Brookings Institution | Strobe Talbott | Talks at Google

Welcome. It's almost seven past the hour. Apparently the mic is working. Welcome everyone to the latest and greatest of the authors at Google Talk series. We're really excited to have Mr. Strobe Talbot with us. Mr. Talbot, or Strobe, I guess we'll say at Google, is president of the Brookings Institution, one of the preeminent, if not the preeminent, think tanks in the world and certainly in the United States, where pleased to have him with us. And he was nice enough to spend some time earlier today with the google.org team and Larry Brilliant talking to us about our efforts there, as well as with Andrew McLaughlin talking to us about our government efforts around the world. Strobe comes to us with an impressive career in journalism, government and academia. Educated at Yale, where he is now a Fellow of the Yale Corporation and Oxford, spent 21 years with time magazine, first as a reporter covering Eastern Europe, the State Department and the White House, then as the Washington bureau chief editor at large and a foreign affairs columnist. In 1993, he went to the State Department where He worked until 2001 under the Clinton administration, first as ambassador at large and special advisor to the Secretary of State for what at the time were the newly independent states of the former Soviet Union, then as deputy secretary of state. So that means number two, Secretary of state being the secretary and then deputy being the second for seven years and was very much, I think, the intellectual leader of the United States work in this area under the Clinton administration. He then founded the Yale center for the Study of globalization and in 2002 became president of the Brookings Institution. He's a prolific author. He's published many, many books and many articles. In preparation for this talk, my team prints out everything that authors write and it's usually something you can hand to me. And this time they came to me and said, which of this stuff do you want? There's like much too much stuff here. We have two of his books available today and he has kindly agreed to stay after and sign books for those who are interested. But there are many other books available as well. We are excited to have him with us at Google. So thank you, Strobe, for being here.

Thank you, Gerald.

So we're going to do this in question and answer format. I'm going to start out and then after a while, and after we've covered the main topics Strobe is hoping to cover, we're going to open it up to the audience. We are broadcasting to our Phoenix office and we are taping for YouTube. So if everyone can Remember to use the MIC for questions. I'll remind you. That would be appreciated. So let's start and talk about global governance, because this is the thing I think Strobe is most interested in and really the thought leader in the world. And Strobe, what is global governance and why should we care about?

Well, first, Cheryl, let me just say how much I appreciate the invitation to be here and what a pleasure it is to actually see some real people who are responsible for this fabulous product and brand that has just transformed the world in ways that may, during the course of our conversation, actually be appropriate to the topic that Cheryl is allowing me to talk about, which is global governance. Global. Let me start with what global governance is not and probably will not be anytime soon. It's not a world government. We're not talking about a capital on the flag, on a city on the map, which is the capital of the world with a giant parliament that legislates for the entire world. Global governance is more of a network of institutions that have grown up, particularly in recent decades, but really going back a very long time, when Andrew McLaughlin and I were walking over here and he was educating me a little bit about some of the issues that Google is dealing with, he used the following phrase. He said, the web is a borderless medium. In increasing number of ways, that's true of the planet Earth. Now, that doesn't mean we don't have governments. There is a government responsible for virtually every little colored patch on the globe, nearly 200 in all. It's kind of worth bearing in mind that the 6.2 billion people on the planet Earth, a third of them are governed from two capitals, Beijing and New Delhi. And everybody else is governed from 190 or so capitals. But one capital is particularly important in determining what global governance means and how well it works. And that's the capital of the United States, my hometown, Washington, D.C. and what I wanted to do at the outset is maybe offer a few observations, Cheryl, about how that enterprise is going.

To.

