In case this is of interest. I searched it out by way of President Clinton's Foundation: info@clintonpresidentialcenter.com

A friend saw the delivery on C-SPAN and raved about what he said, adding, "Clinton is a DIFFERENT person. Even his facial structure has changed of late."

Cath

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Transcript of Remarks by the Honorable William J. Clinton: "Progress and Paradox: The Future of Globalization in the Twenty-First Century" (Delivered at New York University on January 14, 2003; no quote marks used; it's ALL a quote.)

Thank you very much and good afternoon. Let me again thank all of our panelist and moderators from the morning sessions and the ones who will come up here as soon as I finish speaking. And I thank again John Sexton and the whole NYU family and especially my former staff and cabinet members, Jack Lew and Cheryl Mills. John mentioned this morning when I ask old Jack the other day how he liked working at NYU he said, "Well, I just kind of lop three zeros off every number and say it still matters." The thing I loved about Jack Lew as a budget director is that he actually had a heart and as well as a mind, so he helped me to do things that were fiscally responsible and socially progressive. I thank him very much.

I enjoyed the morning's panels and I look forward to the one after I speak with Mr. Soros and other members. I would like to add a couple of points to our discussion.

First of all, most of us have talked, from different perspectives, about how to make the process of globalization work better for the people who have been left out and left behind. Most of us think this globalization of the economy, of culture, of information technology is actually a good thing. We haven't had anybody here representing the people who were in the streets in Seattle or demonstrating against the other international economic meetings, but I think we shouldn't forget that they're out there.

I would like to explain what specific things I think the United States and the other rich countries should be doing to deal with the promise, the perils, the inequalities and paradoxes created by the current state of affairs. To put it in a phrase, I think that this globalized world - this interdependent world - is not sustainable even though it's enormously beneficial to a lot of us. It's not sustainable environmentally. It's not sustainable politically, because more than half the world is left out of it, as Hernando Desoto said earlier. And I don't think it's a sustainable from a security point of view. Because if you live in a completely interdependent world, with the level of adversity and danger that we see, whether in a small place like the Middle East, or a smaller place like East Timor, or a big country with open borders like America, if you live in a world where all you have is globalization and interdependence, then that world today is going to be at the very least more insecure and confined and at the very worst miserable and deadly.

Therefore my paradigm for the 21st century is that we move from interdependence to integration, to an integrated global community. To do that we must have a critical mass of the world with shared benefits, shared responsibilities, and shared values. How do you know if you're there yet? Well, there are a lot of very personal ways in which the positive and negatives of the moment are manifest. A lot of us feel more insecure every time we get on an airplane now. Why? Because on September the 11th, 2001, members of the Al Qaeda used the forces of globalization, open borders, easy immigration, easy travel, easy access to information and technology to kill thirty-one hundred people from seventy countries, in three cities in the United States.

Or I'll give you the flip side of it. Mr. de Soto and I were in Ghana not very long ago to announce with the President of Ghana, Mr. Kufuor, a Foundation on Building Capital for the Poor, to implement Hernando's ideas there. As I was walking towards the airplane to leave this Ghanaian woman was waving something at me and screaming, "President Clinton, President Clinton, wait, wait!" I turned and she came running up to me and she said "I work in a shirt factory that was made possible because you signed the African Growth and Opportunity Act." Keep in mind the backdrop of what else is going on in Africa. The problems of Sierra Leone. The continuing religious strife within Nigeria. The madness the Congo has had in the last few years. So, this woman comes running up to me waving this package and says, "I got a job in a shirt factory with four hundred other people because you pushed and you signed this trade bill." Then she said, "So we're happy we have these jobs, and here's your shirt." And so I said to myself, "Well, you're not in office anymore. You don't have any ethical obligations." I took the shirt.

