... On the other hand, if you live in a poor country or you are more pessimistic you might have answered one of four negative things. You could have said, "No, no, you got it wrong about the economy. Global poverty will dominate the early 21st century because half the world's people aren't in this global economy." They live on less than two dollars a day, a billion people live on less than a dollar a day, a billion and a half people never get a clean glass of water, and one woman dies every minute in childbirth. And that's a recipe for explosion, and that will dominate the world. Or you might have said, "No, before that happens, the environmental crises will consume us. The shortage of water, the deterioration of the oceans from which we get our oxygen, and most of all global warming. If the earth warms for the next 50 years at the rate of the last ten, we'll lose fifty feet of Manhattan Island. The Florida Everglades I worked so hard to save. Whole Pacific Island nations will be flooded, and tens of millions of food refugees will be created, destabilizing governments and causing violence. Or you could have said, "Well, no, before global warming gets us the epidemics will. All over the world public health systems are crashing down, and just to take AIDS as an example, there are now over 36 million AIDS cases, 22 million people have already died. If we don't turn the trend around there will be 100 million AIDS cases in five years, making it the worst epidemic since the Plague swept Europe in the 14th century and killed one in four people. And the fastest growing rates are in the former Soviet Union on Europe's back door, and the second fastest growing rates are in the Caribbean on our front door, and the third fastest growing rates are in India, the biggest democracy in the world. And the Chinese just admitted they had twice as many cases as they had previously thought, and only four percent of the adults in our biggest nation know how AIDS is contracted and spread. So today, two thirds of the cases are in Africa. Tomorrow, it's everybody's problem, unless we turn it around. Or you might have said even on September the 10th, if you'd been keeping up with this, "No, no, no, even before the health crises. We will be consumed by terrorism, by the marriage of modern weapons of destruction to ancient racial, religious and tribal hatreds."

... Now here's how I think you ought to think about this. What do the positive things I mentioned, the global economy, the explosion of information technology, the biological sciences advances, and democracy and diversity, and the negative things I mentioned, global poverty, the environmental crises, the health crises, and terror, what do all eight of those things have in common? They all reflect the absolutely breathtaking increase in global interdependence, the extent of which the barriers of nation borders don't count for much anymore, and to which we are all effected by things that happen a long way from home. Things that used to happen a long way form home can now happen next door. In other words, I honestly believe it's very important if you want to understand the world in which you live that you see September the 11th as the dark side from all the benefits we've gotten from tearing down the walls, collapsing the distances and spreading the information that we have across the world. We have not changed human nature, we have not solved all the problems, and there are a lot of people that see the world differently than we do. You cannot collapse walls, collapse differences and spread information without making yourself more vulnerable to forces of destruction.

... You cannot claim the benefits of this new world without becoming more vulnerable at home. Now having said that, I think it is highly unlikely that the 21st century will claim as many innocent lives as the 20th century did. Keep in mind, it's scary, it happened in our country, and if you live in New York, in your town, and on television. And maybe someone you know died. Most of us who live in New York know somebody who died. But remember, in World War I nine million people died. Between the wars 20 million people died from corrupt and bad governments. In World War II, over 20 million people died. After World War II another 20 million people died from oppressive governments. More than a million died in Korea. Somewhere around a million died in Vietnam. Seven hundred thousand people died in Rwanda in ninety days from people killing each other with machetes. I think it is unlikely, if we do the right things, in spite of how terrifying this is, that the 21st century will be anything like the killer that the 20th century was. But we cannot ignore that fact that we have vulnerability at home because of our interdependence. All the interdependence that's brought us all these wonderful advances in technology and science and economically that benefited America so much required us to tear down the walls, collapse distances and spread information, and it made us more vulnerable.

(Some Remarks as delivered by President William Jefferson Clinton Georgetown University). November 7, 2001