Remarks to the 49th session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York City

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Oct 3, 1994

September 26, 1994

Mr. President, Mr. Secretary-General, distinguished delegates. First, let me congratulate you, Mr. President, on your election as president of the 49th General Assembly. The American people look forward to working with you to celebrate the United Nations 50th anniversary.

We meet today in a time of great hope and change. The end of the cold war, the explosion of technology and trade and enterprise have given people the world over new opportunities to live up to their dreams and their God-given potential. This is an age of hope.

Yet, in this new world, we face a contest as old as history, a struggle between freedom and tyranny, between tolerance and bigotry, between knowledge and ignorance, between openness and isolation. It is a fight between those who would build free societies governed by laws and those who would impose their will by force. Our struggle today, in a world more high-tech, more fast-moving, more chaotically diverse than ever, is the age-old fight between hope and fear.

Three times in this century, from the trenches of the Sommes to the island of Iwo Jima to the shattered wall of Berlin, the forces of hope were victorious. But the victors of World War I squandered their triumph when they turned inward, bringing on a global depression and allowing fascism to rise and reigniting global war.

After World War II, the Allies learned the lessons of the past. In the face of a new totalitarian threat and the nuclear menace, great nations did not walk away from the challenge of the moment. Instead they chose to reach out, to rebuild, and to lead. They chose to create the United Nations, and they left us a world stronger, safer, and freer.

Our generation has a difficult task: The cold war is over; we must secure the peace. It falls to us to avoid the complacency that followed World War I without the spur of the imminent threat to our security that followed World War II. We must ensure that those who fought and found the courage to end the cold war, those from both East and West who love freedom, did not labor in vain.

Our sacred mission is to build a new world for our children, more democratic, more prosperous, more free of ancient hatreds and modern means of destruction. That is no easy challenge, but we accept it with confidence. After all, the walls that once divided nations in this very chamber have come down. More nations have chosen democracy than ever before, more have chosen free markets and economic justice, more have embraced the values of tolerance and liberty and civil society that allow us all to make the most of our life.

But while the ideals of democracy anti free markets are ascendant, they are surely not the whole story. Terrible examples of chaos, repression, and tyranny also mark our times. The 20th century proved that the forces of freedom and democracy can endure against great odds. Our job is to see that in the 21st century these forces triumph.

The dangers we face are less stark and more diffuse than those of the cold war, but they are still formidable: the ethnic conflicts that drive millions from their homes; the despots ready to repress their own people or conquer their neighbors; the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction; the terrorists wielding their deadly arms; the criminal syndicates selling those arms or drugs or infiltrating the very institutions of fragile democracy; a global economy that offers great promise but also deep insecurity and, in many places, declining opportunity; diseases like AIDS that threaten to decimate nations; the combined dangers of population explosion and economic decline which prompted the world community to reach the remarkable consensus at the Cairo conference; global and local environmental threats that demand that sustainable development becomes a part of the lives of people all around the world; and finally, within many of our nations, high rates of drug abuse and crime and family breakdown with all their terrible consequences. These are the dangers we face today.

We must address these threats to our future. Thankfully, the end of the cold war gives us a chance to address them together. In our efforts, different nations may be active in different situations in different ways. But their purposes must be consistent with freedom and their practices consistent with international law.

Each nation will bring to our common task its own particular strengths, economic, political, or military. Of course, the first duty of every member of the United Nations is to its own citizens, to their security, their welfare, and their interests. As President of the United States, my first duty is to the citizens of my country. When our national security interests are threatened, we will act with others when we can but alone if we must. We will use diplomacy when we can but force if we must.

The United States recognizes that we also have a special responsibility in these common endeavors that we are taking, the responsibility that goes along with great power and also with our long history of democracy and freedom. But we seek to fulfill that responsibility in cooperation with other nations. Working together increases the impact and the legitimacy of each of our actions, and sharing the burdens lessons everyone's load. We have no desire to be the world's policemen, but we will do what we can to help civil societies emerge from the ashes of repression, to sustain fragile democracies and to add more free markets to the world and, of course, to restrain the destructive forces that threaten us all.