Commencement Address at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, Washington, D.C.

U.S. NATO Ambassador R. Nicholas Burns Ladies and Gentlemen of the SAIS Class of 2004, it is a very great honor for me to join you, your families and friends and the leadership, faculty and staff of our school to pay tribute to you today.

When you think about it, there is no comparable day on any year’s calendar so full of the sense of satisfaction that you all must feel, and of promise and hope for your futures, than graduation day. Today is all about you. This is your moment, your hour, your day when we recognize your considerable achievements and send you off into the world to do great things.

Now, before we go too far overboard in praising you, we should rightfully recognize first the people who also made this day possible—your parents and family members and your teachers. They dreamed of your attaining what is now an essential feature of an educated life in America and around the world—a graduate degree at one of the world’s great universities. And your parents, especially, have paid, in more ways than one, for that distinction. As they helped make today possible for you, would it not be appropriate for all the graduates to rise and salute your parents with an enthusiastic round of thanks and applause!

They say that graduation day is one of the most five significant anniversaries of one’s life, along with birth, marriage, death and the most momentous day of all—when you finally pay off your student loans. I just can’t promise you can count on that coming before or after death!

Let me tell you that I am acutely conscious of the fact that I am the only person standing in the way of you and your diplomas, so I don’t intend to regale you with all my stories of life in the Foreign Service. But, I do want to communicate how fortunate I think you are to be in your caps and gowns today and to have so much ahead of you that is good and positive.

If there was ever a graduate school so perfectly constructed and inspired by the internationalist ideal that has been, since the end of the Second World War, the central foundation of our globalized world, it is surely the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

Like thousands of others, I am enormously proud to be among its graduates. In my years here in the late 1970s, we were half the size student body that you are now. And to give you a sense of the incredible changes in student life since then, not a single one of us owned a personal computer, a cell phone or a blackberry because they did not exist! In fact, I felt technologically advanced and was the envy of my classmates when I arrived at SAIS with my electric typewriter and its correcting cartridge—the very model of a futuristic machine. SAIS was then fully contained in one building at 1740 Mass. Ave. Most of us focused intellectually on the Cold War stand-off between NATO and the Soviet Union. Many supported President Jimmy Carter’s campaign for human rights in the Third World. Upon graduation, a good number of my friends headed directly for New York and Wall Street where they arrived right at the start of the investment banking boom of the 1980s. Some became so wealthy that they retired well before forty. I hear from my SAIS pals from time to time and they are amazed that I’m still working at the venerable age of 48. It’s at that point that I remind them of the cold reality of U.S. government pay scales.

SAIS grads all around the globe will welcome you enthusiastically to our ranks when the diploma hits your hand in just a few minutes time. I can tell you from personal experience that the very first thing that will happen when that magical moment arrives is you will receive a letter from the Hopkins Alumni Association delivered right to your seat here in Constitution Hall asking you to donate your millions (but they also accept pennies) to this year’s fundraising campaign.

There are many pretenders to the throne of the world’s finest graduate school in international affairs—in Boston, New York, Princeton, Paris, London and even one across town here in Washington D.C.-- but I trust you will all agree as loyal soon-to-be alums that SAIS is the undisputed best school of its kind across the globe.

There is no other school quite like ours. We had a unique beginning. We were founded at the close of World War Two by wise men and women led by Paul Nitze and Christian Herter. Their greatest generation created the United Nations, the IMF and World Bank, the OECD, and the strongest military alliance in history—NATO. And they created SAIS because they knew that America required a graduate school that would encourage its students, as well as international students, toward careers in the governments that have helped to produce two generations of peace on both sides of the Atlantic, and in the great financial houses that built the unprecedented prosperity we enjoy today.

We have a unique global presence through our school in Nanjing, our focus on Latin America, our expertise in Middle Eastern affairs, our long history of interest in Africa and our half century presence in Bologna where I had such a memorable day with your fellow SAIS students last week fielding their thoughtful but tough questions while dodging the communist and anarchist demonstrators who were nice enough to greet me upon my arrival.

Since my time here, SAIS has doubled foreign student enrollment, strengthened Asian studies and International Development, created Conflict Management and a discipline called Energy, Environment, Science and Technology which probably deserves a new name but is surely an important program given the centrality of those issues to modern diplomacy.

We have a unique curriculum. No other school is so determined to turn out well-rounded graduates that it forces students to slave over the intricacies of International Economics as well as Foreign Languages. My classmates and I disliked that spartan regimen at the time but we could not have survived subsequently in our professional lives without it. SAIS takes a consciously different approach to international affairs education. We have neither a solely liberal arts regime nor a purely scientific nor a vocational approach. We don’t even have learning for learning’s sake! We combine the experience and wisdom of academia, business, labor, non-governmental organizations and government itself into a protean whole.

