President Clinton’s Remarks to Mark the 25th Anniversary of the Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary’s Membership to NATO

Yesterday, President Bill Clinton delivered keynote remarks at the “Our Security Cannot Be Taken For Granted” conference in Prague to mark the 25th anniversary of the Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary’s membership to NATO – an expansion that helped to realize a more peaceful, united and democratic Europe. During his keynote remarks, President Clinton spoke about the process of expanding NATO 25 years ago, thanked the Czech government for their support of the Ukrainian people, and reiterated the importance of continued global support of Ukraine.

The full transcript of his keynote remarks can be viewed below.

President Clinton:

Thank you. I thank you very much, Ambassador Vondra, for the memories and for your generosity. You managed to make me think about all this as if it happened yesterday. I miss President Havel and I miss Madeleine Albright, but I’m glad that, after 25 years at least, I’m still standing and able to come and speak—I hope—for them, and for all of us who were there.

I want to thank Lord George Robertson, former NATO Secretary General, for being here. He was there. Ambassador Sabet, thank you very much. And Mr. Pavlacik and others involved in sponsoring this, I thank you.

And mostly, President Pavel, I want to thank you for many things. But I would like to begin, at least, at part of the end of this story.

When I became president, I wanted to expand NATO, but I knew that even some of the NATO members were questioning it. They were very proud of the military alliance and what it had done to stabilize Europe at the end of the war. They were uncertain of whether the expansion would be more politics than security. What did it mean? Where would we stop? You know, all the things that keep people from doing things they should do in many areas of life.

And Vaclav Havel was a remarkable man who had a good sense of humor and was not particularly overbearing. And Mr. President, I say this with great admiration—no one would ever make the mistake of thinking that he had been the head of this country’s armed forces before he became president. He was a poet and a playwright, with an amazing imagination. But he was adamant about one thing—from the first time I met him until I went with Madeleine to your beautiful cathedral to his funeral—and that was that the Czech Republic would never be totally secure unless it was in a network of European security anchored by NATO. And I watched him make arguments for years before we finally worked all this out.

But I remember 25 years ago. And I remember earlier than that when we voted to expand. We were, 27 years ago, in Madrid voting to do this. And it’s funny what you remember. Since men often don’t wear ties anymore—but I’m glad that all of you still do—I still remember that we were in Madrid and that perhaps their most famous manufacturer of ties, Loewe, made a tie for all the people who had come to the NATO summit, to vote to expand NATO. On the tie there was a depiction of a very famous Spanish game, at the time, which involved throwing real-life human beings up and down out of a blanket. I’ve still got that tie. I looked at it again before I came on this trip. And sometimes you just have to take a chance. That’s what everybody involved 25 years ago decided to do.

I think that it’s been a good investment. It was a good sensible risk, and it has immensely strengthened NATO. The motto of this conference is as true today as it was then, perhaps more true: you can’t ever take your security for granted. And we know that we need more networks of cooperation.

For the benefit of those who are not Czech, who are here and anybody who may be covering this—I do think we have a few people in America, I’m embarrassed to say, who like to appear as if somehow they think NATO’s a con game, and the United States is giving too much and nobody else is giving enough. It’s ludicrous, that position. This is something that is helping us all.

No one today has been more visible, but since we’re here and the Czech government is hosting us: what have you done with your 25 years?

Prime Minister Fiala was among the first Western leaders to visit Ukraine after the invasion of 2022. And you, Mr. President, last year became the first to visit the eastern front. Over the last two years, this country of only 11 million people has delivered more than $2.3 billion towards the military assistance to Ukraine. You were the first NATO member to give the Ukrainians heavy armored vehicles, and now you’re leading the drive—I love this, and I’m going to have a field day with this when I get home to America, and I’m lobbying the Congress to do our part—you are trying to figure out how to give a million artillery shells to Ukraine in a global collection effort that goes far beyond NATO members. Nobody else is doing that, that I’m aware of. So the most important thing I can say is, “Thank you.”

