[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 57 (Tuesday, April 30, 1996)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E662-E664]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                     PRAISING OUR DIPLOMATIC CORPS

                                 ______


                          HON. BILL RICHARDSON

                             of new mexico

                    in the house of representatives

                        Tuesday, April 30, 1996

  Mr. RICHARDSON. Mr. Speaker, as a member of our Permanent Select 
Committee on Intelligence, I have had the unique opportunity to 
participate in a number of highly sensitive foreign affairs missions. 
In each of my overseas assignments, I have had the great pleasure of 
working with exceptional members of our diplomatic corps.
  Sadly, the corps is not always appreciated as the State Department 
has been under siege, even by some Members of this body who seek to 
undermine the activity of our diplomatic corps to properly represent 
U.S. interests and citizens overseas.
  The work that our diplomats do in representing this country has a 
profound impact. Their work enables our country to engage in 
international business, but more importantly, they save our country 
blood by defusing crises before we need to send our military.
  Ambassadors, and indeed our entire diplomatic corps, are our 
country's first line of defense and are critical to our national 
security and interest.
  Our most able Ambassador to Spain, the Honorable Richard Gardner 
recently presented an eloquent case defending and explaining the work 
of our diplomats. I urge my colleagues to review Ambassador Gardner's 
March 29, 1996, speech to the American Society of International Law 
which is excerpted here.

                         Who Needs Ambassadors?

