It is a great pleasure to be in the city that Madeleine Albright called last week "the capital of the Pacific Rim." There is a lot happening in Los Angeles that those of us in Washington need to watch in terms of relations with Latin America and also with the Pacific Rim.

I want to do one thing first, and that is to thank Secretary Christopher not only for introducing me today, but also for having given me the job as Spokesman in January of 1995. It was a great honor to be his Spokesman, and we traveled the world together. I traveled several hundred thousand miles to more than 65 countries. Secretary Christopher is the most traveled Secretary of State in history—he went a lot farther than I did. When he left Washington in January, there were many nice things said about him. People said that he was one of the best listeners that Washington, a city of towering egos, had ever seen—and that is certainly true. I know from my experience working for him that he is, I think, the greatest American negotiator of our time. He is the quintessential diplomat. I had the honor of being in Dayton, Ohio with Secretary Christopher in November 1995 when, after we had stopped the Bosnian War through NATO air power, we literally dragged the Serbs and the Croats and the Muslims to Wright Patterson Air Force Base for proximity peace talks. Secretary Christopher visited those talks four times over 21 days, and in his last trip in this negotiating marathon, he negotiated for 22½ hours. Returning to his room at 5:30 in the morning, he had about one hour's rest, went for a jog, and then resumed negotiations for another twelve hours. That was the final day that produced the Bosnian Peace Treaty.

Secretary Christopher's legacy is one of great success in negotiations, in terribly difficult negotiations. I have mentioned Bosnia, but think of what has happened in the Middle East over the last four to five years: despite all the frustrations that we currently see in the Middle East peace process, all the acts of terrorism, in the period of time since September 1993, the Israelis and the Palestinians have made more progress than they had in any other comparable time since 1948, the year Israel was created. Much of that progress, as I think the Arabs and Israelis will tell you, is due to Secretary Christopher's brilliant negotiations, dogged negotiations, tireless negotiations, throughout twenty-four well-documented trips to the Middle East. I think that Secretary Chris's legacy is something we must follow as we try to work through the current problems, especially in light of the most recent brutal terrorist attack in the Middle East.

I also want to pay a compliment to Secretary Christopher for having been a visionary in office. In this sense, he gave a very important speech at Stanford in 1996, where he talked about the fact that threats to our security are changing and that we need to think of the environment, global climate change, terrorism, and narcotics as threats that will be just as important to the United States in the twenty-first century as some of the more traditional threats, such as nuclear war and conventional war, have been in our own century. I know Los Angeles is pleased to have Secretary Christopher back here in his home town at O'Melveny & Myers, as a leading member of this community, but Mr. Secretary, I want to assure you that you are sorely missed in Washington.

I have just returned here to the United States from a very interesting trip to Kuala Lumpur, for the Annual Meeting of the ASEAN countries, and to Singapore, in the company of Madeleine Albright. During the last thirty days, she has taken three trips which, in totality, represent much of the future of American foreign policy. I thought it might be useful to share a little bit from those three trips with you because they give us an indication of where our future challenges are going to be, and how our foreign policy interests are changing.

Just over a month ago, Secretary Albright was asked by the President to represent the United States in Hong Kong for the handover ceremonies, and I think we were all very impressed by the way the British represented themselves, by the dignity that they had in handing Hong Kong back to the Chinese after more than a century of British rule. The British left a great legacy in Hong Kong, the legacy of the rule of law, a legacy of having produced a Hong Kong which is really the citadel of modern capitalism. And the fundamental question that everyone is talking about in Hong Kong is this: What will China do with Hong Kong now that Hong Kong is back as part of China? That is a very important question, not only for the six million people who live in Hong Kong—democrats who enjoy democratic political and economic freedoms. It is also an important question as we watch what happens to China over the next decade or so. It may answer the question of what kind of a country China is going to be. That, I think, is the most profound part of the Hong Kong transition. China is emerging as one of the great powers of the Asia-Pacific region. What we don't know is the extent of China's ambitions, and we also don't know the kind of reform that China will ultimately bring to its own people. The way it treats Hong Kong might answer that question for us. Whatever happens, we are going to have to watch China very carefully. China has taken on commitments that are a test of the leadership it brings to Hong Kong, as well as a test of the commitments that it gives the international community.

