 It taught me too the value of a belief that America is a place that it does not matter where you came from, it matters where you are going. It matters tremendously that our educational system supports upward mobility, that it supports the belief that you can be the child of an itinerant farm worker or the child of a fourth generation legatee, and you can still sit in the same classroom, expand the university or Harvard University. It can matter not where you came from but where you're going. Those values and the belief that merit and hard work can help you get ahead, that class and background should not be impediments to the good life. It's part of the promise that people have come to America speaking for the two-and-a-half centuries of our existence. So in some ways it is a different world from the world that we confronted in the Cold War but we need to remember always that these core values have not changed and that they are indeed the core values that sustain us at home and make us a different kind of power of law. President elect Bush and I had the opportunity many, many times to talk about these values. As Governor of Texas, he practiced them, he saw them. I think it's one of the reasons he has been so fundamentally devoted to education as the most important priority as president. But there are values that he understands and it is for that reason that he will be able to lead Americans as we play our important roles in the world. Now it is absolutely true that America's national interests require a kind of consistency, a kind of consistency about certain elements of what my friend Joe and I would call heart tower. That is the devotion to keeping the military strong so that we can keep the peace, a devotion to friends and allies, making certain that our alliances are strong, that our coordination and consultation with our allies is complete so that we have friends and partners in the world when we need them. And it is absolutely the case that you cannot simply call your friends when you need them. You have to call them before. And so I think that you will see a strong emphasis on the role of allies. It is also true that America's interests are served by devotion to open economies and to free trade and that we have to pay attention, and the President of the United States has to pay attention to the great powers. The powers like Russia and China and increasingly powers like India, that as my kids at Stanford would put it, because they are so large, because they are so consequential, can quote, unquote, learn your whole day. The desire is that those great powers can develop relations with the United States that will not ruin our whole day, but that will instead be cooperative. We will have our disagreements. There are disagreements that are quite serious, but there is no reason to believe that fruitful relationships with other big powers with important interests cannot be nurtured and sustained in a way that is good for all concerned. Now, that's the kind of heart tower. And since most of you may know from reading about me that I'm a realist, or so people say, I apparently pay a lot of attention to heart towers. But I want to assure you of one thing. It's an academic debate as to whether or not our interests or our values are to govern foreign policy. Our interests and our values have to go hand in hand. In fact, our interests are reinforced by our values and vice versa. There is no doubt that American interests are better advanced today in a world in which more countries share our values of individual liberty, of freedom, a belief that the rules ought to be able to choose those who will rule them, of freedom of press, of human rights and human dignity. There is no doubt that those interests and those values go hand in hand. In that regard, there are two elements of American, two instruments of American power that I think are sometimes undervalued in understanding our best road toward a coherent foreign policy. And I want to talk just briefly about two. One is to better understand and to better use the strength of non-governmental institutions in promoting American values and interests of law, in promoting what I would call, in fact, universal values, because these are not simply American values. It turns out that when you ask people, do you want to speak freely? Do you wish to be able to enjoy the face of your labor? Do you wish to be able to be free from arbitrary power? That all people say, yes, they do. These are universal values. Now, non-governmental institutions of many types play important roles. We can think about the tremendous role of institutions that are doing the hard humanitarian work abroad. And we might think about a set of institutions that I'm extremely interested in, our great educational institution. At Stanford, I watched as more and more students, particularly at the graduate level, from around the world, sought their higher education here. And those people go back not just with a better education, but I think with a better sense of who we are. There's a lot of talk about how to build nations. And there's often a reference to the Marshall Plan in doing so. But I would offer to you that as important as the Marshall Plan was to the rebuilding of Europe, and it was, one of the most lasting effects of that period was actually through Fulbright Scholarships and Marshall Scholarships that brought scores of Europeans here and scores of Americans there, scores of Asians here and scores of Americans there to understand each other better and to come to a common vision of human dignity. At