The Johns Hopkins University
Nitze School for Advanced International Studies
Washington, D.C. / May 22, 1996
(The following is the prepared text of Ms. Albright's speech
and has not been checked against delivery.)
Thank you Dean Wolfowitz. Students, parents, distinguished members of the faculty, guests and friends.
It is wonderful to be among so many familiar faces at what is, without doubt, one of America#s most prestigious and accomplished graduate schools. This afternoon, we come together to mark the end of another academic year. It is a day to celebrate. After all, graduation is one of the five great milestones of life--the others being birth, marriage, death and the day you finally pay off your student loan.
At this moment, only one thing remains between you and your degree, and that is my speech. But I promise not to bore you--at least not intentionally. And I will try to control the habit, developed while a professor, of speaking in sound bites 50 minutes long. Because I am a former professor, however, I cannot resist talking about the future in light of the past.
This school, like many of our great institutions, was a product of the World War II era. It was founded to help ensure that Americans would not retreat from the world after World War II as we did, with disastrous consequences, after the previous war. SAIS has served that goal admirably. Prior graduates have brought high standards of scholarship and practicality to a wide range of international endeavors, and I am sure that you will continue that tradition.
Although I taught at a competing institution across town, I was a student here, and I can tell you that no one could enter the world of international relations better prepared than you. But I can also tell you that you are not prepared. No one could be.
When I was teaching, I often asked my students to "role play", to pretend that they were diplomats or generals or Presidents, charged with responding to a particular set of circumstances. During these exercises, I would frequently play devil#s advocate. Unfortunately today, in places like Liberia, Burundi and the Balkans, the devil plays himself.
No textbook can prepare you for choices that weigh the lives that may be saved by intervening in a foreign crisis against the lives that are put at risk. No lecture can enable you to prophesy with confidence the future of regions undergoing revolutionary change. And the diplomat's ability to discern precisely when and when not to press a particular point is better learned at the poker table than from a commencement speech.
It is natural for all of us to seek the simple amidst the complex, but the reality, as Paul Nitze has written, is that: The study of politics and policy can never be a science; science presupposes certainty; (but)...policy and politics can never be precisely repeated and analogies are only suggestive. The best that we can strive for is judgment that is more apt to be right than wrong.
Those words are especially apt today, when even the basics are complicated. Certainly, nothing is more basic than the premise that U.S. foreign policy should be built around U.S. interests. The challenge is to define those interests usefully in this transformed world. Here, again, Mr. Nitze comes in handy. For he has suggested that truth can most often be found not by eliminating one pole of opinion, but rather by deriving harmony from the tension between opposites.
Today, there is tension between those who would saddle America with responsibility for every flood, famine and fight and those who insist that no threat short of nuclear war should cause us to take risks beyond our borders. To find the harmony between these poles, we need a more calibrated view. Certainly, our interests begin with defense of territory, citizens, allies and economic well-being. This is the inner circle, our vital interests. Our leadership in extending the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and our agreement with North Korea to freeze its nuclear program address problems that fall clearly within this circle.
We have a second circle of interests that reflect the interdependence of our age. We live in a nation that is democratic, trade-oriented, respectful of the law and possessed of a powerful military whose personnel are precious to us- We will do better and feel safer in an environment where our values are widely shared, markets are open, military clashes are constrained and those who run roughshod over the rights of others are brought to heel.
The opportunities to help shape such a world are limitless, but our resources are not. In defending this second circle of interests, we must navigate a path between disengagement, which is not possible, and over-extension, which is not sustainable. Our task will be easier if we are able to strengthen the UN and other multilateral mechanisms for preventing armed conflict, prosecuting war criminals and isolating rogue regimes.
Finally, there is a third circle of interests that we share with all others. These are the global concerns--health, population, the environment, drugs and transnational crime--that have a growing impact on all our lives. If left unaddressed, they could well endanger our vital interests, but here the threats are currently more diffuse and our efforts to respond must continue for the long term.
In seeking to further the full range of these interests, we must use every available foreign policy tool, avoiding false choices between multilateral and unilateral or force and diplomacy, selecting, in each case, the combination most likely to succeed in the task at hand.
A prime example has been our use of UN sanctions against Iraq. Our goal, since the end of the Persian Gulf war,.has been to prevent that country from once again developing -weapons of mass destruction or threatening its neighbors with aggression. Those sanctions have now been in place for more than five years, and have caused suffering to the Iraqi people. This week's agreement to allow the sale of oil to pay for humanitarian goods reflects our desire to make these sanctions a less blunt and more effective instrument of policy. The food for oil agreement will keep the spotlight where it belongs--on Saddam's continued failure to comply with the relevant Security Council resolutions. Only when Iraq does comply will the overall sanctions regime be lifted.
