Originally published on the CGS blog on September 3, 2009.
Chuck Hagel, a former Republican Senator, published an op-ed in the Washington Post that reflects many of the ideals that GlobalSolutions.org is working towards. He stresses the need for the United States to take a collaborative role in the global community, working together with other states to solve critical issues:
“We need a clearly defined strategy that accounts for the interconnectedness and the shared interests of all nations. Every great threat to the United States — whether economic, terrorism, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, health pandemics, environmental degradation, energy, or water and food shortages — also threatens our global partners and rivals.”
The best way for the United States to combat these problems is to work alongside other nations, specifically through the United Nations. The U.N. provides a forum in which countries can build “coalitions of common interests”, so that they can work collectively to solve issues facing every nation in the world. These issues require such collaboration because they have such a wide reach, like climate change or the global food crisis, for example.
The United States cannot work as a lone force in the globalized world. Nations are interconnected in ways that were never imaginable years ago, and this requires a change in actions. The U.S. needs to use the U.N. as a tool to help solve the critical problems it is facing, along with the rest of the world.
