of American public life. In 1900, Henry Adams visited the great Paris Exposition and stood in awe before a 40 foot height dynamo generating electric power, towering over him and whirring silently. Imagine it, the balding bearded man dressed in his usual Dapper Suit standing, brooding, as he rode six inches away from this giant machine. The dynamo, Adams thought, was a fair expression of the impersonal forces animating his age. He contrasted the dynamo, in his imagination, with the greatest expressions of human force in more traditional ages of man. For example, he contrasted this monumental dynamo with the great cathedral of Chartres. That cathedral represented the finest achievement of the 13th century society. The force that produced that vast work, the force that cathedral expressed was the hope and power of faith; faith above all in the Virgin. Adams explored this metaphorical contrast of "The Virgin and the Dynamo" in two books, one called "Mont-Saint-Michel & Chartres" and its sequel really, which is also a kind of auto intellectual autobiography entitled "The Education of Henry Adams". To me in these books, Adams is laying out two fundamental themes. One is the struggle and lose of unity. The struggle for what people in the 13th century called the "Civitas Dei" which you could translate as "The Community of God", a struggle which reached its peak a progress in the 13th century. The unity of Christendom, the commonality of faith striving imperfectly to realize universally held ideals. And Adams contrasts this with the multiplicity and chaos that seems to be the character of the impersonal forces modernity is unleashed. His tone is puzzled, often satirical and skeptical. He used to say he was the sole member of a political party of conservative Christian anarchists. Throughout Adams seems to be hoping that something can reverse the process, in which his own life time, traditional notions of civilization seem to be decaying, dying from a kind of entropy. The other fundamental theme is the sheer scale of the new forces. Adams played it calculating in a half whimsical way, but for real the best exponential rate of increase, tracking that rate of increase in the sheer physical energy, the commerce, the industry, just in his life time. Then he would observe with a wry eye, the follies of the essential incomprehension of the human beings riding those forces, yet more their creatures than their masters. We can see both these things. The entropy of values and the match of human society against modern forces; neatly expressed as Adam's dashed off a letter to a scientist friend of his January 1905. I quote, this is Adam's writing; "I am trying to work out the law of expansion from unity, simplicity, morality to multiplicity, contradiction, police. The assumption of unity which was the mark of human thought in the Middle Ages has yielded very slowly to the proofs of complexity. The stupor of science before radium is a proof of it. Yet it is quite sure", he is writing, "according to my score of ratios and curves that at the accelerated rate of progression shown since 1600, it will not need another century or half century to tip thought upside down. Law, in that case, would disappear as theory or our priory principle and give place to force, morality would become police, explosives would reach cosmic violence, disintegration would overcome integration", 1905. Adams was all too pressing. He died as One World War came to a close. To meet the challenge of modernity new ideas came forward for the organization of human society and the struggle among these ideas came to dominate the 20th century. Probably most of you know that Franklin Roosevelt visited to Chautauqua in August 1936, and delivered a memorable address, forcefully telling his listeners "I hate war". But in that same speech Roosevelt offered a sobering warning of the world around his listeners. Roosevelt said "A dark old world was devastated by wars between conflicting religions. A dark modern world faces wars between conflicting, economic and political fanaticisms in which are intertwined race hatreds" in that same speech, "And you know that America could not stay immune from that struggle." Speaking about four years later, in June 1940 the students of the University of Virginia, where I now teach, FDR said that "America could not long survive as an island in a sea dominated by the philosophy of violence". The outcome of World War II and the Cold War closed a tumultuous chapter in world history. But the two challenges that Adam posed was remained. Can we define and sustain a modern world civilization? And can human beings master the natural and unprecedented forces set loose in our modern globalized world? Or in other words, our leaders should take the hopes and fears about globalization and translate them into an agenda a positive agenda for a global civilization. Civilization is a term used many ways; subject to much abuse. Stemming from the roman "civilis," it is a term related to the duties of a citizen in a community. Beginning in the 18th century and with the enlightenment, the term came more and more to have a normative meaning, urging a distinction between civilized behavior and barbarism. As of the sad fate of the most compelling ideals, the term has been abused, belied and corrupted by people acting in its name. Yet there is civilization in this world. There is some of it right here by the shores of this lake. And there is barbarism. When Islamist extremists behead innocent victims on television, this is not just another form of civilization. And we gravely insult Muslims if we imply that it is. We can't define the elements of a modern world civilization; there are many ways to do it. Here are four illustrations. First, respect for the identities of others. Identity is a vital concept, modern life has separated people from traditional roots and so they work hard to define their identity around different communities. Identity is who we think we are; Americans, Methodists, Canadians, Jews, Tennis players and so on. Modern civilized societies respect the identities others have