I took the shirt home to the little town about thirty-five miles north of here where I live. Then I put it in a place where I look at it every single day. Why? Because it represents a positive consequence of globalization. That woman and the 400 people she works with, they're not mad at us. Though they don't have nearly as much money as most Americans, they're not mad at us. Why? Because they think we want them to have a part of our future. That lady and the other people who work with her, they don't want their kids to fight in African tribal wars. They want them to go to school, get an education, and do better. Why? Because they're part of a shared future. But when you don't have that, when you have interdependence without shared benefits, shared responsibilities and shared values, well, all you have to do is look at the Middle East. Since the peace process was abandoned and the Intifada started, you've had a hundred and twenty suicide bombing attempts, many more thwarted. Then the retaliation. Over 1800 dead Palestinians. Over 600 dead Israelis. But they're still just as interdependent as they were the day before the first rock was thrown or bomb was set off. It's just negative interdependence. So again I will say, if you accept this analysis, that we cannot escape each other and you can't be secure unless you can kill or jail all your adversaries, then the question is how do you move from a world of interdependence to integration, to a global community where a critical mass of people actually live with shared benefits, shared responsibilities, shared values.

First of all, there does have to be a security strategy, because there are people who want to derail the whole thing, to prevent and punish those who believe that they can find their redemption in our destruction. And unless we're serious about that it's hard to get to the next steps.

Now I don't want to talk in any great detail about it. That's my friend Sandy Berger's bailiwick today anyway. But we should be committed to eradicating the leadership of Al Qaeda, even if it means sending more troops to Afghanistan. And we have to be committed to helping our friends do a better job of fighting terror, narco-trafficking, and organized crime.

This is almost my six month anniversary wearing this little bracelet around. I got this from Colombian children when I went down there in June to try to continue the work that I'm proud to say President Bush has also strongly supported - to help preserve the oldest democracy in our hemisphere, thirty-five percent of which is now in the hands of the narco-traffickers and their guerilla terrorist supporters. The more we can do to help people deal with their own problems, from the Philippines to Indonesia to Colombia, the better.

We also must do more to restrict the production and the spread of weapons of mass destruction and their stocks.

I think the President did the right thing to go the UN on Iraq. I don't think Iraq should be allowed to keep whatever chemical, biological and nuclear stocks or missile stocks it has. The world community decided in 1991 that Saddam Hussein should not have weapons of mass destruction or the missiles to deliver them. In 1991, after the Gulf War, the U.S and the U.N decided that rather than having another war and deposing him the appropriate thing to do would be to have inspections and keep sanctions on Iraq until he could prove that he didn't have anything else. Then, when he threw the inspectors out, we moved to a policy saying we ought to replace him, that our preference would be for a new leader in Iraq who would be less of a murderer, less of a thug and more of a truthful partner in the world. We bombed all the known suspected weapons sites and other military targets for four days. But we didn't call for invading him.

Now after four years, the inspections have started again. With all these problems, you should know those inspections in the 90s destroyed far more weapons, weapon stocks, missiles, and component parts than the Gulf War did. The inspection system can work. Meanwhile, if Saddam Hussein does have something he has maximum incentive now not to use or give it away. So we ought to let the inspection process go forward and follow the lead of the UN inspectors.

Let me say this, there is a part of the inspection requirement on which there has been very little comment, at least in the United States. Every one of the UN resolutions going back to 1991 has had two parts, not one. They require unrestricted inspections, and Iraq's declaration of what they still have. The inspectors shouldn't have to look for a needle in a haystack. Since 1991, even if the inspections were more or less unrestricted, he's never told the truth in a declaration. That's what Prime Minister Blair was talking about yesterday in his London press conference, which some of you may have seen. I do not know what the facts are now. I just think we ought to let the inspection process play out to maximize the support of the global community for whatever is done next. But for the first time, the U.S and the U.K are saying the failure to honestly declare, and not just the failure to allow inspections, could be justification for an attack on Saddam.

I don't agree with those that think this doesn't matter, that we shouldn't get rid of these weapons of mass destruction. Neither do I agree with those that think it matters so much we should put all of our other security problems on the black burner to go after Saddam Hussein. I think we're right about where we need to be now, and I think we need to let this process play out in the international forum. We have no reason to believe these inspectors are not doing a good job and not trying to find the truth.

