U.S. Mission to the United Nations
Good morning, Stanford! Thank you very much, President Hennessy, for that very warm introduction. It is wonderful to be back at Stanford. Having gotten around a bit over the last few years, I am more convinced than ever- that this is the best university on the face of the planet.
Stanford has had an enormous impact on my life. Not only is it where I met my husband, but it’s where I met the people, took the courses, and championed the causes that ultimately led me to make my career in international affairs. Stanford also taught me focus and discipline. Once you‘ve learned to study in a bathing suit on the grass with muscled men throwing frisbees over your head, you can accomplish almost anything.
Now, graduates: first and foremost, congratulations. I suspect you’re feeling pretty good about yourselves right now. I remember feeling pretty good about myself too when I was sitting in your seats. In fact, I might have been feeling a little too good-judging from how much I remember about my commencement speech.
Hold on to this jubilant moment and cherish your memories of this extraordinary place. Nurture the friendships you have made here. The warmth and security of Stanford can sustain you as you face an economy still climbing out of a deep hole and enter a world changing at a furious pace.
Imagine the world and what it will be like when one of you comes back a quarter century from now to deliver the commencement address. In 1986, when I graduated, the Soviet Union was bristling with 45,000 nuclear weapons, and the Berlin Wall was impenetrable. Nelson Mandela was clocking his 23rd year in prison in apartheid South Africa. Osama bin Laden was fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, and al-Qaeda didn‘t exist. Almost nobody had heard of global warming. Japan was the daunting economic powerhouse, and China’s share of global GDP was 2 percent. There were some 30 fewer countries in the world, and 2 billion fewer people on the planet.
We‘ve seen amazing technological advances. In 1986, only 0.2 percent of the U.S. population had a cell phone, which were bricks about 10 inches long. IBM announced its first laptop, which weighed 12 pounds. Twenty-four- hour cable news was in its infancy.
So much change has transpired just in my adult lifetime, and you will see so much more in yours. But it doesn’t just happen. Progress is the product of human energy. Things get better because we make them better; and things go wrong when we get too comfortable, when we fail to take risks or seize opportunities. Never trust that the abstract forces of history will end a war, or that luck will cure a disease, or that prayers alone will save a child.
If you want change, you have to make it. If we want progress, we have to drive it. Technology and trade helped transform a bipolar world into the deeply interconnected global community of the 21st century. Yet the planet is still divided by fundamental inequalities. Some of us live in peace, freedom, and comfort while billions are condemned to conflict, poverty, and repression. These massive disparities erode our common security and corrode our common humanity.
We cannot afford to live in contempt of each others‘welfare. It’s not just wrong. It‘s dangerous. When a country is wracked by war or weakened by want, its people suffer first. But poor and fragile states can incubate threats that spread far beyond their borders-terrorism, pandemic disease, nuclear proliferation, criminal networks, climate change, genocide, and more. In our interconnected age, a threat to development anywhere is a threat to security everywhere.
That makes the fight against global poverty not only one of the great moral challenges of all time but also one of the great national security challenges of our time.
So, here’s my challenge to you: become agents of change. Be driven by a passion to lift up the most vulnerable and to serve those with the least, both at home and around the world.
For me, for so many reasons, this is a personal as well as a professional imperative.
One of those reasons is a little boy whom I met in war-ravaged Angola in 1995. I don‘t even know his name. He was one face in a friendly mob of destitute little kids who greeted our delegation at a dusty camp for internally displaced persons in the middle of nowhere. He was perhaps 3 or 4 years old, with pencil-thin legs and a distended belly, and only a torn T-shirt to wear. But he stood out because he had the most amazingly infectious smile. I walked up to him before realizing that the only thing I had to give him was the worn baseball cap I was wearing. I took it off, and put it gently on his head. The joy on his face remains etched in my mind to this day. But I had to leave that camp, and when I did, I left that little boy in hell.
I like to think-and I sure hope-that kid is OK. But he could well have become one of the 9 million children under the age of 5 who die each year, mostly from preventable and treatable afflictions.
Yet he has every right to live with the same dignity, hope, and security that my own son enjoys. They are both children of God, of equal worth, equal consequence, and equal rights.
That little boy’s future is tied to ours; our security is ultimately linked to his well-being. So we must shape the world that he deserves.
That child deserves a world without the poverty that crushes the dreams of hundreds of millions. Half of humanity lives on less than $2.50 a day.
That child deserves a world without extreme hunger and dependence that it fosters. So we are investing in building poor countries‘capacity to feed themselves. Agricultural research has produced stronger crops that yield more, adapt faster, and better resist drought, disease, and pests. Yet Africa’s crop production remains the lowest in the world. With your generation‘s leadership and ingenuity, you can make it the highest.