chosen and the communities they have fashioned for themselves, consistent with their civic duties to government and to each other. Second, limited government, - limited government. This is not a new concept and it's not just a western concept. But even in the 13th century, the authority of European kings was limited by duties they owed to the church and by other obligations. Today civilized society's reform more often to the rule of law; however that law may be derived. So an important feature of Islamic culture, an Islamic civilization is also the notion of limited government. Third, cooperative prosperity. Cooperative prosperity modern civilization in the context of the 21st century relies on interdependence. Take you back again to FDR's Chautauqua speech of 1936, the one where he said "I hate war". The principle idea in that speech that he offered for peace was economic openness. Here is the way he put it, 71 years ago, next week "The trade agreements which we are making are not only finding out looks for the products of American fields and American factories, but also pointing the way to the elimination of embargos, quotas and other devices which place such pressure on nations not possessing great natural resources; that to them the price of peace seems less terrible than the price of war. We do not maintain", Roosevelt continued, "that a more liberal international trade will stop war. But we fear that without a more liberal international trade, war is a natural sequence". Fourth; mutual security. Mutual security in a modern global civilization, states cannot secure themselves by making everyone else insecure. Much of the 20th century was dominated by struggles against countries who had adopted mutations of social Darwinism as their new religion, their dominant guide to domestic and international life. To them, the life of their nation was a struggle for survival of the fittest. Struggle was natural, inevitable and appropriate. The purpose of life was prepare for the struggle in order to prevail. Reliance on others was weakness. Fortunately the government's most dedicated to the principle of survival of the fittest did not in fact survive at all. But they brought all hope for civilization to the brink of ruin, not just by their own acts but also by what the victors had to do in order to prevail. The enemies of civilization have, as you can see, a rival set of beliefs. In the context of our modern age in this century, where civilized communities respect the identity of others, uncivilized ones insist on single identities and single labels, usually having to do with blood, soil or god that trump all others and tramp on them too. Where civilized communities believe in limited government, uncivilized ones grant unlimited power to rulers or leaders of their sect who can enslave and kill others in the name of the higher ideal which is usually the triumph of their exclusive community. Where civilized communities believe in cooperative prosperity, uncivilized ones seek to enrich themselves by beggaring their neighborhood. They understandably expect others to fear and distrust them. Therefore they feel, they must gather all the resources they need into their own domains. Where civilized communities believed in mutual security and hope for peace, uncivilized ones believe conflict is natural and appropriate and they dream of triumphul war. There are other enemies of a modern global civilization, more in cities. Inertia is one, whether from fatalism in attention or complacency, despair is another. The hopelessness of people so poor or so alienated that they are drawn to the lure of violent exultation. If you accept the premise that America and other fortunate nations should make a renewed effort to foster and protect a modern global civilization, how should we go about doing it. A benevolent empire or hegemony is no answer. Americans do not want the job. Even if they did, they are not strong enough to do it, nor is any world government in prospect that can fill the bill. Returning to an older world of selfish powers balancing against each other is no solution either. It is a dangerous possibility. But it would do more to threaten civilization than to preserve it. Instead the leading nations of the world need to join in pursuing common interest while respecting local choices. By local choices I mean that no one nation can force the others to pursue common interest. The partners must be voluntary. And I mean that nations and their sovereign communities must make their own choices about the character of their societies and the way in which they participate in a global civilization. To illustrate how these principles might work in a more practical way, allow me to highlight three areas in which modern globalized forces are now accelerating in ways that can threaten the hopes for a global civilization. The way we use energy, catastrophic terrorism and globalized crime, and failing states and the desperate poverty of the billion people who live in; these are actually overlapping and interdependent challenges. For example nuclear energy may be vital in order to reduce reliance on dirty coal and oil. Yet reliance on nuclear energy may increase the danger of catastrophic terrorism, if you do not get a firm grip on the danger of nuclear weapons proliferation. And growing chaos in failing states creates, large effectively ungoverned areas, where transnational terrorist groups can flourish finding many desperate and alienated recruits. So the problem is all overlapped; if you wish they all have to do with security. Start with energy use. Current trends of reliance on oil and dirty coal, if unchanged, pose great dangers to the development of a global civilization. Many of you may think for example that oil is mostly controlled by the big international oil companies like Exxon Mobil or Chevron. But in fact 96 percent of the World's oil reserves are now controlled by National Oil Companies, including the states controlled Russian and Chinese companies. Though there are exceptions these suppliers tend to provide what economists call "rents" that reinforce