The John C Whitehead Lecture
By the RT HON Lord Robertson Of Port Ellen
GCMG, Hon FRSE, PC
15 September 2004
Royal Institute of International Affairs, London
IS THERE A CASE FOR OPTIMISM IN TODAY'S TROUBLED TIMES?
I concede that this is a difficult time to make the case for optimism. World events don't exactly fill anyone with that sentiment.
The appalling atrocity in Beslam, the bomb in Jakarta, the milestone 1000th US death in Iraq with its relentless death toll and now two women humanitarian workers abducted, the continuing carnage in Sudan, more turmoil in pre-election Afghanistan and the Gaza Strip - and all of that is just this month.
Nothing seems to be getting better, and moods of pessimism are infectious. Small wonder that when I say I am going to put before you a case for optimism some will be intrigued and others will be simply bemused. My case today will not be unconditional, but I say to you that it can still be convincing.
This is not the first time I've taken up this challenge. I made two speeches over a decade ago which I managed to resurrect from a mountain of haphazardly archived paper and in preparation for tonight they withstood rereading.
One was made here in Chatham House on 2 May 1989 at the launch of a book on British foreign policy options by William Wallace and Christopher Tugendhat. It was my contribution to a debate with the then junior Foreign Office Minister, William Waldegrave. The fact that all four of us are now in the House of Lords must tell us something about options but that is indeed different territory.
We were on the brink of some world changing events that year, but in May none of us predicted what was to happen in the November when the Berlin Wall was breached and the many towers of Communism started to topple. My speech actually used the dilemma facing Western leaders, including our then Prime Minister Thatcher, with each new breathtaking Gorbachev initiative, to show one major problem for politics then.
If I might indulge myself for a moment and give you one quote.
"Try to look forward we must, since the old values are clearly insufficient, the old objectives make little sense and an affection for the old is no protection from the new. There has been, to coin a phrase, a bonfire of the certainties which have glued together the map of Europe since the War and this has left some people more than a little uncomfortable."
"Plus ca change": some will say.
By the time I got to my next speech, to the AGM of the Great Britain/East Europe Centre in June 1990, the whole world landscape had changed and so too had the mood. That's why I called my speech 'Eastern Europe: the case for optimism'. As we look at the self-confident nations of Central and Eastern Europe today, most of them members of both NATO and the European Union, you might wonder at why I had to make that case.
Let me give you one flavour from what I said then.
"Seven traumatic months have seen not only the return of elections, free speech, open argument, and the rule of law to the countries of Eastern Europe but more sadly they have also seen the rise of a fashionable pessimism which has converted euphoria into caution and celebration into apprehension.? Where we wept and rejoiced only a few months ago with those who had swept away their oppressors, we now find in front of us a veritable cavalcade of gloom about the problems, the difficulties and the obstacles."
Indeed few people believed, after the excitement of the Wall's collapse, that there would be a peaceful, revenge-free transition from communism to free market societies. Most people looked at the legacy of police states and command economies and wilted at the challenges of change.
They were wrong. Fourteen years on these countries have thrown off the shackles, have shouldered new responsibilities and become fully integrated into the European democratic family. Last week I returned for the first time since the end of communism to what was the Czechoslovak Embassy here in London. Where I once used to visit to lobby for political prisoners, including one Vaclav Havel, I was there this time to receive the national decoration of the free Slovak Republic. In 1990 I hoped but would not have forecast.
In the broad sweep of recent times there are many parallels to what is going on today.
Apart from the pessimists about peaceful transformation in the old communist lands, there was equal pessimism about unification in Germany. Joining a basket case economy to the most successful one in Europe was a step too far they said. Wrong again. Even if Germany's economy is struggling today the roots of the difficulties lie deeper than in the remarkable, and successful, unification of the Germanys.
