PRESIDENT CLINTON: I always knew Bud was a trailblazer, but that’s the first time I’ve been introduced as the next First Lady of the United States. [LAUGHS] Actually I like this. I like, you know, being “Hillary’s husband” now, that’s what I am. I told Hillary whatever she’s going to do in politics, she better hurry up because pretty soon we’d be only known as “Chelsea’s parents.” [FEW LAUGHS] I’m in that stage of my life.

The great thing about not being in politics anymore and not being in the White House is that I can say exactly what I think, and the bad thing is nobody gives a rip. [LAUGHS] I’m going to have a good time anyway. I want to thank you for having me here and for having my guest and my great friend, the former football Coach at South Carolina and Notre Dame, Minnesota, Arkansas, North Carolina State, the New York Jets, my great friend Lou Holtz. Thank you for coming, Lou. I want to thank you. [LIGHT APPLAUSE] I tried to get him to give the speech because he’s so much funnier than I am but he declined. I also want to thank Goldman Sachs for being so good to me when I was President and lending me so much talent beginning but not ending with Bob Ruben.

What I’d like to do tonight is to speak maybe almost a little in shorthand about where I think we are in the world today and what I think we should be doing and where I think we should be going. But the first thing I want to say is, I think it’s important that every citizen, and we have mostly but not exclusively, Americans here today. We have people from all over the world. Every person who is as active as you are in the global economy should have a theory about how the world works and a theory about how we should respond to it as citizens. That includes what you think government policy ought to be but is not limited to what government policy ought to be. And that may seem self-evident to you but it isn’t really.

I’m reading now. I’m reading books that are written about the time I was President, reviews of books that were written about the time I was President. Whether they’re favorable or unfavorable, the one great shortcoming they all have, except for mine (how’s that for a little plug) [FEW LAUGHS], is they undersell the importance of ideas, and yet you all have an idea about what you do. Don’t you? I mean you have theory about what you do, all day every day, about how the markets work, why you pursue the strategies you do, what’s ethical and unethical, what’s effective and ineffective. And yet when you read about politics or current events, it’s either totally dominated by gossip (like we spent three holes talking about the Jackson verdict today) or it’s inside gossip, or the inching, whether it’s Social Security reform or whatever, tend to be discussed in an almost atomized fashion, as if they’re just things out there, independent, standing on their own. I don’t think that’s helpful.

So if you don’t remember anything else I say tonight, you need to ask yourself, “In a sentence, how would you describe the modern world? And what would you like the 21st Century to be like for your children? And how do you think we should go about getting there?” Because otherwise every time you turn on the news at night, it will seem like the political equivalent of Kaos’ theory in physics, a bunch of totally unconnected things.

In the three decades or so I spent in public life there were a lot of people who knew more about various things than I did but I always tried to synthesize the information, to take apparently disparate facts and organize them into a pattern that made sense so I could figure out how to get from where we are to where I wanted to go. In a sentence, I believe we are living in by far the most interdependent world in human history, a term I prefer to “globalization,” because it goes way beyond economics and it goes way beyond international relations, that is country-to-country interdependence. We all know we have a globalized economy but we have globalized information technology, globalized culture, tribal technology, the whole nine years.

Furthermore, we are more interdependent across lines that used to divide us, not just among nations but within nations and within communities. Wherever you live chances are that the country you live in and the community you live in is more racially and religiously diverse than it was 20 years ago, and that you’re dealing with all different kinds of people than you were 20 years ago.

Now, for most of us this interdependence has been very positive. That’s why you can afford to be here and Goldman Sachs can afford to pay me to be here. We did well in this modern world. But interdependence is not by definition positive, it can also be negative. In the United States, 9/11 is the triumph of negative interdependence. It’s a brilliant example of an interdependent world, where these guys, most of whom were from Saudi Arabia, all of whom were in al-Qaeda, used easy access to information and technology, easy travel, easy immigration, to turn four jet airplanes into giant chemical weapons. That’s what they were. 9/11 was a major chemical weapons attack on the United States and three of the weapons hit home and one died a fortunate death in the woodlands of Pennsylvania thanks to the incredible courage of people who gave up their lives so more Americans wouldn’t die, and where other people who were victims of 9/11 were a testament of interdependence. They came from 70 countries, including over 200 other Muslims.

I say that not to get this night started off on a downer but just to make the point that how you see this interdependent world depends very much on the way you see yourself in it and how you see others. The interdependent world that we like is not so good for the 50% of the world that lives on $2.00 a day or less, a billion people living on $1.00 a day or less. A billion people who go to bed hungry tonight, after we had this great meal. A billion and a half people will never get a clean glass of water. One in four people who die this year, from everything, the tsunamis, the wars, the diseases, the heart attacks, the strokes. One in four of all the people who die will die from AIDS, TB, Malaria and infections related to diarrhea, most of them will be little kids that never got a clean glass of water. So for them global interdependence means something very different.
So when you see all those Bolivian miners striking and raising hell and getting down to the third person in line to be President of Bolivia, it’s because they think they’re on the downside of an interdependent world. They don’t feel the same way about it you do and if you lived the way they did and you worked as hard as they were working for as little as they’re making, you may not feel that way either.

Now, it seems to me, if you accept that, then the plain mission of people of goodwill all across the world and especially in America with our prosperity and our political and military resources, our mission ought to be to build up the positive and reduce the negative forces of interdependence, to try to move our communities, our country and the world toward a more stable, balanced set of integrated communities. From interdependence to integration requires three things: shared responsibility, shared benefits and shared values.

If you think about all the rebellions just in the last few days, why did France reject the EU Constitution? Why did the Dutch reject it? Because they didn’t think it was consistent with their interests or their values and in some cases their identities. You know the people that were campaigning against the French Constitution kept talking about they would be faced with an invasion of Polish plumbers and what they were really worried about was an invasion of Turkish workers in every area.

If you look at Northern Ireland today, where they haven’t been able to stand up a government in two years because the Catholics and Protestants can’t get along. They have a mixed situation. They have embraced their interdependence enough to get rid of violence forever but they haven’t gone far enough to take control of their destiny if they have to do it together.

If you look at the Middle East, we went through seven years of progress toward peace, four years of pure hell and now we’re making progress again. But on the bad days and the good days, the Palestinians and the Israelis were equally interdependent because it just simply meant they couldn’t escape each other.

Now I could give you lots of other examples, but you get the point. If you believe that we should be moving from interdependence to integrated communities, if you believe in shared responsibilities and benefits and values, how do we go about doing that? And I will try to speak in more shorthand now because I want to leave most of the time for questions.

One, we’ve got to have a security plan. The first responsibility of every community is to protect its members. And in a national and international sense the two biggest security threats are terror and weapons of mass destruction. Actually in the United States, we’re doing reasonably well now in taking down terrorist networks. There were about 20 al Qaeda cells taken down before 9/11, when I was still in office, and we prevented the attempts to take over Bosnia, Albania, blow up targets in the United States and the Middle East around the Millennium and many other things they wanted to do.