I live in a country with 340 million people, and we have trouble managing our immigration problems on the southern border, as all of you know—1.9 million people had to be processed last year. The Czech Republic has 11 million people, you do the math, and it has taken more than a half a million refugees from Ukraine to try to show solidarity with freedom and decency and democracy.

This NATO deal has been the best thing that ever happened to all the rest of us because of what the Czech Republic and Poland and sometimes, more reluctantly, but eventually there, Hungary, have done with it. We did the right thing to expand NATO, and to keep expanding it. And now there are more than 30 countries in NATO. So this is a day to celebrate our forebearers, to say they did a good job. It is also perhaps a day to think a little bit about what lies ahead. But I do think all of you should be grateful, because I’m not sure we could have done this then if it had not been for Havel’s leadership. Just because he was so dogged about.

When I was president, we had a few members of Congress who wanted the White House to do things, and they were impossible to live with until you finally did whatever it was they wanted. So we set up, in the White House, what we called the “Just Say Yes” list. If somebody got on that list, you didn’t waste any time, whatever they wanted, you just went ahead and said yes because you knew you were going to do it anyway, and you didn’t want to be an old person by the time you finally got around to being able to do something else. That’s the way Havel was about this. It was great. So we should celebrate that.

But I think we also should support those who have made sure, in these last 25 years, that the expansion was handled in a proper way. Not too fast, not too slow, making sure people were ready to assume the military responsibility. Your president knows a lot about that. It’s one thing to talk about doing something, quite another to be able to do it and to do it in the right way. And I’m very grateful, again, to you.

And finally, I think we can celebrate the fact that Finland and Sweden have just become the 31st and 32nd members of NATO. They are very capable of strengthening our military capacity, our defense capacity. And they make the strategic geography of Northern Europe look entirely different. So, for all of you who supported that, I thank you.

I just wanted to say one or two other things because I know you have a lot of things to do in your conference. When we were doing all this, I was really lucky that Madeleine Albright was my UN ambassador, and that I appointed as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General John Shalikashvili, who was born in Poland to a father from Georgia and a Polish mother. He was the first enlisted person ever to rise all the way through the ranks to be the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It was really good for America’s knowledge of geography, too. They had to learn how to say Shalikashvili, and then realize where Georgia was—that it was not a place that grew peaches in the middle of America, it was a remarkable place fighting for its own freedom.

And we had, as my Deputy Secretary of State to Madeleine, Strobe Talbott, who is also still with us today—who when we were boys, when we were just 22 and living together in England, had run the Moscow Bureau of TIME Magazine and was selected by the representatives of Nikita Khrushchev to receive his memoirs and translate and edit them. So the other thing I was doing when I first found the Czech Republic, I was living in England and I would get up every morning and make breakfast for my roommate, Strobe Talbott, and listen to Nikita Khrushchev’s voice over a tape recorder.

Anybody who was thinking about anything then would’ve wondered, will the Berlin Wall ever fall? Will the Warsaw Pact ever come to an end? Will freedom ever return? But there were a lot of people who were convinced that it would. And the interesting thing is how many people were ready to make the most of it when it did. Because that’s really what we’re celebrating here, isn’t it? I mean, 25 years ago, you had to figure out what was the next big building block and what would happen after the Berlin Wall. And you did the right thing. And it’s funny, sometimes I feel like I was just the guy who was along for the ride. I was lucky I was in the right place at the right time more than once.

But I remember 25 years ago as if it were yesterday. And I believed that if we did this right, it would be peace and prosperity for 25 years. And I believed that if Russia made a decision, that I was always afraid they would—which is not to keep working together with us but to try to reestablish in some way a dominant geographical position on the European continent—that whether we did NATO right then would determine what would happen when the crisis came.

And I think we should all say, all of you today, you should think about how you feel about all this and think about the next 25 years.

