America’s Global Leadership Challenge in the 21st Century

UNDER SECRETARY BURNS: Thank you. Thank you very much. Dean Garza, thank you for that very warm welcome. It is nice to be here on a beautiful -- unexpectedly beautiful afternoon in Chestnut Hill and to be back at Boston College. I am so pleased to be back on this campus where I had such a great time as a student many years ago. I’m pleased to see a lot of former professors and friends. My high school friend and college roommate, Kevin Donahue, is somewhere here in the audience. He’s here and my in-laws are here, Win and Mary Jane Bayless; and I have a daughter, Elizabeth, who is a junior at Boston College, and I think she is here as well. (Laughter.) So it’s a great pleasure to be here.

I thought when I received the invitation, and as the NCAA hockey playoffs progressed, that I might be able to return to see a national championship hockey team; and if the puck had bounced just a couple of inches one way or the other Saturday night in Saint Louis, they would have been champions. But what a great team and what a great effort and so much honor to Boston College.

I am truly grateful to speak before all of you today. I do have to question, however, your collective judgment. I assume that all of you are loyal members of Red Sox Nation. I am. And I really wonder why you are here when you could be lined up outside of Fenway Park at this very moment to see the Boston debut of the great Matzusaka. So, that was your opportunity, but you’re here and I’m pleased you are.

And I am very pleased to be here with Chuck Clough and his wife, and with Mister Winston. And we just had a very nice hour’s discussion about some of the challenges that the United States is facing around the world. And it’s an honor to speak at the Clough Colloquium this year and to follow my favorite historian, David Mccullough, and

General Anthony Zinni, a great -- two great Americans. So thank you for -- Chuck, for what you have done for BC and for what you will continue to do. Thank you to Robert Winston, for his generosity in establishing the Winston Center. I think we are very fortunate to have both of you as alums and giving so much back to our alma mater.

I have been asked to speak about leadership today. And I don’t think you have to travel very far from Chestnut Hill to see leadership. You’ve got it right here on this campus. I often thought that during the last quarter century, the last 25 years, we have been extraordinarily fortunate to have had two presidents who are as good examples of vigorous and effective and energetic leadership as you will find in any corporate board room or -- in America or any cabinet agency in our nation’s capital.

Father Monan and Father Leahy have literally re-made Boston College during this last quarter century. I loved BC when I was a student here. It was a great place. But it’s now a spectacular place for students. (Applause.) Has any American college grown so much in its endowment and in its reputation as BC in the last quarter century? I don’t think so. And I know that the academic standards are rising. Kevin -- my friend, Kevin, my college roommate, and I wouldn’t have a chance to be admitted today after having somehow snuck in from Wellesley High School when the Admissions Office wasn’t looking in 1974.

And it has really been extraordinary to see the progress here. Without Father Monan’s skill and persistence in rescuing Boston College from near financial ruin when I was a freshman here in 1974, and then building this extraordinary alumni tradition of giving back to the college, we wouldn’t have the college we have today. And without Father Leahy’s incredible, steady, skillful, and persistent leadership of this school -- such wisdom in both of them -- without Father Leahy, we wouldn’t be perched on the edge of greatness as a university as we certainly are, as we look at Boston College today. And so we are all very proud to be part of this community, but we have to pay tribute to these two great gentlemen who have led us with such skill and distinction for a quarter century’s time.

Boston College’s strength, I think all of us would agree, is its Jesuit Catholic tradition and the contributions that the Catholic community makes to this college. I don’t know if Tony Penna is here, Father Penna, today, who is one of our great chaplains, but in my experience -- and I’ve known Tony a long time -- it’s hard to find anyone who connects with young people in a more effective and humane way than Tony. And he’s so representative of all of the Catholic priests and nuns who are here; who give their entire lives to this school and who make it the special place it is.

So I’ve been asked to speak about leadership. That’s leadership. We’ve seen it here at Boston College over these many years. And leadership is, of course, essential to anything we do in human life. It’s essential to corporations. It’s essential to nongovernmental organizations, to universities. It’s also very much essential, I can assure you, to those of us in government. And it’s very important that a nation have great leadership, especially a nation like ours that’s so powerful and has so much influence in the world today.

And that’s what I wish to speak about today: the global leadership challenge that we Americans have inherited. And that will be such a vital factor in the future of the world and certainly in the future success or failure of the way we interact in the world around us.

My view is we have a very different leadership challenge than all the generations of Americans before us. Think about it this way. For all of our history until the mid-20th century, our leaders focused primarily on the internal job of building the country; of sustaining that country, of bringing that country through innumerable crisis over 400 years. But I think that starting now, and certainly in the future, we’re going to need that American leadership primarily externally as we face the rest of the world beyond our shores.

Let me explain why. I live now in Virginia with my family, and we’ve got a great celebration coming this June. The Queen is coming to help President Bush celebrate the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown in 1607. And think of the history of our country in the four centuries since. It’s really quite exceptional.

We succeeded in building a nation, expanding that nation across the Appalachians 3,000 miles across plains and deserts, mountain ranges. We have fashioned the most extraordinary melting pot of religions and races and ethnicities that I think the world has ever seen in this country. We overcome the most deeply divisive and bloody civil war that any country could have. And then we built, largely in the last century, the most powerful economy and the most powerful military the world had ever seen. And all of this astounding growth and success happened right here.

And we succeeded in large part because of leadership; because we have leaders emerge at key points along that continuum of the last 400 years, and they’ve provided the vision and the courage and frankly the greatness that allowed us to surmount those challenges and allowed us to become the nation we are.

We produced some of the most luminous leaders in modern history -- world history -- here in our country: Jefferson, whose universal ideal of freedom and liberty was revolutionary then, 250 years ago, and is still revolutionary throughout the world today; Lincoln, who held us together courageously and nearly single-handedly at the key moment in the last four centuries; Martin Luther King, who convinced white Americans that we had to overlook and overcome -- excuse me -- the original sin of our constitution and accept African Americans and other minorities as rightful and equal citizens of this country; and that took several hundred years to happen.

So while it’s true that we’ve been a leading force, especially in the 20^th century, during the world wars and the Cold War, we primarily have been a country that has looked within, and our greatest energies have been -- had been here building this country.

Now, we’ve also had something else that helped our leaders. We had the extraordinarily unusual good geographic fortune of living practically with no external threats. And think about that for a moment. Is there another great country, great empire in all of human history that has not had to live with external threats? I don’t think so. I think it is particularly unique about the United States.

And so for most of this time, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans have been our great twin protectors, and they’ve sealed us off from the world’s worst excesses. And that gave us the luxury of retreating when we were inclined to follow John Quincy Adams’s famous admonition that Americans should not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.

And this singular fact of our physical separation from the rest of the world permitted us, unfortunately, in my view, to vacillate between isolation from the world and bursts of intense, active engagement in it. But all too often -- all too often, that engagement was quiet brief as it was in the 20th century: the First World War followed by isolation.

