MATHEWS: It's going to surprise you what I think is the biggest challenge for assuring human security, but I think it that the U.S. figure out what kind of leadership it wants to play. If we decide as I think we have there should be evidence that we're heading towards a very unilateral role, not isolationist, but the typical kind of hegemon that make things look pretty grim. If instead we decide that our security rests on leadership that has followers and requires acting together again I think that the picture is pretty bright.

CDI: What kind of leadership role, how can the US in one specific issue or area exercise its leadership and make a change in terms of human security around the globe?

MATHEWS: To answer how I think we can make a difference let me just recite for you where we've just been. We're starting with NAFTA, North American Free Trade Agreement, it was a tough fight but we got that ratified. We only got the broader global trade agreement, the GAP, by a whisper. We came an eyelash close to defeating it. Then we defeated the steps to broaden NAFTA to all of the western hemisphere, which was an enormous disappointment to all the other countries and a real setback. Then we opted out of the international landmine convention. Then we opted out of the International Criminal Court. Now we have defeated the Comprehensive Test Ban, at least for a while. So that is a pretty clear trend, and its says, the U.S. feels as though it can or even should act to assure global security by considering only its own interests, now very narrowly defined. And that I think will ultimately unravel any effort to build, to address any of the global issues, whether its finance government, finance a new set of rules, whether its population, environment, human rights, corruption, almost anything and so few of these institutions or regimes can succeed without us. And it's quite clear as with the CTB vote that our actions kind of unravel.

CDI: Usually opponents of unilateralism cite America's security interests as the rationale or acting unilaterally. So basically what you're saying is actually the counter intuitive fight because if you act unilaterally you're insuring.

MATHEWS: Even in a big debate coming in this country about how to reassure our own security, if it is into saying, well we are so powerful and we think we are so benign, that we should simply make our set of rules. Then I think a great deal of what has been built over the last 50 years will come apart. And you know in history hegemons have to get this disease, that is that they stop practicing diplomacy which is the aid of making choices among competing goals. And they start being dictators in fact by simply having their own right to their own power. And today's world, there are so many issues that require global cooperation. The control of nuclear proliferation, for example, we could put all the power we have into that effort and not be able to stop Iran or Iraq or whoever from getting nuclear weapons. It requires international cooperation and that requires taking into counting interests of people that you would like to be your followers. So to my mind security begins to come apart, unless we can reach agreement on this and I see us heading in a very dangerous direction.

CDI: So you see international institutions like NGOs as being a positive force for U.S. security policies.

MATHEWS: The good news, I think, is that a variety of non-state actors - NGOs, private business and international institutions - are all playing, all have the capacity to play and are playing more influential roles than they ever have before. The role of states remains critical and central and that piece of the system pivots around the U.S. role for most issues. And I should say we, we more broadly the U.S. and Europe, because when the U.S. and Europe agree we can do almost anything, and when they don't agree unless nothing important gets done. So U.S.-European relations also are very key. And I see a grand debt there as well, because the U.S. feeling so jealous of sovereignty, many people do that in a way, find the EU hard to deliver.

CDI: What role should the international community play in a system of failed states, what responsibility does the international community have to restore civil society in a failed state?

MATHEWS: It is a very tough question in how far the international community has to go to help in failed states, because few know the answer to the question what the international community can do. One can't create a democracy where one doesn't exist, from outside. I think the international community cannot intervene where there is a desire to keep fighting. When there is the making of a consensus, that can be built by controlling a small number of people who prefer use violence, than there is a big role. And particular when there is a regional big power that knows the country well and that can take a lead, others than the U.S. Australia in East Timor, for example, that is close by and feels an interested, and that is really educated on conditions. I think we also discovered in the last ten years, we are in the learning curve. We have started to see, for example, in this constant struggle between democracy and self-determination, some things that don't work very well. Voter referendums, for example, don't work as a way to do self-determination, because there is an absolute winner and an absolute loser. And that tends to happen, as in East Timor as the absolute loser said no way. So we are part of what can play a bigger role in the international community if it decides to do so, and again, this comes back so much to the role of the U.S. We can do more than what we have done over the past decade.

