[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1995, Book II)]
[October 6, 1995]
[Pages 1544-1551]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at a Freedom House Breakfast
October 6, 1995

    Thank you very much. I'm honored to be introduced by someone who 
writes so powerfully about the past and is working so effectively to 
shape the future. The Secretary of State and I have tried to encourage 
both those activities by keeping Win Lord busy at the State Department.
    I'm honored to be here with all of you and to be here at Freedom 
House. For more than 50 years, Freedom House has been a voice for 
tolerance for human dignity. People all over the world are better off 
because of your work. And I'm very grateful that Freedom House has 
rallied this diverse and dynamic group. It's not every day that the 
Carnegie Endowment, the Progressive Policy Institute, the Heritage 
Foundation, and the American Foreign Policy Council share the same 
masthead. I feel that I should try out a whole list of issues and try to 
get check-off here--[laughter]--before the meeting goes any further.
    It does prove that there is a strong, dynamic center in our country 
that supports America's continued leadership in the world. We have all 
worked for that. And I want to publicly thank the Secretary of State and 
Tony Lake, the others in our foreign policy team, my Counselor, Mr. 
McLarty, up here who's been especially active on our behalf in Latin 
America. And I want to thank all of you who have supported that 
continued endeavor.
    You know, in 1991 I sought the Presidency because I believed it was 
essential to restore the American dream for all Americans and to 
reassert America's leadership in the post-cold-war world. As we move 
from the industrial to the information age, from the cold war world to 
the global village, we have an extraordinary opportunity to advance our 
values at home and around the world. But we face some stiff challenges 
in doing so as well.
    We know that at home we have the responsibility to create 
opportunity for all of our citi-


[[Page 1545]]

zens to make the most of their own lives, to strengthen their families 
and their communities. We know that abroad we have the responsibility to 
advance freedom and democracy, to advance prosperity and the 
preservation of our planet. We know that the forces of integration and 
economic progress also contain the seeds of disruption and of greater 
inequality. We know that families, communities, and nations are 
vulnerable to the organized forces of disintegration and the winner-
take-all mentality in politics and economics. We know all this, and 
therefore, we have an even heavier responsibility to advance our values 
and our interests.
    Freedom House, in my view, deserves extraordinary praise for your 
sense of timing of this meeting. I wonder if Adrian Karatnycky and his 
colleagues knew that in the days prior to this discussion the United 
States would have the opportunity to demonstrate so vividly once again 
the proposition this conference seeks to advance, that American 
leadership and bipartisan support for that leadership is absolutely 
essential as a source of our strength at home and our success abroad. We 
must stand for democracy and freedom. We must stand for opportunity and 
responsibility in a world where the dividing line between domestic and 
foreign policy is increasingly blurred.
    Our personal, family, and national security is affected by our 
policy on terrorism at home and abroad. Our personal, family, and 
national prosperity is affected by our policy on market economics at 
home and abroad. Our personal, family, and national future is affected 
by our policies on the environment at home and abroad. The common good 
at home is simply not separate from our efforts to advance the common 
good around the world. They must be one and the same if we are to be 
truly secure in the world of the 21st century.
    We see the benefits of American leadership in the progress now being 
made in Bosnia. In recent weeks, our military muscle through NATO, our 
determined diplomacy throughout the region, have brought the parties 
closer to a settlement than at any time since this terrible war began 4 
years ago. Yesterday, we helped to produce an agreement on a Bosnia-wide 
cease-fire. Now, the parties will come to the United States to pursue 
their peace talks mediated by our negotiating team and our European and 
Russian counterparts.
    We have a long way to go, and there's no guarantee of success. But 
we will use every ounce of our influence to help the parties make a 
peace that preserves Bosnia as a single democratic state and protects 
the rights of all citizens, regardless of their ethnic group.
    If and when peace comes, the international community's 
responsibility will not end. After all the bloodshed, the hatred, the 
loss of the last years, peace will surely be fragile. The international 
community must help to secure it. The only organization that can meet 
that responsibility strongly and effectively is NATO. And as NATO's 
leader, the United States must do its part and send in troops to join 
those of our allies under NATO command with clear rules of engagement. 
If we fail, the consequences for Bosnia and for the future of NATO would 
be severe. We must not fail.
    The United States will not be sending our forces into combat in 
Bosnia. We will not send them into a peace that cannot be maintained, 
but we must use our power to secure that peace. I have pledged to 
consult with Congress before authorizing our participation in such an 
action. These consultations have already begun.
    I believe Congress understands the importance of this moment and of 
American leadership. I'm glad to see Chairman Livingston here at the 
head table today. As I have said consistently for 2 years, we want and 
welcome congressional support. But in Bosnia as elsewhere, if the United 
States does not lead, the job will not be done.
    We also saw the benefits of America's leadership last week at the 
White House where leaders from all over the Middle East gathered to 
support the agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. For 
nearly a half-century now, Democratic and Republican administrations 
have worked to facilitate the cause of peace in the Middle East. The 
credit here belongs to the peacemakers. But we should all be proud that 
at critical moments along the way, our efforts helped to make the 
difference between failure and success.
    It was almost exactly a year ago that the United States led the 
international effort to remove Haiti's military regime and give the 
people of Haiti a real chance at democracy. We've succeeded because 
we've backed diplomacy with sanctions and ultimately with force. We've 
succeeded because we understood that standing up

