Below is a transcript of Senator Boren’s speech from the September 10, 2001 AED Symposium.
I never would have dreamed, about ten years ago now, as we were working on an amendment that first got written out on the back of an envelope that I would have the privilege of coming here, seeing all of you.
You can’t imagine how much satisfaction it gives you when you see words on a page now have become a reality. At that time, I certainly had no idea that I’d be going back into higher education myself, and that I would be here as a university president speaking to a group of Boren Fellows under the National Security Education Program today. These changes do come in your life. And I can’t think of a better time to be involved in plunging yourselves into international affairs and the study of international affairs than right now. It is a unique period of time. It’s a unique period of time in our history. And I hope we’re conscious of it.
Sometimes I want to get up on the rooftop and shout to people about the period of time in which we’re living because more change has occurred in a shorter period of time without the cataclysm of a world war than we can possibly imagine at any other time in our history in terms of economic relationships, technological change, the change of political relationships and systems.
Think about all the things that have happened in such a short period of time. I remember Einstein talking about the explosion of the first atomic bomb. He said, “Everything in the world was changed except our thinking.” And it’s often very difficult for thinking to catch up with the pace of change. And I think that’s exactly what we’re going through right now. We’re going through it consciously knowing that we’re living through a period of incredible change in the world, and struggling to come to grips with it.
I always wondered if people that lived through these periods of change that were marked off in history in the past knew it. You know, did they sort of come down to breakfast in the morning and across coffee, you know, sit there and say, you know, “Just think, dear, we’re living through the Industrial Revolution. Aren’t you glad to be alive during the Renaissance?” You know, did they really say that? I doubt it, but I think in a way we do know we’re living through one of these periods. And the interesting thing will be whether or not we’re wise enough, since we are conscious of the pace of change around us, since we are conscious of the fact that a whole new architecture is going to be necessary for our foreign policy and our national security policy, to interrelate with a world, interact with a world that is no longer polarized. It’s very interesting.
And again, the pace of change, the kind of change, is demonstrated by an experiment that was conducted some 15 years ago in elementary school, about the time that some of you were in elementary years. And they asked students in an art class, a free art class, to draw anything that came to mind. Just draw anything you’re thinking about. It was very interesting, as these elementary students, over half of them, drew mushroom clouds, missiles, scenes of mass destruction, military weaponry.
They repeated that same experiment just a year or two ago, and not even one percent of the children in the elementary art class drew such scenes. And so the sort of unconscious fear and unconscious knowledge, even of children, knowing that they were living in a world with a hair trigger, really, of nuclear weapons pointed at each other, that perception has so changed.
What an incredible opportunity it is to live in a world that is not polarized, a world which opens up to us, at least for the moment‑‑how long this window of opportunity will last, we don’t know‑‑but at least for a moment it opens up to us the opportunity to try to think about how we might craft new institutional approaches to make the world a safer and more secure place.
Then I think we have to ask ourselves, how successful have we been since the end of the Cold War in crafting this new architecture, in coming to terms with our own role in the world, what it should be, what kind of institutional frameworks we might develop to make the world a safer and more secure place, as weapons of mass destruction of all kinds‑‑whether they’re chemical or biological as well as nuclear ‑‑ are spread to more and more places in the world.
And I think in a very honest way we have to say, the window of opportunity has been opened, but we haven’t taken very much advantage of this window of opportunity to craft a more secure world situation or to build the kinds of mechanisms that will make it a safer or secure world.
We understood, and we had these remarkable visionary people at the end of World War II, who immediately came in with things like the Marshall Plan to stabilize Europe. Remarkable, when you think about the pressures that had built up in this country: pressures to bring our troops home, and yet we were keeping them there to stabilize Europe; feelings about our former adversaries, and yet we were spending precious American tax dollars at a time in which people had been waiting with their ration cards for consumer goods, and we were here taxing people to send money to our former adversaries.
We had that kind of visionary understanding and leadership. Led to the creation of NATO, which finally led to the containment policy, the balance of power which maintained us through the Cold War years. And so there was a grappling. We confront a world that’s much more complex, in a way a multiple world, a fragmented world, a world in which old ethnic disputes and regional conflicts are allowed to bubble to the surface without almost the discipline, in a sense, a world divided in two.
It’s a much more complex, a much more intellectually challenging task that we have. And in many ways, as we have no perceived single external adversary, it is harder also to gain consensus of the American people around those principles that are needed to form a new foreign policy.
So it was the beginnings of this kind of understanding, of thinking about the fact we were really facing a different world in 1991 than we’d faced before, we were facing a very complex task, and that we needed to mobilize the best intellectual talent in this country, that led us to want to adopt something like the National Security Education Program.
