[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 161 (2015), Part 7]
[House]
[Page 9134]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




         PEACE THROUGH STRENGTH, NOT PEACE THROUGH ENDLESS WAR

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Tennessee (Mr. Duncan) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. DUNCAN of Tennessee. Mr. Speaker, several weeks ago, I spoke to 
about 200 people at the famous Willard Hotel in Washington in a program 
put on by the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce. I had been told that 
this was a group of CEOs and owners of major companies in southern 
California--obviously, a very upper-income group.
  I got to a point in my speech when I said: ``It is long past the time 
we need to stop trying to run the whole world and start putting our own 
people in our own country first once again.''
  Much to my surprise, the audience broke into applause. Middle- and 
lower-income people have applauded when I have said similar things in 
my district and around the country. Many upper-income people claim to 
be moderates, and contrary to popular belief, conservatives lose most 
very wealthy areas 2-1 or worse. I have spoken to a very wide variety 
of groups in Washington and around the country and in my district, and 
I have gotten an overwhelmingly positive response every time I have 
said it has been a horrible mistake to spend trillions on unnecessary 
wars in the Middle East.
  When I was a teenager, I remember reading a publication from the 
Republican National Committee that read: ``Democrats start wars. 
Republicans end them.''
  There was a time, until recent years, when the Republican Party could 
make a legitimate claim to being the Peace Party. I sent my first 
paycheck as a bag boy at the A&P--$19 and some cents--as a contribution 
to the Barry Goldwater campaign. I have worked on Republican campaigns 
at the national, State, and local levels for over 50 years, and it 
saddens me to hear almost all of the Republican candidates for 
President try to outdo each other in their hawkishness. Based on the 
response I have gotten, I think it is a recipe for defeat if my 
Republican Party becomes known as the party favoring permanent, forever 
wars--wars without end.
  All of our candidates try to convince people that they are like 
Ronald Reagan. President Reagan once wrote: ``Our troops should be 
committed to combat abroad only as a last resort--when no other choice 
is available.''
  Reagan was certainly no warmonger Republican or a man eager to go to 
war.
  President Eisenhower, one of our greatest military leaders, was 
another ``peacenik'' Republican. He knew of the horrors of war, unlike 
many modern day chickenhawks. He famously warned us at the end of his 
Presidency about the dangers of being controlled by a very powerful 
military-industrial complex. I think he would be shocked at how far we 
have gone down the road that he warned us against.
  In his book ``Ike's Bluff,'' Evan Thomas wrote: ``Eisenhower would 
periodically sigh to Andy Goodpaster, his Chief of Staff: `God help the 
Nation when it has a President who doesn't know as much about the 
military as I do.'''
  Pat Buchanan wrote on March 20: ``In November 1956, President 
Eisenhower, enraged he had not been forewarned of their invasion of 
Egypt, ordered the British, French, and Israelis to get out of Suez and 
Sinai. They did as told. How far we have fallen from the America of 
Ike.''
  Senator Robert Taft, who was sometimes referred to as ``Mr. 
Republican'' in the 1940s and 1950s, once said: ``No foreign policy can 
be justified except a policy devoted . . . to the protection of the 
liberty of the American people, with war only as the last resort and 
only to preserve that liberty.''
  Most of the Republican Presidential candidates have attacked 
President Obama for acting in some ways that are unconstitutional, and 
he has. But where in our Constitution does it give us the authority to 
run other countries as we have been doing in Iraq and Afghanistan--even 
making small business loans and training local police forces?
  My Republican Party was always the party of fiscal conservatism. Yet, 
with a national debt of over $18 trillion, how can we justify 
continually spending megabillions in religious civil wars between the 
Shia and Sunni?
  Some people and companies that make money off of an interventionist 
foreign policy always very quickly fall back on the slur of 
isolationism, but most conservatives believe in trade and tourism and 
cultural and educational exchanges with other countries and in helping 
out during humanitarian crises. We just don't believe in endless war.
  We are told, if we don't support an interventionist foreign policy, 
that this means we don't believe in American exceptionalism, but this 
Nation did not become exceptional because we got involved in every 
little war around the globe. It became exceptional because of our great 
free enterprise system and because we gave our people more individual 
freedom than any other country.
  I have said in thousands of speeches that we are blessed beyond 
belief to live in this country and that the United States is, without 
question, the greatest country in the history of the world, but there 
was much less anti-Americanism around the world when we tried to mind 
our own business and take care of our own people, and this Nation had 
more friends when we followed the policy of peace through strength, not 
one of peace through endless war.

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