--- title: A Conversation with Bill Clinton | TIME description: TIME Magazine Managing Editor Rick Stengel interviews Bill Clinton at the Aspen Ideas Festival (1:08:41) canonical: https://time.com/video/MdUlb7f7/ og:title: A Conversation with Bill Clinton og:description: TIME Magazine Managing Editor Rick Stengel interviews Bill Clinton at the Aspen Ideas Festival (1:08:41) og:url: https://time.com/video/MdUlb7f7/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/MdUlb7f7/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: A Conversation with Bill Clinton twitter:description: TIME Magazine Managing Editor Rick Stengel interviews Bill Clinton at the Aspen Ideas Festival (1:08:41) twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/MdUlb7f7/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # A Conversation with Bill Clinton > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: A Conversation with Bill Clinton [Watch (HLS stream): A Conversation with Bill Clinton](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/MdUlb7f7.m3u8) (1:08:41)  _Published 2007-07-12. TIME Magazine Managing Editor Rick Stengel interviews Bill Clinton at the Aspen Ideas Festival (1:08:41)_ --- Jul 25, 2023 4:29 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [A Presidential Perspective : Bill Clinton \(Interviewed by Dr. David Agus\)](/video/YVACz0xN/) ### A Presidential Perspective : Bill Clinton (Interviewed by Dr. David Agus) [Rick Stengel on TIME Magazine's special Wireless Issue](/video/mN8uLZ2A/) ### Rick Stengel on TIME Magazine's special Wireless Issue [Bill Clinton Reflects on Steve Jobs](/video/aBedjp9F/) ### Bill Clinton Reflects on Steve Jobs --- ## Transcript >> Welcome to the Aspen Institute and this conversation with President Bill Clinton. No one would have ever imagined that an ex- president could have as much authority, as much powers of persuasion, as much influence as a sitting president. But Bill Clinton is reinventing what it means to be a former president. After all, Bill Clinton has never been an ex- president before and what he is doing with the Clinton Foundation, with the Clinton Global Initiative is he has become a one- man international NGO. And this is something that we haven't seen before. I know there are lots of folks from the Clinton Foundation here. So what I'd love to do is start out by talking about philanthropy in the 21st century and how people like yourself and Bill Gates are leveraging it and is it a third way now in terms of how we can remedy the problems of the world? >> Well, I think it is for several reasons. First of all, we have developed a global economy without a global society. And there are lots of tears in the social fabric. I mean, the world basically seems to me has four big challenges; inequality, insecurity from terror and weapons of mass destruction and failed states, ecological fragility because of climate change and resource depletion, and this massive identity crisis, which in a sentence is, " Are our differences more important than our common humanity ?" which we just saw played out in the United Kingdom where two doctors who made a living saving lives decided they needed to kill a bunch of people. So, I think that there is this huge demand now for non- governmental groups to try to step into all these breeches. You can't do much directly about security, but you can help people to reconcile. You can help fight climate change and resource depletion and you can certainly deal with a lot of the inequality issues in income, healthcare, and education. So first, there's a big need. Second, you have an enormous number of rich people, as you always do when you change the economic paradigm it creates new fortunes, and we have record numbers of millionaires and billionaires, and thankfully a lot of them want to spend their money in their lifetime doing something that's positive. It enables people who aren't as wealthy as they are, like Colin and Alma Powell, they just start our NGOs and get help and do good. Third thing is the internet has enabled people of ordinary means to give a lot of money. We had contributions in excess of a billion dollars from Americans to the tsunami- affected areas. Thirty percent of our households gave-- over half of them gave over the internet; the average contribution was about $ 275 but the median contribution was under $ 60. And the final thing is that you have the rise of the NGOs in both rich and developing countries, which provide a vehicle that give you a decent return on your investment. That is, you got a reasonable chance of succeeding and doing what you're trying to do. So, all those things together have created this explosion of activity. When I became President, there were virtually no NGOs in China or Russia. Today, there are about 400, 000 in Russia, so many that President Putin is trying to restrain them. I wish he wouldn't do it. I mean, they just shutdown a press NGO the other day that you probably know about. But it's a high- class problem compared to having none and having no civil society. China has 280, 000 NGOs registered with the Government, maybe twice that many not registered. India has over half a million active ones. Listen to this, America has 1, 010, 000, not counting the public activities of religious congregations, 1, 010, 000, half of them founded in this decade, half. So, there's a big tidal wave where capacity is meeting need. >> I know you're working on a new book and that it involves public service. And your own life and career was shaped by John F. Kennedy's call for public service in the early '60s. One of the things that we're seeing now, that's an interesting phenomenon, is that young people are volunteering at a greater rate than anytime probably since then, but they don't see it as public service. Is that a good thing? Is that a bad thing? Do we wanna persuade them to do something that's more in the national interest? Or is public service changing? Well, they may-- they may think of public service as government service. But the tradition of Americans acting as private citizens to advance the public good is as old as the Republic, older. Benjamin Franklin organized the first volunteer fire department in America in Philadelphia, 40 years before the Declaration of Independence. One of the great interesting insights of Alexis de Tocqueville's hopefuls, " Democracy in America ", was his observation that Americans had a propensity to see a problem in their communities and create a new organization and just go deal with it, whereas the Europeans tended to look to the state to solve the problem. So, there's a rich tradition of this in our country. I do think for all the reasons I mentioned before, there's more of it than ever before, and young people, because they're more globally aware, and they sense our interdependence, I think are more willing to get involved in all this kind of stuff. The book I wrote is actually not about they way I spend most of my life. It doesn't have much to do with politics. There's one chapter on citizen service related to government ( how you lobby to maintain, or change, or improve a government program or policy ), but the rest of it is all about private giving of time, money, skills, and other things to advance the public good and how everybody without regard to their income, age, education, or time availability, can do something and should. >> You mentioned the word " interdependence ." And I've read a couple of your commencement speeches from this spring, and President Clinton has talked about how he prefers that word, " interdependence" to " globalization ." I'd love you to define what that means. >> Well, " globalization" basically refers in most people's minds to the increasing economic integration of the world for good or real. I like " interdependence ," because our integration goes way beyond economics. It involves security, it involves culture, it involves information sharing. And interdependence-- I like interdependence also because it has no value connotation. It could be good or bad. It simply means that divorce is not