In the years in which I served as President, we worked very hard to prevent a day like September 11th ever happening. Far more terrorist attacks were thwarted at home and around the world than succeeded, large numbers of terrorists who did commit crimes were brought to justice. We strengthened our defences in chemical and biological areas, we spent more money to protect the nuclear stocks in the former Soviet Union, we dramatically increased our terrorist budgets, we trained several response teams in our largest cities to deal with outbreaks of bio-terrorism. Good people had been working on this a long time but we haven't completely closed the gap.

We still have much more to do to know that all of our transportation, our water supplies, and our computer networks are secure. We have more to do to know we have done everything we can to break into terrorist money networks which keep them going. We have to upgrade and integrate our own information systems so we can keep up with potential terrorists and we have to do more to protect the still massive stocks in the world of chemical, biological and nuclear materials which could become terrorist weapons.

But the larger point holds. In terror's long history, it has never succeeded and it won't this time. The war in Afghanistan will be won shortly, the Al-Qaeda network will be broken up, our defences at home will improve. I can't say there won't be more terrorist attacks, there probably will be, but I can say for sure it won't prevail unless we decide to give it permission and I do not believe we are about to make that decision.

Now that brings me to the second point. We're gonna win this fight - then what? The reason September 11th happened, and it was shocking to Americans, because it happened on our soil, is that we have built a world where we tore down barriers, collapsed distances and spread information. And the UK and America have benefited richly - look at how our economies have performed, look at how our societies have diversified, look at the advances we have made in technology and science. This new world has been good to us, but you can't gain the benefits of a world without walls without being more vulnerable.

September 11th was the dark side of this new age of global interdependence. If you don't want to put those walls back up and I don't think you do, and we probably couldn't if we tried. And you watch, if you look at some of the recent elections, we're gonna see some people who try to do that. And if you don't want to live with barbed wire around your children and grandchildren for the next hundred years, then it's not enough to defeat the terrorist. We have to make a world where there are far fewer terrorists, where there are fewer potential terrorists and more partners. And that responsibility falls primarily upon the wealthy nations, to spread the benefits and shrink the burdens.