[[Page 1546]]

for democracy in our own hemisphere was right for the Haitian people and 
right for America.
    American efforts in Bosnia, the Middle East, and Haiti and elsewhere 
have required investments of time and energy and resources. They've 
required persistent diplomacy and the measured use of the world's 
strongest military. They have required both determination and 
flexibility in our efforts to work as leaders and to work with other 
nations. And sometimes they've called on us to make decisions that were, 
of necessity, unpopular in the short run, knowing that the payoff would 
not come in days or weeks but in months or years. Sometimes they have 
been difficult for many Americans to understand because they have to be 
made, as many decisions did right after World War II, without the 
benefit of some overarching framework, the kind of framework the bipolar 
cold war world provided for so many years.
    To use the popular analogy of the present day, there seems to be no 
mainframe explanation for the PC world in which we're living. We have to 
drop the abstractions and dogma and pursue, based on trial and error and 
persistent experimentation, a policy that advances our values of freedom 
and democracy, peace, and security.
    We must continue to bear the responsibility of the world's 
leadership. That is what you came here to do, and that's what I want to 
discuss today. It is more than a happy coincidence that the birth of 
bipartisan support for America's leadership in the world coincides with 
the founding of this organization by Eleanor Roosevelt and Wendell 
Willkie in 1941 when for the first time Americans, both Democrats and 
Republicans, liberals and conservatives and moderates, understood our 
special obligation to lead in the world.
    The results of that responsible leadership were truly stunning: 
victory in the war and the construction of a post-cold-war world. Not 
with abstract dogma but again, over a 5-year period, basing experience 
on new realities, through trial and error with a relentless pursuit of 
our own values, we created NATO, the Marshall plan, Bretton Woods, the 
institutions that kept the peace in Europe, avoided nuclear conflict, 
helped to spread democracy, brought us unparalleled prosperity, and 
ultimately ensured the triumph of freedom in the cold war.
    In that struggle, Freedom House and organizations like it reminded 
Americans that our leadership is essential and that to advance our 
interests, that leadership must remain rooted in our values, must 
continue to advance democracy and freedom to promote peace and security, 
to enhance prosperity and preserve our planet.
    When it comes to the pursuit of these goals, it is important that we 
never forget that our values and our interests are one in the same. 
Promoting democracies that participate in this new global marketplace is 
the right thing to do. For all their imperfections, they advance what 
all people want and often fight and die for: human dignity, security, 
and prosperity. We know these democracies are less likely to go to war, 
less likely to traffic in terrorism, more likely to stand against the 
forces of hatred and intolerance and organized destruction.
    Throughout what we now call the American century, Republicans and 
Democrats disagreed on specific policies, often heatedly from time to 
time, but we have always agreed on the need for American leadership in 
the cause of democracy, freedom, security, and prosperity. Now that 
consensus is truly in danger, and interestingly enough, it is in danger 
in both parties. Voices from the left and the right are calling on us to 
step back from, instead of stepping up to, the challenges of the present 
day. They threaten to reverse the bipartisan support for our leadership 
that has been essential to our strength for 50 years. Some really 
believe that after the cold war the United States can play a secondary 
role in the world, just as some thought we could after World War II, and 
some made sure we did after World War I.
    But if you look at the results from Bosnia to Haiti, from the Middle 
East to Northern Ireland, it proves once again that American leadership 
is indispensable and that without it our values, our interests, and 
peace itself would be at risk.
    It has now become a truism to blame the current isolationism on the 
end of the cold war because there is no longer a mainframe threat in 
this PC world. But when I took office, I made it clear that we had a lot 
of work to do to get our own house in order.
    I agree that America has challenges at home that have to be 
addressed. We have to revive our economy and create opportunity for all 
of our citizens. We have to put responsibility back into our social 
programs and strengthen our families and our communities. We have to 
reform our own Government to make it leaner