If you look back to the beginning of the last century, we had a kind of pattern which is that all hell broke loose in the world. And it was bad enough so that those who were left standing and those who were victorious in the various wars that we had tried to set up a system that would allow us, the human race, to govern ourselves as the human race a little bit better. World War I resulted in the League of Nations, which was very much an American idea from an American president and didn't turn out very well in no small measure. Because the American President, Woodrow Wilson, wasn't even able to get the treaty establishing the League of Nations past the United States Senate. He got sick. There was an empty chair left for an American representative for the decade plus that the League of Nations was in business and it failed to stop World War II. World War II was an even greater cataclysm, but it had a happier ending in one sense, and that is that Franklin Roosevelt was very smart in learning some lessons from the way in which Wilson had failed to get approval for the League of Nations. And first Roosevelt and then Harry Truman were able to get the United nations established in a way that really went on to accomplish a great deal. Larry Brilliant and I were talking in an earlier meeting about the World Health Organization and the success it had in the eradication of smallpox. That was something that was possible only with an effective UN system. Now, for a long time, the UN system was operating under a huge disadvantage, which was the Cold War. You had the world split between the old Soviet camp and the so called free world led by the United States. At the end of the Cold War, we, the human race, had an opportunity to make further progress with global governance. And we've had three American Presidents since then. And I would distinguish between the first two American Presidents we had since the end of the Cold War, George Herbert Walker Bush and the President that I happen to work for, Bill Clinton, who's going to be here on these premises in a couple of days. And our current president, the elder President Bush and Bill Clinton were different in a lot of ways. There was no love lost between them in the 1992 election, but they are actually very, very similar in that they both profoundly believed in an international system based on structures, international law and treaties, alliances that worked, and the consensual participation of all countries and certainly all civilized countries in building a world order. You may remember that the senior President Bush talked about a new World Order. Bill Clinton had that vision too. Both of them made some progress, both of them had some setbacks. We can talk about those when we get to the discussion, which I'm very much looking forward to. Then along came the current President Bush. If his father was the arch multilateralist, he, the President Bush is the arch unilateralist. That is, he came into office more skeptical than any of his 11 predecessors going back to World War II. And that means six Democrats and five Republicans more skeptical than any of them about international law, treaties, alliances, and the very idea of global governance. And that was apparent even in the first nine months of his administration, before 911 happened. You may recall that no sooner did President Bush take the oath of office than he pulled the United States out of the diplomacy in North Korea, in the Middle east, he essentially tore up the ABM Treaty. He walked away from the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. He pulled the United States irrevocably out of the International Criminal Court and thereby, by the way, generated a lot of resentment and anxiety around the world. Then, of course, came 9 11. At first, the world sort of poured out its heart to us, was prepared to support us. NATO, the alliance that we had been instrumental in creating, offered to help us bring down the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. President Bush said, thanks, but no thanks. We'll do this ourselves. In any event, to take a fairly long story and cut it short, the unilateralism of the Bush administration really came to a head with Iraq. And Iraq has, of course, turned out to be such a debacle, not just for the administration, but for the people of Iraq and for the international community, that I think it has gone a long way towards discrediting that whole unilateralist approach to the world that President Bush personified. And in fact, to give him his credit, he has done some course correcting in his second term, moving back towards diplomacy, particularly with regard to North Korea, as you know, and with good results. But nonetheless, his administration is now coming to an end. And I want to conclude these opening remarks by just making a upbeat but cautiously cautious prediction about the next president, whichever party, whichever gender, the president who takes office on the 20th of January, 2009, which is 651 days from today, if anybody's counting, three minutes, two seconds, something, an account I was able actually to get by Googling it, as a matter of fact. We appreciate that the next President of the United States, a Republican or Democrat, I think, is going to represent a return to what I would call traditional American internationalism. And second, is going to have an opportunity to rebuild trust around the world and to go back to work on the business of making global governance work. And it's mighty darned important that he or she do that because again, going back to the conversation that Andrew and Cheryl and Larry and I were having earlier, we do not have a lot of time to address certain issues that can only be solved or at least ameliorated by global governance. They cannot be dealt with by individual countries. And I would pick out four in particular. Climate change, of course, the very real danger that we will have another wave of nuclear proliferation, which could very well lead to not just nuclear war, but multiple Nuclear wars down the road if we don't do something to undo the damage that has been done to the non proliferation regime around the world. Third, global pandemics, something that google.org is working a lot on. And then fourth, there is a threat or a concern that's harder to put into a bumper sticker. I would call it the divide between those who feel like winners and those who feel like losers in the process of globalization. And these are all intertwined in ways that we can talk about. But, but I think we've got basically about 10 years to get a handle, particularly on the existential threats to our planet, which are nuclear proliferation and climate change. But those are tied into the other two threats as well. And we just have to hope that not only will our government be wisely enough led to address those threats, but that it'll have support and indeed pressure from folks like you, which is to say the American citizenry, the private sector, the NGO world, which I think by the way creates some opportunities for some collaboration between Google and Brookings. So why don't I stop there and turn it back over to you, Cheryl?

