And I'm happy to take questions.
Yes, and please introduce yourself.
I'm Alison Brunosky, and I thank you very much
for a wonderful address.
Thank you.
Much too much to do justice to in a question.
But may I just concentrate for a moment
on your last proposal of a solution in a way
and say that while it's wonderful, of course,
to know that the United States wants
to rally the world around, or would like as you recommend,
to rally the world around values and rights
and all the rest of it, and to still hold a leadership
role in the world in doing that, I
wonder whether you don't think that it would be a good place
for the United States to start by obeying those rules itself.
Just as an example, I mean, you're fully familiar
with the examples, but the United States
doesn't accept the jurisdiction of the International
Criminal Court, of the International Court of Justice.
It is in dereliction on the conventions
of the right of the child, the rights of women,
indigenous people, need I go on.
It defies the Convention Against Torture.
It also has recently, just in the last General Assembly
session, voted consistently with tiny, tiny minorities
against all the dis, almost all, the disarmament measures,
almost all of these.
And again and again, and of course, capital
punishment is another one, but the human rights measures,
the United States votes against them again and again.
And if the United States wants a world leadership role,
then it can't be seen in the UN to be identifying itself
with Micronesia, Palau, the Federated States of Micronesia,
Palau, and Israel on almost every issue.
Thank you.
Now, the first thing is, I don't think, you can correct me,
I do not think you ever heard me say the United States should
be the leader of anything I described.
Did anybody hear me say that the United States should lead?
No, it's very important.
I didn't say it because I don't think it's right.
And I don't think it's American values.
As I said, what you heard yesterday again, Paul Kelly
initially and then Don Watson was an account of, in many ways,
the Australian version of universal values.
When we talk about mateship, that's
of an Australian account of equality,
like solidarity is in Europe, where the United States doesn't
have it.
Doesn't mean we all don't believe in equality, we do,
but we have very different views.
I think the United States should lead on some things,
but I think there's no possible way
that we could tackle all the issues that I laid out
if it's up to the United States to lead.
And I frankly don't think that the world is ready or willing
to have the United States return to some fairly mythical image
of us as global leader.
That when we were a global leader,
there was another superpower leading
another block of countries.
So forget that.
That's not part of the agenda.
To the extent we make any difference, I absolutely agree.
The United States has to start by returning to liberty
under law at home.
And we're a long way from it.
First thing we have to do is close Guantanamo.
The second thing we have to do is to return
to the Geneva Conventions.
I actually think that there need to be
agreed interpretations of the Geneva Conventions,
agreed with all nations on how you interrogate terrorists,
on how you hold terrorists.
I don't think the rules are adequate for the 21st century,
but I don't think we get to unilaterally reinterpret them.
I think they have to be agreed.
So those are the starting two.
We have to return to nuclear nonproliferation,
the bargain of the NPT.
It is very noteworthy in the United States
that George Schultz, Henry Kissinger, Sam Nunn,
and William Perry, all four of them
have called for a world without nuclear weapons.
I mean, that's the best political cover there ever was.
And on the page of the Wall Street Journal,
because they genuinely believe that that
is the commitment of the nonproliferation treaty,
and that that's the only way we're
going to actually make progress toward not only counter
proliferation, but disarmament.
I think we need to return to multilateral organizations.
I absolutely agree.
I don't agree that we need to ratify all those conventions.
In fact, I think what is salutary about the US approach
is that we actually want to see a lot of those rights enforced.
And I put to you, there's no way Australia
would enforce all the rights in the Convention on the Child.
Parents have no rights.
Enforce them all.
I'm not saying sign up to them.
I'm not saying follow the spirit of them.
I think it's important.
Well, you haven't signed the protocol either.
There you go.
But for a fairly good reason, if you really take it seriously,
if you read it like a domestic statute,
it's wildly overblown.
It's just wildly overblown.
It's rhetoric, because it's easy to sign on to treaties
when you don't intend to enforce them.
I would suggest that we, in fact, take the law much more
seriously and negotiate treaties that we are willing
to try to enforce in multiple ways.
I absolutely agree with you about the International Criminal
Court.
And if I'd had my way, we'd have signed on to it in 1997.
I expect to devote a lot of time in the next 10, 20 years
to that, because I don't think the United States can possibly
stand for what it says it does if it refuses
to be held accountable.
But I think collectively, we can find a way
to amend international laws and adopt new ones
that we can all sign on to, not perfectly,
by any means, but in a way that means
we are not hypocritical when we actually
talk about a world of liberty under law.