autocratic governments. They tend to under-invest in expanding supply. That is they don't invest in up in increasing production. And they frequently manipulate production for political reasons. The result on current trends is likely to be a supply situation so tight as to great dangers of huge price shocks that could cause global economic recession or worse, and growing political vulnerabilities for the United States and its allies, for example, in our confrontation with Iran's development of nuclear weapons. And I am emphasizing large scale global economic disruption will pose a huge threat to the advance of global civilization. If things feel relatively good right now it's because times are good actually; from a global perspective. In fact over the last 10 years global economic trends have almost never been better. So if you think things are problematical little bit on the margin now, if you think China faces hard choices now, what really is the test is how they do in stormy weather. And we haven't seen really stormy economic weather recently. And then we will see war structures and our systems genuinely threatened. And meanwhile, the current trends in the use of oil and dirty coal also threaten to do terrible damage to the planet itself. I am not a scientist; I didn't even sleep at a Holiday Inn Express last night. But I do understand risk. And the risks of climate change that could tremendously damage the globe are now unacceptably high. You can play around with where you think it's going to fall on the model. But the risk is tremendously high and the terrorism field that I sometimes work in we have spend huge sums of money and make enormous efforts to respond to relatively modest but catastrophic risks. In the case of climate change the level of uncertainty about risk is at least as high as that if not much higher. This kind of climate change could induce chaos in much of the world, including by the way, mass population movements and economic disruption. And as every one looks out for themselves, that two will jeopardize hope for a global civilization relying on cooperative efforts. And the most recent data on sea level rise for instance collected this year, is unfortunately tending to confirm some of the worst case side of the models or projected climate change. The energy use issue can however be addressed by effective local choices in pursuit of an increasingly evident set of common interests; common interests and local choices. For example, I would just offer three simple illustrations. Increasing energy productivity sometimes refers to energy efficiency. But actually we are talking about energy productivity. I am persuaded that in fact investments in increasing energy productivity are not a tremendous cost on our society a kind of Castor Oil we have to drink in order to get through this climate change danger. In fact it will actually increase our economic growth; you will be profitable. There is powerful evidence, actually that I felt recently from the McKinsey Company, which has done a lot of work on this that we could get tremendous gains in our energy productivity if we only invested in changes that would have a minimum of a 10 percent rate of return on investment; which most businessmen would think its pretty good. How do you get all this growth? You get the growth because you spend massively less on energy. And actually the money you do spend actually goes to much more productive elements of our own economy instead of to foreign rent seekers. And you get tremendous economic growth not only from the savings that go into our economy but also you get growth from innovative products. If you develop, for instance, composite metals that are much lighter and slippery for automobiles, you actually have now created capacities for manufacturing in the countries that build those products that give them huge competitive edges in the global market place and will be of great benefit to those firms. For example, to give you a concrete case, Boeing in response to energy concerns used high technology composites to build the new Boeing 787 Dreamliner, which is 20 percent more energy-efficient than its Airbus competitor. And the result the result, Boeing has turned around as a company and can barely keep track of its order book. So first element, increasing energy productivity. Actually it turns out if you do the numbers; the gains from this are not trivial or incremental, they are massive, and could actually decisively affect the importance of oil as a commodity over the coming generation. Second ingredient; a lot of people talk about the need for Carbon Tax or Cap and Trade, things that raise the cost of carbon. I don't like terms like "Carbon Tax" and actually a lot of Americans don't like the word "Tax" in any sentence surrounded by any adjective. But the phrase that I would use instead is "Truth in pricing for oil and dirty coal" "True prices". Prices that incorporate some of the externalities that are associated with the uses of oil and dirty coal. If people were paying the true cost for some of these products, in terms of the expenses that will be incurred by their use in other ways, are very big incentives for change. There are lots of changes in public policy associated with truth and pricing. And for it's another example. Most public utilities in America that actually are the people who make decisions about how they are going to generate electricity and what fuels to buy, have a set of perverse incentives more or less imposed on them. In Chicago all the incentives are actually in favor of increasing electricity generation if you are running the Public Utility Commission. This is these are choices you make in our Public Policy. And they are choices we can change that get markets to flow in the right direction in favor of truth and pricing. Third ingredient; International Agreement on Fair and Common Action. The United States or even the United States and Europe cannot significantly master to this problem alone. It is truly a global problem; it is a true test of global civilization. You cannot move forward on this decisively unless