Yeah, and there's so much obviously in that opening to follow up on from global governance to the current presidency, the next presidency and these other topics. So we'll try to hit at least a little bit of all of them, starting a little bit with global governance. If you look at some of the institutions we have, the un, which didn't do much to help, if anything, with Darfur, where do you see the model for what will really work? Is there one? Is this something totally new that has to be built? How do you get from where we are today with institutions that I don't think anyone believes are doing what they should be doing in a true global governance sense? Is it, is it the way forward new institutions? Is the way forward reform of these.

Third option allowed?

Yes, please.

Okay.

That's why you have your job.

Well, in Washington, we always have three options. You know, abject capitulation, global thermonuclear war, the right thing. I think we'll take three. The answer definitely is not start from scratch, throw the UN out as hopeless and try to build something new for the very simple reason that it would take much too long. The problems would have gobbled us up by the time we even got started. So let's recognize that the UN is a flawed but nonetheless very useful instrument and make much more of it. As a general proposition, if you look back over the 60 years or so of the UN, you can say that the UN has been strong and effective when its strongest member wants it to be. And that's us. I mean, you look back, say in 1956, which was right in the depths of the Cold War, you had an American president, Dwight Eisenhower, and a secretary general of the un, Doug Hammarskjold, who wanted the UN to be effective, working with the United States to stop the war that broke out in the Middle east that year. Now you, quite rightly, Cheryl, zero in on Darfur. Darfur is maddening. It's frustration. It's a blight on the record of all of us. You're going to have Bill Clinton here in the next couple of days and I can tell you that he it's not too strong a word. He agonizes to this day over the failure to respond to Rwanda. Now, there have been other cases where the United nations, always with American leadership, did respond to humanitarian and other catastrophes going on inside of countries, whether it was restoring democracy in Haiti or intervening to stop ethnic cleansing and genocide in the Balkans or to ending the brutal suppression of East Timor. So there have been examples where the UN has worked, but it's always required American commitment. But I think it's going to require more than reform, Cheryl I think it's going to require almost a whole well, not almost literally a whole new level of commitment and willingness on the part of the major powers in the world to make the UN work. And in one sense, we're at a very hopeful moment because for the first time in history, the first time in human history, it is now the case that that none of the major powers in the world are at war with each other or are threatening to be at war with each other. And that includes the newly emerging great powers, India, China, Brazil. And we have to find a way, whatever the issue, whether it's dealing with proliferation or dealing with climate change, very specifically, to bring those new emerging forces into into the kind of directorate of the global governance system. Right now the directorate of the UN is made up of five countries that happen to be the victors after World War II, and that's way out of date. So we have to find some way of bringing these new countries in.

In addition, isn't part of the problem not just bringing countries in, but now we have these non state actors, from Al Qaeda to others. And if global governance is to going going to work, it has to take into account people that aren't states, right, other groups that obviously have tremendous influence. How does a global governance model deal with people or groups like Al Qaeda?

Well, it's a good question. And I would add to it the additional problem that we have, these, as you call them, non state actors, these grotesque NGOs like Al Qaeda, but you also have what are, meet the dictionary definition of states, but are failed states. And the connection between the two is organic. In other words, failed or failing states are very often playing host to these very dangerous and often terrorist non state actors. The classic example, of course, being Afghanistan, which was not in any meaningful sense of state. It was kind of a loose collection of warring tribes governed by this outfit called the Taliban. And that's where Al Qaeda set down roots and eventually went on to strike a terrible blow against the United States. I think the long term answer to your question, Cheryl, is that the international community has to find ways, through a combination of friendly persuasion, incentivization and occasionally intervention, of dealing with the problem of failed and failing states. And that is over time going to mean making it a sort of membership requirement for belonging to the international community that you meet certain norms and, and particularly that means norms with regard to how you govern inside your own borders. It is now the business of the world how any country governs itself. And that's a principle that's beginning to be accepted. Andrew and I were talking about this as it relates to accessibility to information, open society. That's something we take almost for granted here in the United States. But there are large parts of the world where it's not taken for granted. And there's usually a direct correlation between the openness or closedness of a society and the success or failure of a society. I think the good news about India and China, to take these two countries that are home to a third of humanity, each of them different as they are, have kind of come out of their shell. India has been a democracy from the day it became an independent state state, but it was a very closed economy for a long time until the early 1990s when the President and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was Finance Minister and did so much to open India to the world. China was by no means a democracy for a long time, and it still isn't, of course, in many respects. Nonetheless, I think its leadership, with a lot of support from its people, have made a fundamental decision that they want to be part of the world and play by the rules of the world. And we have to make sure that they have a seat at the table in deciding what those rules are.

