Media www.rajawalisiber.coom – FREDERICK KEMPE: Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us tonight for the Atlantic Council’s 2021 Distinguished Leadership Awards, which is at the same time our sixtieth-anniversary celebration. Welcome also to the Andrew Mellon Auditorium for the Atlantic Council’s first in-person awards dinner in more than two years.
To kick things off this evening, I’d like to turn over the floor to our chairman, John F.W. Rogers, who is joining us remotely this evening. He’ll explain that. Mr. Chairman, John, the floor is yours.
JOHN F.W. ROGERS: Good evening. Ladies and gentlemen, dignitaries, and distinguished honorees, as chairman of the Atlantic Council it is my pleasure to welcome you to the Distinguished Leadership Awards. I wish that I could be there with you, but a succession of events—not the least of which has been air transportation—have conspired to keep me from arriving on time.
But please do not let my absence lessen the sincerity of my very best wishes to our honorees and the warmest welcome to the Andrew Mellon Auditorium. It was in this very room that President Truman hosted the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty on April 4, 1949, just four short years after the culmination of the Second World War. As the Atlantic community came together at this historic inflection point, it became evident that a clear, coherent, and more effective voice was needed to address the challenges that lie ahead.
It was against this backdrop that the Atlantic Council was founded in 1961, bringing together the transatlantic community to navigate times of crisis. Sixty years later, the transatlantic spirit lives on, stronger, certainly, more global than ever before.
As we gather on the eve of Veterans Day, I want to offer a special salute to our nation’s armed forces who have dedicated their lives to this great country so that we may live in freedom and prosperity and in the enduring gratitude that we have for the brave men and women who have made the ultimate sacrifice. And on behalf of the entire Atlantic Council community, we thank you.
I would like to offer a salute to the previous Atlantic Council chairmen who have come before me, including General James L. Jones, Governor Jon Huntsman, Secretary Chuck Hagel, and General Brent Scowcroft, whom we lost in August [2020] at the age of ninety-five. I deeply appreciate their immense contributions to the Atlantic Council.
Despite the challenges caused by the pandemic over the past two years, this evening’s honorees have demonstrated their own extraordinary approach to global leadership, which have united communities around the world at a time when it is needed most. And thanks to their vision, the strength of their character, and their commitment to a more secure future, we honor Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission; Dr. Albert Bourla, the chairman and CEO of Pfizer; Professor Sahin and Dr. Türeci, the co-founders of BioNTech; and Dua Lipa, a Grammy Award-winning artist and activist. Congratulations once again.
And before I close, I would like to offer my sincere gratitude to the entire Atlantic Council staff, the board of directors, and the International Advisory Board for making tonight and so much more possible. I am deeply proud to work with each of you and thank you and enjoy the evening.
FREDERICK KEMPE: So thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you also to Adrienne Arsht, the executive vice chair of the board, who is here, of course, this evening, and to Dave McCormick. A little bit of applause for Adrienne, I heard there. And to Dave McCormick, the chair of our International Advisory Board. We’re so happy to have you here as well, Dave. And it really does make me so happy to see you all.
With that, ladies and gentlemen, please turn your attention and you’ll see—you’ll hear from Dave and you’ll hear from me a little bit later on various things this evening. With that, ladies and gentlemen, please turn your attention to the screens as we begin tonight’s Distinguished Leadership Awards.
PHIL MURPHY: Good evening, everybody. It is an incredible honor to be a part of tonight’s event and I must begin by congratulating the Atlantic Council on achieving its sixtieth anniversary.
Many of our European colleagues refer to the United States as the place across the pond from Europe, but the work of the Atlantic Council has helped shrink the figurative size of an ocean and, with it, the distances between our continents, our governments, and our people. So I want to give John Rogers—a dear friend—and the distinguished board a big shoutout, and Fred Kempe and the incredible staff. Congratulations on your sixtieth.
