[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 108 (Monday, August 8, 1994)]
[House]
[Page H]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: August 8, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                  A COHERENT STRATEGY WON THE COLD WAR

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from New York [Mr. Solomon] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. SOLOMON. Madam Speaker, as American foreign policy wallows in 
Clintonian mush, I would like to bring to the House's attention an 
article by Peter Schweizer in the May 30 National Review that details 
how Ronald Reagan won the cold war.
  Basically, Madam Speaker, Ronald Reagan won the cold war with a 
coherent and vigorous strategy that was based on deep moral principles 
and marked by clarity of vision. As Mr. Schweizer proves, Ronald Reagan 
and a select few were all but alone in believing both that the Soviets 
were evil and vulnerable. He outlined his convictions eloquently at 
Notre Dame in 1981: ``The West will not contain Communism, it will 
transcend Communism. We will not bother to denounce it, we'll dismiss 
it as a sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even 
now being written.''
  From these convictions sprang the Reagan doctrine, the holy alliance 
between the Pope and President Reagan to undermine the Polish regime, 
the military buildup of the 1980's, the Euromissile deployment, the 
rollback and liberation of Grenada, SDI, economic warfare, and myriad 
other challenges that simply overwhelmed the Soviets.
  Mr. Schweizer documents all of this with quotes from Soviet officials 
and excerpts from recently released national security documents. For 
instance, Oleg Kalugin, a former high-ranking KGB official said, 
``American policy in the 1980's was a catalyst for the collapse of the 
USSR.'' Kalugin further adds, ``Reagan and his views disturbed the 
Soviet government so much they bordered on hysteria. He was seen as a 
very serious threat.''
  Or consider National Security Decision Directive 75, signed by Ronald 
Reagan in 1983, which broke with the policy of containment and instead 
declared United States policy to be nothing short of rollback of Soviet 
power. Or how about NSDD 32, which declared war on the Soviet grip on 
Eastern Europe, in a clear break with previous United States policy, 
which for all intents and purposes had accepted the status quo of 
Communist domination of those states.
  Oh, how nice it would be to have such clarity today. Instead, we have 
a President who cannot make up his mind from one day to the next what 
our policy should be in a given region, let alone develop an 
overarching strategy. A President who allows his Haiti policy to be 
determined, at least on 1 day, by a single citizen-protester. A 
President who lets his Korea policy be derailed in a day because one 
notoriously untrustworthy man, Kim II-song, made promises to one 
notoriously gullible man, Jimmy Carter. A President who refuses to 
protect 37,000 Americans by building up our forces in Korea, while 
simultaneously planning an invasion of an island of no strategic 
interest to the United States. And a President whose Russia policy 
seems to take for granted that Russia, and not the United States, won 
the cold war.
  This administration has ignored every lesson from recent history, 
toppled pillars of U.S. foreign policy that have stood for decades, and 
junked classical precepts of statecraft that have been around for 
centuries. This whole scenario is bizarre, Madam Speaker. The trouble 
is, with an invasion of Haiti imminent and looming instability in near-
nuclear North Korea, this intellectually laughable foreign policy is 
becoming highly dangerous.
  I sincerely hope that the administration's foreign policy team will 
read the Schweizer article, Madam Speaker. It might prove to be a 
valuable dose of reality.

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