there is global action, above all including China. And here I actually do not despair about including China. The Chinese only in the last couple of years are actually becoming awakened to the full dimensions of this problem which actually will impact them very severely. They will experience huge desertification of their country, they will run drastically short on supplies of fresh water, they will get it, they are smart. It's actually a country that has a long heritage actually of energy efficiency and the driving for energy efficiency that's only changed significantly in the last couple of decades. So I am not pessimistic about the ability to get China to work in an arena of common action. But Chinese have to believe that this is not some global experience conspiracy to put a boot on the neck of their growing economy just at the point they are taking off. But I think that case can be made. And that there is an international regime that can be constructed that would be fair. So energy use is my first illustration. Of what I mean by local choices for common interest with the goal of preserving and protecting global civilization. A second illustration is catastrophic terrorism and global crime. Here again I want to suggest three ideas that just keep in mind for your consideration. Just these illustrations of what I mean. First is we need a coalition approach to a global struggle. It is actually striking and regrettable that United States has not persuaded most states including many of our allies, to agree that we are actually involved in an armed conflict with this global enemy. This is partly their fault and partly ours. Many Governments including practically all of the Western Europe have never really accepted any change from their pre 9/11 Criminal Justice Diplomacy Reliance. Many of their leading politicians and lawyers are fundamentally pacifist and believe that armed conflict is rarely if ever a solution to any problem and certainly not a bit as proposed by Americans. Some of these same governments feel they know the problem well. Yeah, they have not actually been attacked or threatened on the scale suffered by the United States. And while they still assess the risk as being more ordinary, they also like the capabilities to join very effectively in more forceful or distasteful measures. And so they turn such necessities into virtue. But the problem is our fault too. It is tempting for some local governments to let the Americans do the distasteful things that also protect their people too. Then these free riders can criticize and distance themselves as they wish. But it is unwise for America to play along with that game. When Americans designed processes that are exclusively American, our show because we do not want foreign intrusion, we contradict our argument that this is a global struggle waged in common with others and we actually encourage free riders. But if we want other countries to join in pursuing these common interests, we must provide moral leadership too. The moral question is subjective of course. It is closely related to another question. What standard of civilized behavior should the United States exemplify in a fight to preserve civilization against barbarism? My own view for example which I have stated in the earlier address this year, is that the cool, carefully considered, methodical, prolonged and repeated subjection of captives to physical torment and the accompanying psychological terror, is immoral. My moral standards are entitled to no special regard. My argument is not that others should adopt my morale. It is that the responsible policy officials should explicitly, thoughtfully, employ moral reasoning of their own and further, my argument is that the substitution of detailed legal formulations for detailed morale ones is a deflection of responsibility. Such deflections often unconscious are too common in our modern age. The quick morale justification is that a greater good is being served; saving more lives. Yet in most moral lexicons, there is some absolute core of behavior that is improper, whatever the policy gain. And for that conduct which is morally problematical, but justifiable by necessity, the burden of proof should be high. Consider that the enemies we are fighting have used, even celebrated, the most barbaric and nihilistic tactics of violence ever employed by any terrorist organization in World history. To the civilized world, this gives our nation moral ground about as high as one could have. The policy case would need to be compelling indeed to persuade our officials that they should slide and stumble their way down into the valley. In addition to this coalition approach that I have described, I think the second element of a common interest, local choice agenda for global terrorism or crime is a long term vision to abolish nuclear weapons. Now lest you think that, "Well, Zelikow is some peacenik." No. Actually I was a Veteran Cold Warrior. I participated in Arms Control negotiations as career diplomat in the 1980's and when Ronald Reagan was urging that we should abolish nuclear weapons in 1987, I had been the Junior Officer working at an arms control negotiation. But that my President was going a little too far, because we still needed them. But the geo-political situation has changed and in this actually, I am joined by the views of Former Secretary of State, George Schultz Reagan Secretary of State, Former Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, and other kinds of lefty peaceniks. Why? Because we decide we made the decision to develop nuclear weapons fundamentally in 1941 and 1942. That's when we made the decision to bet colossal of sums of money on a scientific bet, still unproven. Why do we make such a colossal bet? We made it at the same time we are making a decision not to field 200 army infantry divisions to win World War II. We were facing a choice that even America with its resources couldn't do everything. We could have a strategic bombing offensive against Germany and Japan or we could have a 200-division army; but we could not have both. And so in the late 1942, the