World Public Forum

Published on 28 October 2009

Written by WPF Dialogue of Civilizations

Strobe TalbottTranscript of the Speech of the Brookings Institution President Strobe Talbott (USA) at the Rhodes Forum plenary session

October 9, 2009, Rhodes, Greece

Good morning to all of you,

I think it is very much in the spirit of these proceedings that some of what I have to say this morning will be subject to discussion and indeed to debate. There is only one issue on which I would presume to speak for everyone in this chamber and only because I’m the first one after him to take the podium, and that is to express admiration and thanks to Mr Yakunin for his role and bringing us together and for making this conference an important annual global event. I too am departing from my text there, Vladimir.

I’ve been asked to address the question of President Obama’s foreign policy. And I’d like to do that beginning by relating that topic to the theme of this conference, the dialogue of civilizations.

There are of course many civilizations in the world today and quite a few of them represented in this room, and there had been many more civilizations throughout history. None can quarrel with the idea that different civilizations should be in dialogue with one another. A proposal to that effect was put forward by Ayatollah Taskhiri countryman, former President Mohammed Khatami in the year 2000. Not long after that, dialogue of civilizations was adapted by the United Nations as a motto for the year, and this for irony was 2001.

It’s worth recalling that both President Khatami and the United Nations promoted the dialogue as an alternative to and a remedy for the clash of civilizations - that phrase had been popularized by one of my countrymen, the late Samuel Huntington.

He divided the world into nine distinct and fundamentally incompatible civilizations: Western, or Judeo-Christian, Orthodox, Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, Chinese, Japanese, Latin American, and African.

Note that the first five categories treat religion as the defining characteristic of civilization. Yet we are holding this conference in the country that gave birth to the idea known in Greek as oikumene. It was adapted by Alexander the Great as he spread his realm from Gibraltar to the Punjab. Oicumene is sometimes translated as ‘a sense of communion with all the peoples of the known world’ and it is of course the root of the ecclesiastical term ecumenical – that word too in its clerical sense is well represented here today.

Another feature of the Alexandrean era and of this region was the Greek ideal of cosmopolitanism, which the dictionary defines as a manner of thinking and living that incorporates an appreciation of the prospective of diverse cultures. Many of you here today are infinitely better versed than I am to address this hapax.

But I feel that I can relate them to the character and the world view of the 44th President of the USA. Barak Hussein Obama is among the most ecumenical and cosmopolitan leaders we have ever had in our country. He is remarkably and perhaps uniquely suited to be a leader in a globalized world. His life, his name, his personal heritage and his foreign policy instincts – all bear the imprint of at least three of the nine civilizations on Huntington’s list: Western, Islamic, and African. And he has exposure to several others as well. Not coincidentally he has actively acted campaign for the White House outside the United States. I am referring to his speech in Berlin a year ago, July. In that speech and in others in Cairo, Ankara, Prague, and last month at the UN General Assembly in the G20 summit in Pittsburg he hammered away at the theme of common security for common humanity, which might be paraphrased as common security for a single civilization.

What President Obama is now trying to do is to translate this in the policy and diplomacy, but he is having a very hard time doing so. We are at a suspenseful and dramatic period in American politics. President Obama is at a pivotal and I would say a perilous moment in his presidency. The outcome of that moment can determine whether his administration last one term or two. And that very fact that such a question even arises is in itself quite stunning.

Eleven months ago, right after the US election, all of you along with millions of others around the world watched the extraordinary phenomenon of Obamamania in my country. And yet this summer you watch the bazaar sequel Obamaphobia, often in the form of this rather bazaar protest rallies called town meetings. You heard fever about socialism, communism, Nazism taking over a country called Obamanation. What started as a fringe movement is now showing up along what I would call the right bank of the main stream.

That’s in part because it derives energy from two factors. One is mounting opposition to the rescue and stimulus package that Mr Obama feels is required for economic recovery. The other is widespread deep-seated resistance to the increased role of government in American life. Both these fears are fuelling the current debate over health care reform. Now because Mr Obama’s party has a majority in both houses of Congress, he will probably still be able to sign a heath care bill into law. Nonetheless, without doubt, he has been weakened not just by the legislative war over the health care bills content, but also by the ugly partisanship that has eaten into his previously strong base among political independents.

Now health care is a US domestic issue, but it is associated with the wave of antagonism against the President, which has foreign policy implications. It is made it harder for him to muster support at the home front for what needs to be done abroad, but certainly includes managing the challenges that he faces in Iraq and Afghanistan. Both those military entanglements are inherited from President George W. Bush, but as commander-in-chief President Obama now owns them.

In addition, there are two other issues in the same general neighborhood. One is the delicate and high stakes negotiation - I’d like to think even dialogue - going between the United States and the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran. And the other is the Arab-Israeli conflict in the effort to do something about it.

Both these constitute tests of Mr Obama’s skill as the nation’s diplomat-in-chief. And as though they were not enough, the US along with its allies and partners in North-East Asia notably including the Russian Federation are copying with a defiant belligerent nuclear-capable North Korea. And as though that is not enough – and Mr Yakunin referred to this in his opening remarks - the US like every government in the world is trying to cope with the great recession, a truly global crisis of seismic dimensions with two epicenters: one on Wall Street and the other in Washington. Each of these tasks requires of the President of the United States immense amounts of political skill, political will, and a willingness to draw down his political capital.