This American ambivalence about the rest of the world is, as I learned so well here at Boston College, the defining feature of our foreign policy since the founding of our country. We have swung wildly back and forth between seeking to lead and shrinking from leadership itself.

Consider a few examples. Remember Thomas Jefferson’s inaugural address when he said, “No entangling alliances.” Remember Woodrow Wilson putting two million Americans into the First World War. That made the critical difference in 1917; Britain and France won because we came. And yet two years later, a senator from this state, Henry Cabot Lodge, led the fight to kill Wilson’s League of Nations. The ideal that we learned from the war, that we create a multilateral solution to end all wars, and Henry Cabot Lodge from Boston, Massachusetts killed that dream and isolationist spirit.

Ten years ago, when I was spokesman for Madeleine Albright, I remember that Senator Jesse Helms decided that we wouldn’t pay our dues to the United Nations, and that went on for two years, and Madeleine Albright had to launch a public campaign to convince Americans that we’re the founding country of the United Nations, we’re the host country, we ought to pay our dues to the United Nations.

Many people here might not remember this personally, I certainly don’t, but this really was dramatized; this sense of isolation versus engagement. One of the great American icons of his time, Charles Lindbergh, launched a political campaign in the ‘30s to say, that’s not our fight against Hitler and Mussolini and the Japanese Empire. And he was so wrong. We were so fortunate to have FDR come forward with the courage and vision to say it is our fight, we don’t live alone in the world, we have to be engaged in the rest of the world.

So a quick look back at our history paints a picture of an America whose leaders had been primarily concerned with America itself and who felt physically safe and separate from the rest of the world.

What I wanted to come here to BC today and say is the following: Ladies and gentlemen, those days are over. They’re long gone. The days when Americans could decide when to pay attention to the rest of the world and then when to shrink back into ignorance and isolation, they’re over because the world’s changed. And America now finds itself at a truly fundamental pivot point in our national history over 400 years since Jamestown.

So unlike every generation before us, I believe our great challenges are no longer within although we certainly have them here at home; but they’re primarily beyond our shores. And unlike the past, the opportunities and the dangers that will be the most powerful forces affecting our country are primarily external.

This is going to require a mind change; a collective national change of how we look at the world, how we live, and how we think about our futures. I think the fundamental fact that every American has to understand and know today is we live in an age of globalization. The borders have shrunk and in some cases they even disappear. Technological and scientific change is so rapid that it literally narrows distance and time in the way we live in the world.

I think in this respect that Tom Friedman’s book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree -- and for the students in the audience, if there’s one book that I would read to understand the modern world, it’s The Lexus and the Olive Tree. Here’s what Tom says in this very prescient look at our future: He says that the most important forces shaping the planet are all transnational; they’re all international. And they represent at once our greatest positive opportunity and our greatest danger.

Think of it this way. Think of globalization this way -- there’s a bright, positive side and there’s a dark side.

The bright side of globalization -- I think, is obvious to all of us who are living, breathing Americans in the 21st century -- is the power of the information age. It’s cell-phones and personal computers and iPods. And it’s the power that gives people, young people, especially in developing countries to have a degree of personal freedom never experienced before in all of human history.

Think of the medical advances that give us the realistic prospect of eradicating malaria and polio and the other insidious diseases that are a fact of life, maybe not here in America, but for most of the people of the world; for the billion people who live in India, the 1.3 billion people who live in China, and the hundreds of millions of people who live in Africa. Think of the energy research -- this is positive -- that promised to free us from our carbon-based economy: hydrogen, biofuels, wind. Think of the space research that could take the young people in this room beyond Mars in their lifetimes.

So when we think about globalization, the positive side, when think about the power of science to change our world for the better, then, I think, we understand we live in one of the most hopeful times in all of human history. We have more power as individuals to change the world for the better, to better the human condition, to alleviate poverty, to help people, than any other generation before us. That’s an amazing opportunity and we ought to grab it. It’s an exceptional moment in our national history. That’s the positive side of globalization.

But there is also a dark side, and we’ve all seen it. We’re witnessing the rapid development of negative forces that threaten the way we live and that threaten, in some cases, our very existence on this planet.

I think the greatest dangers that we face in our country and the world are all these transnational challenges. And it’s going to form the way we act and interact with the rest of the world.

What are those challenges: global climate change for sure, we can’t deny the global climate change is going to have a powerful impact on the way we live and the way we work; trafficking of women and children in many parts of the world; the sale of young women in bondage is a major human crisis in the Balkans, in the Middle East, in Africa, in parts of our own country here at home; the spread of pandemic diseases; think of HIV/AIDS, the pandemic in South Africa; the proliferation of chemical and biological nuclear technology and the really harrowing prospect that that technology might be joined with Usama bin Ladin or any other radical or terrorist you would care to identity who would use those weapons with their incredibly destructive power against us.

So whether we’re encountering the positive side or the negative side of globalization, the Atlantic and Pacific aren’t going to protect us anymore the way they did 19th- and early 20th-century Americans because these forces are flowing over and under and right through our borders.

Think of the international drug cartels who send crack cocaine to streets of every city in this country; and our kids consume that. And think of the international crime cartels responsible for so much of the corruption that plagues our country in other countries. These are the negative globalizing forces.

Because they are by definition global, they can’t be combated by one nation acting alone, however powerful that nation, like us, may be. They can only be met effectively, in my judgment, by nations acting together. And that very fact gives us the enormous opportunity to do great things internationally, but it also gives us a responsibility to do the right thing and to lead effectively.

The United States -- we, this country -- we’re the leading and most important global force in the 21st century. And so that places a premium on us having the type of leadership in business and academia, in the NGO community, and certainly in government, that will be able to see beyond the horizon and make the correct choices for all of us so that we’re prepared to do the right thing and to protect ourselves from these negative forces.

That means we need to think more internationally here at Boston College, here in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and certainly, in Washington, D.C. You know, you learn here if you take political science with Professor Haffner* that all nations act out of their national interest. Well, for the last 400 years, most of our leaders said the national interest is here. And for the next 400 years, our leaders better say the national interest is there.

So if you’ve been reading The Globe or watching CNN lately, you can’t escape the thought that we find ourselves leading at one of the most difficult times in our national history. We’re swimming in a sea of troubles and yet we also have these enormously positive opportunities ahead of us.

I have been a professional diplomat since just after I left Boston College, since 1980. And I can't remember a time when our country was faced with so many difficult problems, similarly all at once. Look anywhere in the world, we're fighting two wars, one in Iraq and one in Afghanistan, and we want to be successful in both of them. We're facing a truculent Iran, a very powerful state that is seeking nuclear weapons that could change the whole game of power in the Middle East.

We are facing this great moral and humanitarian crisis in Darfur where there is a genocide occurring and where the Sudanese Government will not let us come in with a UN peacekeeping force to protect those poor people being raped and killed in great numbers. We see massive poverty: 700 million people in India living on $2 a day or below -- 700 million people; thousands of people across Brazil and the slums of Port-au-Prince in Haiti, all over the world; the HIV/AIDS pandemic; the rise of a dangerous populism in South America; the challenges, positive and negative, that come with this historic rise of India and China on the world stage.