an option. I mean, you think about it, that's all it means. I mean, it means we can't get away from each other. So, whether you like it or not, your future is tied to mine and vise versa, and there is a lot of good and a lot of bad about this world. I mean, this interdependent world has been a peachy- keen deal for most of us, otherwise you couldn't afford to be here today. I mean, it's been great and it's an interesting thing. This is a more diverse crowd than it would've been if we'd had this meeting 30 years ago. And your own life experiences are far more diverse, you've been more places, seen more things, you're in contact with more things, you're in love with people around the world. It-- there's a lot of good about the interdependent world. But half the world's people are still living on less than $ 2 a day. One in four people will die of AIDS, TB, malaria, or infections related to dirty water. Nearly no Americans will die of that. 130 million kids never go to school. So-- and the interdependence in the security areas are highly interesting, because I saw it again, and I was in London last week when they found those Mercedes that did not explode. And the British are, you know, pretty stiff upper lip after this, I mean, London was bombed and they had the IRA. But still, you could just see how everybody was walking down the street wondering whether that car had something in it. I think it's highly unlikely that the 21st century will claim as many innocent lives to politics as the 20th century did. We had World War I, World War II, the purges in the Soviet Union; the three of them took 20 million people out. You had the Holocaust, you had the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, you had all the tribal wars in Africa, you had the Chinese Cultural Revolution. My God, a lot of people got killed in the last century. We're going to have to really work at it to kill as many innocent people in this century. The difference is this time we think one of the victims might be us. That's after all the final power of the terrorist who think-- that's why I was so touched when I saw all of these doctors' groups in America and the United Kingdom condemning those terrorists, you know, they're afraid now we're all going to be suspicious of each other. Why? Because we are interdependent. So even in security, walls are not readily available to us? >> Let's talk about London for a second because there are certain assumptions that we made about terrorism that recent events in London seemed to undermine. One of them is that we thought for a while that we would start getting homegrown terrorism in London, and these fellows were from out of the country. Yesterday, General Powell was talking about people are still lining up around the world who want to come to America. But the question I have is, is assimilation perhaps not working the way we thought it should? I mean, we all think that someone comes to America, they embody our values, they learn to love America, and they could never turn against us. The Brits feel the same way, yet we're seeing something different now. >> But we're not really. I mean, both things can be true, only takes one person to set off a car bomb. I mean, we could all figure out how to do it in a matter of 30 minutes, you know, it wouldn't take much instruction to figure out how to put one of these things together and detonate it. So you-- if 95 percent of all the Muslim doctors who come to the United Kingdom are grateful for the chance to be there and spend their whole life trying to help keep people healthy and save lives, and 4 percent of them are terrorist sympathizers, and 1 percent of them are prepared to, you know, do what that doctor did in Glasgow and burn himself to a crisp trying to kill some people doesn't mean that we're not succeeding, it means we're not succeeding completely. Again, I will say this is a question of identity. I think we need more thought given to this. Amartya Sen wrote a great little book last year called Identity and Violence, which I commend to all of you. It's-- I don't necessarily agree with his whole analysis, but it will force you to think about how people, even well- educated, prosperous people, superficially well- integrated people identify themselves in a way that preclude their treating other human beings as equals in non- warlike circumstances. It's a huge problem all over the world. And we need to really think about how we're raising our kids, how we're talking about this. And one of the reasons I liked all this explosion of young people getting involved in service in America and around the world is I think that lots of people will see them, particularly in other countries, and it will change their sense of identity. It's a huge problem. I mean, you got a lot of these people-- these doctors were doing pretty well in life. But they did not feel they belong in the society in which they live, and they felt morally, emotionally, maybe psychologically impelled to give meaning to their own lives by taking away someone else's. We need to get to the bottom of that. I think it's as old as time. And I think-- you know, if you go back all throughout human history, there've been our crowd and the others. And one of the ways as Robert Wright said in his great book, Nonzero, basically you could see human history as a struggle to create wider, and wider, and wider circles of positive interdependence. And at every juncture, when we run up against another alien force, somehow we have escaped annihilation, we dodged that bullet in World War I, we dodged the bullet in World War II, we dodged the bullet in the Cold War, and now it's like we're being gnawed at by a thousand ants. And there's-- all of whom had the power to affect the ultimate tragedy on whoever happens to be standing in the way of the bomb. So, we're going to have to give a lot more thought to people who live among us, but are not of our community because they do not feel they belong. Their identity, their sense of work, their very sense of what gives their life its force and meaning, requires them to be apart. >> But what do we do about those folks? I mean, do we turn the other cheek. Is the response to 9 / 11 something that should have been the opposite of that, something that was forgiving? I mean, how do you assimilate those people? I mean, you yourself have talked a lot about the rise in fundamentalism everywhere. That's seems inimical to embracing people. >> I think you-- well, I think you have to do three things. I think, first of all, let's not be naive here, if somebody is trying to kill you, you don't have time to change their mind. So, you got to have a security policy. But what did we learn from Afghanistan and Iraq and from all of the arrests that had been made in the last 10 years, and all the terrorist incidents that had been prevented? That most of them have succeeded because of cooperation and law enforcement intelligence and people tracking money. Ninety- five percent of all the people suspected of planning terrorist assaults in the United States have been arrested by somebody else in some other country working closely with our people. Hillary got some grief in one of the debates recently where she said she thought Americans were more secure than we were on 9 / 11 from domestic attack, but not secure enough. That's because of all this work that's done by all these people you'll never know, unless you happen to be related to one of them. You don't even know what they're doing. But these thousands and thousands of anonymous people are out there killing themselves everyday trying to keep you safe and keep you alive, and that's working. You have to be prepared to use military force, but it ought to be a last option not a first option because it's the most expensive thing you can do, and there are always unintended consequences. But you still got to be prepared to do it. So, I think that you have to have a security policy. Then you have to have a policy to make more partners and fewer terrorists; it really does matter. Even though all these people were