>> good evening everyone. thank you, frank. you have created high expectations which i will struggle to live up to but i have to first extend you a really warm thank you not only for bringing me here but because of our first encounter is the next generation project through the american assembly. because if it weren't for that experience and for your support for what we are not exactly orthodox ideas at the time, 2007, 2008, i would probably the less confident to write a book with this title. but going back to that time, 2007 when i finished up the second world, it wasn't conventional wisdom that the american relative decline was well underway, that power such as china should be treated as a

with emerging superpower not just a regional power. there really was this genuine competition for influence in strategic regions which i called the second world. it really took a while for a whole host of books to come out by a bonnie, farid zakaria and others were now i think we have started to some of these things. is a bit lonely early on and you were there for me so i really appreciate it. now, you can only write a book titled "how to run the world" if you are crazy or if you are writing about exactly one thing in one word, and that word is diplomacy. you are not allowed to write it look on "how to run the world" if you are writing about war and conquest and so forth. that would be how to rule the world and a lot of people confuse the two titles but i explicitly called it that for a reason. diplomacy is the one word answer

to how you run the world. running is the operative word. is about operation, but a system. is about management. war and conquest, we all see how far that gets us and where it gets us and where we wind up. what we do today falls very short. is crisis management. is ad hoc committees responding. is a world that feels like it is not too big to fail. a world of financial crises, failing states, commodities price spikes, resource competition, all of these things going on and we are just reacting. we don't have a system, a process to manage these situations. diplomacy is that system. diplomacy is that process. diplomacy is how we run the world. if we don't have diplomacy right, we are not we are not going to run it.

bad system, that process leads to bad outcome which is exactly what we are seeing around the world today. the purpose of this book is to think very seriously and take diplomacy seriously, not deposit diplomacy is the antidote to war. know, diplomacy is everything. is part of everything we do. the joke goes that it is the second oldest profession. i think you all know what the first is. and it is to take diplomacy seriously in that largest possible historical art and bring it to the diplomacy of today. because diplomacy does predate the nation state system and it will long outlast it. diplomacy will also launch long outlast wikileaks. one of the things it is commonly heard wind of leaky leak scandal broke was this is the end of diplomacy and it really fit right into this book because in the first chapter talk about all of the times that famous statement that said it is the end of diplomacy.

lord palmer said that in 1848 when he received the first telegraph cable at whitehall in london. he declared, his exact words were this is the end of diplomacy. zbigniew brzezinski said why do i have diplomats and embassies? i have a subscription to "the new york times." that is the lady. now with wikileaks people say too. as you find diplomacy is always adapting. diplomacy is about dialogue, but negotiations, communication all of those things which we would have international relations. we would have international community. but the players in diplomacy, the who what when where why and how, that is always changing. diplomacy never goes away but we have to move beyond this wedded us of the concept of diplomacy two states alone. that represents a narrower plight of what diplomacy is.

the best analogy in my mind to what diplomacy has become is a term from the internet and from the world of gaming and that is a massive multiplayer on blanking, mmog. like world of warcraft, farmville. diplomacy is a massive multiplayer game. it happens on line and it happens that relate but it does have been there. before the wikileaks scandal broke actually senator john kerry suggested the appoint an ambassador to cyberspace. even cyberdiplomacy was well underway before wikileaks. so, the subtitle of this book is charting a course to the next renaissance. that imply something. it implies that we live in a world that looks like the middle ages. to me the middle ages is a useful understanding so we don't attend everything we are experiencing today is unique and yes it is in many ways but there are precedence and there are

lessons from looking back a thousand years. and there were two exact parallels that i want to flush out without taking either of them too far. the first, and perhaps most important is that was a multipolar world. china, the song dynasty of china was the most advanced civilization at the time. invented paper money, gunpowder and have the largest cities in the world. india was also ruled by seafaring dynasties and increasingly becomes a naval power. they think back to the dynasty of india as well. gear up islamic world. think of the caliphates their world and baghdad that stretch from north north africa to central asia. the expansion of arab and islamic influence again is paralleled from a thousand years ago. it was the west that was divide, uncertain, feeling threatened.