Since 9/11, hundreds of people you don’t know and will never meet in the United States and around the world have worked on this and have taken down about 30 other al Qaeda cells. They’ve dramatically weakened the network and they’re still capable of killing a lot of people and they still recruited some new people coming out of the conflict of Iraq, but they’re weaker than they were. And the ability of your government and governments throughout the world using military, intelligence and law enforcement officials to break up and contain terrorist networks is greater than it was. We’re doing a pretty good job of that.

With regard to homeland security, the record is more mixed, partly because, in my view, we haven’t spent the money in the right ways. I used to sit around in the White House and ask myself, “If I were Osama bin Laden and I wanted to hurt Americans and kill a bunch of them, what would I do?” And one thing I would try to do is to launch a chemical, biological or nuclear small weapon in one of these hundreds of thousands of containers that comes into America every day in our ports, only 5% of which are checked. Two years ago, there was a security report given to the Congress, which said you don’t have to check them all, but there’s no detriment effect if you don’t check 10 20% of them, and you actually have quite a significant deterrent effect if you do that.

There was a Bill on the floor of the Congress that suggested that the 200,000-- It costs a billion dollars to go from 5-10%, by the way. And the Bill on the floor of the Congress suggested that we go from 5 10%, spend a billion dollars and pay for it by asking me and the 200,000 other people who paid income taxes on over a million dollars that year to give up 5% of our tax cut, which averages $88,000, so it would have taken us down to 83, and it was defeated. The leadership of the House and the administration opposed it because they thought it was, I guess, a slippery slope on the tax cut. But most of us, whether we were conservative, or liberal, or Republican or Democrat, would have gladly given up our five grand to make 300,000,000 Americans and all the others who come to our country more secure. But we need anyway to give a lot of thought to this homeland security because, while we’re spending a lot of money, my view is it’s not being spent as effective as it could be.

With regard to weapons of mass destruction, the record is more mixed. We’re doing quite a good job of working with the Russians to contain not only the nuclear stockpiles in the area and destroy nuclear weapons but also biological and chemical stocks. The Russians still have the largest stocks of biological materials that can be made into weapons in the world. For example, a huge stash of Anthrax was buried on an island off the East Coast of Russia about 12 years ago. A couple of years ago, it was dug up. Half the spores were still alive. That’s how dangerous it is.

On the other hand, it’s not easy to carry off a biological attack, as you remember. Remember the Anthrax scare, where five Americans were killed and all that Anthrax was sent around? In theory, there was enough Anthrax there to kill 5,000 people I mean 100,000 people, but only five people died. So the biological attacks are the most frightening, but they’re also the most difficult to pull off.

The most troubling involve weapons that we haven’t seen yet, very small nuclear weapons. If you look at one of the glasses on your table, if you have enough fissile material the size of a cookie, about the size of the top of the glass on your table, you could put it into the fertilizer bomb that Timothy McVeigh used 10 years ago to blow up the Muir Building in Oklahoma City. And just that little bit, if you know how to detonate it, which you can, alas, learn how to do on the Internet, in our interdependent world, it would make a bomb that would blow up 25% of Washington, D.C. So it is very important that we have efforts to control these materials all across the world.

The United States has a very vigorous presence. We’ve led the world in this. We’ve done it since. The first Bush administration, one of the last major pieces of legislation the former President Bush signed was something called the Nunn-Luger Bill, a totally bipartisan effort for American to spend money working, in the beginning, only with Russia. And in the beginning, anyone with nuclear weapons to bring all the nuclear weapons from the other Soviet Republics into Russia, control them and then slowly dismantle them and destroy the material. But since then we also

When I was President, we began to work with biological weapons and chemical weapons and there were some used when I served, when your tax dollars, if you’re Americans, paid the salaries of one-half (20,000) of the 40,000 Russian scientists and technology workers in the weapons of mass destruction field. We did it so they wouldn’t go to work for the bad guys of the world, and it was money very well spent. It wasn’t like they didn’t do good work. And if you questioned their competence For example, Boeing is using 40-something Russian Aerospace Scientists to design their newest airplane. And that in the computer programming competition among the universities in the world this year, Shanghai University finished first, but second and third went to St. Petersburg and Moscow, so that’s a good thing for us not to let those people starve. They ought to be able to make a living. We should be doing more of that. And if the President proposes that or someone in Congress does, you should be for it. It’s one thing that we should spend more money. You cannot spend enough money to help the Indians, the Pakistanis, anybody else that has nuclear, chemical or biological stocks, control and if possible destroy them.

But a security policy is not enough. Why? Because if you believe we live in an interdependent world, as the Israelis and Palestinians find out every single day, you cannot possibly kill, jail or occupy all your enemies, so you have to have a security policy. But if you can’t kill, jail or occupy all of them, you’ve got to also have a policy to make more partners and fewer terrorists, which is Prime Minister’s Blair Initiative coming up this summer at the G 8 meeting to increase development assistance to the world’s poorest countries and to eliminate the debt of the African nations that have responsible governments is a good thing.

We did-- I’ll just give you two examples to make the point. In 2000, in the Millennium year, we had a big bipartisan initiative to forgive the debt of the world’s poorest countries, hundreds of billions of dollars of it. 27 countries qualified, 23 were African. In addition to that, we, in America, forgave all our bilateral debt to these countries as long as they did the following things. They had to observe basic human rights and put all of the savings into education, healthcare or economic development.

Okay, so here are the two stories to make the point I was making. After I left the White House, I went to Ghana, where have an economic project now. And when I was leaving, I was in the airport walking back to my little plane and this lady starts screaming at me on the tarmac, “Mr. President, Don’t go, don’t go.” She’s waving some package. So she comes running up to me and she says, “You know, you have Debt Relief and the Africa Trade Bill and because of those two things, I am one of 400 women working in my factory making shirts. We have jobs. Our children are in school. We have dignity, and here’s your shirt.” I figured, “What the heck? I’m not in office anymore, I took the shirt.” [FEW LAUGHS] And I took that shirt and I put it in my closet in a place where I look at it. I literally look at this shirt every single day to remind myself that woman is not mad at you. She knows you’ve got more money than she does, but she thinks you want her to be a part of your future, and she doesn’t want her to kid to be a terrorist or fight in one of those tribal wars in Africa.

The second example, when former President Bush and I got back from our tsunami tour, the President invited us to the White House to make a report, and we had quite a report to make about all the heroic work of the American military and the American aid workers and the military and aid workers from other places and the thousands and thousands of people from the non-governmental organizations that went, religious and non-religious, just to help people.