Then there was the demise of the Soviet Union. First there was a confidence that the second super-power would go on forever. This was followed, after the Soviet Union departed one lunchtime, by a conventional wisdom that the mighty union could not dissolve without bloodshed, conflict and disintegration. Remember the 'banana republic with nukes' comments. Wrong again.
Then came the Balkans. Pessimism here begot paralysis. Many people, myself for a time included, believed that the conflict had no external solution.? That then became a self-fulfilling formula and it took three blood soaked years before the outside world bothered to take the military action required to force an end to the killing.
Let me come back to Bosnia and Herzegovina later but bring to your memory the response to the military action taken against Milosevic in 1999 to end the systematic and brutal ethnic cleansing of Kosovo.
I still have the letters I received as Defence Secretary from some very eminent and surprising people telling me of the folly of using military power. I still also have the articles and commentaries warning of spill over, quagmires; the likelihood of defeat and its catastrophic impact on NATO and Western unity and of course the impact of relations with Russia. Seventy-eight long days it took, and the prospect of victory was not always obvious, but we achieved every single objective and Milosevic is in the Hague not Belgrade. Moscow took a year to get over it.
In 2001 the pessimists had a view on the situation developing in Macedonia, that small neighbour of Kosovo's, which faced an armed insurgency and a potential civil war. A peace process was developed by the EU, NATO and the OSCE working hand in hand, but there were of course risks. One key ingredient involved the deployment of NATO troops to collect the guns and armour from the surrendering insurgents. Back came the merchants of 'quagmire', and 'mission creep', inaction and doom. Simon Jenkins in the Times wrote one such article with a strap quote across the front page of the paper entitled 'Lord Robertson will not stop until the Balkans are ablaze from the Adriatic to Istanbul'. One down again to the pessimists.
In the midst of the campaign against the Taliban in 2002 some preached with real pessimistic fervour. They predicted a long and bloody and unsuccessful war of attrition against the Taliban army, which had seen off the Russians. Wrong again
And even if Iraq is far from good today and if its insurgency is horrible and brings daily headlines to fuel the pessimists, it is salutary to recall the forecasts made by so many critics in the lead-up to the invasion. We were told that it would set the whole region aflame, that the Republican Guard would occupy every city and fight for every street. We had good reason to believe that Sadam had chemical and biological weapons and would use them when confronted, if not before. Even those who said there were no weapons felt able to say "if he has them he will use them". We were told that there would be oceans of refugees and that every government in the region would be toppled in the maelstrom.
It is bad today in Iraq, but not nearly as bad as they said and in my passionate belief it will get much better and the region, like the Balkans, will be much the better for what was done.
And for the continuing sceptics, for those who cannot draw any hope or confidence from the catalogue I have already presented, I say one more thing. Go to Sarajevo.
To get the full picture you would have had to have been there between 1992 and 1997, but even if you only saw the siege and the viciousness on TV if you go there today you will see with your own eyes what has happened since the NATO bombers took to the skies in 1995.
In Bosnia and Herzegovina over 700,000 people died - through some of the worst violence since the Second World War. In three hellish years two and a half million people were displaced either in their country or outside it. Hatred was the prevailing sentiment after mass killing, torturing, systematic raping, the concentration camps, cattle trucks and the birth of that new expression 'ethnic cleansing'.
In the last days before NATO intervened, in 1995, there were no TV cameras present to record the cold-blooded massacre of at least 7,000 men and boys in the small village of Srebrenica. Given current preoccupations please note; this was not done in the name of Islamic fundamentalism but in the name of Serb domination and it took place on Europe?s front door step less that ten years ago.
At that time few people gave Bosnia a chance. The hatreds, the awful legacy, the memories, the grievance on all sides left the clear message to some that it could never be a viable state and that the moment the NATO troops left, the violence would restart. But it did not.
There were 65,000 troops under NATO's flag in Bosnia in 1995. Today there are under 12,000. By the end of the year the EU will take over the stabilization role with even fewer para-military forces backing the local police.
