[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000-2001, Book III)]
[December 8, 2000]
[Pages 2653-2661]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at the University of Nebraska at Kearney, Nebraska
December 8, 2000

    Thank you very much. Didn't Casey do a good 
job? [Applause] She was great. I'd like to thank Chancellor 
Johnston for her kind remarks and the 
honorary degree. And thank you, President Smith, and members of the board of trustees, to both the 
students and the other members.
    Thank you, Governor, for your welcome. And 
I thank the other State officials who are here. I am especially grateful 
that my long-time friend and former colleague as Governor, your retiring 
Senator, Bob Kerrey, flew down here with me 
today. Thank you, Bob, for your service, along with our former Nebraska 
Congressman, Peter Hoagland. Thank you for 
coming with me. I congratulate Ben Nelson on his 
election to the United States Senate. Governor Morrison, thank you for being here today.
    And I want to say a special word of thanks to my great friend, your 
former Senator, Jim Exon, who persuaded me to come 
here and to come to Kearney. He said--[inaudible]--should be here.
    When I came in here and I looked at this crowd, one of my staff 
members joked that we had found a building in Nebraska that would hold 
every single Democrat--[laughter]--and a few charitable Republicans, to 
boot. [Laughter]
    Let me say, I'm glad that I finally made it to Nebraska. There were 
a lot of signs outside that said, ``You saved the best till last.'' 
[Laughter] And I saw the patriotism and the spirit of the people, all 
the children holding the American flags. It was very, very moving, 
coming in. All the schools were let out, and there were hundreds and 
hundreds of people along the way. And it made us a little bit late, and 
for that, I'm sorry. But I did actually stop, and we got out and shook 
hands with one group of schoolchildren there just to thank them for 
being in the cold. So I thank them for that.
    I was also reminded at the airport that we are literally in the 
heartland of America. A gentleman at the airport gave me a sweatshirt 
that had a little map of Nebraska with Kearney, and it had a line and it 
said, ``1,300 miles to New York and 1,300 miles to San Francisco.''
    Most Americans have probably forgotten this, but back in the 1870's, 
there was actually talk of relocating our Nation's Capital away from 
Washington, DC, to a more central location. And a local publisher in 
this community, named Moses Henry Sydenham, launched a national campaign 
to nominate Kearney for the Nation's Capital. He promised to rename it 
``New Washington'' and to use the real estate profits to pay off the 
national debt. [Laughter]
    Critics of his proposal asked him what in the world he would do with 
all those big, fancy buildings in old Washington. He said it was simple. 
He would turn them into asylums. [Laughter] Well, history took a 
different course, except for that part about turning those buildings 
into asylums. [Laughter] I have occupied one for the last 8 years.
    And we are finally paying off the national debt, which is good. 
[Applause] Thank you. But since half of Washington is in Kearney today, 
maybe we should think again about moving the Capital. I rather like it 
here. [Laughter]
    I want to say again, I thank the people of this community for a 
wonderful welcome, and all of you in the university community, 
especially. I also want to say again how impressed I was by what Casey 
had to say. Because I came here today not just to keep my promise to 
visit Nebraska but to keep working on something at the very end of my 
term I have been trying for 8 years to do, which is to persuade 
ordinary, hard-working American citizens in the heartland of America 
that you should be concerned about what goes on beyond our Nation's 
borders and what our role in the rest of the world is, because the world 
is growing smaller and smaller and more interdependent. Every Nebraska 
farmer knows that. And indeed, when Senator Kerrey and I visited the units of the Nebraska Air National 
Guard out there, we

[[Page 2654]]