We have a unique and extraordinary faculty led by our energetic, committed and inspiring Dean, Jessica Einhorn who has done a magnificent job in her first two years. We have wise and approachable Professors such as the very first person I met at SAIS, Fred Holborn, who has contributed a lifetime of intelligence, wit and devotion to our school; Fouad Ajami who has brought a unique blend of eloquence, scholarship and personal insight to the hard choices facing us in the Middle East; Riordon Roett who has championed the study of Brazil and Latin America; and Eliot Cohen, one of the most influential strategic thinkers of our time whom I was happy to greet in Belgium this winter when he led the large and enthusiastic SAIS Security Studies staff ride to Waterloo, Ypres and Bastogne.

Finally, we have the world’s most uniquely enthusiastic alumni network—9,000 strong in 143 countries. In just the last few months, I have met with SAIS alumni groups in Brussels, Rome, Milan and Bologna. All are committed to the school. Our fellow grads are running foreign ministries and armies, Fortune 500 firms and non-governmental organizations. We seek each other out, stay in touch and preserve the special bond that comes with being a graduate of this truly unique institution.

Ladies and Gentlemen, every graduation speech ever delivered can be boiled down to the same theme—go forth and do good things in the world. And, that is the one message I wish to give you today. This commencement day is your call to service.

We need the 315 of you to serve in the government ministries of your 66 countries. We need you to lead the growing number of non-governmental organizations making a crucial difference in the Third World and in tough places like Baghdad, Kabul, Khartoum and East Timor. We need you to run for political office as democracy spreads from the Americas to Africa and across the Greater Middle East. We need you to be enlightened and ethical leaders of the great corporations and financial institutions that are the key to global growth and higher living standards. In short, we need you to think of your futures as a call to service.

I am not talking about the austere and often poverty stricken stereotype of service that the words often imply (although U. S. government service sometimes inspires that definition) but a broader notion of service based on what you can do best for the greater good in both the public and private sectors. Public service is still the highest calling and it has always been so. Why else would the ancient Greeks have used the word “idiot” to describe those who disavowed service to the public!

We ask you to consider public service for one other reason—we need your help, the world needs your help, as Tennyson wrote, “to seek a newer world”. He meant a better world—more just, more developed, wealthier, more secure and peaceful, everything good that people want the world to be.

This is an exceptionally important and difficult time for the United States and for all the countries represented in your graduating class. We are living in an age of unparalleled freedom, technological progress and prosperity. But we also live at a time of unprecedented danger, instability and even potential cataclysm.

We surely live more fortunate lives than those of nearly all the generations before us. On the one hand, the bright side of globalization has given us advantages our forebears could not have imagined with jet travel narrowing distance and time, medical advances that allow us to live longer and better, the information age that has revolutionized the way we live and think, the spread of democracy on the internet, fiber optics, the spread of capital to create wealth. These are all good things.

But, the world is beset by a sea of troubles produced by the dark side of globalization—the pandemic of 40 million people worldwide living with HIV/AIDs, three million of whom die annually, including over 500,000 children. Other destructive, global forces afflict modern life—the power of international crime and narcotics cartels, global climate change, the spread of terrorism and the proliferation of biological, chemical and nuclear technology from the previously secure vaults of nation-states to serve the irresponsible and evil designs of international terrorist groups. Our international age has big upsides but also a daunting, forbidding downside.

The defining feature of this globalized world is that these transnational threats flow under, over and right through our national boundaries. No oceans, mountains or fences are impervious to them. No country, including the United States of America, can sit back in isolation from them.

This is the great, global test of our time—how do we cope with this new set of challenges? The only way I know to spread the bright side of globalization and to fight the darker side is to join forces on a global basis in concerted international action. No one country, however powerful, can combat these incredible problems on its own. We need strong and purposeful global cooperation to defeat complex, global ills.

This is not a completely new challenge for the world. The wise people who founded SAIS also faced a dilemma much like ours nearly sixty years ago in the wake of the Second World War. They had the foresight and wisdom to create a web of multilateral institutions that rescued Europe and Asia from the ashes of war and created the security and prosperity that defined the latter half of the twentieth century.

Their example can help us to answer today’s global challenges. We need to rebuild and re-energize the great multilateral institutions that play such an important role in organizing the world. And that is beginning to happen. Since September 11, 2001, for example, the U.S. and the European Union have combined forces to use our soft power---intelligence sharing, judicial action, immigration control, economic and diplomatic pressure---to pursue a war against terrorist cells in our countries. In London in November, President Bush advocated the importance of “effective multilateralism” when he called for a new American commitment to rebuild NATO, and to promote closer ties between the U.S. and EU and to make the UN itself more effective. In his landmark speech at Whitehall, he said: “Like eleven Presidents before me, I believe in the international institutions and alliances that America helped to form and helps to lead.” He was surely right to set this course for American foreign policy as was Secretary of State Powell who has highlighted the importance of partnerships as the keystone of America’s relations with the rest of the world.