well- educated, and I know all that, they still feed on the sort of the zeitgeist of resentment in their culture. So, when you work to overcome the inequalities of education, in health and economy, it matters, it makes a difference. Keep in mind, arguably America's most successful military operation in a Muslim country, except for getting rid of the Taliban in Afghanistan in this decade, was the Military's humanitarian airlift in Indonesia after the tsunami. A poll done there when-- the President asked for-- his father and me to go raise money for that. And we did, and we funded some projects, we went over there and did our little, you know, fact- finding tour, and we came back to the White House. On the way in, the USAID man who had been our point person handed me a survey completed the day before in Indonesia that said that America's popularity had gone from 30 percent before the tsunami to 60 percent after, solely because people saw us trying to help them start their lives again. Again, it doesn't mean you don't need a security policy, but this works. And the third thing I think we had to do is amorphous and uncertain of result, but we have to try to all think about and flush out this whole question of identity. How do we see ourselves in relation to other people? What are the sources of meaning in our lives? How does our self definition lead us off a cliff or into the embrace of our fellow human beings? It's a huge problem everywhere. And that's-- I think, you know, one of the great tragedies in the last few months is that the Hamas and the Fatah are now fighting each other, they don't even have time to jump on the Israelis anymore. But what it means is it's going to be almost impossible to work out a near- term settlement in the Middle East at a time when the external factors are highly favorable to it. All the Sunni Arabs are dying to recognize Israel, normalize, establish security and economic partnerships because they're worried about Iran, and the internal politics are not working for us. And that feeds what goes into the people's mental processes as they define what it means to be in the community of the United Kingdom as opposed to the community of Islam, as opposed to the community of oppressed Muslims or Arabs or you name it. We've got to just keep working on this. Most people don't live like we do. Most people will never get to come to a meeting like this and think highfaluting, broadminded, generous thoughts about one another. >> And-- but they are basically just as good as we are. And they need to be given a chance, especially children, not only to learn at a rational level, but to feel that their life has more meaning if they think our common humanity is more important than our interesting differences, it's a massive problem. And it's at the root of, if you look at every single trouble spot in the world that's where it is. >> Let's talk about the trouble spots-- I'd love to get to a happier subject, but we're still on this. What are the most dangerous places in the world right now, and what should we do about them? I mean, off the top of my head I mean, you mentioned Iran, Iraq is a festering wound; Pakistan is a dangerous place as you know. How-- what can we do about those places? I know there are other places that we haven't even mentioned? >> Well, first of all it's-- it depends on whether you're talking about today or 10 or 20 years from now. The-- let's assume you mean in the present, so you have to worry about-- Iraq is dangerous because of its uncertain corollary consequences. It's a tragedy which is different from being a danger to the whole world, and I noticed, I read in a paper where General Powell said about this the other day. I think we have no choice, but to withdraw a substantial number of our military forces there this year, I think that-- Wait, wait, let me finish. We have no ground forces with which to confront an unforeseen security challenge. Our naval personnel are training in traditional army tactics. I met a young officer at a healthcare forum in San Francisco a couple of months ago. And I said what are you doing for training, he smiled and said, " You know, don't you ." I said, " Just tell me what you're doing ," he said " Target practice ." The man who runs-- Hillary-- in my home in New York, took-- retired early from the Navy when in the naval reserves, he's a navy cook, he was in the White House mess. And his last weekend reserve duty, he did target practice then he went away for summer camp, and he was part of two 12 men groups that were dumped out in the woods on the east coast and engaged in two weeks of intensive guerilla warfare against each other. He didn't think he was going to do that when he became a navy cook. And when he came home, he said, he said, " I survived and they never killed me, but I wasn't sure I was happier and that's the hardest I ever did ." It's interesting-- I-- navy guys oftenly joke now that they're being called an army. So, whatever you think about Iraq, the ongoing vitality of our national security, I think will almost mandate some sort of substantial reduction there. But I think you'd have to be prepared again to echo what I read in the paper that General Powell said, " As awful as Iraq has been, fewer people have died there than would've died if the American military hadn't been there ." You go-- you got to be prepared for this. And all you have to do is look at Bosnia; both Bosnia and Iraq were multiethnic artificial creations of the demise of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I. We didn't do anything in Bosnia for three years, until sort of the bloodlust was spent, we-- NATO bombed them for a few days and we went to a peace agreement, we made a deal. But before that deal was made, there were 250, 000 dead people and 2- 1 / 2 million refugees. Iraq is four times as big. Nearly as I can tell, the death rate is 300, 000 or 400, 000 and two million refugees, which means you could have another 600, 000 dead people and eight million more refugees, if we disengage altogether before the process plays itself out and politics can assert itself; that's a horrible thing to contemplate. But we can't-- all you-- you just hit the numbers with a chain, which should tell you the answer to an interesting question, why did Iran want to talk to us about Iraq, not why didn't we want to talk to them, why did they want to talk to us. Their policy so far has been easy, anybody could have it. Their policy is whatever makes America miserable. I mean, from their point of view, our policy was we went out in the middle of a desert, put down four stakes in the ground, tied ourselves to the stake, and had someone pour 4, 000 red ants over us, and said, " Okay, let's fight ." But if we leave it's their problem, where do you think those millions of refugees will go; so it's a dangerous situation. If Iran develops a nuclear weapon, it could be a dangerous situation for two reasons; first of all, I suppose there's some chance that they can actually believe they could use a nuclear weapon on Israel and that the world would not respond. We have to disabuse them of that. We'll have to recreate the Cold War, understanding if that happens. Our military options are limited if we use the air power there. Since the stuff is underground, we might not get it and we would almost certainly kill huge numbers of civilians, which could turn public opinion in Iran, which has basically been fairly pro- western against us all, it's a dangerous situation. Pakistan is exceedingly dangerous-- oh, the second problem with Iran is, they develop a lot of fissile material. They could give it to the terrorist groups to make smaller nuclear dirty bombs. And then Pakistan is dangerous for the same reason. If the Musharraf Government with all of its imperfections were to collapse and radical Islamists were to take over Iran, they would be in charge of a nuclear arsenal. And again, they would be subject, presumably, to the same constraints that kept United States and the Soviet Union from nuking each other in the Cold War, but they would