asked them where the guardsmen were. We found out that you have some 
Nebraska guardsman now still in Kosovo. So we are personally affected by 
it.
    But I don't think I have still--people say I'm a pretty good talker, 
but I still don't think I've persuaded the American people by big 
majorities that you really ought to care a lot about foreign policy, 
about our relationship to the rest of the world, about what we're doing. 
And the reason is, in an interdependent world, we are all directly 
affected by what goes on beyond our borders--sure, in economics, but in 
other ways, as well--and by what we decide to do or not do about it.
    This is an immensely patriotic community. That's one thing Bob 
Kerrey kept saying over and over again, ``Look at all those people 
holding the flag. These people love their country.'' But what we have to 
do is be wise patriots. This country is still around after 224 years 
because our Founders not only loved our country; they were smart. They 
were smart enough to figure out how to give us a system that, as we have 
seen in the last few weeks, can survive just about anything. [Laughter]
    And I want to ask you again today, just give me a few minutes to 
make the case in the heartland about why there is no longer a clear, 
bright line dividing America's domestic concerns and America's foreign 
policy concerns and why every American who wants to be a good citizen, 
who wants to vote in every election, should know more about the rest of 
the world and have a clearer idea about what we're supposed to be doing 
out there and how it affects how you live in Kearney. Because I think it 
is profoundly important.
    Let's start with a few basics. Never before have we enjoyed at the 
same time so much prosperity and social progress with the absence of 
domestic crisis or overwhelming foreign threats. We're in the midst of 
the longest economic expansion in our history, with the lowest 
unemployment rate in 30 years, the lowest welfare rolls in 32 years, the 
lowest crime rates in 27 years, 3 years of surpluses in a row, and 3 
years of paying down the national debt for the first time in 50 years, 
the highest homeownership and college-going rate in history. Today we 
learned that the November unemployment rate was 4 percent, staying at 
that 30-year low.
    Now, this is good news for America. But there is good news beyond 
our borders for our values and our interests. In the last few years, for 
the first time in all human history, more than half the people on the 
face of the Earth live under governments that they voted for, that they 
chose.
    And more and more, even in nations that have not yet completely 
embraced democracy, more and more people, especially young people, see 
our creative, entrepreneurial society with more and more personal 
freedom as the model for the success they want. Last month I went to 
Vietnam, where America fought in a very difficult war for a long time, 
where Senator Kerrey earned the Medal of 
Honor and nearly 60,000 Americans died, and 3 million Vietnamese died on 
both sides of the conflict.
    So I was interested to see what sort of a reception that I would get 
and the United States would get, because the Government there remains in 
the hands of a Communist leadership. And frankly, some of them didn't 
know what to make about America showing up. But everywhere I went, from 
Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, tens of thousands of people 
appeared out of nowhere. Not for me, for America; for the idea of 
America. Sixty percent of the people who live in Vietnam are under 30. 
Because of the tragedy of the war, only 5 percent are over 60.
    But the ones under 30 like what they know about America. They want 
to be our partners in the future, and they want to have the chance to 
build the kind of future they think young people in this country have. 
That is a priceless gift.
    So the first thing I want to say, especially to the young people 
here, is that we should all be grateful that we are so fortunate to be 
alive at this moment of prosperity, military and political power, social 
progress, and prestige for America.
    But the really important question is, what do we intend to make of 
this moment? Will we be grateful but basically complacent, being the 
political equivalent of couch potatoes? Will we assume that in this era 
of the Internet, freedom, peace, and prosperity will just spread? That 
all we have to do is kind of sit back, hook the world up to AOL, and 
wait for people to beat their swords into shares on the NASDAQ? 
[Laughter] Or will we understand that no change is inevitable--change is 
inevitable, but

[[Page 2655]]