       I come to you as a deeply troubled ambassador. I am 
     troubled by the lack of understanding in our country today 
     about our foreign policy priorities and the vital role of our 
     embassies in implementing them. I sometimes think that what 
     our ambassadors and embassies do is one of our country's best 
     kept secrets.
       During the Cold War there was also confusion and ignorance, 
     but at least there was bipartisan consensus on the need for 
     American leadership in defending freedom in the world against 
     Soviet aggression and the spread of totalitarian communism.
       Much of my work as ambassador to Italy was dominated by 
     this overriding priority. At a time when some Italian leaders 
     were flirting with the compromesso storico--a government 
     alliance between Christian Democrats and an Italian Communist 
     Party still largely oriented toward Moscow--I was able to 
     play a modest role in making sure the Italians understood why 
     the United States opposed the entry of Communist parties into 
     the governments of NATO allies.
       When the Soviet Union began threatening Europe by deploying 
     its SS-20 missiles, it was vitally important for NATO to 
     respond by deploying the Pershing 2 and cruise missiles. It 
     soon became clear that the deployment could not occur without 
     a favorable decision by Italy. Our embassy in Rome was able 
     to persuade an Italian Socialist Party with a history of 
     hostility to NATO to do an about-face and vote for the cruise 
     missile deployment in the Italian Parliament along with the 
     Christian Democrats and the small non-communist lay parties.
       Some years later Mikhail Gorbachev said it was the NATO 
     decision to deploy the Pershing and cruise missiles--not the 
     Strategic Defense Initiative as some have claimed--that 
     helped bring him to the realization that his country had to 
     move from a policy based on military threats to one of 
     accommodation with the West.
       So at the height of the Cold War, it did not take a genius 
     to understand the need for strong U.S. leadership in the 
     world and for effective ambassadors and embassies in support 
     of that leadership.
       Today, however, there is no single unifying threat to help 
     justify and define a world role for the United States. As a 
     result, we are witnessing devastating reductions in the State 
     Department budget which covers the cost of our embassies 
     overseas.
       Now that there is no longer a Soviet Union and a Communist 
     threat, what is our foreign policy all about? And what is the 
     current need for ambassadors and embassies?
       A common refrain heard today is that American foreign 
     policy lacks a single unifying goal and a coherent strategy 
     for achieving it. But precisely because the post Cold War 
     world is so complex, so rapidly evolving, and characterized 
     by so many diverse threats to our interests, it is difficult 
     to encapsulate in one sentence or one paragraph a definition 
     of American foreign policy that has global application.
       Perhaps we should start by recalling what our foreign 
     policy was all about before there was a Cold War. It was 
     about trying to create a world in which the American people 
     could be secure and prosperous and see their deeply held 
     values of political and economic freedom increasingly 
     realized in other parts of the world. Well, that is still the 
     purpose of our foreign policy today.
       Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, with broad 
     bipartisan support from Republicans like Wendell Willkie and 
     Arthur Vandenberg, sought to implement these high purposes 
     with a policy of practical internationalism, which I define 
     as working with other countries in bilateral, regional and 
     global institutions to advance common interests in peace, 
     welfare and human rights.
       Our postwar ``founding fathers'' in both political parties 
     understood the importance of military power and the need to 
     act alone if necessary in defense of U.S. interests. But they 
     also gave us the United Nations, the Bretton Woods 
     organizations, GATT, the Marshall Plan, NATO and the Point 
     Four program as indispensable instruments for achieving our 
     national purposes in close cooperation with others.
       We are working with host governments to restore momentum to 
     the endangered Middle East peace process by mobilizing 
     international action against the Hamas terrorists and their 
     supporters, providing technical assistance and economic aid 
     to the Palestinian authority, encouraging the vital Syrian-
     Israeli negotiations, and promoting regional Middle East 
     economic development.
       We have been consulting with key European governments such 
     as Spain as well as with the EU Commission in Brussels on how 
     to bring a peaceful transition to democracy in Cuba.
       On the second priority: confronting the new transnational 
     threat:
       Having worked successfully with our host governments for 
     the unconditional and indefinite extension of the Non-
     Proliferation Treaty--a major diplomatic achievement--we are 
     focusing now on building support for a Comprehensive Test Ban 
     Agreement, on keeping weapons of mass destruction out of the 
     hands of countries like Iran, Iraq and Libya, and on securing 
     needed European financial contributions for the Korean Energy 
     Development Organization, an essential vehicle for 
     terminating North Korea's nuclear weapons program.
       We are working to strengthen bilateral and multilateral 
     arrangements to assure the identification, extradition and 
     prosecution of persons engaged in drug trafficking, organized 
     crime, terrorism and alien smuggling, and we are building 
     European support for new institutions to train law 
     enforcement officers in former Communist countries, such as 
     the International Law Enforcement Academy in Budapest.
       And we are giving a new priority in our diplomacy to the 
     protection of the global environment, coordinating our 
     negotiating positions and assistance programs on such issues 
     as population, climate change, ozone depletion, 
     desertification, and marine pollution. For we have learned 
     that environmental initiatives can be vitally important to 
     our goals of prosperity and security: negotiations on water 
     resources are central to the Middle East peace process, and a 
     Haiti denuded of its forests will have a hard time supporting 
     a stable democracy and keeping its people from flooding our 
     shores.
       On the third priority: promoting open markets and 
     prosperity:
       Having worked with our host countries to bring a successful 
     conclusion to the Uruguay Round, we are now busily engaged in 
     discussing left-over questions like market access for 
     audiovisuals, telecommunications, and bio-engineered foods, 
     and new issues like trade and labor standards, trade and 
     environment, and trade and competition policy.
       We are also encouraging the enlargement of the European 
     Union to Central and Eastern Europe and we are reporting 
     carefully on the prospects of the European Monetary Union by 
     the target date of 1999 and on the implications of an EMU for 
     U.S. interests.
       In carrying out this rich global foreign policy agenda we 
     will be greatly assisted by the

