Tonight I’m going to talk about the sources of stability and instability in the 21st Century. Now when we say sources of stability and instability, what we really mean is how do we get peace? But in order to talk about how we get peace in the 21st Century, I have to fall back a couple of centuries earlier.

One of the greatest thinkers of all time, who wrote one of the most succinct essays on international relations in the modern period was Immanuel Kant, the great German philosopher. He wrote an essay called "Perpetual Peace" asking the question that we are asking tonight: how do we get a peace that will last?

Kant answered this by first saying something quite startling. He said you have to recognize that there are two kinds of peace in the world, not one. There is peace with democracies and there is peace with dictatorships. They are fundamentally different from one another.

He said peace with democracies is automatic and it is self-sustaining. You need to do nothing to achieve it or to keep it. Democracies reflect the will of the majority, and most people do not want to go to war, and they do not want their children to die on battlefields. Democracies automatically tend toward peace.

Then he asked, what is going to keep the peace, opposite a dictatorship? When there is no electorate, there is no bar, no constraint on aggression. Saddam Hussein does not take a poll in downtown Baghdad before he decides to invade Kuwait, right? So what’s going to stop aggression from a dictator? Kant said, nothing. Absolutely nothing inside the dictatorship will prevent aggression and war. He said that the only thing that will prevent a dictator from going to war is an outside constraint. This external constraint would be the power of deterrence provided by what he called the league of free nations. By the way, he didn’t say United Nations. He wouldn’t think that the amalgamation of dictatorships and democracies would somehow stop aggression from dictatorships. Of course he understood that. But he meant that there would be the combined power of the democracies that would deter aggression or roll it back if deterrence failed.

This is the model that Kant had put forward over 200 years ago, well before the rise of Napoleon and the rise of Stalin and Hitler and all these other lesser dictators that seek to imitate them. Now was anyone reading, listening, implementing Kant in the first half of the twentieth century? The answer is practically known. Faced with a horrific dictatorship of Nazi Germany, the democracies practiced the wrong kind of peace. Instead of strengthening themselves and building their deterrent power, they did the very opposite. They weakened themselves and weakened themselves, . and of course, they did not get peace. They did get the most catastrophic war in history and of course the greatest catastrophe in the history of my own people, the Jewish people.

But equally I can say that in the second half of the twentieth century the democracies practiced the right kind of peace. Faced with a still more powerful dictatorship, how can one compare the ballistic missiles and atomic warheads of the Soviet Union to the power of Nazi Germany? Yet faced with this much more powerful dictatorship, the democracies did exactly what Immanuel Kant said we should do a century and a half before. They built the league of free nations. You know it as NATO. It provided the deterrent power to maintain half a century of a cold peace. Of course we don’t call it a cold peace, we call it a cold war. But there was no war. There was no war because there was the deterrent power of the democracies that kept the peace opposite dictatorships. That is something that we can see in retrospect and understand it and also celebrate it.

Now that Soviet Communism has been defeated, it does not mean we’re well on the road to a period of harmony and development. The Soviet Union was the last or perhaps the biggest stopgap against the rise of militant Islam. Militant Islam is in many ways a much more perfidious and more dangerous force than Soviet Communism, a much greater threat to the west.

Militant Islam seeks to roll back the last millennium, the last one thousand years of history. It seeks to go back to a world in which Islam was ascended and the West was subpar. It seeks to reverse the rise, especially in the last five hundred years, of Western civilization as we know it. And it seeks to achieve this not by healthy competition of technology, economics, and culture, but by destroying the West which means destroying the main engine of the West, the United States. That is its goal. It is possessed with this goal. It wants to dominate the world and in this it is not different than Soviet communism.

But I have to say this about the Soviets. Every time that they had to choose between their ideology and their survival, they always, always chose their survival. They always backed off. They might have killed millions, even tens of millions of their own people but they never, never took risks with the survival of their regimes. They always backed off.

The same cannot be said of militant Islam. When faced with the choice of their zealotry or their lives, it is not clear what they will choose. That is why militant Islam produces suicide bombers. Did you ever heard of a communist suicide bomber? Never. But militant Islam produces battalions of them. You have mothers that hold up their children, their babies, and say "I hope he will be a martyr for Allah." You have suicide kindergarten camps, and suicide museums, and suicide glorification. This pathology—there is no other term that I can use—this pathology of militant Islam, the fact that it knows no limits and the fact that it can prefer ideology to survival, is what makes it so dangerous. If the regimes that espouse and are governed by this zealotry acquire weapons of mass death, they will use them.