So I know a couple people requested that I ask specifically about Iraq. So I read an article where you said where you wrote it was clearly unilateralism, very much in line with what you said that got us to where we are. There's an article in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine by someone named Noah Feldman who's written on this for the New York Times for a while, saying, however we got here, basically we're here for a while. There is no easy exit. What do you think the right strategy is? Given we are where we are for both now, the rest of this president's term and then the next president, what is the best possible outcome we can hope for in Iraq and what's the path to get us there?

You know, I'm going to preface this. I'm going to make a stab at an answer. But I want to say that particularly in a company like this, I feel like an old guy. I've been around for a while and I've spent all my adult life having opinions about foreign policy challenges facing the United States. There has never been a time before this one where I couldn't write an 800 word op ed and say here's the solution to this problem, whether it was the war in Vietnam or the Sandinista challenge in this hemisphere or you name it. But I'm stumped by this one. I do not have an easy answer, but I still owe you an answer. And I think unless people who don't bear the weight of public office can come up with constructive ideas, then we can't expect our elected officials to easier either. Okay. I think that the name of the game from here on out is first of all to recognize that it's going to be a very long game. I do not support these calls for a set deadline to get all American troops out of Iraq because bad as that situation is in Iraq, it is imaginable that it could be worse. We created Iraq is the first failed state of our own making. I subscribe to Tom Friedman's Pottery Barn principle. If you break it, you own it. And we broke it. Iraq was always an artificial state and it was a grotesque, brutal dictatorship for over 30 years. But at least it wasn't a failed state that threatened to destabilize the whole region. Now that's what it is. And we need to do two, well, really three things. One, and it's going to definitely fall to the next President of the United States to do this. There's no way this thing is going to be over in January 2009. One is for the United States to do a number of things to prove that we are no longer we know the difference between a leader and a boss. And we're prepared to be a leader, and we're not going to boss people around. And that's going to involve things like restoring the right of habeas corpus to detainees, closing down Guantanamo, signing up to the International Criminal Court, a whole bunch of other things I can think of. And then we have to strengthen the UN and do everything we can to get genuine international support to provide some security inside what is the failing state of Iraq itself. The other thing we're going to have to do is negotiate much more vigorously in a sustained way and directly with people that we don't like, particularly the Syrians and the Iranians. One of the bizarre situations that we've gotten ourselves into over the last couple of years is that we have a government in Washington that basically says the world is divided into, well, maybe three categories, good countries, really bad countries, and then some that are somewhere in between. And we're not going to negotiate with countries that are part of the axis of evil. Well, that came as news to me because, you know, for a long time those were the countries that we that our leaders felt were the most important to negotiate with. You know, Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union the empire of evil, but he certainly negotiated with it and to very good effect in terms of keeping the nuclear peace. So we're going to have to do those three things. We're going to have to restore the trust of the world in us. We're going to have to work with the rest of the world to essentially make that giant and fractured country of Iraq into kind of a ward of the international state. And we're going to have to do hard, tough negotiating with the states in the immediate region so as to make them more part of the solution and less part of the problem. And the most important of those is Iran. Iran is more influential in Iraq today than the United States States is. And it is not using that influence to good effect. And it knows it is because, among other things, it's trying to force us into a negotiation with them. And we're going to have to have that negotiation.

How do you. One thing you mentioned in your opening was the fear, which I think everyone shares on nuclear proliferation, given the number of states, some of which our new policy is not to speak to, that have nuclear weapons states like Iran that are obviously clearly trying or potentially can get it. What is the answer for how do we work on the nuclear proliferation problem?

