A look at noteworthy addresses in...

A look at noteworthy addresses in the Southland. Ambassador Winston Lord, chairman of the Carnegie Endowment National Commission on America and the New World, spoke on “Changing Our Ways: America and the New World,” at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles on Tuesday. The speech by Lord, a former U.S. ambassador to China and president of the Council on Foreign Relations, was sponsored by Town Hall of California.

On the New World and Foreign Policy “We are in a paradoxical period. George Bernard Shaw says there are two things that can break your heart: one is to strive for something, to desire it fervently, and not get it. And the other is to actually get it. And that’s what’s happened. We’ve won a 40-year struggle and we’re miserable. We have Angst and concerns about our domestic situation . . . but, more strategically, (about) the future direction of this country and whether the next few decades will be as good for the next generation as they’ve been for us.

“We believe that we have a chance, the third one in a century . . . to help shape a world that reflects our values and promotes our interests. We muffed a chance after 1919, after World War I, when we withdrew from the world. We acted with greater vision, realism and bipartisanship, through four decades . . . after World War II. So the question is, what are we going to do with this new world?”

On Weapons Spending

“We want to get at the levels of weapons generally in the world, not just weapons of mass destruction, but conventional arms. This is very difficult, particularly when many arms industries are trying to stay alive through exports now that the Cold War is over. And it doesn’t help us, when we sell lots of arms to Taiwan and Saudi Arabia, to go to other countries and say you’ve got to cut down on your sales. But we call, and this may sound Pollyannaish, for the level of arms spending by the world to be cut in half from the 1988 peak, which is $1.2 trillion, down to $600 million by the year 2000. Now that’s not as crazy as it sounds because, by 1996, if everyone does what they say they’re going to do, including the former Soviet Union, which is cutting drastically, we’ll be down to $800 million.” “

Looking Ahead Monday: Jack Katz, UCLA sociologist, on “Crime and Social Protest: Notes on Disturbing Events in L.A.,” 6:45 p.m., Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum, Claremont-McKenna College, 385 E. 8th St., Claremont. Free and open to the public.

Tuesday: Michael Harcourt, premier of British Columbia, Canada, on “British Columbia and the Pacific Rim: the California Connection,” noon, at the Biltmore Hotel. Sponsored by Town Hall of California. Call 213-628-8141.