have an awful lot of fissile material, and they-- and the Iranian security services, the military is full of people that are sympathizers with the Taliban, with al- Qaeda, and may be more than happy to let a lot of that material out. So, we would be much more at risk of having small- scale nuclear weapons explode, God knows where in the world. So, I would say those are the danger places. The Middle East is dangerous, because if we could resolve it, it would take about half the steam out of the terrorist argument everywhere in the world. So, I don't suppose it's as dangerous as the other places because their capacity to do that with the absence of solving it has created a lurking danger, which embraces this whole environment we're discussing. >> Tom Friedman yesterday was saying that our addiction to fossil fuels is fueling both our military and our enemies at the same time. I know you've spent a lot of time thinking about how to, as he put it yesterday, make green the new red white blue, And in fact, this notion of doing well by doing good is something that could go some ways toward solving a lot of these problems, is that true? >> Yeah, I don't-- I don't think that our addiction to fossil fuels is the main source of the difficulties in the Middle East, but I do believe that if you're talking about what's the most dangerous place in the world looking ahead 50 years, the most dangerous place in the world is any place that's either putting too much greenhouse gases-- too many greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, are destroying too many natural resources without which the world can't live. So, let me set it out and then I'll go to that. Let's take climate change as a given and all we really know is that something bad is going to happen. We just don't know how bad it will be and how quick it will happen. Okay, we know that. We also know that resource depletion is related to climate change, but operating independently of it, that is 90 percent of the world's fishing stock, fishing places are under stocked, only partly by over fishing. Excess CO2 in the atmosphere has caused the oceans to bravely try to take up the slack and to suck more in. As they do, it's changing the chemical composition of the oceans, interrupting the food chain of the fish, often destroying microscopic life forms and preventing a lot of these places from restocking. You've got a loss of trees, a loss of water, a loss of top soil. E. O. Wilson, the great Harvard biologist, says that we're losing plant and animal species at by far the most rapid rate since the first person stood up on the African Savanna 150, 000 years ago and maybe even long before that. And it's possible that resource depletion will hurt us and lead to food wars and other wars, even before the worse consequences of climate change, because let me remind you, the world's population is predicted to grow from its current 6- 1 / 2 billion to nine billion in 43 years. So, it took us 150, 000 years to get from 1 to 6- and- a- half- billion and we're going from 6- 1 / 2 billion to nine billion in 43 years. Almost a 100 percent of those people are going to be born in countries not now able to support the people who live there, which gave a certain air of unreality to the recent debate in the Congress on illegal immigration. It's almost like the people said, " Let's don't even bother to pass it now, let's all try to live 20 years and see what real hell looks like ." I mean, if you would, I mean-- So, on the other hand, I do not buy even the conservative UN panel forecast that it would require us to accept a one percent reduction in global GDP to appropriately reduce greenhouse gas emissions. For 30 years, Amory Lovins, sitting over there next to my old buddy, Sam Branagh, two relics of the '60s and here we're. He and I, Amory's not a relic; he's been telling you that you can make money out of this deal. This is crazy, you know, we could-- we could have the greatest mobilization of resources in America and the greatest creation of jobs, and the greatest effort to reduce income inequality, certainly since we started to suffer from income inequality in the '70s, but I believe since we mobilized for World War II, if we got really serious about this, this is an economic boom. Mayor Bloomberg just put out-- you know, he's part of this 40 cities group I work with, to try to help them reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. So, he puts out New York City's greenhouse gas reduction proposal. All the press is about the proposed congestion fee, 8 bucks a vehicle on people that go deep-- too deep into Manhattan, and you know, you can all imagine what the pros and cons are, but Singapore and London have done it, and it's been good for them. But that's a tiny part of the greenhouse gas problem. In New York City, only 20 percent of our greenhouse gases are from transportation, 80 percent from buildings and the energy necessary to run them, we have 950, 000 buildings. Let's assume 50, 000 that are maximally efficient and 50, 000 are about to be razed. You got 850, 000 left. How many people would it put to work, how many jobs would it create, how much wealth would it generate, and how many of those jobs will be lower skill jobs if we decided to green every roof, change every light bulb, put in the most efficient glass, do insulation where it was structurally appropriate and put in automated controls on lighting and heating and cooling where the system would bear it in those buildings? I can look out over-- out my window in Harlem, and I look at all these building. Most of them are tarred roofs, old flat roofs. On a 90- degree day, after two hours, the surface temperature will be about a 150 degrees. If you go in and seal off the roof, so it not doesn't leak, put down sod and put whatever vegetation the roof will hold. It will cut the surface temperature of the roof to 80, lower than the ambient air temperature, having drastic implications for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and lowering the utility bills of all the businesses and renters in that building. This is not rocket science, and you cannot outsource these jobs to India, someone has to be standing on the roof. So-- I-- and I can make the same argument on all the clean energy sources. It's just right through the deal. I just think it's the greatest economic boom and let me offer one other piece of evidence because I don't want to take up the whole period on this. But in the United States since 1973, when our income started to diverge, we've only had about one period, the last five or six years of my presidency, when all income groups rose and inequality actually diminished some. Now, I'd like to tell you it was because I was an economic genius, but that's not quite true. We had in the last six years of the '90s a source of new jobs which paid above average wages, changed the job mix in America and lifted all groups. It was the explosion of information technology out of Silicon Valley into every element of American life, all right, and it's still going on, that's why people stayed up all night for their iPhone. But if you think about it, it-- there is no job in America that is like what it was 10 years ago, none, not one; they've all been changed by information technology. In my time as President, it was 8 percent of total employment, 28 percent of job growth, 33 percent of income growth, therefore you got a different mix, inequality went down, median wages went up. We haven't done that in this decade. I think it's because we haven't embraced this decade's source of new jobs. You cannot run a rich country, preserve the middle class, and keep inequality from increasing in an interdependent world unless every five to eight years you find a source of new jobs; you can't do it. And our obvious source for this decade was a commitment to a clean, efficient, independent energy future; you don't have to take my word for it. There are two examples; two European economies that are probably closest to America's, at least two of the ones that are closest are the UK