Remarks
Hillary Rodham Clinton
Secretary of State
United Nations
New York City October 1, 2012

SECRETARY CLINTON: Thank you very much, Foreign Minister, and thanks also to the Secretary General and the UN General Assembly President for their remarks and for their leadership. I’m delighted to have been invited by Singapore to join you at the Forum of Small States to mark the 20^th anniversary of its founding. I think organizing this event and the program that follows this opening provides a valuable opportunity to reflect on the issues that we face as a global community, and in particular, the roles and responsibilities that small states have.

In my time as Secretary, I’ve been honored to travel to over 100 countries and to meet with leaders in government, business, and civil society in every corner of the world. Now of course, this means frequent visits to larger nations and traditional centers of power, but for me, it has been equally important to visit many of your countries, to understand what you’re going through, to share ideas about how we can make progress together, to meet the Millennium Development Goals and then the initiative of the Secretary General, the Sustainable Development Goals.

Just last month, I attended the Pacific Islands Forum in the Cook Islands to talk with leaders of the region about how the United States can build stronger partnerships with their countries, and I’ve had similar conversations with small states from around the world. Now I believe this is absolutely essential because we have a lot of challenges that we are confronting, and I don’t think it’s unfair or inaccurate to say that smaller states often bear the burden of a lot of these challenges. These challenges don’t respect international orders, whether it’s a global financial crisis or climate change or transnational crime. And none of these problems can be solved by three or four big countries sitting around a table. We need partnerships from large and small nations alike. MORE