So on the way in, one of our AID workers gave me a poll to take to the President that was completed the day before in Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim country, 200,000,000 people, 95% plus are Muslims. Before this tsunami, the same research firm had done a poll saying that the positive approval of America was 36%; after the tsunami, 60%. Before the tsunami, the positive approval rating of Osama bin Laden, 58%; after the tsunami, 28%. He didn’t do anything to them, but he didn’t do anything for them. And when you watch your loved ones washed out to sea and you lose everything you had and you have to start all over again? In a stunning moment of insight, a whole country realized that it means a lot more to build a house than to tear one down. It completely changed the view of America, and by the way, all other countries that came to help because we came not with a political agenda, but as human beings to help other human beings, with no thought of any immediate gain.

And I cannot tell you how proud every one of you would have been of the Marines, the Navy personnel, the U.S. government personnel, and then all these people from all these groups that showed up. (I’m going to say more about that in a minute). The point is that aids our security. It makes a better, stronger country.

The third thing we have to do: security, more friends and fewer enemies. The third thing we have to do is build habits and institutions of cooperation. There’s a headline story in The New York Times today about a commission headed by George Mitchell and Newt Gingrich recommending changes in the UN. It’s a good report. They made good recommendations, but they did it because they know we need a strong UN and they actually made recommendations to make it stronger. They do a lot of good. Now that I’m working for the UN on Tsunami Relief, I can tell you, for example, just there, we’re feeding 700,000 people a day. We’re feeding all those people in those refugee camps in Darfor and the UN is going a lot to keep children all over the world alive. There was no epidemic outbreak in any of the countries affected by the tsunami in large measure because of international organizations that went there and prevented outbreaks of cholera and dysentery and all the other terrible things that could have happened.

This is one, anyway, where I’ve really been in a lot of disagreement with President Bush whom I, as the whole world knows now, I like very much, but we have these differences. He and I both agree that we need a World Trade Organization, we should have a free trade area of the Americas. He supported the expansion of NATO, which I cheered, but he believes the United States shouldn’t be in the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty or the International Criminal Court or the Kyoto Climate Change Accord, and I disagree. If there was somebody here from the administration, let’s say Don Rumsfeld, they could get up here and make a good argument and probably convince you that they were right and I was wrong because they could come up with an example where there those people could make a decision that you would think is bad. But if you only joined organizations because you agreed with every decision made, you wouldn’t join better. The World Trade Organization made decisions I thought were nuts when I was President, on occasion, but I never regretted either that we were in it or that I had worked to get China in it. Because I think we were in a rules-based organization that tries to resolve things fairly, that over the long run, we’re better off. And it becomes harder to go to war, harder to fight and easier to cooperate.

If you only were in organizations that we agree with every decision, Goldman Sachs wouldn’t exist. Lou Holtz never could have kept a football team together. There would be no marriages. There would be-- Let’s think about it. So the test has to be something more than, “I won’t join unless I agree with every decision they’re going to make,” and it’s something all of you should debate. So I told some people before I came out today, I understand why the French and the Dutch voted against the EU Constitution but I hope the Europeans will continue to grow together economically and politically, though they will be bigger and richer than America when they do, it’ll be a good thing for the world I want, a world of shared responsibilities and benefits and values. It’ll be a safer, better world for my daughter and the grandchildren I hope to have. And that’s the same reason that I want us to be in these groups.

The third thing we’ve got to do is to keep making America better. If you want to talk about this in detail, I will. But I think internally, our biggest challenges are the following: We need a dramatic change in energy policy. We need to move away from an imported oil, greenhouse gas based energy economy to a clean-energy energy conservation future. That’s where the next generation of high-paying jobs could come from. There could millions of them, if we did it right.

I am delighted that there are some executives who see it that way, most of them are Europeans, Sir John Brown, the head of British Petroleum, the head of Royal Dutch Shell. But recently Jeff Immelt, the new leader of General Electric, said he was going to spend a billion and a half dollars researching new products for a clean-energy future. There is a trillion dollar unmet market today with existing technology that we are not filling because the old energy economy is well-organized, powerful and well financed and the new energy economy is entrepreneurial, disorganized and undercapitalized, but we could change that.

We ought to do something about health care. I’d be glad to talk about that if you want to. But the most encouraging thing there, for the first time since we had a serious debate in 1993, you have business people in the health insurance companies and consumer advocates all talking about trying to do something about it. The fundamental fact is we’re spending 15% of our income on health care, nobody else is spending more than 11. Most of our competitors are under that. General Motors just announced they were laying off 25,000 people in America and nobody in Canada, because we’re spending $1,800 a car more on health care in America than in Canada. We’re spending 4% of our GDP, that’s over $400 billion dollars a year more than any other country on earth (about $4,000 a family). Half of it is because of the way we finance health care, through all these different health insurance policies, giving us 34% administrative costs. 34%, nobody else is over 19, compounded with the fact that we don’t computerize our records.

The other half can be explained by the fact that we pay more for drugs than anybody else, we have doctors that have to practice defensive medicine because they’re afraid they’re going to sued and they won’t be able to afford their malpractice, or can’t get it. We spent more money on the last two months of life than anybody else by far. It’s interesting. America’s the most religious big country in the world but we have more people who are reluctant to go to heaven than anybody else on Earth. [LAUGHS]

And the fifth thing is, we have bad lifestyles. We basically are too fat and too slow. Obesity’s going through the roof and it’s one reason I’m working on Childhood Obesity Initiative with the American Heart Association. We have, for the first time in the history of America, significant numbers of our children with adult onset diabetes, at a time when diabetes and its related complications already costs you 25% of the Medicaid budget for poor people in America. It’s a serious problem, and you can’t blame the doctors. You can’t blame the health insurance companies. You can’t blame anybody except all the rest of us for that. We have to deal with it.

We have an education crisis, which I can summarize in two sentences. From about the 5th grade to the 12th grade, there are public schools in America that have solved every problem but we have totally failed to replicate excellence. We have followed neither the military model of top-down uniform standards, leadership training and accountability or a total competitive model like we have in our colleges and universities. We’ve been neither fish nor fowl and we’ve never found a way to replicate excellence. And in our universities, we don’t have enough people going and those who do go, we don’t have enough studying of math and science and the things that will show up our future.

And we have an economic crisis that I believe is directly the product of deciding to go back to trickle-down economics, which I did my best to get the country off of, which is more about theology than economics and it’s a greedy theology. Because it basically says that all tax cuts are good no matter what level you’re spending out. I’m an old-fashioned fiscal conservative. I just don’t believe that. John Maynard Keynes said we should run deficits in recessions. The President proposed tax cuts in 2001 and 2002. I would have supported even larger temporary tax cuts to stimulate the economy. It turned out most of the stimulus we got out of the Iraq war and the homeland security spending. Most of the tax cut costs were coming later. We have built in large structural permanent deficits again, which we got rid of.

