Remarks to "Forum on the Future of America's Role in the World and on the
Role of the United Nations," Henry L. Stimson Center, Washington, DC,
October 3, 1995
My thanks to the Stimson Center and to the Ford Foundation for sponsoring today's forum. The Stimson Center has been in existence for only six years, but many of us have come to think of it as a venerable Washington institution. That's because of the center's good works in areas such as arms control and preventive diplomacy. Let me single out for special appreciation my old friend Michael Krepon, who has been so effective in educating the American public--and I might add the Washington community--about the importance of the Non-Proliferation Treaty and about the need for a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty that lives up to its name: that is genuinely comprehensive and genuinely a ban. President Clinton and Secretary Christopher are committed to delivering to the Congress a CTBT that so qualifies within the next 12 months.
Michael and his colleagues have asked me to speak this afternoon about the Clinton Administration's policy toward the United Nations, and I will do so. But, first, I'd like to put that subject in a broader context.
We as a nation face some fundamental choices--choices of such consequence that they merit a great national debate. At issue is whether we are prepared to do what it takes--and that means spending what it takes--to have a foreign policy worthy of our aspirations and our interests as a world leader--indeed, as the world leader.
We're facing these choices now because we've entered a new era. Over the past decade, nearly 2 billion people in some 70 nations on five continents--from Argentina to South Africa to Lithuania to Bangladesh to the Philippines--have moved decisively toward democracy and free markets. Today, to an extent few of us ever expected to see in our lifetimes, the world is joined in a loose, imperfect, incomplete but still extraordinary consensus in favor of open societies and open markets. During this dramatic transformation, America has not been a bystander--far from it. From South America to Eastern Europe to Central Asia to the Pacific Rim, our foreign policy has helped nation after nation to emerge from totalitarianism--and to keep moving in the right direction. Thanks in large part to American leadership, the political and economic principles that we have nurtured here in the United States for over 200 years are now ascendant around the globe.
One important moral of the end of the Cold War--a story that is still unfolding and will provide us with plenty of suspense for a long time-- is that the United States must maintain its position of international leadership. Let me cite two examples from the headlines--examples that will also feature prominently in the history books.
One is in the Middle East. Last week, the Israelis and Palestinians took another bold step toward a comprehensive and lasting peace. That landmark agreement--like the accords in September 1993 and August 1994 that preceded it--simply would not have happened without U.S. leadership. That means sustained, steady, patient, persistent, consistent leadership, exercised by one administration after another-- Republican and Democratic. When we speak, as we do with increasing optimism these days, about the Middle East peace process, we are talking about a work that has been in progress for four decades; it is the work of Ralph Bunche and William Rogers and Henry Kissinger and Cy Vance and Jim Baker as well as my boss, Warren Christopher. Last week Shimon Peres put the point bluntly: "The United States," he said, "is the only country in the world that has the will and the capacity to run the peace process."
The other example is what might now be properly, and hopefully, called the Balkan peace process. After four years of horror for the people of the former Yugoslavia and frustration for the international community, the situation has become more hopeful. There are several reasons for the improved prospects for a political settlement. An important one is American diplomacy backed by the credible threat of force--in this case, the force of NATO airpower. Thanks in large part to President Clinton's leadership--at the London conference and thereafter--we are now within sight of an end to the worst conflict in Europe since the end of World War II and the first major threat to peace on the continent in the post- Cold War era. The lesson--which I assure you our friends and allies in both the Middle East and Europe recognize and endorse--is that American engagement is essential to their security. And because their regions matter so much to our political and economic interests, our engagement there is essential to our own security.
The flip side of that proposition is just as important to recognize clearly: If the United States does not provide international leadership- -in the Middle East and Europe and around the globe--then there is no other country that can or will step in and lead in our place as a constructive, positive influence.
Make no mistake about that. And make no mistake that there are plenty of other forces that will fill the vacuum we leave, and they will do so in ways not at all to our liking or to our advantage or in keeping with our interests. For instance, thanks to American leadership, the enemies of the Arab-Israeli peace accords--in Iran, Iraq, Sudan, and Libya--are now more isolated than ever before. But if we let down our guard, the leaders of those rogue states can still make trouble by menacing their neighbors, sponsoring terrorism, and stockpiling weapons of mass destruction.
By the same token, a continuing, festering conflict in the Balkans would present an ever-more-attractive target of opportunity for hostile forces, including some of those same rogue states I just mentioned, to secure a foothold in the heart of Europe.