A week after Hong Kong, Secretary Albright and President Clinton went to Madrid for what was probably the most important foreign policy event of the last decade, and that was the decision by NATO to expand eastward to central Europe, to admit three new members and to indicate that, in a couple of years, additional new members will be admitted from the Central European democracies into NATO. This process of keeping NATO alive, transforming it, giving it a new mission, is a process that involves all of us deeply as Americans because it means that we will continue to be a European power into the next century.

Oftentimes, we Americans do not think of ourselves at a European power, but we are very much so. We are the key to the stability of Europe in the next century because of our leadership in NATO. Because of the foresight of Secretary Christopher and Secretary Albright working with President Clinton, we now have made a fateful decision (I think, the right decision) to support the greatest collective security organization that has ever existed, to keep it going, to broaden it, and to broaden it in such a way that we incorporate some of the countries that have profited from the end of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union.

But there are questions that we have to ask ourselves about this transition. We in the administration hope that by enlarging NATO we are securing the great strategic hope that we all have for Europe in the next century, that Europe will be unified and stable and peaceful—everything that is was not in the twentieth century, in the bloodiest century for Europe in many, many centuries. That is the strategic vision that President Clinton and Secretary Christopher decided upon several years ago and that is what is at stake. That is why it is so important that NATO enlargement work. We have many critics in this country and around the world, and some of those critics say that by making NATO move eastward, we are going to provoke latent nationalist sentiments in Russia and produce a counter-reaction. Or, they say we are going to make NATO not the greatest collective security organization in the world, but perhaps the European version of the United Nations—a great debating organization. They think we may dilute the strength and unity of NATO by expanding it. We don't accept that criticism, and we don't agree with that criticism, but we will have a chance to respond to those critics when the Senate engages in a great debate over the next nine to twelve months—when the Senate needs to ratify that NATO treaty. So that event is also an important event to watch.

Last, I want to just talk briefly about the Secretary's trip to Southeast Asia. Now I know all of you in California do not need any reminding about the importance of the Pacific Rim to the United States. However, sometimes those of us who are East Coast-based—who take more trips to Europe every year than to Asia—do need reminding of the importance of Southeast Asian economies to our economy, of the importance of their stability to what we are trying to accomplish in the Asia-Pacific region. It was an extraordinarily interesting trip. ASEAN, the nine countries of Southeast Asia, now represents the fourth-largest trading bloc with the United States, soon to be the third-largest. [They are] dynamic, growing economies. During our debates in Kuala Lumpur, we heard many interesting things. We heard from Dr. Mahathir, Prime Minister of Malaysia, that somehow the United States is not playing a positive role in Asia. He blamed us for the currency problems that Malaysia and Thailand have been experiencing, and he blamed it on George Soros, one man.

Dr. Mahathir also made the suggestion that the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, which was passed in the late 1940s and is the seminal human rights document which we all live by internationally, is really a western plot to impose western values on Asian countries. [He implied] that those values of individual political freedom, religious freedom, freedom of the press, and the rights of the individual in our societies, should be changed, watered down, and that economic rights, as defined by other countries, should be put in their place. Obviously, we rejected both of these assertions from Dr. Mahathir, but particularly the last one. I think if we have learned anything in this century, as those of you who are involved in law and human rights work know, we have got to do something to make sure that all of us agree as we enter the next century that there are certain rights of individuals that are inviolable, that cannot be transgressed be authoritarian governments or societies, and that we must stand up for the document in the United Nations.

Now these three events—the Hong Kong handover, NATO enlargement, and our work with the Southeast Asian economies—do tell us a lot about the changing nature of our foreign relations. They point the way to some very difficult problems the United States is going to have to confront in the next several years.

Before we go to questions, I thought I would give you my thoughts on where the United States should head in the next century. I am in a particularly interesting position now, as I am in a time of personal transition and will be leaving the State Department's Spokesman's job next week. I have spent the last ten years in Washington working as Spokesman, as well as working on Russian affairs, so there is now a little bit of time for me to reflect. One of the things that has impressed me as the nation talks of foreign policy is that everyone is desperate to define exactly what American foreign policy should represent as we approach the twenty-first century, in the wake of the Cold War. There is a search for a simple, lucid phrase or word to describe the mission of the United States in the next century. We all know that between roughly the end of World War II, and the fall of the Berlin Wall, American foreign policy could be expressed in one word: containment. Containment of the Soviet Union, containment of Communist forces in Europe and Asia. There has been a search since 1989 to magically define where we are heading.