Now onto the task at hand. By the way, very rare for me, even having lived in Germany, that the Scorpions are playing before I got out here. And I’m opening for both Ursula von der Leyen and Dua Lipa. So I want to—I’ve got to pinch myself here. I salute each of tonight’s outstanding awardees and I am so privileged to introduce the recipient of this year’s award for Distinguished International Leadership, someone who, from our very first moments when I served as the United States ambassador in Germany, my wife, Tammy, who’s with me tonight—we bonded with our honoree tonight instantly and became dear friends. And she’s someone with whom I have found so much both professional and personal common ground. For those of us who have dedicated parts of or all of our careers in service to the preservation and strengthening of the transatlantic partnership, Ursula von der Leyen needs no introduction, but given that this is an awards ceremony and I’m expected to fill up three minutes of the program, she’s going to get one.
The thirteenth president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen counts ancestors across generations in public service—and, by the way, on both sides of the Atlantic—and she is the daughter of an esteemed German civil servant who also served as minister president of Lower Saxony in Germany. That is, for those of you who don’t know the German system, the equivalent of an American governor, and therefore, I know that Ursula also understands the excitement and relief after a successful governor’s reelection. Just making sure you’re paying attention out there.
One could rightfully say that Ursula was born to lead, and certainly, that would be correct. But you could also be incorrect in that assertion, given all that she has done herself throughout her own distinguished career in public service. A doctor and public-health expert by profession, she’s had an even larger impact on our world by answering the calling of public service. Across a distinguished fourteen years in the Cabinet of Chancellor Angela Merkel, another extraordinary champion of the transatlantic partnership, Ursula compiled a unique portfolio that has directly improved the lives of literally tens and tens of millions of German citizens—minister of family affairs and youth, minister of labor and social affairs, minister of defense. But now, as the president of the European Commission, her work is impacting hundreds of millions of European lives and, in turn, billions of lives around the world. Her tenure has also coincided with one of the most challenging periods in our long transatlantic partnership, even beyond the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. But President von der Leyen’s unwavering commitment to strong US-European relations is ensuring that we are not letting anything as wide as an ocean keep us from achieving our shared goals.
So perhaps leadership is in Ursula von der Leyen’s DNA after all, or as my friend Albert Bourla and the other medical leadership, outstanding leaders here tonight might say, it’s in her mRNA. Either way, the seventy-five-year economic and security partnership between the United States and Europe is returning to full strength, and so much of this is due to one person in particular: Liebe Ursula, meine damen und herren, ladies and gentlemen, it is my distinct honor and pleasure to present the Atlantic Council’s 2021 Distinguished International Leadership Award to my dear friend, President Ursula von der Leyen.
PRESIDENT URSULA VON DER LEYEN: … Thank you very much. Thank you, Phil, for your kind words.
And I must say, ladies and gentlemen, I feel incredibly honored by this award. The fact that the Atlantic Council is awarding me, as a European and transatlantic citizen, means so much to me. This is exactly how I feel: A European and a transatlantic citizen.
My great-grandmother was born here in the United States in 1883. When she was nineteen years old, she married a German merchant, my great grandfather, and she moved to Bremen—that is a city in northern Germany—and spent there the rest of her life.
My father —and thank you, Phil, for mentioning him—was fifteen years old when World War II ended. He saw all the atrocities and horrors of war as a boy, but then he also made the overwhelming experience of liberation thanks to the United States and their allies. And after the war, he was one of the first German students awarded a Fulbright US scholarship. He studied at Cornell University, and for him, a completely new world opened up through the generosity and the foresight of a US politician. He never forgot this great experience throughout his life, and he passed on the typical American “why not” and “can do” spirit to his children.
And, my dear friends, around about forty-five years later I fell in love with the United States during the years I spent as [a] trailing spouse in Stanford. My husband was a postdoc and later a faculty member at the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine at Stanford, headed at that time by Dr. Victor Dzau, who is with us tonight. So we moved to California with our at that time three children.