Stanford, I was fortunate to engage with some of my colleagues in the creation of something called the New Democracy Fellows. These fellowships brought outstanding scholars from Eastern Europe to Stanford. We helped them to study traditional academic disciplines, where top-flight scholarship in the former communist states had really been cycled. Disciplines like history and sociology and anthropology and political science. When these fellows went back home, I'm sure that they were not preaching the virtues of the Republican Party. The Stanford faculty made certain of that. But I can assure you that they were experiencing free, scholarly exchange and free, scholarly ideas. You know, at the toughest, most difficult times, countries that were cut off from one another could sometimes find a way to break down barriers through scholarly exchange because knowledge truly knows no borders. And if we ever forget that knowledge knows no borders, we again will take one of the most important arrows of the quiver of the forward march of democracy. Another example is, of course, this public partnership, the U.S. Institute of Peace. The Institute has pioneered a new virtual diplomacy program that applies information and communications technologies to prevent, manage and resolve international conflicts. The program sponsors right about a Revolution and Diplomatic Affairs. That can parallel the Revolution and military affairs. And I think the Institute is onto something because where power lies in knowledge and ideas, surely the new information technology has become an astonishing force multiplier. Now, as I give these examples of public-private and private institutions, let me assure you that I think that there are many things that the U.S. government can also do to further values, to further the promotion of ideas, and to create a world in which there is a common shared experience and thereby a common understanding of human dignity. Now, it's a real challenge for the way in which our government does its work, particularly in national security affairs. And that leads me to the subject of the National Security Council system. That system was, of course, created by the National Security Act of 1947. It was created to help unite the great department and agencies of the government to prepare for the dangers of total war. One of the statutory members of the Council under the Act was the Director of Defense Mobilization. Now, since he doesn't come to the meetings anymore, I think we may ask the question, how relevant is this particular institution to the world that we face now? What we need today is an NSC system that unites the government to prepare, not for total war, but for the total spectrum of policy instruments we can use when military power is not appropriate. We find ourselves into a quite bipolar discussion. We either intervene militarily or we're isolationists and we don't intervene at all. In fact, there are a whole host of instruments in between that need to be fine tuned for the times when military power is clearly not appropriate. In 1947, the challenge was to tame the clashing interests of the State War and Navy Department. In 2001, the challenge is to unite the far-flung concerns of all the agencies that are working across our real and virtual borders, from the Department of Defense to the Public Health Service, from the Administrator of NASA to the Federal Communications Commission. Let me comment then on how I see my own role as Assistant to the President for national security affairs in this complex world. These many agencies have to perform in concerts driving toward a common purpose, precisely because our policies now involve so many players. We have to have a clearly written sheet of music, you may know I'm a musician, so part in the reference, so that everyone knows what to and display. The National Security Council system with the President at its top is the instrument we use. Now, it's not my job to make people, quote, told the line. Instead, the challenge and the great opportunity is to sense the possibilities of this new era and to make connections to work as a team toward an American foreign policy that is coherent and successful. We can no longer afford stealth flights. When we talk about America's commitments with our European allies, we should think about how our common ideals help us to see ways to work together on issues of the new economy without being mired in problems of the past. When we talk about free enterprise with our Latin American trading partners, we should make the connections to the health of our political institutions. When we think about the new dangers of transnational terrorism, we must make the connections between law enforcement and national security. When we think about transforming defense, we must make the connection between defense agencies and the way business and society are already adapting to the new information technology. While my confection and my hope for this job is overwhelmingly positive, we at the National Security Council are going to try to work the same, stitching the connections together tightly. If we can do that, if we can provide glue for the many, many agencies and many, many instruments the United States is now deploying around the world, I think we will have done our job on behalf of the President of the United States. Then we can develop a foreign policy that uses all the incredible strength of this country and is able then to project American influence in support of its principles. Thank you for your attention, and I look forward to your questions.