Remarks at the U.S.-Brazil Innovation Summit

I hope what we can do when I finish speaking is to have some interaction, that we could actually maybe even see you -- it's very dark in here -- and you could let us know what is on your mind. You could give us suggestions that you might have for how those of us in government can help improve relations between our countries and the lives of our people. I would be very happy to take questions or take your ideas. I hope we can do that as part of this program.

I want to say today that I'm happy that you are talking about innovation, because I think all of us are living in a vastly changed landscape globally. I have been a professional diplomat for 25 years, and frankly, I can't remember a time quite like this one. The world is changing because we are living in a globalized world. That changes everything about the way we have to organize ourselves, certainly those of us in government, and I imagine for those of you -- the same is true in the private sector. It means that the old certainties about the way we look at human problems have to be seen in a new light, and it means that we have to have the courage and the energy to change the way we do business.

Let me just give you one example. The United States, like most other countries in the world, has diplomatic consulates and embassies all around the world. We have 266 of them. Until about two or three years ago, we still were structured diplomatically as if the Cold War was in full swing. We had extraordinarily large embassies in our allied capitals in Europe, in places like Russia and Brussels and in Rome and France. We had relatively smaller embassies in places like New Delhi and Beijing and Jakarta and Pretoria and Abuja and in Brasilia.

I went on a trip to India when I first became Under Secretary of State. And I went to our consulate in Calcutta, and I talked to our very good Consul General. I said to him, "How many people live in the district of this consulate?" He said, "290 million people in East Bengal." I said, "How many people do you have in this consulate, American diplomats who can actually go out and engage those 290 million people?" He said, "Three."

I went up to Delhi to see our ambassador, David Mulford, the United States ambassador to India. I said, "David, how many people do you have in your political section here to engage the Indian government, one of our foremost global partners?" He said, "Four people," which is exactly the number of people we had in Oslo, Norway, a country of four million people, versus India's billion.

So I came back to Secretary Rice and I said, you know, I think we still haven't adjusted -- we as an institution and the State Department -- to the fact that the Cold War ended in 1989 and 1990 and 1991, but we are still structured as if the Cold War was underway. And we haven't taken account in terms of where we have placed our people in the world of the most dramatic change in the global landscape. Brazil is an emerging world power. India and China and Indonesia are emerging world powers in South Asia and East Asia; Nigeria and South Africa and Egypt in Africa.

So over the last three years, Secretary Rice has asked us to shift about 300 people from those wonderful palaces that we inhabit in Europe to these emerging capitals of the great global powers of Latin America, Africa, South and East Asia.

Now we're a very small diplomatic corps. I know that the image of the United States is that -- that we're somehow this overwhelming global power. We do have a rather large military of about 1.5 million people. Do you know that our diplomatic corps is about 6,000 people? And so if you shift 300 out of 6,000, you're making a dramatic statement about the world, about how you see the world and about the power structure in the world today, which is vastly different than the way that it was when the United Nations and the World Bank and the IMF and NATO were all created in the four or five years after the close of the Second World War.

So when I thought about innovation and your conference today, I thought to myself, what can I possibly tell a room full of experts on innovation about innovation? I decided not to compete with you. I just thought I'd take a chapter from our own book and say that we are trying to adjust to these changing global realities and we're trying to make the right decisions, frankly, for the people for whom we work, the American public, and establish a presence of the United States, the official diplomatic presence, in a way around the world that reflects the way as it is in 2007, not the way the world was in 1947. So that's the first thing I wanted to say to you.

I also wanted to say that great changes are occurring here in this relationship between Brazil and the United States, and Tom [Shannon] talked about some of them. We have with President Lula a great friend of the United States. We have in President Bush a great friend of Brazil, someone who recognizes Brazil's importance economically, culturally, as a leader of Latin America, and a country with which we need to be the leading partner in order to fulfill what we need to do in this hemisphere: produce a hemisphere of peace, of growth economically, of inclusion socially, and overcoming the poverty and injustice that is still too much part of the landscape in my own country, as well as in the other countries of Latin America.

I think we are at a major strategic moment in Latin America, in the Americas, in the Western Hemisphere, where we are finally seeing the fulfillment of what all of us knew for decades was the promise of a relationship between Brazil and the United States that would be the foremost relationship that both of us have with any other country in the hemisphere. We are seeing that happen.

When President Bush came to Sao Paulo on March 8, and then when President Lula came to Camp David outside of Washington on March 31, they redesigned the strategic landscape for this relationship. The symbolic centerpiece of it is biofuels. We are the two leading producers of ethanol in the world. We live in a world where we have to deal with these tremendous environmental problems and also the problem of availability of energy to average people. We have the capacity in this biofuels agreement between us to make sure that all the countries in this hemisphere are sharing in the promise of biofuels. That is what Assistant Secretary Shannon, Ambassador Sobel and I will be doing later today when we meet Foreign Minister Amorim and other Brazilian officials.

