Congressman Kim Calls for a New “Architecture of Stability” at Halifax International Security Forum

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, Congressman Andy Kim (NJ-03) delivered remarks at a panel discussion at the Halifax International Security Forum where he called for a new “architecture of stability” in response to a “new era of global politics”. Congressman Kim, in attendance as part of a Congressional delegation along with bipartisan members of the United States Senate, spoke on a panel entitled “Era of Action: Sinking CRINK (China, Russia, Iran and North Korea) Inc”, joining General Jennie Carignan, Chief of the Defence Staff, Canadian Armed Forces, Canada; Admiral Samuel Paparo, Commander, U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, United States; and Mr. Andrew Shearer, Director-General National Intelligence, Office of National Intelligence, Australia. A full video of the panel can be found by clicking here.

Key quotes from Congressman Kim include:

“What I try to convey to the American people right now is that this is a new era of global politics. The rise of these four nations and their ability to disrupt and have the impact that they do is because we’re at a new inflection point moment as a world. We’re so clearly no longer in a post-9/11 world. We’re in a new era, but this new era is not shaped and determined. 

These new eras – often times the beginnings of these new eras are incredibly fluid. Incredibly tumultuous. Very chaotic. What our job is to try to build an architecture of stability at a time when we see other countries challenging norms like sovereignty to try to test what this new era is like.”

“We live in a time in of tremendous degradation in terms of trust in governance – trust in politics right now…you can have the strongest military in the world, if people don’t rely on you, if they don’t believe and trust that you can utilize that in a means when the chips are on the table and the crisis is full blown, what’s the point…we should think about strength not just about hard power, not just in terms of military might and economic might, but try to recognize that at this point, with such a deficit of trust, we live in the time of the greatest amount of distrust in government in modern global history, let alone American history, that is something fundamental we need to wrap our heads around. Otherwise, I don’t know how we’re going to mobilize the power and the trust and the patience of the American people, let alone how we can build a coalition internationally.”

“We live in the time of a new era of politics, but what’s interesting is that it’s coinciding with a new era of technological innovation advance too. So these two paradigm shift moments in our human history are happening at the same time. So what we hope to do is try to think strategically how to engage…We should try to work together to try to think through what is our collective vision, what do we want this international system to look like 10, 20, 30 years from now?”

Congressman Kim is a member of the House Armed Services Committee, House Foreign Relations Committee, and the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party. Prior to being elected to Congress, Kim was a career public servant, working in national security at USAID, the Pentagon, the State Department, the White House National Security Council, and as a civilian advisor to commanding generals in Afghanistan.