[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 72 (Thursday, April 27, 2017)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2572-S2574]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
Foreign Policy
Mr. BARRASSO. Mr. President, people around the country know the world
continues to be a very dangerous place. It became more dangerous over
the past 8 years. I believe that is particularly related to what I saw
as unwise and unsound policies by the Obama administration, certainly
when it comes to foreign policy.
Every President's foreign policy should secure America's national
interests and demonstrate America's leadership around the world. That
was not the case under President Obama. The last President and his team
followed a policy, what has been called strategic patience--strategic
patience--when dealing with hostile countries all around the world:
Iran, North Korea.
Any time there was a belligerent, aggressive, cunning dictator on the
move, President Obama's position was strategic patience. It was a
terrible approach--a terrible approach for us in dealing with reckless
regimes.
I always thought President Obama was completely focused on signing a
nuclear deal with Iran, not because it actually was a great deal but
maybe because it might reflect well on his legacy. I thought he wanted
a deal so badly that he ended up getting a deal that was a bad deal.
Well, as part of the deal, the former President accepted Iranian
demands--and he accepted all of them--to lift an arms embargo that the
United Nations had put into place.
This was an embargo that said that Iran was not supposed to be
selling weapons to other countries. The embargo was going to disappear
in 5 years, whether Iran complied with it or not. We already know Iran
has no intention of playing by the rules. They haven't played by the
rules all the way through. Last week, the Secretary of Defense, James
Mattis, said Iran has already been violating the embargo. That is why I
believe they have no intention of playing by the rules.
The Secretary of Defense tells us they are not playing by the rules
now. He said we have seen Iranian-supplied missiles--our Secretary of
Defense said: We have seen Iranian-supplied missiles being fired into
Saudi Arabia by the rebels in Yemen. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson
was even more clear. He said last week that Iran is ``the world's
leading state sponsor of terrorism.''
He said that Iran is ``responsible for intensifying multiple
conflicts''--``intensifying the conflicts and undermining U.S.
interests in countries such as Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and Lebanon.'' Now,
this is a direct result of President Obama spending 8 years being
strategically patient. It is the result of sending the signal that Iran
would be rewarded for its bad behavior.
So let's look at what happened last year when the Obama
administration was bragging about the nuclear deal--and they were high-
fiving, bragging about the deal.
Just when the deal went into effect, President Obama arranged to send
to Iran $1.7 billion in cash--$1.7 billion is an astonishingly large
amount of money. It is a million and a million and a million--it is
1,700 piles of $1 million. Remember--try to visualize this. You may
remember the news reports about pallets of cash stacked up going to
Iran. President Obama sent $400 million as a downpayment.
Within 24 hours, the Iranians agreed to release a group of Americans
whom they had been holding hostage. The Obama White House said it was
not a ransom payment to free the hostages. The Obama administration
actually thought the American people were naive enough to believe it
was just a coincidence in timing. Well, you can bet the Iranians did
not believe it was a coincidence because they actually said it was not
a coincidence.
The Iranians described the money as for the release of the hostages.
We know from experience that the Iranians see hostage-taking as a valid
way of conducting their own foreign policy. Right now, North Korea also
has taken hostages--three American hostages written about today in the
papers.
We know from experience the Iranians see hostage-taking as a valid
way to conduct foreign policy, and they have also gotten the message,
at least from the previous administration, that it can be a very
profitable policy as well. President Obama played right into their
hands. There is something else President Obama did that we just learned
about, and that is why I wanted to speak about this today.
Politico had a major expose on Monday of this week. The headline was:
``Obama's hidden Iran deal giveaway''--
[[Page S2573]]
the ``hidden deal giveaway.'' Around the same time President Obama was
sending cash to Iran, he also released seven Iranians who had been
arrested by the United States. The President downplayed the crimes
these individuals had committed. He said it was a ``one-time gesture''
to help grease the skids for his Iran deal.
Now, according to the documents obtained by Politico, the Obama
administration also dropped charges and international arrest warrants
against 14 other individuals. Some of them were wanted for serious
threats to our own American national security. One man was charged with
trying to buy thousands of assault weapons--thousands of assault
weapons--and send them to Iran.
Another was charged with conspiring to get from Iran thousands of
pieces of equipment with nuclear applications. The scheme included
hundreds of U.S.-made sensors for uranium enrichment centrifuges in
Iran. Centrifuges were a big reason we were concerned about Iran's
nuclear program in the first place. Yet, according to President Obama,
this doesn't seem to be a problem.
According to the article that came out Monday, ``As far back as the
fall of 2014, Obama administration officials began slow-walking some
significant investigations and prosecutions of Iranian procurement
networks operating right here within the United States.''
As one expert told Politico, ``This is a scandal.'' She said: ``It's
stunning and hard to understand why we would do this.'' Republicans in
Congress warned about this kind of thing from the very beginning.