The BiH state institutions are now functioning, border controls are in place, taxes are being paid and café society has returned. Of course it is not yet Switzerland and there is deep poverty in rural areas and the worst war crimes indictees, Karadic and Mladic are still getting protection from their clans, but what a change has taken place and what a blow to the pessimists.
Not only did the BiH flag fly proudly at the Athens Olympics but this year Bosnia had an entry in the Eurovision Song Contest and a team, cheered on by the country?s tri-Presidency, in the Euro 2004 Soccer qualifiers.
From the killing fields of Srebrenica to the Eurovision Song Contest in nine years is a great tribute to those who remained optimistic. It is furthermore down to the half-million NATO troops from over forty countries who came to make, and keep and stabilize the peace and to outstanding people like my friends Paddy Ashdown and Wolfgang Petritch, who as High Representatives of the international community drove the process of reform and change and reconciliation.
And today? South Africa and Northern Ireland both confounded the pessimists. Israel and Palestine feed them. Libya gives us hope for a safer world, North Korea makes our flesh creep. And all the time global terrorism is an omnipresent and unpredictable threat to life and safety.
So optimism is not a blank cheque for foreign policy. Hoping for the best is like waiting for the National Lottery to deal with your overdraft.? And luck played only a limited role in confounding the pessimism in the areas I have outlined.
Hard work, diplomatic engagement, robust international organizations, aid and investment of time and money at the right time; all of these made optimism work. If we are to remain optimistic amid current gloom then all of these weapons and more will be required. I am now going to outline a couple of what I strongly believe to be the key ingredients required if the current sense of fatalism is not to be self-fulfilling.
First and Foremost:
Alliances both formal and informal are crucial and none more crucial than the deep transatlantic relationship, which has served us so well over the last sixty years. Of course it is constantly tested. It perpetually looks as if it is going to rupture and the debate endlessly provides fodder for those who delight in portraying the two sides of the Atlantic as different planets.
It is always a time of maximum angst when there are elections in process. At the moment the Europeans look on with dismay and no little distaste at what passes for political debate in the US Presidential elections - even when we are spared the TV adverts. In turn the US public and elites were dumbfounded during the German General Election of 2002, given Chancellor Schroder's robust pro-American line on his visit shortly before to Washington.
Terrible things elections are - people have a nasty desire to win and occasionally they do take the low road to victory. But that is democracy, and that is what we all stand for, and it is our one great and unquestioned common value. So perhaps we should all be a bit less precious about how other people win and lose and rejoice that it is the people in their wisdom who make the final choices. They often prove surprisingly more sensible than the politicians, the commentators and the 30 second TV adverts.
I will venture a forecast. When the Presidential election in the US is over, we will get back to thinking about the issues on their merits and there will be less room for the peddlers of the apocalypse to pontificate about.
However one aspect of the pre-November climate is worrying and wholly indefensible. Iraq, its provisional government and its road to elections, need help and assistance from the outside world - and they need it now. Too many governments in Europe are shirking their responsibilities for bringing stability in Iraq for a very unworthy and unspoken reason.
They know that Iraq as a failure and as regional wreckage would be a victory for extremism and chaos and they know full well that the ramifications of that would hit Europe long before it hit California, but they still do little. They do little and sometimes nothing when they could do a lot because they think that improving Iraq would improve George Bush?s prospects. They still resist even supplying protective forces for the United Nations Mission.
That is a deeply unworthy and near suicidal policy. It is time that those involved in this cynical exercise looked to the interests of their own people and of the world, and not the voting intentions of the American people.
I repeat that Alliances matter, and permanent alliances matter more. That's why the transformation of NATO means so much to the future of world stability. The NATO alliance matters to more than just its twenty-six members. The network of relationships, including the crucially important one with Russia, ensures that the spider's web of influence intensifies cooperation in the effort against terrorism and other new threats.