and Denmark. Denmark has grown their economy 50 percent with no increase in energy use, not one more watt and a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by generating 22 percent of electricity from wind. You know what happened? Their unemployment rate's about what ours is, but their wages are going up and inequality is decreasing. The UK is even more like the American economy. When we walked away from Kyoto and it wasn't just President Bush that walked away from it, let me remind you before he rejected it and said it would be the end of free enterprise as we know it, the senate voted against the Kyoto agreement that Al Gore and I and [ unk ] negotiated, 95 to nothing. It's the only bill I ever lost; I think we lost it before Al Gore got out off the airplane from Japan. But I'm sure they voted against it before I even sent it to them. I never got a bill beat before I sent it out before. It was the end of the world. You know what the British said? " We like this, but it's weak as dishwater and we can do better, we're going to beat our Kyoto targets 25 to 50 percent ." Last year, the then chancellor, now Prime Minister Gordon Brown, issued a report saying they were going to beat their targets and detailing by-- in like 15 different categories how many new jobs, thousands upon thousands upon thousands of new jobs every category had been created in the United Kingdom because they made the decision to beat their Kyoto targets. As a result, they have about the same unemployment rate we do, but they have rising in median incomes and no increase in inequality; this is not rocket science. And we guess the more we live in the Nile, the more we're going to pay for it, not only in terms of the burden we're putting on our children and grandchildren, but in terms of the gnawing inequality within American society which makes Americans more reluctant to welcome immigrants, to shoulder new responsibilities around the world, to spend American tax dollars fighting the problems that I think we ought to be fighting around the world. >> Now, we've gotten from international affairs to domestic affairs, and there's a presidential campaign going on, I noticed you have a handsome lapel pin there, that says " Hillary 2008 ." So my question for you is what would be your preference, first gentleman or first man? >> I think the Scottish friends of mine have suggested I should be called " the first laddie" which will look-- that would be the easiest to relate to the previous, you know, I don't know. I-- Look, I'm proud of her and I think she's doing a great job, I hope she wins, I think it'll be good for the country, but it's-- I think-- This is a very interesting election because it's starting so soon. I think there's a bad reason for that, which is that the calendars all have been jammed up and with maybe unintended consequences for all the big states that moved up so close, I can't-- still can't tell what's going to happen. But the good news is that, after the 2006 election, the American people decided including a substantial number of republicans and almost all independents, they all decided that we had to-- what we were doing wasn't working and we needed to find a new way forward and we all launched this great debate about what the terms of our citizenship should be, what the mission of our government should be, what the role of our country should be in the 21st century. It's almost like we've passed the-- you know, kind of pushed the restart button or something. And I think that's very healthy, we're having, you know, basically positive campaigns in both primaries, with basically serious discussion of important issues and that's got to be a good thing for America. So yeah, I have strong feelings about it, but it-- most of my life is what I do now outside politics, it's almost like Hillary and I have switched positions, I do the kind of thing she did for more than 20 years from the time we first met and I hope very much that she wins and I'm doing what I can to help, but I hope that whatever I'm called, I'll do whatever I'm asked to do, but I hope whatever it is I'm asked to do I'll still have time to keep doing what I am doing now. >> But how do you see the electorate, I mean, do you feel you have that same touch-- feel for the way Americans are thinking that we used to have, or do you feel a little more distant from it? And what do you see among American voters in terms of an appetite for change. Because some of the issues have been, does she in fact represent change or are there other people who represent change more prominently? >> Well, that's not about substance, that's about labeling presentation. I'll say again, it seems to me the country has some very big challenges, we have to restore America's leadership in the world, which involves finding some resolution to Iraq, yes, but it also involves telling people we're back in the diplomacy and cooperation business, whether it's on, you know-- And let me say this-- The one thing that really bothers me from my country is that I think that when we pulled out of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the Kyoto Climate Change Accord and the International Criminal Court and all these other things, we stopped cooperating with the Latin American military, something President Bush has since reinstituted. I think that we had an image of ourselves frozen in the minds of a lot of people around the world, and I don't think America or the President can now get enough credit when they're doing something that's good-- this AIDS program has done way more good than harm, way more good, it's done a lot of good. We worked with it in my AIDS project around the world. President's trying to take on malaria now. I think I would-- he did something I really liked and apparently majorities of both parties in Congress disagree, but he wants to change the way we give food aid in America today, you got-- all the food we give the hungry people around the world has to be grown in America and three quarters of it has to be delivered on American flagships. The Canadians and the Europeans have changed to allow more of their money to be spent, just giving the money to poor farmers in the place closest to the famine, which means more money for the farmers and the money buys a lot more food and it gets there a lot quicker and, you know, I think that's a great thing, but I haven't heard a single foreign leader say, " Boy, I'm glad he did that ," because we've convinced people that we prefer to act alone. In Secretary Albright's terms, we prefer to act alone whenever we can and cooperate when we have to, and it should be the reverse. So that's the first thing. We got to get ourselves back in business if we want to lead the world and convince China and any to join this fight on climate change or any of this other business. We have to tackle inequality at home. We can't continue to-- this-- the last six years we've had 40- year- high corporate profits, all time high in the stock market, every year, worker productivity has increased, but wages are flat or declining, median wages. And there's an increase in poverty amongst working people, increase in the working people losing their health insurance; and Goldman Sachs says two- thirds-- Goldman Sachs now, not some liberal democratic think- tank says, " 64 percent of the increase in corporate profits is directly due to the ability to depress wages and compensation ." So, we are now seeing a growing inequality in our country, which is-- bodes ill for a country that was made great by a strong middle class. We got to do something about healthcare, it's going to bankrupt the economy. And we can't just raise more taxes and cover everybody because if we don't fix the system and we don't deal with the rising tide of obesity and diabetes, no matter what we do to cover everybody, the system will collapse on itself within a decade again. We're already spending 16 percent of our GDP on healthcare, Switzerland spends 12 percent, but they have 17- 1 / 2 percent of their people over 65 and we're at 11- 1 / 2 or 12 or something. Nobody