I think it’s a terrible mistake. We’re financing Bill Clinton’s tax cut by going into markets every single day and borrowing money from the Chinese. Now how dumb is that? And we will point the finger and them and say, “You hypocrites. Why don’t you raise the value of your currency and be fair in our trading? But please keep loaning me money at low interest rates so I can cover Bill Clinton’s tax cut.” I just don’t think it’s right. I don’t think it’s good ethnically. I don’t think it’s good theology and I know it’s bad economics. And it’s going to lower the standards of living of Americans dramatically in the future if we persist in running chronic deficits when our people already have, individually, quite low savings rates.

Finally, we have to try to find a way to construct a world where we have shared values across all these blizzard of divisions. What in the world could we do? How would you ever do that? And I’ll just tell you in a sentence what I think. I think the world’s shared values, if you want to have communities, have to be the following: every person counts, deserves a chance, has a responsible role to play. Competition is good but it has to occur within the framework of fairness and cooperation. Our differences are very important but our common humanity matters more. Now the only thing you have to do to get those values accepted is to reject fundamentalism in all its forms. In all its religious and political forms, you’ll find that the ability of one person or one group to be in possession of the absolute truth. You don’t have to deny that there is an absolute truth, you just have to deny that anybody’s smart enough to have it all and to turn it into a political program and impose it on everybody else. That is the only prerequisite for building a world that we can all live in.

On balance, I am quite optimistic for three reasons. In the 1990’s, these three things happened, and I didn’t have anything to do with any of them so I can brag on them, except to push them along a little bit.

In the 1990’s, for the first time in history, more people lived under democracies than dictatorships making change more possible. In the 1990’s, the Internet exploded and became an independent force for the public good potentially for all the bad things on it.

Now a classic example is the SARS epidemic. We all remember the horrible things that happened to the Chinese young people that took to the streets in Tiananmen Square. But when the SARS epidemic exploded early in this decade, the Chinese government denied that it was happening. Then the cases spread from rural China to Hong Kong and it got out and then all of a sudden they were in Toronto and there was an explosive revolt of Chinese young people, not in Tiananmen Square but by the tens of thousands on the Internet. They jammed all sites. They demanded the government to tell the truth. They turned around and cooperation ensued and what could have killed hundreds of thousands of people was shut down almost overnight because of the Internet. Americans gave $1.4 billion dollars to Tsunami Relief, half the households in America. I mean 30% of the households in America contributed, 30%, over half of them over the Internet.

The third thing that happened is the growth of the Non-Governmental Organizations. Lloyd was kind enough to tell you about some of the things I do. I started two years ago with nothing, three years ago, and I wanted to something about AIDS because it made me mad there were over 6,000,000 people at death’s door in the poor countries not getting this medicine and we get it automatically in America, whether we’re rich or poor, at about $10,000 a person a year. And then with generic medicine developed at about $500 a persona year. So I went to work on it and 2 1/2 years later, we’re serving 110,000 people and we now only pay $180 a year for the medicine and the testing, just in my little Foundation.
Bill Gates has spent a billion dollars in India and Africa on health care and $250,000,000 on education in America. He’s the biggest non-governmental organization. But I just came from Tamil Nadu in India, where widows of fishermen and women who fished who lost their boats have been taught by a small non-governmental organization how to do crafts work. And they’re selling their crafts and they’re going to make twice as money as they ever did fishing.

All over the world there are thousands of these group and that’s changed life for you and me. People like us used to go to meetings like this and we would all sit around talk about what the government should do and that’s a very important thing and it’s still a legitimate question. But you can’t ever come to a meeting like this again and ask that, without also asking, “What can I do about something I care about?”

When the UN opens in September, I’m going to have a meeting called the “Clinton Global Initiative” where a lot of world leaders are going to come, a lot of Republicans and Democrats in America are going to come. We have about 1,000 business people. We hope to limit it to that. I tell everybody this is going to smaller and cheaper than Davos but it will be much more expensive in one way. You can’t come to my meeting and discuss those four subjects unless at the end, you promise in writing to take some specific action to make one of those four problems better. And I figure if we have 1,000 people meeting for 10 years, we can really change the world and make it a better place.

So that’s why, on balance, I’m optimistic. I can draw all the doomsday scenarios you want, but on balance, I think we’ll do the right thing. For those of you who are not from America and you worry about us, don’t ever forget what Winston Churchill said in the darkest days of World War II. When people tried to bait him The press repeatedly baited him because America wasn’t in the war. Roosevelt was having to sneak around to get him help and he said, “Aren’t you worried about America? Aren’t you worried about America?” And Churchill said, “The United States of America invariably does the right thing, after exhausting every other alternative.” [LAUGHS] It’s going to be all right, if we do the right thing. Thank you very much. [POLITE APPLAUSE]

QUESTION & ANSWER SESSION

PRESIDENT CLINTON: Anybody got any questions? The mosquitoes aren’t biting us, I don’t think.
MAIN SPEAKER: There are microphones. In fact, if you just raise your hands, there are plenty of folks with microphones who will run over to you.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: Go ahead. Here.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Good evening, sir. I’d like to know if you had been in office when George Bush took the allies into Iraq, whether you would have done anything differently.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: Well, I’ll answer that question but first I want to tell you that whether you believe we did the right or the wrong thing, you should want it to work now. It’s largely irrelevant whether you think we did the right or the wrong thing. You should want it to work now because 58% of the Iraqis showed up the vote and that’s a higher percentage than we had. And we were proud of ourselves with this enormous turnout we had in the 2004 election? Their turnout was better than ours, all those little people with the purple ink on their fingers. And because if it works, it could be part of what we hope will be a new democratic era in Lebanon. We hope the Palestinian authority will stabilize and eventually peace will come. And because we hope they’ll have a better life than they had under Saddam.

But having said that, and I supported giving the President the authority to go to war in Iraq because I wanted Saddam Hussein to know that we were going to take him out if he didn’t cooperate with the Weapons Inspectors. So it’s hard for me to know what I would have done.

Here’s what I think would have happened. I believe, my instinct would have been to keep more troops in Afghanistan until I had completely destroyed Osama bin Laden and let Hans Blix, the Weapons Inspector from Sweden, who I had a very high regard for, finish his job. He was begging for 2 4 weeks to finish the work. I would have let him finish his job. You can say, “Well, then we wouldn’t have found any weapons and we would have had no pretext to go to war.” And obviously the, a lot of people in the Bush administration wanted to go to war and take him out for other reasons. But I still think we would have been better off.

And then I think if we had kept the world together, finished the job in Afghanistan, if he had other reasons for wanting to depose Saddam Hussein, I think we might well have been able to do so with a lot more global support. It was pretty tough out there with only the British supporting us to any significant degree. With other people making smaller contributions, it’s been It’s required an enormous amount of our troops. It’s put enormous strains on the National Guard and Reserves. It’s undermined our recruiting and our ability to meet our recruiting quotas. We paid quite a high price for what’s happened. 1,700 people have died, thousands more are wounded. But the Iraqis are dying alongside us and in much greater numbers. So even though I would have preferred finishing the job in Afghanistan first, stabilizing Mr. Karzoff(?), of whom I have a high regard, and going after bin Laden whom I still think is a very dangerous man even though his power is much reduced.