Saddam Hussein's complaints about the unfairness of all this remind me of the story about the schoolboy who came home with his face damaged and his clothes torn. When his mother asked him how the fight started, he said: "It started when the other guy hit me back."
The importance of using and refining a variety of foreign policy tools is evident also in responding to international crisis and conflict. Here, a cookie cutter approach simply does not work. A strategy that succeeds in Cambodia may fall flat in Bosnia, while arrangements that are suitable for El Salvador may not work somewhere else.
In each case, we--and the international community--must work together, matching our prescriptions to the particular symptoms we observe, while developing a healthy knowledge of the subject's history and personality. For example, in Bosnia, a full range of international instruments is now employed. NATO is enforcing the ceasefire agreed to in Dayton; the OSCE is preparing elections; UN police monitors are helping to provide local security and a Special High Representative has been appointed to coordinate reconstruction.
The team effort in Bosnia is replicated, to a lesser degree, in our response to other problems. Elsewhere in the Balkans, for example, the UN retains the lead role in peacekeeping missions in Eastern Slavonia and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. In Haiti, a U.S.-organized coalition restored the elected leaders to power. Now, a UN mission, led by Canada, is providing security so that democratic institutions can take hold. In Angola, the UN is seeking to implement an agreement that would finally end that nation's two decade long civil war. And in Guatemala, a civilian UN mission is monitoring human rights and helping to mediate an end to violence.
The goal in each case is not to impose peace, but rather to give confidence and backing to the forces of peace, to help those who believe political differences are best resolved not through violence--but as in our own society, peacefully--through voting, reasoned debate and negative advertising.
The team approach to international crisis management is important not only because it appears to work, but because the American people want and expect others to bear their fair share of the burden. And if our policies are to be sustained, they must earn and maintain public and Congressional support. That is a truism. The complicating fact is that measurements of American sentiment are inexact, and the nature of that sentiment is subject to sometimes rapid and dramatic change.
That is why a President must do more than reflect public opinion. His duty--or hers--is to lead opinion in directions it is in our interests to go. President Clinton has done this, especially in Haiti, where his decision to restore democracy came in the face of much skepticism. And in Bosnia, where the President remained rock solid--despite controversy and setbacks--in refusing to send U.S. troops until a settlement was achieved and in helping to implement that agreement once it was signed. In today's environment, where images of horror and heroism are transmitted instantly around the globe, and attention spans are short, there is no certain formula for ensuring public support for American activism overseas. Certainly, frankness helps. Consultations with Congress are essential, and we are consulting with Congressional leaders of both parties to an unprecedented degree. But we Americans are brutally fair. As President Kennedy observed after the Bay of Pigs, success has a thousand fathers, while defeat is an orphan. Ultimately, we will be judged not by our rhetoric or our rationales, but by our results.
The reality is that Americans have always been ambivalent about activism abroad. At the end of World War I, an American Army officer, stuck in Europe while the diplomats haggled at Versailles, wrote to his future wife about his yearning to go home:
In its aftermath, in a speech delivered 50 years ago last month, Winston Churchill urged his generation to join together, to reject division, and to build, instead a "temple of peace." He said that temple must be built by "workmen from all countries", sharing tools and tasks, working together as partners.
The mission that Churchill set for his generation is now ours--yours and mine--to carry on. Today, the greatest danger to America is not some foreign enemy; it is the possibility that we will succumb to the temptation of . isolation that this great school was founded to guard against; or that we will misunderstand the challenges we face; or discard available tools; or grow complacent and forget the fundamental lesson of this century, which is that problems abroad, if left unattended, will all too often come home to America.
A decade or two from now, we will be known as the neo-isolationists who allowed totalitarianism and fascism to rise again or as the generation that solidified the global triumph of democratic principles. We will be known as the neo-protectionists whose lack of vision produced financial chaos or as the generation that laid the groundwork for rising prosperity around the world.
We will be known as the world-class ditherers who stood by while the seeds of renewed global conflict were sown or as the generation that took strong measures to deter aggression, control nuclear arms and keep the peace.
There is no certain roadmap to success, either for individuals or for generations. Ultimately, it is a matter of judgement, a question of choice. In making that choice, let us remember that there is not a page of history of which we are proud that was authored by a chronic complainer or prophet of despair. We are doers.
We have a responsibility in our time, as others have had in theirs, not to be prisoners of history, but to shape history. A responsibility to use and defend our own freedom, and to help others who share our aspirations for liberty, peace and the quiet miracle of a normal life. That is our mission as we enter this new era. That is your assignment as you enter your new life.
Congratulations and thank you very much.