Transcript
CARLOS PASCUAL: I think in many ways we're at a point in time where we need to be thinking about how we redefine the concept of security. If we think of the concept of war that dominated most of the 20th century, it was a concept of conflict between nations who were sovereign states, and we had the image of two aggressive actors acting across borders.
We had an international security system that was, in effect, designed to deal with those issues, and when we think about the United Nations it was premised on nation states as rational actors coming together to exercise scrutiny of one another in the hope that that kind of scrutiny would avoid the worst kind of aggressive and egregious behavior. And it's not that that is irrelevant today, but when we think about a world with non-state and sub-state actors with rogue regimes who may not be necessarily rational in the way that they approach issues or rational from the perspective that we might have when they may not necessarily have the interests of the nation state in mind or, for that matter, not care about the opinions of the international community.
We see the evolution of new challenges -- things like transnational terrorism and organized crime or, worse yet, the possibility of a link of these issues with the proliferation of sensitive technologies.
We also see, increasingly, issues and conflicts and challenges that occur within nations — internal conflict or poverty or extremism — whereas in one day we might have said that those are issues that might apply to a particular country. September 11th — where Afghanistan, the second poorest country in the world, became the base for the most significant strike that we've ever had in U.S. territory — really forced us to change our conceptualization of these issues.
And, hence, we really have to ask ourselves in the 21st century and as we look ahead: What is the concept of security? What is the concept of war? What is the concept of conflict? How do we prepare for that? How do we develop the capabilities to deal with that? What are the budgetary resources that are necessary to address these challenges? And how is it that our military capabilities have to interact with our civilian capabilities to be able to address these issues effectively?
It's in that spirit that we are extraordinarily pleased to have the first public event of the 21st Century Defense Initiative, together with the Saban Center, to be able to sponsor General Petraeus.
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