[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 154 (2008), Part 4]
[House]
[Page 5572]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                            COMMUNIST CHINA

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Michigan (Mr. McCotter) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. McCOTTER. Mr. Speaker, one of our greatest Presidents was Harry 
Truman. And one of the reasons President Truman was held in such high 
regard by people, including my own father, was that he had the courage 
to go against conventional wisdom, especially in the area of foreign 
relations.
  It was President Truman who had the moral courage to tell the 
American people that our World War II ally the Soviet Union was no 
longer our friend and had become a threat to the very liberty that our 
people had helped advance throughout the course of that conflict. This 
was not a message that the American people were particularly expecting. 
In fact, there were many who decried President Truman's analysis at the 
time. One of them was George F. Kennan, who is, unfortunately, often 
remembered as the father of the containment policy.
  In fact, when faced with the rise of the Soviet Union as a strategic 
threat and rival model of governance, it was Mr. Kennan's position that 
the Soviet Union could be managed, that we should constructively engage 
them, that their ideology meant nothing to them, and that, in fact, 
they were but a different variation of the traditional Czarist order 
within Russia. And, besides, Mr. Kennan concluded, what did it matter? 
Eventually the two systems of communism and our free Republic's 
democratic system would merge into one.
  President Truman was not as educated as Mr. Kennan. He was not as 
sophisticated as Mr. Kennan. And President Truman took the Soviets at 
their word that they were in fact communists. He took them at their 
word that they meant they were going to put in practice their 
intrinsically evil ideology. And Mr. Truman dissented from Mr. Kennan 
and said that the fundamental goal of the United States foreign policy 
to defeat the intrinsic evil of communism will be the advancement of 
liberty throughout our world where and when we can achieve it.
  Recently I came across a picture that I had ordered from a friend of 
mine in the District, Mr. Doug Brown. It was from one of Mr. Truman's 
return trips to St. Louis. He was meeting a gentleman from his old 
World War I Artillery Battery. And a picture that struck me the most 
was this: The MC of the event that night for President Truman in 
Missouri was an entertainer named Ronald Reagan. And in that 
crystalline moment, it was clear for me to see the link in the Cold 
War's victory between the foundation President Truman courageously laid 
and the way that President Reagan courageously won it ultimately.
  What we see today now is a repeat of history where we have two paths 
we can take. We can take the path of Mr. Kennan and the detente crowd 
of the Kissingerites and others that says we can manage the rise of 
Communist China, that we can engage them and barter with them and 
engage in structural diplomacy, all the while the oppression of their 
own people's God-given rights to rights to life, liberty, and dignity 
are repressed, while Tibet suffers under their yoke, while the Burmese 
and Sudanese regimes are propped up, and while they continue their 
stealth assaults on our national security with sleeper cells, and I 
could go on. Or we who profess to be the heirs of Ronald Reagan, 
especially within the Republican Party, can follow the path of 
President Truman and understand that you cannot barter with butchers. 
You cannot constructively manage evil nor engage it. But what you can 
do is unleash the liberty of people yearning to breathe free where and 
when you can.
  The reason I bring this up is not merely the Beijing Olympics. I'm on 
record as opposing our President's attendance at the games. I believe 
it would be a betrayal of our free Republic's commitment to liberty. 
But I was struck by a statement in this regard by our current Secretary 
of State, ironically enough herself a Sovietologist. I will not make 
the joke that a Sovietologist is often considered diplomacy's 
equivalent of a Latin teacher for this has relevance. She said, ``It is 
important for the Chinese people to see that the United States supports 
their emergence onto the world's stage.''
  I fundamentally differ with that assessment. I remain a Reaganite. I 
remain my Truman Democratic father's son. The United States, and my 
party in particular, exists to put communism in the ash can of history, 
not to usher communism onto the world's stage. If my party, as it has 
strayed from principle in the past, does not understand the 
emancipation imperative that runs through Abraham Lincoln to Ronald 
Reagan and to today, we are in a sad state. I trust we wake up while 
there is still time.

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