But I think this relationship has great promise. If we can work with Brazil in biofuels, if the CEO forum that is being established between Brazil and the United States can lead -- give us some advice for how to bring down the barriers to trade, if we can increase the interaction among our peoples, if Brazil and the United States can have a global agenda that goes beyond the Americas to have us strengthen the United Nations, for instance, and play a common role in trying to deal with the problems of Latin America, of Africa and of the rest of the world, then we will have done what we can do and must do to make sure that the two largest, the two most powerful countries of the hemisphere are partners in a way that we have not been for the last four or five decades. So I stand here as an optimist about this relationship, someone who believes in it, someone who thinks it's terribly important that our two countries be working together.

Now I hope, for those of you who are Brazilian, that you see this energy on the part of my own government. Our Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson was here for the last two days in Brazil. Tom Shannon and I are here today, and our Secretary of Health, Secretary Leavitt, will be here and will be in Rio to help represent the United States as Brazil hosts the Pan American Games. By the way, we are so happy and pleased to see Brazil do such a great job in hosting these games, and we believe in Brazil. I know that Brazil has ambitions to host future international sporting events, and we wish Brazil well, because Brazil deserves that moment on the world stage, and Americans believe in this country and have great respect for this country.

That is the first thing I wanted to say about innovation. I hope you will see that we are trying to be innovative in the way that we approach the relationship with Brazil. But we are also trying to be innovative here in the Americas. For a long time, I think there was an image of the United States, for many years, that we talked about democracy and we talked about countering drug trafficking, but perhaps we hadn't responded to the real problems of the average person here in Brazil or in Colombia or in Panama or any of the other countries of the region. But I hope you have seen in President Bush's trip in March to Latin America, in what all of our officials are saying, that we understand that we have to have a comprehensive vision and policy for the Americas, and that we have to speak to the issues that the common person, the average person, cares about in this hemisphere. I include the citizens of my own country, of course, in saying that.

So what do we believe in for our hemisphere? We believe that we have to stand up for democracy. Because with the exception of Europe, there is no other part of the world that is so uniformly committed to democracy and liberty for their people as the countries of the Americas. Of course there is a notable exception of Cuba, communist Cuba. There is the exception of Venezuela -- at least from the government in Venezuela. But for the most part, every other government in this region is committed to democracy and freedom for their people. We have to stand up for that.

We also believe in the transformative power of market economics. There were great ideological debates in the 1960s and 1970s about left and right and Marxism versus capitalism. Haven't those debates ended with a universal, global affirmation that market capitalism must be the way forward for human beings on earth? The Chinese people have certainly, I think, answered that question. They have seen this tremendous growth in China because of their adoption of free market principles.

The people of India, one billion strong, now have 300 million people in their middle class, lifted out of poverty in the last generation because of the market reforms of the two major political parties in India itself. We see this same phenomenon in places like Dubai in the Arab Middle East, in Estonia and in Poland and the Czech Republic, countries that used to be enslaved by communism and now are leading market innovators. We see it here in the Americas. If we can bring trade barriers down, if we can encourage the kind of knowledge, economy and innovation to invest in our people, we can all succeed in an era of the triumph of market capitalism.

So democracy and market capitalism have been the twin fundamental pillars of our policy in the Americas. But we realize that it is not enough if we are to be a good neighbor in this hemisphere to all the other peoples of the Americas. We do realize that too many people still live in poverty in Brazil, in Bolivia, in Central America and in the United States of America, and we understand that governments have to work for their people.

I was in Santiago on Monday and met with President Michelle Bachelet, someone for whom we have great respect. She made this point to me and our ambassador and our delegation. She said, "Democracies need to produce for their people." So we know that part of the American effort here in the Americas has to be to pay attention to poverty alleviation and to make sure that we in the public and you in the private sectors are acting in such a way that what we do will help lift people out of poverty.

We know that, particularly in the Andes, but again, in parts of my own country, many people feel excluded from society, many people feel discrimination and many people feel the sting of social injustice. We know that in addition to democracy and market economics, we have to be committed to alleviating social injustice in our hemisphere. President Bush said that when he was in San Paulo on March 8, and Tom and I are saying it again today. The President and our Secretary of State said it at the White House on Monday when they held this public/private partnership conference on the Americas. We have to be committed to the basic problems of the people of this hemisphere. So I wanted to say that we Americans get it, and that we Americans understand that we have to be part of the movement to end discrimination and to alleviate poverty all over this hemisphere.

Finally let me say Brazil and the United States live in the world. We don't just live here in the Americas, in the Western Hemisphere. I think for those of you interested in innovation, thinking about innovation, also understand the major global reality of our time. The Cold War is over. The way of organizing the world around blocks of East versus West is over. It can no longer serve the needs of human beings in the twenty-first century, because the fundamental reality that we face is we live in a globalized world.