You must know that in Germany in the early 1990s—in the early 1990s, it wasn’t that common to be a mother while having a professional career too. Then coming to the United States felt like a breath of fresh air for me. No one questioned my choice of being a working mom. Everyone expected both me and my husband to work and take care of the kids. I felt supported and empowered like never before. Two more children were born. And thus, since then, my husband and I are proud parents of two American citizens.
The story of the transatlantic ties is made of millions of stories like mine, but most importantly it’s made of shared values and interests between the two sides of the ocean. And this was true when the Atlantic Council was created exactly sixty years ago and it is still true today, in an entirely different world compared to the era of the Cold War. Yes, the European Union and the United States are still natural partners. And even if recently we may have disagreed on some difficult choices, our interests and values converge on all of the most crucial issues of our times. For example: Shaping the economy and the recovery while fighting climate change; rewriting modern rules for the global economy; and protecting our democracies.
And I would like to briefly address these three issues tonight because all of them—on all of them, the United States and the European Union are on the same side of the table and surely on the same side of history.
First, on a green recovery, what are the European Union’s and the United States’ interests? We both want to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius while at the same time relaunching the economy both domestically and around the world. And this means on one hand decarbonizing our economies, investing in green innovation and clean technologies, and in high-quality infrastructure at home; and on the other hand, it means supporting developing countries to leapfrog to a carbon-neutral future. And as President Biden and I demonstrated at the COP26 in Glasgow last week, the European Union and the United States are fully aligned on this. We initiated together [the] Global Methane Pledge and got more than one hundred countries to join. We are working on a circular economy that gives back more to nature than it takes. We are both working on a pilot with South Africa to help them close their coal plants and create new green jobs instead. And at the G20 summit in Rome, we agreed not only to pause our disputes on steel and aluminum but to join our efforts to decarbonize these two crucial industries. The United States and the European Union are exactly where they should be: Showing global leadership to [ensure] nothing less than the survival of our planet at stake.
Second, on rewriting modern rules for the global economy, the challenge we face here is clear. Fast technological change and shifting economic forces need a modern rulebook and effective international action. Take tech policy. Both the European Union and the United States want to become less dependent on international supply chains for critical technologies. We can help each other to diversify and improve resilience.
For example, on critical issues like semiconductors, here at the Atlantic Council you have recently argued that it is time for transatlantic digital policy. Well, with the EU-US Trade and Technology Council we are taking crucial steps in absolutely the right direction.
And I imagine us cooperating also on the rules for digital platforms. We have a convergent vision on how digital platforms should work in open societies and open economies.
And then let me touch on building the networks we need for the global economy. We in the European Union are about to present a new strategy to connect the world. We call it Global Gateway. Like President Biden’s Build Back Better for the World, Global Gateway will seek to be a multiplier for high-standard investment in infrastructure around the world. Our initiatives will help build much-needed networks for transport, energy, trade, data, and people while insisting on the highest environmental and labor standards, and on financial transparency. It will forge links, not create dependencies. And when the European Union and the United States come together, we have the power to shape the world of tomorrow from 6G to green finance.
And therefore, finally, this year has reminded us that we must stand up for democracy every day. Democracy is being challenged from both inside and outside. Authoritarian regimes try to influence the outcomes of our democratic elections. In the United States, hundreds of people attacked the Capitol, the heart of your democracy. In the European Union, some are questioning basic democratic principles upon which our union is built. It is time again to stand up for the values that define our democracies. We believe in the freedom of citizens with both rights and responsibilities. We believe in the rule of law. Every human being is equal before the law. We believe in the dignity of every person, and thus fundamental rights. It is again time to speak up for our democracies.
I know we can count on the Atlantic Council for this. And I want to thank you not just for this award, but for keeping alive the flame of transatlantic cooperation towards a new day in our deep friendship. Thank you so much.