NATO is the best example of what the President discussed in his speech--an effective multilateral organization that is vital for both the United States and all our allies. NATO remains our strongest bridge to Europe and America’s most important alliance. Left for dead by many of its critics in the 1990s, NATO proved invaluable in stopping the savage wars in Bosnia and Kosovo and in keeping the peace there to this day. After September 11, 2001, it was abundantly clear to Americans and Europeans alike that we needed to completely transform NATO’s basic mission as well as its military capabilities to adjust to the completely new strategic environment we faced. During the past two years, we’ve changed NATO more than at any other time in its history. NATO is extending its hand in partnership well outside of Europe to the arc of countries stretching from Central and South Asia to the Middle East and North Africa to protect all of our collective interests. Today NATO is on the ground in Afghanistan and at sea in the Mediterranean doing just that. Led by Secretary Rumsfeld, we have completely transformed the military structure and capabilities of the Alliance for modern missions. NATO and the EU both added new members this spring, bringing us closer toward constructing the Europe, whole, free, secure and at peace that has been one of our greatest strategic aims for half a century. NATO’s new partnerships with Russia and Ukraine, with the Caucasus and Central Asia, are helping to consolidate the historic, democratic peace in Europe with those vital countries.

A few years ago, the U.S. was accused of neglecting NATO. The irony now is that it is the U.S. that is advocating the most ambitious roles for NATO in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Greater Middle East. The U.S. deserves credit for leading the revival of NATO these last three years.

Still, in the modern world, multilateral action alone is not always sufficient to resolve tough problems. In this sense, the United States government and the American people bear a special responsibility for stability and peace in the world. At the start of this new century, we Americans find ourselves as the most powerful country in the world, perhaps the most powerful in modern history. To channel that power most effectively, we must face the perennial contradiction that has bedeviled American foreign policy since the founding of our country more than two hundred years ago. SAIS’ legendary Professor Robert O. Osgood posed this existential question more than twenty-five years ago--Will America be isolated from the world or actively engaged in it? The terrible carnage of September 11 surely convinced most Americans that we have no choice but to be involved in the world’s affairs and that our historic flirtation with isolationism is an impossible choice for a country so important to all that happens in the world. Let us hope that September 11 ended isolationism as a major force in the U.S. forever because Americans have concluded that we cannot separate ourselves from a world brought so much closer together by globalization.

During the last few years, another ideology has arisen to campaign for a different American foreign policy in an age of terrorism—the call for America to pursue an essentially unilateralist course in the world. Some of its proponents, mainly in think tanks and academia, take an extreme view outside the mainstream in both political parties. They claim that America’s unique size, power and mission can be best served by acting outside of what they see as the constraints of the international community. Some who preach this gospel say that America’s overwhelming power should lead us to pursue policies essentially without regard for our alliances, international law and the multilateral institutions we created decades ago because they might encumber us, slow us down, restrict our freedom. Some of them believe NATO’s best days are past or that, with the fall of communism, the U.S. should no longer accept a multilateral arrangement with NATO in which we necessarily have to work and compromise with our allies on a daily basis. For unilateralism’s most extreme proponents, it is not an exaggeration to say that multilateralism is a symbol of weakness in a world in which the U.S. must act, they believe, unfettered outside the boundaries of the international system.

Now, it is certainly true that the unique nature of America’s role in the world will surely dictate, as it has in Democratic and Republican administrations alike, that the U.S. must sometimes act alone, or in small groups to defend the American people and American interests. But the U.S. can advance those interests for the long term most effectively through our permanent alliance in NATO and by nurturing economic cooperation with the EU and by supporting, as we are, the critical role the United Nations is playing in forming new governments out of chaos in Afghanistan and Iraq. In fact, we have had successes in the war against Al Qaida and in stemming proliferation, precisely because the Bush Administration has worked so closely with a variety of allies on both fronts, as we are doing in Afghanistan, North Korea and Libya.

The U.S. can do many good things in the world on its own. But, we cannot hope to fight infectious diseases or global environmental challenges or resist AIDs, or cure river-borne illnesses or certainly stop terrorism all on our own. The great foreign policy thinker Hans Morgenthau agreed a half a century ago, “We know that no nation’s power is without limits; and thus we know that our policies must respect the power and interests of others”.

In short, ladies and gentlemen, unilateralism is the wrong road at the wrong time to guide America’s role in the world.