[[Page 1547]]

and more effective. But we cannot do any of these things in isolation 
from the world which we have done so much to make and which we must 
continue to lead.
    Look at what is going on. Many of the new democracies in this world, 
they're working so hard. I see their leaders all the time. They believe 
in the cause of freedom, and they are laboring out there in these 
countries against almost unbelievable obstacles. But their progress is 
fragile. And we must never forget that. We have to see them as growing, 
growing things that have to be nurtured in a process that could still be 
reversed.
    And we also have to recognize that we confront a host of threats 
that have assumed new and quite dangerous dimensions, the proliferation 
of weapons of mass destruction. In the technology age, that can mean 
simply breaking open a vial of sarin gas in a Tokyo subway. It can mean 
hooking into the Internet and learning how to build a bomb that will 
blow up a Federal building in the heart of America. These forces, just 
as surely as fascism and communism, would spread darkness over light, 
disintegration over integration, chaos over community. And these forces 
still demand the leadership of the United States.
    Let me say again, the once bright line between domestic and foreign 
policy is blurring. If I could do anything to change the speech patterns 
of those of us in public life, I would almost like to stop hearing 
people talk about foreign policy and domestic policy and instead start 
discussing economic policy, security policy, environmental policy, you 
name it.
    When you think about the world and the way that you live in it, you 
readily see that the foreign-domestic distinction begins to evaporate in 
so many profound ways. And if we could learn to speak differently about 
it, the very act of speaking and thinking in the way we live, I believe, 
would make isolationism seem absolutely impossible as an alternative to 
public policy.
    When the President of Mexico comes here in a few days and we talk 
about drug problems, are we talking about domestic problems or foreign 
problems? If we talk about immigration, are we discussing a domestic 
issue or a foreign issue? If we talk about NAFTA and trade, is it their 
foreign politics or our domestic economics? We have to understand this 
in a totally different way. And we must learn to speak about it in 
different ways.
    The isolationists are simply wrong. The environment we face may be 
new and different, but to meet it with the challenges and opportunities 
it presents and to advance our enduring values, we have to be more 
engaged in the world, not less engaged in the world. That's why we have 
done everything we could in our administration to lead the fight to 
reduce the nuclear threat, to spread democracy in human rights, to 
support peace, to open markets, to enlarge and defend the community of 
nations around the world, to share our aspirations and our values, not 
in abstract but in ways that are quite practical and immediately of 
benefit to the American people.
    Consider just a few examples. Every American today is safer because 
we're stepping back from the nuclear precipice. Russian missiles are no 
longer pointed at our citizens, and there are no longer American 
missiles pointed at their citizens. Thanks to agreements reached by 
President Reagan, President Bush, and our administration, both our 
countries are cutting back their nuclear arsenal.
    Over the past 3 years, we've been able to persuade Ukraine, 
Kazakhstan, and Belarus to give up nuclear weapons left on their land 
when the Soviet Union collapsed. We've convinced North Korea to freeze 
its nuclear program. We've secured the indefinite extension of the 
Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. We're working hard to make sure 
nuclear materials don't wind up in the hands of terrorists or 
international criminals. And I hope and pray that next year we'll 
succeed in getting a comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty.
    Americans are safer because of the tough counterterrorism campaign 
we have been waging, including closer cooperation with foreign 
governments, sanctions against states that sponsor terrorism, and 
increasing the funding, the manpower, the training for our own law 
enforcement. These have helped us to get results, big, visible results, 
like the conviction just this week of those who conspired to wage a 
campaign of terror in New York, and things that aren't so visible but 
are very important, the planned terrorist attacks that have been 
thwarted in the United States and on American citizens, the arrests that 
have been secured in other countries through our cooperation.

