Brent Scowcroft: Remarks at the US Institute of Peace

It's a great pleasure to kick off this conference on America's Challenges in a Changed World after 9/11. It's a huge topic, and as the keynoter I will not attempt to cover everything.

In fact, it reminds me of the story of the couple who were taking a vacation in Scotland. And they landed and rented a car, drove out into the countryside and promptly got lost. And after driving around for some time, they saw this little man sitting at an intersection printing on a piece of wood. So they said, "Excuse me, sir. Could you tell us the shortest way to Aberdeen?" And he looked at them, and he said, "Folks, if you want the shortest way to Aberdeen, you wouldn't start from here."

Anyway, I propose this morning to be something of a scene setter for the great program which you have in front of you today. To set the scene of a changed world, we must ask at least two questions. The first is, Changed from what? And the second is, How much is the change in the world and how much of the change is in us?

In the first decade after the Cold War, we were relieved from the awesome pressure of nuclear holocaust. Relieved, we tended to treat foreign policy sort of like a charity: something we could engage in or not as the whim struck us.

We were no longer threatened even remotely, and we'd essentially drifted without any deep inquisition into what might be going on in the world. Indeed, Frank Fukuyama published a book during this period, "The End of History," in which he forecast the triumph of liberal democracy, market economy and the absence of conflict.

What was going on in this period before 9/11? In particular, I want to mention two phenomenons developing contrarily but, in some respects, interacting. The first was globalization – primarily in the fact, rather than the policy, of globalization, but both are involved. Borders are becoming porous. The old notion of the Treaty of Westphalia, in which national borders are an absolute barrier to the outside world and what goes on inside – that notion is crumbling under the pressure of international capital flows, communication – not only press, television – all those kinds of things – environment and conscious development, such as Kyoto, the International Criminal Court and things like that. They're changing our world dramatically.

In the United States, in Western Europe and other developed countries, globalization was broadly seen as a good, enabling progress and prosperity in an integrating world. But the world was very different from the earlier world, say, in 1945, when the United Nations was founded. It had 51 members. It now has 190. And the bulk of these new members are poor, weak. And for them, globalization is the onslaught of a bewildering melange of forces disrupting their lives, their culture, their values and the ability of their poor governments to provide for them in the way that Westphalia assumed.

And for many of these people for whom globalism is a threat, the term "globalism" is synonymous with the United States, because we're the ones who are carrying the flag – McDonald's, the movies, the television – it is the onslaught of American culture which is taken to be globalism.

The contrary and yet associated phenomenon which is going on is the political tendency in societies to break up into every smaller, more homogenous, more intolerant political entities. Perhaps the connection here is groups seeking purity against the onslaught of alien forces.

In any case, this has been going on during this period, and this, I believe, is a breeding ground, especially globalization, for terrorism. We didn't see it, partly because we tended to see terrorism as regional or a response to specific grievances, not existential.

During this period, however, we did see the dynamism of Asia during the 1990s and its vulnerability to globalization in the form of the extreme of capital flows in the crisis of '97, '98. What we have not really noticed, however, is the growing ability of China as it modernized to turn out quality industrial products, coupled with the lowest wage rates almost anywhere in the world. This is a phenomenon which would dramatically change Asia and threatened the economies even of the Asian "tigers." On the other hand, of course, with WTO, the Chinese market may finally come into being. But this is a dramatic change.

Our gradual estrangement with Europe continued during the '90s as the Europeans became more intent on integration, turned their gaze primarily inward, and the United States reacted by becoming contentious and unilateral.

Russia, during the '90s, we began increasingly to ignore completely, unless we wanted something from them.

And then there were the holdover issues – the two Koreas, Taiwan, India-Pakistan, and the Middle East conflict –which threatened during this period, as they have before and since.

Into this world first came the Bush administration and then 9/11. The great change of 9/11, I believe, was in the US rather than in the world as I have described what was generally going on.

For us, it was a huge discontinuity, as Dick mentioned, partly because we didn't see it coming and partly because it was a huge departure, was the first time in generations that Americans have felt vulnerable.

It was new for us. Even World War II, while Pearl Harbor was a horror, Hawaii was a long ways away, it wasn't a state, and for most Americans, there was not the personal sense of vulnerability. That is new to us, almost uniquely in the world. In addition, the perpetrators were non-state actors, for whom the traditional notions of deterrence retaliation either didn't apply or took very different forms. And finally, there was the suicidal component which, in addition to the horror of it, is very difficult to combat.

The change in the United States was immediate. First, the last vestiges of what we call the Vietnam Syndrome disappeared. There was no objection, virtually no objection to our sending forces into Afghanistan. We see the American flag everywhere now, and none of them are burning. That is a dramatic change over the previous 30 years. And our hero now is no longer the Wall Street hotshot who makes his first million long before he's 30 years old, but the policemen or the firemen who go back into the burning building one more time.

After 9/11, there was initially a great coming-together in the world. In Europe, the French, of all people, said, "Now we are all Americans," later invoked Article V for the first time. The Russians, Chinese, Pakistan, Iran, Sudan. Indications of cooperation came from around the world. And this spirit helped us to get through phase one of the war on terrorism, which I think was a great military success and probably the only military phase in this war on terrorism, which is part of the problem that we face because we've also been engaged in military transformation.