else with a comparable age distribution spends more than 11. The difference in 16 and 11, $ 700 billion a year. So, we got to control costs, cover everybody, and start promoting wellness as well as treating sickness. If we don't do it, the country will pay an unconscionable human and economic price. So, we got big things to do. So, are we going to change? You bet we are. But the real question is how are we going to do it. No candidate-- there is no candidate that won't represent change, so that's just a little cheap slogan, I don't think that people mind the changes that affected-- that were affected in the eight years-- I was President, and I had a 65 percent approval rating when I quit, but nobody thinks we can go back to the '90s either because the times are different. So, we got to have a-- you know, a restore America policy abroad and a restore America policy at home and they require all changes, all kinds of changes. >> Now, I've been very greedy in asking all the questions myself, and there are two microphones up there, so we have time for a few questions from the audience. And well, I'll do an interstitial until somebody gets up there to ask a question. What are you reading now that you like and more importantly I'd like to know when do you get a chance to read? >> Oh, I read all the time. I read when I'm on airplanes and I read when I go to bed at night mostly, that's when I read. Sometimes I read, other times, but usually it's when I'm on an airplane or when I'm in bed at night. I just read a great interesting book called " Churchill's Folly ," about the creation of Iraq in 1921 and I believe the author's name is-- a British author, I think his name is Catherwood, but it's really a good book because it takes you back to the days of the end of World War I, the demise of the Ottoman Empire, how a lot of those issues in the Middle East could not be resolved at the treaty of-- in the Treaty of Versailles and how it all got carved up. And once you see kind of how arbitrary it was and the maddening dilemmas that faced the British there and the French in their area, it's not surprising that once you took the dictator away, all hell broke loose. I read Walter's book on Einstein, and I understood some of it. I thought it was great, I thought it was fabulous, and I'm reading Stella Remington's new mystery. You know, Stella Remington was head of MI5 in the United Kingdom. She wrote one gang buster's mystery, and she just wrote another one, so I'm reading that. That's what I'm working on. >> So, the first question from the young lady over there on the left. >> Thank you for calling, " young ." Mr. President, Elizabeth Drew. The Republicans obviously is a talking point, obviously also to shift the blame say that your administration failed to get Bin Laden. The 9 / 11 commission was somewhat critical. I know you did some bombing, what do you say about why anticipating-- knowing that he was a problem-- the African embassies were blown up why did you-- your administration not give him and that movement more priority? >> Well, Elizabeth, congratulations on speaking for the Republican National Committee. >> I mean, look, let's just go through the facts here. Not-- The 9 / 11 commission did their best to be anodyne and evenhanded because they had a Republican Congress and a Republican White House, and they wanted their recommendations accepted. When Rudy Giuliani said I didn't do enough in 1993, Bob Kerrey wrote-- who was on that commission wrote a letter tearing him up. You know, that's their-- first thing is-- Al- Qaeda was involved in the first World Trade Center bombing, nobody on earth knew that, nobody on earth thought Al- Qaeda was any- was involved in any way in direct terrorist operations. We got every single person that was involved in the first World Trade Center bombing including an extradition from Pakistan and put them all in prison. We prevented an enormous number of attacks. The Republicans, let me remind you, when I tried to get Osama Bin Laden based on good intelligence, they accused me of wag the dog and they made fun of me and they said we shouldn't be doing anything about this. And one of the reasons I thought President Bush was disserved is a lot of his Neo- Con advisors said that " We were crazy when we told him in the transition that the biggest problem was Bin Laden ," they said any fool knew that Saddam Hussein was a bigger threat to our security than Osama Bin Laden. This was after the USS Cole and that I was obsessed with Bin Laden, so the same people that are criticizing me now criticized me then because I was obsessed with Bin Laden. We dealt with him four or five days a week every week for the last four years I was President. I did not turn down one request for the use of force. We tried to mount a CIA operation to go in and take him out, they couldn't do it, we contracted with tribals to try to take him out, they couldn't do it. I was willing to use whatever power I could. We didn't have until 9 / 11 any kind of basing rights, remember, in Uzbekistan or any place else. The logistics of doing this were much different. I would've attacked him at the end of my Presidency even though they would've accused me of trying to affect the outcome of the Presidential election, but the CIA and the FBI had not jointly certified that he was responsible for the USS Cole bombing even though we all knew it. If I had been President in the Spring of 2001, when they did confirm that, I would've given the Taliban an ultimatum to turn him or gone after him. But I wasn't there then. So, I don't think there's any question if you look at all the things we did on terror, did I fail to get in, yes, did I try, yes, and I don't think there's any question that we were far more obsessed with him, and I don't mind using the word than the Bush Administration, their obsession was Saddam. You can draw your own conclusions about who should've done what when. I don't think we should be in the business of blaming anybody for 9 / 11. If you want to blame somebody, blame whoever didn't communicate the message when the two FBI agents called the FBI central headquarters and said, " Hey, there are two people out here flying these airplanes, and they're not taking off or landing, should we try to find out what's going on at the flight schools and close the doors of the pilots ?" That's the only one factual breakdown I can think of that almost a 100 percent sure would've prevented 9 / 11. Even if we had killed Osama Bin Laden, those people were already in America and they were here when I was President. Do I feel badly about it? Yes. Do I know anything I could've done to have stopped it? I don't. And let me say when I testified before the 9 / 11 commission, I went through several mistakes I thought I made with them, and I do think there are things that I should've done that would've handled some of this better, but being more concerned about Osama Bin Laden isn't one of them. >> Gentleman in the black shirt. >> President Clinton, this is Cameron Sinclair, Architecture for Humanity. A friend of yours is holding a number of concerts today and you've spoken very eloquently about the need for green roofing our major cities, but I wondered if-- this is just the first suggestion, is that all the great work you've done down on the Gulf Coast, it could be an opportunity to take green and sustainable initiatives, not because it's the right thing to do, but to lower the bills of those who are in need of getting back in their homes and the question is actually I'm a fellow TED prize winner and I know in March you stood up and said you wanted to bring healthcare to Rwanda and I want to know how that was going. >> Let's talk about New Orleans. When former President Bush and I did our-- we raised about a $ 137 million and we gave $ 40 million to the states to fill the gaps between their funding and federal funding, $ 30 million to faith- based institutions to either compensate them for expenditures they'd already made or to continue to deliver services, $ 30 million to various community projects, and