[[Page 1548]]

    We have an obligation to work more and more and more on this. And if 
there is any area in the world where there is no difference between 
domestic and foreign policy, surely it is in our common obligation to 
work together to combat terrorism.
    That is why, even before Oklahoma City, I had sent legislation to 
the Hill asking for additional resources and help to deal with the 
threat of terrorism. And after Oklahoma City, I modified and 
strengthened that legislation. The Senate passed the bill quickly, but I 
am very disappointed that the bill is now stalled in the House. We need 
this legislation.
    I believe Federal law enforcement authorities must be held 
accountable. I believe we must be open about whatever has happened in 
the past. But that has nothing to do with our obligation to make sure 
that the American people have the tools that they need to combat the 
threat of terrorism. So, once again, I say I hope the antiterrorism 
legislation will pass. We need it. The threat is growing, not receding.
    When we gave democracy another chance in Haiti, a lot of people said 
this has nothing to do with the United States. Well, it did. It did. It 
mattered that, when somebody came to our country and gave their word 
that they would leave and bring back democracy, that we enforce that 
commitment. And in a more immediate sense, in the month before our 
intervention, 16,000 Haitians fled tyranny for sanctuary in Florida and 
elsewhere in our region, but 3 months after the intervention, the 
refugee flow was practically zero.
    When Mexico ran into a cash flow crisis, we put together an 
emergency support package to help put our neighbor back on the course of 
stability and economic progress. And to their credit, the Republican 
leaders of the Congress supported that effort. But it was impossible to 
pass a bill through the Congress endorsing it because of all the surveys 
which showed that the American people were opposed to the Mexican 
bailout by about 80-15, as I remember the poll on the day that I took 
executive action to do it. This is another case, however, when what may 
be unpopular in the short run is plainly in the interest of the United 
States in the long run.
    When your neighbors are in trouble and they're trying to do the 
right thing, you normally try to help them, because it's good for the 
neighborhood. Look what's happened since the United States stepped in to 
try to be a good neighbor to Mexico. Economic growth has returned, even 
though in a fragile state, more quickly than it was anticipated; exports 
have returned to levels that exceed what they were pre-NAFTA; and just 
yesterday, President Zedillo called me to say that Mexico will repay 
$700 million of its debt to the United States well ahead of schedule.
    Consider what would have happened if we would have taken the 
isolationist position. What would have happened to their economy? What 
would have happened to the international financial market's reaction to 
that in Argentina, in Brazil, throughout Latin America and other 
fragile, emerging democracies? What would have happened to our 
relationships and our cooperation on a host of issues between us? It was 
the right thing to do. Was it a domestic issue or a foreign issue? You 
tell me. All I know is we have a better neighborly relationship and the 
future is brighter for the American people and for the people of Mexico 
because we are pursuing a strategy of engagement, not isolation.
    You can see that in what's happening in Europe, where we're trying 
to bring the nations of Europe closer together, working for democracy 
and economic reform in the Soviet Union and Central Europe and 
modernizing NATO, strengthening the Partnership For Peace. And again I 
will say, these things also further our interests.
    I was told just last week that by all the trade initiatives which 
have been taken, from NAFTA and GATT to over 80 separate individual 
trade agreements that Ambassador Kantor has conducted, 15 of them with 
Japan alone, the expanded volume of exports for the United States has 
created more than 2 million jobs in the last 2\1/2\ years, paying well 
above the national average. With the Summit of the Americas, with the 
APEC process that we have agreed on, there are more to come.
    The Commerce Department and the State Department have worked 
together more and have worked harder than ever before to try to help 
Americans take advantage of these new opportunities. They are a part and 
parcel of our foreign policy and our domestic policy.
    And let me say one other thing. We have tried to make it a constant 
refrain that while we seek to engage all countries on terms of goodwill, 
we must continue to stand up for the values that we believe make life 
worth living.