CDI: What kind of local infrastructure is necessary to insure human security? Is there presently enough of that kind of infrastructure to begin the process of instituting human security in underdeveloped nations, for example? And who should carry the burden of building infrastructure in these nations?

MATHEWS: The first step in terms of local infrastructure, and I interpret it broadly, is a population growing rate slow enough that the government can provide jobs, food, the basic necessities and education, faster than the population is growing. What we have seen, for example in Africa, even where the grow rates have come down, they have eaten up any increase in investment to catch up the government has been able to pour in. And where you see the rates come below that level, as they did beginning 25 years ago in South East Asia, then you saw countries beginning to take off. And the one country in South East Asia where they didn't come done, the Philippines is the one, is the one where they didn't take off. And it tends to happen before you see the economics take off. The second requirement is human resources, and, now more than ever, educated people, this is going to be where the world economy is based on human ideas and education. Without you just can't succeed. The external environment has to provide fair rules of trade especially, and manageable systems of fine investment and, what we yet don't have, an understanding how to manage the enormous face of private capital in a safe and what the responsibilities are of the private investors, recognizing that are different from them, but that they now have a role that is so big that it needs to be understood and needs certain parameters put along it. At least for the beginning, these are key elements for the economic take-off that we gradually built through human security. Globally, it is also going to take an effort to do those global XXX, because if we don't deal with it, as we have seen in the last year, the cost of living can be enormous. I believe, over the next decade, there will need to be a kind of background, a global effort to commonly address that issue as well.

CDI: You talked about the economy in the 21^st century and the fact that as an individual to be successful in that economy you have to be educated. What are some positives and some negatives of global connectivity?

MATHEWS: One of the positives of this revolution, and some of them are still pretty mercury because America has never experienced a technological revolution nearly as fast in scale and scope as this one, is the access to information. I can remember in the early eighties, I was at the World Resources Institute, we used to have Chinese delegations that constantly wanted to come and work with us. Why? When they got to Washington and spent a week here, and they went home with fifteen boxes of studies. They just took everything. Now they can sit home and get access to what they need. The access in any corner of the world where there is electricity, in a few years, through computers and the net, to any information you need, is just a huge transformation and enormous plus. Another advantage is the direct access to markets, to information where markets are and what the prices are, that is a big equalizer. Culturally, even though in it early days English seemed to write off every thing else, ultimately it will turn out the other way, because of costs of publishing on the web are so low, basically zero, it will be a strengthening for small languages and local cultures. There is a great gathering available on the web to anybody in the world for anybody in the world who reads it. So I expect there will be a flowering and a strengthening of particularly of displaced peoples. It strengthens diasporas of all kinds and the people can live on the web as part of the global community.

The negative side is that people are much more aware than they have ever before of disparities, and the disparities are getter greater, this within societies and between societies. The question of how political stable that leaves countries, the pressure that puts on governments, that is a very serious one.

CDI: Can you quote to any potential security issues related to this negative side of this connectivity and disparities between societies?

MATHEWS: I think we have seen in the last decade, some of the ethnic conflicts we have seen were really ethnic conflict, a lot of it has also been fired by people feeling both the tensions of being left out of a globalized market and the tremendous gap between how they live and how other live. People have no hope. Things have gotten better, but people feel that they are not where they should be. The net is going to give them that sense, because they have such a perspective on everybody else. That will bring real political instability. It will put pressure on governments to deliver economic growth faster, maybe faster than the can and that will lead to political instability.

CDI: Is this a process that is running amok or is there anything the international community or the U.S. through leadership can do?

MATHEWS: Globalization and the information communication revolution are two entirely different routes and two completely different concepts, but overlap by about ninety percent. The extent to which that is an out of control process or a steerable revolution are the central issues. My belief is, and I don't think I can proof it, it is a steerable revolution. For example, people have talked a lot about the information to wipe out the government's ability to tax. I don't think so. A lot of small of nations can get together and decide whether they are whether going to tax decisions. It is just a question of making a decision and the technology would make it able to do the job or there are companies offering to clear up taxes. I think it is a steerable revolution, but is extremely hard. Because with profound technological change, it takes society decades to catch up. For example, we are still trying in the U.S. to catch up to advances in medical technology that happened three years ago. That is a constant that is always the case. This revolution has gone so much faster that it means the transition is even harder and the catch-up is much more frantic. And the change is so profound, so the understanding of where it is headed is a much harder job. So one of the core issues for people concerned about security is understanding this revolution and trying to tease out where it might be headed, what the political and social impact are. The duty to do that - and governments, the private sector, NGOs and international organizations together - try to figure ways how to steer in ways that minimize its effects.