the particular change is not. And we have to actually make some 
decisions if we're going to seize the opportunities and meet the 
challenges before us.
    To put it in another way, the train of globalization cannot be 
reversed, but it has more than one possible destination. If we want 
America to stay on the right track, if we want other people to be on 
that track and have the chance to enjoy peace and prosperity, we have no 
choice but to try to lead the train.
    For example, you all applauded when I said more than half the people 
in the world live under governments of their own choosing for the first 
time in history. We'd like to keep that process going. But we know that 
democracy in some places is fragile, and it could be reversed.
    We want more nations to see ethnic and religious diversity as a 
source of strength. You know what the chancellor said when the choir was 
singing? I said, ``Boy, they're good.'' She said, ``They got a lot more 
rhythm since I came here''--we're laughing. [Laughter]
    Casey talked about her Hispanic heritage. I was shaking hands with 
these kids out on the street, and about the third young boy I shook 
hands with was of Asian descent. This is a more interesting country than 
it has ever been. Everywhere I go--I mean, you can't be President 
anymore unless you understand the concerns of at least 50 different 
groups.
    It's an interesting thing. For us, this is a big plus, even though 
we still have our problems with hate crimes and racial or religious or 
other instances. But basically, our diversity has come to be something 
that makes life more interesting in America, because we realize that 
what unites us is more important than what divides us, that our common 
humanity anchors us in a way that allows us to feel secure about our 
differences, so we can celebrate them. And this is important.
    I don't like to use the word ``tolerance'' in this context, because 
tolerance implies that there's a dominant culture putting up with a 
subordinate one. I don't really think that's where we're going as 
America. I think we're going to the point where we say, ``Here are our 
common values, and if you sign on to those, we respect you; we treat you 
as an equal; and we celebrate and find interesting the differences.''
    Now, that's what we would like for every place. And we know that if 
everybody deals that way, that America's going to do very well in the 
global society of the 21st century, because there's somebody here from 
everywhere else. And that's good. You know, we're going to do very, very 
well, as the world becomes more interdependent. So that's the outcome we 
want.
    But all we have to do is read the paper everyday to know that old 
hatreds die hard. And their persistence, from Bosnia and Kosovo to the 
Middle East to Northern Ireland to the African tribal wars to places 
like East Timor, have in our time led to hundreds of thousands of deaths 
and countries being impoverished, for 10 years or more, because people 
couldn't give up their old hatreds to build a new future together.
    So how this comes out is not at all inevitable. We want global trade 
to keep our economy growing. Nebraska farmers like it when people open 
their markets and the most efficient farmers in the world can sell their 
food to people who need to buy it. But it is possible that financial 
crisis abroad could wreck that system, as farmers here found out when 
the Asian financial crisis hit a couple years ago, or that alienation 
from global capitalism by people who aren't a part of it will drive 
whole countries away. We want global trade to lift hundreds of millions 
of people out of poverty, from India to China to Africa. We know if it 
happens, it will create a big market for everything American, from corn 
to cars to computers. And it will give all of us new ideas and new 
innovation, and we'll all help each other in constructive competition.
    But the gap between rich and poor nations could continue to widen 
and bring more misery, more environmental destruction, more health 
problems, more and more young people in poor countries just checking out 
of wanting to be part of a global system, because they think there is 
nothing in it for them.
    We want advances in technology to keep making our lives better. I 
went last year to that annual show in Chicago of all the latest high-
tech gadgets. And I held in my hand, in my palm, a little plastic 
computer--with a complete keyboard that I held in my hand, that also was 
connected to the Internet. And I was getting CNN on those tiny little--I 
don't see well enough in my old age to even use the thing. It's so 
small, and my hands were too big to effectively use the keyboard, it was 
so small. Very exciting.
    But the same technological breakthroughs that put that computer in 
the palm of my hand could end up making it possible to create smaller 
and

[[Page 2656]]