Now that it’s been done this way, I think that we should want it to work and I have encouraged many members of my party in the Congress not to try to impose an artificial deadline for our withdrawal. If the Democrats want to be constructively critical, they should try to figure out how we can devote even more resources to properly training and equipping the Iraqi security forces more quickly because we have to phase our withdrawal based on their capacity to defend themselves. Clearly there are a lot of them who want to do it, yet it’s a tough slog. So that’s my answer. Yes, sir?

AUDIENCE QUESTION: I don’t see a microphone.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: I can hear you. I’ll repeat the question. They’re running to you though.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Thank you.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: It’s not all bad, is it? [LAUGHS] He looks like a rock star. He’s got all these....

AUDIENCE QUESTION: This administration has continued through the ____’s strong dollar policy. In that regard, if you were still leading the nation, would you still have it? In that regard, what would you do about the Chinese currency issue?

PRESIDENT CLINTON: Well, for one thing, if I were still running the country, you wouldn’t have a $400 billion dollar deficit. You know, if I were running the country and could control what the Congress did, we would have passed a two-or three-year tax cut. It would have gone off. We would have returned to the path of fiscal responsibility. We’ve got plenty of growth now. We don’t need these deficits. We shouldn’t be asking the Chinese to finance our homeland security expenditures and everything else. We borrow the money largely from China, Japan, Korea, Saudi Arabia and an assortment of others. And the only reason the dollar is as strong as it is, is that Europe’s growth has been anemic. The Japan seem to be somewhat resurgent but it’s not clear yet. And all these countries, particularly the Chinese and the Japanese, continue to buy our debt because they want to keep the dollar strong enough for us to buy their exports. In other words, the reason the dollar is strong is very different from the reason it was strong when I was in office, when we had a more traditional strong dollar policy, where we ran a balanced budget, surpluses, paying down the debt, had a savings rate but we had a robust consumer economy on the private side. You know, I would have a different

I think we have a strong dollar because everybody wants to keep, prop us up as long as we can be propped up to keep buying their exports. Again, I will say, if you run this out, currere addum(?), just year after year after year after year, you may think this can go on forever. But at some point, when other markets are available for those countries or if they decide they want to raise the per capita incomes of their own people and can generate enough growth internally If they stop buying our debt, our dollar would drop like a rock in a well tomorrow.

If the big countries in Europe were to follow the growth models of Denmark and the Dutch and some of the other Scandinavian countries that are doing well and Europe had higher growth rates and there was more demand for capital there, if the Japanese really are, at long last, coming out of it, we may not have a strong dollar over the long run. So if I were there, I’d be trying to have a real-- I’d be making the strong dollar unavailable by going back to a path of fiscal responsibility. Maybe a lot of you think I’m an old legend, but that’s the way I feel.

I don’t think most of us in high income groups needed those tax cuts either. We’re all doing plenty fine in America. Nobody makes us live here. We shouldn’t ask We’re the first generation of Americans ever to cut taxes during a military conflict, and it’s been done four times, and half the benefits went to 1% of the people. And then we went out and borrowed the money to cover our tax cuts. I think it’s wrong. I think it’s bad economics. I think it’s bad ethics. It’s not shared responsibilities.

You know, one of you came up tonight and said you were friends of a couple that live near me in Chappaqua, Dick(?) Spurs(?) and Mare(?) Rison(?). Their son is one of my daughter’s best friends. He joked that he was the only Jewish Democrat officer in the entire United States Marine Corp and he led one of the first groups of truth into Fullujah.
My college roommate for four years is an Irish Catholic Marine Veteran whose sons are in the Marine Corp. They both served, one in Afghanistan, one in Iraq. He’s an airline pilot who took a 25% pay cut to keep his company from going under. You know, I make more money in one speech than he makes in a year and he’s as fine a human being as I’ve ever known. And his kids risked their lives for me. And what do they ask me to do for him? Take four tax cuts. It was wrong. It was wrong. And I’d be badly fooled if we don’t yet pay a severe price for it unless we correct it. And it probably will be manifest at some point in the future in a falling dollar. Right now nobody can afford to let us fall, so we’ll be propped up. But some day they’ll be able to, unless we come to our senses.

That may be an unpopular view in this audience, but that’s what I think. Nobody makes us live here and we shouldn’t ask for a government we’re not willing to pay for. We now have the government, we ought to pay for what we got, especially when we got 3% growth. It’s outrageous, it’s just wrong.

Me and Bob Ruben-- I guess you wouldn’t take-- Some of you wouldn’t take Ruben back either, but we had pretty good results. [LAUGHS] Lloyd may have made more money under the Bush presidency but most people would make more money when I was there. [LAUGHS] Go ahead.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: We pay taxes whether we live here or not.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: Go ahead.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Mr. President, is it inevitable, in your view, that Iran and North Korea get nuclear weapons? And if not, what would you do about it?

PRESIDENT CLINTON: Well, it’s not inevitable. They are two very different cases. Let me take a different-- North Korea, when I was President, here’s what we did... [CASSETTE TAPE SIDE ENDED]

PRESIDENT CLINTON: ...nuclear weapons. They had a small nuclear reactor at a place called Yongbyon that was run by plutonium fuel rods, which when spent are still quite potent and can provide fissile material for nuclear weapons, and they had plans to build a bigger one. If all that had gone forward during the time I was President, they would have acquired the capacity to build somewhere between 6 and 12 nuclear weapons every year. So in 1994, I basically presented them with an ultimatum that I couldn’t let that happen. Not because I really thought the North Koreans would use nuclear weapons but because-- The only thing they do well is build missiles and weapons. They can’t feed themselves. They can’t provide energy. They don’t have a moderate economy.

So I didn’t really think they would use nuclear weapons on the Japanese or the South Koreans because if they do it, then their country would be history the next day. In other words, if deterrents worked against the Soviet Union, it would work against them. But the temptation to sell the technology or the materials or the weapons themselves would be overwhelming if they couldn’t eat and stay warm. So I said, “Look, you know, we can have a serious confrontation here or we can make a deal.” The deal we made was that they would get food and energy and the beginnings of a cooperation on some other issues but they had to give up that nuclear program and subject it to international inspection. They did.

In ’98, they agreed to give up their missile-testing program, which meant they could sell their long-range missiles, but it would be like buying an expensive car without a warranty. Then Kim Dae-Jung got elected and began to have a sunshine policy and then they created an economic zone and had some people transfers. And I thought we were moving in the right direction. Then it came out that in 1998, the North Koreans had begun a smaller, much, much smaller, but still improper nuclear development program in a laboratory to make highly-enriched uranium and that they were on track to make enough of that to make maybe one nuclear weapon a year, but it was clearly a violation of the understanding we had, if not the letter.