So we are faced right now with a horrific threat; and the question is what to do about it. The concrete expression of this threat today is in the terrorist network, the international terrorist network, and for that the answer is fairly simple. The answer for that is given to us by Immanuel Kant. The first thing you want to do is look at the source of aggression and then roll it back. The source of aggression in this case is fighting terrorism. You don’t fight terrorism by fighting the terrorists; I hope you understand that. You fight the terrorists, but they’re not really the main target because terrorism by its nature is like a needle in a haystack. You don’t go looking for the needle, you go after the haystack.

To give you another analogy, if you are attacked by kamikaze pilots off an aircraft carrier, of course you shoot down the kamikaze pilot. You’re crazy not to. And the next one who comes in. But he’ll be replaced by somebody else. If you want to stop these attacks, these kamikaze attacks, you’ve got to get at the carrier. In attacking the carrier you can do one of two things: you can either punish it and make it go away. That’s called deterrence. Or you can sink it if deterrence doesn’t work. You either deter a regime or you destroy it. These are the two options. There is no other way to fight terrorism. It so happens that this terrorist network is composed of six militant regimes: Iran, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Afghanistan, Arafatistan. That’s about it. With about two dozen terror organizations that harbor around them. So the way to fight this is exactly what the United States has done. You deter some regimes: Somalia, Syria. And you destroy others. You have already destroyed the Taliban regime and the mop up operation of Al Qaeda has become secondary.

As President Bush has widely said, you’ll have to target the two big regimes —Iran and Iraq, especially before they acquire nuclear weapons. He has it exactly right. We, by the way, have to dismantle our own terrorist regime neighbor. We have to do with Arafat what you did with Mullah Omar or with Bin Laden. You scatter them. Get rid of them. Expel them. You can’t negotiate with somebody who preaches policide and suicide, which is what Arafat does. You can’t negotiate with someone who’s out to destroy the state, and who doesn’t want to make peace with you.

Many had hoped that Arafat would become a Palestinian King Hussein. He turned out to be a Palestinian Saddam Hussein. What do you do with Saddam Hussein? You don’t negotiate with him, you don’t make concessions to him, you get rid of him. And when you do, when you get rid of the Taliban, when you get rid of Saddam, you can ask what next. And the answer is you’re not sure. You’re not sure what will happen next. You don’t know who will govern Afghanistan in five years or even in three years, or perhaps even in three months. But you’re pretty sure of one thing. You’re pretty sure that whoever governs Afghanistan will not dispatch a single terrorist attack against the United States for fear that they too will be replaced or killed or exiled. So you rely essentially on deterrence. So far so good.

So Kant was right. This is what is going to happen, and it’s going to work. And within a shorter time than people expect, after you dismantle these half dozen regimes, dismantle, punish, dismantle or deter, you will see that the whole scaffolding of international terrorism collapses to the dust. Now you might have a few cells, a few poison grapes on the vine, but once you cut the roots off they wither on the vine. You still may have an attack or attacks, but you’ve destroyed the structure. So we can now go back and rest. But, that is not true.

The more I look at this problem, the more I’ve come to the conclusion that Immanuel Kant was wrong. He was right for the 19th Century, he was right for the 20th Century, right as no other thinker has been so right. But he’s not right for the 21st Century because even a prophet like Kant could not foresee the development of suicidal regimes. He could not see the development of suicidal regimes with nuclear weapons. It is absolutely clear that we cannot cork the technological genie back in the bottle. There is no way to prevent any one of these regimes from acquiring a critical mass of plutonium and producing a very primitive and dirty bomb.

I think that in the end there is only one protection. The only way we can glean a clue to what it is, is to go back to other diseased militancies, to other zealotries that knew no limit to power. The closest one I can think of is Nazism. Hitler knew no bounds to power, no moral constraints whatsoever on violence. Had he acquired atomic weapons it is very clear he would have used them and history would have taken a different course. What did the democracies do with Nazism? They defeated it, and once vanquished they didn’t leave it. They defeated it, and they planted the seeds of freedom, the seeds of democracy. They built democratic institutions. There are neo-Nazis in Germany; that tendency is there, but it doesn’t get anywhere because that society is ventilated by the natural process of debate, dissent, discussion and choice. That is what democracies give you.

The same thing happened with imperial Japan, which, by the way, had clear suicidal tendencies. What happened there? Imperial Japan was defeated, but you didn’t leave it at that. It was defeated and in its place we planted the seeds of freedom. And you have democracy. It’s not a Western democracy exactly, but its democracy.