So the essential challenge before us is to lead and to be part of the world, and to do so persuasively and effectively so that we maximize these positive forces and we minimize the dark side of globalization.

With this in mind, let me just toss out for this audience -- and we are going to have a chance to talk, and I am looking forward to your questions and your thoughts when I conclude my remarks -- but I thought I might just present, since the Winston Center asked me to talk about leadership, five leadership challenges for the United States in the years ahead.

Here is my first leadership challenge. We must accept the mantle of global leadership. We have no choice because our power is unmatched in the world today.

How would you measure the power?

Let's think of it this way. Politically, we are the indispensable country. That's not an arrogant statement, I think that's a factual statement. Whenever a country is called to mediate a difficult crisis, whether it's Darfur or Kashmir or Jerusalem or Taiwan, they call us. And whether people love us or not, they want the United States in the middle of the world's hot spots and we really can't avoid that major political role in the world.

Economically, we have the largest economy. We have the most innovative private sector. We're still the world technology leader, although India, especially, and China are creeping up upon us. And the world economy can't run without the United States at the wheel.

Militarily, and here's where it really becomes interesting, and think of it in historical terms, we may just be the strongest country relative to all the others since the Roman Empire 2000 years ago. Now think of the huge strategic advantage that gives us. But also think of the huge responsibility it gives us to use that power effectively.

So this unprecedented power demands that we embrace our status as a global leader. And we haven't done it for 230 years, and we need to now. That's my first challenge for our country.

Second, we must simply reject the lure of isolationism, which has too often been our reflex at great international turmoil. We need to choose instead a policy of permanent engagement in the world; it's our overriding national interest and priority. And if there's one central lesson that we can learn from 9/11, and there are a lot of them, and they're mostly bad and negative, is that you can't live apart from the world. You can't turn away from challenges. You can't pull the covers over your head on a stormy morning.

Third, we need to reject isolationism's twin evil: unilateralism. There are still some in our chattering classes. You see them on FOX TV, you see them on CNN, who still believe that we are best off essentially acting alone in the world. And they argue that our power is so great and we're such a powerful country, it's so pervasive, that we can afford to act alone; choose when we work in an alliance and choose when we should not. And I think the unilateralists among us are just plain wrong about the direction that our country should take. It's a one-way road to failure in our foreign policy. A unilateralist country could not in the future take advantage of all these terrific opportunities we have and it certainly couldn't face all the dangers that we do. Do we have enough troops and money to fight the dark forces of globalization on our own?

So my question for the unilateralists would be: Why is going it alone a good idea? In 2007, it makes no sense to neglect an alliance like NATO that could help us shoulder the burden in places like Afghanistan. It makes no sense to want our soldiers to do all the fighting or our taxpayers to do all the contributing; to fund all these priorities around the world. The world's problems are not going to be resolved easily by that American icon -- that image that we all grew up with, that the cowboy on the Western range riding alone. We should want to be the sheriff of a unified, democratic global community that stands for something; that wants to defend freedom and liberty and democratic capitalism and our way of life. That's what we should want to be. And that's what we can be.

So instead of turning away from the world as the unilateralists would like us to do, I think we need to turn back. We need to turn back to a policy rebuilding the United Nations. And we're trying to do that. And President Bush has put a lot of effort into rebuilding NATO over the last four years. It is paying off. NATO is now shouldering the mass -- the major part of the burden for us in Afghanistan. And I think that there is no difference between the politicians in Washington on this. I see that the Governor -- President Bush and the Democratic majority in the Senate and the House understand and are embracing the fact that we've got to be activists and increasingly multilateral when that is effective in the world.

Fourth, we need to remain strong if we're going to be a credible global leader. I know that there are times and there certainly was in the beginning of the '90s when the Cold War ended, when the Berlin Wall fell, when the Soviet Union disintegrated, people said we can finally turn back to attention to problems here at home and reduce the defense budget and reduce the size of the military. Well, we've got 170,000 soldiers in Iraq. We have 27,000 soldiers in Afghanistan. We have 60,000 soldiers in Western Europe, 60,000 in Japan and Korea, and we are stretched thin.

We have a big job to do overseas. We need to remain strong. We need to remember that diplomacy and the effort to achieve peace is sometimes best reinforced by strength; by a military that's second to none because what we're facing in some parts of the world are groups like al-Qaida and the Taliban. They were willing to fly airplanes into buildings on September 11th 2001 just to make a political point; just to kill people and to make that statement. And they're willing to do it again. And they have to be met by an enlightened diplomacy combined with strength. So we have to remain strong to counter these frankly evil forces in the world.

And this calls for a strong American military. There's a young woman here -- Heide Bronke. She is a BC graduate from the School of Management in 1992. Heide demonstrates public service. She became a Foreign Service Officer like myself. She also joined the Reserves and is an Army major and just spent in Iraq. We need more people like Heide. We need young people here at BC to say, I'm going to join the U.S. military or the American diplomatic corps or the Peace Corps; or, I'm going to work through business in a multinational corporation to further that good around the world. But we need people to choose national service and to choose doing something for our country and the world. That's my fourth challenge.

My fifth would be to say this. We need to be a positive, inclusive world leader because true global leadership requires a concern for everybody's problems. If we communicate that we really don't care about the problems that other people have around the world, well -- and those problems are the environment in Europe, and social justice in Central America, and poverty in Africa and disease -- if we don't show people in those continents that those are our problems too, they're not going to follow us and we're not going to be an effective leader.

So simply put, you know, just as the BC football and hockey teams have game plans, we've got a game plan. We're got a foreign policy strategic plan. That game plan cannot be all about us. It's got to be about the rest of the world too. And the U.S. agenda has to become a global agenda because that's the way that leaders operate. They show that kind of strength in incorporating the thoughts, the aspirations and the human dreams of people around the world. And we especially in this country, in this generation – we are the luckiest generation ever. We live lives of incredible luxury and wealth. We really have very little to worry about if you're in the middle- or upper-class of the United States of America. We especially have to identity with the poor of the world and so something about poverty alleviation because the status quo for most people around the world is not our status quo. It's a very different life and a very different future.

President Bush went to Latin America last month. I think he surprised his audience in Colombia and Brazil and Guatemala and Mexico because what he did in his speech was to say we in the United States believe in democracy and capitalism; we also believe in social justice; we also believe in helping poor people. And this was his response to Hugo Chavez, who says the way forward is through populism and the way forward is through nationalizing corporations and the way forward is through socializing economies. We have to show that we care about these universal human problems as well as aspirations.

So those are my five challenges that I would toss out to you. I would be very interested in hearing your response. But before I conclude, I thought I'd just maybe say one more thing that we have to do in the world. I think we have to give the world hope because I think that global leadership is more than just getting the economics right and getting the politics right. We have to give people a sense that we are on their agenda and that we believe their problems can be resolved. This is somewhat of a cynical time. A lot of people think -- who think, you know, what's the use of trying to resolve these massive problems around the world because they're so huge; what can I do about it? That's cynicism.