Roosevelt administration decided to execute what historians call the 90-Division Gamble. We slashed the planned size of the US Army in World War II from 200-Divisions to 90 Divisions. And then send those divisions mainly to Europe and fought them until they were worn out. And then with a relatively small army compared to the Armies being fielded say by Germany and Russia, we decided to keep pour in a lot of resources into firepower and technology and a strategic bombing offensive and things like an atomic bomb project. To compensate for the relatively small size of our army we decided to leverage technology and firepower. That's a decision we made about the way we wanted to win World War II. And so we made a decision actually to escalate a strategic bombing offensive at the end of 1942 and 1943. And then you can have an argument about how effective it was. I actually believe it turned out to be very important. But my point is is that's the basic reason we build these weapons in the first place and those reasons continued during the Cold War; because the fundamental military condition of the Cold War was our Army was always much smaller than theirs. And we always compensated for our relatively small Army by continuing to rely on technology and nuclear firepower. And that made sense when I was in Arms Controller in 1987. But it's 20 years later now. We have the most powerful conventional army in the world; by far. Every one else now wants nuclear weapons as an equalizer to us. Is that in our interest? George Schultz, Henry Kissinger, I others, think the geo-political circumstances have changed, which gives us the opportunity to begin an endorsing agenda to abolish nuclear weapons that seemed like Utopian pipe dream. And there is the plan do it. It's not just the plan where we just out law them and say everyone accepts inspectors. Actually very early in the nuclear age, the best experts concluded that wouldn't work. Efforts were made at the very beginning of the nuclear age to figure out how to place the capability of building these weapons under international control. The most Blue Ribbon Panel or Blue Ribbon Panels convened on this in the early 1946. Who was on it? Vannevar Bush, who had masterminded the whole scientific program for America in World War II. Robert Oppenheimer, who lead the scientific effort to build the atomic bomb. General Leslie Groves, who ran the Manhattan District and the bomb project. And half a dozen other of the best scientific and political minds in America and they developed a report which historians know as the Acheson- Lilienthal Report, in March of 1946 on how to go forward. And even people like Edward Teller who was involved in the H-bomb project conceded that it was technically sound. And it was 50 years ahead of its time 60 years ahead of its time. Because in the circumstances of March 1946, with the situation with the Soviet Union, the prospects for this program were bleak and it was watered down into a political plan called the Baruch Plan for the United Nations and then descended into Cold War arguments and could not be realized. But the fundamental of that plan in a way are still valid today and offers the prospect of a long term vision of how to use an affirmative international cooperative effort to ultimately control and abolish the competitive nuclear weapons we have today worldwide. The transition over the long term to achieve this will be difficult. But first you create the institutional capacity to do it and then you can activate it; once it's already present in all the relevant countries. But my third ingredient in addition to the coalition, in addition to the long term vision about the future of nuclear weapons, is a short term readiness to prevent outlaw states like Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons now. Now why then did I place such stress on having a vision to get rid of nuclear weapons? It's precisely because I think you need to pair that kind of long term vision to the short term requirement to make each palatable for the other. Instead of saying to the Iranians, which is actually true, is that their development of nuclear weapons will be dangerous to everyone around them, because they actually do not share the principles of a global civilization, and they are extremely dangerous. Instead instead of just saying, "We don't like you to" to them, it is better for the World to say, "We actually have a vision in which nuclear weapons need to go away." And if this goes forward in the short term that vision cannot be realized. Because it will create a spiral of escalation that will wreck any hopes to control these weapons and and then in turn I think increases the dangers of catastrophic terrorism and the consequent threats to our hopes for modern global civilization. The final dimension I wanted to discuss with you and then I'll close, is "Failing States and the Bottom Billion." The Bottom Billion by the way is a phrase I borrowed from British scholar of African Development, Paul Collier, whose work with that title I urge all of you to look at. Globalization had not overwhelmed the nation state. Sates remain essential in at least two ways. First, they provide most of the infrastructure and law enforcement that allows the globalized system to function. And second, they shape and should be accountable for the way their own societies adapt to the global system. You may know Tolstoy's famous line in Anna Karenina that quote, "All happy families resemble one another; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." For nations I think, the description can be reversed. In International Life, it seems more that each successful adaptation to the global system is successful in its own way. All failed states resemble one another. So I say again that the key issue comes back to how failing States and many of the States in the urban Muslim world will answer the question of, "What do you want for your people?" Their local choice. "How do you want your society to adapt to the modern globalized planet you inhabit today?" Only the people who inhabit those societies can finally answer