AMBASSADORISCHINGER:
Thanks very much. I think now we can continue. It’s my great pleasure now toopen our second panel this morning. We have two longtime friends of the MunichSecurity Conference. Both of our panelists have been with the Munich SecurityConference when they served in the U.S. Senate for many years. So let mewelcome both Secretary John Kerry and Secretary Chuck Hagel, both now no longerin the Senate but both now for a year, for practically a year, Secretary ofState and Secretary of Defense. Welcome, Mr. Secretaries. (Applause.)
I think the way we want to usethese 45 minutes or so is that both Secretaries will offer introductorycomments; and if you have a question to ask, please put it on one of the slipsof paper and hand it to the staff, and then we’ll use whatever time we have tohave a discussion, a Q&A session, in just a few minutes.
John, would you like to start?Thank you.
SECRETARYKERRY:
Well, thank you very much, Ambassador Ischinger. I’m very grateful for theopportunity to be here. (In German.) Nice to be with everybody. And I am – Iwant to remark that Ambassador Ischinger had the pleasure of going to therenowned Fletcher School at Tufts University, but it sounds to me like he losthis Boston accent. I don’t know what happened to him along the way. (Laughter.)
This is a very real and specialpleasure for Chuck and me to be here at this conference. We do know thisconference well. And as Walter said, we are not just friends from the Senatebut we’re friends from a common experience of a long period of time. So it’s apleasure for us now to be working together as partners with respect to thenational security issues that challenge all of us.
So the fact is also that bothChuck and I feel this Atlantic relationship very much in our bones. Both of ourfamilies emigrated to the United States from Europe, and both of our fatherssigned up to fight tyranny and totalitarianism in World War II. And we bothwatched the Berlin Wall go up as we grew up, and we grew up as Cold War kids.
So we come to these discussions –both of us – with part of our formative years planted in the post-ColdWar/post-World War period, and certainly deeply in the Cold War period. As akid who grew up in school doing drills to get under my desk in the event ofnuclear war, this is something that still conditions my thinking.
It was during that period of timethat I first encountered what I came to understand as one of the unmistakablesymbols of the enduring American-European partnership. I was a young kid whoserved – who was with my father in Berlin when he served as the legal advisorto the then High Commissioner to Germany, James Conant. And I spent a piece ofmy childhood getting on trains in Frankfurt and going through the dead of nightto arrive in Berlin and be greeted by the American military man, and movebetween a British sector, a French sector, an American sector, and a Russiansector. So I can remember cold signs warning you about where you were leaving,and I can remember guns rapping on the windows of my train when I dared to liftthe blinds and try to look out and see what was on the other side.
I’ll also never forget walkinginto a building – I used to ride my bicycle down to Kurfurstendamm when it wasstill rubble. We’re talking about the early 1950s, just to date myself. And youcould see a plaque on a building that said: “This was rebuilt with help fromthe Marshall Plan.” But the truth is today, as we gather in Munich in 20xx,George Marshall’s courageous vision – resisting the calls of isolationism andinvesting in this partnership – requires all of us to think about more than justbuildings. That period of time saw the Marshall Plan lead America’s support forthe rebuilding of a continent. But it was more than just the rebuilding of acontinent; it was the rebuilding of an idea, it was the rebuilding of a visionthat was built on a set of principles, and it built alliances that were justunthinkable only a few years before that.
And I say all of this to try toput this meeting and the challenges that we face in a context. So long as I canremember, I have understood that the United States and Europe are strongestwhen we stand united together for peace and prosperity, when we stand in strongdefense of our common security, and when we stand up for freedom and for commonvalues. And everything I see in the world today tells me that this is a momentwhere it’s going to take more than words to fulfill this commitment. All of usneed to think harder and act more in order to meet this challenge.
With no disrespect whatsoever –in fact, only with the purest of admiration to the strategic and extraordinaryvision of Brent Scowcroft sitting over here, Henry Kissinger, Zbig Brzezinski,who I don’t see but I know is here somewhere. There he is. These are men whohelped to shape and guide us through the Cold War and the tense moments and thereal dangers that it presented. But the fact is that this generation ofconfluence of challenges that we’re confronting together are in many ways morecomplex and more vexing than those of the last century. The largely bipolarworld of the Cold War, East-West, was relatively straightforward compared tothe forces that have been released with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the riseof sectarianism, the rise of religious extremism, and the failure of governancein many places. In fact, we should none of us be surprised that it is thewisdom and vision of Henry Kissinger in his brilliant book Diplomacy – which,if you’ve read it, reread it; if you haven’t, read it for the first time – laysall of this out in his first chapter as he talks about the balance – the oldgame of balance of power and interests. And as he predicts that this is moreconvoluted because of the absence of a structure to really manage and cope withthis new order that we face. Those were his words.
So today we are witnessing youthpopulations, huge youth populations: 65 percent of a country under the age of30, under the age of 25 in some places; 50 percent under the age of 21; 40percent under the age of 18 – unemployed, disenfranchised, except for whatglobalization has brought them in their capacity to be able to reach out andsee what the rest of the world is doing even as they are denied the opportunityto do it too – an enormous, desperate yearning for education, for jobs, foropportunity. That’s what drove Tahrir Square, not the Muslim Brotherhood, notany religious extremism, but young kids with dreams. That’s what led that fruitvendor in Tunisia to self-immolate after he grew too tired of being slappedaround by a police officer, denied his opportunity just to sell his fruit wareswhere he wanted to.
We are facing threats ofterrorism and untamed growth in radical sectarianism and religious extremism,which increases the challenge of failed and failing governments and the vacuumsthat they leave behind. And all of this is agitated by a voracious globalizedappetite and competition for resources and markets that do not alwayssufficiently share the benefits of wealth and improved quality of life with allcitizens.