It seems to me we have to regain some of the idealism that was so prevalent on this campus in the 1970s when I was here. We were very idealistic. And I'm not saying that the students here today are not. I see it in my own kids. There is idealism. I think actually it's we, the leaders of our institutions, who need to become a little bit more hopeful and idealistic because that's essential to greatness on the world stage.

Americans have been at their best when we managed to articulate for the rest of the world what it wanted most. So we've been at our best when Jefferson called for revolutionary political change against monarchy. And we were at our best when Lincoln ended slavery. And we were certainly at our best when Eleanor Roosevelt committed the United Nations to a universal declaration of human rights and committed our country to human rights. And we were absolutely at our best when Martin Luther King sat in that jail in Birmingham, Alabama and called for revolutionary change through non-violence. So we need to give the world hope again that positive-inspired idealistic leadership has a place in business and academia and in politics.

Let me conclude on this note. I was at a dinner in Washington two weeks ago, and one of the people there was a very wise, retired American politician. His name was Lee Hamilton. You've probably heard of him: Baker-Hamilton Commission; Indiana Congressman. He said to the people around the dinner table that night: You know, great leaders and great countries don't just dump problems on their citizens, they give people a sense of hope; a sense that there is a solution out there, and they ask us to reach for a higher horizon and a bigger dream.

So I thought about that when I was driving home that night. The next morning, my wife, Libby, and I -- we did our annual Washington tradition of walking around the Tidal Basin to see the magnificent cherry trees the Japanese Government gave us back in 1912, and we came upon the FDR Memorial, the memorial to Franklin Delanor Roosevelt, which if you haven't seen it, you should, it's magnificent. It's right along the Tidal Basin, surrounded by cherry trees on a beautiful Saturday morning.

And we looked at the great words of FDR etched in stone and it really struck both my wife and I that morning that when the American people faced their greatest crisis of the last hundred years, the Great Depression and the Second World War, FDR's greatest act of leadership was to tell people it was going to be all right; that the only thing we had to fear, he said so famously, was fear; and that with combined will and with a little sense of idealism and hard work, we would great through the Great Depression, which we did, and then we would defeat Hitler and the Emperor of Japan, which we did. And he really instilled hope in people's souls. And that was a wonderful historic contribution that he made to our country. And then gave the rest of the world, Europe and Asia, the hope that they could transcend the war just before he died. The United Nations was his vision and his wife's vision. It was a great vision.

So I think to be a truly effective global leader, the United States needs to be that hopeful sign to the rest of the world. That's worthy of us. That's worthy of Boston College and our community here. It's certainly worthy of our country. And it is a dream that we can reach with goodwill and a lot of hard work.

That is what I wanted to say to you today. I preceded my coming to Boston College by going to the John F. Kennedy Library and I spoke to a group there at lunch about the problems we're having with Iran. And the president of the library, Ambassador John Shaddock introduced me by saying, let me read you some words from the commencement address that President Kennedy gave at the American University in Washington, D.C. on June 10th, 1963. And the words are perfectly attuned to our problems now. This is President Kennedy speaking 40 -- more than 40 years ago.

Here is what he said: "So let us not be blind to our differences" -- he was taking about the global community, the east-west standoff -- "but let us also direct attention to our common interests, and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal."

There are some people who can see over the horizon. I think he saw over the horizon that day in June of 1963. I think they're words we should reflect upon here and around the world. And I think our country and its very -- and its greatness can be that aspiring idealistic world leader in the future.

Thank you very, very much for listening to me. I'm happy to now talk to you, hear your concerns and take your questions. Thank you. (Applause.)

MODERATOR: Let me thank you for a very thoughtful, insightful talk, and invite the audience -- we have some time for questions, observations, comments. There are some microphones on top of the passageway here right between the two sections of the auditorium. If -- yes, Erin (ph). Go ahead, yes.

QUESTION: Thank you very much for your talk. I just wanted to make a relatively quick point with a brief preface, if that's all right with you.

AMBASSADOR BURNS: Sure.

QUESTION: You compared our military to that of the Roman Empire. You've put, you know, great emphasis in the fact that we have one of the strongest militaries in our history. But even while maintaining this very large military, we experienced one of the greatest attacks on our soil ever on 9/11. Our military did take down the regime of Saddam Hussein in weeks, but we're still failing, or seem to be failing -- I would say failing -- in other aspects of the Iraq war.

So the question I would like to you ask is the emphasis you put on strength. I agree with almost every other point you make -- excuse me -- about the importance of U.S. leadership. But the question of putting strength to answer violence with violence -- if that's still the correct way of dealing of our role of global leadership in the world. You mentioned Martin Luther King, his emphasis on nonviolence in response to violence.

You mention the importance of (inaudible) influence of peace and forgiveness in this university. Are we still caught in this blind ignorance of 400 years of American history and, you know, realist influences by concentrating on military and strength, or will we be better off investing in poor countries and warding off terrorism rather than trying to wait and fight it with the military? I mean, I guess my question to you is: Is military now, if all of your points are correct -- is that a moot point?

AMBASSADOR BURNS: Thank you, very thoughtful question; thank you very much for your thoughts. I would put it this way. I think that, you know -- think of the military as an institution that can do a lot of different things for America. First of all, it protects our country, the elementary responsibility in any government: defend the borders, defend the country, defend the people in it. And that is absolutely essential in a very dangerous, complicated world which is getting more dangerous and complicated by the second.

Secondly, the military can project power on a humanitarian basis. When the tsunami hit Southeast Asia on December 26, 2004, it was the American military, the Japanese, Australian and Indian navies that brought that immediate support to the people of Indonesia and Sri Lanka and Thailand. And so the military exists to help people, not just defend people.

Third, I'd say that if you read Hans Morgenthau, which we read in our political science classes here at BC, I don't think any cogent thinker of the last hundred years would contradict the thesis that you can't really be successful by diplomacy alone in the world in discussion. The world is dangerous. There are sometimes evil and forbidding forces in the world. You need to have the threat of force or the use of force, as we had to employ in World War Two, to use it; to threaten it during the Cold War; to keep the peace -- the deterrent strategy -- and that's critical.

But I take your point. We can't live by the military alone, and power can't be projected through the barrel of the gun alone. And so you need a balance force in diplomacy. And right now, I think we're in an interesting time now. It was unusual to fight two wars and to initiate two wars as we did in 2001 in Afghanistan and 2003 in Iraq; unusual in our history. We're now in a period of trying to consolidate. We're trying to keep the peace in Afghanistan and we're doing it rather successfully, not without challenge in the Taliban, but rather successfully. And we have this enormously difficult task in Iraq. But we're trying hard. And the 170,000 men and women in uniform are doing a spectacular job under extraordinarily difficult circumstances.

