The U.S must reconceptualize its role in the world, Mills says.

Question: What are the world's biggest challenges in the coming decade?

D. Quinn Mills: The biggest challenge the world faces now, is to adapt to the changes that are taking place. The Chinese want a major role in the world that has all kinds of implications for geopolitics, for the environment, for all kinds of things. The Indians want a bigger role. The Russians are going to try to put together their empire again. The economic structure of the world is changing dramatically. Some countries rising, others falling, all of this we have to adapt to in some way and we seem to me in the United States to have taken the view that our role in the world is to see that nothing much changes, that the political boundaries and the relations among nations stay pretty much the way they are, so I think we're having an enormous problem and the world’s biggest problem is how to adapted to the changes that are so strongly underway.

Question: What does the U.S. face? 

D. Quinn Mills: Biggest challenge confronting United States is to figure out what are the proper role in the world is. If we are the world’s major superpower, what does that mean we should be doing? It seems to me to be obvious that we should not be engaging in small-scale wars in the Europe, Asian, African continent mass. We can't win those; we have never won them, our people keep forgetting that. At best we draw them and that is at best we get a stalemate. They are very expensive to us. We can't be successful, and our politicians are having an enormous amount of difficulty figuring out what our proper role should be.

Recorded on: 9/27/07