That brings me to North Korea. I think it would be a terrible mistake for us to fail to do everything we can to stop them from producing nuclear weapons. I think you know we have been moving for several years to get them out of the weapons business and out of the missiles business. North Korea is a perplexing country. They cannot grow enough food to feed themselves but they're world-class missile builders and bomb builders. Missiles and bombs are their cash crops. We can laugh about it but it's heart breaking really, and disorienting. Even China now does ten times as much business with South Korea as North Korea. The country feels more isolated, convinced it can bargain to get a better deal from the rest of the world whether it's for energy or food or some sort of political future only by presenting a threat: "Nobody wants anything good we have so we have to threaten to do something bad or they won't take any account of us."

We went through a tense period in early in my first term where we went to the UN and prepared to do other things to get North Korea to agree to end its attempt to use plutonium to make nuclear weapons. And they would have been able to make eight or more nuclear weapons a year if we hadn't ended it. That program worked, though North Korea is threatening to abandon it and resume plutonium production. We also tried to end their missile program and got them to end their missile-testing program.

We now know that sometime in '98 they began a much smaller effort to make fewer nuclear weapons with highly enriched uranium in a laboratory. I think what should be done now is that there should be really tough talk in private, firm but non-provocative talk in public, and a cooperative effort with the South Koreans, the Japanese, the Russians, and the Chinese to achieve a comprehensive deal to end all nuclear programs and missile sales so it doesn't look like we're in effect trying to buy them off, only to go through this all over again in a few years, paying them again and again for the same good conduct they've already promised. There should be an omnibus deal where they agree to give up their uranium nuclear programs, not go back to the layer plutonium program, and stop their missile sales. That also buys us another five years before we have to worry about putting up an expensive missile defense whether it works or not. It will make the world a safer place, and enable South Korea to continue its outreach to North Korea. If it costs a little bit of oil and a little bit of food, and a non-aggression pact which would be voided anyway if they did something terrible that provoked us to attack them, then I say do it. But let's get the thing on the road. I think that the posture we've seen just in the last twenty-four to forty-eight hours from the administration sounds about right to me.

Again, if anybody thinks it doesn't matter whether the North Koreans have nuclear weapons, you're wrong about that. It does matter. Because they don't have any other money makers.

Just one other thing on security. We spent a lot of your money on a program that actually began before I became President, the Nunn-Lugar program, designed to safeguard Russian nuclear stocks and weapons, provide money to destroy some of these weapons and in some cases, to employ some of the scientists who had worked in weapons mass destruction fields, primarily nuclear. It began shortly before I became President and we tried to make maximum use of it. There were some years when we employed over half the whole Russian force of scientists and technology people from chemical, biological and nuclear areas. We took down thousands of weapons, destroyed hundreds of them, agreed to destroy fifty tons of plutonium with the Russians and did a lot of other useful things.

The Russians didn't have any money during a lot of this time. So we spent the money to engage the Russian scientific community in positive ways that made the world a safer place. We should spend more money in this area, with a greater emphasis on biological and chemical weapons and personnel as well, and the inclusions of other countries that are known repositories of nuclear weapons and materials, and chemical and biological weapons and stocks. Whatever we spend on this is money well spent. Last year the effort to expand the program to other countries failed in Congress. I hope and pray it will succeed this time.

The main point I want to evoke is, if you're an American and you want to do something to alleviate world poverty, if you want to be heard, you have to be credible on security too.

I don't think we have to chuck our civil liberties or the civil liberties of our immigrants. We only have to make sure we have the same information available for law enforcement in America that's already available all the rest of us, and the computers of mass mailing companies anyway.

Mohammed Ata had twelve addresses, in the computers of mass mailing companies. If our government simply had the same data processing capacity these private companies do, they would have a tickler system every week or so they'd check and see who's been here less than two years who's got more than two addresses. They're either rich or up to no good. Let's go see which. That's a lot better than just profiling people because of their religion or their ethnic heritage or whatever else. One of the men who flew into the World Trade Center had two hundred and fifty-thousand dollars in debt on thirty credit cards, paying out a consolidated payment of ninety-eight hundred dollars a month. Now if you've been here less than two years, and you owe over fifty-thousand dollars and you've got more than three or four credit cards, you're either rich or up to no good. That information is available on all of us already so we ought to be able to figure that out instead of giving up our civil liberties.