So I think now we need to consolidate through diplomacy. And the greatest challenges we'd probably face right now outside of Iraq are trying to prevent Iran and North Korea from becoming nuclear weapons states. We're using diplomacy in both cases. The six-party talks have succeeded in an agreement mid-February to lead to the destruction by peaceful means of North Korea's nuclear arsenal. They've agreed to it. We now need to implement it.

In Iran, where I do a lot of work, we're trying to convince the Iranian Government to come to the negotiating table. We don't want to fight Iran. We should not want to have a military altercation with them. We have a diplomatic approach that says to the Iranians we're willing to meet you halfway at the negotiating table; we are willing to work out our differences peacefully."

So I do think you're right to suggest that foreign policy is most often successful when diplomacy represents the aspirations for peace. But it's backed up by strength. You've got to have strength to be successful, and we've been so fortunate in this country over the last century or so to have that military strength to buttress our diplomatic power.

QUESTION: Hi. I watch the news quite a bit and I listen to a lot of -- sort of Bush Administration's talking points on the war in Iraq. And there doesn't seem to be a lot of content in what they say. It's sort of one-liners like "Support Our Troops" and "Stay the Course." I guess from -- well, why don't I choose from a policy perspective -- specifically, what do you think needs to be done and what is being done by the Bush administration to turn the Iraq war around?

AMBASSADOR BURNS: Thanks a lot, and I think you're right to ask about Iraq. It is the most important thing we are doing in the world today and it's probably the most -- it's certainly the most frustrating and it's the most dangerous. I think you're right to ask that we talk -- go beyond the talking points. So let me just try very briefly.

We've got a number of priorities, and I think you have to take them one by one. You can't -- we're not going to be successful in trying to resolve every problem concerning Iraq in the next couple of months.

Job number one: just restoring some order to the streets, particularly of Baghdad and Anbar province, and of Basra and the south. Number one.

Number two: helping the Iraqis get some control over their borders. Right now on the Syrian-Iraqi border, the Syrian Government is allowing foreign fighters to come in, and most of those guys come and shoot at us. And the Iranian Government is allowing the same thing of a different sort to happen on its border. And so, getting control of the borders.

Third: maintaining a unitary state in Iraq. The Middle East was put together by the British and French at the end of the colonial period in the 1920s without regard for ethnicity, where groups -- where people, real people live. They just kind of drew lines. You look at the lines of Jordan -- the borders of Jordan, or Iraq or Syria. They are largely straight lines. They shouldn't be straight. Keeping Sunni, Shia and Kurds together in one state is a huge task. The British failed at that in the 1920s. Saddam did it by brutal force, which we don't want to do. And so trying to help the Iraqis fashion a political compromise -- how do you share power? How do you share the oil wealth of the country? Who gets to be President, Prime Minister, Speaker of the Parliament so that the Kurds and Shia and Sunni all have some investment in the country?

And fourth, how do we help the Iraqi Government build up its own capacity so that they can take over the jobs that our young women and young men are doing in uniform? We also have the largest American Embassy in the world in Baghdad in what our young diplomats are doing.

So that's a very simplistic answer to a really good question, but it's substantive in the sense that I think there are certain concrete things -- objectives that we need to attain before we can leave. I know this is controversial, when should we leave. The Democrats in the Senate and House are putting forward a bill now to challenge the President that he should choose a date to begin the withdrawal of troops. And I'm sure there's lots of opinion, pro and con, in this room about that.

My own personal view is that we went into that country four years ago and we overthrew a government, and so we have the responsibility now. And I think just to walk away because it's hard, because it's bloody, because it's difficult, would be ignoble. I think we have to find a way to help them succeed. If we just walk away -- I mean, if we withdrew our military and withdrew the embassy and just said it's yours -- well, we went in and we overthrew that government; we are partly responsible for what has happened. And so I think the responsible thing to do is to try to succeed, and not try to fail.

I don't say this from a partisan basis -- I'm not a Democrat, I'm not a Republican, I'm a career civil-servant, I'm not partisan -- but I do think that we have to try. I don't think it's an Olympian task, an impossible task, but it's certainly the hardest thing we have to do in the world today; no question about that.

And, you know, Washington is not the font of all wisdom. There may be a lot of good ideas in this campus about what we should be doing. You ought to be in touch with your congressman. And you ought to be writing in the school newspaper. This is a big, big issue, and I thank you for your interest in it with your question.

MODERATOR: We'll take another question on this side and then we'll come back to the other.

QUESTION: I want to thank you for your positive comments and your attempt to give us some hope in our ability to lead in the future. But I have a question about a negative point, or at least negative in my point of view. The U.S. military budget is the largest in the world. In fact, it equals the sum of all the other nations' military budgets put together. It's also the single-largest item in our budget.

AMBASSADOR BURNS: Yes.

QUESTION: Is that appropriate going on into the future?

AMBASSADOR BURNS: Well, you have to make choices when you're building the national budget. You have to make a million different choices about where you put your money: welfare, rebuilding cities, infrastructure, agricultural support, foreign aid, et cetera, et cetera. I do think that if you think about the role that government has in a democratic society, our first obligation is to protect and defend the country, especially in a violent world, unfortunately in which we live.

The fact is that our military superiority, which is very important for our country, is based on the huge expense of fielding a modern navy, a modern air force, and a modern army, which are built on high-tech technology, high-tech gadgets. And I don't -- I think that we need to look beyond the -- perhaps the caricature, not that you're drawing it, but that sometimes people draw of the military; it's just about violence and aggression.

The military -- our military, has been the guarantor of power in Asia since September 2nd, 1945 when the war ended in Tokyo. We have kept the peace among the major states, with notable exceptions of Korea Vietnam -- but kept the peace and avoided a regional war with China and the United States because of our military strength; because of the Navy in Japan and the Army in Korea. And we kept the peace for 60 years in Europe because we were willing to send several million young men and women to serve there on the fold gap between the Warsaw -- facing the Warsaw Pact forces. And our ability to be successful in disaster relief -- humanitarian relief, depends pretty much on our military infrastructure.

So it is enormously expensive. I think it is worth it. I don't think we can shrink from a credible and strong military. That's the choice I make as a citizen: to support that.

QUESTION: I also want to thank you for your remarks today. I just wanted to ask that, in emphasizing the need for the U.S. to further engage our partners and even enemies abroad, do you also believe that the best way to do so is by directly promoting democratization, or do you believe that other means are better equipped to do that?

AMBASSADOR BURNS: Well, that's a -- you've really put your finger on a really -- a very important question about our foreign policy. When do you seek to -- can you impose a political system on a people who don't know it? Or does that system have to grow organically from within itself? I think it's a very important question. You know, we ask that question about Vietnam. And we ask it now about Iraq or the greater Middle East where democracy has not taken roots; the only region of the world where it really hasn't to any great extent.

