Given on September 12, 2005. Transcribed by Reg.

Number 4.
We've got to have a new framework for US security. We have no national strategy for the United States of America. That's the simple truth. I was talking to- in the elevator -to Dave on the way down. We both are products of something called the National Defense Education Act, passed in 1958. Many of you are too. Because in this country after the Soviet Union launched the first Sputnik, we realized that we need to keep up with education and we put a lot of extra emphasis on education. The we changed P.T., physical training, in the United States. John F. Kennedy pu a new American physical fitness program in. We worried about nutrition and advanced technology. It all was designed to help America win the Cold War, and when we won the Cold War we lost our strategy. There's no organizing principle for what we're doing in the world today. We took advantage of a global opening of trade, technology, communications. We created 22 million jobs during the 1990's. It was unprecedented prosperity, but we had no national strategy. I was a senior officer in uniform. We committed the United States more in the 1990's than we ever had since the Vietnam war. We delivered relief supplies in Rwanda.
(tape side one ends)
(While I turned over the tape, General Clark talked more about the things that the US military did during the 1990's.)
...And we never had a national strategy. We wrote one. I helped write it. It was called, "A National Strategy of Engagement and Enlargement." (bloggers chuckle knowingly) And if you ever heard of it today you'd think it was an advertisement for some kind of a men's pharmaceutical product. (much laughter) It never made the grade with the American people. We just did what we wanted to do, and used our armed forces. We were- my friends from abroad would come into this country and say (inaudible), "We were in Chicago. We went to your department stores, and people were very friendly. They even- they helped us -they even asked us over to their homes for dinner. But then when we began to talk, they didn't know were our country was. They didn't know what its capitol was, what its electoral system was, who its president was. We know everything about your country. You don't know anything about us. And we never saw any foreign news on your television." All that changed of course in 2001. Now there's a lot of foreign news on there, but what didn't change is there's still no effective national strategy. We don't know how we're going to organize our national effort, an all spheres endeavor to cope with the international challenge we face - not just the war on terror - but the looming challenge, for the first time in American history, of not being the top dog economically.
You know in economics it's not just supply and demand. It's the law of scale. it's who's the biggest. Walmart proves that you don't have to make a 10% product on every sa- profit on every sale to be a huge company. They've done it well. And China has four times the population, and therefore, four times the potential market scale of the United States. What that means is that we're investing there. So are businesses all over the world. We can't ignore that market. With that market comes vast accumulation of wealth. With wealth comes universities, and universities fund technology. That technology funds military technology, and that military technology combined with the economic power of China has the potential to constrain American freedom of action, impact the prosperity of our people, and put us in a position where our historic freedoms are at risk in a way they haven't been. It's not that China is threatening to invade America, and I'm not advocating war against China, far from it. What I'm advocating is that we recognize what the challenge is and organize ourselves using all the elements of our power to deal with that challenge and win the war on terror.
We've got to build a new framework for security, strengthen our relations with Europe, reinvigorate the North Atlantic Alliance, go after nuclear proliferation by talking to people and putting resources behind it, not just labeling states as members of the Axis of Evil. We've got to tend to events in our own hemisphere. One of my friends always said, he said, "Latin America, South America," he said, "it's the continent of the future. Always has been, always will be." (laughter) But that's no longer true. China's buying up huge swaths of resources in South America. We've got to have an answer for that that involves the development, the partnership, the strengthening of relations with our friends that we've got historic relations with in South America.
We've got to have a legal basis for what we're doing in the war on terror. The first line of effort is offensive, ideologically. The second, in the war on terror, is legal. Harmonize the law. Create a common definition of terrorism around the world, common elements of proof, common use of evidence. So that information gathered in one country can be used in prosecution in another country. And then use force only, only, only as a last resort. We need a new framework for understanding US security.
That's the fourth one.
(to be continued)