Yet I am still not finished with the list of tasks that he faces. In fact the two I have not mentioned supersede all the rest in their magnitude and in their urgency. The most consequential and urgent of those is climate change. The other, a close-second, is the unraveling of the global nuclear non-proliferation regime. These two mega threats are existential in nature, that is they threaten if not the survival of our species, than the survival of the human enterprise in its current form. In other words, our civilization.

In the case of climate change we have to take steps now to stop the increase in green house gases in the atmosphere, so that the consequent increase in the average temperature of the planet does not reach the level of two degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.

Now, in the spirit of openness and dialogue and listening to each other that Mr Yakunin called for in his opening remarks a few minutes ago I must register my own strong view on that subject. It has been suggested that there is still an open question of whether the climate and the planet are warming or cooling. I believe it is not a matter of dogma, but a matter of empirically demonstrated scientific fact that it is warming. And if we are to argue about the facts, we will loose precious time in doing something to change a trend that is scientifically indisputable. The current trajectory on what we find ourselves would have us reached that threshold of two degrees Celsius climate temperature increase in the planet some time around mid-century. And that is not just a number picked out of the air – 2 degrees Celsius. It is almost certainly a tipping point for a perfect storm of irreversible and catastrophic consequences.

Now on that other mega threat, nuclear proliferation. There we have to find ways now, of capping the number of nuclear weapon states on the planet at nine. That’s already four more than the five the nuclear non-proliferation treaties were meant to put in place forty years ago. If we do not put on a new cap now, we could in the next decade or so find ourselves living on an Earth with twenty-five or more nuclear weapon states. And that would be a very dangerous place. It’s already the case that all nine of Sam Huntington civilizations either have a bomb, have had a bomb in the past, or are seeking a bomb. And all nine civilizations are also represented in the ranks of the top green house gas emitters.

When I say that we have to make a break-through in addressing these mega threats now, I mean taking major decisive effective action in the next five or so years. And that means during the Obama presidency, if in fact it lasts for two terms.

One of President Obama’s favorite words – also word Mr Yakunin used in opening the conference this morning – is responsibility. President Obama recognizes that the United States as the No 1 emitter of green house gases and the most powerful nuclear weapon state on the planet has a unique responsibility for turning the corner on both climate change and proliferation. But here is the road and it goes back to American domestic politics. In both cases – climate change and proliferation – Mr Obama’s ability to take the necessary action requires cooperation with and acquiescence of the United States Congress. Why? Because he needs legislation to implement executive branch policy. In order to take a meaningful step towards mitigation of climate change, he needs for the first time in our country to put a price on carbon emissions.

By the same token and order to show leadership on non-proliferation, he needs the United States Senate ratify two treaties – a new strategic arms treaty with Russia, currently in the final and I think very promising stages of negotiations - and a comprehensive test ban treaty which the Senate rejected ten years ago and which Mr Obama plans to re-submit next year.

Those are going to be very, very tough debates. He may win them, but if he does, it will be at the price of some compromise with powerful senators who are skeptical about both imperatives, pricing carbon and taking significant steps towards eventual disarmament, senators who will do everything they can to weaken if not neutralize the measures taken. In order to secure passage of a carbon pricing bill and ratification of two new nuclear treaties, the President is going to prove himself a master of politics as the art of the possible. And that means making deals and not rushing the process. As a result, on climate change the world may have to wait until after the Copenhagen summit in December to see what the United States is willing to commit to. And that combination of delay and uncertainty will be seemed by many at home and abroad, especially in Europe, as falling short of high hopes for Copenhagen.

Copenhagen is right around the corner, not one of President Obama’s favorite destinations these days, I might add.

The world obviously should do its very best in Copenhagen. But we should not expect too much of what can be accomplished in one meeting and thus set ourselves up for a self-fulfilling failure. We made that mistake in Kyoto. Let’s not do it again, a decade later, half way around the world. Dealing in an effective and timely fashion with climate change is going to require doing the best we can through international targets and binding limits attained in multilateral forms and put into treaties. But it also means bilateral agreements of the sort towards the United States is working on with China and will also be seeking with India as well as unilateral initiatives by individual countries and for that matter individual cities.

President Obama has said repeatedly that dealing with climate change requires an all-hands-on-deck effort. He might add all hands on all decks, at all levels of governance, from the local to the national, to the regional, and to the truly global. But always keeping in mind that the stakes are indeed global, universal, and ecumenical. All this takes us back to what I was saying at the outset about the two connotations of the word civilization.

Civilizations are born, they grow, they prosper, they have dialogues and wars between and among themselves, and then they die to be replaced by others.

We are in the part of the world that is rich in mementos of long deceased superpowers: not far to the North is the Parthenon, not far to the South are the pyramids, and of course about fifteen minute’s ride we can join the millions who over the centuries have imagined what it was like when the harbor was guarded by the Colossus of Rhodes, a ghost of a long-dead civilization, called the Dorians.

The point is mortality of civilizations plural has been as much a fact of history as the mortality of individuals, as a fact of human life. But the possible mortality of civilization singular is something new to contemplate, yet contemplate it we must, including what comes out of this conference. It should be part of the new paradigm that Mr Yakunin has suggested. And let’s hope that by contemplating it, we will concentrate our minds on urgent need to muster the national and international will to assure the survival of civilization as a whole.

Thank you very much.