[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.