    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1994, Book II)]
    [November 16, 1994]
    [Pages 2097-2101]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks to the International Business Community in Jakarta
    November 16, 1994

        Thank you very much, Secretary Brown, for the introduction and for
    your tireless work on behalf of American businesses and American
    workers. Thank you, Mr. McNabb, for your testimonial, and
    congratulations. I want to come back to northern California and see you
    after you've doubled your work force. Congressman Mineta, it's great to
    see you here. Ambassador and Mrs. Barry, distinguished ministers of the
    Indonesian Government, and the mayor of Jakarta, and all of our fine
    hosts from Indonesia who have made this such a wonderful visit for me
    and for the First Lady and the entire American delegation. This is my
    second trip to Asia as President, and as I was watching Secretary Brown
    give his remarks, I thought if I keep coming back here I might become as
    well-known in Asia as Secretary Brown is. [Laughter]
        I want to thank all of you here from the American private sector who
    are in the audience for your presence but more importantly for your
    commitment to keep our Nation engaged economically across the world.
        Keeping America on the front lines of economic opportunity has been
    my first priority since I took office. We are pursuing a strategy to
    promote aggressive growth in the short run and in the long run. We began
    by putting our house in order. Our deficit was exploding; the public
    debt in America had quadrupled between 1981 and 1993. Now we're looking
    at a reduction in the deficit for the third year in a row for the first
    time since President Truman was President. Federal spending is the
    lowest it's been in more than a decade. We cut domestic and defense
    spending last year for the first time in 25 years. And the Federal work
    force is shrinking to its lowest level since President Kennedy was in
    office.
        The second thing we are doing is working hard to expand trade and
    investment. That's what NAFTA was all about. That's what the GATT
    agreement is all about, what the Summit of the Americas, soon to be held
    in Miami, and obviously this wonderful APEC meeting are all about.
        The third thing we're working to do is to develop a system of
    lifelong learning for our people, from expanding preschool programs like
    Head Start to providing more affordable college education to our people,
    to changing the whole unemployment system in America to a continu-

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    ous retraining system for people who must find new jobs in a rapidly
    changing global economy.
        Lastly, we're trying to change the way our Government works.
    Secretary Brown talked about it a little bit. There was, I think, a
    perception among American businesses when we took office that both
    parties, historically, were wrong in their approach to business, looking
    to the future, not to the past; that the Democratic Party sometimes
    tended to see the relationship between business and Government as
    adversarial and the Republican Party sometimes seemed to be
    philosophically committed to being inactive on the theory that anything
    the Government did with the private sector would probably make things
    worse.
        In a world in which all economics is global as well as local,
    clearly the important thing is partnership, efficiency, and good
    judgment. We have deregulated our banking and interstate trucking
    industries. We have changed our whole way of purchasing things in the
    Government. We have invested more in defense conversion and new
    technologies, in partnerships with the private sector. We have
    deregulated our relationships with our own local governments, permitting
    States to pursue their own reforms in health care and education and,
    most importantly, in changing our welfare system.
        But perhaps over the long run the most significant thing we have
    done is to reorganize the way we relate to the private sector, requiring
    all of our departments to work together and to look outward in
    partnership. The key to making this strategy work is erasing the
    dividing line between domestic and foreign economics, between,
    therefore, domestic and foreign policy.
        So far, I think, we're off to a pretty good start. Now the figures
    for the first 22 months are in. We have over 5 million new jobs in our
    economy. Our industrial capacity is operating at its highest level in 14
    years, with our lowest rate of inflation in 29 years. And after years
    and years in which we weren't seeing any increased income among our
    working people, this year we have more high-wage jobs coming into the
    American economy than in the previous 5 years combined. [Applause] Now,
    that's worth clapping for.
        But the success of this ultimately rests on what our private sector
    does, on the productivity of our workers, the skill of our management,
    our continuing commitment to investment, to technologies, to enterprise,
    and to outreach. That's why we have pursued from the beginning a
    vigorous export strategy, a strategy rooted in tearing down trade
    barriers that deny our people the opportunity to compete and in actively
    promoting the sales of American goods and services in other nations.
        We have especially tried to target, thanks in large measure to
    Secretary Brown, not just our traditional markets but the big emerging
    markets, the markets of the 21st century, places like China and
    Indonesia, Mexico and Brazil. In a departure from the behavior of
    previous administrations of both parties, we have unashamedly been an
    active partner in helping our business enterprises to win contracts
    abroad.
        I know that many of you in this audience have already benefited from
    the coordinated and vigorous efforts of the Commerce, State, Treasury
    Departments, the Export-Import Bank, the Overseas Private Investment
    Corporation, the Trade and Development Agency. One of the things I most
    enjoy now when I go abroad is I always try to take a little time to meet
    with American business people operating in other countries. And
    repeatedly they tell me that, for the first time ever, they see an
    American State Department interested in economic advancement as well as
    diplomatic progress. All these things are important.
        I have to say to all of you that the most important thing we have to
    do this year is to go home and get the Congress to pass the GATT
    agreement. When the APEC leaders met in Seattle last year for the first
    time, and President Soeharto came there along with leaders from 14 other
    countries, one of the things we did at APEC was to let the rest of the
    world know that we weren't going to sit around while they decided
    whether we were going to have a GATT agreement. And so it wasn't very
    long before we got a GATT agreement. But now that the leaders have
    agreed on it, the legislative bodies of all these nations must adopt it.
    And the world is looking to the United States for leadership here, as
    well they should.
        We've had opposition to GATT in our Congress from members of both
    parties. But we've also had strong bipartisan support. So I say that I
    am going home to seek to capitalize on that bipartisan support, to ask
    the Democrats to support GATT and to invite the new Republican leaders
    in Congress to ratify one of their great predecessors Senator
    Vandenberg's admonition that partisanship should stop at the water's
    edge.