then about $ 20 million more to specific things, but we kept some back, he and I did, for our own findings, if you will, of what was going on. And I funded a couple of schools to build green schools in New Orleans, and we now got someone down there-- New Orleans is one of the cities in our climate change initiative; one of the adjunct cities, which is being run by Ira Magaziner who's right there, raise your hand Ira. And anyway, we got somebody on the ground down there now and we're trying to integrate all this. Brad Pitt came to see me the other day and told me that he'd been working with an architect, Bill McDunn, whom a lot of you know, to devise a very energy efficient house that-- like the ones that were in the 9th Ward that can be built for a $ 130, 000, five or ten grand more than the standard shotgun houses being built for down there now. And we are now looking for ways to see whether-- I mentioned it to Walter before I came out here, whether the Louisiana Recovery Authority or some other source of funding could start all the reconstruction with maximally energy efficient buildings down there. I've also talked to Wayne Reynolds who runs energy and they-- that's-- New Orleans is part of that utility. About financing this, the way some other utilities financed energy efficiencies, they're willing to do it, but it was all they could do to avoid taking bankruptcy in New Orleans because the city hasn't yet rebounded. So, we had to work out the economics of it if the utility is going to finance in Amery's words, " megawatts" through energy efficiency. So, we're working on all this. It's highly complex because of all the moving parts in the slow rebuilding of New Orleans, but it-- you're absolutely right, it should be done. We're doing pretty well in Rwanda. More than half the people who should be on treatment for AIDS now are there. We're building healthcare clinics and reopened a hospital that'd been closed since the genocide. We're training people and Paul Farmer's there with his Partners In Health model that was perfected in Haiti and it seems to be getting similar results there, so I feel really good. And Rwanda in general is on the upswing. I'll be surprised if they don't more than double their per capita income in the next five years. It's the most densely populated country in Africa even though there are only 8 million people there because it's so tiny. So, it's possible to do many things in less time than would otherwise be the case because of physical space. So, I feel pretty good about it. >> This gentleman over here. >> Stefan Eddlis here. My question relates to the very beginning of your talk. It refers to the statistics about the NGOs in the world and I hope I didn't mishear you, but did you say " 800, 000" or somewhere in that area roughly? >> In America? >> The huge number of NGOs? >> Yeah, there are-- there are a million in America, over 500, 000 in India, 280, 000 registered in China, many more and give or take 400, 000 in Russia. >> All right, that's my question now; we know there's significant covert budget in the U. S ., what, why would Putin not have a perceived suspicion that these NGOs could perhaps be used for geopolitical purposes, except other than their official purpose that they're formed for. What are the safeguards that NGOs can present to other countries? I know our ideas, of course, are better than anyone else's ideas, but I think the Jesuits in the 16th century and Portuguese missionaries in Japan weren't always perceived to be benevolent. >> Well, first of all, some of the NGOs have an avowed political purpose, like the one that was shutdown in Russia. Recently, that was designed to promote freedom of the press. And if you don't believe in freedom of the press, then that's, you know, a political purpose. In-- we had throughout Central America, a lot of hostility to NGOs through the '80s because even though they may've been doing education or healthcare or whatever, they were also interested in more political liberties. But I think that-- so the answer is it's hard to generalize about that. China has become more tolerant of NGOs and even went so far as to ask our AIDS project to have space in the Chinese Ministry of Health, and now they asked me to do political work; they've asked me personally as well as our NGO to go out to the rural areas to change the political attitude of rural Chinese to get to not to be so prejudiced against people with AIDs anymore and so afraid. But I had to-- I think the answer to your question is if you're doing healthcare, or education, or economic development, you can make an agreement if you can live with it in good conscience that won't be political. But if you are operating in a country that is full of tension and political conflicts, it is almost impossible that no one who works for you will ever say anything, that's political or that there won't be some political ramification of what you do. If-- let's suppose you went into a-- Zimbabwe that do micro credit. Well, after you funded 10, 000 entrepreneurs that can make their own money, they probably wouldn't like Mugabe and what he does anymore and they'd have more money and more credibility to criticize it. So, I-- we try not to be political in the sense you mean, and I think our operations have that credibility, but at some point under certain circumstances, everything you do has a potential political impact. >> Over here, but I can't believe that's Jim Fallows, second in line, who sat in this chair last year and asked you a bunch of questions and has-- >> I got a few questions for him-- First-- >> I gotta run some interference. My name is Matt Spence; I'm a director of the Truman National Security Project. The one thing you talked about is the importance of, with our interdependence of greater need for foreign aid, and greater need for caring about the well- being and security of people outside the United States, and one thing that we talked about earlier at this festival was how we can make the Green Revolution, a great movement, more red, white, and blue. And I guess my question is, how do we do the same with development policy and foreign aid, but despite the War on Terror and despite these problems that cross borders, American support for foreign aid is still very small, which is only one tool, of course, of what we need to do, and American foreign aid is still one-- less than one percent of what our foreign budget is. So, as we're talking about it now is there might be this new opportunity to really make these foreign aid and development questions, a real question and not just moral importance, but real national security for Americans. What do you say to the American people to actually care about this in a way that we just haven't before? >> Well, first of all, let me say, under President Bush, we have increased foreign assistance in AIDS. We're giving-- we're spending like $ 5 billion-- $ 5. 5 billion a year now in AIDS and Malaria and other things like that, that's a lot more than we were spending. Our foreign aid budget is still miserably low. But the main reason is not that the American people wouldn't support an adequate foreign assistance budget, it's that they are still under the illusion that we are spending more money than we are. Like if you ask the average American " Well, how much should we spend in foreign assistance ?" They'd say " Oh, between three and five percent of the budget ." Well, what are we spending, " Oh, 10 or 15 percent. >> One percent. >> And the truth is, as you've just pointed out, we're spending about one percent. So, a lot of this is simply education. I think we need to talk more about it and we need to-- so we need to get the facts about what we're spending. Second thing we need to do is something I've really tried hard to do in this book is to show skeptics that you can spend money effectively. You can actually get a very high rate of return on your investment in advancing healthcare, and education, and clean water, and sanitation, and economic development. I mean, whenever I give a speech-- for example, today, I always say that when Muhammad Yunus won the Nobel Peace prize for his micro credit movement, a goal for which I probably campaigned for 14 years, he got lots of publicity on the fact that 97 percent of his borrowers were women, and the repayment rate was 98. 