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We must continue to stand up for the proposition that all people, 
without regard to their nationality, their race, their ethnic group, 
their religion, or their gender, should have a chance to make the most 
of their own lives, to taste both freedom and opportunity.
    The most powerful statement of that by anyone in our administration 
recently was a statement made by the First Lady at the women's 
conference in Beijing, where she condemned abuses of women and their 
little children, and especially their little girl children, throughout 
the world, not sparing the problems of domestic violence and street 
crime here in the United States.
    These are the kinds of things that America must continue to do. From 
Belfast to Jerusalem, American leadership has helped Catholics and 
Protestants, Jews and Arabs to walk the streets of their cities with 
less fear of bombs and violence. From Prague to Port-au-Prince, we're 
working to consolidate the benefits of democracy and market economics. 
From Kuwait to Sarajevo, the brave men and women of our Armed Forces are 
working to stand down aggression and stand up for freedom.
    In our own hemisphere, only one country, Cuba, continues to resist 
the trend toward democracy. Today we are announcing new steps to 
encourage its peaceful transition to a free and open society. We will 
tighten the enforcement of our embargo to keep the pressure for reform 
on, but we will promote democracy and the free flow of ideas more 
actively. I have authorized our news media to open bureaus in Cuba. We 
will allow more people to travel to and from Cuba for educational, 
religious, and human rights purposes. We will now permit American 
nongovernmental organizations to engage in a fuller range of activities 
in Cuba. And today, it gives me great pleasure to announce that our 
first grant to fund NGO work in Cuba will be awarded to Freedom House to 
promote peaceful change and protect human rights.
    Just mentioning this range of activities and the possibilities for 
positive American leadership demonstrates once again how vital it is to 
our security and to our prosperity, demonstrates once again that 
advancing our values and promoting our self-interests are one in the 
same.
    I suppose, given the purpose of this conference and the unique 
sponsorship of it, that everybody here shares that belief and that, in a 
way, I'm just preaching to the choir. But this isolationist backlash, 
which is present in both parties, is very real. And if you look at it 
from the point of view of people who feel threatened by the changes in 
the world, it is even completely understandable. So it is important that 
we not simply condemn it. It is even more important that we explain the 
way the world is working. And as the world works its way through this 
period of transition toward a new order of things in which we can garner 
all of the benefits of change and technology and opportunity and still 
reinforce the importance of giving everybody a chance, giving all 
families the chances to be strong, solidifying communities, as we work 
our way through this period, it is more and more important that we not 
simply condemn the isolationists but that we seek to explain how the 
world works and why we must be engaged and lead.
    Condemnation is not enough. Characterization is not enough. We must 
work through these issues. The American people are good people. They 
have common sense. They care when people are being murdered around the 
world. They understand that a war somewhere else could one day involve 
our sons and daughters. They know that we cannot simply pretend that the 
rest of the world is not there. But many of them have their own 
difficulties. We must work and work and work on the basic values and 
interests and arguments until we beat back the forces of isolation, with 
both intense passion and reason.
    You can do that. That is what you must help us to do. Every one of 
you, each in your own way, with your own centers of influence, you can 
do that, with assertion and with argument.
    Let me just give you one specific example: I am determined to do 
everything I can to preserve our international affairs budget. It 
represents, after all, less than 2 percent of our overall budget. 
Foreign aid is unpopular in the abstract because Americans believe we 
spend a lot more of their money on foreign aid than we do. But when you 
ask the American people how much we should spend, they will tell you 3 
percent, 4 percent, 5 percent, more than we in fact spend.
    No agency in this era when we're trying to balance the budget can be 
exempt from conscious cost-cutting. Vice President Gore and I have 
worked very hard to give the American people the smallest Government, in 
terms of Federal employees, we've had since President

