Ambassador Dan Kurtzer

which really was a deficit of an education system that was not training people in the Middle East to cope with emerging technologies and emerging changes.

A lot of rote memorization, and that hasn't changed very much.

And there was a deficit of women's empowerment.

You know, in most Middle East societies, women still don't participate fully in any aspect of the society.

It's a place that's going to keep us in business for a long time as Middle East analysts because it's a target-rich environment for this kind of analysis.

I think much of any scenario planning is going to depend on the degree to which we in the United States move away from unilateralism to multilateralism.

When we have tried to deal with problems multilaterally, we've had some success.

I go back, for example, to the period after the Madrid Peace Conference when we started the multilateral peace talks and the

economic public-private summits that took place.

There were four of them in the region.

And it looked like we had found, I don't know, a methodology for getting people's attention and denying them an easy exit.

In other words, if the United States and Europe and Japan and South Korea and even China

are lining up in favor of economic change or maybe a more open society or a different social contract, it's going to be really hard for people in different societies to push back against that.

United States does it alone, these countries have choices.

You know, China had a Belt and Road Initiative and they have ways of investment which are attractive to some of these countries.

So I think one of the most important keys to looking at the longer term is thinking about a multilateral, a multinational approach to almost everything that we do.

And it's not just economic matters, it's also on security.

After the first Gulf War, we thought about multilateralizing Gulf security so that it wouldn't rest only on the United States to protect these countries, and that didn't work very well.

But why not revive the concept and just do it better?

These countries ought to be responsible for more of their own security.