Remarks before a Town Hall Meeting in St. Louis, Missouri, March 6, 1996
Thank you, Mr. Gunn. And my thanks also to the World Affairs Council of St. Louis, to McDonnell Douglas, Emerson Electric, the World Trade Club and World Trade Center and the United Nations Association of Greater St. Louis. The participation of these and other groups is an encouraging testament to the quantity and quality of American grass-roots interest in international affairs and in our nation's role in the wider world.
You'll have a chance to hear this afternoon from two of my colleagues at the State Department: John Herbst will speak to you about Russia, Ukraine and the other New Independent States of the former Soviet Union -- an area of the world that is fraught with uncertainty but also with opportunities for us to advance our national interest; and you'll hear from Dan Kurtzer on the Middle East, where the latest terrorist outrages -- the four Hamas bombings over the past ten days -- have greatly complicated the quest for a lasting peace.
Twelve hours ago, a U.S. Air Force C-141 landed at Ben Gurion airport in Israel, carrying the most sophisticated explosive-detection equipment in the world and a team of American technical experts. Meanwhile, the President and Secretary Christopher are personally calling on key regional leaders to try to ensure that there will be no safe havens for the perpetrators of these horrors. Dan, as I've said, will give you more details this afternoon.
But the point I would stress is this: the United States has been the leader of the search for peace in the Middle East. In the aftermath of the recent bombings, the United States is also the leader of the international effort -÷ which for the first time brings together Israel and several of its Arab neighbors -÷ to combat and defeat the forces of extremism that are opposed to peace. And when the peace process resumes, the United States will once again be in the lead.
That is the topic of my remarks today: America's leadership in the world - why it is vital to our national well-being, why we must preserve and enhance our leadership in the face of new opportunities and new challenges.
Let me begin by describing, in broad-brush terms, the world in which we live. As the headlines of the last few days make all too clear, there is still plenty of misery, violence, chaos, insanity and brutality on our planet. But we must not lose sight of the big picture, which is far more positive.
It is an indisputable fact that the world has changed a lot in the last ten years - and changed overwhelmingly for the better. We have seen, simultaneously, the decline and fall of of dictators and the rise of freedom. Over the past decade, those twin trends have been evident in the victory of "people power" in the Philippines; the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain; the end of apartheid in South Africa; and the inspiring spectacle of Cambodians walking across mine fields and defying death threats to vote against the Khmer Rouge.
As much as any region, our own hemisphere has been transformed. As recently as seventeen years ago, a majority of the nations in Latin America and the Caribbean suffered some form of dictatorship. But when Secretary Christopher traveled through the region just last week, every government except the Castro regime in Cuba had a claim to democratic legitimacy. As political systems have opened up throughout the Americas, so have the region's economies: import barriers have fallen; trade has flourished; competition, long a dirty word, has gained respectability -- all to the benefit of American exports, American investors, and American jobs.
Today, to the 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. 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. We face an historic opportunity to build a world that reflects our ideals and promotes our interests -÷ a world that will be more prosperous and more secure not only for our generation, but for our children, and their children as well.
That is the good news. But it is clouded not just by outbreaks of bad news abroad of the sort we've seen recently in the Middle East -÷ there are also some disturbing trends here on the home front. Ironically, at this very moment of great hope and opportunity, there is, here in this country, a backlash against internationalism -- or, to put it differently, a resurgence of isolationism.
I say "resurgence" because we've see it before. Today, in the aftermath of the Cold War, just in the aftermath of other great struggles earlier in our nation's history, there is a temptation to draw back into ourselves, to devote all our attention and resources to fixing our own problems -÷ a temptation to let other countries fend for themselves. That temptation, if not kept in check, would turn the American eagle into an ostrich.
We are, in this decisive year of 1996, embarked on a great debate over America's role in the world. On one side are some members of Congress - and one major presidential candidate -÷ who have even suggested diverting the money we now spend on foreign aid to the construction of a giant fence along our borders. (Sunday's New York Times, by the way, estimated the construction costs of such a fence as somewhere between $166.8 million and $45.2 billion, a wide range that will make sense to anyone who has ever tried to pin down a contractor on what it will cost to do any major home improvements.)
Ponder the symbolism of this idea: there is an instinct twitching in our body politic to wall us in - and wall the world out; an instinct to build barriers to ensure that what happens elsewhere, far away or right next door, does not affect us here in the United States. We see this same isolationist instinct in efforts to reject free trade agreements, or the desire to keep us from having anything to do with any foreign conflicts, or to gut the United Nations, or in the fantasy that we can build multi-billion dollar space-based shields that will keep us safe from any military attack.
And it's certainly apparent in calls for us to slash the international affairs portion of the federal budget. More accurately, I should say "keep slashing," since international affairs spending, in real dollars, adjusted for inflation, has already been cut by nearly half over the past decade. President Clinton's proposed 1997 international affairs budget of $19.2 billion represents only about 1.2% of total Federal spending. That 1.2% pays for all our embassies and diplomats overseas; for our foreign aid and economic assistance programs; for our participation in international organizations and our support for multinational peacekeeping operations; for many of our arms control initiatives; and for our overseas public information services. That is how much or rather how little President Clinton is asking Congress to approve, and the taxpayer to fund, in order to assure that Americans live, travel, and trade in a safer, more stable, more prosperous world.
Yet there is a move in Congress to slice more than 30% from this bare-bones budget over the next seven years. If this move prevails, the result will be deep, across-the-board cuts in all areas; it would mean scaling back the nuclear safeguards program of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which tracks and regulates the presence and use of nuclear materials all over the world, especially in the former Soviet Union, North Korea, Iran and Iraq; it would mean stopping in its tracks the President's initiative to combat international crime and fight drug trafficking; and it would mean closing more than two dozen embassies and consulates around the world. We would be less able to replace a tourist's loss passport or help an American company gain a foothold in a foreign market.
There is a view in Congress that the United States can have a foreign policy on the cheap; that our truly vital interests in some sense end at the water's edge. That view is just plain wrong, and dangerously, damagingly so. Why? Because our national well-being -÷ our safety and our prosperity -÷ depends, to an unprecedented extent, on what happens in other parts of the world; it depends on a continuation of that steady progress of the kind I mentioned a moment ago -÷ toward open societies and open markets.
And why is that? Because our society and our economy are, as never before, interacting with those other ones around the planet. Since I work for a President who won the White House on the slogan, "It's the economy, stupid," let me start with the issue of open markets. The livelihood of our workers and farmers increasingly depends on their ability to compete in global markets. Here in Missouri, for instance, one out of every five manufacturing jobs is dependent on exports. Every other row of Missouri soybeans and one out of every four bales of Missouri cotton is sold abroad.
No President in the last 40 years has done more than Bill Clinton to open up new markets for American trade and investment. NAFTA and the Uruguay Round of GATT are creating hundreds of thousands of good jobs for Americans all across the country, including here in Missouri. For instance, this state's exports to Mexico have risen by more than 250% since 1992.
The President recognizes that there is still more work to be done in breaking down barriers to doing business overseas. That's why every American diplomat - from my boss, Warren Christopher on down, in Washington and in our posts overseas -÷ has made economic issues and U.S. commercial interests a top foreign policy priority.
The Clinton Administration is also focusing foreign policy resources on those international threats that directly affect the safety of Americans here at home. Thanks to our efforts, the architects of the World Trade Center bombing were brought to justice. We stopped another attack in New York before it happened, and thwarted a plan to blow up American airliners over the Pacific.
Each of these law-enforcement operations depended on having a vigorous presence abroad. We must be able to track villains on their home turf before they can strike at us where we live. If we start drastically cutting back on embassies abroad, as several congressional bills would require, we'll be punching holes in our first line of defense against international terrorists and criminals. And what a stupid time to be doing that! The battle against international terrorism is far from over, as we saw not just from the Hamas bombings in Israel but also from the recent IRA attacks in London.
We also need to keep up the struggle against the proliferation of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons that might someday end up in the hands of political extremists. When our Administration came into office, the world had known for some years that the North Koreans had an active nuclear weapons program, and the time was fast approaching when we might see North Korean nuclear weapons for sale to other rogue states or organizations. After months of intensive negotiations, our Administration brought the North Korean project to a halt. We did it by putting in place a program that will substitute relatively safe power-generation reactors for dangerous, bomb-building ones. But some in Congress would like to pull the plug on that program, which could have the consequence of allowing the North Koreans to resume their quest for nuclear weapons.
