Today, as our economies recover,we also have to do more to put this indispensablepartnership to work, a sharedprosperity that benefits us all. And we can start, frankly, byharnessing theenergy and the talents of our people, which is what the Transatlantic TradeandInvestment Partnership is all about. T-TIP is about more than growing oureconomies. It willpromote trade, investment, innovation. It will bring oureconomies closer together whilemaintaining high standards in order to ensurethat we create good jobs for these young peoplewho are screaming about thefuture. And it will cement our way of doing business as the world’sgoldstandard. Imagine what happens when you take the world’s largest market and theworld’slargest single economy and you marry them together with the principlesand the values thatcome with it. It will – if we’re ambitious enough, T-TIPwill do for our shared prosperity whatNATO has done for our shared security,recognizing that our security has always been built onthe notion of our sharedprosperity.
We are the most innovativeeconomies in the world, the United States and Europe, and assuch we have amajor responsibility to deal with this growing potential catastrophe ofclimatechange. I urge you, read the latest IPCC report. It’s really chilling. Andwhat’s chilling isnot rhetoric; it’s the scientific facts, scientific facts.And our history is filled with strugglesthrough the Age of Reason and theRenaissance and the Enlightenment for all of us to earnsome respect forscience. The fact is that there is no doubt about the real day-to-day impactofthe human contribution to the change in climate.
Next year, the United States willassume responsibility for the Arctic Council, and I can tellyou just lookingat what’s happening in the Arctic – and there are others here who aredeeplyinvested in that – we have enormous challenges. None of them are unsolvable.That’sthe agony of this moment for all of us. There are answers to all ofthese things, but there seemsto be an absence of will, an absence ofcollective leadership that’s ready to come together andtell our people notwhat they’re necessarily telling us through this crazy social media,incredibleconfluence of information that they’re sort of told they’re interested in, butfor us asleaders to suggest to them this is what you ought to be interested inbecause it actually affectsyour life and your livelihood and your future.
President Obama is implementingan ambitious plan that sees climate change not only as achallenge, but as anincredible set of opportunities for all of us, and I believe that.Themarketplace that created the great wealth in our country in the 1990s which saweverysingle quintile of our income earners see their income go up, everyquintile saw their income goup, and we created the greatest wealth the worldhas seen during the 1990s, greater even inAmerica than the period of thePierponts and the Morgans and the Rockefellers, Carnegies,Mellons, muchgreater. You know what it was? It was a $1 trillion market with 1 billionusers. Itwas the high-tech market, the personal computer mostly,communications.
The energy market that we arestaring at – that is the solution to the climate change.Energy policy is thesolution to climate change. That market, my friends, is a $6 trillionmarkettoday with 4 to 5 billion users today, and it will grow to some 9 billion usersover thecourse of the next 20 to 30 years. It is the mother of all markets,and only a few visionaries aredoing what is necessary to reach out and touch itand grab it and command its future.
I spoke last week at Davos aboutthe diplomatic work that the United States is engagedin, that I am engaged in,at the direction of President Obama, who believes in this vision and inall ofthese issues, and our European partners are jointly with us undertaking onthree of themost important initiatives right now to make the Middle East andthe world more secure.
With the help of countries likeGermany, the U.K., Italy, Denmark, Norway, Russia, wereached an agreement,ratified by the United Nations, to remove chemical weapons fromSyria.Obviously, I’m sure there’ll be some questions about that, and there ought tobe, buttogether, we need to all keep the pressure on the Assad regime to stopmaking excuses andfulfill Syria’s promises and obligations and meet the UNdeadlines.
With the help of the EU, Germany,U.K., France, and Russia – as well as China – Iran agreedto freeze and rollback its nuclear weapons program for the first time in a decade. And inthecoming months, we will remain unified – or I hope we will – to guarantee Iran’swillingnessto reach a comprehensive agreement that resolves the world’sconcerns about its nuclearprogram, hopefully through diplomacy backed up bythe potential of force.
With the help of the EU and theQuartet, we are pursuing a long-sought and much-neededpeace between Israelisand Palestinians. I have to tell you, the alternatives tosuccessfullyconcluding the conflict, when you stop and list them, are or ought to beunacceptableto anybody. If you look at it hard, you ought to come out and say failure isnot anoption, though regrettably the dynamics always present the possibility.
And so together we need to helpthe parties break through the skepticism, which is half thechallenge, andbegin to believe in the possibilities that are within their grasp. AsPresidentObama said on Tuesday, “In a world of complex threats, our security andleadershipdepend on all the elements of our power – including strong andprincipled diplomacy.” And itdepends on harnessing the power of our strongestalliances, too. No one country can possiblyhope to solve any of the challengesthat I have listed on its own.
That’s why this kind of meetingand the alliance that it represents, more importantly, andthe work that we doout of here after these meetings – that’s why it’s so important that theUnitedStates and Europe stick together, that we continue to understand the importanceof thestrength of our unity and unity in action, whether we’re working onAfghanistan, the CentralAfrican Republic, the challenge of the Maghreb, theLevant, the DPRK, global challenges likecyber security, infectious disease, orthe pursuit of a world without nuclear weapons. Plain andsimply, our sharedprosperity and security are absolutely indivisible. And in a shrinkingworldwhere our fundamental interests are inseparable, a transatlantic renaissancerequires thatwe defend our democratic values and freedoms. Don’t for aninstant underestimate howimportant that it is or that the difference that itmakes to courageous people like those in theUkraine, in Ukraine who arestanding up today for their ability to have a choice about theirfuture.
As I say all of this, the UnitedStates is the first to admit that our democracy too hasalways been a work inprogress. We know that. We’re proud that we work at it openly,transparently,accountably to reform it, to fix it, and to strengthen it when needed.PresidentObama’s review and revision of our signals intelligence practices isa case in point. So Iassure you we come to this conversation with humility.But humility is not a reason toavoid calling it the way you see it. And thefact is that we see a disturbing trend in too manyparts of Central and EasternEurope and the Balkans. The aspirations of citizens are once againbeingtrampled beneath corrupt, oligarchic interests, interests that use money tostifle politicalopposition and dissent, to buy politicians and media outlets,and to weaken judicialindependence and the rights of nongovernmentalorganizations.
Nowhere is the fight for ademocratic European future more important today than in Ukraine.While thereare unsavory elements in the streets in any chaotic situation, the vastmajority ofUkrainians want to live freely in a safe and a prosperous country,and they are fighting for theright to associate with partners who will helpthem realize their aspirations. And they havedecided that that means theirfutures do not have to lie with one country alone, and certainlynot coerced.The United States and EU stand with the people of Ukraine in that fight. Russiaandother countries should not view the European integration of their neighborsas a zero-sumgame. In fact, the lessons of the last half century are that wecan accomplish much more whenthe United States, Russia, and Europe worktogether. But make no mistake, we will continue tospeak out when our valuesand our interests are undercut by any country in the region.President Obamaleaves no doubt about America’s commitment to this relationship, and hewillcome to Europe three times already scheduled this year to reinforce theinvestment in ourshared future.