Saturday, January 19, 2008

"American Foreign Policy and You" (Lee Hamilton, March 2006)

I just found some random notes from 2 years ago, from a talk given by Lee Hamilton. In unabridged, unedited form:

"American Foreign Policy and You"
* notes - a lot of white/balk heads in the audience
- more and more, must see problems in the context of the world we live in
- regime-change; interesting selection of regimes to change, ignore, deal with
- dependent on a very unstable region of the world

Choices (?) Made
- no energy independence
- ignore climate change (Kyoto)
- abandon Afghanistan in 1990s
- not to worry about debt, import/export balance

---- "don't ever let a politician tell you there are no alternatives in American foreign policy"

e.g.'s
Darfur - rape, killings, genocide
Congo - 4m dead

spend now, children can pay.
JFK - there cannot be an American solution for everything.

"What kind of a world do you/I/we choose for our children??"

"Must convey [to those 1.3b Muslims] we want the same things for you as we want for ourselves"
'I want for you what I want for myself' ---- a decent life [for you, me - and our children]

1 comment:

K said...

Huh - this rarely happens, but I had the exact same take on that speech. It's amazing, looking back after two years of high-flown "us vs. them" rhetoric, how refreshing it is to know there IS such a thing as level-headed nationalism.