Having said that, if you live in an interdependent environment, whether it's a small piece of land like the Middle East and the West Bank and Gaza and Israel or the whole wide world, unless you can kill all your opponents, or put them all in jail, sooner or later you have to make a deal.

The omnibus deal on globalization has to be to build a world with more partners and fewer terrorists, more friends and fewer enemies. And that's nothing more than what was done by Harry Truman, George Marshall and in Japan, Douglas MacArthur, after World War II. They got it. After World War I, the Treaty of Versailles was a disaster. The repudiation of the League of Nations was a disaster. The rise of protectionism was a disaster. And you put all those three things together, and you've got World War II and tens of millions of people lying slaughtered. So after World War II, those leaders who had spent their lives in the first half of the 20th century said, "Hey, suppose we take a little money and try to not have World War III and have more friends and fewer enemies."

We need a 21st century version of that. That's basically what all of us have been talking about here today. This is not rocket science. But this is probably the last and greatest stage of this movement toward global integration. We need an economic strategy, a health and education strategy and an environmental strategy to do all these things. I won't go all through the details. We gave Hernando de Soto's program a little money when I was president, and I wish we'd given more. We should do more of that. We funded two million micro-credit loans a year. (I got a letter yesterday from Muhammed Yannis by the way who said he was sorry he couldn't be here.) We should have funded twenty-million. I've seen whole villages in Latin America and East Asia and Africa transformed by this.

We know how to do aid and trade and debt relief. The global debt relief initiative cries out for expansion. It covers twenty-five countries now, it will soon cover thirty-two. You get debt relief if you're poor, but only if you put the money into education, health or development. We're almost into our third year since the debt relief passed, Honduras went from six to nine years of mandatory schooling with our savings. Keep in mind every year of schooling for every boy and girl means ten to fifteen percent a year in extra income. Uganda doubled primary school enrollment and reduced class size, something many American politicians would like to do. We know how to do this. Mexico and Brazil pay the parents of the poorest families to send their kids to school. Ninety-eight percent of the primary school kids in Brazil are in school. We spent three hundred million dollars of American tax money in my last year as President to give children in poor countries a nutritious meal but only if they'd come to school to get the meal. Enrollments soared. There are a hundred thirty-million kids out there who don't go to school, at least at the elementary level. We can afford our fair share of putting them in school.

The same thing is true of health care. Kofi Annan asked the rich world for ten billion a year to fight AIDS, T.B., Malaria, and other infectious diseases which kill one in four people of all those who die every year. Ten billion bucks. What's our share? Two and a half? It's peanuts, ands we know how to spend the money. Uganda cut the HIV infection rate in half in five years with no medicine. Brazil cut it in half in three years with medicine and prevention. You also can look at Thailand, Senegal, Cambodia. We know what to do here. This is one of the things my foundation works on. We're helping to build systems for comprehensive prevention care, and drug treatment in the Caribbean, Rwanda, and Mozambique so that we can drive down the AIDS rate. It's not all that expensive for the benefits you get. And the cost of not doing it is going to be enormous. Whenever America does something like this we create another several thousand people like that little lady from Ghana waving her shirt. It's important.

So let me just talk about the numbers here. One of the reasons America is so unpopular around the world is people think we're so selfish. They don't resent wealth.

They resent the fact that we don't know enough, care enough or do enough about the other people's problems. The real problem is that no matter how many times I give this speech and no matter how many cameras there are in the back, thank you very much for coming today, the American people still think ten years or so after I started talking about this that we spent ten to fifteen percent of their budget on foreign aid, that we should only spend three to five percent of the budget on foreign aid, and that we don't really know how to spend the money. It may be true that at one time we didn't know how to spend the money. But we do know how to spend money now. The debt relief initiative is working. Micro-credit is working. The money we gave to Hernando de Soto is working. We do know how to spend the money. We know how to get kids in school. We know how to combat healthcare problems. We do know how to spend the money