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    That used to apply to national security defined in military terms.
    Today, it applies to national security defined in economic terms. We
    must pass the GATT, and we should do it right away.
        For five decades after the Second World War, our presence in Asia
    was intended to help guarantee security and to allow prosperity to take
    root. In meetings this week I reaffirmed the United States commitment to
    strengthen our important bilateral security relationships, to bolster
    regional alliances in security, and to rapidly implement the very
    important agreement we have reached with North Korea for that nation to
    become a nonnuclear nation. All these things will make this region more
    secure and, therefore, enable more prosperity to take root.
        I have tried to make it clear to all the leaders of Asia that the
    United States will honor its commitments to Asian security. But it's
    also a fact, and a healthy one, that the balance of our relationship
    with Asia has tilted more and more toward trade. As a result of the
    efforts of the Asian people, the Asian economies are clearly the most
    dynamic and rapidly growing on Earth. Already they account for one-
    quarter of the world's output. Over the next 5 years, the growth rate in
    Asia is projected to be over 50 percent higher than the growth rate in
    the mature economies of the G-7 countries.
        This means expanding markets to those who have the most attractive
    products and services. Increasingly, we like to believe those products
    and services are American. One-third of our exports already go to Asia,
    supporting more than 2 million American jobs. Over the next decade, we
    estimate that if we are vigorous and effective, Asia could add more than
    1.8 million jobs to the American economy, jobs that pay on average 13
    percent above non-export-related jobs. That is a very important thing
    for us and an important thing for every American to think about. These
    facts compel us to remain ever more committed to deeper and deeper and
    deeper economic, political, and security engagement in Asia.
        For decades, we concentrated our economic efforts on Europe and, of
    course, on Japan. These nations will remain our close allies, our key
    competitors, our critical trading partners. But this new century we're
    about to enter compels a new strategy. Indonesia, Thailand, China,
    India, among others, must be a big part of that strategy.
        The importance of Asia to our future is what has animated the
    intense interest of the United States in the APEC meetings. APEC, for me
    and for our country, is a long-term commitment. A year ago, as I said,
    14 of the APEC leaders met for the first time in the United States in
    Seattle. We wanted to say to our trading partners and friends in Asia
    that the United States wants to remain engaged. We want the Pacific
    Ocean to unite us, not to divide us. We want to see the world growing in
    an open trading system, not breaking up into various trading blocs
    opposed to one another. We sought to give this incredibly diverse Asian-
    Pacific region a common identity rooted in a common purpose, committed
    to free trade and investment.
        This week at the summit, thanks in large measure to the leadership
    of President Soeharto, we began to transform that vision into a reality.
    We established concrete goals to reduce barriers to trade and investment
    throughout this region by a date certain. And we are now committed, next
    year in our meeting in Osaka, to come up with a practical, day-to-day
    blueprint for achieving that goal, to simplify customs procedures,
    harmonize standards, identify other bottlenecks, lower tariff and
    nontariff barriers.
        This commitment to achieve free trade and investment in the Asian-
    Pacific region by 2020 may sound like a long time to most people, and in
    our country, most of our teenagers think tomorrow is a long time away.
    But the truth is that, number one, it's not so far away, and number two,
    that is the end date. We will begin reducing barriers to trade and
    investment as soon as all of the parties to APEC agree on a blueprint
    and agree to implement it. I am profoundly encouraged by this prospect.
        Yesterday I got an interesting question from the American press
    which I might have gotten from American business people, who say, well--
    they said, ``Mr. President, this is not a mandatory agreement. How do
    you know it will be carried through?'' Good question. I said I believe
    it will happen for two reasons. Number one, it is in the interests of
    all the countries involved to do it. And number two, I have seen it work
    in this region. ASEAN, after all, committed to reduce barriers to trade
    by a date certain, and the commitment was so strong that the leaders
    reduced the date certain by 5 years. They moved the calendar closer.
    That can happen here as well. I hope it will. It will be good for all
    the nations involved if it does.