And the Afghan war showed the awesomeness of that transformation. Somehow it doesn't work now, because subsequent phases are unlikely to be military in the sense Afghanistan was. There are not really many more volunteers to be the next Taliban. And the war is going to be primarily a war of intelligence, and we're not nearly as high-tech in that community with respect to this new enemy as we are in our military.

This is a war -- the intelligence phase -- we cannot win by ourselves. We cannot do it. We have to have the cooperation of friends, allies, in capital flows, in terrorist flows. We need the help of every service, because our enemy is shadowy, elusive, not playing by any of the rules that we know how to take advantage of so well.

The nature of our intelligence task in this part of the war is conceptually simple but high-tech in a new way. Whenever terrorists talk, whenever they move, whenever they spend money, whenever they get money, they leave traces. And theoretically, we ought to be able to pick up those traces.

There are two problems. How do you pick them up and then how do you separate those from the millions of other traces from people going about their daily lives? And how do you do all that while respecting the privacy of the other millions? That is a problem partly of technology, and we need to focus on it very, very deeply.

I'm not going to talk about homeland security, but it is interesting that for the first time in 200 years we now are setting up a Department of Homeland Security. We've never had one before. Why? Because early on we were protected by two great oceans and lately by our power-projection capabilities.

And we have assumed we could keep conflict away from the United States.

Now several problems are beginning to arise in the war on terrorism: Cooperation is waning. The Europeans conceive that, in essence, we've stiffed them in Afghanistan; did not accept or utilize the forces they offered until much of the conflict had been completed. We said, you know, "Thanks. We can do it by ourselves."

And other issues, whether it's the conflict in the Middle East, the second intifada, whether it is Iraq – these are interfering with the concentration on the war on al Qaeda. Stage one is virtually over, although the mopping up is taking a long time. And nationbuilding, an essential part, will take even longer. The administration has not explained the strategy for phase two the way it did for the Afghan phase. Last week there was a cartoon in the Financial Times which had a billboard saying "America's Most Wanted." On the billboard was Osama bin Laden, and a workman was pasting over the front Saddam Hussein.

The administration is no longer talking about "terrorism with a global reach." That's important in several respects. There are all kinds of terrorism. They're all repugnant. And we need to deal with them all. We cannot deal with them all at once. And by dropping the phrase that the president began with – "terrorism with a global reach" – and making all terrorism equal dissipates our ability to concentrate and makes the problem, if we take it seriously, almost unmanageable.

And finally, except on the East Coast, 9/11 is fading as a galvanizing concept. Can we win the war on terrorism? Yes, I think we can, in the sense that we can win the war on crime. There is going to be no peace treaty on the battleship Missouri in the war on terrorism, but we can break its back so that it is a horrible nuisance and not a paralyzing influence on our societies.

To win it, however, as I said, will require close cooperation in a worldwide campaign. And it will require perseverance, patience, and focus to do it.

But in the meantime, of course, the world goes on and all of the other things which preceded 9/11 have not gone away, thus threatening to divert our attention on what is clearly the predominant problem we face. We must learn to walk and chew gum at the same time. The longstanding conflicts – the Koreas, Taiwan, Israel-Palestine – they all are as threatening as they have ever been to disrupt this world of ours. India-Pakistan came very close recently. And the notion that all terrorists are equal and the focus on preemption could play into the hands of the Indians.

Incidentally, just as an aside, it is interesting to look at Kashmir and the West Bank, and in many respects, the conflicts have a great deal in common. The Indians and the Israelis are status quo. They want the violence to stop. They're quite happy with the situation the way it is. It is the Palestinians and the Pakistanis who resent the status quo and want to overturn it. And that makes for a very, very difficult conflict.

There's a new element in the Middle East, and that's Al-Jazeera Television. You know, the Arab world has complained for over a decade about its "street." You have to be careful about its street. It very well may be real now because Al-Jazeera plays night after night, day after day, pictures of Israeli tanks smashing Palestinian homes, and so on. And there may really be building a fury in the region.

In Europe, after the surge of 9/11, relations have resumed their decline. There's a book which will be out this fall which discusses what it claims is a return to great power politics of the late 19th and 20th century, and that one of the fundamental conflicts is likely to be between the U.S. and Europe.

To me, that's probably extreme, but not impossible. And what, to me, this world demands is a US-European cooperation, close cooperation; and simply assuming it is not nearly enough.

After a very bad first year with the Bush Administration, China is beginning to be viewed with more balance. The transition of leadership seems to be going okay, and the Olympics should be a very positive influence over the next several years. There will always be rocks in the road, but that looks better than it did a year ago.

Russia is a bright spot, and I think it shows the value of personal politics, because the improvement in Russian relations, I think, is heavily a result of a personal rapport between President Bush and President Putin. And in fact, it has not fully penetrated down through the bureaucracy on either side. It's not clear exactly who Putin is, but it appears we have an opportunity to attract Russia toward the West.

There are a great many issues that I have not discussed – Japan, NATO, Latin America – Latin America, where the promise of the early '90s, and Fukuyama's book, of democracy and market economies may be in some peril.

One last word on terrorism. While we can only win terrorism on the offensive, homeland security cannot meet the war on terrorism. We have to take the war to the terrorists.

We need also to work on the predisposing factors, which Dick alluded to, behind the terrorist organizations themselves for those countries and people still struggling to find their way in what for many of them is an alien world. Just more economic aid will not suffice. We have to try to find new ways to reach out a hand to help the peoples and small countries into the 20th century so that the promise of technology and an integrated world can become a blessing for all rather than a curse for most.

Thank you very much.