Meanwhile the President had to deal with 9/11. So he gave that “Access of Evil” speech. Remember that? I felt, I really felt for him, because he didn’t want to look like he was talking to the North Koreans, and yet it was the only problem in the world that everyone wanted us to handle unilaterally. Because the North Koreans want three things: they want to not be East Germany. They don’t want to disappear. They want to eat and stay warm and begin to build an economy that works and they want to be viewed as important country. Right now they’re only viewed as important when they misbehave, otherwise there’s 17,000,000 people living on next to nothing-- or 21,000,000 now, however many they have.

So we are in these talks-- We’ve let about 3 or 4 years go by but it appears just from looking at the press in the last few days, that the North Koreans want to talk again. They don’t want to have a crisis. They want what they always wanted and the United States apparently is willing to talk to them under the rubric, or the cover, of these six-party talks. I still believe that if we say, “Look, you know, in the end, we’re not going to let you have a nuclear arsenal that you can sell.” It would be a horrible thing for us to have a conflict over this, but we can’t take military force off the table with North Korea.

But if you go the other way, and you keep pounding this friendly exchange, you resume there and you let the South Koreans help rebuild a modern economy. We’ll give you enough energy. We’ll give you enough food to get you through and we’ll help you find other, more peaceful ways of generating an energy future. So that, I think, can be handled. I kind of thing that’s where we’re going with that.

Iran is much more difficult, politically and factually. First of all, let’s look at what Iran really is. It’s the only country in the world with two governments. They’ve had six elections in Iran in the last several years, two for President, about to have a third; two for the Parliament; two for Mayors. This will be the first election with a more progressive candidate. How’s it won with two-thirds to 70% of the vote. Rafsanjani will probably be elected and is viewed more as middle of the road in the context of Iranian politics.
Before him, the more progressive candidate got two-thirds to 70% in the President’s races, the Congress’ races, the Mayor’s races. But the other third is affiliated with a religious council headed by the Ayatollah Khomeini and they have the power to kick people off the ballot, to invalidate laws and they control all the money that funds terrorism, as well as foreign policy generally. So it’s a country that’s like a split personality. The people in the street are basically very sympathetic not just to America, but to the west. They’d like to be reconciled with us. But we’re worried about what the people who would control the nuclear weapons have. The problem is 90% of uranium is not nuclear power, not necessarily the bomb, although they think the bomb’s fine too. They think they are as important as India or Pakistan and it’s become like a status symbol and they have absolutely no idea how totally expensive it is to build and maintain and replenish a nuclear arsenal. It’s very costly, and to secure it.

So I think that for us to get there, we’re going to have to have lots of help. I think President Bush is doing exactly the right thing in the short run, allowing the Europeans to take a lead in the diplomatic initiative. I think at some point he’s going to have to be a part of it and there may be a deal to be had there, once the Presidential election is over. But you should just know that, the real problem we’ve got with Iran is 90% of the Iranians think (including people who really like all of you), really think that their country has as much right to a nuclear weapon as we do and if not a nuclear weapon, certainly nuclear power. It’s very tough. That one, I think the President’s doing all he can do on. Yes?

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Given your popularity and if you could be elected to a third term tomorrow, where do you think the Democratic party has lost its way? You know, we keep losing elections.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: Well, first of all, let’s just have, put a little context here. The Democratic party is doing worse in the Congress than it did in the 1980’s because we had an artificially inflated majority after Watergate and we have a lot of Southern seats that were basically Republican seats, because we had people in Congress who’d been there for a long, long time. And because the Republicans got control of reapportionment when they had more Governors than we did the last reapportion-ment. So we don’t have-- We should have slightly more Senators than we do and significantly more House members than we do.

On the other hand, as a Presidential party, even though we lost in 2000 and in 2004, and we should not have lost in 2000 and we could have won in 2004, we’re doing much, much better than we did, from 1968 until 1992 interrupted only by President Carter’s victory in 1976. When Jimmy Carter was the picture perfect candidate for a conservative America. Right? He was running two years after Watergate. President Ford had pardoned President Nixon, it was widely unpopular. President Carter was the Governor of Georgia, a graduate of the Naval Academy, a born-again Christian, Southern Baptist Sunday schoolteacher. He won by two points.

After that, we never won more than 10 states in the next three presidential elections until 1992. So the Democrats need a little realism here. We actually we won the popular vote in three out of the last four presidential elections. We lost the 2000 election 5 to 4 in the Supreme Court, in what I still believe will go down in history as one of the five worst decisions ever handed down by the high court. But it shouldn’t have been that close.

President Bush ran a brilliant campaign in 2000. That compassionate conservative was the most brilliant campaign. I mean our administration had a 63% approval rating when we were running, the ___ was running, so Bush’s compassionate conservative to the swing voters was, “Hey, I give everything they give with a smaller government and a bigger tax cut. Wouldn’t you like that?” Same as that, a smaller government, a bigger tax cut. It was brilliant. I never heard anything like it. It was the best slogan ever. I never heard anything that approached it as being that good. [FEW LAUGHS]

And in 2004, keep in mind, no President has ever been defeated in the middle of an ongoing conflict, and the American people perceived they were in the middle of an ongoing conflict against terror. And we were in the middle of an ongoing conflict in Iraq, and President Bush had the smallest reelection margin of any reelected President since Woodrow Wilson in 1916, before World War I. So the condition it was, and in won because he pushed the country so far to the right is simply not so. He won in spite of that because people thought he had done a good job with 9/11 and terror and because we didn’t compete in the so-called red states, or in the red communities in the potentially blue states.

So what should we do? The following: number one, nobody can be elected President without a credible security policy. The American people can’t vote for somebody that they don’t trust to defend them. Keep in mind, I started-- If you want a world with assured responsibilities, it starts with security. John Kerry actually had a very good security policy but it was not rendered clear to the American people. He had a really, really good position on security but it was not clear to the American people either what it was or how it was different from President Bush’s.

Number two, we have to have sensible proposals that move the bar forward in all those areas I mentioned (in energy, the economy, education and healthcare). That’s important.

Number three, you have to have good tactics. Since 1980, the Republicans have won most elections by having these front groups attack Democrats as people. You know, as people. We’re weak. We have no values. We can’t be trusted to stand up for America. You know? Negative ads against Max Cleland _________. Max Cleland left half his body in Vietnam for God’s sakes. He lost two legs above the knee and one arm. And a guy that had ____ deferments like me, beat him, winning ads against him with Cleland and Saddam Hussein pictured in the same damn ad, comparing Cleland to, saying he was the same as Saddam. Why? Max Cleland voted to give President Bush the authority to go to war in Vietnam-- I mean, in Iraq. Why? Because the Bush people wanted the 2003 election to be about security and since most Democrats supported him on Iraq and all Democrats supported him on Afghanistan, he was in a real pickle.

