Jessica Mathews: Good evening, all. My name is Jessica Mathews. I’m president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. I know that I speak on behalf of the whole Carnegie board, which is with us tonight, when I say how honored and happy and pleased we are to have with us our former colleague, Steve Hadley, current National Security Advisor, of course, and member of the Carnegie Board until he left to become the deputy national security advisor all these many years ago in 2001. Steve, we understand that in advance of the president’s trip to Africa, you intend to talk tonight about the importance of new partnerships with developing nations to address the many problems facing them from fighting disease, hunger, debt, conflict to providing education and building democratic government. Given the huge importance of these issues and the recent events in Kenya, Chad, and Zimbabwe, I particularly regret that we can’t be joined this evening by our newest trustee at Carnegie, Kofi Annan. But as all of you know, he’s been in Kenya working tirelessly to achieve a peace plan between that country’s political leaders and a critical mission if there ever was one in which we wish him success. He has sent his great regrets at not being able to be with us tonight. It’s also fitting, of course, that you have agreed to give a talk about partnership at Carnegie. As the oldest foreign policy think tank in the world, the Endowment has made a habit of reinventing itself as circumstances on the international scene have merited. And as globalization has taken hold of so many aspects of our lives and a global approach has become so obviously needed to tackle the major challenges, we have set out to break the traditional think-tank mold here in Washington and to begin to work on solutions to problems in partnership with leading scholars in and from the key regions of the world. So a year ago this week, we announced Carnegie’s plan to pioneer the first global think tank. And since then, building on our 15 years of running a very successful research operation in Moscow, we have opened offices in China, Europe, and the Middle East. So it’s a particular pleasure on the first anniversary of that launch to be hearing, to welcome you back to the Endowment, Steve, and look forward to hearing your views on this important new set of partnerships. Thanks.
Stephen Hadley: Thank you, Jessica. James Gaither, thank you for your leadership. It’s a pleasure to be with you this evening. For nearly a century, fellows of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace have made contributions to our public debate on international affairs. In the 21st century, your work will continue to be vital. I appreciate your efforts to expand your presence in other parts of the world so that Carnegie can offer a truly global perspective on the choices in front of us. As you know, next week the president and Mrs. Bush will travel to Africa. It will be his second visit to the continent since 2001 and Mrs. Bush’s fifth visit. They will travel to Benin, Tanzania, Rwanda, Ghana, and Liberia. The trip will be an opportunity to demonstrate American commitment to the people of these countries and to Africa as a whole. The trip will highlight how the United States has partnered closely with the people of Africa to address the challenges of disease, poverty, and security and how together we have made remarkable progress. There’s now more hope in Africa and the American people can be proud that many of our innovative programs are making a real difference. Africa is also one part of the world where you can see in action the president’s approach to development. And tonight I’d like to describe the concepts and the principles behind that approach, how his initiatives are having an impact, and why this approach deserves the support of both political parties here in Washington in the years ahead. We help the people of the developing world because America is a compassionate nation. When Americans see people in need, they want to help because we believe, as a nation, that every individual deserves the opportunity to reach his or her potential. As the president said in his State of the Union last week, building a freer, more hopeful, more compassionate world reflects the calling of our conscience. Yet we also recognize that helping people in the developing world is very much in our national interest. People who are free, educated, healthy, empowered, and able to use their freedom to enhance their economic well-being are less likely to support terror or attacks on others. If this new century has shown us anything, it is that our own prosperity, freedom, and security are increasingly intertwined with those of less developed nations. President Bush believes that U.S. development assistance is central to our nation’s national security and foreign policy and his budgets have reflected that commitment. Since he took office, he has more than doubled U.S. development assistance from about $10 billion in 2000 to about $23 billion in 2006. This is the largest increase in development assistance since the Marshall Plan. In his first four years in office, the president doubled our official development assistance for Africa. At the G8 summit in 2005, he promised to double our assistance to Africa once again by 2010. And the president’s budget request for fiscal year 2009 that was released today reflects that commitment. If approved by Congress and fully implemented, this budget request will ensure that our nation keeps its promise to our international partners and to the people of Africa. The president’s approach to develop grew out of the collective wisdom our nation has gained from decades of experience working with the people and nations of the developing world. In some nations, our development assistance