I think President Putin made a mistake deciding to stay for life. I loved being America’s president, and I would’ve stayed forever if there were no term limits or until the people defeated me at the polls. But it’s better in a free society to extol the system, the values, and the rule of law, instead of the dominance of any individual. We should all do our part, give it our best, and go on with our lives as best we can, grateful for the chance to serve.

But I just ask you to think about all this now, because he probably won’t like my saying this—but President Putin’s not going to live forever any more than I am. The last I checked, we all have an expiration date, we just don’t necessarily know when it is. And our job is to leave our children and grandchildren with a future better than we had.

So I will say this, I do not regret a single minute I spent trying to bring Russia into partnership with the rest of us. And we all know I failed, don’t we? But I don’t regret it. I met with President Yeltsin [18] times. I met with President Putin, when he was prime minister and then president, five times. We had a NATO-Russia Founding Act, to have a partnership. We gave Russia a vote in NATO affairs early. We offered them the chance to participate in how we managed the end of both the Bosnian campaign and the campaign in Kosovo. I don’t regret any of it. And I failed, or we did, in the sense that Russia took a different path. But it’s important to get caught trying to do the right thing.

So there will come another time in the next 25 years, I predict—maybe I’ll be long gone—but we’ll have a chance to write a new history, and it will be better because of the strength of the Czech Republic. It’ll be better because you let Sweden and Finland into NATO. It’ll be better because no one can claim you’re operating from a position of weakness when you hold open the door of partnership.

I will always regret that all those years—in the years that I was president, eight years—I met with the leader of Russia only three times less than all Americans had between 1945 and 1992. Just in those eight years. So when I hear all this stuff about how we jammed them with expansion of NATO, that’s a big fairy tale.

But the people of this country and your neighbors in Poland and Hungary and everywhere else, they deserve the right to be free. We deserve a chance to see Europe democratic and united and at peace for the first time since nation-states rose up on the European continent. And as my old friends used to say, it was not NATO moving east, it was the East knocking on NATO’s door.

So I ask you, in this security conference, without obviously ignoring what the consequences are now, we have to stay with Ukraine as long as Ukraine is fighting. Every one of us today. And the people who act like it doesn’t matter to America or any other country just need to go back and review the history of Europe from the 1930s to the current day and see if we don’t have a common responsibility to our people and to the future.

But you also should be thinking of a brighter day. Yes, we need to get everybody behind Ukraine. I admire the way President Zelensky and his family and his administration, have hung in there. But someday we will have other options, and we need conferences like this to think about what do we want NATO and Europe to look like 25 years from now? What about 50 years from now?

I think that my president, President Biden, and our country, our government, has the right position on this. I hope we will be able to persuade the Congress to go along. I think we need to make sure people know more about how much stronger NATO is with Sweden and Finland in it, and what a complementary picture it makes.

But the most important thing I want you to do is not be ashamed or embarrassed, even in the midst of this conflict in Ukraine, to imagine 25 years from now. It will help us to hold support, for staying the course in Ukraine, if people actually believe that it can be different than it is. I do, I do.

I’m sorry that, when I was there, I couldn’t persuade Mr. Putin to stay with where I think we were going with his predecessor. I did my best. But time and circumstance happens to everybody. You’re going to have another chance. So we got to stay together, stay with Ukraine, get through it. Make sure the world knows how much better NATO is now because of your new members, what’s being done. And keep dreaming of a better tomorrow.

Remember, Havel was a poet and a playwright, and he had an infectious sense of humor, which he kept even when he was in prison. He was the only head of state that I ever had ask me, when I invited him to the White House for a state dinner, he said, “I want you to get Lou Reed to perform at the state dinner.” He was the only head of state who ever asked me for someone who was a rock and roll legend. Everybody else wanted to hear a famous cellist, a famous violinist, see a great actor. Havel knew, as we say where I grew up, where the rubber met the road. Don’t forget, NATO lives where the rubber meets the road.

So be proud of what you’ve done, prove that it works, and start dreaming right now about what you hope will happen when this meeting is held 25 years from today. Thank you.