President Obama was so interested in getting a deal that he got one
that in my opinion, has been very bad for the United States--not just
for the United States, bad for the world because Iran with a nuclear
weapon makes the world less safe, less secure, and less stable.
President Obama has this as part of his legacy, but I will tell you
strategic patience has failed. Secretary of State Tillerson said so
last week, and I agree with him completely. I am glad to hear our top
diplomat recognized this, and I am glad to see the Trump administration
doing a comprehensive review of the Iran nuclear agreement.
The last President put international opinion first when it came to
foreign policy. We see this all around the world. This President,
President Trump, is showing that we will put America's interests first.
It is not just Iran where we have the problem. I was recently in Asia
over the break, along with a group of Senators. We went to Tokyo, we
went to Beijing to meet with the leaders in China. We went around that
region. We met with the Premier of China, who is the No. 2 person in
China, and we met with the No. 3 and the No. 4 to talk specifically
about the problems of North Korea and the region.
For a long time, North Korea has been called the land of lousy
options, but there is new urgency as we see the increasing capacity of
North Korea now with their rockets not just propelled with liquid fuel
but now with solid fuel that allows for quicker launches. The launch
vehicles are no longer on wheels limited to the roads in North Korea,
they are now on tracks and they can go anywhere.
North Korea has increased their nuclear capacity as well as their
missile deliverability, and they are working on intercontinental
ballistic missiles that can hit the United States. That is why we were
at the White House yesterday for this secure briefing. That is why it
is so critical that we focus on North Korea and we have a President who
is focused on a peaceful resolution but is not afraid to use force, as
we have seen in Syria and in Afghanistan, because if you want to use
deterrence, you have to have a capacity--which we have had in the
United States, which is incredible--through the Presidents over the
years. You have to have a commitment to use that capacity, and we have
seen from President Trump a commitment to use that capacity in Syria,
in Afghanistan. You have to communicate a willingness to use that
capacity, as President Trump is doing today.
Last week, Vice President Pence traveled to the demilitarized zone
between South Korea and North Korea. He said very clearly that when it
comes to North Korea's nuclear weapons program, ``the era of strategic
patience is over.''
North Korea has been allowed to get away with too much for too long.
It continues to test nuclear weapons. It continues to test missiles. It
continues to use hostages as a way of getting what it wants from other
countries.
Over the weekend, we learned that North Korea arrested an American
professor who was in that country. North Korea, like Iran, has a
history of taking hostages and using them as leverage to get what it
wants. We now know three Americans are being held in North Korea.
The leadership of countries like Iran and North Korea need to
understand that this kind of action will not succeed.
No one wants a fight with Iran. No one wants a fight with North
Korea. The way to avoid the fight is to show that there is a limit to
the patience of civilized countries of the world, which is why the age
of strategic patience is now in the past.
There is new leadership with negotiation, deterrence, and, as a final
option, the use of force, if necessary, which has not been the case in
the last 8 years, where the use of force, the message sent by that
administration was: We have no commitment to use the capacity which the
United States has.
Mr. President, I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Delaware.
Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, there is probably nobody in the Senate I
admire more than the Senator from Wyoming, except maybe his colleague,
Mike Enzi, who is also from Wyoming.
I come to the floor not to talk about these issues but to talk about
others. I feel compelled to respond to some of what he said.
There's no need for Senator Barrasso to remain. So don't feel as
though you have to, but thank you just the same.
Mr. President, a little background: As the Presiding Officer knows,
having spent some time in the military--'06, the Marine Corps; the Navy
salutes the Marine Corps. I am a retired Navy captain, three tours in
Southeast Asia in the Vietnam war. I served as a P-3 aircraft mission
commander right at the end of the Cold War. The month I stepped down as
a Navy captain, I led a congressional delegation back into Vietnam. Six
of us--Democrats, Republicans--went at the behest of former President
George Herbert Walker Bush's administration to find out what happened
to thousands of MIAs to see if we could get information about them and
to provide that information to their families for closure. That was the
beginning of an effort in the House, mirrored by the one over here led
by John McCain and John Kerry, to move us toward normalized relations
to see if the Vietnamese would cooperate with us in providing
information that we wanted and the families wanted and deserve.
In fact, a year ago, I learned, along with President Obama, that we
are there to kind of close the circle on our relationship with Vietnam,
which has changed a lot over the last 30 years. Interestingly enough,
we are Vietnam's best trading partner, and they are a very good trading
partner to us.
When we were there, they announced they were going to buy something
like $10, $12, $14 billion worth of our aircraft--not fighter aircraft,
not military aircraft, but civilian aircraft from, I believe, Boeing.
