Bill Clinton: We must work together

Bill Clinton

Opinion

The number one characteristic of the modern world is that we are inter-dependent, we cannot really escape each other. For most of us, that's a good thing. In a global economy I got on a plane and flew to New Zealand. I liked it.

A great deal of the work of the next 40 to 50 years of this new century will be devoted to trying to develop political and social responses that will bring the interactions of the world up to the level of the interaction of the global economy.

The world we live in is highly inter-dependent but we are not yet in a set of interlocking communities where we all understand and accept the rules.

So what should we focus on?

It is important to have a security policy dealing with the central challenges of the age.

The day before 9/11 I was saying in interviews that Osama Bin Laden was the most dangerous person in the world, because he did not have a nation state therefore he was a difficult target to strike.

But in many ways al Qaeda are weaker than they were because we have interrupted their money chains and broken up their terrorist cells.

The main thing that is happening is counter terrorism co-operation all over the world. Since 9/11 we have taken down 30 or 40 al Qaeda or affiliated cells and interrupted lots of their money chains, prevented several attacks and arrested somewhere in the neighbourhood of 3000 more people. Over 90 per cent of them were arrested by non-American security forces with whom we had co-operative arrangements. There are people around the world - anonymous people - working against those who will blow up hotels and bomb Bali or Jordan or attack the United States.

The second thing we need to do more is contain the stocks of weapons of mass destruction. This enterprise has got a bad name because of what happened - or didn't happen - in Iraq, but the truth is there are stocks of chemical and biological agents and small units of nuclear fission material that, if they fell into the wrong hands, could be weapons to terrorise. The third thing we should do - and it has become a big issue in America - is so-called homeland defence. We have not done very much on something that affects our homeland defence - cargo containers that come into our ports and airports. We only check about 5 per cent.

Recently in an international business transaction, a Dubai-based company merged with another company and all of a sudden it had a presence in the United States in major ports including New York. There has been an enormous reaction to it, because the company is from UAE, where some of the money from 9/11 was laundered.

The issue is this: you have what appears superficially be an economic issue but instead is a high-profile national security and political issue.

To go back to where I began, unless we continue to develop political and social and legal responses to keep up with the global economy, we are going to have problems like this.

I predict we will develop these systems in an uneven way with greater success but not complete success over the next several years.

The second thing is it won't be enough to develop just the security system to support the global economy. We cannot kill, jail or occupy all our enemies, so you need more friends. That's the right thing for the global economy anyway, because that means we must bring more and more people into the circle of opportunity.

The third thing we have to do is to get people in the habit of working in international co-operations. The UN may not be perfect, the World Trade Organisation may not be perfect, but we cannot have a global economy and deal with global security threats and try to meet global challenges unless we have some forum within which we can co-operate. We are better off being in them than outside.

And the fourth point is that we all have to keep making our societies better at home, particularly as we grow more and more diverse. All the problems you read about somewhere else in the world, are happening on some block in our country.

We really have to give a lot of thought to how we can make our nations microcosms of free, diverse, tolerant and effective societies of the kind we are trying to build in the world.

I do believe if we are committed to a reasonable security policy, a reasonable policy of having more partners and fewer terrorists, more institutional co-operation and more national improvement,that the 21st century will be more peaceful and less bloody than the 20th century.

* This is an abridged version of the speech prepared by former US President Clinton for the Global Business Forum in Auckland on Friday.