Excellencies
Distinguished colleagues
Ladies and gentlemen
A traditional Irish blessing proclaims: “May the road rise to meet you, may the wind be always at your back, may the sun shine warm upon your face, and the rains soft upon your fields. And until we meet again, may God hold you in the hollow of his hand.” Or, in more prosaic words, Welcome to Ireland!
We meet at a time of transformational change to the world system, but in the more than forty years of meetings of the InterAction Council, our leaders have often responded to changes just as significant and dangerous as today’s. I want to begin by outlining some of those past radical shifts and how they compare to those we face in 2025.
The Council was formed in the mid-1980s by Helmut Schmidt of Germany and Takeo Fukuda of Japan and almost immediately the security architecture of the world altered with the coming to power of Mikhail Gorbachev and the eventual demise of the Soviet Empire in Europe. Many nations were suddenly freed of Soviet domination in 1989, leading to a more prosperous, secure, peaceful Europe and a greatly expanded European Union. The InterAction Council welcomed these changes, and its leaders worked hard to bring Russia into the concert of nations and to suggest innovative ways to reduce risk further such as the Hiroshima Declaration of 2010 on reducing nuclear weapons.
But tragically, some Russian leaders were determined to restore their dominance and with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Council once again returned to the primacy of European security, the importance of NATO and, at the Malta plenary in 2023, condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine in the strongest possible terms.
In its early days, too, the Council met as the last vestiges of nineteenth century colonialism in Africa, Asia, and Latin America were being eliminated. As a symbol of this transformation, the Council has frequently met in China, encouraging China to take its rightful and historic place as one of the great powers of the world. The Council welcomed China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001 and, subsequently, made many suggestions for improving world trade after the financial crisis of 2008. The south or developing world needs access to the markets of rich countries and a high-tariff world impoverishes all but the poor especially.
As with trade, so too with world health. Years before the pandemic of 2020, the InterAction Council argued for improved world governance in health, especially to aid developing nations in meeting the requirements of international health regulations and standards. Viruses know no boundaries, and for that reason the Council’s 2017 Dublin Charter for One Health advocated health for all and made the integration of health concerns with environmental concerns, especially on climate change, a key organizing concept. “The Charter,” the Council declared, “is focused on collective action to protect and promote health and wellbeing… and foster resilience and adaptation that responds to the fragility of the planet.”
Technology drives transformation as much as geopolitics. The Council truly broke new ground with A Universal Declaration ofHuman Responsibilities in 1997, which emphasized the centrality of truth-telling ethics, but in the Baku plenary of 2016, it equally explored new technologies like artificial intelligence and powerful social media platforms, which have the power to spread lies through everyone’s cell phones. Dealing with disinformation over the internet is one of the predominant challenges of our age. As Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, has written about his creation: “I had hoped that 30 years from its creation, we would be using the web foremost for the purpose of serving humanity…However the reality is much more complex. Communities are being ripped apart as prejudice, hate and disinformation are peddled online.”
With our partner One Young World, we will again address, in this plenary, all these historic challenges. This is not, however, a normal year.
In 2025, our world is experiencing changes in geopolitics, economics, ethics and well-being every bit as profound as the transformations the InterAction Council has had to deal with in the past forty years. But there is one major difference. Then, the changes were products of major shifts in the power balance involving many nations or technological advances that swept the world. Today, the changes are due to the whims of one man and his legion of dedicated followers. Donald Trump and his MAGA movement are tearing down the international institutions, world trading system, security architecture and ethical norms that the United States, more than any other single country, has championed. It is rare, perhaps unprecedented, for a great power to attack its allies, give succour to its adversaries, and weaken an economic system from which it has benefited greatly - not because it was forced to but due to its own volition. Yet this is the world in which we are now living.
After the First World War, when Europe had torn itself apart and China was riven by revolution and civil war, the American century began. Like any era of great power supremacy, there were many missteps along the way - the InterAction Council was especially critical of the invasion of Iraq over the chimera of weapons of mass destruction. But the world we know was one that Americans built.
President Franklin Roosevelt began the job of dismantling the high tariffs of his Republican predecessors and that led to the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs and eventually the World Trade Organization. After the Second World War, the United States took the lead in creating the United Nations and bringing democracy to Japan. President Harry Truman initiated the Marshal Plan that rebuilt Europe and laid the foundation for the European Union. Dwight Eisenhower was the first Supreme Commander of NATO, the alliance that contributed so much to the peace and security of this continent. President Ronald Reagan created the National Endowment for Democracy to advance human rights and political engagement across the globe. And many Presidents used their good offices and American power to contribute to international political settlements: I can personally attest, for example, that President Bill Clinton played a very positive role in helping to bring about the Good Friday Agreement.
Yet, the United States has not always been a world leader. In the nineteenth century, presidents warned of “entangling alliances” and isolationism was the norm. Current politics in the United States appears to be yearning for this past era, which means that the Age of American international leadership is over or at least it is no longer a given. This does not mean, however, that problems cannot be solved or that international institutions must decline. It does mean that states, bodies like the InterAction Council, and citizens dedicated to world peace and justice must step up and play a larger role to preserve and promote the better world we all want. One of the Council’s greatest achievements was to call for a new commitment to responsibilities. We all have a responsibility today to advance collectively, not retreat individually.
In June 1963, President John F Kennedy was the first American President to visit Ireland. He told our Parliament: “No nation, large or small, can be indifferent to the fate of others, near or far. Modern economics, weaponry, and communications have made us realize more than ever that we are a human family, and this one planet is our home.” In 2025, the Earth is still our home, and the peoples of our Earth are still our family. What we have built together, let no man pull asunder.