Our generation’s challenge is different. Fundamentally, it is the challenge of globalization, of a crowded, interconnected world of seven billion–plus people (more than twice the three billion alive at Kennedy’s inauguration). Our world society is now intertwined more tightly than ever before—by markets, by technology, by social networks—and at the same time faces unprecedented stresses on a global scale: environmental change, resource scarcity, mass migration, vast disparities of income and wealth, and destabilizing technological change. These realities of globalization are daunting and unprecedented. They are not clearly perceived or understood by much of humanity. Our political and economic systems have not yet begun to cope with these new realities.
Between 1991 and 2012, as we see in Figure 1, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the Doomsday Clock from seventeen minutes till midnight—its safest level since the atomic age began in 1945—to just five minutes from midnight. We are once again at risk of spiraling out of control, as we were for a dozen years after 1947 and for a dozen years more after 1972. Once again we will need a peace initiative, one suitable for our own time.
The dire message of the Doomsday Clock in 2012 is no longer about the confrontation of superpowers. Rather, it warns us about the complexities of globalization and sustainable development and the proliferation of nuclear weapons:
The challenges to rid the world of nuclear weapons, harness nuclear power, and meet the nearly inexorable climate disruptions from global warming are complex and interconnected. In the face of such complex problems, it is difficult to see where the capacity lies to address these challenges. Political processes seem wholly inadequate; the potential for nuclear weapons use in regional conflicts in the Middle East, Northeast Asia, and South Asia are alarming; safer nuclear reactor designs need to be developed and built, and more stringent oversight, training, and attention are needed to prevent future disasters; the pace of technological solutions to address climate change may not be adequate to meet the hardships that large-scale disruption of the climate portends.3
Sustainable Development as Our Common Goal
We define our generation’s goal more clearly by placing it in the context of sustainable development. The dominant political priority in nearly every society in the world today is economic advancement. Every government in the world puts the strength of the economy at the top of its agenda. Its political survival, and its ability to compete with adversaries, depends on economic success. Yet sustainable development as a doctrine contends that the pursuit of economic gain alone cannot suffice for human well-being and security. There should be three objectives, not one. The economy should advance. The economic gains should be broad-based or “inclusive,” cutting across different parts of society, different ethnic and minority groups, different classes, and benefiting women as well as men. And the gains should be sustainable in terms of resource use and the conservation of ecosystems. In short, we should aim not for economic growth alone, but for inclusive and environmentally sustainable growth. To accomplish this, governments also require a modus vivendi with the powerful corporate sector, which needs to play by the rules of sustainable development (for example, desisting from pollution and deforestation) without trying to use its lobbying muscle to write the rules for its narrow financial benefit.
The challenge of sustainable development all too often falls on deaf ears, as Kennedy warned about the challenge of peace. Sustainable development surely lacks the drama of the global war on terror. But like Kennedy’s peace initiative, sustainable development can actually save lives in vast numbers and promote global prosperity, something that wars do not do. And as with arms control, the public’s interest in sustainable development has been limited and episodic. Just as arms control negotiations went through countless fruitless sessions in New York, Geneva, and elsewhere before yielding results, sustainable development has been our own generation’s putative commitment for more than twenty years. It was introduced to the world’s consciousness by the Brundtland Commission of 1987, and introduced into global law at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. Yet it has stuck mainly as a concept of theoretical and specialist interest, not as a broad-based and practical venture.
Sustainable development can alleviate global tensions and solve global problems if, following Kennedy’s suggestions, the goals of sustainable development are defined more clearly and made more manageable and less remote. In our time we could at least take steps toward solutions to the great sustainable development challenges we face.
Peace Through Sustainable Development
We need to reconceive the challenge of peace itself. Making peace is a political and social process, but the ability to sustain peace depends on economic development. Impoverished countries fall into violence, conflict, and civil war with far greater frequency and predictability than do stable, prosperous societies. For this reason the United States launched the Marshall Plan in 1947, which provided economic assistance to postwar Europe, as a way to forestall Soviet political advances and consolidate democracies in Western Europe in the context of extreme economic duress. As Secretary of State George Marshall explained, “Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.”4 U.S. leaders were fully aware that the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917 in the context of Russian economic chaos, and Hitler came to power in 1933 in the context of 25 percent German unemployment.
This most basic lesson has been lost on recent policymakers. Today’s conflicts are found mostly in impoverished or economically destabilized countries. Consider Mali, Somalia, Yemen, and Afghanistan, four of the world’s poorest countries. The United States is now engaged in covert or overt military action in all four. Many thousands of civilians die each year. And violent extremists are taking advantage of this instability to make bases for regional operations. Poverty opens the way for conflict, while conflict leads to a further downward spiral of impoverishment. The result is a poverty-violence trap, in which poverty and violence become chronic and mutually reinforcing.