seemed only to subsidize corrupt regimes while the people continued stuck in poverty. Yet in other nations, our assistance did help strong economies and democracies emerge and helped make people more prosperous. What accounted for the difference? The president’s approach to development answers this question and reflects these lessons learned. The best way to enhance development is to invest in people: their health, their education. So this is what we are doing while encouraging governments in the developing world to make the choices that enable their people to achieve a better life. We are measuring success by the number of lives that change, not the number of dollars that change hands. We are using our assistance to encourage innovation and reform, not to subsidize governments that have failed to invest in their people. We are helping nations to open their economies to free markets and free trade so they emerge over time from dependence upon foreign aid. And we are building relationships based on partnership, not paternalism. Our president’s budget commitment for development combined with his approach to development have allowed our nation to build partnerships to help developing nations fight many of their most pressing challenges. First, the United States is partnering with developing nations to fight terrible diseases. The president’s emergency plan for AIDS relief, proposed by the president, but funded by the Congress and supported by the American people, is the largest international health initiative in history ever dedicated to a single disease. PEPFAR is based on partnerships with local communities and indigenous organizations that deliver treatment and care for those suffering from the disease and prevent its spread. PEPFAR has helped bring lifesaving treatment to more than 1.4 million people around the world. The president has asked Congress to double this initial commitment to the program with an additional $30 billion over the next five years. These new funds will help bring us closer to our goal of treating 2.5 million people, preventing more than 12 million new infections, and caring for more than 12 million people including five million orphans and vulnerable children. The president’s malaria initiative, also with the support of the Congress, is helping to fight a disease that claims the lives of one million children under the age of five each year in sub-Saharan Africa. This is a five year, 1.2 billion-dollar effort. The key to beating the disease is fighting the mosquito, so the initiative provides insect insecticide-treated bed nets and indoor spraying as well as anti-malaria medicines. Through this initiative, U.S. tax dollars leverage private-sector support, and more than six million long-lasting insecticide-treated mosquito nets are being distributed through public-private partnerships. The president’s malaria initiative has already reached an estimated 25 million people in 15 African countries. Our goal is to reduce the mortality rate of this disease over five years in those 15 countries by 50 percent. The United States also leads the world in its support for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, making the fund’s founding contribution and the United States has contributed approximately $2.5 billion to date, far more than any other nation. Second, the United States is partnering with developing nations to provide basic education. Our Africa education initiative is providing $600 million over eight years to increase access to quality, basic education. By 2010, this effort will have distributed over 15 million textbooks, trained nearly one million teachers, and provided 550,000 scholarships for young women. Last May, President Bush launched the International Education Initiative and committed to provide an additional $425 million over five years to make our international education programs more effective. U.S. resources are focused on countries that demonstrate a strong commitment to education by investing their own resources in schools and teachers operating with financial transparency and adopting plans with international standards. This approach will help to provide an additional four million children with access to basic education in Ethiopia, Ghana, Honduras, Liberia, Mali, and Yemen. Third, the United States is partnering with developing nations to fight hunger. Currently, more than half of the world’s food assistance comes from the United States. In 2007, our emergency food aid reached 23 million people in 30 countries. Last week, the president proposed an initiative to supplement food aid grown in the United States with crops re-purchased from local and regional farmers. These purchases would help our nation respond to crisis situations, but also help break the cycle of famine in developing countries by encouraging local agriculture rather than displacing it. Fourth, the United States is partnering with developing nations to lift their burden of debt. For decades, many governments had to spend huge amounts of money just to make interest payments on their accumulated indebtedness, money they could have otherwise invested in their people. This debt limited the growth of developing economies and trapped millions of people in poverty. So the president worked with our G8 partners to ease this debt burden. Three years ago, at Gleneagles, Scotland, the G8 nations agreed to support a multilateral debt-relief agreement that will free poor countries of up to $60 billion of debt. Last year, we built on this progress when the Inter-American Development Bank approved another debt-relief initiative for some of the poorest nations in the Western Hemisphere. This initiative will cancel $4.4 billion owed by five countries: Bolivia, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Fifth, the United