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Speech at the 43rd Munich Conference on Security Policy, February 10, 2007.
Thank you, Horst.
Distinguished ministers, Parliamentarians, representatives of the
United States Congress - ladies and gentlemen.
I would like to thank Horst for inviting me to speak at this
venerable forum to offer some thoughts on our transatlantic
partnership. It's gratifying to see so many people who I've worked
with on these security issues going back many years.
Speaking of issues going back many years, as an old Cold Warrior,
one of yesterday's speeches almost filled me with nostalgia
for a less complex time.
Almost.
Many of you have backgrounds in diplomacy or politics. I have,
like your second speaker yesterday, a starkly different background
- a career in the spy business. And, I guess, old spies have a
habit of blunt speaking.
However, I have been to re-education camp, spending four
and half years as a university president and dealing with faculty.
And, as more than a few university presidents have learned in
recent years, when it comes to faculty it is either "be nice" or
"be gone."
The real world we inhabit is different and a much more complex
world than that of 20 or 30 years ago. We all face many common
problems and challenges that must be addressed in partnership with
other countries, including Russia.
For this reason, I have this week accepted the invitation of both
President Putin and Minister of Defense Ivanov to visit Russia.
One Cold War was quite enough.
The world has dramatically changed since May 1989, when Horst
Teltschik and I sat out on the patio of the "Chancellor's Bungalow"
in Bonn with Chancellor Kohl and my colleague Larry Eagleburger. At
that time, the allies were trying to come together on the issue of
reducing conventional forces in Europe. The way I remember that
particular meeting, however, was that the tough part wasn't
addressing the military balance of power in Europe, it was seeing
to it that there were enough cakes and pastries on hand for both
the Chancellor and the Deputy Secretary of State.
It is certainly good to be in Munich following the NATO
ministerial in Seville. I should say that this trip has been quite
a different experience than my so-called fact-finding excursion
last month to Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia.
The one fact, above all, that became clear from that venture is
that I am too old to visit seven countries in five days. However, I
have now learned here in Munich that I am still too young to sit
still for seven hours.
As many of you know, the security of this continent has been of
interest to me for much of my academic and professional life - for
more than 40 years in fact. This was true when I was a Ph.D.
candidate in Russian and Soviet history, through my career at CIA,
as well as during service on the National Security Council under
four presidents.
For many of those years, I worked hand in hand with colleagues
from Western European governments to help coordinate our actions
and responses in the latter half of the Cold War. Many of those
colleagues are here this morning.
I had a ringside seat for an extraordinary run of events from the
1975 Helsinki conference to the liberation of Central and Eastern
Europe a decade and a half later.
During that struggle, there were times of confrontation between
the superpowers. Relations among the allies were not without their
stresses and strains, either. But our Atlantic partnership was
strong enough to allow us to surmount the difficulties and make the
right choices at the right times. For example, the decision to
deploy cruise and Pershing missiles to counter the Soviet Union's
new weapons in the late 1970s, was politically difficult for many
allies.
But ultimately, the courage and leadership of statesmen and
stateswomen on both sides of the Atlantic, and the actual
deployment of the missiles early in the 1980s, helped set the stage
for deep reductions in nuclear arms and the end of the Cold
War.
Looking back, it seems clear that totalitarianism was defeated as
much by ideas the West championed - then as now - as by ICBMs,
tanks, and warships that the West deployed. Our most effective
weapon, then and now, has been Europe's and North America's shared
belief in political and economic freedom, religious toleration,
human rights, representative government, and the rule of law. These
values kept our side united, and inspired those on the other side -
in Wenceslas Square, in Gdansk, behind the wall in Berlin, and in
so many other places around the world - to defeat communism from
within.
At the end, the peoples of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet
Union simply stood up, shrugged off their chains, and re-claimed a
future based on these same ideas.
I believe these shared values and shared interests endure, as do
our shared responsibilities to come to their defense. Today, they
are under threat by another virulent ideological adversary and are
confronted by a range of other looming geopolitical challenges.
