I’d like to make just one last point about our national community.  Our economy is measured in numbers and statistics.  And it’s very important.  But the enduring worth of our nation lies in our shared values and our soaring spirit.  So instead of cutting back on our modest efforts to support the arts and humanities I believe we should stand by them and challenge our artists, musicians, and writers, challenge our museums, libraries, and theaters.

We should challenge all Americans in the arts and humanities to join with their fellow citizens to make the year 2000 a national celebration of the American spirit in every community, a celebration of our common culture in the century that is past and in the new one to come in a new millennium so that we can remain the world’s beacon not only of liberty but of creativity long after the fireworks have faded.

To prepare America for the 21st century we must master the forces of change in the world and keep American leadership strong and sure for an uncharted time.

Fifty years ago, a farsighted America led in creating the institutions that secured victory in the Cold War and built a growing world economy.  As a result, today more people than ever embrace our ideals and share our interests.  Already we have dismantled many of the blocks and barriers that divided our parents’ world.  For the first time, more people live under democracy than dictatorship including every nation in our own hemisphere but one, and its day, too, will come.

Now we stand at another moment of change and choice, and another time to be farsighted, to bring America 50 more years of security and prosperity.

In this endeavor, our first task is to help to build for the very first time an undivided, democratic Europe.  When Europe is stable, prosperous, and at peace, America is more secure.

To that end, we must expand NATO by 1999, so that countries that were once our adversaries can become our allies.  At the special NATO summit this summer, that is what we will begin to do.  We must strengthen NATO’s Partnership for Peace with non-member allies.  And we must build a stable partnership between NATO and a democratic Russia.

An expanded NATO is good for America, and a Europe in which all democracies define their future not in terms of what they can do to each other, but in terms of what they can do together for the good of all—­that kind of Europe is good for America.

Second, America must look to the East no less than to the West.

Our security demands it.  Americans fought three wars in Asia in this century.

Our prosperity requires it.  More than 2 million American jobs depend upon trade with Asia.  There, too, we are helping to shape an Asia Pacific community of cooperation, not conflict.

Let our—­let our progress there not mask the peril that remains.  Together with South Korea, we must advance peace talks with North Korea and bridge the Cold War’s last divide.  And I call on Congress to fund our share of the agreement under which North Korea must continue to freeze and then dismantle its nuclear weapons program.