And that, in turn, could bring us to the brink of a new Korean war. Over the last two years, President Clinton has concluded landmark agreements to make sure that there will be only one nuclear-weapons state on the territory of the former USSR, rather than four. Together with the former Soviet states, we have been destroying nuclear warheads at an unprecedented rate. We are helping those countries improve security over their bomb-making materials, so that those materials don't someday end up in the wrong hands. Yet some of the proposed budget-cuts would prevent us from finishing that job.
Another job we must see through is the one we've undertaken in the former Yugoslavia. We can all debate the history of the last five years. No one, I suspect, will argue that the international community did enough, or acted quickly enough, in the early stages of the tragedy. But we can all be proud of the role that the United States has played in galvanizing an effective diplomatic and military strategy over the past year. The peace that reigns in the Balkans today, however fragile and uncertain, is a credit to American leadership.
It is also a credit to America's willingness and ability to assemble international coalitions in support of our own interests. In Bosnia, we have put together, and led, a force of 33 nations, including nine of our former enemies from the old Warsaw Pact. Part of the lesson - and it's a very encouraging one - is that the emerging global consensus in support of our values and interests increases our ability to defend and advance those values and interests in cooperation with others.
Now, let me be clear: the ultimate guarantor of our security remains our capacity and willingness to act forcefully all by ourselves when necessary. Our military must remain modern, mobile, ready and strong. But as this century has amply demonstrated, our freedom, security and prosperity cannot be fully ensured without the active help of other free peoples, all of whom are looking to us for leadership.
The most successful American-led coalition of our time is NATO, the anchor of American engagement in Europe and the linchpin of transatlantic security. As Secretary Christopher puts it, NATO has "helped to reconcile old adversaries, to embed free countries in strong and solid institutions, and to create an enduring sense of shared purpose in one another's security." Now that the Cold War has ended, we must work with our NATO allies not just to make peace possible in the Balkans, but also to bring the new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union into a new European security order. If we meet that challenge, then we will have dramatically reduced the chance of conflict in the area where two world wars and a global cold war began.
When we talk about American leadership of international institutions, we must also address the question of the United Nations especially today, since that organization has come under increasing attack, particularly in regard to its peacekeeping activities. Some of the proposals now in Congress would effectively force the United States to stop paying our UN dues, thereby reneging on our treaty obligations under the UN Charter. In the name of the Contract with America, it would abrogate the contract with the world that Harry Truman signed 50 years ago and that every President since, Republican and Democrat, has reaffirmed.
How much does our membership in the UN actually cost you and me as individual Americans? The current per capita price to the U.S., for all the work the UN does, from blue helmets for peacekeepers to polio vaccines for babies, is less than $7 per year, which is considerably less than the cost of a ticket to see the St Louis Blues play -- with or without Wayne Gretzky.
In short, the UN is a good bargain; and it is a good way of leveraging our power and influence. It is a good way of exercising our leadership. And if we withdraw our support of the UN - if we withdraw from our position of leadership in the international community more generally - there is no other country that will step in and lead in our place.
Make no mistake about that. At the same time, make no mistake that there are plenty of forces that will fill the vacuum we leave in other ways, not at all to our liking or to our advantage. That is why, just as the Wise Men put in place American foreign policy after World War II, our generation must put in place a foreign policy for the post-Cold War era that is equally hard-headed and forward-looking - and that means outward-looking; a foreign policy that is not penny-wise and pound-foolish; a foreign policy that puts our money where our interests and principles are.
So by all means, let's get on with the great debate. Let's have that debate not just inside the Washington Beltway or on the floor of the Congress or on the '96 campaign trail. Let's have it in town meetings like this one.
And let its starting point be a shared recognition of what must continue to be the three pillars of American foreign policy: first, the strength and global appeal of our democratic values and institutions; second, the strength of our economy, which depends on global peace and stability; and third, the strength of our military power. In short, we have the heart, the brains, the wallet and the muscle to lead the world, and to do so on behalf of our own interests as well as those of humanity as a whole. Thank you.