Western intervention in these places has tended to be almost entirely military in character, though the problems they face can rarely be solved by military means, and never by military means alone. I know this bias firsthand, as I’ve tried for years to encourage some measure of development assistance from the United States, which would ultimately be cheaper than military spending. It has almost always been a losing cause. Poor places are treated as foreign policy irrelevancies until they succumb to violence and terror; then they are treated as military and security threats. There seems to be little Western policy in between these two extremes: complete neglect followed by panic and drones.
Looking at a map of the world’s conflict zones, one is struck by the extent to which they are currently concentrated in the African and Asian drylands, an eight-thousand-mile swath that runs west to east from Senegal to Afghanistan, including the African Sahel, the Horn of Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, Western Asia, and Central Asia. The violence in this region is most commonly attributed to what Samuel Huntington famously called the “clash of civilizations,” the alleged front line in an ongoing struggle between Islam and Christianity. Yet there are many peaceful Muslim places in the world, and many of them border Christian places. I suggest that Islamic extremism in the dryland belt is more symptom than cause. One of the deep causes is poverty against a backdrop of severe ecological stress, rising populations, diminishing rainfall, and a growing frequency of droughts and famines.
Recognizing that economic development is a key to peace and democratization, Kennedy launched the Peace Corps, the Alliance for Progress in Latin America, and similar development programs in other parts of the developing world. In his inaugural address, he addressed the people in the “huts and villages across the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery”:
> We pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required—not because the Communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.
Yet foreign assistance was never popular with the American public or political leaders. The Marshall Plan itself barely passed Congress. And after Kennedy, foreign assistance faced a long-term decline in interest and effort. Once the Cold War was over, foreign aid plummeted even further, since the “strategic case” for aid had supposedly disappeared. The share of aid as a percentage of GDP, just 0.1 percent, was lower in 1998 than at any time since 1947. Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, aid rose slightly, especially to “allies” in the Middle East and Central Asia, but still remained low by historical and comparative standards, at about 0.2 percent of GDP.5
To reestablish aid as a pillar of foreign policy—thus saving money, lives, and future grief—would therefore require a change in the American mindset. Americans need to understand that impoverished foreign nations, even those that are ostensibly “foes,” respond positively to practical aid—for health, education, and infrastructure—that is given openly and generously. In addition to providing practical and sometimes lifesaving help, aid signals human respect and a recognition of the commonality of human interests. Aid guided by the precepts of sustainable development would lead America back to true problem solving, the kind that a policy based on drone missiles can never accomplish. If we use our science, technology, and development experience to take on the challenge of basic economic development in the bereft places of the world—from Mali to Somalia, from Yemen to Afghanistan—our country itself would also be a huge beneficiary. We would win diplomatic allies, trading partners, and friends and supporters in the villages and cities of Africa and Asia, and for the right reasons.
Cooperative Problem Solving
Convincing an adversary or a competitor that we share aims and interests isn’t easy. Trust is typically low, and there are ample reasons to bluff. Trust is even lower when countries have been adversaries for years or decades. It would have been much easier if Kennedy had needed to make peace with Canada, but he needed to do it with the Soviet Union, the state that had threatened America’s very survival just months earlier.
We have learned many lessons from Kennedy’s experience and its aftermath. We learned that only those leaders with a holistic and empathetic view are able to achieve success in complex negotiations with an adversary. Otherwise, the pessimists, hardliners, and fearmongers on each side can create self-fulfilling prophecies of failure. Kennedy therefore had to assert his leadership among his own colleagues just as much as with Khrushchev.
Another basic lesson is this: The path to success lies in the nature of the process of negotiation and mutual accommodation itself. Kennedy and Khrushchev signed agreements in 1963 because by then they knew and trusted each other, in part because of the bluster, bluffs, and near disasters that had come before. They had exchanged dozens of letters and suffered the consequences of many misunderstandings. By 1963 each had arrived at a realization he could not have had earlier: their situations were symmetrical. They each sought peace with the other despite a mood of militarism, the skepticism of the generals and hardliners, the vested interests of the military-industrial complex, and the interests and opportunism of their political competitors.
In the academic sphere, where many battles are also surprisingly bitter (“because,” as the saying goes, “the stakes are so low”), the great economist (and Kennedy adviser) Paul Samuelson offered his own wisdom on the art of persuasion. He said that to convince another academic of a point, “give him a half-finished theorem.” That is, let the other person reach his or her own conclusions, not through bluster, but through independent inquiry, guided by a half-finished product.
