Former Australian Prime Minister John Howard

On March 5, 2008, former Australian prime minister John Howard delivered the Irving Kristol Lecture at AEI's Annual Dinner. Edited excerpts follow.

The long friendship between Australia and the United States has grown deeper and stronger as we have responded to the threats of these past years. It is a powerful testament in the modern world that the values that unite nations create the most enduring bonds of all. Australia has been beside the United States in every military conflict of consequence in which your country has been involved since our soldiers first fought together at the Battle of Hamel, in France, on the fourth of July, 1918.

Important though that history of military cooperation may be--important though our political, economic, and cultural ties might be--they are dwarfed by the commonality of the values that we share. They are the values of personal liberty and individual freedom; the belief that decency and hard work define a person's worth, not class or race or social background; and the confidence that all the peoples of the world will embrace democracy if given the opportunity to enjoy its benefits. To make that friendship even stronger was a cornerstone of the foreign policy my government pursued.

I speak to you tonight as an unapologetic and continuing advocate of the broad conservative cause, restlessly conscious, as you are, that the battle of ideas is never completely won and must always command both our attention and our energy. The former Australian government, which I led, was accused of many things, but never of betraying its essentially center-right credo. We pursued a blend of economic liberalism--in the classical sense of that term, connoting as it does a faith in market forces--and social conservatism. Rather than being in conflict, the one reinforced the other. When we left office in November last year, Australia was a stronger, prouder, and more prosperous nation than it had been twelve years earlier.

While the intrinsic worth of values never changes, their relative importance and the tenacity with which they are applied by societies will always be determined by contemporary threats and challenges. Today's world remains confronted by the ongoing threat of Islamic fascism, a new and quite unfamiliar assault on our values and way of life. It relies on indiscriminate terror without regard to the identity or faith of its victims. It also calculates that it is the nature of Western societies to grow weary of long struggles and protracted debates. They produce, over time, a growing pressure for resolution or accommodation. The particular challenge posed by extremist Islam means that, more than ever before, continued cultural self-belief is critical to national strength.

Ronald Reagan and that other great warrior in our cause, Margaret Thatcher, taught us many things. One of them was to remain culturally assertive, to understand always the importance of self-belief in the psyche of a nation, to be willing to stand against the fashion of the time.
It was Reagan's unapologetic American character that really won me. In my years in politics, I have seen or heard no political slogan more evocative than "Morning in America" in 1984. In a brilliant phrase it encapsulated simple patriotism and a confident but not arrogant assertion of the great values of American life.

In the protracted struggle against Islamic extremism, there will be no stronger weapon than the maintenance by Western liberal democracies of a steadfast belief in the continuing worth of our own national value systems--and, where necessary, a soaring optimism about the future of freedom and democracy. We should not think that trading away some of these values will buy us either immunity from terrorists or respect from noisy minorities. If the butter of common national values is spread too thin, it will disappear altogether.

Shared values and a common commitment to democracy make for open societies, a precondition for genuine understanding and trust. They provide strong glue for enduring alliances.

To read the full text of Howard's lecture, visit www.aei.org/publication27613/. For more information about the Irving Kristol Award, visit www.aei.org/kristolaward/.