    [[Page 2100]]

        Our industries and businesses have proved that they can compete in
    this region and with Asian companies as long as they are allowed to do
    so in a fair way. We have regained our position throughout the world as
    the leading seller of semiconductors. This year, for the first time in
    15 years, American automobile manufacturers have outsold their Japanese
    competitors in the world markets. We have done things that I think are
    very important for the future in the changes we've made to become more
    competitive in computers and in telecommunications. According to a
    recent survey that's conducted every year by the world economic forum in
    Geneva, the United States was voted for the first time in 9 years the
    world's most competitive economy. That's thanks in no small measure to a
    lot of you and a lot of American workers back home and some pretty
    wrenching and difficult and painful changes we had to undertake.
        In the 6 months from March to August of this year, our companies won
    34 major contracts in Asia, from turbine generators in China to waste
    incinerator technology in Taiwan. These contracts alone will generate
    $5.3 billion in U.S. exports, supporting 85,000 jobs back home. And this
    week alone, as you know, American companies signed contracts in the
    Philippines, Malaysia, here in Indonesia for everything from fiber-optic
    phone networks to environmentally friendly geothermal plants.
        Secretary Brown was just at the signing ceremony. As he said, we had
    projects worth over $40 billion. I know that there is increasing wealth
    in Indonesia and throughout Asia, but where I come from, $40 billion is
    still real money, and we're grateful for the business. Of course, as the
    American President, the most important thing to me is that these
    contracts will support jobs, thousands of them, back home from every
    place from Germantown, Maryland, to Oakland, California; from Evandale,
    Ohio, to Plantation, Florida.
        For all these successes, if we're going to keep going, we have to
    recognize that there are still some barriers--let me just cite two
    examples--and that's why this APEC agreement is so important. By the
    year 2000, the market for automobiles in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand,
    and the Philippines will be equal to--I believe will exceed--today's
    market in Canada and Mexico combined, combined. Now, even after GATT
    takes effect, tariffs in these nations on U.S. cars are between 30 and
    60 percent, as opposed to a 2.5 percent tariff already in existence in
    the United States. That makes it harder to sell a Ford in Bangkok than
    it is to sell a Honda in Los Angeles.
        Let me give you another example. The Asian APEC countries plan to
    invest more than $1 trillion in infrastructure projects over the next 6
    years. For those of you here from California who know that our busiest
    highways are in southern California, that's like rebuilding 15 Santa
    Monica freeways every single day. Here again, tariffs imposed even after
    GATT include 25 percent levies on hydraulic turbines, up to 15 percent
    tolls on steel. These are things that the American companies are eager
    to take down so that we can take part in the emerging adventure of Asia.
        The bottom line is that if we're going to have freer trade, it must
    be fairer. The APEC leaders have made their commitment to this goal. It
    is very, very exciting.
        Let me also say that I'm very often asked by our press, and
    sometimes by the global press as I travel around the world, whether or
    not our pursuit of economic engagement undermines our commitment to
    human rights throughout the world. And I have said many times, I will
    say again, I think it supports our commitment to human rights throughout
    the world. In every private meeting I have with leaders, not only in
    this region but around the world, we talk about human rights issues and
    the other values, the things that make up the quality of life in any
    nation, things that are important to Americans from all walks of life.
        We do not seek to impose our vision of the world on others. Indeed,
    we continue to struggle with our own inequities and our own
    shortcomings. We recognize that in a world and in a region of such
    diverse and disparate cultures, where nations are at different stages of
    development, no single model for organizing society is possible or even
    desirable. And we respect the tremendous efforts being made throughout
    this region to meet the basic needs of people in all these countries.
        At the same time, we remain convinced that strengthening the ties of
    trade among nations can help to break down chains of repression, that as
    societies become more open economically, they also become more open
    politically. It becomes in no one's interest to depress the legitimate
    aspirations and energies, the hopes, the dreams, and the voices of the
    many people