[[Page E663]]

     agreement that was reached in Madrid last December between 
     President Clinton, Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez and 
     President Jacques Santer of the European Commission on the 
     ``New Transatlantic Agenda'' and its accompanying ``U.S.-EU 
     Action Plan.''
       These documents were a major achievement of Spain's EU 
     presidency. They represent an historic breakthrough in U.S. 
     relations with the European Union, moving those relations 
     beyond consultation to common action on almost all of the 
     foreign policy questions I cited earlier and many others I 
     have no time to mention.
       A senior-level group from the United States, the European 
     Commission and the EU Presidency country (currently Italy) is 
     responsible for monitoring progress on this large agenda and 
     modifying it as necessary.
       The Madrid documents commit the U.S. and the EU to building 
     a new ``Transatlantic Marketplace.'' We have agreed to 
     undertake a study on the reduction or elimination of tariffs 
     and non-tariff barriers between the two sides of the 
     Atlantic. Even as the study proceeds, we will be looking at 
     things that can be done rather promptly, such as eliminating 
     investment restrictions, duplicative testing and 
     certification requirements, and conflicting regulations. This 
     means more work not only in Brussels and Washington but in 
     each of our embassies.
       We will also be following closely the EU's 
     Intergovernmental Conference (IGC) that is now opening in 
     Turin. The common foreign and security policy provided for in 
     the Maastricht Treaty is still a work in progress. Although 
     the EU provides substantial economic aid and takes important 
     regional trade initiatives, it has so far proved unable to 
     deal with urgent security crisis like those in the former 
     Yugoslavia and the Aegean.
       The IGC offers an opportunity to revise EU institutions and 
     procedures so that a common foreign and security policy can 
     be made to work in an EU whose membership could grow from 15 
     to 27 in the decade ahead. We hope that opportunity will be 
     seized.
       What changes the IGC should make in the Maastricht Treaty 
     is exclusively for the EU countries to decide, but the United 
     States is not indifferent to the outcome. We believe our 
     interests are served by continuing progress toward European 
     political as well as economic unity, which will make Europe a 
     more effective partner for the United States in world 
     affairs.
       The question that remains to be answered is whether the 
     American people and the Congress are willing to provide the 
     financial resources to make all this activity possible. The 
     politics of our national budget situation has ominous 
     implications for our foreign policy in general and our 
     international diplomacy in particular.
       Let us begin with some very round numbers. We have a Gross 
     Domestic Product of about $7 trillion and a federal budget of 
     about $1.6 trillion. Nearly $1.1 trillion of that $1.6 
     trillion goes to mandatory payments--the so-called 
     entitlement programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and social 
     security and also federal pensions and interest on the 
     national debt. The remaining $500 billion divides about 
     equally between the defense budget and civilian discretionary 
     spending--which account for some $250 * * *.
       Of the $250 billion of civilian discretionary spending, 
     about $20 billion used to be devoted on the average of years 
     to international affairs--the so-called 150 account. This 
     account includes our assessed and voluntary payments to the 
     UN, our bilateral aid and contributions to the international 
     financial institutions, the U.S. Information Agency's 
     broadcasting and educational exchange programs, and the State 
     Department budget.
       Congressional spending cuts have now brought the 
     international affairs account down to about $17 billion 
     annually--about 1 percent of our total budget. Taking 
     inflation into account, this $17 billion is nearly a 50 
     percent reduction in real terms from the level of a decade 
     ago. For Fiscal Year 1997, the Congressional leadership 
     proposes a cut to $15.7 billion. Its 7-year plan to balance 
     the budget would bring international affairs spending down to 
     $12.5 billion a year by 2002.
       Keep in mind that about $5 billion of the 150 account, goes 
     to Israel and Egypt--rightly so, in my opinion, because of 
     the priority we accord to Middle East peace. So under the 
     Congressional balanced budget scenario only $7.5 billion 
     would be left four years from now for all of our other 
     international spending.
       These actual and prospective cuts in our international 
     affairs account are devastating. Among other things, they 
     mean:
       that we cannot pay our legally owing dues to the United 
     Nations system, thus severely undermining the world 
     organization's work for peace and compromising our efforts 
     for UN reform.
       that we cannot pay our fair share of voluntary 
     contributions to UN agencies and international financial 
     institutions to assist the world's poor and promote free 
     markets, economic growth, environmental protection and 
     population stabilization;
       that we must drastically cut back the reach of the Voice of 
     America and the size of our Fullbright and International 
     Visitor programs, all of them important vehicles for 
     influencing foreign opinion about the United States;
       that we will have insufficient funds to respond to aid 
     requirements in Bosnia, Haiti, the Middle East, the former 
     Communist countries and in any new crisis where our national 
