In that protest, one can see many of the issues that are shaping our foreign policy agenda. The world is linked by trade, by politics, by economics, and by a constant awareness that people all around the world have of one another, thanks to CNN, the Internet, and all the other wonderful news media. The whole world is a bit then like a family reunion on a currently rolling basis. Everyone is related, whether they want to be or not. There is a program but there is also a measure of unpredictability because of the number of players interacting.
Wonderful things happen as a result.
Our country's foreign policy is at the beginning of a new century and can appear almost too vast and too complex to deal with, much less fully to understand. That sense of enormity is, of course, accurate in many ways. There are problems to resolve, such as in Kosovo, Congo, Colombia, and Indonesia. These are all parts of the world where the potential damage of calamity is such that we have to expend enormous energy to ensure that tensions do not reach crisis levels, and these include the Middle East, the Korean Peninsula, and the Taiwan Straits, which we are watching carefully in this building, even as we speak here. In addition to this churning of crises and near-crises, there is the job of managing relations with allies, with major powers like Russia and China, and with institutions like NATO, the Organization of American States, and the United Nations.