smaller chemical or biological or nuclear weapons in the hands of 
terrorists. And all the things we're learning about computers will be 
learned by people who, because they belong to organized crime units or 
narcotraffickers or terrorists, would like to pierce our secure networks 
and get information or spread viruses that wreck our most vital systems.
    So I'm a wild-eyed optimist. But I've lived long enough to know that 
things can happen that are not necessarily what you want, and that every 
opportunity brings with it new responsibilities because the organized 
forces of destruction can take advantage of them, all these 
opportunities, too.
    A long time ago, one of your citizens, William Jennings Bryan, said, 
``Our destiny is a matter of choice. It is not a thing to be waited for. 
It is a thing to be achieved.'' We have to continue to achieve America's 
destiny. And the point I want to make is that it cannot be achieved in 
the 21st century without American citizens who care about, know about, 
and understand what is going on beyond our borders and what we're 
supposed to do about it.
    Now, for the last 8 years, I've had the honor of working with people 
in Congress, principled people of both parties, like both your Senators, 
Bob Kerrey and Chuck Hagel, to try to make a choice for American leadership in the 
post-cold war, global information age. I think it's been good for 
America and for people around the world. And as I leave office, I think 
America should continue to build a foreign policy for the global age 
based on five broad principles, which I would like to briefly state and 
explain.
    First, everything we want to achieve in the world, just about, 
depends upon maintaining strong alliances with people who share our 
interests and our values and adapting those alliances to meet today's 
and tomorrow's challenges. For example, our most important alliance with 
Europe is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO. It was organized 
to defend Europe against the Soviet Union in the cold war. When I became 
President, the cold war was over, and the alliance was in doubt. What's 
it for, anyway? Who's going to be in it? What's it supposed to do?
    But the values that we shared with Europe and the interest we shared 
were very much threatened when I became President by a vicious, 
genocidal war in Bosnia. Our European Allies were aiding the victims 
heroically, but unintentionally shielding the victimizers by not 
stopping them. And for the first time since World War II, America was 
refusing to help to defeat a serious threat to peace in Europe. But all 
that's changed. America decided to lead. Our European Allies decided to 
work with us. We revitalized the NATO Alliance. We gave it new missions, 
new members from behind the old Iron Curtain, a new partnership with 
Russia.
    We finally ended the war in Bosnia. We negotiated a peace that grows 
stronger, steadily. When ethnic cleansing erupted in Kosovo, we acted 
decisively to stop that and send almost a million people back home.
    Today, the Serbian leader who began the Balkan wars, Slobodan 
Milosevic, has been deposed by his own 
people. And instead of fighting something bad, we're trying to finish 
something worthy, a Europe that is united, democratic, and peaceful, 
completely for the first time in all human history. That takes a big 
burden off America in the future and give us a big, big set of economic 
and political partners to deal with the world's challenges.
    Now, here's the decision for today. Do we believe that we did the 
right thing or not? If we do, we have to stay the course, keep expanding 
NATO, keep working with the Russians, keep burdensharing to do what 
needs to be done. I don't think most people know this, but in Kosovo 
today, we provide less than 20 percent of the troops and the funds. But 
we would not be there as an alliance if the United States had not agreed 
to do its part. America cannot lead if we walk away from our friends and 
our neighbors.
    The same thing is true in Asia. We fought three wars in Asia in the 
20th century. Huge numbers of Americans died there, from World War II 
through Korea, through Vietnam. What should we do now that the cold war 
is over, but the future is uncertain? What we have done is to decide to 
keep our troops in the Pacific, to renew our alliance with Japan. We 
sent ships to keep tensions from escalating between China and Taiwan. We 
stood by South Korea and diminished the nuclear threat from North Korea, 
and we supported the South Korean President's 
decision to seek to end 50 years of tension on the Korean Peninsula, for 
which he justifiably won the Nobel Peace Prize.
    Should we withdraw from Asia? I don't think so. I think we ought to 
stay there, modernize

[[Page 2657]]

our alliances, and keep the peace so we don't have to fight any more 
wars in the 21st century.
    The third thing I want to say about the alliances is that the 21st 
century world is going to be about more than great power politics, which 
means we can't just think about East Asia and Europe. We need a 
systematic, committed, long-term relationship with our neighbors in 
Latin America and the Caribbean, with South Asia--next to China, the 
most populous place on Earth--and with Africa, where 800 million people 
live.
    One of the most--[applause]--yes, you can clap for that. That's all 
right. So I think that's important. We've been estranged from India for 
50 years. Do you know how many people live in India? Nine hundred and 
eighty million. In 30 years India will be more populous than China.
    In Silicon Valley today, there are 700 high-tech companies headed by 
Indians--700, in one place. This is totally off the radar screen of 
American policy during the cold war. So I would encourage all of you 
who, like Casey, are involved in some sort of 
international studies, not to just think about America's traditional 
concerns but to think about what we're going to do with Latin America 
and the Caribbean, with sub-Saharan Africa and with south Asia, because 
a lot of our future will be there.
    So beyond alliances, the second principle is that we have to build, 
if we can, constructive relationships with our former adversaries Russia 
and China. One of the big questions that will define the world for the 
next 10 years is, how will Russia and China define their greatness in 
the 21st century? Will they define it as their ability to dominate their 
neighbors or to control their own people? Or will they define it in a 
more modern sense, in their ability to develop their people's capacity 
to cooperate with their neighbors, to compete and win in a global 
economy and a global society?
    What decision they make will have a huge impact on how every young 
person in this audience lives. It will define what kind of defense 
budget we have to have, how many folks we have to enroll in the armed 
services, where we have to send them, what we have to do. It's huge. 
Now, we cannot make that decision for Russia or for China. They'll make 
that decision for themselves. But we can control what we do, and what we 
do will have some impact on what they decide.
    So we should say to them what we've been trying to say for 8 years: 
If you will accept the rules and the responsibilities of membership in 
the world community, we want to make sure you get the full benefits and 
be a full partner, not a junior partner. We also have to say, we have to 
feel free to speak firmly and honestly when we think what you do is 
wrong by international standards.
    When we've worked together with Russia in a positive way, we've made 
real progress. Russia took its troops out of Estonia, Lithuania, and 
Latvia and put them in joint missions with NATO, something nobody ever 
thought would happen. We're serving together in Bosnia and Kosovo. 
Russia helped us find a just end to the war in Kosovo. They worked with 
us to eliminate 5,000 nuclear warheads from the old Soviet Union and 
safeguard those that are still there.
    Now, do we agree with everything in Russia? No. We think there has 
been too much corruption at times. We don't agree with wars in Chechnya 
we think were cruel and self-defeating. We don't agree with backsliding 
on the free press that we see. But we need a little perspective here. 
When I went to Moscow for the first time as President, in 1993, people 
were still lining up for bread, recovering from inflation that got to 
2,500 percent. Many people were predicting that an impoverished Russia 
would go back to communism or turn to fascism.
    Since then, Russia has had five--five--free elections. And every 
time, people have voted to deepen democracy, not to weaken it. The 
economy is growing. Now, are the positive trends inevitable? No, but 
they are more than possible. And it's in our interests to encourage 
them.
    The same thing is true in China. We have tried to encourage change 
by bringing China into international systems, where there are rules and 
responsibilities, from nonproliferation to trade. That's what I think 
will happen with China coming into the World Trade Organization. It is a 
statement by them, by agreeing to the conditions of membership, that 
they can't succeed over the long run without opening to the world. It is 
a declaration of interdependence.
    It increases the chance that they'll make a good decision, rather 
than a negative one, about what they're going to do in the 21st century 
world. And if China goes on and follows through

