Transcript
CARLOS PASCUAL: We often talk about the way issues are interconnected and related and interdependent. And, you know, here they are. What happens on the economic agenda, and if that crisis intensifies, it’s going to affect the ability to deal with the international climate change agenda, because those issues will have an impact on economic progress and viability and economic growth.
What happens on the economic side and the climate side together will influence the environment for conflict, and whether there’s greater competition for scare land and water. What happens on the conflict side is going to have an impact on the terrorism agenda, in places like South Asia. What happens on the terrorism front is going to be related to the ability to get hands on destructive weapons of mass destruction, such as biological and chemical weapons or, worse yet, nuclear materials.
And so we do need to thing of these as a package. And to complicate it even further, it’s not just a package that you can think about in some broad, global sense. But in the end you have to relate it back to, “What is the policy and strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan?” And how do you build the capacity internationally, nationally on the part of the United States -- but nationally on the part of those local actors. Because, in the end, if the Afghans and the Pakistanis can’t actually control and govern their own state, it doesn’t matter what we do from the outside because we can’t fix it an control it forever.
And that’s the nature of these transnational problems in the world that we face today. It is absolutely huge. It’s critical. It has to be at the center of any kind of foreign policy and international security agenda, if 50 years from now we want to be able to say the world is safer and more prosperous.
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