CDI: Does this cause offer you an opportunity to create some kind of international legal regime governing this entire process, that will be the bases?

MATHEWS: The notion that the somehow the net has to be this free place will pass. People will see as it becomes such a major point of our lives, that it has to have rules like any other institutional part of the economy. There are projections that e-commerce within first decade of the next century will be 10% of the global economy. It is really dopy that 10% of the economy is going to operate without rules. The problem is been, is just started that way, and it seems that is will the way it proceeds. I think there will be international regimes. I think it is still possible to build them around the consensus of a relative responding countries first.

CDI: In this changing global paradigm, what kind of role do you envision for a military force?

MATHEWS: With the U.S. in particular, military force right now is a tremendously tough question. Since the end of the Cold War we have had two of these quadrennial defense reviews and now there are four or five major studies going on that rethink military security in the next century. And they all are kind of all thrashing around in the dark, I think. Because on the one hand, you want to prepare for the big one and be able to be ready to fight a major war, and be able to do all things that we had to do over the last decade in basically every part of the world. Everybody knows there are not the resources to do that. Also we do not know who the big one is we are getting ready for, who is the enemy. And is the big one going to be fought if it happens like other big ones, just how much mass you have to deal with against somebody's other mass. Almost certainly not. So, in the conventional big war sense, there are al kinds of questions. And then the question how much resources we devote into that and how much to the capacity for deployment, quick intervention, delivery of humanitarian aid, peacekeeping and policing. All of which are different and competing roles that hurt us. We cannot do it all. Right now, the key problem is, we do not have a screening for deciding, like we did in the Cold War, where we are likely to be called on to do these things, a national test screen. We are seemingly have to be prepared to act almost anywhere. And I do not think we can. We do not have a strategic framework yet. All of these studies, perhaps the best they can do is to point out how absent we are.

CDI: Could frame this in debate in this country between multilateralism and unilateralism? What are the potential consequences if the first world fails to address the human needs of the rest of the planet?

MATHEWS: What we are, the paradox of the next century, is that after 25 years the developing countries have made such a progress in infant mortality, life expectancy, the gap between the first and the third world has grown wider. In a world where everybody is intimately aware of how everybody else living, the widening gap will be unsustainable in a security sense. We will have a world in which 10% of the population is consuming 90% of the resources, 90% of the science. So you have this island of wealth and a great sea of poverty that will lead to political instability and ultimately violence. The other part of it, will be that the rich will not be able to live securely in a world like that for a variety of reasons. We will not be able to deal with climate, corruption, drug trade, diseases that are coming across our borders, drug resistant infections. We live in a world in which threats do not respect borders. A world of violent disparities will also not be so great for the wealthy.

CDI: Could you say some more on the human security concept?

MATHEWS: With the disappearance of an external threat with the end of the Cold War for most countries, there are few countries that face external boils but not very many, that internal intentions switch naturally. They have always been there, they were drawn back by the Cold War. We tend to think the Cold War was something between the U.S. and the Soviet Union/Warsaw Pact, but it touched everybody, it was everybody's national security's framework. A Swiss diplomat told me once that the end of the Cold War was devastating for Switzerland, because their role was to be the neutral nation and now it was all gone. This overnight disappearance of external tension, what countries more and more see and what there citizens more and more demand is a country where security is defined as a job, adequate nutrition, adequate housing, security from other forms of external threat like ultraviolet light from the ozone hole, threats that individuals cannot protect themselves against. That is a profound change, your security does not primarily come from the state downward, it comes from the state upward. The security of the country is the aggravate security of all its citizens. External threats will not disappear. People will not stop fighting, that is part of human nature. And countries, nations do not disappear. The traditional sense of national security stays with us, the new sense of human security appears. The next several decades will be a time to integrate the two in a way.