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Kennedy was in office, to eliminate hundreds of programs. But we must 
have the tools of diplomacy.
    American leadership is more than words and the military budget. 
Although the military budget is important, we must have a diplomacy 
budget. Some in Congress literally want to gut foreign assistance, to 
hack the State Department's budget, to slash the Arms Control and 
Disarmament Agency, the USIA, AID. They would shirk our responsibilities 
to the United Nations. I want to go give this speech to the United 
Nations. Wouldn't you like it if I did? Wouldn't you like it if I did? 
[Applause] I appreciate the applause, but you tell me what I'm supposed 
to say. I will go give this speech, and they will say, ``Thank you very 
much, Mr. President, where's your $1 billion?'' [Laughter] Why is the 
United States the biggest piker in the U.N.?
    Now, let me say, does the United Nations need to be reformed? Has a 
lot of our money and everybody else's money been wasted? Does there need 
to be greater oversight? Of course there does. Is that an argument for 
taking a dive on the United Nations? No.
    We need your support for this. We must do this. It is the right 
thing to do. It is the responsible thing to do. Those who really would 
have us walk away from the U.N., not to mention the international 
financial institutions, they would really threaten our ability to lead.
    As you know, in instances from Bosnia to Haiti, working out how we 
can lead and still maintain our alliances and cooperate through the 
United Nations and through NATO is sometimes frustrating and almost 
always difficult. But it is very important. We don't want to run off 
into the future all by ourselves, and that means we have to work 
responsibly through these international organizations and we have to pay 
our fair share. Every dollar we spend on foreign assistance comes back 
to us many times over.
    By reducing the threat of nuclear war in the Newly Independent 
States, we've been able to cut our own spending on strategic weapons. By 
supporting democratic reforms and the transition to free markets in the 
Soviet Union and in Central Europe, we promote stability and prosperity 
in an area that will in the future become a vast market for the United 
States. By assisting developing nations who are fighting against 
overpopulation, AIDS, drug smuggling, environmental degradation, the 
whole range of problems they face, we're making sure the problems they 
face today don't become our problems tomorrow. The money we devote to 
development or peacekeeping or disaster relief, it helps to avert future 
crises whose cost will be far greater. And it is the right thing to do. 
It is the right thing to do.
    I am very worried that all these budgets are at risk--some of them 
in an almost deliberate attempt to cut the United States off from 
partnership. I'll just give you one other example so I can go home and 
tell the Vice President I did it. [Laughter]
    We have a little bit of money devoted to a comprehensive, worldwide 
effort to deal with the threat of global warming. It is simply a matter 
of science and evidence. Just in the last several days, there have been 
a whole new rush of scientific evidence that 1995 is the warmest year on 
our entire planet in 20,000 years, that the hole in the ozone layer is 
bigger than we had imagined it to be, and that global warming is a real 
threat. We spend a pittance on it. That is one of the items targeted for 
elimination. This is not budget-cutting; this is ideology. This is 
another example of what the teenagers say about ``denial'' being more 
than a river in Egypt. [Laughter] This is wrong. It is not necessary to 
balance the budget, and it is necessary to reverse it to stand up for 
America's values and America's interests.
    Let me just cite one more example. Radio Free Europe and Radio 
Liberty were key weapons in the war of ideas waged against communism. 
Many of you stood up for it and fought for them. To meet the challenges 
of the new era, they have been dramatically downsized and moved from 
Munich to Prague. But some want to squeeze their already vastly reduced 
budget on the eve of major Russian elections, at the very time the 
Russian reformers most need objective information and the free exchange 
of ideas. They would do the same for the Voice of America, which serves 
on the frontlines of democracy all around the world from Burma to the 
Balkans.
    Reckless budget cutters would shut down our Embassies first and 
consider the consequences later. Last year alone, our Embassies 
responded to nearly 2 million requests for assistance from Americans 
overseas. They helped American companies win billions of dollars in 
contracts. And every international business leader will tell you that 
the State Department and its Embassies are working harder to advance our 
economic