I guess I'd say this: What's distinct about our country, what's unique about it, and what we've always valued about our country, going all the way back really to Plymouth Plantation, is that we believe that all people should be free. That's what Jefferson said. Now, we didn’t really mean it because he didn't mean African Americans. And we only redeemed that in the 1960s. But pointing that historical point aside, we believe in democracy, freedom and equality, and that -- we believe these are God-given rights. That's what makes us unique. That's what makes America special to the rest of the world.

I think, despite all the anti-Americans in the world today -- and there's a lot of it, and we face it personally, all of us, when we go overseas -- people vote with their feet. We still have several million people who try to come in legally or illegally in this country. Why? Not just because we're rich and life is good here. It's because we're free. And so I guess I would say, as someone involved in foreign policy, we should never shrink from supporting democracy. And we should never be bashful or embarrassed to stand up and say we don't support dictatorship in Russia; we don't support massive human rights violations in Zimbabwe, which is occurring right now; we don't support the massive violations of the rights of the people in Burma. I think Americans need to stand up for those values.

Now you asked a tougher question, and I've kind of avoided it. I can't give you a great answer, except to say there may be times when we can suggest to a people -- in extraordinary circumstances like 1945 and '46 and '47 to Germany and Japan -- you can become democratic. MacArthur wrote the constitution for the Japanese, and it's been wildly successful. And nobody predicted that that would happen back in 1946 and '47. And Germany, this militant, militaristic state for centuries has become one of the most peaceful, law-abiding global citizens there is in the world today.

So when people say, well, the Arabs can't be democratic, I think it's a little bit unmindful of the history of our times. It's also a little bit unfair to the Arabs. Are we really saying that only Caucasians be democratic or that Arabs don't have the right, or Africans don't have the right to democracy and freedom? We think that everyone should have that right, and we should always champion it.

I read that quote from John Quincy Adams: "America should not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy." The preceding clause is that we should -- whenever the banner of liberty has unfurled, there should America be. And I think that he was right. That's how I'd answer your really good question.

QUESTION: Thank you, sir. You've spoken of quite a few aspects of foreign policy. Obviously, today, continued involvement in -- not necessarily promoting democracy but definitely promoting America's interest and globalization. You spoke of the defense budget. I'd like to address and ask you about what was your fourth point, which was almost a fourth challenge, a -- call to service --

AMBASSADOR BURNS: Yes.

QUESTION: -- whether that be Peace Corps or the military on the part of my generation. Several months ago, Senator John Kerry made a political gaffe when he botched a joke and it came out saying, oh, if you don't study hard, if you don't work hard in school, yadda yadda, you'll end up in Iraq. Unfortunately, perhaps I'm cynical in the sense that a political gaffe is, I feel, is when a politician speaks the truth inadvertently.

And this is most unfortunate in this case because what that reveals is, I feel, a very big stigma. As much as we support the troops and no matter how many magnetic yellow ribbons we have on our bumpers, there's a stigma against what it means to be a soldier in the United States. It's -- it almost seems like a different demographic. How does that call to service play into the social role and social position of the soldier in today's society?

AMBASSADOR BURNS: Well, that's a very, very interesting comment that you've made. I'd say two things. I'd say first is, you know, if you talk to people about the modern military, we ended the draft in, I believe, 1973, and we created the professional all-volunteer army. Colin Powell used to be my boss when he was Secretary of State and he lived in the draft days. He was a Vietnam -- an officer in Vietnam, drafted. And then he also, of course, became Chairman of the Joint Chiefs in the all-volunteer army. He used to tell us that there is no comparison. In his mind, the all-volunteer army was 100 percent better than the draft army because everybody chose to be there; because it was their career, and because you had a chance to mold and train and build leadership across a person's length of a career. I was almost impressed by that because he's come from an immigrant background; minority background; very tough upbringing; brought himself up. I thought that was an interesting testimony -- testament to the all-volunteer army.

But there is obviously a tradeoff. My dad used to say -- he served in the Marine Corps during the Second World War -- that one of the interesting things about being in the Marine Corps during the war was that you met people from all over the country from all walks of life because everybody served; and that there was a real -- he thought there was a real social value to that. He was an Irish-Catholic kid from Worcester, Massachusetts, but he met, you know, kids from all races and religions from across the country. We’ve lost that, and boy, do I admire the people who serve in our military. I've seen them in Afghanistan. I have seen them in Bosnia and Kosovo, and they're putting their lives on the line. They have a lot of kids who come out of urban backgrounds, poor backgrounds, minority backgrounds. They're choosing this, but they're putting their life on the line for us.

So I think there is a tradeoff here. We maybe have a better professional army than we did in Vietnam -- we certainly do -- but the tradeoff is that a certain group of people are doing a lot of fighting for a lot of us who are wealthy, and who don't have to serve anymore. And so we have to be aware of that tradeoff in our society.

It gets to your larger point, thank you very for asking it. You know, I think there's lots that we can do to be public servants; it's not just the conventional public servant -- join the military servant, join the State Department. But you can be in the Peace Corps. You can work for an NGO. You can work in the inner city. You can do what a lot of our great business people do, and they give back. Look at all the great benefactors here at BC. A lot of these people have been very successful in their business careers, and they don't want to spend the rest of their life just adding to their bankroll; they actually give their money away. And I think that's public service. I think what Chuck (ph) has done and Mr. Winston (ph) have done is really public service to help build this community here.

So I think we should have a broad dimension -- a broad definition of public service. President Kennedy said, when he spoke here on our centennial in 1963, he said what he said to a lot of groups back then: Public service is the most noble profession. And if we have a big tent philosophy of what it is, we can all embrace it to make the world better, to make our society better. Isn't that what the Ignatian ideal of Boston College is all about? Isn't that what makes BC different, perhaps in some secular institutions that we say to our students: Find a way; you don't have to become Mother Theresa, you can actually go to Wall Street and do great things for your society.

So that's -- I believe in public service, but I believe we should have a big definition of what it is, and I hope that you can find your way to that too. Thanks a lot.

QUESTION: Thank you.

QUESTION: Thank you for coming today. My question was that -- you spoke at the Heritage Foundation of the necessity to engage in South Asia, and the reasons of its importance to American foreign policy. My question is, how is the -- is that engagement continuing currently, in light of the current civil nuclear engagements and the agricultural agreements that have recently been signed?

And also, do you envision that relationship to be one that is akin to the U.S.-Israel relationship with the heavy reliance on the diaspora community? And if so, how does that further relationship affect the U.S. in its relationship with Pakistan?

AMBASSADOR BURNS: Thanks very much. You know, I think one of the great hopeful things we've got going on right now is this new relationship with India. We look at India as this largest democracy in the world, a billion people. It's going to overtake China in population in 10 to 15 years, and they're all democrats. And they live by elections and the rule of law.

