SECRETARY BLINKEN: Gina, thank you very much and it’s wonderful to be here with all of you. Thank you so much for taking the time for this conversation this afternoon. We’ve had a very productive day already in Pittsburgh, a great American city, an industrial capital in the last century, a high-tech capital in this century, and so a very fitting place I think for the conversations we’re having.
Let me just - at the risk of repeating something I said in one of our conversations this morning, just put it this way: If we were gathered in this room around this table 100 years ago when we were asking ourselves what constitutes the wealth of our respective nations, we’d probably be talking about everything from the expanse of our land mass to the size of our population to the strength of our military to our abundance of natural resources. And happily, the United States and the European Union remain very wealthy in all of those attributes.
But I think what this conversation reflects is the fact that, more than ever before, the true wealth of a nation is found in its human resources and the potential for a country or a group of countries to fully unleash those resources to meet their full potential. And that’s ultimately what this is all about and what we’re trying to get at today, particularly how we do that more effectively and more equitably in the tech space. And so we’re very anxious to hear from all of you.
As my colleagues have said, one of the other things we know so powerfully is that we have to be doing all of these things hand-in-hand and from the takeoff with all of the relative stakeholders, and not just on the landing, because if we don’t, whatever decisions we may arrive at as representatives of our governments will probably not be sustainable. They won’t last. So it’s vitally important that we have these conversations, we have this input, and it’s a regular dialogue. That’s very much the spirit of the enterprise that we’re engaged in with the TTC across all the issues we’re working.
So again, thanks to everyone for being here, and anxious to hear from you as opposed to hearing from us. Thanks.
Source: U.S Department of State, Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs
