SPEECH GIVEN AT STANFORD UNIVERSITY 23rd APRIL 2014
When I first came to the United States, it was 1981. I was spending a long hot summer as a medical student at the DuPont Institute in Wilmington, Delaware. Following this, in the way which you only do when you are a student, I spent six weeks on a Greyhound bus touring coast-to-coast, visiting 42 states. Of all the many dozens of trips I have made to this country, including those to visit family and friends across the entire nation, this was the one that made the greatest impression on me.
Perhaps it was because I was young and impressionable, maybe even idealistic about America but these were the early days of Ronald Reagan and it was an increasingly confident and assertive country.
We had yet to reach the heady days of the vindication point in the Cold War, when the West’s collective strength in economics, military muscle and political cohesion meant freedom from Soviet oppression for millions of European citizens. Too many people forget that the Cold War did not simply end - it was won - and not least because of the leadership shown by the United States. It ushered in a time of both optimism and chaos with hope springing up in some parts of the former Soviet empire while ethnic tensions pulled others apart. It left the United States as the unparalleled global power.
And so, at the start of the 21st century, the United States finds itself not only the world’s biggest economy but in the top 10 countries measured by GDP per head, a testament to the high quality of its economic activity. It also has the world’s biggest military, bigger than the next eleven military budgets in the world combined. This is not a nation whose destiny lies in backing away from global political, economic or security challenges. The environment we live in is harsh and binary – either we shape the world around us or we will be shaped by it. Those who believe in our values of liberty, democracy and the rule of law should regard our ability to shape our world not as a duty but a glorious opportunity.
I believe that much of the inspiration for the great American achievements of the 20th century can be found in the concept of American exceptionalism. This is not, as some critics seem to think, a belief that Americans themselves are genetically exceptional, but that the institutions and values, embodied in the American Constitution, its system of government and rule of law allow free people to achieve exceptional things. It is sad, and somewhat depressing, to hear some of America’s political leaders distance themselves from this core concept today.
Indeed, viewed as an outsider – though by no means an impartial one – all does not look too rosy in the American political garden today.
There are a number of symptoms of this malaise.
Last week, in Washington I discussed my surprise at the reaction here to the Snowden leaks. The debate has centred, although hijacked is perhaps a better description, around the idea of how Americans and their allies need to be protected from the intrusion of the security and intelligence services rather than the very real threats to our safety that the security services are protecting us from. In Britain, the argument has been more typified by “of course our spies spy – if they don’t, why are we paying them”. Perhaps it’s just the James Bond effect!
The debate in the United States seems to have been viewed entirely through a libertarian lens without fully focusing on the national security implications. I liked how the Economist magazine put it: “when the question is asked” it said, “who decided that the NSA and a secret court should be trusted to interpret the meaning of the fourth Amendment in a context shielded from either public scrutiny or congressional or judicial oversight?” The answer is Congress. The NSA is established and governed by law. It is subject to congressional oversight and judicial scrutiny, and receives instruction from an elected government”
In the US, despite all the noise generated about the activities of the NSA, what has really been established about the legality and oversight of its operations? First, that the collection programmes operated have been authorised by all three branches of government. Second, that this authorisation has come with the approval of two presidents from different parties and with two widely divergent political outlooks.
And third, not only have there been multiple checks and balances but critics have yet to show any record of agencies significantly abusing the ability to access information about the American people, far less disproportionate or illegal activity. It has been difficult for many external observers to understand why a self appointed minority seem to have decided that only their view of events qualifies as the moral high ground, especially when it appears to be built on mere supposition rather than fact.
We have also witnessed the shutdown of the American government over an argument that those of us watching from overseas found hard to fathom. Ostensibly, Congress did not want to see the debt ceiling raised further which is, in itself, a laudable aim. The problem , however, is that Congress is running a budget with an annual deficit which, any school pupil with a rudimentary grasp of arithmetic would tell you, inevitably results in greater accumulated debt.
Forgive me for saying this, but there seems from the outside, to be a growing bitterness and tribalism in US politics which not only impedes the necessary cooperation required for effective governance but has the potential to undermine the American people’s faith in their own political institutions. As a friend put it to me “some of us feel that there are individuals on both sides of the aisle who would rather see America fail than see their opponents succeed”. What a tragedy for us all if that very un-American view were ever to prevail.
For, the consequences of a faltering America would not be limited to the domestic political arena. A strong and united America is essential to bolster the confidence of allies and deter potential aggressors. The concept of “leading from behind” in Libya and the abandonment of the red lines over chemical weapons use in Syria have undoubtedly weakened our collective standing in the world. The renewed confidence of Putin in the Ukraine and the more strident tone of Al Queda and their allies in recent days are warnings of where this posture can lead. Even if such a posture could have been justified in the past, it is simply unthinkable today – or at least it should be!
The need for American leadership is more, not less, important in the era of globalisation.
If Francis Fukuyama had called his book The End of Geography rather than The End of History he probably would have been closer to the mark in describing the world in which we now find ourselves.
Politicians have, however, been generally slower than their business counterparts to see the opportunities globalisation brings.
Why should that be? I think there are probably two reasons. The first is that many politicians see the increasing interconnections that the new environment has brought as threatening many of their concepts of sovereignty. The second is that, while globalization may bring enormous opportunities in terms of trade, there is also an unavoidable importation of strategic risk. As we become more interdependent we interact with many more players in many more parts of the world than at any time in our history. This makes us more vulnerable to external shocks and less able to insulate ourselves from instability in distant parts of the global economy or from transnational security threats which may arise in a far-flung corner of the world. Phenomena ranging from the economic and security implications of the 9/11 attacks, through the vulnerability that the SARS outbreak in Asia in 2003 demonstrated, to the economic reverberations following the Japanese tsunami all showed that the era when we believed events happened ‘over there’ is increasingly behind us.
The sheer pace of globalisation is also sometimes difficult to grasp. For example, the World Health Organization estimates that 500,000 people or more are in the air at any one time, travelling from one part of the globe to another. The time that the Black Death took to travel along the Silk Route would be reduced to hours today. In 2010 there were over 940 million international tourist arrivals worldwide, a growth of more than 6.5 per cent on the previous year. To put that in perspective, at the end of the Black Death in the mid-1300s the entire global population stood at around only 370 million. With the huge rise in the birth rate and improving life expectancy as poverty is gradually eliminated, nutrition improves and improved medical care becomes more widely available, current projections indicate a global population of up to 10.5 billion by 2050.
This is happening at a time of simultaneous and exponential technological change. At the end of 1995, during President Clinton’s first term, around 16 million people (0.5 per cent of the world’s population) were using the Internet. By the end of 2012 this figure had ballooned to 2.75 billion people, around 39 per cent of the world’s population. It is astonishing to think that in the middle of 1993 there was a total of 130 websites. By the end of 2012 this had become an estimated 634 million.
Isolationism and protectionism are dangerous forces in our politics. They are dark impostors, promising protection and security from outside forces, but ultimately resulting in greater instability and economic insecurity. Opting out or adopting a head in the sand approach were never successful strategies in the past. To try such an approach in this era of globalisation and shared risk would be foolish and irresponsible.
What are the risks we face together? In my book “Rising Tides” I looked at a number: the risks of global financial imbalances including migration, trade and debt; the threat that transnational terrorism is taking across borders; the risk that failing states will endanger the security and economy of an ever more interdependent and sensitive world; the risks and opportunities of the
global struggle within Islam, which has replaced the clash of capitalism and communism as the most unstable ideological problem; and how the competition for basic commodities, especially water, shows how interdependence could turn to conflict if we do not manage our global resources properly. All too often, I think, our straightjacketed structure of government tries to put interconnected risks in entirely different, and separate, departments. So we end up with a pigeon-holed approach to policy. Economists talk to one another in their own language, defence specialists speak acronyms to one another and security experts speak only to those cleared to hear the arguments.
We need to understand how these various risks may interact with one another to produce dangerous consequences. We need to learn how to join the dots.
Let me give you an example where water played an unusual role in a current geopolitical problem.
The father of the current Syrian president promised the Syrian people food and security and economic stability and underpinned his promises with subsidies to bring down the price of food, fuel and water. Unfortunately, at the same time, he decided that it would be a good idea to produce cash crops for export and began the widespread planting of cotton. This meant that more water was being consumed than ever in a country where water management was barely considered at all. This led, eventually to a new licensing system for wells as the majority of irrigation in Syria uses groundwater as its source, since the amount of water available from rivers is insufficient.
So, in 2005 the government began licensing the digging of agricultural wells, but its policy of keeping the Kurds in the north-east of the country economically underdeveloped resulted in licences being denied there. Unsurprisingly, the result was that more than half of the country’s wells were illegally dug, and hence unregulated, leading to rapidly depleted groundwater reserves.
In 2009 it was reported that over 800,000 Syrians had lost their livelihoods as a result of the droughts, and in a UN report published a year later it was stated that ‘up to 80 per cent of those severely affected live mostly on a diet of bread and sugared tea, which is not enough to cover daily calorific and protein needs for a healthy life’. The results were all too predictable, with hungry and thirsty people establishing temporary settlements on the edges of Damascus, Aleppo, Hama, Homs and Daraa. This worsened an already bad situation created by the arrival of nearly 2,000,000 refugees from outside the country, mainly Iraq and Palestine.
The American embassy in Damascus sent a message to the State Department quoting the Syria representative of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, Abdullah bin Yehia and what he termed a ‘perfect storm’, the confluence of drought conditions with other economic and social pressures. The message said, prophetically, that these factors could undermine stability in Syria. I’m sure it is little comfort to realize how accurate the predictions were. Quite how much drought and migration were instrumental in tipping Syria into protest and then civil war is difficult to say, but is surprising that in the vast coverage given to the Syrian issue this particular predisposing factor is scarcely ever mentioned.
And, if you really want to understand the strategic importance of water then consider this thought. 47% of all the people alive on our planet today are dependent, for their drinking water, on rivers that arise on the Tibetan plateau. Just think of the strategic value that control of Tibet brings and factor that into China’s thinking.
Let me take another example – the events which have come to be known as the Arab spring. This process was initially welcomed by leaders in the West as a new dawn and an expression of pent-up desire for pluralistic liberal democracy.
I believe we have been too quick to ascribe the motivations for these changes to values that we take for granted in Western political discourse. It is much more likely that we have witnessed a commodity revolution than a value-inspired political one, although that is not to say that one cannot metamorphose into the other over time. We should, however, be careful in case wishful thinking becomes a substitute for critical analysis.
A number of theories have been put forward to account for the Arab Spring. Many experts in the field see the trigger as being a backfiring of the food subsidies which had been used as a political tool by repressive regimes for many years. When food prices rocketed in 2008, and then again in 2010, the cost of subsidies became unsustainable – by 2010 the Egyptian government’s bread subsidy bill alone was more than $3 billion a year. Not only was this highly inefficient and wasteful but it was a recipe for corruption with bakers reselling subsidized bread and flour onto the black market, where prices could be five times or more the subsidized rate.
The flaw in the democratic revolution theory is that the populations of these countries were willing to tolerate the regimes under which they lived as long as their basic commodity prices were controlled. Nothing is more likely to push a man onto the streets than the inability to put food and water on his family’s table.
There are many, including myself, who believe that widespread unrest does not arise from long-term failings in a political system but from its perceived failure to provide essential security to the population.
In other words, in the case of the Arab Spring a certain threshold was crossed when the deal to sacrifice political liberty for affordable commodities fell apart and the whole system rapidly disintegrated.
So what, some may say. The point is that it is impossible to disaggregate the risks we share in this globalised era. What if the massive quantitative easing we have seen in recent years combines with rising demand as a result of population and dietary changes with the consequent result that we see sharply higher soft commodity prices? We have already seen record prices for pork, beef, fish and shrimp over the past year. What if the inability of indebted Western countries like the US or the UK to live within our means results in higher food prices for some of the world’s poorest people?
Where does the next Arab spring come from and what price will we have to pay in terms of increased instability and insecurity?
In truth, we cannot be isolated from the problems of the world around us because our actions and policies may have unavoidable consequences in places and in ways we do not immediately think of.
All these questions need to be seen as potential security risks alongside those of failing states, transnational terrorism and religious fundamentalism. We need to take a much more holistic view of the global problems that we face if we are to have any chance of understanding them in context and producing realistic and meaningful solutions.
But perhaps the most important reason that we need a fully engaged America is the issue with which I started – that of values.
It is one thing to have the capability to deal with some of the problems we face. It is another to have the will to do so. This is where I believe our values are so important.
I remember talking to a senior European official about how we had won the Cold War, not just because of our military and economic superiority but because we also had a moral superiority and belief in our own values. I asked why it was that we had been so willing to use the word ‘better’ then (democracy was better than dictatorship; freedom was better than oppression; capitalism was better than communism) but seemed so afraid to use it now. Surely in relation to Islamist views our ways are better – better to have religious tolerance than violently imposed orthodoxy, better to have a concept of universal human rights than not, better to have societies in which women play a full and equal role with men?
The answer was depressing: ‘I don’t think we can really say “better” nowadays, I was told, only “different”.’ If this is what we really believe, we are in deep trouble. Has the concept of moral equivalence become so prevalent that it has diminished our belief in what has made us who we are? If we do not believe that our values are better than the alternatives, and worth defending, then why should anyone else listen to us.
Liberty, equality and the rule of law are better than the alternatives. We need more ‘better’ and less ‘different’ or we risk losing the battle of ideas and ideals for the future. That would be an unforgivable betrayal of those who sacrificed so much for what we too often seem to take for granted.
This is no time for an inward looking America. The siren voices which seem to believe that the tide of history can be kept back need to be defeated.
I can think of no better words to sum up our dilemma that those of Shakespeare with which I began my book. In Julius Caesar, these were the words of Brutus, whose echo is so profoundly relevant today:
There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea, are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.