Well, let's start at home. The United States is in two respects, contributing to the problem of nuclear proliferation. We are bound by the terms of the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty, and we are allowed under the NPT to have nuclear weapons ourselves, along with China and Russia and Britain and France. But one of the obligations we undertook when we signed the NPT was that we would conscientiously, over time, work to reduce and eventually eliminate all nuclear weapons. We have never really, as a nation, taken that obligation seriously. With a couple of exceptions, Ronald Reagan took it quite seriously and came pretty close to negotiating something with Mikhail Gorbachev, about whom Cheryl and I were speaking earlier. But that was kind of an exception that proved the rule. We have to get serious about that again. Instead, right now, our government in Washington not only is not pushing levels of nuclear weapons in that direction, it's holding open the option of testing again. The United States might test nuclear weapons to develop a whole new generation of bunker buster warheads. If that were to happen, you could really kiss the NPT goodbye. So I hope that one of the first things that the next president of the United States will do, whether it's President Romney, President Obama, President Clinton, or whoever, will be to work very hard during a honeymoon that he or she will have with the Congress to ratify the. The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, something the United States has never done, then it's going to be a matter of working with other countries. I think there's actually some good news there. The one diplomatic achievement for which this president deserves a great deal of credit is the one that he got with North Korea just several weeks ago. And I think it is actually possible that the North Koreans, in exchange for all kinds of financial and diplomatic goodies that they want, may actually cross back over the threshold that they crossed by testing a nuclear weapon. And Iran has stayed just shy of that threshold, too. So I think it's not yet hopeless, but within a couple more years drift of the kind that we've had over the last six years, it could be hopeless.

What about climate change? Climate change does, I think, feel to so many people, if you see the updates, including the one from last week, that it's such a. A dire situation, it's just hard to reverse. What do you think the right answers are? And do you think there's real hope to turn this back?

Well, there has to be hope, because the hopelessness in the case of climate change is like accepting a death sentence for the planet. You may have noticed that Cheryl's going to have a baby. I'm going to be a grandfather in a couple of weeks. Your daughter and my granddaughter, assuming that they have good genes and good luck, may well live to see the 22nd century. The bad news there, or the ominous news is that those two little girls will grow up to find out whether the optimists or the pessimists are right about what's happening with climate change. And with every report that comes out, including the most recent UN report, there is more evidence on the side of the pessimists. You know, a lot of us as Americans think that the Kyoto Protocol doesn't exist because we're not part of it. There is a Kyoto Protocol and it's going to expire in 2012, which means halfway through the next presidency. If it's a two term presidency and we have got to start working, if not now, then January 21, 2009, to have something to replace the Kyoto Protocol with. And my own suggestion, it should be called either the Shanghai Protocol or the Mumbai Protocol, which is to say that India and China need to be part of it and they need to undertake the same obligations to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions as the developed world. But that's going to require a lot of concessions on our part to get them to buy into it. And that's just part of it. The rest has to do with alternative sources of energy, cleaner fuel, more hybrids and so forth and so on. But it's going to probably. Sheryl requires something else and that is a whole rethink about the extent to which we're prepared to generate electricity through nuclear power. And when I was the age of a lot of you out here, nuclear power was absolute taboo. Nuclear power plants were being shut down all over the place. We're going to see them start opening up because at least they don't generate greenhouse gases. But that's going to take us back to the non proliferation issue because if you're going to have a whole lot more civilian nuclear power plants around the world, that means there's going to be a lot more fissile material that could be used to make bombs. Which means that we're going to need a much, much tougher, more enforceable and more reliable non proliferation regime.

I'm going to ask one final question and then open it up to the audience. One thing I just wanted to add. President Clinton is here on Friday, but it's not a Google event. He's speaking at the Global Philanthropy Forum. And I think we are making, are we making arrangements for people to be able to watch that? Josh, do you know we haven't gotten clearance yet? We're trying to get clearance to make that Broadcast for Google as well. So we're working on it.

Ask Clinton for clearance.

He'll get it. We're working on that. But the final question I wanted to ask is I was hoping Strub could tell us a little bit about Brookings and what Brookings is doing to be part of the problem. If there was ever an organization that believes that information is part of the problem, I think Google is that audience. So we'd love to hear how your work at Brookings is informing some of these issues.

Well, I've heard said at least twice in the two hours that my colleague Linda Steckley and I have been here today that the core idea of Google is that information is power. We don't have the technology you folks do, or I might add the staff, or I might add the lovely premises. But Brookings, as the original, oldest and largest of the American think tanks, is based on the same premise. We believe not just that information is power, but that ideas are power. And we're basically in the idea business. I mean, the conceit of think tank is something like that old line that, you know, war is too important to leave to the generals. We believe that governance is too important to leave just to elected and appointed government officials and that they will be able to govern us better if they have good constructive ideas on ways to innovate and do a better job. And that the best ideas are those that come about as a result of of rigorous fact based research, which is what we carry on at Brookings in about five different areas. Economic studies, globalization, metropolitan studies, governance studies, and foreign policy studies. And increasingly we're trying to generate those ideas in collaboration with our neighbors on Think tank row, like the Carnegie Endowment next door and center for Strategic and International Studies. We're working with universities. Linda and I spent earlier part of the afternoon out at Stanford talking to senior people there about ways in which we can collaborate with Stanford. And we very much want to partner with you folks here for all kinds of obvious reasons.

