Cardinal Dolan, thank you for your invitation to address this great gathering and for our long friendship. Your devout faith and irrepressible vitality are an inspiration to us all. It is also a special pleasure to add my congratulations to Rob Speyer on receiving this year’s Happy Warrior Award. Rob and his parents have been my close friends for many years, and I admire Rob’s abiding commitment to his family’s tradition of generosity and grace.

I last addressed this dinner nearly a half century ago, in 1974. On that occasion, I learned the reach of this event. Referencing the issue of whether Senator Javits’ trip to sanctioned Cuba without State Department permission bothered me, I said that “the trip didn’t bother me; what bothered me is that he came back.” Senator Javits heard this remark on the radio in his car and, as soon as the dinner ended, chastised me, because he thought the event reached a far larger group of people than the usual Washington dinners to which I was accustomed.

At the 1974 dinner, during a moment of national upheaval, I suggested that “a society thrives not on its victories, but on its reconciliations.” That sentiment is still applicable today, amidst international tension, domestic division, and breathtaking technological change. We should remember Al Smith and his enduring spirit of reconciliation. “The flag stands for equal opportunity,” he declared, and his life was a testament to constructive patriotism.

On Labor Day 1938, my family arrived from Nazi Germany in New York. This pulsating port had forged Al Smith’s character. In that year, and until his death in 1944, he had his office in the Empire State Building, a towering monument to his vision and his stature. Al Smith still lived on Fifth Avenue across from his beloved Central Park Zoo. As a boy, Smith and his father had traversed the uncompleted Brooklyn Bridge; as a man, his passage from the Fulton Fish Market to the State House in Albany offered an irreplaceable education in the grand diversity of America’s people.

The Happy Warrior embodied civic virtue, harmonizing the personal politics of the nineteenth century and the practical imperatives of the twentieth. Al Smith was an utterly pragmatic politician who understood the virtues of compromise because he believed in the virtues of America. He knew the difference between giving a speech and making life better for ordinary Americans. Al Smith got things done – he reformed the civil service, established the first state park system, and improved the lots of women, children, and minorities. His was a city and a nation of endeavor, which transcended the divisions of the Old World in a new land of achievement.

National renewal in our time requires leaders who can channel the crosscurrents of America as Al Smith did. In that spirit, let me say a few words about leadership. Leadership lifts people from where they are to where they have never been. On that quest, the leader must harmonize society’s past and its future, its experiences and its aspirations.

The first stage on that journey is for the leader to seek to fulfill a society’s best sense of itself. No people can remain great that concentrates on impugning its own historical self-image. Smith’s was not a policy of grievance but of achievement and prospect.

A leader must balance fidelity to history with analysis of the present and intuition for the future. The leader weighs those elements of reality which offer opportunities for vision, those which must be managed, and those which steel society for its tests. The true leader discerns society’s vital interests and devises a strategy for attaining them. In turn, strategy is formed by its objectives, the markers along the way to accomplishment. Transformational leaders respond to their societies’ failures by appealing to their peoples’ most basic values – which in our society are freedom, hope, transparency of government, and equality.

The leader achieves consensus by affirming a clear sense of purpose. A view of the future is the only inducement to shouldering the sacrifices that greatness demands.

This means that, for the greater part of history, the United States has been able to rely exclusively on the visionary part of its foreign policy, largely because the country was protected by two great oceans, and partly because the Founders developed institutions that permitted us to implement it.

We need a combination of the visionary and the tactical. Few of our foreign policy challenges will lend themselves to purely visionary solutions. Paradoxically, if we are to avoid permanent conflict, most of them require a gradual approach and sustained effort.

In China, the United States for the first time encounters a country with resources potentially comparable to its own. Each country thinks itself exceptional, but in different ways. China expects that its civilizational continuity and magnitude will command respect. America acts on the conviction that its values are universally applicable. The key test is whether these concepts of national greatness can coexist. Regarding Taiwan, the conflicting positions have been too different to permit an immediate permanent solution. If we want to avoid both conflict with China and an abandonment of Taiwan, we should find a way to make the current dangerous situation tolerable – a diplomatic enterprise to maintain an equilibrium over time. For equilibrium will not supply its own momentum; it must be constantly nurtured and sustained.

With Russia, the challenge is whether that country can be brought to reconcile its mystical vision of itself with the independence of its neighbors. In Ukraine, the Russian insistence on security through domination has to continue to be resisted. But ultimately, Russia must be part of a final settlement. Only in this manner can Ukraine and the West build on the victories that they have already won and secure the freedom of Ukraine, the reduction of Russia’s conventional threat, the affirmation of Western values, and the revitalization and expansion of NATO. The test of a postwar system will be whether it can eventually incorporate Russia into an enduring European order.

In the Middle East, a barbaric attack by terrorists has redefined the problem for Israel and its allies. Past progress in the region has always depended on direct and active American diplomacy, and the United States must revitalize its historical role over time. But that requires America to recognize that, while Jerusalem renews its contribution to a lasting regional order, there will be no durable peace so long as Iran surrounds Israel with tens of thousands of advanced weapons. The immediate question is whether the Jewish state can fulfill its aspirations for freedom in the face of these accumulated arms, both to the north and to the south, and the seemingly implacable hostility to Israel of some Palestinians that produced this latest disaster.

The backdrop of all these challenges is the revolution in artificial intelligence: AI, for short. In its scope and potential, the advent of AI grows out of the invention of the printing press. Just as the printing press spawned the Enlightenment that enabled universal literacy, AI upends analytical reasoning by providing instantaneous answers to questions in search of explanation. But while AI promises many benefits, its application to advanced weapons creates a dangerous disjunction between the power of modern arms and the purposes of nations. Our technology has outrun our understanding.

During such a revolutionary period, leaders will be tempted to await events. But as the scope for decision-making narrows, merely managing the status quo can be the most perilous course of all. As the prophets of AI drive technology inexorably forward, statesmen must emerge to reconcile AI and its fruits to ourselves, our societies, and the cause of World Order. Transformational times require statesmen with the vision to build toward a better future.

***

Pope Benedict XVI proclaimed that “diplomacy is the art of hope.” The same is true of leadership – a great leader is the giver and protector of our hopes. Tonight, as I observe the present from the vista of my century, I remain hopeful that the nation that produced Al Smith will call forth leaders of courage and character to continue the American journey. Thank you.