MR SCHWAB: Good afternoon, and before we start our session – and I know, Mr. Secretary, you will be in very good hands with my friend Tom Friedman – but allow me to be very personal. It’s your last session in your official capacity here in Davos, and I want to use this opportunity to thank you. You have been such a great friend and partner of the World Economic Forum. You have been a personal mentor to me. I remember the many hours we spent in your senator’s office many years ago already. You have been 11 times here in Davos. So that’s a opportunity to thank you from all our heart, and you, Mr. Secretary – I think you are an example and a role model for everybody in terms of your engagement for world peace.

And I can tell you the forum will continue to act as an ambassador and, let’s say, as a kind of keeper of your legacy. And in order to do so, I hope, even if you are not anymore in office, we have many opportunities to see you back. So thank you so much. (Applause.)
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FRIEDMAN:Last question: You served on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. You traveled the world. You were a soldier for America abroad. And you got to be Secretary of State for the United States these last four years. What surprised you about the job? What did you learn that you couldn’t see from there that you could see from here, and that if you did get a chance, in a friendly way, to write your successor a letter that he should know about being the secretary of state of the United States in the early 21st century?

SECRETARY KERRY: Well, first of all, it’s been a remarkable privilege and a great journey. And I don’t regret any moments of it, in that regard. A number of things have really struck me. First of all, I – well, let me come to that at the end.

In the beginning, I’d say to you – and I don’t say this – I think those of you who know me well know I say this without an ounce of chauvinism, without any arrogance at all, but Madeleine Albright’s description of the United States as the indispensible country just comes home to me every single day. And because we are blessed with this powerful economy, and because we have a military second to nobody on the planet, and because we have the value system that we do have, shared by many other people in the world, we have a responsibility. And I think it’s a privilege to exercise that responsibility, but you have to do it with enormous sensitivity and judgment and apply all the wisdom in the world you can find to do it properly. And we haven’t – though, I mean, I’m sure we’ve made mistakes. But I think our intent and our purpose has always been the best, the highest sort of set of possibilities. That’s number one. And the power that we have to have an impact is enormous. And I think people need to understand that.

The second thing is that it’s really dangerous to play to the lowest common denominator of American – of global political life. The history of the world, when economies are having a hard time and there is fear and anxiety in the workplace, enhanced by religious extremism and exploitation of ethnicity and sectarianism, you wind up with really bad outcomes. And the last century in Europe is the greatest testimony to that reality. And we got to be really careful here.

FRIEDMAN: We have been here before.

SECRETARY KERRY: We have been here before, and with disastrous consequences. And so I find that in the Arab world and elsewhere in the world, in the Muslim world, the world of Islam, people are sensitive about this. People – most of these countries are really tuned in to not wanting to see it exploited and not wanting to have a confrontation. But there are dangerous forces out there and people who are falling into it who are exploiting that lowest common denominator and pushing a sectarian divide that could be very dangerous for everybody. And I think I would warn against that. I think it’s – we’ve got to be really careful.

The final thing I’d say is this: I know some people are looking at the world and saying, “Oh my God, the world order is coming apart,” and this and that. No, it isn’t, folks. And it won’t. I’m – I’ve been around long enough to remember walking the streets of New York in 1964 when Lyndon Johnson won a landslide race against Barry Goldwater, and everybody said, “The Republican Party is dead.” Four years later, Richard Nixon was president of the United States. And then we had Watergate and we lost Nixon, and then we’ve had – and I went through the assassinations of President Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers, all of this. This touched our generation. And so I’ve seen it bad.