Yeah, here in the front.
Thank you.
I'm Laura Beth Bug, and I want to say
you've got at least one right in vote
on the next presidential ballot.
My question is about religion, religious pluralism,
and Islamofascism.
One thing that I think the United States has done well,
deeply imperfect, but well, is religious pluralism.
In terms of the Constitution, historically,
we have managed to incorporate Muslims
in our neighborhoods, in our schools, mosques.
This is part of the paradox perhaps
that you were talking about, but we still
regard Islamofascism as a terror.
And in terms of Europe, the secular project
has perhaps not worked so well in terms
of incorporating Muslim immigrants.
So I wonder if you could say a word
about how we deal with that paradox,
and whether you think the separation of church and state,
also in this weird sort of rise of the evangelical right
in politics, has had to do with this construction
of the Islamofascist terrorist framework
that we've now ended up having to deal with,
and also whether you think this tradition of, well,
that's a hold on the lecture.
Yeah, you could address as much as you
want to or not address it.
And whether you think this strong tradition
of religious pluralism could help
nuance some of this Islamofascist framework
that we're now having to work within,
and whether that could complicate things enough
to make it perhaps not so black and white.
So that's a long question that raises
a lot of important issues.
Let me see if I can address it fairly succinctly.
The starting point, I think, is that immediately after 9-11,
President Bush, I thought, acted very well
when the first thing he did was to say,
we are not going to have riots against Muslims.
This is not Islam that has done this.
We're going to wait and see who has done this.
And I remember vividly the fear of,
I remember a Pakistani store clerk in Virginia who
didn't want to open his mouth because he was afraid we'd
hear his accent and know that he clearly was, at least
from a country that could be Muslim.
That initial impulse, I think, has waned, unfortunately.
And the biggest problem that American Muslims face today
is, A, yes, the reference to Islamofascism,
or more broadly, Islamic something-something terrorist,
or Islamic something-something violence.
When we took the Princeton Project on National Security
to the National Defense University
and got their criticisms, strikingly, our military people
said, take the word Islamic out.
Our friends in Islamic countries find that,
no matter what you say, you are coupling Islam with violence.
And that is effectively demonizing the religion.
So these were the military people saying,
talk about them, as we did, as global terrorist networks.
Focus on the means, the violence, but not the religion.
We haven't done that.
And many Muslims say, and it's right,
where do you see Muslims on American television?
Well, they tend to be bearded and turbaned and dangerous.
And African-Americans complain about the way
African-Americans are shown as criminals.
Well, it's a similar problem.
I think we need to be much more aggressive
about embracing Islam.
I would recommend that an American president host
a conference on the glories of Islam,
on the traditions of Islam.
Islam was the world's most tolerant religion in its time.
The Jews of Spain fled to Turkey because they
were driven out of Spain and embraced.
And when Islam was at its most tolerant,
it was the most advanced of the world's civilizations.
That's a story that no Americans know.
Many Muslims, I'm not sure, know.
And embracing that in various ways,
I think, would be very valuable.
On the religious question quickly,
I think we simply need to return to the understanding
of our Constitution, which was about multiple faiths.
You go back to American history, and you
have to talk about faith.
When I originally started my book,
faith was not one of my values.
But you can't write about American history
without including faith.
But it's multiple faiths.
It was originally Catholics and different Protestants
and Jews of various kinds.
And now, of course, it's an absolute mosaic
of every religion in the world.
We need to return to the idea that they're multiple faiths,
and no one faith gets to put its stamp on our foreign policy
or our domestic policy.
I'm going to take one in the back,
and then I'll go to Bob because, yes.
Hi.
My name is Dorian.
He was.
Here, I promised all the way back.
I'll come in.
Whoever grabs the mic has the question.
Thanks.
Dennis Holtman from The Trope.
I was very struck, Henry, when you
went through the list of threats to security, which
is basically a good group under, I guess, human security.
But the one that I don't think, and I may be wrong,
you talked about was global inequality.
And I was thinking back to the Millennium Development Goals
and the awareness, growing awareness of inequality
as much as the inequality itself, it seems to me,
is a major issue in promoting global insecurity.
And you're nodding your head.
So I guess this is going to be a quick question.
You're going to agree largely.
I do.
I do agree.
And we actually had listed it as a separate threat.
We found it's an odd thing to classify as a threat,
but it is a huge, huge problem, and one
that becomes a threat in specific ways.