States is partnering with developing nations to build democratic and accountable institutions of government. To succeed in the global economy, nations need fair and transparent legal systems, free markets that unleash the creativity of their citizens, banking systems that serve people at all income levels, and business climates that welcome foreign investment and support local entrepreneurs. The United States is helping developing nations build these and other free institutions through the Millennium Challenge Account. This program funds projects in nations that govern justly, fight corruption, invest in the education and health of their people, and promote economic freedom. Since its inception in 2004, the Millennium Challenge Corporation has approved compacts totaling over $5.5 billion with 16 partner countries. In Benin, the MCC compact helped reform national policy on microfinance and helped small farmers and entrepreneurs build their businesses. And in Ghana, MCC projects will increase the production of high-value cash crops in some of Ghana’s poorest regions and then help bring those products to regional and international markets. Sixth, the United States is partnering with developing nations to – by expanding trade and opening markets. In the long run, the best way to lift people out of poverty is through trade and investment. Open markets ignite growth, increase transparency, and strengthen the rule of law. A recent World Bank study found that developing nations that lowered their trade barriers in the 1990s grew three times faster than those that did not. The United States opened the markets through international trade and investment agreements. These agreements establish rules such as non-discrimination, respect for private property, transparent regulation, and independent dispute settlement. In 2000, the United States had free-trade agreements with three countries. Today, we have free-trade agreements in force with 14 countries, most of which are in the developing world. We are urging Congress to improve the free-trade agreement we’ve negotiated with Colombia, Panama, and South Korea and we are discussing bilateral investment treaties with several developing nations. These treaties would promote greater U.S. investment in these countries, encourage economic reform, and strengthen government accountability. The United States is also seeking to open markets through the Doha round of trade negotiations. Doha represents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to help millions in the developing world rise above poverty and despair. And the president is committed to concluding an ambitious Doha round agreement this year. Finally, the United States is partnering with developing nations to address regional conflicts and help bring peace. Peace and security are necessary foundations for development and democracy because people who fear for their safety cannot easily access the global market price or participate in the free institutions of democracy. So the United States is working with regional organizations and other nations to build capacity to respond to crises and conflicts across the globe. In Liberia, the United States has helped a democracy emerge from a brutal dictatorship in less than five years. We worked with our partners at the United Nations to impose sanctions on the Charles Taylor regime. As he fled into exile, we provided logistics support to deploy a regional peacekeeping force to protect the innocent and establish order. We assisted the transition government and helped it hold free elections and we strongly support the first elected female head of state in Africa’s history, President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, as she and the Liberian government reform their security forces, strengthen democratic institutions, rebuild their infrastructure, and connect their people to the global economy. In Africa alone, the United States has helped end conflicts in Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Angola, and Burundi. We helped end the north-south civil war in Sudan and we are leading international efforts to stop the genocide in Darfur. We are working with the African Union and sub-regional organizations like the Economic Community of West African States to enhance their peacekeeping capabilities. The United States is committed to training 75,000 peacekeepers worldwide and we will meet that target. Some of those U.S.-trained peacekeepers are already on the ground in Darfur. And in this way, African institutions can increasingly contribute to solving regional conflicts. America’s partnerships with developing nations are helping to make the world a better place. We are helping to treat the sick and feed the hungry. We are helping to teach children and empower entrepreneurs. We are helping to open markets and strengthen good government. We are helping more people live lives of dignity and hope. The American people can be proud of what their government is doing in their name in the developing world. Our partnership model for development also offers the world an alternative to two competing visions for the future of the developing world. One vision is the donor-client dynamic of decades past, a well-meaning, but ultimately flawed approach that kept too many people mired in poverty. Another alternative is the ideology of hatred that sees suffering as an opportunity to foment violence against the innocent and advance an agenda of oppression and despair. The president believes that America is now offering a third and more hopeful vision. He appreciates the bipartisan support in Congress for this development strategy. In the coming years, such support will continue to be vital for the future of the developing world and for the future of our own country. Thank you very much.
member. 