I mean, how do you make us look unpatriotic, but Karl Rove found a way. The way was to decide they were going to be for the Homeland Security Bill. Joe Lieberman, a Democrat proposed the Homeland Security Department Bill, that the President and the White House had vociferously opposed for eight months. They went against the President once, they decided they were for it. The next day, if you weren’t for it, you were a trader. And it worked because we were still sort of in a fog after 9/11.

So that brings me to the third point. You’ve got to have good tactics. You know, I got beat by one of these negative campaigns in 1980. There was an excuse for it back then. There’s no excuse for it now. I do not blame the Republicans. If you’ve got a business strategy that produced a half a billion dollars in income for you every year and you never had to change your business strategy, you just had to change your computer program every couple of weeks, would you change your business strategy? So if you can win every election by saying the Democrats are a bunch of liberal, leftwing slugs that never wrote a tax they didn’t like, they won’t stick up for their wife and family, they don’t care anything about raising their children with values and all that stuff they say. They want an abortionist on every street corner, you know, all that stuff they say. Why would you ever change your strategy?

They’re in business to beat us. And one reason they didn’t like me very much is I didn’t let them get away with it. I beat them twice, because I wouldn’t put up with it. But if we put up with it, we have nobody to blame but ourselves. People ask me all the time, “When will these mean campaigns stop?” The answer is they will stop when they do not work anymore. They will stop when the voters do not reward them. It’s a business, just like the business you’re in. You will stop pursuing your business strategy, whatever it is, when you’re going to go broke if you keep doing it. So that’s the answer. Do you want an end to mean campaigns? Stop rewarding them.

Basically it started off, I think, as anger by the right in America over their perceived excesses of the 60’s and they were mad about President Nixon and they hated President Johnson. But then in the 80’s, they got really good at it and they just realized it worked all the time. And Democrats kept waking up being surprised.

Now I’ll give you an example. Tom Daschle was defeating South Dakota and the Catholic Bishops, both of them said to the Catholics in South Dakota, “You can’t be a good Catholic and vote for Tom Daschle.” But Tom Daschle never ran an add pointing that out, not once. But for seven long years, he sponsored a Bill in every session of the Senate to make Roe v. Wade the law. In all of 50 states, there are 11 states where 40% of the abortions are performed that do not prohibit third-trimester abortions and Daschle tried to stop them and the Republicans wouldn’t let it come to a vote. Do you know why? Because they didn’t want any Democrats on record on the pro-life vote. It would have prevented far more abortions in the so-called Partial Abort Bill. But you can’t blame the voters for not knowing that, and Daschle didn’t tell them.

And John Kerry didn’t say in the debates, on abortion, he didn’t say that abortions went down 17% under me and had gone up in the last four years, and we had a strategy to drive them down. So if you’re not willing to take that on. If you’re not willing to play the game and realize politics is a contact sport and you can’t have your feelings hurt when somebody hits you between the eyes with a 2 X 4 and you can’t expect the voters to be sympathetic, because they figure, “Nobody made you run for this job.” And half the time people just want to see how you react when somebody kills you. [A FEW LAUGHS] You know, a lot of times, they’re just amazed with me, I get up every day. [LAUGHS]

But I think-- You’ve got to understand, it’s a head game. It’s like all great contests are head games. You see on Annika Sorenstam walking down that fairway, the 18th fairway yesterday? Nobody could touch her. They say, “She’s playing with us.” She is inside their heads. She’s not only a great golfer, she’s won their head game. And the Democrats have got to stop giving away the head game.

And finally, we have to talk to the so-called red states. You know, and you can’t just go places where you’re going to win. In Ohio, John Kerry knew much better than I did (and I have a high regard for him, by the way). I think he would have been a good President, and he’s a very good man, and I think he was a good United States Senator. You know, they didn’t campaign in places that weren’t for them, but I did. I don’t believe you should only go where everybody’s for you. He ran much better in Cleveland than I did. We registered more voters, we voted more. He was much better. But in all these places, in rural Ohio, where I got beat 6 to 4? He got beat 4 to 1. Well, you can’t expect people to vote for you if you don’t talk to them.

One of the many pearls of wisdom I picked up in Africa was that, there are tribes that live in the hills of North Central Africa. When they meet each other walking, if one of them says, “Hello” or “Good morning,” the response is not, “Hello. How are you?” The response translated into English is, “I see you.” Think about that. Tomorrow when you walk around your day and you look at all these people that work here at this place, you think how many people serve you dinner, or fix your place, or out there helping that golf course run, and ask yourself if you actually see people that have an impact on your lives.

The Democrats made a lot of these Christian conservatives who were just trying to raise their families, trying to do the best they can, feel like we didn’t see them anymore. We didn’t care what they thought. We couldn’t get them. That’s crazy. So security position; a positive on the issues; better tactics, outreach to red states. It’s way more than 50/50 likely that we’ll win. The demographics are moving our way, and we’re in much better shape than we were in the 80’s. That’s my opinion.

And I don’t think we should do to them what they do to us. You know, I said at my Library Dedication, that I had become convinced three days before the election, that I was the only American left in the entire country who liked both President Bush and John Kerry. But there were no other Americans left who felt that way. That’s a shame. Because the truth is, if all these problems were easy, we would have solved them. You know, I like George Bush. I think he’s a man of his-- He’s got convictions and I just like him. Now that I’ve been around him some, I get why the people who are for him are really for him. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t disagree with him. And I think the problem with American politics (and we have trivialized it).

I’ll go back to what I said at the beginning of my speech, that’s why I want you think about how you think the world works. When you get in a position when you intensely dislike somebody, you can’t hear them anymore and you tend to devalue what’s good about it. And if they’re your adversary, you tend to underestimate them. Like I told The first time I heard Bush give a speech in 2000, I called the Gore campaign, I said, “This guy can beat us. He’s a really good politician.” I said, “This compassionate conservative, I think it’s a load of whoey, but it’s the best damn political slogan I ever heard.” [FEW LAUGHS]

You know? I get this. You know, if you’re just mad at somebody, you can’t hear them. So I really think, whether you’re a Republican or Democrat or whatever else, you should really strive to take the venom out of American public life. I think, on balance, it helps us, because more people would agree with us. But the main thing is it’ll help America because we’ll be able to hear each other again. Do you want to quit?

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Do you have any idea who’s going to run next time?

PRESIDENT CLINTON: No. There’ll be a ton of people running, both the Democratic and Republican primaries and that’ll be good for the country. Yes?

AUDIENCE QUESTION: America represents 5% of the population of the world. In the last 100 years, maybe since the Roman Empire, there hasn’t been one country that dominates the world in the way we do. I’m curious about your opinions on our obligations, whether it Kosovo, Iraq or Rwanda, in terms of being proactive in leading the world, as opposed to waiting for the world?

