The global community needs to intensify its efforts to lock down all fissionable material. The United States, specifically, must increase funding for the Nunn-Lugar program and for US Energy Department programs to secure former Soviet plutonium stocks and nuclear weapons. The United States must also work with Pakistan to make sure that their nuclear arsenal does not fall into the hands of Jihadists. The Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT) needs to be upgraded and tightened in an effort to prevent states from legally developing their nuclear capabilities and then opting out of the treaty as they rush to build bombs.

If the United States wants other countries to take the NPT seriously, it must show that it takes it seriously itself. The United States should re-affirm its NPT commitment to the long-term goal of global nuclear disarmament, and it should invite the Russians to join in a moratorium on new weapons and further staged reductions in arsenals, beyond what has already been agreed, over the course of the next decade. US diplomacy should also seek to get the other nuclear powers to reduce their arsenals, to get the non-nuclear powers to forego nuclear fuel enrichment, and to agree to rigorous global safeguards and verification procedures. The United States also should ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, not only because it is good policy, but also to send a signal to the world that it has turned a corner and once again will be a global leader, not a unilateralist loner.

The United States also must lead the world in opening an ideological front in the war against Jihadism. There is a civil war within Islam between extremists and moderates, and the United States and its allies need to stop helping their enemies in that civil war. The United States needs to start showing, both through its words and through its actions, that this is not, as the Jihadists claim, a clash of civilizations. Rather, it is a clash between civilization and barbarity. The international community needs to present Arab and Muslim populations with a better vision than the apocalyptic fantasy of the Jihadists: a vision of peace, prosperity, tolerance, and respect for human dignity. There are a number of steps the United States can take to help accomplish this.

First and foremost, the United States must live up to its own ideals. Prisoner abuse, torture, secret prisons, and evasion of the Geneva Conventions must have no place in US policy. If the United States wants Muslims to be open to it, it should start by closing Guantanamo.

The United States also needs to pressure Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and other friends in the Arab world to reform their education systems, which are incubators of anti-US sentiment. Moderate US Muslims must be given a louder, more systematic voice in US policy toward the Middle East so that they can speak the truth about the West and be heard by their fellow Muslims. The United States also must re-engage the Middle East peace process, as peace would deprive the Jihadists of their most effective propaganda tool. The sole superpower must use all its sticks and carrots to strengthen Palestinian moderates and to achieve a two-state solution which guarantees Israel’s security.

The United States spends more than US$2 billion per week on Iraq, but it has left its own cities, nuclear power plants, and shipping ports vulnerable to terrorist attack. Resilience, or the ability to recover from an attack, is an essential component of national defense, and it lowers the utility to the terrorists of attacking. The United States must spend more to recruit, equip, and train more first responders and to drastically improve public health facilities, which, five years after 9/11, are not ready for a biological attack. Homeland Security dollars should be allocated to where they are needed most—to the population centers and facilities that Al Qaeda targets.

The United States needs to lead the global fight against poverty, which is the basis of so much violence. By example and diplomacy, the United States can encourage all rich countries to honor their UN Millennium goal commitments. A Commission on the Implementation of Sustainable Development Goals, composed of world leaders and prominent experts, should be created to recommend ways of meeting Millennium commitments.

In this effort, the United States should lead donors on debt relief, shifting aid from loans to grants, and focus on primary health care and affordable vaccines. The World Bank must focus on poverty reduction, and the IMF must be more flexible regarding social safety nets. The United States should promote trade agreements, which create more jobs in all countries and which seriously address wage disparities, worker rights, and the environment. Together with other governments, the United States should pressure pharmaceutical companies to allow expanded use of generic drugs, and it should encourage public-private partnerships to reduce costs and enhance access to anti-malarial drugs and bed nets.

Most importantly, the United States should promote a multilateral Marshall Plan for the Middle East and North Africa. For a small fraction of the cost of the Iraq war, which has created so many enemies for the United States, the nation could make many friends. A crucial effort in fighting terrorism must be support for public education in the Muslim world. Many Muslim students have no educational opportunities except for madrassas, some of which teach Jihad. It must be a major component of US aid policies to poorer Muslim countries, as well as of US diplomacy with all Muslim countries, to take education out of the hands of those who preach violence. Development alleviates the injustice and lack of opportunity that proponents of violence and terrorism exploit. To those who say the United States cannot afford an aid program to build pro-American sentiment in the developing world, I say the United States cannot afford not to.

The challenges facing all nations today are the shared problems of an interdependent global society. Solutions necessarily also must be shared. The United States must adapt its thinking to these realities and provide the leadership that only the sole superpower can provide in fostering the cooperation needed to solve the issues that face the modern world. The US government needs to see the world as it really is—so that the United States can lead others to make it a better, safer place. The United States should craft a new realism that looks at the world through cool eyes, but which is inspired by ardent principles. A new realism for a new century. I believe that such an enlightened and effective policy for the 21st century is possible.