The fashionable pessimists would have us that NATO has outlived its use. One op-ed in the Financial Times last month proclaimed, The disappearance of the Soviet threat has removed the chief reason for the NATO alliance. In what sort of intellectual cave has this authority, commanding half a page in Britain's greatest newspaper, been living?
Who else would, or could, stop the violence in Bosnia? Or the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. Or put together 4,000 multinational troops in five days to collect the surrendered guns in Macedonia? Who could, or would have taken on the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan or helped Poland and Spain to take on a whole division in post conflict Iraq? Who else is available to help with the training of new Iraqi forces if NATO, with its experience and method of producing multi-national force packages, was not there to do it?
Let those who share Mr Lind's pessimism take note of three unfamiliar words. Operation Active Endeavour.
This operation, involving the ships and submarines of the Standing Naval Forces Mediterranean, was mounted under the Article 5 Declaration made by NATO on 12 September 2001. NATO sent the force to the Eastern Mediterranean to monitor, track and eventually hail and board shipping, which might be suspected to have been involved in terrorism. In 2002, after intelligence was received about the Straits of Gibraltar being an Al Q'uida target Operation STROG was created to intensively patrol that vital seaway. Hundreds of thousands of ships have been tracked, hailed, boarded and escorted.
All the evidence suggests that the sheer presence in these sea areas of the NATO ships has reduced cross-Mediterranean crime and trafficking and has clearly inhibited the terrorist access to the sea-lanes. Using what were the assets of Cold War anti-submarine warfare in the war on terrorism is just one, under-publicised way in which the Alliance has taken on new roles in a new world. It is often said that 9/11 involved a failure of imagination in what the terrorists might do. With some justice the same may have been true of the Russians in relation to Beslam. In neither case did we contemplate, or prepare, for such inhuman wanton criminality.
Operation Active Endeavour is one way in which imagination was used pre-emptively to convert the weaponry of an old confrontation for use against a modern one.
I want to deal with one other point in my non-exhaustive list of pre-conditions for being optimistic. The role of Europe.
Nowhere should a sense of permanent optimism be more assured than our own continent. Against a legacy of wars, conflicts, tragedies and centuries of cyclical violence, today's Europe stands as a genuine example of how old enemies can be turned into a genuine partnership involving deep co-operation. Fifty years ago, a hundred years ago, two hundred years ago - who would have thought the most contentious issue today between Britain, France and Germany would be whether taxation levels should be harmonised across the continent or whether the British rebate should be absorbed into the overall common funding calculus?
The most recent enlargement of the EU, with ten new states joining the Union, bringing the total number of countries to 25 brings its wealth to one third of global GDP.
Such an example of the voluntary integration of old enemies has never before been seen on this planet and it is now, a few extremists on the left and right excepted, simply taken for granted. Nations further east still jostle to join what is seen as an experiment in shared sovereignty which has produced unprecedented stability, peace and prosperity for its members.
Now the EU reaches out beyond its boundaries, and beyond its own unified identity to help other nationals and, through the new Constitutional Treaty, to anchor its achievement in an understandable form.
It should be the time of Europe. The US is still as powerful, but still lonely in its Superpower Status. No other stage or group of states can match its economic or military strength, and yet it needs friends and allies and collaborators in what needs to be done. The US may not understand the functioning of the EU, but it does understand that it is its only peer in today's world.
But where is Europe? A common trade policy the equal to, and combatant with, the USA. A common Agricultural policy built on pillars of social engineering and food shortage abolition - both objectives long redundant. A single market which works.
But in foreign policy or defence burden sharing - Europe is still a bit player on the international stage.
Mission creep is an ugly expression for a military action which gets involved in more than was envisaged or was equipped for. The European Union is involved in 'ambition creep' an equally ugly expression for wanting to get involved but without the means to match the ambition. There is today a shameful mismatch between the ambition to intervene diplomatically and militarily and what instruments are available to actually do so.