Whether deterring threats or seizing opportunities, the United States needs to remain fully engaged in the world. That point should be self- evident, but, unfortunately, it is increasingly controversial--or, at least, it is increasingly obscured by other controversies.
There is, in our country, a resurgence of the view that our vital interests in some sense end at the water's edge. I say "resurgence" because we've heard that argument before.
In the aftermath of the Cold War, just as after other great struggles earlier in our nation's history, there is a temptation to draw back into ourselves, to devote more of our attention and our resources to fixing our own problems--to let foreign countries fend for themselves. That temptation, if not kept in check, would turn the American eagle into an ostrich.
We must call the problem by its right name: There are some in the United States, including in the United States Congress, who are flirting with ideas and proposals that are isolationist in their potential consequences if not in their motivation.
Just a few blocks from here, up Pennsylvania Avenue on Capitol Hill, the foreign affairs budget of our government is under a two-pronged attack. It's under attack from those who think we can afford to withdraw from a very complicated world--and also from those who think we can significantly reduce the federal deficit by reducing our spending overseas.
But the fact is that those in Congress who would slash foreign spending in the name of fiscal responsibility are deluding themselves. The deficit, as we all know, began to mushroom out of control in the early 1980s. But the eighties saw no corresponding boom in our international budget. Quite the contrary, over the past decade the amount of money that the U.S. Government spends each year on foreign policy has actually declined nearly 40% in real dollars--adjusted for inflation--and is now at its lowest level in over half a century.
Even if we were to eliminate our foreign affairs spending altogether, it would make very little difference to the cause of deficit-reduction.
The current international affairs budget is only about 1.3% of total federal spending. That tiny fraction pays for all our embassies and diplomats overseas, our foreign aid and economic assistance programs, our participation in international organizations. It pays for our support of multinational peacekeeping operations, many of our arms control initiatives, and our overseas public information services. We've long since cut the fat out of our foreign affairs budget. We're now in danger of cutting into muscle and bone and vital arteries.
Let me put it as simply and bluntly as I can: Every single foreign policy initiative and program we have underway in the world today--from our support of new democracies and market economies in the former Soviet Union and Central Europe, to our support for the Middle East peace process, to our ability to foster reconciliation and reconstruction in the Balkans, to our fight against international crime and narcotics trafficking, to the battle against further genocide and famine in Africa, to our commitment to assure the safe dismantlement of nuclear weapons that have been aimed at our cities, to our role in ensuring a nuclear weapons-free Korean Peninsula--every single one of those efforts and countless more are in dire jeopardy.
This is, I would submit, a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States. It is a threat we face right now, as misguided Members of Congress wield the meat cleaver with which they are hacking away billions of dollars from the American people's ability to defend and advance their interests.
Let me now turn to the United Nations. It, too, is on the chopping block--not just our position in the UN but the UN itself. Throughout the Cold War, our nation's leaders--again Republicans and Democrats alike in both the executive and legislative branches--viewed the UN as a key instrument for advancing U.S. interests. Whether it was fighting communist aggression in Korea or smallpox in Africa, we turned to the UN to help us achieve our goals and further the cause of freedom.
But, today, the bipartisan consensus in support of the UN has frayed badly. In the current political environment, the only target that is juicier for rhetorical and budgetary attack than big government is world government. The United Nations is, of course, no such thing, but it does represent an attempt--welcome, admirable, and promising--to concert the energies of sovereign states on a variety of common causes, and, as such, it is vulnerable to demagoguery, particularly these days. The UN is "the longtime nemesis of millions of Americans," says one leader on Capitol Hill. It is "a totally incompetent instrument anyplace that matters," says another.
What makes these wrong-headed congressional assessments of the UN's capabilities particularly regrettable is that, if translated into draconian cuts in American funding for and participation in the United Nations, they may soon become self-fulfilling prophecies. The surest way to make the charge true that the UN is incompetent is to deprive it of resources--and of American leadership.
American leadership is necessary for, among other things, ensuring the reform of the UN. Like virtually all the institutions that are now making the transition to the Cold War era, the UN is in need of comprehensive changes in the way it manages itself as well as in the way it defines and carries out its mission.