But I said earlier that I'm a member of various foreign policy
groups, and all of us have been grappling
for how to think about managing globalization
so that the distribution of its benefits is much fairer,
and that if we don't do that within the United States
and certainly around the world, we
will risk losing all the benefits of what not all,
but many of the benefits of globalization
through a backlash, but also through simply the kind
of chaos that comes from individuals
seeing others profiting hugely and not benefiting at all.
So I agree.
Bob.
Ann Marie, thank you for a wonderful presentation.
I just want to comment on two aspects of it
as the only member of the Canberra Commission
on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons in the Room.
I was delighted to hear your reference to the Gang
of Four Declaration.
The United States is the principal target
for nuclear weapons in the world today,
and the people who are likely to use nuclear weapons
against the United States are totally undeterrable.
And it's great to see that there are
people who've carried high-level responsibilities
in the United States showing awareness of this problem.
But unfortunately, it isn't going to be solved at that level.
When we had composed our report and went around
the existing nuclear powers, we had interesting dialogues
with the United States and Russia.
And the Chinese were actually quite interested in taking
these proposals further because they did not
want to face the intense round of competition
in generating a new generation of nuclear weapons.
But the people who really cling to their nuclear weapons
and will not give them up are Britain and France
because these are two middle powers on the way down
and nuclear weapons give them access to the top table.
They get the attention of the United States and so on.
Now, what we've done in the past few years
is admit another three members to the nuclear club
at this intermediate level.
And one of them, Israel, you can't even
talk to or about India and Pakistan are the other two.
So I think we are in a major bind here,
and it's not going to be sorted out for a long time.
Second thing I wanted to say is that you
didn't talk about alliances in your address.
You talked about the United States,
and you talked about global organizations,
and I thought that was fine.
But the United States, for much of the period after 1945,
achieved distinction in the world
for being able to run alliances in a cooperative, very
intelligent, effective way.
Began with FDR, goes on through Truman and Eisenhower,
and so on.
And Ronald Reagan, in his own way,
I think was also a good alliance conductor.
Bill Clinton really didn't have the chance
because world order was being reshaped so fundamentally
in his period.
George Bush has been an absolute disaster.
As Michael was saying yesterday, it's my way or the highway.
Well, the last person, a bunch of people
to try and run an alliance like that were the Russians.
And look where the Warsaw Pact ended up.
There is going to need to be a security dimension
to American cooperation with its friends in the world.
And I really think this might be a fairly simple one line
optimistic note that a candidate could
sound in the coming election, that the United States
would restore its role as alliance leader in the West,
in the world.
Instead of having a miserable coalition
of the unwilling in Iraq, you might
have a coalition of the really willing
because there is a pooling of brains
and a sharing of decision making.
It's wonderfully put on the first question, which
is a comment on nuclear proliferation,
I agree with you about the difficulties.
And I must say, I was very disappointed
that Tony Blair didn't take the chance of real leadership.
And he could have taken the chance
to say, we're not going to develop
another generation of nuclear weapons.
We're actually going to turn around.
As a global leader, it would have been an extraordinary
opportunity.
And he didn't.
And he didn't for the reason you said.
The only hope, I think, is to take something
that Jim Wolfenson said that I sharply disagreed with,
but to use it, which is I couldn't believe Jim Wolfenson talked
to us last night and never mentioned the EU.
He just read out the EU because he still
was thinking about, well, yeah, Britain and France,
our Germany individually will not be economic powers.
But the EU today is a bigger power than the United States
economically.
And it will gradually get more political power.
It will never be a unitary state.
But to count it out, I think, is a real mistake.
But my point is simply, perhaps the way we do this
is to effectively read out Britain and France at every turn
unless they're willing to think about it more broadly.
And within the EU, then you have plenty of support
for getting rid of nuclear weapons.
On your second point, the op-ed that I published today,
I haven't seen it, but my original title
was A World of Partners.
And I absolutely agree that the United States needs
to return to its alliances.
Hillary Clinton uses the term security through statecraft.
And underneath that, she starts by talking
about the importance of alliances.
I think we need the formal international organizations,
strong alliances, and then lots of informal networks
as well, something that is less than a formal alliance,
but more a partnership and a real partnership,
not a coalition of the willing, but the ability
to engage lots of different actors in networks and partnerships
that address different issues, maybe
often within the framework of an alliance
or reaching out beyond an alliance.
But I talked about international organizations
as sort of a shorthand for what I see
as an entire tapestry of different kinds of organizations
that include alliances in the world.
