Date: 19/09/2001
By Tom Allard
Mr Keating condemned the attacks and agreed the terrorists had to be dealt with, but said the US should step back from plans for a missile defence shield and invest more in rethinking the global political architecture.
"In the end, there's got to be a guiding light in the way the world is managed and that guiding light just can't be about the bounty of the world resting with the foremost industrial nations and the rest running up the rear," he said.
He said the world was saddled with political institutions that are relics of World War II, which were inappropriate for the 21st century and excluded the highly populated developing nations.
Resentment toward the US in the developing world is as much a result of poverty and low living standards as US foreign policy, analysts have observed.
Mr Keating singled out the UN Security Council and the G8 grouping of the world's industrialised economies as targets for reform. He said it was absurd that countries such as Italy, Canada and Britain were in the G8 club while nations such as China and India were excluded.
"The more the world co-operates, the better off we will be," Mr Keating told a Property Council of Australia conference in Canberra yesterday.
Mr Keating raised the spectre of a more isolationist US and urged it to drop the controversial and expensive plan for a missile defence shield, which would protect the US against rogue states and terrorists.
"The problem about limited nuclear defence and shields is no-one wants, even us, the US cocooned behind some kind of shield while there's a Mad Max world outside," he said.
"The answer has to be to make this world better by dealing with these problems at source."
He said the risk of attacks lay not with nuclear weapons being lobbed into the US via intercontinental ballistic missiles "with a cheerio note for CNN" but in "surreptitious" attacks aided by new technologies.
Nevertheless, Mr Keating said the world's nuclear arsenal - about 10,000 weapons - was a Cold War hangover and needed to be addressed. He noted that an inventory of the former Soviet Union's nuclear weapons revealed an unexplained absence of "fissile material and weapons".
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