Also, the American people spend less than one percent of their budget on foreign assistance, the lowest of any country in the world with an advanced economy. And no matter how many times people like me say this, and no matter how loud the volume is it never seems to kind of get into the collective consciousness. It's the most maddening thing on Earth. But to give you an example we could double America's foreign assistance, for about ten billion dollars. Double it. Now last year, to give you some notion of what we're talking about, we spent about sixty-billion dollars in increases in defense and home land defense in last year's budget. This new round of proposed tax cuts is six hundred billion dollars over a decade. And nine hundred billion with interest costs. I don't personally think I should get a tax cut but that's another issue. But the point I want to make is, we're talking about peanuts here to double our foreign assistance. Yet the psychological benefit and the lives that would be changed would be enormous. On the other hand, if we spend all of our money on defense and none of our money on building the world with more partners and fewer terrorists, we will pay a terrible price because we will not move from interdependence to integration and we cannot kill or jail every one of our actual or potential opponents.

The third thing we need is more institutions within which people can develop the habits of cooperation. I did a lot of work on this. We expanded NATO. We supported UN action in Bosnia and Kosovo. We committed to the free trade area of the Americas, and started the regular enacting of the Summit of the Americas. We helped create the World Trade Organization, joined NAFTA, and started the annual Asia-Pacific leaders meeting. My whole premise was that the more you create frameworks within which people have an interest in working together and finding nonviolent rules-based solutions, the more likely you are to move from interdependence to integration. Of course whenever you join anything you've got to agree to give up some of your autonomy, to play by the rules of the organization. You do it when the benefits outweigh the costs.

So I also signed the Kyoto protocol on global warming, which Vice President Gore had a large hand in crafting. We were the first country to sign the comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty. I supported the International Criminal Court after appropriate changes to protect our military. And I think I should have done more to strengthen the bio-weapons convention. I think our industry people were a little wrong about that.

The current administration is backed away from all of those four things because in every case, there is some worst-case nightmare they can come up with. Well, if none of us joined anything unless we got our way all the time, nobody would ever get married. [LAUGHTER] There would be no families. There would be no bowling teams. [LAUGHTER] There would be no business partnerships. There would be no labor unions. There would be no corporations. Look, once in a while the WTO made a decision that made my hair stand on end when I was President. But I was still glad I helped to bring it into being because I thought that it gave us a place to have a rules-based forum that would keep the world coming together when other people were trying to take it apart. Of course we can't meet the Kyoto protocol deadline now because we've been fooling around for all these years when we should have been passing laws and doing things to meet the deadlines. [APPLAUSE] But we still should get back into the regime. You can't have the climate warming like it is and the biodiversity going away like it is, and all the clear consequences that will follow without doing something.

I could give you lots of other examples but the point I want to make is that all the intense institution building we did, including our efforts to modernize the international financial institutions to work better in the 21st century, for me at least there was a larger purpose that went beyond the specific function of whatever they were doing at the WTO, the Summit of the Americas, beyond the detail of whether we're going to expand NATO by three or ten members. We were trying to put things together and minimize the ability of other people to take things apart.

When I was a kid we used to play with something called Lincoln logs. Most of you are way too young to know what Lincoln logs were. They were way before Lego toys. I and three or four friends would build these log cabins. Then I had one friend who'd come along and kick 'em down. [LAUGHTER] And we were in a constant race between whether we'd build them up faster or he'd kick 'em down faster. That's what's going on today: the forces of integration against the forces of disintegration. That's why these institutions are so important.

The last point I would like to make is this. This is why I asked you to come here today. I think that all of us who get this, whether we differ on this trade bill or that policy or whatever, have a very heavy obligation to take this general message out across our country and across the world, because we have to keep working to develop the habits of mind and heart necessary to build a global community. This may be the last step in a process that began when people first came out caves in clans. As I said earlier, Robert Wright in his book "Non-Zero" says that that increasing interdependence and community in a positive sense always come from greater interaction because it's so self-evidently in interdependent people's interest to cooperate. A more cynical view is found in Robert Kaplan's Warrior Politics. He says nobody ever cooperates unless you make them so America should make them because we can now. In Matt Ridley's book "The Origins of Virtue" he says people cooperate when there's no other reasonable alternative. But eventually they get to it because their interests cry out for it.