these questions. We cannot impose it on them local choices. The role that outsiders can play is to help or hinder these choices common interests. Common interests that arise on the morale obligation that goes with participation in a global civilization. Common interests that arise from the fact that the developed world cannot be immune from chaos. In the 20th century, we used to think that our vital interest rotated around the great industrial areas of the world the Ruhr Valley in Germany, the Coal Fields of Manchuria. Those were the focal points of global conflict because they were the centers of industrial power. That has changed. In the globalized world of transnational issues, the greatest threats arrive not from the places with the greatest industrial power, but with the least. And we find our soldiers committed in just such places today. So how do we get at that problem? Again three ideas to consider. First, focus. We often think of the developing world as a huge mess. In fact, much of the world is making rapid progress towards more developed and more civilized societies. The greatest problem really are the people who are not making progress at all. About 50 States with about a billion people that are just not moving forward; that face desperate poverty, no growth so the combination of poverty and hopelessness create all the ingredients for state failure. So focus on the bottom failure not just on developing countries like say, China or India which are moving in the right direction. Second, think about capabilities and conditionality in things like for example Foreign Aid. They have to make the choices to turn their societies around. Foreign if if Foreign Aid is given unconditionally, without regard to whether local people are making those choices not only do you further the day which you will make them, you may actually make their conditions worse. You provide Foreign Aid as additional source of rent for the autocrats to use and aid become one more reason to launch a coup d'état so you can control the aid flows, which deepens the conflict trap that already keeps these societies from struggling forward. So you need the capability to intervene from the outside where people are willing to make the turn around to intervene constructively; which means skill sets and a body of people that don't exist right now in our Government. Why the size of our foreign service the entire foreign service of the United States and the State department, NAID, is smaller than the size of the people who play in military bands in our Country's Armed Forces. So you have a column; musicians in American Armed Forces and you have a column; size of US Foreign Service and the first column is larger than the second. Its we need a little more capability in that dimension. So condition capabilities and conditionality, by the way I would make these same points about our future policy towards Iraq as well. We are actually our aid has too often tended to be unconditional. Training and giving money to people regardless of whether they are actually advancing American vital interests and that too needs to change. But the third dimension I wanted to focus on and this is the tough one; is readiness for real peace keeping real peace keeping. Peace keeping has a bad name because you imagine these UN forces that are affect less and don't do anything because they are not willing to fight. Or you image interventions like Somalia and Iraq, you say, "No more of that please." But too often the conflict trap that these countries are in arise from the fact that they cannot defeat chronic serious civil struggles in their society often by people who were just trying to steal natural resources. If you saw for example the movie "Blood Diamonds", with Brad Pitt about Sierra Leone; these are rebel groups that are just trying to seize control of the diamond trade. That's what a lot of these conflicts are about. And let's take the example of Sierra Leone which was so vividly portrait in that memorable movie. There was a U.N. Force in Sierra Leone. In the year 2000, the rebels the RUF took 500 of the UN peacekeepers hostage to strip them off their military equipment. I want to offer a comment that Peter Collier had on this episode. "Was the RUF such a formidable fighting force? Hardly. One a few hundred British troops arrived a few months later, willing to take casualties, the whole rebel Army rapidly collapsed. The U.N. troops were an easy target because the RUF understood that they would not resist. They were carrying their guns like tourists flaunting their jewelry." Real peace keeping because many of these countries have a security vacuum; and the irony is is they all divert aid money and they all divert resource money to build up armies because they have no other way to fill the security vacuum. And then the armies of course then become threats to the security of the government launching coup de tat that then deepen their conflict trap. And the reason they spend all their money on the army in the first place is that they have no other way of controlling the rebel factions that are trying to steal things for themselves. So relatively small investments by the outside world can help them break sometimes out of that security trap as was the case in Sierra Leone. But it has to be a readiness for real peace keeping not cosmetic peace keeping. And too much of what we are doing on climate change, on terrorism, on problems of poverty are cosmetic solutions and not real solutions that face the kind of challenges that we will need to face in the century to come. So to conclude, I want to come back to the original challenge. Remember Adams standing in front of the dynamo. The two challenges I drew from that first, "Can we preserve the ideal of a global civilization?" And second, "Can we stay ahead of the modern forces that we are setting into motion in this globalized world?" One chapter, the struggles of the 20th century, is over. But another is just beginning. And that's part of the agenda for America and the generation to come. Thank you
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