In light of the new hemispheric policy demands of our time and new calls for the services of this Organization, two actions are essential. First, we must honestly examine the Organization's current programs and expenditures and shift resources to meet the new priorities we have assigned to it. Second, though we commend and deeply appreciate the steps already taken by the Secretary General to accommodate new activities within fixed resources, the Organization, including the members' intergovernmental processes, must do more still to streamline and make its activities even more efficient. These courses, naturally, entail hard choices. But we should not shun them in favor of the easy way.
Avoidance invariably translates into inertia, the paralysis of the status quo.
My previous post was at the United States Mission to the United Nations. There, just one month ago, the member states gave approval to a very ambitious and far-reaching reform blueprint offered by the Secretary General that did much to instill a new culture of reform throughout the United Nations system. I would encourage all the members, and the Secretary General, to examine the United Nations' experience closely and consider how much of it might be productively imported and applied here to further enhance the reform initiatives the OAS has undertaken. To us, the option for the Organization to avoid taking tough actions is only deceptively easy, and not without its own long-term costs and implications. At bottom, the actual choice before us reduces to something else.