I’m arguing that once these regimes are defeated it is important for the United States to begin to introduce into the Arab and Islamic world the idea of democracy, the idea of pluralism, the idea of a free press, the idea of individual rights. It is important to begin to introduce these conceptions because, in the end, they are the only guard that we have against the repetition of the madness with greater venom and greater force.

Now people will say, "Well, the Islamic world is incapable of adopting democracy." Really? It may not be a perfect Western democracy. What about Turkey? Given the choice I’d prefer Turkish style democracy to Iranian style tyranny. But I think the choice that we face today is whether we’re going to stop the exemption that the United States has given to the Arab and Islamic world, to take action today against these tyrannies, to begin not only to defeat them but also to plant democracy there. I think this is something required of the bold and courageous leadership that the United States has today.

Now everything I have said here could be challenged. You can say that the source of terrorism is these dictators. But the real root cause of terrorism is nothing like that. The root cause of terrorism is deprivation of natural rights, and human rights, and civic rights. Out of frustration, the people who do not have these rights act out. That is what you should treat and if you treat that, then you won’t have terrorism. In the last 200 years we’ve had thousands of conflicts for human rights, for national liberation, for independence. So we would expect to see a lot of terrorism in these conflicts. But it’s very hard to see terrorism in practically any of them. It is very hard to see the deliberate and systematic attack on civilians. In the 19th Century you don’t find it in the Poles fighting the Russians, you don’t see it in the Italians fighting for their independence, you don’t see it with the Czechs fighting for their liberation from the Hungarians and so on. A lot of battles were fought against brave and courageous armies, but you did not see the systemic destruction, the murder of women, children, innocent civilians.

In the 20th Century it is very hard to find it. You don’t see it with Mahatma Gandhi fighting for independence from Britain, you don’t see it with the peoples of eastern Europe fighting to tear down the Berlin wall, you don’t see it in the fight for civic rights for all Americans in this country. Martin Luther King, Jr. preached the absence of violence. You don’t see it in the worst occupation of history: the Nazi occupation of Europe. I don’t know of a single case in which the French resistance, for example, practiced terrorism. They had plenty of opportunities. They had the wives and children of German officers, the families of collaborators with the Nazis, but they never touched them. The question is why? Why did all these people who evidently fought for freedom and for human rights and for liberty, why didn’t they practice terrorism?

The answer is that they were democrats. I know there are a lot of Republicans here, but I mean democrat with a small "d." They believed in the innate rights, the rights of man, and women and babies. They believe that there are limits to power. I read that one of the things that the Ashbrook Center teaches in this college is the limited powers of government. That’s right. Democracies always limit power. But the terrorists don’t believe in these things.

They don’t believe in all these things, in fact, they believe the very opposite. They think there is a higher goal out there that is so encompassing, so powerful, so commanding and commandeering that for the sake of this goal—which could be political, or racial or religious or whatever, they can crush—indeed they are required to crush—all conventional morality. To kill people, line them up against a wall and shoot them, blow up a bus full of babies, anything. In fact, the more savage it is, the more they ennoble that goal.

There is a name for the phenomenon that I have just described to you. It is called totalitarianism. The totalitarian mindset is the root cause of terrorism. And from its inception from Bukharin, to Lenin, to Stalin, to Hitler, to the Ayatollahs, to Mullah Omar, the Taliban regime, to Bin Laden, to Arafat, it’s a classic totalitarian regime. All these dictatorships used terror not only against their enemies, but also against their own people. You know what they’re really about when terrorists come to power and they don’t set up democracies. They set up the darkest dictatorships. The root cause of terrorism is the totalitarian mindset. And the root cause of suicidal terrorism is suicidal totalitarianism.

The whole world is experiencing the winds of democracy. South America and Latin America are democratized. The Soviet Union is democratized. If anybody deviates, the U.S. goes in there gangbusters, and they’re right. The U.S. agitates for human rights and democratization in China and South Africa, and parts of Africa are democratizing. Albania, for God’s sake is democratized. Remember Albania?

If we leave this last region of the world un-democratized, unventilated by the winds of freedom, we are toying with our common survival. Not with Israel’s survival, but the survival of our civilization.

We now have to do two things. We have to uproot terror, and plant the seeds of freedom. This is the job before us. I have every confidence, when I look at the free peoples of the world and especially at America, at Israel and others, and at the leadership provided by President Bush, that we’re up to the task. And armed with moral clarity, and strategic clarity and the will to win, we will win and safeguard our future. Thank you very much.