We're going to open up for questions. Please use the mic. Got to use the mic. We're videotaping. Feel free to line up if that's helpful. Yeah, thanks.

It's Tom, right?

Yep, it's. I said it. Isn't that good. We were talking a little bit beforehand.

Formerly known as Tommy.

I really wish you hadn't said that on video. I won't tell your real name in.

Retaliation, however you can't remember it.

Want to bet?

Okay.

That was really stupid. You googled it. I know.

Not exactly, but anyway. My apologies, because this isn't quite. I haven't quite put this together as a coherent question, I think. But given that we still have the topic of nation states and severely severe differences in the power of nation states, for example, just comparing the United States to, say, Uruguay or even South Africa, Australia, how do you bring the states together in the sense to do global governments when we have such difference in real economic power, military power, et cetera? And also tying this in with the fact that I think that you said that the nations, the major powers, are not at war. I think we're actually almost in the starting stages of war on an economic front, in a sense. One of the problems with the Kyoto Protocols, as you did imply, was that the United States was being asked to give up quite a bit of its development ability with greenhouse gases, whereas China and India, which are trying to raise their level of industrialism up to ours, might or might not have done so under the protocols. So we do have this problem of the United States being such an economic superpower that it takes up a large percentage of the world's resources, but other countries are trying to raise themselves up to that, and that leads to the problem of additional greenhouse gases and the like. I said I'm not sure if this is really a coherent question.

So no, there are two questions, and they're very good ones. On the horrendous disparity between not just physical size, but economic power of a country like the United States, which has unprecedented history, and a smaller country. You mentioned Uruguay. Part of the idea of the UN originally was that the General assembly would serve as what Paul Kennedy calls kind of a parliament of man, although it wouldn't have legislative authority, but that it could serve as a forum to bring all countries together on an equal basis and take positions on issues, but at a more utilitarian and operational level. I would just point out that there are a lot of small countries that punch way above their weight. And this goes back to one of Cheryl's questions. Countries that are really well governed and that have kind of, if not mastered, then made exemplary progress in how to govern themselves, can very often then serve as kind of examples for other countries, including in their region, and can play a. Can punch well above their weight in international diplomacy. Just to take one example from the part of the world you mentioned, Costa Rica or perhaps Switzerland. Well, yes, Switzerland come back to in a second. But Costa Rica in particular, because of, unlike all of the other countries of Central and South America under the first President, Figueres, Pepe Figueres, One of the smartest things he did was basically to shut down the military and have a police force instead, which meant that you had pretty much an uninterrupted record of elected governments. You didn't have military coups on a regular basis. And Costa Rica produced a lot of, of world class statesmen as well. In Europe, I would actually cite Scandinavia and the Nordic area where, you know, Finland is quite a small country. And yet when Finland has the presidency of the European Union, it exerts real leadership. The same is true of particularly the, well, all of them really. The Danes, the Swedes, the Norwegians. And they've helped bring the Baltic states that used to be part of the Soviet Union into their orbit. And now those states are really remarkably well governed. So I think there's a lot to be learned from. One of the things we believe at Brookings is that just because we're big and powerful doesn't mean we can't learn from other countries. And as we address issues, for example of how to fix our horrendously broken health care system, we're going to be studying where France and Canada and countries like that have something to teach us. On your other point, it's absolutely valid and you're really underscoring, I think, what I was alluding to earlier, that the United States is going to have to take a deep breath and make some concessions in order to get the emerging countries to join us in helping address a problem that we historically are much more responsible for than they are. But we're all going to suffer if we don't solve that problem. One point I would make there, Tom, is that I think we, the US need to start synchronizing our foreign policy much more with the way we develop constituencies in support of that foreign policy here at home. It's been our habit for decades to send our diplomats, you know, to far corners of the world, negotiate a treaty, bring it back, present it to the Senate and expect the Senate, Senate to ratify it. When it comes to issues like trade, which affect so many Americans, climate change, which affects so many Americans and is going to involve sacrifices by Americans, we need to start right now, not just with the diplomacy with other countries, but also educating the American people and trying and listening to the American people and trying to engage them in the policy making process, which takes you back to knowledge is power.

Thank you.

