Former Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia said he’d consider being Barack Obama’s vice president. Columnist Tom Friedman previewed his forthcoming book titled “Hot, Flat and Crowded.” And journalist Jeffrey Goldberg turned an interview with Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff into a comic affair.
So went an “Afternoon of Conversation” at the Aspen Ideas Festival on Thursday, which served as the close of the first half of the week-long conference and the opening of the second half.
While interviewing Nunn and former Secretary of State Colin Powell, Aspen Institute President and CEO Walter Isaacson told Nunn he is the best candidate to be Obama’s running mate.
Nunn, who served 24 years in the U.S. Senate and is viewed as a foreign policy and arms control expert, replied modestly that it was a “great honor to be mentioned” as a potential running mate.
But he said he thinks the odds are long that he will be selected, and that, if chosen, he will have to think hard about it. One key factor, Nunn said, is who else will be on the team Obama assembles, as the make-up of the president’s team is critical.
With that, he turned to Powell and asked, “Right, Colin?”
Powell promptly responded, “Right!”
Powell was secretary of state during President George Bush’s first term, and ultimately clashed with former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
Under rapid-fire questioning from Isaacson, Nunn, 69, said he did not vote on whether to invade Iraq, as he was no longer in the Senate, but that as a citizen, he was against the decision.
When asked what America should do in Iraq, Nunn said, in his thick, Georgia drawl, that we should continue to train the Iraqi army and police, protect the country’s borders, “do what we can to take care of Al-Qaeda,” and work towards reconciliation.
“But what we are not going to do is continue to be involved in an urban civil war between religions,” he said, adding that he would not put an absolute deadline on pulling out troops.
Both Powell and Nunn said that the American armed forces can no longer sustain the troop levels currently called for in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Nunn added that “manpower is going to dictate when we get out of Iraq more than any politician’s campaign promises.”
Nunn, who was instrumental in setting the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy governing gay men and women who serve in the military, said he highly values the service of gay men and women, and it is appropriate now to review the policy. He added, however, that it will likely prove politically difficult to change it.
And in response to another political hot potato tossed at him by Isaacson, Nunn said he thinks the economic embargo on Cuba should be lifted.
“I think the policy is counter-productive,” Nunn said.
Addressing an Aspen Institute crowd gathered at the Benedict Music Tent can apparently be good for national political candidates, as both Obama and Sen. John McCain spoke here in 2005. McCain is returning to Aspen to speak on Aug. 14.
Chertoff’s chuckles
The afternoon in the tent opened with Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic magazine reassuring Secretary Michael Chertoff that there were, in fact, some Republicans in the Institute audience, noting that he had spotted “at least seven” on the Institute’s campus this week.
At one point, Goldberg read Chertoff the instructions posted on the Homeland Security Web site about how people might want to stay indoors in the event of a nuclear attack, and suggested, to much laughter, that “this might not be adequate advice.”
Later, Goldberg asked about the porous nature of the border with Mexico, especially with regard to drug trafficking, and said that “the easiest way to smuggle a nuclear device is to hide it in a bale of marijuana.”
Chertoff, who gave common-sense answers to the questions posed by Goldberg, said he is most concerned about a nuclear or radiological weapon’s being smuggled in to the country on a private jet, and noted that private jet owners will have to get used to new regulations someday.
Goldberg stopped him, motioned to the audience, and said, “By the way, you’re speaking directly to them. They are all here.”
Friedman’s flattening world
In between Chertoff and Nunn, Tom Friedman, the foreign affairs columnist for The New York Times and a best-selling author, gave a stirring speech about the fate of the world and how Americans can help to save it.
Friedman, a frequent visitor, read the opening and closing passages from a book he has recently completed that will hit stores on Sept. 8.
The full title of the 400-page book is “Hot, Flat and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution and How It Can Revive America.”
“It is about energy and the environment and it is about America,” said Friedman, whose last book was titled “The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century.”
Friedman said the “engine” driving all the important trends in the world today is the convergence of global climate disruption, the rise of a consumptive middle class around the world — what Friedman calls “global flattening” — and the growing world population.
With regard to global warming, Friedman said we can all expect to experience severe weather and “global weirding,” a term he credited to Hunter Lovins, formerly with the Rocky Mountain Institute.
He went on to say that peoples all around the world increasingly aspire to live a comfortable American lifestyle, and the world’s population, which was 2.6 billion in 1953, is expected to more than triple, to 9.2 billion, by 2053.
“Flat is meeting crowded, and it was already getting hot,” Friedman summed up.
The new book then explores the energy and food demands those new billions will place on existing systems, the rise of “petro-dictators,” the frightening loss of biodiversity, and the fact that one in four people in the world still do not have access to electricity.
Friedman said that Americans can lead the way forward, and that a crucial step will be to develop “clean energy systems” that provide “abundant, cheap, clean electrons” to “smart homes” and “smart cars.”
Squarely addressing the members of the American political, financial and cultural elite in the audience, Friedman then read from the closing chapter of his book:
“In the final analysis, the decisions Americans make about sustainable development are not technical decisions about peripheral matters, and they are not simply decisions about the environment. They are decisions about who we are, what we value, what kind of world we want to live in and how we want to be remembered.
“This is not about the whales anymore,” Friedman read. “This is about us.
“We are the first generation of Americans in the energy-climate era, and what we do about the challenges of energy and climate, conservation and preservation, will tell our kids who we really are ... We need to rediscover green and redefine America, and, in so doing, rediscover ourselves and what it means to be Americans.”
