Speech
Prepared Testimony before the White Paper Commission on Defense and National Security
Delivered Paris, France, November 15, 2007
James B. Steinberg, Dean, LBJ School of Public Affairs
Good morning ladies and gentlemen, thank you for the opportunity to appear here today for this timely and important discussion on the security challenges facing France and her key partners. We meet at a time of great uncertainty and change. Although the Cold War ended more than a decade and a half ago, there is little agreement among either scholars or practitioners about the nature of the threats and challenges facing us, or about the proper strategies we should adopt to shape our future. It is all the more important then, that the democratic partners of the Atlantic Alliance try to frame a common view of the strategic environment and our response, if we are to work together to meet the challenges that none of us acting alone can effectively address.
Since the end of the Cold War, some, especially in the United States, have sought to identify a new, over-riding threat to replace Communism as the organizing principle for national security strategy. Since 9/11, many have suggested that “terrorism” or “Islamo-fascism” represents such a new bipolar challenge; a threat that poses a mortal danger, like that of Communism, to the values and way of life of liberal democratic societies; a threat against which free societies must marshal their full military, political and economic resources to defeat. Others with a more traditional view of international relations view the emergence of new powers, especially China, as the core challenge of the future. They believe that human history is a never-ending saga of struggle between established and rising powers, which inevitably leads to periods of turmoil and conflict as the rising powers demand, and the established powers resist, a rearrangement of the global order – a story not unfamiliar to our friends here in Europe.
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