Your Majesty, Your Royal Highnesses,
Your Highnesses, Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen, Welcome to the Opening Dinner of
the 7th IISS Manama Dialogue, held under the patronage of His Royal
Highness Prince Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa, Crown Prince and Deputy Supreme
Commander. Allow me to thank you again Sir, for the tremendous collaboration the
IISS has enjoyed with the Kingdom and its government in advancing the goal,
shared by everyone in this room, to create a stable trans-regional forum to
advance defence diplomacy in the Gulf and to ensure a more sophisticated
international public understanding of the strategic and geo-economic issues of
the day.
We are delighted that the
Manama Dialogue in Bahrain is now established, rather like our Shangri-La
Dialogue is in Singapore, as the primary inter-governmental security summit of
the region, involving a measured blend of prime ministers, foreign ministers,
defence ministers, defence chiefs and security professionals with top
strategists in a dialogue focused on the security issues of this region, involving
all those with a stake in its stability. We are particularly privileged that
tomorrow, on the first full day of our official deliberations, the Keynote
Address will be delivered by His Majesty King Abdullah of Jordan, whom I have
the distinct honour to thank for his gracious presence with us tonight.
The International Institute for
Strategic Studies launched this Dialogue in 2004, mindful of the fact that
formal regional institutions could not include all the regional powers and
indeed all the outside powers that were involved in Persian Gulf security. This
Dialogue could help fill that gap, by bringing together in one place the
highest representatives of the regional states, with leaders from North
America, Europe and Asia whose engagement with the region was strong and
essential to its growing role in international affairs. The fluidity and
dynamism of contemporary strategic realities make it in any case difficult for
formal institutions to be instantly responsive to every emerging need, or to incorporate
in their structure every actor as soon as their relevance is established.
By giving a powerfully
intergovernmental character to the Manama Dialogue, while preserving the
informality of an unofficial mechanism, the IISS could serve this twin need for
official exchanges on strategic challenges, conducted between groups of states
flexibly assembled. This effort at privatised defence diplomacy works, we like
to think, precisely because the IISS has no agenda in mounting the Manama
Dialogue other than to create a forum where the agenda can be set by those
responsible for security and foreign policy and to have those perspectives
seriously and un-polemically debated with top analysts and experts.
Proud as we may be to have, so to speak, filled a market need with the creation
of this regional security summit, the tremendous effort would be wasted, if the
subjects raised here were not seriously studied. Our core mission at the IISS is
to provide from an international perspective the facts on which good public
policy can be based and the analysis that can help the right questions to be
framed. This we do every day of the
year, with analysts drawn from dozens of countries.
The International Institute for
Strategic Studies, headquartered in London, and with offices in Washington and
Singapore, opened this year a regional office in Bahrain. The Institute’s
office here is intended to bring an international perspective to Middle East
debates and a Middle East accent to global discussions. From here we will
publish facts and analysis on the region, but also bring to it the best
information and strategic judgements about the rest of the world.
Our very special guest this
evening may be happy to learn that as we reviewed the literally hundreds of
applications we received for employment in this office for the first dozen or
so positions we wanted to fill, searching for the brightest, most hardworking,
most entrepreneurial, most imaginative and most promising talent available,
that we met those criteria most easily by hiring a majority of women.
It is a delight for them and
for all of us, that one of the most influential and prominent American
political leaders of both the last decade of the 20th Century and
the first decade and more of the 21st Century should be our Opening
Speaker tonight.
Hillary Rodham Clinton has
played an enormous role in the executive and legislative branches of US
government. Her energy as US Secretary of State has been formidable and her
commitment to direct personal diplomacy unrivalled. While the sheer miles she
covers and the numbers of leaders she meets in the service of US international
relations is impressive, the statistics would be cold and even sterile, without
the accompanying appreciation of the singular efforts she makes not just to meet
the leaders, but to understand the societies with which she and the US is
engaging. Today in a packed schedule in Bahrain for example, she has met not
only the political establishment, but also important representatives of civil
society.
Her presence with us today,
with such a wide and deep representation from the national security
establishments of the Gulf and neighbouring countries, endorses this Manama
Dialogue process as an important animator of strategic debate. The interest in
this room, and beyond it, in the priorities the US entertains in this region
and the issues with which it wishes to grapple is intense. We very much look
forward, Madam Secretary, to your thoughts on the US and regional security and
thank you for addressing us tonight at this podium.