So you talked about nuclear non proliferation without actually mentioning the latest members of the nuclear club, India and Pakistan. The Bush administration, current administration just negotiated a bunch of agreements with India which essentially sets up a parallel mechanism to npt.

I missed that.

A parallel mechanism to NPT because India hasn't signed npt. So you talked about the future efforts on non proliferation and I was wondering if the set of agreements that have just been agreed to by the two countries closes the doors to those future efforts. Or does it open the doors?

Incidentally, I have written, since the book you're carrying, I've written another book called Engaging India and a few have a business card or an address. I'd be glad to send it to you. It's about the role that I played in the negotiations with the previous Indian government, the BJP government, to deal with exactly the question you're posing. And then I have an afterward which takes the story into the future, I hope. There is a great irony that is now unfolding with regard to the deal that President Bush made with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. And that is despite the fact that a number of us who believed very much in the NPT and had strong reservations about that deal. It passed overwhelmingly in both houses of Congress. And by the way, had I been a member of the House or a member of the Senate, God forbid, I would have voted for it because I think it would have done no good and would have done quite a bit of harm to turn it down now. There is a distinct possibility that the deal is going to fall apart on the Indian side because the Prime Minister has lost a key part of his coalition, the Communists, as you know. And so this deal that was supposed to be the cornerstone of US Indian relations may come a cropper on the Indian side rather than the American side, even though it was a hell of a good deal for India because it required India to make no concessions whatsoever either with regard to the NPT or with regard to restraints on its nuclear weapons programs. Nonetheless, I'm knowing India reasonably well. I think that now that India has regained or has gained a degree of kind of geopolitical self confidence that it didn't have before, it will understand the logic of being part of a new non proliferation regime that will require some constraints on its own nuclear weapons program, not least because of the problem of its neighbors and particularly its neighbor Pakistan, which does not have a responsible record with regard to proliferation at all. So whatever happens to the deal, I'm quite hopeful about the role that India will play. And I indicated earlier some optimism about North Korea, some optimism about Iran. I wish I were so optimistic about Pakistan. Another nuclear related question. Earlier you mentioned about negotiating with Iran. I was wondering about your assessment of what is the government of Iran's agenda, what endgame are they trying to secure with the nuclear activity and the public relations campaigns? Well, Iran is a singular noun, but we should not think of it as a monolithic phenomenon. And one of the reasons that I greatly regretted the depiction of Iran as part of the axis of evil was that it suggested that Iran was in the same category as Saddam Hussein's Iraq and Kim Jong Il's North Korea. In fact, it is much more complicated, much more interesting, and has actually quite a bit of positive promise. Now, Iran is weighted down with a total nutcase as president and this obscurantist theocracy that is the most powerful force in the land. But that's not all there is to Iran. It also has a democratically elected government, including Mr. Ahmadinejad, who got elected to the presidency of Iran not because he was going to deny the Holocaust or threatened to wipe Israel off the map or develop nuclear weapons, but because as mayor of Tehran, he'd been pretty good at fixing potholes. And the guy he was running against was well known to be corrupt. And this he and Ahmadinejad was seen as Mr. Clean and so forth. But Iran, largely because my impression is, and I suspect there are people in this room who could give me data on this, Iran is actually quite a live citizen in cyberspace, and young Iranians in particular, who make up a very large portion of the population, are plugged into the world in lots of different ways, and they want to be part of the world. And so you now have Ahmadinejad being pulled back from his craziness, both by the clerics who are nervous about him getting them into a war with the United States and by the electorate. And my guess is that if handled properly and if engaged more, Iran may over time, become more of a normal state. As for what it wants with its nuclear program, I'm sure there are differences. There are certainly people in Iran who want to have a tested nuclear weapon. But there are others who probably want to see Iran get all of the privileges to engage in enrichment that a full member of the NPT has and might be willing to stop short of testing a nuclear weapon if they got, among other things, some sort of guarantee that they weren't going to get bombed by the United States. United States.

We'll take the last three questions.