PRESIDENT CLINTON: Well, I think-- First of all, after the Cold War, we were in a unique position in history, where we were the world’s only economic, political and military superpower. We had-- The Japanese were beginning a long, long economic period of economic stagnation; the Europeans were beginning to have serious economic problems and didn’t have significant military; the Japanese had virtually none; and our political influence was enormous. But there was no great consensus about what we should do about it.

What I tried to do when I was President, was to make our country the world’s strongest force for peace and freedom and prosperity, but also at the same time to build a world that we would like to live in when we were no longer the only military, political and economic superpower, and that’s very important.

For example, if you think-- In Kosovo and Bosnia, I was ready to intervene in Bosnia the day I got there, and a lot of people have wrongly assumed that we didn’t do it because I didn’t serve in the military in Vietnam, I didn’t want to do it. That’s a bunch of whoey. I didn’t want us to go in unilaterally to Bosnia with the opposition of the French and the British with the Germans constitutionally esstopped from supporting us even though they supported military intervention, because I thought it would destroy NATO and undermine our attempts to unify Europe. That is, I thought we ought to save Bosnia, but we ought to do it with the Europeans, that it would be good for Europe. So it took me about two years to put the coalition together but eventually we did it and we did it together. We strengthened NATO; we strengthened Europe. And then when the time came to act in Kosovo, we were able to move right away.

The one that is the biggest regret of my Presidency, that and not getting bin Laden and not making peace in the Middle East. But in Rwanda, I think we could have saved probably a third of those lives. Now let me remind you what happened. In Rwanda, somewhere between 700-800,000 people were killed in 90 days, mostly by machetes. And it takes a while to mobilize and get there and occupy a country and do all that. But I very much regret that and I have spent a lot of my time and effort, both in the White House, and since I left, trying to make it up for the Rwandans. Ironically, they’re the only people who never attacked me for it.

When I went to Rwanda to apologize, they said I was the only person in the world that ever came in and said he was sorry. Nobody else even did that. But they’re remarkable people. What happened in Rwanda was-- We had just gone through a blackout down in Somalia, where the Congress tried to force me out the next day and I beat them back for six months and I was trying to build the political coalition to go into Bosnia and I didn’t know how bad it was going to be until it was virtually done. But that’s no excuse. We should have sent in troops. If I could have sent 20,000 troops to Rwanda, we could have probably saved a third of those lives.

And therefore, the Africans want to handle this. They have offered to go to 7,700 troops. In my opinion-- And NATO has said, “With U.S. support, we’ll take them in there. We’ll handle the logistics.” In my opinion, what should be done is, that the UN should be working to get the Africans to accept other non-American, non-European troops under the in-flag to get about 20 25,000 troops. That’s a big, big area, Darfor, and I think we could stop the slaughter if we had 25,000 troops there. But I think we’re-- You know, we’re learning as we go along, to do that and we’re growing together as we go along. But I think it’s very important on the security front, and I say again, it’s also important on the aid and development front. That’s why the United States will support, as much as possible, what Tony Blair’s trying to do at this G 8 meeting in Scotland. Anything else? Is that it? One more. There we go. I’ll let you go. The flies are getting over. Maybe they’ve heard all this before. [FEW LAUGHS]

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Thank you. Thank you. A question for you. China is having a big affect on a lot of people here and on business in general. What are your long-term expectations for China from a threat standpoint and also an opportunity standpoint for the U.S.?

PRESIDENT CLINTON: Well, it’s interesting you said that. I used to have long conversations with Jiang Zemin about that. About whether-- You know, there was an element in China, basically the ultranationalist who believed every time we disagreed with the Chinese, it was part of a long-term effort on America’s part to contain China. And I told Jiang Zemin that I wasn’t trying to contain China, any more than I was trying to contain Russia by expanding NATO. That I would never contain Russia unless Russian conduct warranted it, and the same with China.

But to go back to what we were saying, if I could make a point, I want to make an opinions question. The reason I tried to blow the world of cooperative networks, like the Asian-Pacific Leaders Meeting; the Democracies of the Americas Meeting; the Free Trade of the Americas. All these organizations that I either joined or created was that I knew when there would come a time where we wouldn’t be the only military, political and economic superpower.

Secretary Rumsfeld has been loudly criticizing the Chinese for buying a new fleet of hypermodern diesel-powered submarines that will run very deep and very quiet, but he believes threats to up This goes to your question. That he believes threatens to upset the military balance of power in the Pacific. Well, when somebody’s got enough money, then whether America’s the only superpower momentarily is their decision, not ours. It’s just up to them whether they spend the money on military hardware or something else. We have literally nothing to do with it. Once they’ve got enough money to buy the same stuff we have, if they choose to buy it, it’s their decision, not ours. The Chinese have chosen to upgrade their Navy. They say it’s not a threat but it could be. That, to me, brings home the fact that we need to always work for the best and prepare for the worst.

China historically has not been an aggressive power beyond its borders in a very narrow sphere of influence. We got into the Korean War with them because we crossed the ____ and there was a period of unusual aggression there. But what we have to try to do is create the conditions in which our former adversaries, Russian and China and any potential future adversaries we have (like Iran), define their greatness in terms than other military and political domination and that’s why I tried to outline the plan I did earlier tonight. We don’t have total control of that. That’s why we have to continue to modernize our defense forces, modernize our weapons systems.
You know, this last Iraq conflict, we fought with 70% more smart weapons than we fought in the first Gulf War. Most of those things were developed while I was there. The unmanned, but armed drone that we used against the terrorists in Afghanistan was developed when I was President and we could only use it for spy purposes because the Air Force didn’t complete the arming process until a month or so until after I left office.

I take this very seriously. We are foolish not to prepare for the worst. You know, right before World War I, the world was almost as economically interdependent as it is today. There was all the happy talk that we’d seen the end of war because everybody was trading and traveling and talking with one another and all of a sudden we were awash in carnage that was breathtaking. I hope and believe we’ll be wiser now than we were then. I do not believe terrorism, even the terrorist groups get a hold of biological or chemical or nuclear agents will ever destroy any civilization or any of our countries.

I do think if we don’t do something about climate change some time in the next 75 years, there will be severe and perhaps irreversible adverse consequences. But in the meanwhile, we need to keep working to make a partnership with China, to understand them and be understood by them and to reach out to them and to create opportunities for young Chinese people to relate to the rest of the world so that it becomes more and more and more difficult for us to be in a hostile Cold War type standoff with them. But we can’t let our defense go away. We have to continue modernize it but we should be working for the best. My gut is that 30 years from now, we will be allies, not adversaries.

I think we’ll be allies with the Indians. If the Indians ever make up with the Pakistanis and quit increasing defense spending 20% a year, they have a more balanced economic policy than the Chinese. They’re trying to grow through both exports and internal growth, and I believe the Indian subcontinent could well outstrip China, if they could get that enormous military burden off their back in the short-run. So, you know, I think we’re going to have lots of competitors out there and we just need to worry about our own renewal, work for the best, but always be prepared for the worst. Thank you very much. [POLITE APPLAUSE]