This year is the tenth anniversary of the genocide of Rwanda where hundreds of thousands perished in central Africa. Ten years on we rightly wring our hands and say it must never happen again. But let me pose a blunt question; are we any better-prepared and equipped in 2004 to act to stop a Rwanda tragedy if it confronted us again?
Has Europe got the large transport aircraft needed to ferry troops and equipment to distant places? Have we the logisticians and engineers and field hospitals to support the troops whose boots on the ground are the only preventative measure? If we had to hit hard at a well-armed genocidal force, have we the precision weapons to hit the right people?
The answer is no, we don't. In Kosovo the US had to supply 85% of the precision airpower which international law and international public opinion demands, and six years on from that conflict and ten years on from the disgrace of Rwanda the situation has changed all too little.
The European Union countries have a million and a half soldiers in their land armies. There are a million more in reserves. That is much more than the US Army - almost twice as much. And yet, the number of these soldiers deployed on all international missions is around 70,000. Given a generous rotation of three a total of 210,000 soldiers are deployable out of 2.5 million on the books. It is a shocking waste of European taxpayers cash and a mark of weakness against today's threats.
And then there is the issue of whether today's leaders have anything like the political grit of those who pioneered what is now a Union of twenty-five democratic states.
Take the decision of the twenty-four European stages in NATO who took on responsibility last year for the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan.
"Either we go to Afghanistan or Afghanistan comes to us" is how I explained the decision at the time. Only NATO could have taken on the continuity operation being done since the Taliban defeat by ad-hoc country-led coalitions of the willing, and the NATO decision was taken with everyone's eyes wide open to what it entailed.
Seven thousand troops was all that was involved with a few thousand more for the Provincial Reconstruction Teams outside of Kabul and to look after the special problems of the forthcoming elections. It was a struggle to get the troops each six months but it was done. The key shortage was helicopters - the workhorses of any conflict zone - and in Afghanistan indispensable to transporting troops, equipment and for medical evacuation.
There are over 4,000 helicopters of all sizes and types in the European military inventory. Every country knows their importance to mobility and to troop safety.
Yet out of the fleet of 4,000 helicopters only a couple have been sent. The shortage of 11 the necessary helicopters makes every day for ISAF an avoidable hazard day, but although excuses are many and ingenious, the mighty nations of a United Europe choose to keep their helicopters safely at home.
This is one example of political timidity. The refusal to abandon the weapons and armour of a Cold War long gone relegates Europe to a permanent Second Division in world strategic stakes.
In the world of one super-power the self-relegation by Europe is a formula for impotence not influence and that is a tragedy for our continent, and for the wider world.
Why should America listen when the voice for our own protection is so feeble?
Europe, the European Union or the individual stakes are capable of much more. The continent, united democratically for the first time, can show the way and can play a serious role in translating optimism into reality. That involves growing up in strategic terms and that in truth requires strong political leadership. The safety and security of our populations are in peril and they will not be ensured by the tools of yesterday's battles.
It was General de Gaulle, writing in 1932 who said this:
"What policy can succeed if the country's arms are brought low? Of what use is strategic planning if the means of carrying it out are not forthcoming?"
For any politician, as I have been all my adult life, optimism is a trademark. For me who spent eighteen parliamentary years in opposition it was a necessity. But optimism based on luck and without clear objectives and political guts is just a confidence trick.
If we want this world to be better we can make it happen. If we want to eliminate terrorism, as we did piracy and slavery, then the means are there to do it.
If we care as much about the safety of future generations as a previous generation did about ours, then we can take the measures, reinforce the institutions, make the investment, transform our armies, take the precautions, and match our ambitions with the means.
In that way, but only in that engaged way, can we all afford to be optimistic, and enjoy the benefit that flows from it.
It can be done, it must be done.
