This presentation is brought to you by Arizona
State University's Julie Ann Wrigley Global
Institute of Sustainability, and a generous
investment by Julie Ann Wrigley.
It was actually Heisenberg, I'm sure you all
know this but I'll reiterate it, so it was
Heisenberg who came up with Heisenberg's Uncertainty
Principle.
What, he wasn't going to call it "Clyde's
Uncertainty Principle," so he came up with
Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle which says
in quantum mechanics, in particle theory,
you can either accurately measure a particle's
location or you can accurately measure its
momentum, but you can't simultaneously accurately
measure both its location and its momentum.
It occurred to us—I mean, we really did
have this discussion, I'm not making this
up—it occurred to us simultaneously that
that was exactly what was wrong with every
strategy we had ever seen in the Pentagon.
Now, I've been doing strategy for more than
six years, and in the Pentagon we have about
a gazillion strategies and across the river,
they have about two gazillion more strategies,
none of which or very few of which seem to
be overly well-aligned with each other but
all of them are focused on averting or overcoming
a recognizable risk or threat.
All of them, and it occurred to us, that what
we're doing is we're hyperfocusing on our
location and by the time you recognize your
location and the recognizable risk or threat
inherent in it, it's too late to change it.
All you can do is respond to it, all you can
do is react to it.
While, if our strategies maybe were focused
on our momentum as a nation, the opportunities
inherent in our trajectory forward as a nation,
maybe we would have a better opportunity to
influence the future environment to make it
a more sustainable future.
We thought, well, that's kind of where we
want to go, so then we had to come to grips
with okay, so what really is a strategy?
Well, a strategy, we thought, has to have
some kind of primary objectives, you know?
We had to—we thought, well what are the
enduring national interests of the United
States that form the—in a big flick that
form the basis of our national strategy, you
know?
I've said this repeatedly, I said it last
night, but it's true.
I'm Catholic and I wanted there to be three
of them, so we argued around and around and
around, and we could only, as hard as we tried,
we could only come up with two.
We came up with two overriding national enduring
interests, and those are prosperity and security.
We recognized that prosperity and security
are wholly interdependent.
You cannot have security in the absence of
prosperity.
You can't have prosperity in the absence of
security.
Now, we'll get maybe to this a little later,
but I'll tell you right off the bat, I define
security and prosperity in a much different
way than I bet you're thinking.
I would define security as freedom from anxiety,
and this covers a lot of things.
This covers not only freedom and security
from attack, from the outside, but it's freedom
from economic collapse or economic depravity,
it's freedom from hateful ideologies, it's
freedom to express yourself freely, it's freedom
from pandemic diseases; there's a lot of things
wrapped up in anxiety and security, and freedom,
I think we recognize as Americans.
The other thing that I do is, I define prosperity
differently.
I don't think prosperity is determined by
GDP.
I think GDP has to be a very poor metric of
prosperity.
I define prosperity as well-being, and interestingly,
so does Gallup.
The Gallup organization is doing a world,
a global poll of all nations eventually, that
they've been running for a couple years now.
It's called the wellbeing index, and it's
interesting, because it judges how people
in other countries feel about their wellbeing,
on that, the day that they're polled.
Okay, so we had these two enduring national
interests, well, I've got to tell you and
I said this to Dr. van der Leeuw last night,
I've got to believe that probably many of
the 200-plus nations in the world probably
also have prosperity and security as primary
objectives or enduring interests.
It was that-and this is really where it was
divine intervention, because we got the third
piece of this whole thing, it was really,
it's the values that characterize us as Americans
that constrain us in our pursuit of security
and prosperity.
We can't just go commit genocide because we're
running low on rare earth elements in Africa.
There are constraints put upon us by the values
that we respect, that were laid out pretty
clearly by our founding fathers, and all of
our foundational documents.
Liberty is one, but I mean, all the freedoms
I talked about before.
Those are included, as well.
Okay, so we can't do that, but interestingly
we're not only constrained in our ability,
in our pursuit of prosperity and security,
we're empowered by those values.
Those values are what provide us credibility
to be a leader among nations, so that by remaining
true to those values we gain credibility in
the eyes of the rest of the world as well
as our own people.
The values that I'm talking about here, those
values are also shared by, I would submit,
by probably most people and most religions
on Earth today.
We share a lot of common values, and I talked
before about the fact that we recognize we're
in a completely different strategic environment
now, one that is completely interdependent.
It occurred to us that we as a nation, need
to stop seeing interdependence as a weakness
and start recognizing it as a strength.
If many of the people in the world share the
same values, then we should be able to find
converging interests in any given area in
which we can offset the inimical bastards
who will inevitably exist, who have divergent
or conflicting interests.
It's not simply a matter of a national direction,
it's really a matter of finding the converging
interests among peoples and nations and cultures
and ideologies to offset those who have clearly
divergent or conflicting interests with us
collectively.
Basically, that was kind of the way we decided
to frame this whole thing out.
When I told Admiral Mullen, let me interject
something here really fast.
It was at about this time that we both realized
we're not smart enough to write a national
strategy, so it actually came to us—I'm
the one who said it first, but I said when
I mentioned it, I said, but you know, actually
the more I think about this—now we wrote
this, this was in August of 2009.
When I said it, I said, but you know what,
I don't really think that's what's needed.
I actually have thought about it and I don't
think what we need right now nationally is
a new national strategy as much as we need
a strategic narrative; a narrative to explain
who we are as Americans in a new century and
in a new strategic environment.
A new civilizational epic, actually.
So, we decided that we would write a narrative
that explains, a simple narrative.
We said we wanted to limit it to ten pages.
I actually wrote the words, it wound up being
11, so I got gigged for that, but that was
the length of it.
We wanted to write something that people could
easily read and find unity in.
It's non-political, it's non-divisive, it's
hopeful in nature, and in fact the other thing
that occurred to us when we were talking about
Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and risk
and threat, is that there's every bit as much
opportunity and hope in uncertainty, as there
is risk and threat.
We're a nation, or we used to be, a nation
of opportunity and hope.
That's what we represent in the world.
It used to be in any case, and I think it
still does.
I think people are desperate for America to
represent opportunity and hope again, and
we're poised to do that.
This presentation is brought to you by Arizona
State University's Julie Ann Wrigley Global
Institute of Sustainability, for educational,
and non-commercial use only.