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interests than at any time in the history of the global economy.
    If we didn't have diplomats in Asia and Latin America to help stem 
the flow of drugs to our shores, imagine how much harder that task would 
be. In Northern Ireland and the Middle East, if we didn't have people 
representing us, it would be a lot harder to move the peace process 
forward. In Burundi or Rwanda, if we didn't have brave people there, 
like Ambassador Bob Krueger, it would be even harder to avoid human 
tragedy. We don't need half-strength and part-time diplomacy in a world 
of fast-moving opportunities and 24-hour-a-day crises.
    The last point I want to make is this. There are people who say, 
``Oh, Mr. President, I am for a strong America. I just don't understand 
why you fool with the U.N. What we need is for America to stand up 
alone. We'll decide what the right thing to do is and do it. Let the 
rest of the world like it or lump it. That's what it means to be the 
world's only superpower.'' That also is a disguised form of 
isolationism.
    Unilateralism in the world that we live in is not a viable option. 
When our vital interests are at stake, of course, we might have to act 
alone. But we need the wisdom to work with the United Nations and to pay 
our bills. We need the flexibility to build coalitions that spread the 
risk and responsibility and the cost of leadership, as President Bush 
did in Desert Storm and we did in Haiti.
    If the past 50 years have taught us anything, it is that the United 
States has a unique responsibility and a unique ability to be a force 
for peace and progress around the world, while building coalitions of 
people that can work together in genuine partnership.
    But we can only succeed if we continue to lead. Our purpose has to 
be the same in this new era as it has ever been. Whatever our political 
persuasions, I believe we all share the same goals. I think we want a 
future where people all over the world know the benefits of democracy; 
in which our own people can live their lives free from fear; in which 
our sons and daughters won't be called to fight in wars that could have 
been prevented; in which people no longer flee tyranny in their own 
countries to come to our shores; in which markets are open to our 
products and services, where they give our own people good, high-wage 
jobs; a country in which we know an unparalleled amount of peace and 
prosperity because we have fulfilled a traditional American mandate of 
the 20th century well into the 21st, because we, we, have led the world 
toward democracy and freedom, toward peace and prosperity.
    If we want the kind of future I described, we have to assume the 
burden of leadership. There is simply not another alternative. So I ask 
you, bring your passion to this task, bring your argument to this task, 
and bring the sense of urgency that has animated this country in its 
times of greatest challenge for the last 50 years to this task.
    The future, I believe, will be even brighter for the American people 
than the last 50 years if, if, we can preserve our leadership in pursuit 
of our values.
    Thank you, and God bless you all.

Note: The President spoke at 9:37 a.m. at the Hyatt Regency Hotel. In 
his remarks, he referred to Adrian Karatnycky, president, Freedom House, 
and Representative Robert Livingston.