I would like to say something heretical. I would like to say that such a search is not really terribly meaningful. It is not meaningful because we don't live in a world where we perceive one or two threats. We live in a world where the threats are increasingly multi-dimensional, where we are affected by the forces of globalization and interdependence, and therefore it really does not make a lot of sense for me to try, or to have the United States try, to find one roadmap to design the future. I would suggest instead, that we focus on a different question: What are our national interests and how can we protect those interests in the next century? That is a far more compelling and interesting and important question to focus on. So I would humbly like to put forward six challenges for American foreign policy. I know that in putting forward these six subjective challenges that I define from my own experience, I am going to provoke a lot of questions and a lot of counter suggestions from you. That is a good thing because we ought to have vigorous debate in this country. But I think there are six things that the United States must do. Let me tell you what the first one is.

The first one is going to seem very self-evident and perhaps even trite to some of you, and that is that the United States must lead in the world. That is not a question that we have got answered as a country. If you look at the debate in our Congress, on the Op-Ed pages, this is not a partisan debate. If you look at the debate, a lot of people are suggesting quite seriously that the United States is exhausted after having spent several trillion dollars to win the Cold War, that we have done our bit and it is time for others in various regions of the world to step into positions of leadership. While we do want our allies and friends around the world to be active in protecting their own interests and, with us, protecting interests regionally, I would submit that it is a very compelling lesson to learn that the United States in the key to stability and peace in the world. Let me give you a couple of examples.

When Secretary Christopher went to Vietnam in August 1995 to open the United States embassy there after a diplomatic hiatus of 25 years, the constant refrain that we all heard from the Vietnamese leadership was this: "The war is over, we do not want to debate the war with you. We do want to request one thing: the United States must remain an Asian power. We want you to keep your troops in Korea and Japan." That was a very interesting thing to hear from a country with which we fought a war not so long ago. And that is the sentiment that is shared by every country, with the possible exception of one or two, in all the Asia-Pacific region. The Asians see us as the only country, the only great power, that does not seek any kind of territorial ambition in Asia, but will protect what has made Asia the most important and most dynamic region of the world in recent times, in economic progress and growth and political stability, military stability. In Bosnia, I think you saw the difference that the United States made with our combination of military force and political skill in negotiating an end to the war. In the Middle East, over the last 49 years, the Arabs and Israelis have looked only to the United States to be the independent, objective arbiter who can help them make peace. It is not just our decision to be a world leader. It is what the rest of the world really wants from the kind of benevolent, and yet forceful, diplomacy that the United States has expressed for many decades now.

Another example, closer to home to all of you in California, is Central America. Ten or fifteen years ago, in the early 1980s, you could not find many people in Central America who would argue for a greater role for the United States. But in Secretary Christopher's trip to Central America a year and a half ago, in Secretary Albright's trip to Mexico just two months ago, Central Americans want the United States to be more involved than we currently are in their affairs—not militarily, no one wants that after a century of military involvement—but economically, through trade and investment. [They want American involvement] certainly to tackle the problem of narco-trafficking, and certainly the problem of international crime. In fact, when we were in El Salvador a year and a half ago, the big issue was the theft of tens of thousands of automobiles from Southern California and our southern American states into Central America. That gives you sense of the changing way that diplomacy is working. It also gives you a sense of the importance of the United States.

The other thing that we need to learn and understand about American leadership and power is that we are on the ascendant. Ten years ago, Paul Kennedy wrote a book about the decline of the great powers in which he predicted that the United States was a declining power in the world and would be overtaken by a variety of forces and countries. Professor Kennedy is a very bright man and he sold a lot of books, but I don't think there is anybody who would seriously contend in 1997 that the United States is a declining power. It is the reverse. Economically, we are the largest economy in the world. Our second competitor is dwarfed by our economic size. "Militarily," Charles Krauthammer made the comment in Time magazine last week, "We may be the greatest military power since Rome." Think about the lack of competitors we have, and the lack of any combination of competitors that can do us any harm. Politically, we are continually called upon to be the creative force in the world and so we are seen by others as the key indispensable power, but it is not always the way we see ourselves. Thus, the first challenge for America and America's foreign policy in the next century, is to answer that question: Will we lead and use our power for good in the world?