[[Page 2658]]

with this, they'll have to dismantle a lot of their old command-and-
control economy, which gave the Communist Party so much power. They'll 
open their doors to more foreign investment and more foreign information 
and the Internet revolution. Will it inevitably bring freedom? No, but 
it will increase the chances of China taking the right course.
    So I believe if we stay with this course, one of the most profoundly 
positive changes the generation of young people in this audience will 
see could be the change that ultimately comes to China. And I told you 
the Vietnam story. I felt the same thing in Shanghai. I felt the same 
thing walking in little villages and talking to people who were electing 
their mayors for the first time in China, where there are, at least now, 
a million local villages electing their local officials. So, alliances, 
constructive relations with Russia and China.
    The third thing we have to recognize is that local conflicts can 
become worldwide headaches if they're allowed to fester. Therefore, 
whenever possible, we should stop them before they get out of hand. 
That's why we've worked for peace in the Balkans, between Greece and 
Turkey on Cyprus, between India and Pakistan, Ethiopia and Eritrea. 
That's why I'm going back to Northern Ireland next week, the land of my 
ancestors. And it's why we've worked so hard to make America a force for 
peace in the Middle East, the home of the world's three great 
monotheistic religions, where God is reminding us every day that we are 
not in control.
    But we have made a lot of progress. We've seen a peace treaty 
between Israel and Jordan. We saw a sweeping agreement between the 
Israelis and the Palestinians and progress toward implementing it over 
the last 8 years. But what's happened is, they're down to the hedgerows 
now and the hard decisions, and they've gotten to those fundamental 
identity questions, where they have to decide what I was talking about 
earlier. Is it possible for them to look at each other and see their 
common humanity and find a solution in which neither side can say, ``I 
have vanquished the other,'' or have there been so many years of history 
welling up inside them that neither side can let go? That is the issue, 
and we will continue to work on it.
    But the main point I want to make to you is, you should want your 
President and your Government involved in these things, and you should 
support your Congress if they invest some of your money in the cause of 
peace and development in these hotspots in the world.
    And let me say again: This is not inconsistent with saying that 
people ought to take the lead in their own backyard. I think most 
Americans feel if the Europeans can take the lead in Europe, they ought 
to do it. The same thing with the Asians in Asia and the Africans in 
Africa.
    What I want you to understand is that we have unique capabilities 
and unique confidence-building capacity in so many parts of the world 
that if we're just involved a little bit, we can make a huge difference. 
Our role was critical in the Balkans, but it was also critical in East 
Timor. Do you remember when all those people were getting killed in East 
Timor? You saw it on television every night. And people that couldn't 
find it on a map, all of a sudden were living with it every single 
night.
    We provided about 500 troops to provide support for the 
international operations the Australians led there. But it made all the 
difference. We're training peacekeepers in Sierra Leone. They don't want 
us to go there and fight, but they want us to train the peacekeepers.
    We've been involved in trying to settle a war between Ethiopia and 
Eritrea that has claimed over 60,000 lives, that most people don't know 
much about, but could cause us a world of trouble. And besides, it's 
just tragic.
    We had 10 people--10, total--in the jungle when we settled the 
conflict between East Ecuador and Peru and got them to agree--but they 
couldn't agree to let it go unless we, America, agreed to send 10 people 
into a remote place on the border of these two countries, because they 
knew we could be trusted to do what they had agreed ought to be done. 
Now, you ought to be proud of that for your country.
    But the only point I want to make is, we should do things with other 
people, and they ought to do their part in their own backyard. But we're 
in a unique position in history now. There is no other military 
superpower or economic superpower. And we can do some things, because 
we've maintained a strong military, nobody else can do.
    And I'll be gone in a few weeks, and America will have a new 
President and a new Congress, but you ought to support them when they 
want to do these things, because it's very, very important to the 
stability and future of the world.
    One other thing I want to say. We ought to pay our U.N. dues and pay 
our fair share