     interests are at         * * *.
       Why did they do these things?
       Because they understood the growing interdependence between 
     conditions in our country and conditions in our global 
     neighborhood.
       Because they understood that our best chance to shape the 
     world environment to promote our national security and 
     welfare was to share costs and risks and other nations in 
     international institutions.
       And because they understood that our national interest in 
     the long run would best be served by realizing the benefits 
     of reciprocity and stability only achievable through the 
     development of international law.
       Listening to much of our public debate, I sometimes think 
     that all this history has been forgotten, that we are 
     suffering from a kind of collective amnesia. I submit that 
     the basic case for American world leadership today is 
     essentially the same as it was before the Cold War began. It 
     is a very different world, of course, but the fact of our 
     interdependence remains. Obviously, in every major respect, 
     it has grown.
       What are the specific foreign policy priorities in the 
     Clinton Administration? In a recent speech at Harvard's 
     Kennedy School, Secretary of State Warren Christopher 
     identified three to which we are giving special emphasis--
     pursuing peace in regions of vital interest, confronting the 
     new transnational security threats, and promoting open 
     markets and prosperity.
       The broad lines of American policy in these three priority 
     areas are necessarily hammered out in Washington. But our 
     embassies constitute an essential part of the delivery system 
     through which those policies are implemented in particular 
     regions and countries.
       This includes not only such vital multilateral embassies as 
     our missions to the UN in New York, Geneva and Vienna, and to 
     NATO and the European Union in Brussels, but also our 
     embassies in the more than 180 countries with which we 
     maintain diplomatic relations.
       Americans have fallen into the habit of thinking that 
     ambassadors and embassies have become irrelevant luxuries, 
     obsolete frills in an age of instant communications. We make 
     the mistake of thinking that if a sound foreign policy 
     decision is approved at the State Department or the White 
     House, it does not much matter how it is carried out in the 
     field.
       This is a dangerous illusion indulged in by no other major 
     country. Things don't happen just because we say so. 
     Discussion and persuasion are necessary. Diplomacy by fax 
     simply doesn't work.
       Ambassadors today need to perform multiple roles. They 
     should be the ``eyes and ears'' of the President and 
     Secretary of State; advocates of our country's foreign policy 
     in the upper reaches of the host government.
       They need to build personal relationships of mutual trust 
     with key overseas decision-makers in government and the 
     private sector. They should also radiate American values as 
     intellectual, educational and cultural emissaries, 
     communicating what our country stands for to interest groups 
     and intellectual leaders as well as to the public at large.
       In a previous age of diplomacy, U.S. ambassadors spent most 
     of their time dealing with bilateral issues between the 
     United States and the host country. Bilateral issues are 
     still important--assuring access to host country military 
     bases, promoting sales of U.S. products, stimulating 
     educational and cultural exchanges are some notable examples. 
     And every embassy has the obligation to report on and analyze 
     political and economic developments in the host country that 
     may impact on U.S. interests.
       But most of the work of our ambassadors and embassies today 
     is devoted to regional and global issues--indeed, to acting 
     upon the three key priorities identified by Secretary 
     Christopher in his Kennedy School speech. Let me give you 
     some examples based on my experience in Madrid and with my 
     fellow ambassadors in Europe:
       On the first priority: pursuing peace in regions of vital 
     interest:
       We are working with our host countries to fashion common 
     policies on the continued transformation of NATO, Partnership 
     for Peace, NATO enlargement, and NATO-Russia relations.
       After having secured host country support for the military 
     and diplomatic measures that brought an end to the fighting 
     in Bosnia, we are now working to assure the implementation of 
     the civilian side of the Dayton Agreement, notably economic 
     reconstruction, free elections, the resettlement of refugees, 
     and the prosecution of war crimes.
       That we will have fewer and smaller offices to respond to 
     the 2 million requests we receive each year for assistance to 
     Americans overseas and to safeguard our borders through the 
     visa process.
       And that we will be unable to maintain a world-class 
     diplomatic establishment as the delivery vehicle for our 
     foreign policy.
       A final word on this critical last point. The money which 
     Congress makes available to maintain the State Department and 
     our overseas embassies and consulates is now down to about 
     $2.5 billion a year. As the international affairs account 
     continues to go down, we face the prospect of further cuts. 
     The budget crunch has been exacerbated by the need to find 
     money to pay for our new embassies in the newly independent 
     countries of the former Soviet Union.
       In our major European embassies, we have already reduced 
     State Department positions by 25 percent since Fiscal Year 
     1995. We have been told to prepare for cuts of 40 percent or 
     more from the 1995 base over the next two or three years.