I think, Meredith, is somebody going to tell me one more?
One more.
OK.
Well, Michael, you were the speaker yesterday morning,
though we're going to have more time for questions
after the break.
I thought it was a cost-terrific set of remarks.
And they're instinctively just enormously appealing,
because I think they're right.
So my question is not about whether your vision is correct.
My question is feasibility and implementation,
which seems dull but important.
Let me just raise one issue.
When you enlarge groups of decision-makers,
you know this as a dean dealing with faculty
versus subset of faculty dealing with yourself
behind the closed door.
You enlarge the group.
It makes it more complicated.
It makes it more difficult.
And it makes it less likely that there will be resolution.
If you enlarge the Security Council to 15 or 20 members,
if you enlarge the G8 to G20.
So first of all, I don't know in your own work
whether you've got a great set of counters to that.
What I'm actually more concerned about is that it
will lead to a kind of stalling out of things,
a sense in the US of lack of progress.
Let's assume we get the slaughter model.
And you know what that produces in the US?
That produces kind of frustration,
American nationalism, negative feedback.
We want to take our bags and go home.
And in some ways, this is what led to American frustration
with the UN, with five Security Council members, two of whom
were basically blocking US policy and the General Assembly
as well.
So I'm concerned about when you get the great architecture up
there, which I think will be hard to do.
But let's assume you get it.
If it doesn't produce good results,
the US Americans are not patient people.
They're not going to wait 25 years for some of these issues.
And the net result will be a Jimmy Carter will be thrown out
and a Ronald Reagan will get elected.
It's a great question.
And the first response is that I think there are arguments.
Well, the first argument is, yes, it's
going to be terrible, but look at the alternatives.
It's not working now.
And it's not working now because we often get blocked.
But it's also not working because the UN is increasingly
illegitimate in many parts of the world.
So even when it does make a decision,
it's seen as a vehicle for American power.
So you have to start with a proposition
that the system really is broken.
And now we're looking at other alternatives.
The second point is there's been very good work, actually,
on an enlarged Security Council.
Jim Fearon at Stanford has done work that shows by-gain theory
that if you enlarge the Security Council the way
the high-level panel recommended,
it is actually no worse.
And in some cases, it's better because it's
easier to isolate the existing veto players.
Now, I should make clear, I'm not
suggesting enlarging the Security Council with more vetoes.
You would not have any more vetoes.
None of the proposals that the high-level panels come up
with say any more vetoes.
The vetoes have fewer or less?
No, no, the five have it.
But there are no more vetoes.
And it becomes easier to isolate the holdouts.
I would even say that I think we are moving toward a world in
which one veto may not be enough.
I think if only France had vetoed the invasion of Iraq,
the situation would have been very different than it was
when you had multiple vetoes and votes against.
So I think there is more hope than you think
for a broader Security Council.
But the second answer, and it has to be both,
is you go for the Security Council,
but you also create other decision-making mechanisms,
some more informal, and some regional
that would also have legitimacy.
Now, we've gone to NATO.
That doesn't have a lot of legitimacy
in many parts of the world.
But it's still a better check on decisions
than unilateral decisions.
If you look at the way we're strengthening
the Organization of African Unity,
you look at what's happening in Asia
with ASEAN or ASEAN plus six,
I think there is the possibility
of effectively saying to the Security Council,
if you can't decide, this action has to be taken
and there will be other multilateral fora.
There will not be unilateral action,
but there'll be other multilateral fora.
If that doesn't work, right?
If the whole thing comes to a halt,
then we sort of have to start over.
But I'm relatively optimistic
that a combination of expanding the Security Council,
but also creating options
to put pressure on the Security Council,
at the very least, won't be worse than what we have today.
Very optimistic note to end on.
Thanks, Anne-Marie, for an eloquent
and thoughtful presentation.
And also the beginnings, I think,
of an interesting exchange,
which we will continue after you've had some sustenance
and built up your strength.
While you're having morning tea,
you might notice on the reception table out there
that there are photocopies of the op-ed
that Anne-Marie has in today's Australian
and Alan Dupont's op-ed from yesterday.
So please help yourself to those.
Alan Gingel has been listening intently and taking notes
and when we come back,
he will respond to the earlier presentation
and there'll be more opportunities for questions and comments.
So have a leisurely morning tea and we'll see you after that.
Thanks again, Anne-Marie.
APPLAUSE
Right on the top.