It's often stated that the US Won the Cold War. Would you agree with that statement? And in any case, what lessons do you think our Cold War strategy has for the future of our foreign policy? I think that we Americans were among the many who won the Cold War. But the winners in the Cold War also included the reformers in the old Soviet bloc and the and even though many of them don't feel it this to today, that the people of the what used to be the USSR will come to realize that the end of the Cold War was good for them as well. And there's no question that the combination of the American hard power, which is to say containment and NATO and nuclear deterrence, and American soft power, which is a willingness to continue to engage with the communist world and the information revolution brought down that terrible system. One of the reasons that Gorbachev embraced the policy of glasnost and gave up the policy of the big lie is because in a world of the information revolution, you couldn't make the good big lie work anymore. So I think we were all winners of that. But now we have a huge challenge in making those people who feel that they lost out as a result of the end of the Cold War because their lives are because they're poor, whatever bringing them, they're part of that category I was talking about earlier who feel like losers in the process of globalization. The end of Cold War is part of that. Yes.

I actually have a non issue related question, more about public service. So it would be my observation when you look around that increasingly the best and the brightest are tending to go into the private sector and not pursuing careers in public service or the public sector. You know, look at someone like yourself and your profile and I worry that there are not enough people, you know, like yourself who are focusing on a career in the public sector public policy. And does that trouble you? Does that not. Do you agree with that observation or not? And is there any. What is the best thinking of think tanks and others who care a lot about public policy and public service, about how they engage young people and people entering the workforce to be more interested in those kinds of careers.

Well, I think it's a terrific question and I do worry about it some, but not over much, partly because I see every day so many examples of younger people making the decision to go into a life public service. It's a little self referential, but I'm delighted that, you know, one of my sons has decided that he's going to basically make his life in politics with all of the difficulty that that is no doubt going to going to entail he's actually going to be out here for the global philanthropy forum. But every time one of the happiest jobs I had when I was in the States Department. Cheryl told you what my position is. I like to think of myself as having been the highest ranking male in the State Department for at least four years. One of my jobs was to meet with what's called a 100 class of incoming foreign service officers. And they just were terrific in terms of their dedication ability. Now, very often they spent a couple of years in the private sector, but I think that if we can just as a body politic, do something to restore a higher degree of civility in the way we carry out our political debate. So it's not all about gotcha and, you know, slash and burn and take no prisoners and negative advertising and all that kind of stuff. That would definitely help. There's a lot that we could do. We could pay a little better too, and that would help too. But I think you shouldn't be too discouraged. Discouraged about that.

You have the honor of the last question.

Super. My question is about equality. And when you're talking about winners and losers. Equality, equality, equality, equality. And you were talking earlier about winners and losers and minus energy, which hopefully will be a renewable resource, is it ever going to be possible for China and India to have the lives of luxury and convenience that we have and their economical booms they're having right now? That's probably what they're striving for. But are there enough natural resources for them ever to have as many automobiles, houses and infrastructure like we have? So if that isn't possible, are we trying to make things equal and they're always going to want more and eventually try to take it away from us?

Well, if it's cast in those zero sum terms, it's almost a formula for what Tom was suggesting earlier could be the makings of a 21st century war among the great powers. So it can't be cast in those terms. My sense of both India and China, and I don't proclaim to be an expert in either of them, but I spent a lot of time traveling in both, is that there is good news and there is bad news. And the good news slightly outweighs the bad news. The bad news, obviously is that in each of these countries you have within their borders the winner, loser, divide that we have globally. And I think that we, as 6.2 billion Earthlings, are not going to lick that problem unless these two very large countries can lick it themselves. And their leaders are aware of that. When I was with Linda and some other colleagues, John Thornton in China, and we saw Wen Jiabao, the Prime Minister last October, he talked about this in very very specific terms that made me think he wasn't just, you know, blowing smoke at us. He really gets it. And the leadership there is thinking about how do they close the gap, particularly between the city and the rural areas. And I know that the Indian leadership is thinking along the same lines. Will they ever achieve. Will the average Indian or the average Chinese ever achieve the standard of living that Americans enjoy today? Probably not. Will Americans continue to enjoy the standard of living that we enjoy Today throughout the 21st century when your little girl and my granddaughter grow up? Maybe not, because we have a lot of bills to pay that have accrued over time. But let me, since this is the last answer to the last question, bring this home to what you folks do for a living. And that is the combination of technology, information, ideas, and dedication. And from what I, everything I know, responsible leadership of a country company. You are empowering people. And I have seen that in rural Maharashtra province or state in India, where desperately poor people are now not quite so poor because they've got cell phones. And they're not just using cell phones to do networking, to do little business transactions, but they're learning how to do bank transfers and things like that. So keep it up, and let's see if we can do some stuff together. So thank you very much, Cheryl.

Please join me in thanking Strobe for being a pleasure.