[[Page 2659]]

of peacekeeping operations. Now, nobody in the world benefits from 
stability more than we do. Nobody. Nobody makes more money out of it. 
Just think about pure, naked self-interest. Nobody. And when we pay for 
this peacekeeping--I'll say more about it in a minute--but we get more 
than our money's worth out of it. And when we walk away from our 
responsibilities, people resent us. They resent our prosperity; they 
resent our power; and, in the end, when a whole lot of people resent 
you, sooner or later they find some way to manifest it. When we work 
with each other and do things that we don't just have to do in the 
moment, we build a common future.
    The fourth point I would like to make to you is that this growing 
openness of borders and technology is changing our national security 
priorities. People, information, ideas, and goods move around more 
freely and faster than ever before. That makes us more vulnerable first 
to the organized forces of destruction, narcotraffickers, terrorists, 
organized criminals--they are going to work more and more together, with 
growing access to more and more sophisticated technology.
    Part of the challenge is just to get rid of as many weapons of mass 
destruction as possible. That's why we got the states of the former 
Soviet Union outside Russia to give up their nuclear arsenals, and we 
negotiated a worldwide treaty to ban chemical weapons. That's why we 
forced Iraq to sell its oil for money that can go to food and medicine, 
but not to rebuilding its weapons. And I think the other countries of 
the world that are willing to let them spend that money rebuilding their 
weapons systems are wrong. And I hope that we can strengthen the resolve 
of the world not to let Saddam Hussein 
rebuild the chemical weapons network and other weapons systems that are 
bad.
    It's why we negotiated a freeze on plutonium production with North 
Korea. Now, dealing with terrorists is harder, as we have seen in the 
tragedy of the U.S.S. Cole. Why? Because terrorists, unlike countries, 
cannot be contained as easily, and it's harder to deter them through 
threats of retaliation. They operate across borders, so we have got to 
strengthen our cooperation across borders. We have succeeded in 
preventing a lot of terrorist attacks. There were many planned during 
the millennium celebration that we prevented.
    We have arrested a lot of terrorists, including those who bombed the 
World Trade Center and those who were involved in several other killings 
in this country. And make no mistake about it: We will do the same for 
those who killed our brave Navy personnel on the U.S.S. Cole.
    But the most important thing is to prevent bad things from 
happening. And one of the biggest threats to the future is going to be 
cyberterrorism--people fooling with your computer networks, trying to 
shut down your phones, erase bank records, mess up airline schedules, do 
things to interrupt the fabric of life.
    Now, we have the first national strategy to protect America's 
computer systems and critical infrastructure against that kind of 
sabotage. It includes, interestingly enough, a scholarship-for-service 
program to help students who are studying information security and 
technology, pay for their education if they will give us a couple of 
years' service in the Government. It's really hard to get talented 
people in the Government, because we can't pay them enough. You've got 
27-year-old young people worth $200 or $300 million if they start the 
right kind of dot-com company. It's pretty hard to say, ``Come be a GS-
13,'' you know? [Laughter]
    But if we can educate enough people, we can at least get them in 
their early years, and that's important. We funded this program for the 
very first time this year, thanks to bipartisan support. And let me say, 
I'd also like to congratulate the University of Nebraska--some of you 
perhaps know this, but Nebraska has set up a new information assurance 
center which is dedicated to the same exact goal. We need more 
universities to follow your lead. This is going to be a big deal in the 
future, a big deal.
    There are other new things you need to think about in national 
security terms. Climate change could become a national security issue. 
The last decade was the warmest in a thousand years. If the next 50 
years are as warm as the last decade, you will see the beginning of 
flooding of the sugarcane fields in Louisiana and the Florida 
Everglades; you will see the patterns of agricultural production in 
America begin to shift. It's still cold enough in Nebraska; you'll 
probably be all right for another 50 years. [Laughter] I mean, we laugh 
about this; this is a serious thing.

