[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 12 (Friday, January 20, 1995)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E147-E148]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


    OUR FOREIGN POLICY REQUIRES BIPARTISAN CONSENSUS BASED ON SOUND 
                              INTELLIGENCE

                                 ______


                          HON. STEVE GUNDERSON

                              of wisconsin

                    in the house of representatives

                        Friday, January 20, 1995
  Mr. GUNDERSON. Mr. Speaker, our foreign policy must be bipartisan. 
However useful or inevitable our internal debates or expressions may be 
for domestic issues, we simply cannot continue to apply many voices to 
foreign affairs. Our goal in foreign affairs is to positively influence 
and shape foreign situations to our benefit. That is so whether it is a 
trouble spot in Chechnya, North Korea, Bosnia, or Iraq. It is so for 
whatever type of situation--be it impending trouble or opportunity--
that may arise somewhere else.
  That influence cannot serve U.S. interests, however, if it is founded 
on, and bespeaks, divisive and often petty partisan agendas. This is 
especially so when those agendas derive from domestic interests having 
little relevance to the situation. So doing confuses us. It confuses 
our constituents. It confuses foreign leaders who look to what we say 
and do to formulate their own policies and reactions. Confusion about 
what we are doing, or are likely to do, simply from too many voices, 
can itself harm the situation, can increase the dangers. Ultimately, 
many voices confuse--and dissipate--our ability to shape our national 
future relative to other countries. I submit to you that the more we 
cast about in the eddies and swirls of partisanship, blown hither and 
yon by polarization and parochialism, the more we will seem to lack any 
overarching, unifying vision at all for what we want our own future to 
be. A ship that has no clear port of embarkation, no compass, no 
rudder, and no articulated destination--how can it ever arrive? How can 
we even begin to advance on our national goals of peace and security 
when they are not what we have set before us?
  Colleagues, we must get beyond our partisan differences. Our higher 
order national interests and visions--spoken with one voice--must 
guide. Random undertow denies our choices, traps us. Our foreign goals, 
policies, strategies and objectives--indeed the effects of all those on 
our future national security--simply cannot be left to such chance. We 
cannot permit our end points to forever recede.
  Instead, we must together do the hard work of shaping foreign policy, 
and decide our strategy, for the reasons that are relevant to the 
specific situations at hand. We must begin the process with accurate 
and expert estimates of those situations, and how they might be 
affected by various events and courses of action. Our support for this 
work must come not from vested parochialism, but from U.S. intelligence 
agencies that we fund for this very purpose.
  An additional point may pertain here. These agencies, as we speak, 
are reviewing and adaption their own visions, goals, and the 
organizations and processes that should flow from those. They are doing 
so to more effectively meet requirements that we and others place 
before them. In envisioning their future uses, purposes, character, and 
attributes, these agencies surely are telling themselves ``if we don't 
know where we are to be, then we won't get there.'' Clearly, in better 
defining 
[[Page E148]] their place in the coming decades, they are bound between 
funding realities and the quickly changing global situations we need 
them to monitor ever more astutely. Their leadership surely knows that 
to do this, any mere perpetuation of vested bureaucratic interests can 
no longer justify them. Circumstances are compelling them to 
thoughtfully chart their future. They must now navigate with the 
compass of a clear, overarching, well-articulated, and broadly 
understood vision of what they will be and what they will do to serve 
national security. They recognize that their success at relating their 
means to that end is the standard by which we ultimately will judge 
them.
  My colleagues, can we fairly ask less of ourselves? I submit there is 
a lesson in some of this for how we carry out our own tasks in foreign 
affairs and national security. As is true for our intelligence 
agencies, our efforts must rise above our own bureaucracy. We must look 
beyond the affiliations and vested interests that are poised to cast us 
about without aim, reduce our successes, invite failures, trap us. So 
for us too, the context of our foreign policy pursuit can only be--must 
be--our larger, enduring goals. These are what unite us as one country. 
I submit that bipartisanship is absolutely essential to furthering 
those goals and attaining those attributes that make us one.


                          ____________________