the division between the holy roman empire, characterized western civilization at the time. but for the rest of the world, they look back and that was the golden age. and so it is important to remember when you look at the rise in china and india today and we look at the growing power in the middle east and arab countries we realize that it is not the first time. the second reason why medieval analogy is interesting is because of this notion of a massive multiplayer game. because that was a time in history before the nations states. this is the pre--- world than in europe at the time city states were the dominant actor. merchant families were very important in financing the expansion of local trade and forming the rows that connected eason was. religious groups, and obviously the church and the pope were very important players. mercenaries and nyce roamed around surfing whichever king or prince would pay the right

phrase. all of this should sound very familiar because again it feels a lot like the world today. humanitarian groups and so forth you the great universities of europe, bologna, paris, oxford were founded during this period met. they too were diplomatic are -- principle of recognition among the actors. it was constituted by mutual recognition and that is again what is happening today in the 21st century. so we live in a globalized middle ages, middle ages on steroids. so it would be so easy to stand here, having written a book called "the essential american" to say we have -- "how to run the world." the g20, we have got the solution. let's expand the u.n. security council or let's recapitalize the imf. that will do it.

or let's have another climate summit, cancun, raleigh, copenhagen. there are so many silver bullets out there that pretend to tell you how we will fix the world, how we will save the world. how we will get things right once and for all. all of this thanks again to me are apathetic will actually to the notion of diplomacy and on in on the ongoing process. in which you are always negotiating, always working to resolve and always adapting to the circumstances that change. and so, we have had in history international institutions and organizations that have tried to lock in world order to keep the world stable, to establish that process. congress of vienna and the early 19th century after the pulley on a course was of course one of the first that had worldwide impact because of the global reach of the european empire. then came of course the league of nations after world war i.

that were short-lived. then came the united nations after world war ii. i think everyone at reese that the international architecture, the oval diplomatic system is in need of reform. the kinds of things it we hear about how to reform it to me seem like very very minor miniscule trivial tinkering. when you take into account the globalized middle ages, a truly multipolar world where an enormously powerful state empires are present in making the new rules that weren't there or weren't at the negotiating table at that time years ago and when you look at the enormous resources that nonstate actors wield. such as corporations, ngos and others. there is nothing on that deck of the u.n. secretary general today that to me indicates that the power that be at that level are taking seriously the idea that they need entirely new

structures that cut across the public and private divide in order to harness the potential of all of the authorities enact terse letter active and influential in world politics today. there is nothing that i see in the u.s. department of state which i visited a couple of weeks ago to speak to the policy planning staff about this, that indicates to me that they have a systemic approach to harnessing and leveraging the resources of the american prospector, of the american ngo let alone those in the rest of the world. today we are very much on uncharted territory and therefore there is a need to rethink our diplomatic system. i want to really emphasize the extent to which what we are seeing today, the explosion of activity from the private sector, is not a flash in the pan. this is part and parcel of what globalization has done to the world. the rise of multinational

corporations that began with liberalization of trade and commerce in bringing down economic their ears after world war ii unleash the power of the national corporations. the end of the cold war helped to accelerate their rice and their prominence but that is not a genie that can be put back into the bottle. similar to the revolutions technology, communication and so forth that have empowered nonstate actors and she is in store for if that is not something that could be undone. these are intrinsic to localization. the growing strength, the power of the united states and the growing power of china and india and so forth is not going to -- it just means from a geopolitical standpoint the world is populated with more centers of power, but it does not eliminate, doesn't roll up the power of the other actors nor should it. i would submit to you that all of the problems in the perfect storm that i was talking about in the beginning.

the state of the world's international organizations have had decades to address these problems, and we still feel more and more anxious and nervous and a sense of hopelessness almost in some cases about these problems. it is time to think about harnessing nonstate powers, bringing them to the table to try and address these situations. you know and what can't be undone is that all of these doctrines leveraging localization are conducting their own foreign-policy. corporations move and relocate their headquarters. they buy into supply chains and basically network through mergers and acquisitions around the world. google very much has its own foreign-policy. bloomberg i described in this book not just as a news organization. is the world's largest private intelligence service. you are paying for proprietary data collected from about every

government in the world. the financial times has now gotten in on the act with a private site that they called tilt and for the right price you are also going to get intelligence as well. everyone is playing in this game. everyone has their policy to enrich themselves. walmart has a group global strategy. the ceos that we seem to admire the most whether it is bill gates or warren buffett or george soros, look at how they so effortlessly move across public and private divide by pursuing their own agenda whether human rights, technology or combating climate change, public health issues around the world. they'll think of themselves as ceos first in than later. these lines are being blurred very much. the same thing goes for ngos. i mentioned bill gates and the gates foundation but oxfam and even celebrities like bono or george clooney hiring satellites to monitor the north-south sudanese border.

things like this are examples of everyone trying to run their own foreign-policy. religious groups again they return in a and a way of the catholic church, hezbollah. -- various islamic factions in the way they too hastert own foreign-policy. and i mentioned cities earlier. places like new york, singapore and so many of them are conducting their own economic strategies. i need mayors and ministers of provinces of european countries who travel on their own diplomatic mission to try and raise money from. [speaking in arabic] are in wealth funds and gain investment into their city.