David Speedie and Shirley Williams on transatlantic relations

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David Speedie and Shirley Williams on transatlantic relations

09 Oct 2009

Speakers: Baroness Shirley Williams, David Speedie

David Speedie of the Carnegie Council is joined by Baroness Shirley Williams for a wide-ranging conversation, covering US foreign policy, progress in the Middle East, and the British political establishment. The Carnegie Council brought Williams and Speedie together as part of it US Global Engagement Programme, exploring the enduring importance of ethical issues within international affairs, and productive means of generating global discourse between dissenting governments and bodies.

The main drive of the US Global Engagement programme addresses how America conducts its business with the rest of the world. For Williams, this direction is embodied in no greater way that in the hopeful conferral of the Nobel Prize for Peace upon the newly elected President Obama. A “peaceful revolution” is paramount, with a brooding necessity for the diplomatic address of issues rather than through imposition.

Obama’s approach towards Islam needs to remain one of understanding. An understanding which acknowledges the religious as much as political implications of a US presence in Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Nuclear disputes with Iran are certainly a two-fold relationship of discourse, not puritanical dictation from one country to another. Similarity is a fundamental stepping stone towards solving difference.

And if Copenhagen and Obama’s healthcare issues have exposed anything, it’s the sheer idiocy of extreme partisan politics. Williams, the “living embodiment” of a political structure which can’t rely simply on political dichotomy, wraps up by cementing her demand for a parliament of representative discourse as a means of diffusing the apathy and disillusionment which permeates the British public’s opinions of Westminster.