"Refashioning Institutions for the Twenty-First Century"

Donald H. Rumsfeld (former Secretary of Defense)

Text:www.claremont.org/events/pageID.2525/default.asp

Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's remarks at the Claremont Institute's Twentieth Annual Churchill

Dinner on November 17, 2007, invoked the lessons of the immediate post-World War II years as a guide for the United States to meet the emerging threats of the twenty-first century. President Harry Truman faced new and dangerous threats in the forms of Soviet-backed communism, economic devastation in a Europe and Asia ravaged by war, post-colonial crises in Asia and Africa, and the beginnings of the nuclear arms competition.

Truman met those challenges, Rumsfeld noted, by developing new foreign policy strategies and programs, and transforming and rearranging domestic and international institutions to meet those emerging threats and problems. Operating in a bi-partisan manner with Republicans in Congress, Truman launched "containment" by promoting economic recovery programs for Greece and Turkey (the "Truman Doctrine") and Europe as a whole (the "Marshall Plan"). Truman institutionalized containment by creating and helping to create the Defense Department, the CIA, the National Security Council, NATO, Radio Free Europe, the United Nations, the World Bank, and the IMF, among other domestic and international institutions.

Faced today with the new and emerging threats of the early twenty-first century (asymmetric warfare, irregular conflicts, terrorist attacks, and cyber warfare), the United States, according to Rumsfeld, needs "fresh thinking and capabilities." "If free people are to meet the challenges posed by what will be a long struggle against violent extremists, we will need all elements of national power--diplomatic, economic, as well as intelligence and military to work in concert."

What Rumsfeld calls the "Industrial Age" institutions developed in the immediate post-World War II years, must be transformed and rearranged to meet the threats of the "Information Age." In addition to urging military transformation (some of which Rumsfeld initiated and oversaw as George W. Bush's Defense Secretary), Rumsfeld, perhaps learning from the problems in Iraq, calls for creating "a deployable cadre of international experts in police, justice, border patrols, education, diplomacy, agriculture, and economics that can be available as needed."

We face a choice, Rumsfeld concludes, "between rearranging our domestic and international institutions to meet the threats of the twenty-first century, or thinking we can safely drift along and leave those tough challenges for future generations."

Reviewed by Francis P. Sempa