03/10/2005 12:12
"Facing new risks in a dangerous world"
Excerpts from a lecture
given on
23 October 2004
by
THE RT HON LORD ROBERTSON OF PORT ELLEN
GCMG, PC
To the 150th Anniversary Conference of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland, Edinburgh
The question I put to you today is this. Have we got a proper grasp of the range of threats and risks facing us as individuals, as companies, as countries, or as an international community?
Take the rising tide of illegality. Organised crime has made a mockery of national borders. There is a Single Black Market from Dover to Dushambe, from Amsterdam to Almaty but there is no Single Legal Market beyond the EU. That is because the forces of law, order, sovereignty and national interest cannot find the same identity of interest as the smugglers and traffickers whose net worth eclipses that of many nation states.
They trade in people, prostitutes, asylum seekers and economic migrants; they trade in guns, cigarettes, in drugs and alcohol and in power and wealth they dwarf countries and legitimate companies. They feed on their greed and corruption and they breed in ethnic and religious conflicts even when the participants are blind to ethnic origin and have no religion except money and hate. They are the forces of disorder and chaos.? Their strength is our weakness and a qualitatively new danger.
The dark side of globalisation is that security threats too are networking and going global.
Al-Qaida offers the most obvious illustration. First it proved conclusively that terrorism had gone global. Al-Qaida was based in Central Asia, led by a wealthy Saudi, trained its personnel in Europe, and carried out its operations from Africa to the United States.? It used the Internet and powerful new encryption software, to communicate freely anywhere in the world.
To add to the danger, global terrorism is linked up to proliferation. Laxer border controls and increasing travel make it easier for terrorists and terrorist states to get their hands on weapons, including weapons of mass destruction. Access to the Internet gives them the information they need to make what they can't buy or steal. The information found by the US-led coalition in Afghanistan leaves no doubt of that.
As we saw on September 11th, the new global terrorist wants blood - as much as possible. Which means that the nexus between global terrorism and proliferation has taken on a new, much more deadly nature.
To compound the agony, terrorism is getting new funding from organized crime. Just as an illustration, of the 24 terrorist organizations identified by the US State Department, 12 have links to international drug trafficking. That is no coincidence. Furthermore, international criminal cartels are themselves increasingly engaging in trafficking weapons, and selling them to very nasty people.
This international power grid of terrorism, proliferation and organized crime is nourished by another characteristic of today's world: the plethora of regional conflicts. These conflict zones, from the Balkans, to the Caucasus and Central Asia to Africa, have become centres where terrorists find recruits. Where organized crime traffics drugs and weapons. Where loss of state control can mean loss of control over lethal weapons themselves.
And behind it all is money. Globalization has made illegal money the lifeblood of the new network of security threats. Over and over, throughout the past decade, regional conflicts, narcotics trafficking, arms smuggling, civil war and terrorism have been facilitated and sustained by illicit financial networked embedded in the world's legal financial system.
How easy it was for Al-Qaida's bankers to have five hundred thousand dollars wired from a bank in Dubai for anonymous use in automatic teller machines in Florida and Maine. How difficult it has been, even with the backing of United Nations resolutions and 150 nations, to find out who raised or sent those dollars.
And when it comes to money, the knife cuts both ways. Because illegal money doesn't just feed other security threats - it also causes them.
Illicit finance has made possible the trade in diamonds that fuelled civil wars in Liberia, Angola and Sierra Leone. It allows countries surrounding Congo to engage in relentless asset stripping under the cover of war. A fraudulent pyramid scheme caused a financial collapse in Albania that led directly to civil chaos, and the proliferation of small arms throughout the Balkans. We still see the effects today, in increased tension and the occasional explosion of armed conflict.
This is a complex set of interrelationships - but the overall pattern is clear. Today's security threats have taken advantage of the infrastructure of globalization - to support each other, to feed each other, to build on each other. They have networked. The result is a clear and present danger to our citizens, and to the stability of the international system.