I want to urge a similar approach to the practical work of sustainable development. One of the reasons for the bitterness between Israelis and Palestinians, Indians and Pakistanis, Americans and Iranians, and other conflicting parties, is the almost complete lack of practical experience in solving problems together, working on “half-finished theorems.” How easy it is to dehumanize one’s adversaries when you peer at them through the lens of a drone, rather than work beside them in some common endeavor. And consider how many of our problems today are problems that cross national boundaries, and how easy it would be to share the burden and excitement of problem solving as well. Israelis and Palestinians share a small sliver of land facing increasing drought and depletion of freshwater resources. So far, Israel has faced this problem by commandeering a disproportionate share of the region’s scarce water supply, but climate and demographic forecasts convince us that this is a losing battle for both sides. The dwindling freshwater resources will not sustain the combined populations of the two sides. Many (including me) have discussed this issue at length with Israelis and with Palestinians. Yet they have rarely discussed it with each other.
President Obama was on to something important in Cairo in 2009 when he proposed the establishment of a set of scientific centers of excellence “in Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, and the appointment of new Science Envoys to collaborate on programs that develop new sources of energy, create green jobs, digitize records, clean water, and grow new crops.”6 This is the right approach. It echoes Kennedy’s remarkable call for scientific collaboration in his speech to the UN General Assembly in 1963. Disappointingly, till now Obama’s vision remains only that, a vision. It is high time to fulfill it, since surely it would mark a step toward peace.
And as always with trip wires of war, we may not have much time. The United States and Iran, for example, seem now to be on a relentless collision course, though the two countries could find much common ground if they tried. Iran is home to great culture, history, and know-how that could help to improve conditions not only in its own region, but in other parts of the world as well. Engagement, joint problem solving, and an honest negotiation over political differences would be vastly more fruitful and prudent than a military faceoff and the possibility of outright conflict.
Leadership and History
We owe our very lives to John Kennedy’s grace under pressure in October 1962. We owe the eventual end of the Cold War in part to his ability to forge a measure of trust and respect between Americans and Russians in 1963, the final year of his life. Between then and now, though, we’ve squandered enormous opportunities. Millions have died needlessly in proxy wars with no real purpose; trillions of dollars, enough to end human poverty in all its forms, have instead been wasted on the Cold War arms races and outright conflicts.
Historians have long debated the great theme of whether people and societies can truly help to steer their fate. Are we but the flotsam on the turbulent seas of technological and social change, rising and sinking in waters beyond our control? Or, as Kennedy insisted, can man be as big as he wants? Is Kennedy right that no problem of human destiny is beyond human beings?
Not every moment of history is equally pregnant with the possibility of constructive choice. Some times are times of stasis that resist change. Others are periods of great flux, in which individual acts of leadership can make a profound difference for good or ill. Deep economic and geopolitical crises are such periods. At the height of the Cold War, with its potential for total destruction, Kennedy had the opportunity to exercise choice, and he showed us how it could be done.
The stakes were so high in 1963 in large part because of the new technological realities, the new face of war in the nuclear age. As Kennedy noted in his inaugural address, man now held “in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life.” We have been struggling to save ourselves ever since, and that struggle continues until today.
At such a hinge of history, individuals can make a vast difference, and Kennedy was fully aware of the high stakes. His struggle was with the genie of n
uclear power, and the unknowns of coexistence with a communist superpower. “With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God’s work must truly be our own.”
Now it is our turn. We still confront the nuclear genie and the thousands of warheads that continue to threaten human survival. We are still challenged by the lack of trust within and between societies. We have developed and mastered remarkable new technologies but still flounder in the art of self-preservation. We still threaten ourselves with our own destruction, whether with our armaments or through the world’s remarkable economic productivity coupled with a still-reckless disregard for the natural environment.
We know that our tasks are large, but so too are the acts of past leadership that inspire us and encourage us on our way. We have been granted the lessons of John Kennedy’s peace initiative, and the gift of his and Ted Sorensen’s words for our age and beyond. We are not gripped by forces beyond our control. We too can be as big as we want. We too can take our stand and move the world.
AMERICAN UNIVERSITY
COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS
June 10, 1963
President Anderson, members of the faculty, board of trustees, distinguished guests, my old colleague, Senator Bob Byrd, who has earned his degree through many years of attending night law school, while I am earning mine in the next 30 minutes, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen:
To Move the World Page 16
