Anxious Talk, Perpetual Threats
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Stanford trotted out the big guns—Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, Former Secretary of State George Shultz, and President Hennessy, amongst others—for its alumni last weekend. This “roundtable,” entitled “Anxious Times: Seeing a World of Perpetual Threats,” drew enough alums to fill about two-thirds of Maples Pavilion; the 9AM start time seemed to deter most students from attending.
Besides Kennedy, Shultz, and Hennessy, the panel also featured Jean-Pierre Garnier, CEO of pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline; Dr. Lucy Shapiro, a scientist at Stanford; Jerry Yang, founder of Yahoo!; and Former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry. Clearly an arranged showcase of talent for alumni (and nicely cross-promoted with the new fundraising campaign, The Stanford Challenge), each of these panelists has some academic connection to Stanford. The eclectic makeup of the panel, however, ensured that a given discussion would be limited to two or three people; hence, topics changed rapidly. Moderating the dialogue was newscaster Ted Koppel, who expertly guided the panel for two hours without notes.
After some predictable promoting, including the mention of two Nobel Prize winners in one week, the panel got down to business with perhaps America’s most pressing foreign policy challenge: a nuclear North Korea. The long discussion surrounding this issue was one of the best parts of the panel. Debating how America should handle this situation, Perry correctly noted that “all good alternatives are behind us…only bad ones remain,” the best available being “firm action.” Shultz, well into retirement but still the sharpest person on the panel, took over the conversation at this point, noting that “high-level energetic diplomacy” needs to be restored; a pointed criticism of the Bush Administration’s dithering on the diplomatic front with North Korea. The consensus reached by Perry and Shultz on the best approach to North Korea seemed to be “effective diplomacy backed by force.” It is a shame that there are not more like Shultz who genuinely value effective diplomacy while keeping other options off the table, yet clearly demonstrate reluctance to use them.
After Koppel moved the discussion away from North Korea, the panelists drifted off into a series of related topics, including the discussion of the avian flu being transmittable to humans, Dr. Shapiro’s condemnation of the federal government’s poor planning and excessive bureaucracy, and Koppel’s comment that “our destiny” is linked, meaning that any disease pandemic will certainly affect more than one country. Garnier noted, then, that vaccine supplies should be shared rather than hoarded to “nip [the pandemic] in the bud.”
Shultz again stole the show at this point in the discussion, pointing out that with such a solution, “we would be trying to invent the U.N. if we did not have it already.” Famous for serving as Reagan’s Secretary of State from 1982-88, Shultz consistently values active diplomacy much more than the current Republican administration does. At the end of the panel, he disagreed with Koppel’s pessimism about the state of the world, noting that poverty is falling sharply in India and the China, and that the IMF world outlook reports grow ever-more optimistic. Justice Kennedy concurred, stating, “I see in this generation of youth a civic commitment, an altruism, a rationality, a balance, I haven’t seen in forty years.” With so many challenges in the world today, one can only hope they are right.