Thoughtful critics such as Barry Blechman and William Durch here at the Stimson Center have made constructive, practical suggestions as to the direction that those reforms should take. President Clinton made the case for reforms when he spoke at the UN Charter ceremony in San Francisco in June, and Secretary Christopher reiterated that case and provided further specifics in his address to the UN General Assembly in New York last week.
But no institution can reform itself--or maintain its effectiveness--if it cannot pay its bills. The United Nations is now on the verge of financial collapse. It is currently $900 million in arrears in payments to countries that have provided peacekeeping troops and equipment, and another $400 million behind in payments for purchases of various kinds. Not coincidently, the total amount of the UN's arrears--$1.3 billion--is just about the same as--actually, a bit less than--the amount that the United States owes the organization because Congress refuses to appropriate sufficient funds.
We're not the only nation that has fallen behind in paying our assessed contributions, but we're far and away the biggest delinquent. And we're likely to fall much further behind in fiscal 1996, since the Senate Appropriations Committee has proposed to cut more than $600 million--a whopping 45%--from current spending levels for international organizations. That approach to UN reform is analogous to Dr. Kevorkian's contribution to the healing arts of medicine.
If the UN dies of bankruptcy, there will be consequences for the national security interests of the United States--none of them good. One of the most immediate will be that tens of thousands of Americans will lose their jobs. Almost half of all of the dollars that the UN awards in contracts every year go to American private sector companies. And as Mayor Rudy Guliani pointed out in his address to the United Nations General Assembly last month, UN agencies and accredited diplomatic missions spend some $3.3 billion a year in New York, making a major contribution to the economy of our nation's largest city.
There are also likely to be significant consequences for our nuclear and conventional arms control efforts. The UN provided the forum that we used to lobby more than 100 nations in our effort to secure the unconditional extension of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in May. Now we're working under UN auspices to establish a worldwide moratorium on the export of anti-personnel landmines. But this and other American- led multilateral initiatives will be at risk if the UN closes its doors.
And we may see equally immediate and unfortunate repercussions in the area of peacekeeping. Peacekeeping is the UN's biggest financial burden, but with that cost comes a huge benefit. And with our refusal to pay that price would come huge damage to the international common good. I can think of few quicker ways to undermine regional and even global stability than to yank UN peacekeepers out of Cyprus, Lebanon, Kashmir, and the border between Kuwait and Iraq. These operations have few if any American troops, but it's hard to see how they will be able to continue if we refuse to pony up our share of the funding.
When he was Secretary of State, James Baker framed the peacekeeping issue vividly when he testified in Congress in 1992. He noted that "UN peacekeeping is a pretty good buy and we ought to recognize that. We spent trillions of dollars to win the Cold War and we should be willing to spend millions of dollars to secure the peace."
Secretary Christopher has said much the same thing. He's done so more recently and just as succinctly. But I thought I'd quote his predecessor here to underscore that support for UN peacekeeping is a tenet of American foreign policy that ought to enjoy bipartisan backing.
UN peacekeeping, like the United Nations as a whole, is a good bargain for the United States. The U.S. share of UN peacekeeping costs us an amount equal to less than half of one percent of our defense budget. The per capita price to Americans for the entire UN system is less than $7 a year--about the price of a single movie ticket at the Uptown cinema or of a couple of one-night rentals at the video store next to it. That $7 pays not only for blue helmets for peacekeepers, but also for polio vaccinations for babies. Every year, UNICEF oral vaccines save the lives of three million children. Last year alone, the World Food Program fed 57 million hungry people. The World Health Organization has eliminated smallpox from the face of the earth and is making great strides in its campaign to eliminate polio by the year 2000.
That $7 also pays for the United Nations Fund for Population Activities, which provides contraceptives and family planning education for tens of millions of couples in 140 countries around the world. Thanks in large measure to UNFPA and USAID efforts, a Bangladeshi woman can now expect to have 27 great-grandchildren today, down from 217 15 years ago.
I will conclude with that example, since it underscores that what we're talking about here is the building of the future. What we do--or fail to do--today will have a vast impact, for better or for worse, on the world that we pass on to our children, our grandchildren, and our great- grandchildren, however many each of us has. That will be a better world if it has the benefit of American leadership, including American leadership of a vigorous and effective United Nations--a United Nations that can, as Henry Stimson would have put it, offer "pragmatic steps toward ideal objectives." That, of course, is the motto of the center that has provided me with a podium this afternoon. And on that note I'd like give the microphone back to Michael so he can open up the floor to discussion. Thank you.