So we can combine forces with India, not for military purposes, but to show that democracy can exist in a poor country and that now you have a middle class of 300 million people in India that didn't exist 25 years ago; that democracy and capitalism can actually lift people out of poverty. That's what the Indians believe about their own society. And if we can combine to the effective partners in trying to help in the civil wars in Sri Lanka, to help with the Islamic insurgency in Bangladesh, to help in Nepal, we can really stabilize South Asia and beyond that. India has so much credibility in the world. We've got to promote -- a project right now where India and the United States try to promote democracy together around the world. We're trying to promote HIV/AIDS prevention together in the world.

So, you know, it's tempting, the news really is all about what's going wrong in the world. Here's something that's going right. The development of the relationship with India and the United States that might be 10 or 15 years ago from now, one of our two or three most important relationships. So thank you for asking about that.

Yes, sir.

QUESTION: Thank you, Secretary Burns, for coming here today. We really appreciate it. My question is on -- you've mentioned Hans Morgenthau. I currently just read him this semester. And like, one of his mains points in his book, Politics Among Nations, is the policy of prestige. And you've mentioned anti-Americanism throughout the world. An d one of the main points that he makes in the book is by creating a pre-emptive war, we inherently lose part of our power, our strength. It's a detriment to our foreign policy in the fact that we become less powerful by engaging in this.

And throughout the world today, America's name is tainted because of this, whether it was -- it was not anyone's intention, but it exists. And as a representative of our State Department, I was wondering what currently we're doing to change our image because throughout the world today, it can be a liability to be an American in a foreign country (off-mike).

AMBASSADOR BURNS: Thanks. That's a very -- that's a very important issue that we're grappling with, and I'd say this: I'd say yes, you're right to an extent that we're facing a higher degree of anti-Americanism in the world today than we've ever seen before. It's certainly true in Europe where global climate change is the big issue and where a lot of Europeans feel we're not doing enough as the largest economy in the world. It's true in the Muslim world where, you know, a lot of Muslims, a lot of Arab countries are -- have antipathy towards us because of our policies in Iraq and Afghanistan and concerning Israel and the Palestinians. So it's true.

But it's not true in India. India is the second largest country in the world. We are very popular there. Public opinion polls show a high degree of favorability to the United States. It's not true of China. It's not true of the Philippines. It's not true of Colombia.

So there are important parts of the world where the United States is well thought of. There are important parts of the world where we are reviled and where anti-Americanism is on the rise.

My family and I lived in Greece for four years during the Kosovo war. Now, Greece was an ally of Serbia. We were fighting Serbia. You can imagine how unpopular we were: anti-American demonstrations and riots and Molotov cocktails. And you work through it and you live through it. And now the Greeks -- those passions have subsided and I think the Greeks feel better about the United States.

Last thing I'd say is, a lot of this has to do with power. Nobody liked the British Empire in the places where the British Empire was powerful because people want to have some self-respect. People don't want to have someone else's military, or McDonalds, or Microsoft, or Starbucks, you know, in the face of their culture. And so I think that our soft power and our military power are double-edged swords. They're important for us. They're a part of the power base of our country. But they're also sometimes off-putting.

I think we just have to understand that with great power comes sometimes that adverse action. I'm not apologizing for it. I do think that we have to make a much better effort to explain who we are and to show the goodness of America to the rest of the world. I mean, there are some countries where the state-controlled press in authoritarian countries spew out lies about us; I mean, pictures of us that you would not recognize. And so in those situations, you have to stand up and make the argument. That means you have to talk to people, even people you don't like; people who might be on opposite sides of the barricades and try to communicate a more true picture of who we are.

So I think it's a very complicated issue and we have to be very concerned about it. It's a job -- it's a big job of our government and it certainly will be in the next administration.

QUESTION: Thank you.

AMBASSADOR BURNS: Thanks.

QUESTION: Thank you very much for your speech, Secretary. You mentioned that the U.S. needs to play a role in strengthening the United Nations. Do you feel that in the future, the UN should be performing essentially the same functions but with greater strength, or do you feel that the role of the UN needs to change in the future? And more specifically, do you feel that the UN's role in peacekeeping missions needs to be increased?

And as an aside to that, you also mentioned Darfur. Do you feel that the U.S. needs to push for a Chapter 7 resolution so that we can advocate the use of force to resolve the conflict there?

AMBASSADOR BURNS: Really good questions. The United Nations is the only institution in the world that embodies global human aspirations, where everybody is equal in the General Assembly; one vote each. So we and Luxembourg and we and Sao Tome and Principe have the same weight. That's important to have that democratic body. We're the founding country, the host country and the leading donor. So if we kind of shrink away and walk away from the UN, it's self-defeating. Our view is we ought to try to rebuild the United Nations and make it effective.

Now it can't be all things to all people. There are things that we can do in NATO or working with the Asian countries or the African countries that the UN doesn't have to do, but you put your finger on a very important job of the UN: peacekeeping. In Congo, the bloodiest place on earth of the last five years, in Cote d`voire, in Somalia, in Darfur, in Liberia, in Sierra Leone, it's the United Nations that goes in with peacekeeping forces to try to break up civil wars and keep the peace. We're not willing to do that, other countries aren't willing to do that. That's why we pay dues to the United Nations.

So I do agree with you with the implication of your question that the UN is terribly important. And it may be unpopular in certain parts of the country, but we shouldn't want to live without the UN. Why would we want to -- if we did away with the UN, guess where all that burden would fall? Right here on our shoulders.

Darfur is a very vexing problem. We have been pushing for six months now for a United Nations peacekeeping force to go into Darfur. Now, generally what you don't want to do is go in against the will of the host country, Sudan. So we have been trying to work with the leader of Sudan to convince him he ought to let us do this; the United Nations, all of us, to protect the people of Darfur. He's refused. Our Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte, my colleague, is leaving tonight to go visit Khartoum and to talk to President Bashir and to convince him that if he does not do this, then I think we are going to have to turn to the options that you have cited; some kind of sanctions resolution against Sudan that will compel them, we hope, to do the right thing in Darfur. Thank you.

QUESTION: Good afternoon, Secretary Burns. I wanted to shift gears to a region that you mentioned in point five, which is South America. I'll start out by saying that I was born and raised in Venezuela, so you may have an idea of what I'm going to ask you.

AMBASSADOR BURNS: I do. (Laughter.)

QUESTION: You mentioned in one of your previous answers that the U.S. fully supports democracies. And as you very well know, despite the fact that Hugo Chavez was elected in Venezuela, some of the political decisions that he has made can be questioned if they are compared -- or if they compared to true democratic ideals. So what do you see or how do you see the U.S.’s role -- is with respect to the current situation in Venezuela? But also in the region as a whole -- and I could also vouch for the fact that the U.S. has lost a lot of influence, even with people who are anti-populists such as myself -- how do you see the U.S. gaining some of that influence gaining some of that influence back in South America and Latin America in general?

AMBASSADOR BURNS: Thanks very much. I think we ignore the Western Hemisphere at our peril. You know, if you had to name one relationship that we have with a foreign country that’s vital, it’s Mexico; this symbiotic relationship we have along the border. It's drugs, it’s crime, it’s people, it’s the environment. It’s good things and bad things, but we’ve got to get it right.