The second challenge is not going to make a lot of people in this room very happy. I think the second challenge is to be very clear about what our vital national interests are and where they are not. And by vital national interests, I mean national interests that truly define security for our country. Where are the mortal threats that could destroy us or our way of life, and how can we protect ourselves from them? I think we elect the President and Vice President and we pay the rest of us in Washington to answer these questions. Here is my own answer: We ought to focus like a laser on two parts of the world—Europe and Asia. It does not mean that the rest of the world—Latin America, Africa, the Middle East—is not important. It just means that when you think as policy-makers about where you put your military resources, your fleets and your armies, where you put your diplomatic attention, where you focus your economic initiatives, it must be on both Europe and Asia, the two parts of the worlds where we have our security, our most vital security commitments: in NATO, in Europe, in Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Thailand, and Australia, security commitments in Asia. It seems to me that we need to make sure that we are well- grounded in both areas, and that means that we need to be a truly global power, not a continental power. So we remain with one hundred thousand troops in Europe. We work through NATO enlargement to keep the peace so that Americans do not have to fight in Europe in the next century, as we did three times in this century. It means that economically in Europe, we work in a more effective way with the European Union to protect the ability of our companies to invest fairly in Europe and we have seen a fairly dramatic example in the aerospace industry on that issue just in the last couple of weeks. It means that we need to think of ourselves as a European power.

In Asia, an area of increasing importance to the United States, this means that we must maintain troops in Japan and Korea, maintain our security commitments, engage economically so that we help our companies preserve their positions in that part of the world. It also means that we must be very careful in designing a strategy that will work in China, with China. My own view is that the greatest unanswered question about American foreign policy in the next fifty years is: What about China? What kind of power will China be? What kind of ambitions does China have for its own military, strategic sense of itself in Asia?

The Clinton administration has tried very hard to engage China, but it is not always easy because we have a variety of very profound differences with China. President Clinton and Secretaries Christopher and Albright have made a big effort now to develop a policy based on engagement, but a policy that also tells it like it is on the issue of human rights. When Secretary Christopher was in office, he used to say publicly as well as privately that we need more institutional links in Asia. As Secretary of State, Secretary Christopher was called upon to travel to Europe ten times a year, it seemed, to attend one meeting or another of an organization to which we belonged that united Europe and the United States. There aren't a lot of organizations that unite Asia and the United States. There is APEC, and there is ASEAN, and we need to develop those lists. It seems to me that we Americans need to get to know Kuala Lumpur and Singapore and Seoul and Tokyo as intimately as we know London and Paris and Bonn and Moscow, because I have a sense that our increasing national interests will take place in that part of the world rather than in Europe. That is the second challenge: focus like a laser on Europe and Asia.

The third challenge, it may sound slightly contradictory, but welcome to a California audience: don't forget Latin America. Latin America is a place of profound importance to the United States and you will be surprised to know that between 1988 and 1996, an American Secretary of State did not travel in Latin America. Secretary Christopher resolved that problem by making an eight-country trip through Latin America in February 1996. But that does give you an indication of where the Reagan and Bush Administrations put some of their priorities. They did not travel to the continent. It is extraordinary.

Following on the heels of Secretary Christopher, Secretary Albright has been to Guatemala and Mexico, and now the President, having been to Mexico, will travel to Argentina and Brazil in October, and then to Santiago, Chile, in March of next year for the Summit of the Americas. The Clinton Administration is trying to give and is giving more of a focus on our relations with Latin America.

I mentioned that this is a challenge because I do not think that this message has permeated through Washington, or throughout the establishments in this country that are concerned with foreign affairs: business, political, and military. We will disregard and ignore Latin America at our peril because of all the opportunities and problems that emanate from all the countries that inhabit that region. Just take Mexico as one example: we share a 2000-mile border. Along that border many wonderful things happen in terms of a very large trade relationship, and [there are] a lot of very good people-to-people contacts. Yet there are tremendous security problems for both Mexico and the United States on that border: immigration, about which I need not talk to a Californian audience; narcotics trafficking, the scourge of crack cocaine in our streets that comes right through Mexico from sources in South America; environmental problems in Southern California and Texas and New Mexico and Arizona across that 2000-mile border. We have got to pay more attention to Latin America and we must give it more focus in our diplomatic relations. That is the third challenge.