[[Page E664]]

       In our Madrid embassy, to take an example, this will leave 
     us with something like three political and three economic 
     officers besides the ambassador and deputy chief of mission 
     to perform our essential daily diplomatic work of advocacy, 
     representation and reporting in the broad range of vitally 
     important areas I have enumerated. Our other embassies face 
     similarly devastating reductions.
       I have to tell you that cuts of this magnitude will gravely 
     undermine our ability to influence foreign governments and 
     will severely diminish our leadership role in world affairs. 
     They will also have detrimental consequences for our 
     intelligence capabilities since embassy reporting is the 
     critical overt component of U.S. intelligence collection. In 
     expressing these concerns I believe I am representing the 
     views of the overwhelming majority of our career and non-
     career ambassadors.
       Under the pressure of Congressional budget cuts, the State 
     Department is eliminating 13 diplomatic posts, including 
     consulates in such important European cities as Stuttgart, 
     Zurich, Bilbao and Bordeaux. The Bordeaux Consulate dated 
     back to the time of George Washington. Try explaining to the 
     French that we cannot afford a consulate there now when we 
     were able to afford one then when we were a nation of 3 
     million people.
       The consulates I have mentioned not only provided important 
     services to American residents and tourists, they were 
     political lookout posts, export promotion platforms, and 
     centers for interaction with regional leaders in a Europe 
     where regions are assuming growing importance. Now they will 
     be all gone.
       Closing the 13 posts is estimated to save about $9 million 
     a year, one quarter of the cost of an F-16 fighter plane. 
     Bilbao, for example, cost $200,000 a year. A B-2 bomber costs 
     about $2,000 million. I remind you that $2 billion pays 
     nearly all the salaries and expenses of running the State 
     Department--including our foreign embassies--for a year.
       Let us be clear about what is going on. The commendable 
     desire to balance our national budget, the acute allergy of 
     the American people to tax increases (indeed, their desire 
     for tax reductions), the explosion of entitlement costs with 
     our aging population, and the need to maintain a strong 
     national defense, all combine to force a drastic curtailment 
     of the civilian discretionary spending which is the principal 
     public vehicle for domestic and international investments 
     essential to our country's future.
       Having no effective constituency, spending on international 
     affairs is taking a particularly severe hit within the 
     civilian discretionary account and with it the money needed 
     for our diplomatic establishment. The President and the 
     Secretary of State are doing their best to correct this state 
     of affairs, but they will need greater support from the 
     Congress and the general public than has been manifest so far 
     if this problem is to be properly resolved.
       I submit that it will not be resolved, until there is a 
     recognition that the international affairs budget is in a 
     very real sense a national security budget--because diplomacy 
     is our first line of national defense. The failure to build 
     solid international relationships and treat the causes of 
     conflict today will surely mean costly military interventions 
     tomorrow.

                          ____________________