Globalization brings us this enormous positive promise on the one hand of technological and medical breakthroughs, and on the other, the dark side of globalization: the forbidding, transnational problems that face every country in the world. Globalization isn't just negative. Tom Friedman, who is a very smart visionary American thinker, has written a book called The Lexus and the Olive Tree. He wrote it eight or nine years ago. In it, he says, there is a tremendous, positive up side to what is happening in the world economically, technologically, scientifically and socially.

We live in the information age. We have the enormous, liberating freedom that people, through personal computers, through cell phones, through BlackBerrys, can achieve a degree of initiative, creativity and freedom that human beings have never known before. We have the enormous promise of the Green Revolution in agriculture. We can feed every person in the world, and we are the first generation in human history that has the capacity, if we are organized correctly, to eliminate famine in the world. There is no technological or agricultural reason for famine. We just have to commit ourselves to getting the food where it is needed most.

We have the incredible advances of medicine, where we can now help human beings cope with HIV/AIDS. Our administration has a $30 billion long-term program, mainly in Sub-Saharan Africa, to do that. We can eliminate malaria. We can help cure diseases that have afflicted generations, centuries of human existence on this planet.

So there is an enormous up side to share the technology in a democratic way, to use science to help people deal with the most basic human problems. I think as we think about globalization, we need to reflect on that positive side and welcome it and embrace it and organize ourselves internationally to take advantage of it.

But there is also this dark, forbidding specter of global-transnational challenges that are truly fearsome to behold. Think about the five or six most important international problems we face. What are they now? Global climate change is one of the most important. Another is trafficking of women and children. A third is the proliferation of criminal terrorist rings around the world. A fourth is the proliferation of drug cartels that send crack cocaine to Brasilia and to Washington, D.C., where I live, and our kids abuse it and we have tremendous social and medical and psychological problems because of it. A fifth is the specter of global terrorism and its juxtaposition with the most dangerous technology in the world, biological and chemical and nuclear technology.

If you would agree with me that on the dark side of globalization, those are the great problems that we face, what is the common denominator of all those problems? They are going right through your borders here in Brazil and my borders in the United States. They are going over them and under them and through them. We cannot defend ourselves against these problems alone.

So the first lesson I draw, and particularly for Americans, we can't be isolationists. We can't think that somehow we can withdraw from the world's problems and just live a happy existence in our comfortable countries, wealthy countries like Brazil and the United States. We have to join forces to fight these problems because all of them lend themselves only to multilateral action.

The second conclusion I draw as an American is that unilateralism can also not work in a globalized world. Despite the great power of the United States, politically and economically and militarily, we can't succeed in the world in fighting global climate change, in ending this horrible problem of trafficked women and children in every continent of the world. We can't succeed against terrorism unless we're working here in the Americas, unless we are working in Europe, with the European Union, unless we are working with the African Union in Africa or the ASEAN countries of Southeast Asia.

So what I'm saying to you is we are at this very profound strategic juncture where we must work together multilaterally and strengthen those institutions that are the foundation of the globe today, the United Nations, the European Union, the Organization of American States and all the others, to fight these problems. If we can think that we can either go it alone or somehow withdraw into our relative prosperity and avoid these problems, we are wrong.

That is a fundamentally different way of approaching the world, of thinking about the world's problems. It means, particularly for my country, that we have to reach out to new strategic partners in the world. All the generations of American diplomats before Tom Shannon and myself faced east towards Western Europe because that is where we felt our natural allies were. Now they are still great allies of the United States of America. But it will be more important for us in the future to work with the emerging regional powers, Brazil and Mexico, South Africa and Nigeria, Indonesia, Japan and China, and certainly India and South Asia.

We, a collection of large, populous, many of us multiethnic, multiracial and multi-religious countries, embody common characteristics. We all have power. We all should have the national and international vision to tackle these problems. And if we work together, we can overcome the worst side of globalization, and we can take advantage of the positive side. That means to organize ourselves to strengthen the UN, the United Nations, and to strengthen our bilateral relationships, like the Brazil-U.S. relationship, in that common cause.

As a human being and as a representative of a great country, the United States, I think this is the most compelling, most important and most urgent global challenge, that we organize ourselves and commit ourselves to triumph over these very daunting challenges before us. I don't know if that helps you think through innovation, but I hope it is a message that we can all embrace. I wish all of us success internationally in achieving this triumph of human beings over these problems and challenges that we face in the world today.

I wish you all luck for this conference, as well. I know that we have all spoken at some length. I hope there is some time left that we could have some interaction and hear from you, and maybe the people up on the stage, all of us can respond to any questions you might have. Thank you for this warm welcome. Thank you to the U.S. Council and its Brazilian counterpart for organizing this great conference.