[[Page 2660]]

    Already, in Africa, we see malaria at higher and higher levels than 
ever before, where it used to be too cool for the mosquitoes. This is a 
serious problem. And the only way to fix it is to figure out a way for 
people to get rich without putting more greenhouse gases into the 
atmosphere. In other words, we have to change the rules that governed 
the industrial revolution. And you can play a big role in that, too.
    Why? Because scientists today are researching more efficient ways of 
making ethanol and other biomass fuels. I always supported that, but the 
real problem with ethanol, you should know, is, is that the conversion 
ratio is pretty low. It takes about 7 gallons of gasoline to make about 
8 gallons of ethanol. But scientific research now is very close to the 
equivalent of what happened when we turned crude oil into refined 
gasoline, when we cracked the petroleum molecule.
    In other words, they're very close to figuring out how to change the 
conversion ratio from 7 gallons of gasoline to 8 gallons of ethanol to 
one gallon of gasoline per 8 gallons of ethanol. When that happens, 
everybody is all of a sudden getting 500 miles to the gallon, and the 
whole future of the world is different. And you don't have to use corn, 
either. You can use rice hulls; you can use grasses on range land. You 
can do anything. You can do this. This is going to be a big deal.
    If I were--no offense, Mr. President--if 
I were the president of the University of Nebraska, whatever I was 
spending on that, I'd double it. [Laughter] Because if we can do this 
one thing, if we can do--or you could ask the Department of Agriculture 
to give you some more money, because we've got some more--[laughter]--
because the Congress gave us a lot more money this year.
    We're all laughing about this, but you think about it. One-third of 
this problem is transportation. It's an issue. Some people made fun of 
us a few months ago when we said we considered AIDS a national security 
issue. You know why? In some southern African countries, it is estimated 
that half of all the 15-year-olds will die of AIDS. There are four 
African countries which, within a couple of--a few years, there will be 
more people over 60 than people under 30.
    It is estimated that AIDS will keep South Africa's GDP income 17 
percent lower than it otherwise would have been 10 years from now. That 
obviously makes it harder for them to preserve their democracy, doesn't 
it, and to give jobs to their children. So that's why we're involved in 
this international AIDS effort for a vaccine, for more affordable 
medicines, for better care. It's an important foreign policy issue. Our 
effort to relieve the debt of the world's poorest countries is a very 
important foreign policy issue.
    Our efforts to help people rebuild their public health systems--they 
all collapsed, and a lot of the countries of the former Soviet Union, 
they now have the highest AIDS growth rates in the world because they 
don't have any public health systems anymore. And all these things will 
affect whether these countries are breeding grounds for terrorists, 
whether the narcotraffickers in the places where drugs can be grown will 
get a foothold, whether we can build a different future. So I hope you 
will think about that.
    The last thing I want to say is that the final principle ought to 
be, we should be for more open trade, but we have to build a global 
economy with a more human face. We win in the trade wars, or the trade--
not wars, the trade competition. And I know that Nebraska is more--I 
have not persuaded my fellow Americans of that either, entirely, but in 
Nebraska, because of the agricultural presence here, has been generally 
more pro-free trade.
    But these 300 trade agreements, from NASA to the World Trade 
Organization and many others that we negotiated, 300 of them, have given 
us the longest economic expansion in history. Over 25 percent of our 
growth is tied to trade now.
    Here's the problem: The benefits have not been felt in much of the 
rest of the world. Eight hundred million people still go hungry every 
day. More than a billion people have no access to clean water. More than 
a billion people live on less than a dollar a day. Every year 6 million 
undernourished boys and girls under the age of 5 die. So if the next 
President and the next Congress want to spend some of your money to 
relieve the burden of the world's poorest countries and debt, if they'll 
put the money into education and health care and development, if they 
want to spend some money fighting AIDS, if they want to expand a program 
that we have done a lot with--the microcredit program, which loans money 
to entrepreneurs in poor countries--we made 2 million of those