The first gap of the 20th century raised the question: what happens when people don't get it? What happens when there's a whole new level of interdependence, and a whole new level of capacity to destroy ourselves and our adversaries, and the capacity to destroy outpaces the habits of mind and heart to cooperate? Throughout human history people have always found self-definition by positive reference to their crowd and negative reference to the other. Everybody's done it. You've done it. You've all done that. You've all said sometime in your life, "Well, I may not be perfect but thank God I didn't do that." [LAUGHTER] I've been in politics for thirty years and I met a lot of people who were absolutely miserable except on those days when they had somebody to hate. And then they were happy. Oh God they were happy haters. We had people in the Congress like that. I felt bad for them. I thought they'd never have a happy day. But then they'd really get their hatred built up and they'd be happy as a clam.

Hatred and division is also often good politics. There's a fabulous book about Africa called "The Graves are Not Yet Full" by Bill Berkeley about the tribal, ethnic and religious slaughters in Africa over the last thirty years. He says there are natural tensions between groups, but they do not turn murderous until some politician wants money or power by dividing people against one another. This is an old story.

I'm glad my friend Dahlia Rabin from Israel is here. Her father was killed not by a Palestinian terrorist but by a young Israeli who thought he was a bad Jew and a bad Israeli because he wanted a homeland for the Palestinians and a future for their children, a shared future with Israel. Sadat was killed by another Egyptian. Gandhi was killed by a Hindu who thought he was a bad Hindu because he wanted India for the Muslims and the Sikhs and the Jains and the Christians and the Jews and the Buddhists.

So this conflict about what makes us important, and how we derive meaning in our lives is very significant. That's really the purpose of this conference. Most of us don't have any power except the power of ideas.

>From the dawn of time to the present day, humans have been stumbling forward to constantly expand the definition of who is "us" and shrink the definition of who is "them." We have to get to where we define "them" not by race or religion or gender, or whether they're gay or straight, but by what they do, and whether what they do is consistent with building a world of shared benefits, shared responsibilities and shared values. I think that at least all of you who, like me, are not kids anymore, should just accept that we're going to have spend the rest of our lives trying to get this paradigm to be the dominant one in the world. If everybody accepts that sort of broad outline, they'll still be room in America for a Republican position and a Democratic one; for a more liberal response and a more conservative one.

But we won't be out here saying we shouldn't give any foreign aid and acting like we're giving the shirt off our backs when we're not giving a nickels' worth of what we ought to be. We won't be out here pretending that we have no obligation to the rest of the world so we can have another huge tax cut and run big deficits, so that when our economy grows, our interest rates will go up and we'll be ripping money out of the global economy that's desperately needed in Latin America; East Asia; Africa. And we're going to take it out four, five, six or seven years from now if we pass a bigger deficit onto our successors. We must begin to think in terms of an integrated community, to see our responsibilities and question ourselves in terms of the world we wish to build for our children.

This is an interesting time. America is the dominant political, economic and, military power in the world. I think fifty years from now we'll be a leading economic, political, and military power. I think it inconceivable that there will not be economies as big as ours. The Chinese will be. If the Indians will quit fighting with the Pakistanis and, wasting money on defense they can make the Indian subcontinent grow faster than China. If the EU keeps becoming more "U" - more united - they're already bigger than we are, they just have to formalize what exists under the surface. Therefore the American people ought to be asked to think about how we would like to be treated when we're no longer the biggest dog on the street. And, whether we shouldn't behave now with that future in mind, because I think we'll be judged in part then by what we do now, by how we handle this magic moment. The great philosopher John Rawls who just passed away a few weeks ago, wrote a book thirty something years ago that had a great, great influence on the young people of my generation called a "Theory of Justice." He said every good society ought to be organized by people who ask and answer the question: how would I feel if I were born in the other's position? If I were born to a different race and a different gender? In a different income group? And in this case in a different country? How would I feel?

So to all of you who are young go out there and move the world from interdependence to integration, to a place where we share benefits and responsibilities, a place where we do not give up our distinctive identities but we say our common humanity matters more. Thank you very much.

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