I learned about some polling data. They had taken two polls, two
surveys of the Vietnamese people early last year, and the question
asked of Vietnamese people was: How do you feel about other countries,
the people from other countries? How do you feel about the Chinese, the
Russians, Filipinos, Malaysians, Indians, Pakistanis, Americans, and
others? How do you feel about them? In one survey, 85 percent of the
Vietnamese people said they had favorable opinions toward America and
Americans--85 percent, the highest of any other nation surveyed.
Another survey said: No, no, 95 percent of Vietnamese have favorable
opinions of the United States, which is higher than their opinions of
any other nation.
The reason I mention Vietnam--they were a bitter enemy of this
country. The names of 55,000 men and women with whom I served in
Southeast Asia are on a wall just down 2 miles from here, down by the
Lincoln Memorial. While we were bitter enemies, we resolved those
differences in the 1990s.
[[Page S2574]]
We are now close trading partners. We don't agree with them on every
single thing, but they like us a lot. We have much more of a
relationship than we have ever had in the past, and it is a much better
economic relationship than we have ever had in the past.
The reason I mention Vietnam is that there are some corollaries here
with Iran. In 1978, that was when some will recall--the pages are too
young to remember this. But in 1978, Iranians, led by their religious
leader, captured, took control of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. They held
our folks for a year or two as part of their cultural revolution or
religious revolution.
When they did that, do you know what we did? We seized a lot of their
assets in this country, in other countries as best we could. And that
was not just a couple of dollars, not just a couple million dollars; it
was hundreds of millions of dollars, and, man, maybe even more. Maybe
it was even billions of dollars.
We held those assets, and we kept the Iranians from reclaiming those
assets for, gosh, over 30 years--maybe close to 40 years. They have
litigated in court. They say that they feel they should have access to
what is theirs, what was theirs.
We are told by lawyers--I am not a lawyer--but we are told by some
pretty smart lawyers on our side and others that they had a very good
chance of getting all that and more in court if we didn't settle.
What we did, at the end of the day, when the Iranians agreed to the
Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action agreement, which was reached with
not just the United States but with the Germans, the French, the Brits,
the Chinese, and the Russians--the idea was to make sure that Iran
didn't have a quick path, a fast track to continuing their development
of nuclear weapons. They were clearly wanting to do it, and we wanted
them not to do that.
So we ended up negotiating this agreement. Part of the agreement was
to settle these claims from almost 40 years ago, financial claims,
valuable assets that we basically seized and refused to return.
It turns out, we have to mention how highly the Vietnamese people
think of us today. As it turns out, Vietnam is a very young country,
very young. So is Iran.
Iran has about 80 million people. In Iran, the majority of the people
are under the age of 25. They like this country a lot, but they have
people over there who are more in line with the old regime, who don't
like us. The Revolutionary Guard, some of the military leadership--they
don't like us.
They have newly elected leadership from 4 years ago, President
Rouhani, Foreign Minister Zarif, and others who, frankly, want to be
able to work with us, if they can. They are willing to agree to what I
think is a very harsh agreement to ensure that they don't move forward
on developing weapons and developing nuclear weapons. If they do, then
we are going to impose these really stringent sanctions on them, shut
down their economy--double-digit rates of inflation, economy in the
tank. Finally, they said: OK, uncle. We will agree to this agreement.
Since then, the Iranians have done what the Vietnamese did a year
ago; they have a more abundant civilian air fleet. Their civilian
aircraft are old, decrepit, and they need new ones. They are doing what
the Vietnamese have already done: buying a lot of American-made
aircraft, passenger aircraft by Boeing. We are not talking about just a
couple billion dollars' worth but certainly more than $10 billion
worth.
I think they have already taken orders on one and have made one of
the very first ones, and there is more to come. I think they are also
going to buy a bunch of airbuses. I think more than half of the
airbuses have components made in America, and that is another boost to
our economy.
I don't remember who said it, but a Chinese military leader once
said: The greatest victory of all is the one that we win without firing
a shot. That is what he said: The greatest victory of all is the one we
win without firing a shot.
Well, for a Navy guy who has seen some time in a combat area and the
Presiding Officer, who knows a little bit about this stuff as well--I
think he probably agrees with me that if you can win one without
shooting anybody or getting anybody killed, I think that is worth
doing.
The other thing I would say is, that doesn't mean we just trust Iran
that they are going to do what they said they are going to do in the
deal. There is an agency--I think it is called the International Atomic
Energy Agency. They are all over them in terms of monitoring the deal
and making sure that what the Iranians agreed to do, they actually do.
What is it, trust but verify? That is really what the Iranian deal is
all about: trust but verify. We will see how it all works out.
Color me hopeful. A lot of times when we vote on stuff, we vote our
hopes as opposed to our fears. Sometimes we vote our fears, as opposed
to our hopes. On the Iran deal, I voted my hopes. We will see how it
goes, and I am hopeful.