[[Page 2661]]

loans last year--if they want to double, triple, or quadruple it, I hope 
you will support that.
    If they want to close the digital divide so that people in, let's 
say, a mountain village in Bolivia can be hooked up to the Internet to 
sell their rugs that they knit to Bloomingdale's in New York, I hope you 
will support that. You know why? Bolivia is the poorest country in the 
Andes, but they've done the best job of getting rid of the 
narcotraffickers. And so far, they don't have a lot to show for it, 
because they're still the poorest country. And it would cost us a 
pittance of what it cost to deal with the drug problem once these drugs 
show up in America to help those good, honest poor people who are so 
proud and honorable that they do not want to tolerate the 
narcotraffickers to make a decent living from their efforts.
    Anyway, that's what I want to say. We've got to keep building these 
alliances; we've got to try to have constructive relationships with 
Russia and China. We've got to realize there are other places in the 
world that we haven't fooled with enough. We have to understand the new 
security challenges of the 21st century. We have to keep building a 
global economy, because it's the engine of the global society, but we 
have to do more to put a human face on it.
    Fifty years ago Harry Truman said something that's more true today 
than it was when he said it. Listen to this: ``We are in the position 
now of making the world safe for democracy if we don't crawl in the 
shell and act selfish and foolish.'' We still haven't fully--you 
probably all say you agree with that, but there are practical 
consequences.
    For example, Congress agreed this fall to fund our obligations to 
the U.N. But because Congress hasn't finished the overall Federal 
budget, the agreement is at risk, and Congress has got to send me the 
money pretty soon, or if it doesn't, literally, the very future of the 
United Nations will be in jeopardy. How would you feel if you picked up 
the paper and the Secretary-General of the United Nations said, ``I'm 
sorry, we're going to have to close down for a few weeks because the 
United States won't pay its dues''?
    What will that do to us? They share the burden with us of keeping 
the peace, fighting hunger, protecting the environment, advancing human 
rights. Listen to this. When you hear people say America spends too 
much, just listen to this: Right now, at a time when we are the world's 
only superpower with the strongest economy in the world, less than one 
in every 800 United Nations peacekeepers is an American--less than one 
in 800.
    Less than 2 percent of our men and women in uniform are involved in 
ongoing military operations abroad of any kind. Our annual global 
budget--for everything from diminishing the nuclear threat to preventing 
conflict to advancing democracy to fighting AIDS--is no more than what 
Americans spend each year on dietary supplements--in my case with mixed 
results. [Laughter] I want you to laugh about it, because I want you to 
remember that this is a big deal.
    We must not squander the best moment in our history on 
smallmindedness. We don't have to be fearful. We've got the strongest 
military in the world, and in history, and we're going to keep it that 
way. We don't have to be cheap. Our economy is the envy of the world. We 
don't have to swim against the currents of the world. The momentum of 
history is on our side, on the side of freedom and openness and 
competition. And we don't have the excuse of ignorance, because we've 
got a 24-hour global news cycle. So we know what's going on out there.
    We can no longer separate America's fate from the world any more 
than you could celebrate Nebraska's fate from America's, or Kearney's 
fate from Nebraska's. So that's what I came here to say. I hope that in 
the years ahead the heartland of America will say, America chooses to be 
a part of the world, with a clear head and a strong heart; to share the 
risks and the opportunities of the world; to work with others until 
ultimately there is a global community of free nations, working with us, 
for peace and security, where everybody counts and everybody has got a 
chance.
    If we will do that, America's best days, and the world's finest 
hours, lie ahead.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 9:58 a.m. at the Cushing Health and Sports 
Center. In his remarks, he referred to Casey Mendez; who introduced the 
President; Gladys Styles Johnston, chancellor, and L. Dennis Smith, 
president, University of Nebraska at Kearney; Gov. Mike Johanns and 
former Gov. Frank Morrison of Nebraska; President Kim Dae-jung of South 
Korea; and President Saddam Hussein of Iraq.