5 percent. But from the point of view of a skeptic, the most important statistics is this; 58 percent of the borrowers of the Grameen Bank used their loans to lift themselves above the international poverty line. Fifty eight percent, that's a staggering statistic. Bangladesh today has a per capita income of just under $ 500, it was $ 340 when he started. Today-- Last year, Bangladesh grew about over 6 percent in spite of the fact that it was involved in a horrible political turmoil that virtually paralyzed the country because they have a decentralized vibrant entrepreneurial sector. So, the second thing we have to do is say, " You know, we can do this, we can tell people that we can get kids in school for not very much money and we can show them that, we can show them how this health program works, so I think that's the second thing. Third thing I have to say is we can't have either parties switch their position on it depending on whether the other person's in the White House. For example, I was delighted that the Republican Congress would give President Bush more money than they'd have ever thought of giving me to fight AIDS because it meant people are going to live. But if we get a Democratic President next time, will the same people vote against foreign aid, when we know that it builds more partners. But if you look at the millennium development program of the Bush Administration and the healthcare program, I think they're positive. It's just that we need to do more. And I-- the third thing I think would help is if people understood the relative cost. Let's suppose we decided to really go out there on a limb and fund America's share of meeting the United Nations' millennium development goals, with only the organization of economic cooperation and development countries-- the richest country in the world is paying. So, we paid our fair share, that would be about a little over a third, give or take $ 40 billion a year, that sounds like a hell lot of money. The government's budget this year is $ 2. 8 trillion. We spent over a $ 100 billion in Afghanistan, over $ 500 billion in Iraq. It's essentially about five months in Iraq, which affects 25 million people to affect 2 billion. So, these are the things we need to put out, but basically the public is already there. All you got to do is tell them the truth. If the leaders will do the right thing, the public will support them. What the public will not do now is vote against you for doing the wrong thing because it's not high on their hierarchy of values and because their information base is inadequate. So, you should try to get their information base fixed, but recognize in the end, in the near term, it's just going to depend on whether the leaders want to do the right thing or not. >> We have time for only one more question and-- Okay. So, we had to end with-- Oh, Jim, you're sitting down? Okay. Yeah. -[ unk ] >> Yes, please. Come on ahead. >> You may recall last year someone wanted to talk to you about becoming the Middle East envoy. Now that Tony Blair has that job, what do you suggest should be his priorities? And secondly, given his involvement in Iraq, do you think that he still has credibility there with the parties? >> Well, first- >> let me answer your first question first. I believe that what his job is will be defined largely by how much the quartet and especially United States, but also that the EU, Russians, the UN, how much they let him do, if anything beyond his stated mandate, which is to promote economic opportunity, isn't that right-- promote economic opportunity among the Palestinians. What needs doing is to decide whether there is any way in the wide world to found a nonviolent reconciliation between the Palestinian factions which will enable them to make sufficient commitments at least privately to justify private talks with the Israelis like those which led to the original agreements that we signed on the White House lawn in '93. Does he have the credibility to do that? He would if all those governments supported him because the Israelis trust him because he defended them after Lebanon, which infuriated a lot of the other actors in the area, especially after he supported the policy in Iraq, but you got to understand, you can't help the Palestinians unless the Israelis think you care whether they live or die. I mean, the reason we couldn't make progress for seven years is, even the conservative Israelis who disagreed with my policy knew that I really cared whether they lived or died. They knew it mattered to me, and I think Tony Blair's been very forthright in being for a Palestinian state. Very forthright in having it as contiguous as possible as much of the West Bank as possible. And look, I feel-- I told him, I saw him right when I was in London last week, right after, day after he left office, and I said I feel the same way about you, I did about me. I said, " You will probably fail, all I know is when you're failing because you're trying fewer people die ." My view is that we should never define success in the Middle East based on whether there's a comprehensive peace on our watch because that's up to them, not us. All I know is that whenever good people try, fewer people die. And if fewer people die, the possibilities of peace remain open more. So-- And look, how crazy is this? The biggest story. The only thing that's pushed Iraq out of number one in the Middle East news is the epic battle between Hamas and the-- and the Fatah for the Fatah security headquarters and 90 people died. Now, some of us in this room have been in that building. It ain't that big a deal. And I don't mean to be pejorative in my discussion of the Palestinians. I do not know any Palestinians. I've said this every time I come here, and I'll tell you this again. I know a lot of Palestinians. I have never met a poor Palestinian in my life outside the territories. They're the number one per capita income in Ecuador. They control the flower trade in Chile. Every Palestinian I know in America is a college professor or a millionaire. I have never met a poor Palestinian outside the territory. They are the most misgoverned, abused, misused people I have ever seen in all my born days. If the Palestinians would get together, make a deal with Israel which they desperately want to do now because they're worried about Iran, and the Arabs want to help because they're worried about Iran, within 10 years the whole locus of economic and political power in the Middle East would be in the hands of the Israelis and the Palestinians because they would get so rich together, they would make a new Middle East; a positive interdependence, that's what I think. >> From your lips to God's ear. >> I'm sorry that was the last question. I always thought of listening to President Clinton that the thing that I most wanted was an executive summary or a clips note version of what was in his brain, and we tried to give you that here today in one hour. And I want to thank the Aspen Institute, the Aspen Ideas Festival, The Atlantic Monthly for being a sponsor today, I hope you all enjoyed it, I hope you'll come back next year. >> Thank you very much, thank you. >> Ladies and gentlemen, thank you. ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"A Conversation with Bill Clinton","description":"TIME Magazine Managing Editor Rick Stengel interviews Bill Clinton at the Aspen Ideas Festival (1:08:41)","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/MdUlb7f7/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2007-07-12T16:57:41.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/MdUlb7f7.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/video/MdUlb7f7/","duration":"PT1H8M41S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/video/MdUlb7f7/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}} ```