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Thank you very much, and I’d like to thank Ambassador Tanner for a really terrific summary of a first-rate seminar.
I thought it was really terrific today in terms of the whole process that we are trying to evolve here, and just for the sake that people understand, we do have – this is the second of four seminars where we are taking up different subjects and there are going to also be some informal meetings as well as later consultations, and just so you know, the experts, we don’t all just sit here. Basically what we are doing is absorbing all the information and we keep meeting in between, and we are going to meet tonight, and then we keep this process going, just so you know.
I do think that what has been very important about this seminar, and Ambassador Tanner pointed to this, is that basically you all also get to hear each other and really have a sense – at least I got out of this – in terms of the comprehensive approach who does what in a way that is very focussed, and so I think there is great value in that. I think, for me, what has come out of this is the issue of looking at lessons learned. It is very important to look at lessons learned, but also as somebody who has been subjected to lessons learned or made some of the wrong decisions, I think that it is also important to figure out what is the right lesson and to make it in a timely fashion. You can take all time in terms of analysis. If you make the decision too late, then it doesn’t matter whatever lesson you learn. So I think that that part is important, and if I might just parenthetically say, one of the more successful operations was Kosovo, which was done without UN mandate. So I think it is worth thinking about that when one talks about legitimacy and lessons learned.
Let me also say that there is more demand for the kinds of work that we are doing than there is supply, and we have to keep that in mind and that there really has been an evolution in all of this. When I was at the United Nations, we spent a lot of time trying to figure out the two-key solution in the way that NATO and the UN work together, and I think in listening to all this, I am very encouraged by the progress that has been made and to realize that we are involved in an evolutionary process, not one event, and let me just also say that it has been said that advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but which we didn’t, and if the challenges faced by our alliance were simple, there wouldn’t be any need for this process or for a new strategic concept, but the international challenges have never been simple, and I return again to the person that was present at the creation of all of this, Dean Acheson, and I think it’s very worth, again, for me to read this quote.
“The problems that bedevil the world are not like headaches, where we can take a powder and in the morning they are gone. Instead they are like the pain of earning a living. They will stay with us until death, and we’ve got to understand that all our lives the danger, the uncertainty, the need for alertness, for effort, for discipline will be upon us, and this will be hard for us, but we’re in for it, and the only real question is whether we shall know it soon enough,” and I think that is why we have to listen to what is going on, and we do, I think, have to assess the situation we’re in, but to end in this way, I always like my fa-… we’ve all quoted many favourites. Mine always is Vaclav Havel, and I’m on my way to Prague to celebrate the Velvet Revolution, so I think it’s appropriate to say this. Havel says this: “I’m not the optimist, because I’m not sure that everything ends well. Nor am I a pessimist, because I’m not sure that everything ends badly. Instead I’m a realist who carries hope, and hope is the belief that freedom and justice have meaning and that liberty is always worth the trouble.” What we are doing here is taking time to make sure that others have liberty that we have enjoyed ourselves.
Thank you very much.