In a complex global landscape where the pervasive color is often not black and white but gray, the U.S. cannot rely on the twin illusions of isolationism and unilateralism to ensure a safe, secure and prosperous future for our country.

There is a third way—strong, vital and purposeful American leadership in concert with our allies and friends around the world in effective multilateralism. This is surely not an original thought but it is grounded in the experience and history of America as a global power. In the fourth year of World War Two, the twelfth year of his presidency and the last year of his life, our great internationalist President Franklin Roosevelt reminded Americans what they must always remember about our position in the world: “We have learned that we cannot live alone at peace. We have learned that our own well being is dependent on the well being of other nations far away. We have learned to be citizens of the world, members of the human community.”

These past few months have been difficult for the United States, especially in Iraq. The battles in Falluja and an-Najaf and especially the disgraceful and appalling prison abuse scandals have tested our strategy, our self-confidence and our resolve. The fact that we are facing these challenges openly and with unparalleled transparency is a tribute to our strong democracy.

It would be a tragic mistake if Americans concluded from these trials that we would somehow be better off retreating from the world stage or leaving the hard job of building peace in inhospitable places like Iraq to others. Such a retreat would be as equally calamitous as choosing a unilateralist path in the world. The plain fact is that the world needs American leadership and engagement as well as America’s vision for the future. While America also needs NATO, the EU, ASEAN and our many friends around the world to succeed, it is also true that the world requires America’s military and economic power, our political energy, our unique blend of optimism and purpose, to resolve the many problems ahead of us. America must not lose its confidence and sense of purpose and capacity to do good at a time when we face dangerous problems. Despite our imperfections, the United States remains a unique force for good in the world.

If America’s obligation to the world and to itself is to engage vigorously in the great multilateral institutions that bind us together, then the rest of the world has an obligation too. It is to accept that American power, purpose, energy and optimism are necessary and essential foundations for world order and progress. And it is to overcome the often gratuitous anti-Americanism that we see so often in the press and even in public statements of friendly governments. Anti-Americanism is not worthy of our alliance of democracies in NATO or in any other part of the world. Americans understand that our friends are often preoccupied with our role as a great power in the world. We would ask in return for our friends to remember that ours is a proud record of support for democracy and freedom all over the world. You should not wish to see our voice stilled when there is so much more that we all must do to advance in the world together.

Ladies and gentlemen of the graduating class, great and small nations are effective on the world stage in direct proportion to the talents, wisdom and experience of their leaders and citizens. This is where you graduates come back in for the last word. I think you understand how much we need your brainpower and energy and commitment on all these great issues ahead. Just as Americans need to realize collectively how important our country is to the world, you as individuals must believe how vital your individual contributions can be to our common future. To know and understand history is to embrace the truth that President Kennedy proclaimed forty years ago; “One person can make a difference. Every person should try.” I deeply believe that there is in each of your lives as SAIS graduates and in your potential, a future Kofi Annan, Paul Nitze, Hamid Karzai, Eleanor Roosevelt. None of these people accepted as permanent the ills of the world into which they were born. All of them believed they could make ours a newer and better world. You can, too.

Ladies and Gentlemen of the graduating class, like every other generation before you, you are today called to service. You have role models in this hall today closer to home who can show you the way forward. Some of your grandparents are here. They are rightfully called the Greatest Generation because they overcame the great depression around the world and then triumphed in the most terrible war of all time. Your parents launched the great crusade to end racial segregation in America and to give to African-Americans the rights that should have been theirs since our country’s founding. They put men and women into space, learned how to transplant hearts and to condense a library full of books into a single, slender disc in igniting the information age. They and we are finally granting women equal rights in the workplace and before the law. In Europe, they survived the imposition of totalitarianism behind the Iron Curtain and then launched one of the most important and peaceful revolutions in history by tearing down the Berlin Wall and restoring democracy to all of Europe. In Asia, your parents did the impossible-- they created in Japan and South Korea two of the world’s most powerful nations out of the ashes of war. In country after country in Asia and the Pacific and in the Americas, democracy and increasing prosperity took root.

Your grandparents and parents have spoken the essential human truth that everything is possible and that your hopes and those of the world for peace can be realized if you commit yourself to service. As you set out on your paths ahead, we all hope that you will retain the will to take risks, the strength to be courageous and the spirit of optimism that has been the foundation for human progress in all of history.

SAIS has prepared you well for all the challenges ahead. You will find that the professors who taught you, the lessons you learned, the friends you made, the alumni network you will now join will help to sustain you and to keep your course on the road ahead

So, as you graduate today, we wish for you the very best—good fortune, success and happiness in the years to come. And we look forward to following your accomplishments as you live and write the history of America and of the world in the century to come.

It is an honor to be with you on this great day.

Congratulations to you all!