It is our debt to work with the people of Central America, who depend so much on trade with us, and we have a Free Trade Agreement with Central America and the Dominican Republic. It’s the enormous promise of what we can do in Brazil. President Bush and President Lula just signed a biofuels agreement. I was in Brasilia and Sao Paolo in February to negotiate that. We are the world leaders in biofuels. We control 74 percent of the ethanol market worldwide. We can -- 82 percent of the cars in Brazil are flex fuel -- 82 percent; they don’t any import any oil anymore. If we can take a page from what Brazil’s done in this country, we can revolutionize our energy sector. So there are promising things.

What is the danger? The danger is that people of Latin America will see the United States focused everywhere but Latin America, and they will think that we don't have a stake in their future. And that's why the President -- he tried very hard on this trip -- to say, look, we're different than you, of course, but we're with you. And we understand that you're different than we are. But the issue is social justice of indigenous people not having power. That's important in the Andes and so it's got to be important and we have to say that. And he did it. So, I think, if we identify with people's problems, we are much more likely to get a sense of, you know, connection to them; we'll build a bridge to them.

In the case of Chavez, our philosophy -- you know what it is, our philosophy? -- ignore him. He's a demagogue. He is a contrary, negative person. You know he argued against the biofuels agreement? He said it would take food away from people. Castro did too, by the way. But Lula, poor person who grew up to be President of Brazil, largest country of the hemisphere, said this is a way forward for my country and the people of Latin America.

So I think that, you know, we've got a lot of friends in Latin America. We need to pay attention. We need to get on their page, work with them, and I think we'll be fine in Latin America in the future. That's my prediction. I hope I'm right. Thank you.

QUESTION: Thank you.

AMBASSADOR BURNS: Thank you very much.

MODERATOR: We'll take two more questions.

QUESTION: Hi, thanks very much for your speech. Apologies if this question is a little long, but you said that there is a problem with imposing democracy in areas of the world that aren't used to it. And you also said that the U.S. is called upon in the various conflict areas of the world to mediate and to support democracy.

But I would just ask, perhaps the problem isn't a lack of experience in democracy, but the problem that the U.S. is only invited to mediate because of an opportunistic impulse of the people sort of on the ground, and (inaudible) for the U.S. to tell everybody what to do, but for its power to be manipulated for particular advantages. And I'm thinking kind of Iraq and Israel, Palestine, in that sense.

So in that sense, the implication is that the U.S. often ends up trying to fight a guerilla war with a conventional army, and -- yeah, that's my question basically. Would you say that is a problem rather than sort of a deficit of leadership, or a need for leadership in the world?

AMBASSADOR BURNS: Thank you. I would say this: We have to pick and choose where we engage and where we make a commitment of military force. And where we take on a great project like helping a country build a democratic future – we had to do it after World War Two because the two countries we had vanquished were so important to the world order we didn't want them to shrink back into fascism or despotism. And it paid off.

And so, if we're looking for a template, for how we in our time can be successful, we might think of that generation of the '40s, of Truman, Marshall, Acheson, George Kennan; really wise, far-sighted diplomats who understood that the Marshall Plan only cost $12 billion dollars, a lot of money in '49/'50. But think of the enormous advantage we got because of the expense of that money. We rebuilt the European economy and this transatlantic symbiotic economic relationship.

So we got to pick and choose our fights, and pick and choose when we intervene. And we can't impose democracy on people. But – by who we are and what we stand for, we can show them it is the best system of government. It's the right way for people to live freely. I think that America has that role to play; to be an example if we can for the rest of the world and to, you know, overcome our internal imperfections so we can do that job in a better way. Thank you.

MODERATOR: Last question.

QUESTION: Hi, Secretary Burns, thank you so much for coming today. You kind of just addressed this, but I'll just kind of expand on it. My question pertains to how much democracy can stop terrorism. China, being the most populous Communist nation, has not, as far as I know, had any terrorist attacks on their soil. So I was just wondering if you could expand on whether or not democracy can in fact stop terrorism.

AMBASSADOR BURNS: I think -- boy, that's an interesting question that combines domestic and foreign policy. We're not willing to do everything it takes to stop terrorism. We're not wiling to turn our country into a prison. We're not willing to do away with the Bill of Rights to stop terrorism. Now China's willing to have a politically authoritarian system, and of course they don't have as much terrorism; they have some, but not much. We're not willing because we know that we have to live lives that are free. And you live with the consequences that come from that. One of them is our free society can be permeated by terrorist forces.

Now I guess I'd say, in answer to your really good question, is that maybe it's not democracy but liberalism in its broadest dimension that is the answer to terrorism. It's what's in people's minds and hearts and souls. You know, there are -- there are reasons why young men -- wealthy, educated young Arabs -- would become suicide bombers, or fly an airplane into the World Trade Towers. And we have to get at those reasons, and understand what made those people do that.

Tom Friedman has said consistently -- I really think he's a very perceptive person -- it's humiliation of those people in their own societies. And I think a lot of us feel it's in the authoritarian societies and authoritarian cultures where liberal thought, religious or philosophical, is not introduced; where there's no freedom to express yourself; there's no economic opportunity to get ahead. That produces the type of desperation, perhaps, and humiliation that then leads people to become suicide bombers.

India is a country of a billion country with the second largest Muslim population in the world, second only to Indonesia, and yet it has had very little terrorism. It's a democratic, inclusive, liberal society. People feel that there is a future in that society. But if you have an autocrac or monarchical or a despotic form of government where there's no future, then people are going to find an extreme way to express themselves; an extreme way out.

And so I'm just -- you know, this is the tip of the iceberg, I don't have a great answer for you. But I think that somewhere in there, inculcating education, liberal thought, the idea of tolerance, the idea of freedom -- if that's the basis of your society, it's the basis of ours. We're not producing many suicide bombers either. We have this enormous country and a lot of people disagree with what is happening with the government or whatever, but people express that through democracy, through democratic means.

I think that's probably the answer for the Arab Middle East and for the Muslim world: long term, very gradual change. We won't see it happen overnight, but it's getting at the liberal basis of a democratic society. Thank you very much. That's a great question.

MODERATOR: Now before bringing this colloquium to a conclusion, I'd like to ask Mr. And Mrs. Clough to please come up and present Ambassador Burns -- I'm sorry, Under Secretary Burns with a gift.

MR. Clough: Thank you, Under Secretary Burns. I don't -- this wasn't mentioned earlier, but Boston College was able to honor then-Ambassador Burns with an honorary degree in 2002. He addressed the students and he was inspirational then as he's inspirational now. I know among you students there is some of you dream of serving in the diplomatic corps and a lot more who dream of serving in public life, and I know to you he is very inspirational.

Nick, you've been ambassador to and for a lot of things: to NATO, to Greece, but more importantly, you've been an ambassador for Boston College and an ambassador for your own profession. Thank you for being with us and congratulations. (Applause.)

AMBASSADOR BURNS: Thank you all.