We’d actually been having some closed hearings in the Intelligence Committee, which I was chairing then, on the history of our intelligence operations. How did the CIA come into existence? How did intelligence grow up during World War II under General Donovan?
And as we listened to these octogenarians who came in and told us about what it was like to have been recruited into the Intelligence Service at that time, fresh out of school, and thrown into the situation during World War II and immediately after, one of the things that just kept coming back is that we were able to gain a very remarkably clear understanding of what was going on in the world around us then, in part because we had an exceptionally talented group of people, coming straight out of our universities as students and graduate students, in many cases, in some cases actually from the faculties of our institutions, who had such a breadth of knowledge and understanding. They were bringing that immense talent to bear.
And then we looked at where we were in our country ten years ago as we faced all of this change and we faced this challenge. And what we saw was really alarming. We were more intertwined with the rest of the world than we had ever been, and yet we had fewer and fewer skills than we’d ever had.
In Japan, for example, all of the high school students in the country, all the school students in the country, were required to take six years of English. I remember we did a survey at that time and we found that exactly .05 percent of any American school students were ever studying Japanese, for example, in return.
We had 600,000 students coming from around the rest of the world as exchange students, coming to the United States to learn about us, to learn how we think, to learn how we behave, to learn about our society, to even learn about our economic attributes and how we might behave as people in a market for their products and services, for example.
We had only about a tenth that number going from the United States to the rest of the world. And of that meager number going from the United States to the rest of the world ‑‑ and by the way, Taiwan and Malaysia alone at that time were sending more students to study in the United States than we were sending to the rest of the world, if you can think about that.
And of the students that were going overseas to study, 75 percent of them were concentrated in four countries in Western Europe. Only 25 percent, a mere trickle, something like 10- or 12,000, were going to all the other countries of the world to gain firsthand understanding of languages and cultures in those areas.
And so we’re alarmed. And unfortunately, that still continues. The European Union today requires two languages of all of their school graduates, let alone college and university graduates.
Today, only 20-some percent of American school students take a foreign language. Only 6 percent of our college and university students are taking another language at this particular point in time, and 82 percent can graduate from most universities in this country without any requirement of ever having any acquaintance with another language at all.
And if we really delved into the amount of knowledge in terms of area studies and cultural studies of the rest of the world, we would find similar kinds of percentages. So it really is alarming that at a time at which we ‑‑ and we were alarmed by it ‑‑ at a time at which we so desperately needed these skills, that we were so ignoring the development of skills to help us understand and relate to the rest of the world.
And it was particularly alarming to us as we realized that what defined a superpower in many ways was changing, that it wasn’t simply going to be a matter of military might that defined superpower status.
It had to do with economic strength. It had to do with the moral credibility of a country, the strength of the political system, the strength of the system of rights, the ability to communicate those values to the rest of the world. And so we understood that.
So we decided we had to do something. We were presiding over ‑‑ one day we were having hearings on the strategic minerals reserve in the Intelligence Committee, and we had built up in this country, and I’m sure we still do, a whole stockpile of strategic minerals that might be needed in case of an international crisis.
And someone said, “You know, did anyone ever stop to think that we really need a skills reserve as well, that we have people that literally ‑‑ so few people understand the culture and language of certain regions of the world, and as the old Soviet Union began to break up, almost as soon as we would find somebody who spoke that particular language and had even a nodding acquaintance with the culture, we would say, “How would you like to be ambassador?” We were so think in terms of our ability to send people with that background to certain areas of the world.
So we tried to figure out what to do, and we tried to start out the National Security Education Program really as an education program because thinking back to that history, we decided in the intelligence committee that that was the most important thing that we could do, that we had to improve the human understanding and human analytical capability of what was going on in the world. It was more important than anything else we could do in terms of really the long‑term security and well-being of our country.
I get letters from the undergraduate scholars and graduate fellows from time to time telling me about their experiences, but this is the first time I’ve had a chance to see you in person. And that task of defining our position in the world and struggling really to find our role in the world, to figure out who it is that we are now that the Cold War is ended, that identity crisis, as it is, as it would be for our country and how we define our national security, that challenge goes on.
I believe we should have the ability in this country as an American ‑‑ I’m enough of a nationalist that I want us to always have the ability on our own, acting alone if we have to, to defend our very legitimate and important national ‑‑ critical national interest.
But having said that, I think it’s very important that we understood we are not the only superpower in the world in the same sense that we were immediately after World War II. We no longer have a nuclear monopoly, as we had for that brief period following World War II when we were the world’s only atomic or nuclear power.
And so we’re not a superpower in the same sense that we were. We face a very different world environment. And I think in some ways it is almost dangerous for us to go around the world beating our chests and saying, “We’re the only superpower in the world today,” that there’s a mono-polar world and that we’re it.