Our challenge, as an international community, is to dismantle this network. To prevent, or stop, regional conflicts. To stop the proliferation of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. To defeat terrorism. To control organized crime. And to ensure that the international financial system is used for the good of the international community, not exploited to undermine it.
To accomplish this, we need an international security network. Diplomats, militaries, international security organizations, financial institutions, law enforcement officials, and arms control experts must move beyond narrow definitions of their mandates. They must adapt to take on new challenges. And more and more, they must identify common challenges, and work together to solve them.
Addressing terrorism, for example, can no longer be a job only for law enforcement officials. Now, our militaries must also be prepared to tackle this challenge, both to protect themselves and to help protect our populations. Financial institutions must track, and freeze, terrorist money. Arms control experts must stop proliferation into the hands of terrorists, and alert our militaries when it does occur.
Similarly, stopping regional conflicts must be a job for more than just the military. Law enforcement officials must also be deployed into conflict zones, to prevent organized crime from taking hold. Financial experts must also be available to stop corruption. Civilian institutions in post-conflict areas must be supported, to preclude the instability that is the hothouse for so many other threats.
All of these changes require new thinking, new ways of doing business. Outdated Cold War habits and capacities do us no good against 21st century threats unless we adapt them to meet these new challenges. We need a global, integrated response, with deep cooperation between states, international organizations, international financial institutions, the private sector, and non-governmental organizations - all working together, in new ways, to meet this new network of security threats.
And it can be done.
I am at the moment both depressed AND optimistic - and that is no contradiction in terms. I have offered you today a bleak analysis and one designed to make you think and reflect, but I contend we need not be pessimistic if we do the right things in the light of the analysis, and we do them now.
I submit to you one example of how it can be done.
In NATO we did learned the lessons of 9/11, and of Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia and Afghanistan and what's more, we set about applying them.
We brought in 12 new members to the 50 year-old Alliance - including the nations of the Warsaw Pact and even the three ex-Soviet Baltic States.? That made us politically stronger and it added new niche military skills.
We developed new relationships - with Russia, with Ukraine and with the countries of the Caucuses and Central Asia. We drew up complex, but workable new working links with the European Union which will allow, among other things, the EU to take over from NATO in Bosnia at the end of the year.
We created new capacities to meet the emerging new threats and risks. A new cutting edge, high intensity NATO Response Force to go far, hit hard and stay long. We built in the first ever multinational Chemical, Biological and Radiological Battalion to collectively meet the newest and most deadly dangers.
We took our warships of the Mediterranean fleet away from submarine detection and set them to patrolling the sea-lanes used as the trafficker's superhighway. Our collectively owned airborne early warning planes left Europe for the fist time and secured the skies over the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics and then came back to do the same for the Summer games in Athens this year.
And in one of the biggest changes of all we took the old Cold War Allied Command, Atlantic, based in Norfolk, Virginia and created a brand new Supreme Commander - for Transformation. New thinking and new capacities all joined together - uniting and keeping in step the militaries on both sides of the Atlantic.
This dramatic modernisation of NATO, from the shield which protected our freedom and democracy throughout the Cold War to the key political/military instrument of dealing with tomorrow's dangers and risks, shows what can be done.
Institutions can be reformed and reforged. Diplomacy can be re-energised. Conflicts like Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Afghanistan and yes, even Iraq, can be tackled and sorted - if the political will is there.
However, stove-piping, turf protection, exaggerated sovereignties and political feebleness will be a recipe for the worst of all outcomes. Future generations will be the ones to suffer and they will never forgive us.
The accountancy profession, with its special Scottish rigour and intensity, has its role to play in all this. Honest accounting, ruthless and open-eyed auditing of public accounts and governmental processes can underpin the institutions of integrity and good faith. These values - of transparency, honesty, integrity and accountability are essential pre-requisite values of an ordered, decent and safe society.
We must never allow these standards and these essential values to drop or be compromised. We are simply the custodians of what our children will inherit and that obligation should keep us awake every night.