Viddler

US President Barack Obama will address the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday. UN Ambassador Susan Rice outlines what the President will talk about during a press briefing at the White House.

Transcript:

MR. GIBBS: Good afternoon. In order to even enliven more greatly the week ahead, to describe in great detail the week ahead and our events at the U.N. General Assembly, we have our U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice with us. We'll walk you through some of that, we'll take some questions, and then we'll do our regularly scheduled TV programming.

AMBASSADOR RICE: Good afternoon, everyone. In anticipation of President Obama's historic first visit to the United Nations next week, I'd like to talk to you a bit about the work we've been doing at the U.N. over the past eight months to advance our interests and make Americans safer, and how the President intends to use his time up in the United Nations next week.

The United States has dramatically changed the tone, the substance, and the practice of our diplomacy at the United Nations and our approach to the U.N. as an institution, as well as our approach to multilateralism in general. We start from the premise that this change is necessary because we face an extraordinary array of global challenges -- things like poorly guarded nuclear facilities, terrorism by al Qaeda and its affiliates, nuclear challenges from Iran and North Korea, genocide and mass atrocities, cyber attacks on our digital infrastructure, pandemic disease, climate change, international criminal networks and organizations.

These transnational security challenges can only be dealt with in cooperation with other nations. They can't by definition be dealt with by any single country in isolation. In the 21st century America's security and well-being is in fact inextricably linked to the security and well-being of people elsewhere. And the United Nations is thus essential to our efforts to galvanize concerted interna