It’s a very different situation. And we struggle to come to grips with all of this change. Change in itself is unsettling.?
We are also confronted with such a massive amount of data, of information, that it has overwhelmed our ability to sort out what it means. Daniel Boorstin, who was Librarian of Congress, the great Pulitzer Prize-winning historian ‑‑ some of you may have read it ‑‑ has come up with what he calls Boorstin’s Law. And his law is that the amount of information available to us increases, our knowledge or wisdom decreases in inverse proportion.
Today, and I see this in my students. I teach an honors course to freshmen on American government, American politics, and I slip in a little bit of international affairs as I go.
But we were talking the other day, and we were talking, for example, about China. We were talking about Tienanmen Square. And I said, “What could have led Deng Xiaoping to have used force, to have had this massacre of the students in Tienanmen Square,” an image which every one of those students had burned in their minds forever at a very young age. I said, “Why do you think that a person who could have brought about economic reforms and an opening to the West and new relationships, how could he have reacted in such a way with this kind of use of force?”
People speculated back and forth. No correct answers. No one even close. And then I said, “What do you know about the Cultural Revolution?” Not a hand went up. Sixteen National Merit Scholars in the room, not a hand went up. I said, “What do you know about Deng Xiaoping and about how members of his own family, including one of his own children, was injured by being thrown out of a window by the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution when anti-intellectualism swept the country, and every time you saw a huge crowd you didn’t know what it was going to do? It was closing down universities; it was destroying ancient monuments; it was an anti-intellectual movement.” None of them knew about the Cultural Revolution. How many of the American people know about it?
How do we define our role in the world? And that’s where I think all of you who have come through this program are so important.
There’s some 80 of our agencies right now in the federal government that say they desperately need people with language and cultural skills, and so far 55 languages have been studied through this program, and many various parts of the world with their own ethnic and cultural uniqueness. And so you bring to bear that kind of understanding, that kind of context.
Those of you that don’t go directly into the government itself, into the national security policy-making and international policy-making, some of you will go into education. How badly we need these very bright and talented young people, this whole generation in our country, to be given some kind of historical context that will help them turn the information that they’re receiving into knowledge, into something that will make sense, because there’s a historic perspective and a historic context.
What should be the legacy of our country at this particular point in time? How should we resolve‑‑ for example, we can take the current debate over the missile defense shield as a kind of question that is one that’s very difficult for us to answer.
I in the past have supported the idea of continuing research on this effort and continuing to develop this capability because ‑‑ and I can understand how no president would want to wake up some morning being blackmailed by some rogue nation or terrorist group with the threat of launching a missile attack, say, on New York City or someplace else in isolation.
There’s something that says, you don’t want to be there and have people ask you, “Why? Where were you all those years when you could have developed this kind of capability?”
I would hope we never turn our backs on keeping sufficient strength to take care of ourselves and maintaining a very strong unilateral defense and national security posture for our country. I hope our legacy will be, the legacy of your generation of leaders, as you come into government policy, as you come into government organizations, as you meet your service requirements, as you go into the educational classrooms and higher education and give our students some context‑‑I would hope that it would be written that the United States took advantage of this window of opportunity to build a more secure world by using its superpower status, perhaps its predominate superpower status at this particular moment in time, to build institutions involving the cooperation of other nations; that in the long run, perhaps when our power is not relatively as strong in the future as it is today because others will continue to grow economically and in other ways in terms of their strength, that we will have used this time to lead the rest of the world toward building the kinds of institutional strengths that will serve all of us in a time of need and crisis.
What have we done? What can we do? These are your challenges. This is a window of opportunity that we’re given. And we can’t escape, I think, the judgment of history on ourselves, on your generation and mine, if we don’t take advantage of this window of opportunity, this gift of time given to us, not given to our parents, our grandparents, or our great-grandparents who faced these superpower blocs looking at each other across hair-triggers.
We’re going to be held accountable. What a window of opportunity it is. It’s an extraordinary time, not only intensity of change, but intensity of opportunity.
And my hope is that the legacy of this program will be that it has trained a group of people who will be involved in this process of putting the challenge in context, helping us to understand it, and helping us to lead it in the right direction; that some day some of you, either individually or collectively, could write of your own particular involvement that you were present at the creation of something meaningful and real in terms of building security for the world ahead of us.
I can’t tell you what optimism it gives me about the future to hear from you, to hear about some of the things that you’ve done, to have your insights shared with me. I congratulate you, and I can say I’ve never had a greater honor in my life than to have my name linked in some way with you, with your efforts, your work; and in the years ahead, as your work and your skills bring results, I know that that pride will only grow.
Thank you very much for your interest.