This strategic environment has challenged the mission and identity
of the Atlantic Alliance - an institution and an arrangement that,
in my view, is the political and military expression of a deeper
bond between Europe and North America.
Many of these questions are not new. I recall spending countless
hours beginning in 1989 on the future of the Alliance and how it
would need to change in order to remain vital and relevant after
the collapse of the Warsaw Pact.
The question that still confronts us today is how a partnership
originally formed to defend fixed borders should adapt to an era of
unconventional and global threats.
The European continent, of course, has been confronting the threat
of terrorism for decades. I don't have to remind the citizens of
Munich of this - the very city where, in 1972, the world witnessed
the kidnapping and massacre of Olympic athletes not too far from
where we sit today.
But the challenge posed by violent extremism today is unlike
anything the West has faced in many generations. In many ways it is
grounded in profound alienation from the foundations of the modern
world - religious toleration, freedom of expression and equality
for women.
As we have seen, many of these extremist networks are homegrown,
and can take root in the restless and alienated immigrant
populations of Europe.
The dark talent of the extremists today is, as President Bush
said, to combine "new technologies and old hatreds." Their ability
to tap into global communications systems turns modern advances
against us and turns local conflicts into problems potentially of
much wider concern. The interest they have shown in weapons of mass
destruction is real and needs to be taken seriously.
We have learned that from a distant and isolated place, from any
failed or extremist state - such as Afghanistan during the 1990s -
these networks can plan and launch far-reaching and devastating
attacks on free and civilized nations.
No fewer than 18 terrorist organizations, many linked with al
Qaeda, have pulled off bloody attacks throughout the world - in the
United States, Spain, the United Kingdom, India, Algeria, Somalia,
Russia, Pakistan, Jordan, Egypt, Indonesia, Tunisia, Morocco and in
others as well.
Those attacks - and other threats that have since emerged -
revealed even more starkly the need to reorient the Atlantic
Alliance to be able to export security beyond the borders of
NATO.
Although created to oppose Soviet communism, NATO's guiding
principle was a broad and deep one from the very start: to build a
defensive alliance against any threat to the security and interests
of the transatlantic community for generations to come.
And today we see that an Alliance that never fired a shot in the
Cold War now conducts six missions on three continents. It has
created new mechanisms for action on the international stage. It
has been through profound changes and will undergo more in the
future.
We see this in NATO's truly historic mission in Afghanistan, where
Alliance forces have engaged in significant ground combat for the
first time, in complex operations across difficult terrain, in a
theater many long miles from Western Europe.
Last year in Afghanistan, the Taliban paid the price for testing
the fighting mettle of NATO forces, as troops from the United
Kingdom, Canada, the Netherlands, Australia, Romania, Estonia and
Denmark - along with our Afghan allies - prevailed in often fierce
combat in Kandahar province.
In fact, as the NATO allies just discussed in Seville, if we take
the necessary steps now, the offensive in Afghanistan this spring
will be our offensive - one that will inflict a powerful setback on
the enemy of an elected people supported by the overwhelming
majority of the Afghan people.
Going forward, it is vitally important that the success
Afghanistan has achieved not be allowed to slip away through
neglect or lack of political will or resolve.
All allies agree we need a comprehensive strategy - combining a
muscular military effort with effective support for governance,
economic development, and counternarcotics.
But now we have to back up those promises with money and with
forces. An Alliance consisting of the world's most prosperous
industrialized nations, with over two million people in uniform -
not even counting the American military - should be able to
generate the manpower and materiel needed to get the job done in
Afghanistan - a mission in which there is virtually no dispute over
its justness, necessity, or international legitimacy. Our failure
to do so would be a mark of shame.
What has emerged in Afghanistan is a test of our ability to
overcome a challenge of enormous consequence to our shared values
and interests. In today's strategic environment, there are
potentially others:
Source: Munich Conference on Security Policy, http://www.securityconference.de/
© 2007 The Acronym Institute.