A fourth challenge, I think, are new threats to global security. We need to think of our foreign policy not in traditional European terms of land wars and balance of power and even nuclear diplomacy. We need to think of the insidious threats to the security of everybody in this room and, in fact, these threats probably make more of a difference in your daily lives than do the larger war- and-peace questions. The threats of narcotics, terrorism, population, international crime, and nuclear proliferation—these threats are very hard to deal with because one country alone, even a country of our size and power, cannot hope to resolve them. So we must build alliances around the world to help confront these problems. We must spend money on these problems, and we must work, particularly on the question of nuclear proliferation, with our old adversaries, Russia and China. [We must] limit the ability of Russian scientists who used to work in the Soviet nuclear weapons laboratory out in the Urals (there are 4,500 of these people). If [one of them] decides to take up an offer from Saddam Hussein or Khadafi, to build a lab in Baghdad or Tripoli, he could produce, on his or her own, a nuclear device. We need to keep nuclear devices our of the hands of dictators and rogue states like Iraq and Iran and Libya.

We also need to keep fissile materiels out of the hands of terrorists. We have seen Dow Chemical gas being used in terrorist attacks in Japan. It is not farfetched to think that terrorist attacks in the future will have a nuclear or biological warfare dimension to them. This is an international problem that everyone can agree on. It is a problem that speaks to the need for us to act effectively overseas. We must pay attention to them. Again, I do want to pay tribute to Secretary Christopher for his vision in having put these problems on our foreign policy agenda and having said publicly that we now need to treat them as seriously as any other question in American foreign policy. That is the fourth challenge.

The fifth challenge is that the United States needs, in my view, to retain a sense of itself as a country that is willing and able to negotiate some of the very difficult regional problems around the world, such as the Middle East peace process, such as the Bosnian problems, such as the problem in Cyprus and the problems between Greece and Turkey in the Aegean. The Cambodian problem. The Peru-Ecuador border dispute. Problems in keeping the peace in Angola, and Southern Africa. All of these problems sooner or later normally require the United States to make a tactical decision to get involved as part of a wider U.N. effort to negotiate a peace or send peace-keeping troops to these countries, or to be involved in actually negotiating a peace treaty. Sometimes there is resistance in the United States as well as overseas to the United States playing this kind of role, yet no one else will play it. The United Nations is in many ways a very effective, very fine organization, but it has not distinguished itself politically in its existence over half a century as an organization that can go out and actually negotiate the peace in most parts of the world. The United States does have that capacity.

The last challenge is the first challenge: the decision to lead. I thought I should begin and end with that challenge—it is so important because, with all of our power, and with all of our good intentions, we will not be effective if we do not have the self-confidence and will to look upon ourselves as the country that must lead around the world. Again, this is not a partisan debate. There are liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans who want us to withdraw, and we have to resist that temptation. There is a great national debate occurring on this issue and it is interesting: it is occurring on talk radio, on cable television, and it certainly occurs during primary season, before our national election and our midterm elections. That debate is framed very simply, and perhaps too simply, between the isolationists and those who believe in engagement. I think you know where those of us in government, at least, most of us in this administration, come down on this issue—it is on the side of engagement. There are two reasons why we must pursue an engagement with the world: self-interest is the most compelling. We do not live alone in our continent any more, we cannot. We have an economic self-interest in engaging with the rest of the world. Our companies and our economy will not succeed if they are not export-driven.

But the larger reason is humanitarian, it is moral, and it gets to the sense of vision that we have for our own society. We were built more that two hundred years ago on an idea that the individual is sacrosanct, that democracy should be ascendant. If we do not stand up for that around the world, if we do not oppose Dr. Mahathir in his effort to destroy the U.N. Declaration on Human Rights, if we do not continue to try to make peace in the Middle East, if we do not continue to try to engage Russia and China for peace, not war, in the next century, no other country will do it and our own vision of America will suffer and our sense of ourselves will not be complete. So my sixth challenge is my first challenge: America must have the will and self-confidence and foresight to lead in the next century.