Transcript
SUSAN RICE: I think that causes us all to have to ask the question: How much does this really matter? All of us prefer to be liked, for the most part, than disliked. But if this were just a popularity contest, I think we could learn to develop a thick skin and blow off the rest of the world when they became too tedious. The fact is this is not a popularity contest. The negative opinions of the United States, particularly to the extent that they are sustained and seemingly entrenched, have negative and potentially lasting security implications for the United States.
Why do I say that? Well, Carlos [Pascual] alluded to it a little bit in his opening comments. When you consider the nature of the world we are living in, one that is characterized by increasingly rapid globalization, not just of the economic sort but the globalization as well of security threats, it is wise to recall that the nature of the threats we face, despite our focus today on important concerns like Iran and North Korean, are increasingly transnational in nature. Transnational threats being terrorism, proliferation, disease and environmental degradation, international crime and narcotics flows, and relative to the Cold War era, for instance, less and less state-based. In a world where the threats that we need to contend with are increasingly transnational, which means that they can flow to anywhere from anywhere, emanate from anywhere, it suggests that we have some different security considerations than we might have had in the past.
In order to deal effectively with transnational threats that can pop up anywhere on the planet, it stands to reason that we need the effective cooperation and the willing cooperation of the maximal number of countries and peoples that we can muster around the world. To the extent that effective cooperation is a function both of the will of government and its people to cooperate with the United States and with international institutions on these transnational security threats, we have to remember that this is a function not only of will but also of capacity. There are many states around the world that lack the capacity to control their territory, their resources to provide for their people, and they are weak inherently. That is one concern.
An added concern, and one that the survey I think underscores, is that we also have a deficit potentially of will -- will at the popular level and in some cases will at the governmental level to cooperate on issues that we deem most important, whether it is terrorism, proliferation, or international crime.
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