    [[Page 2101]]

    who make up all of our nations. Commerce does tend to open more closed
    societies. Throughout this region, we will see as markets expand, as
    information flows, as contacts across borders and among people multiply,
    the roots of open societies will grow and strengthen and contribute to
    stability, not instability. More nations will learn that the freer and
    more educated people are, the more they are able to be creative and to
    change with the fast-changing winds of the global economy. Japan,
    Taiwan, and South Korea have all demonstrated this to an admirable
    degree.
        We in the United States also believe, however, that some basic
    rights are universal, that everywhere people aspire to be treated with
    dignity, to give voice to their opinions, to have a say in choosing
    their leaders. We permit it on a regular basis in the United States,
    even when we don't like the results. [Laughter] And these aspirations
    are part of human nature. We see it in the stunning life story of
    President Kim of South Korea or the courageous dissidents like Wei-Jing
    Sheng in China or Aung San Suu Kyi. We see it in the lives of these
    people.
        Our Nation has sacrificed many of our sons and daughters for the
    cause of freedom around the world in this century. So we are moved and
    we will continue to be moved by the struggle for basic rights. But I
    will say again, even though we will continue to promote human rights
    with conviction and without apology, we reject the notion that
    increasing economic ties in trade and partnerships undermine our human
    rights agenda. We believe they advance together and that they must.
        At a time when our Nation is strong, in a time when our inspiration
    has permeated across the world and people from South Africa to Northern
    Ireland have asked us to help them in their struggle for democracy and
    freedom, we cannot turn away from that cause, and we will not. But your
    work and your progress and your success is also central to that cause.
        We live in amazing times. It was only 5 years ago this month that
    the Berlin Wall fell, an amazing thing. Look what has happened to the
    world in the last 5 years. For the first time since the dawn of the
    nuclear age, no Russian missiles are pointed at the children of the
    United States. For the first time since the end of World War II, there
    are no Russian soldiers in Eastern or Central Europe. And even though we
    have differences with our friends in Russia from time to time, we are
    working in genuine partnership across a whole range of areas that once
    would have been unthinkable.
        After hundreds of years of fighting, the Catholics and Protestants
    in Northern Ireland are working hard to resolve their differences. We do
    see now the prospect that the nuclear threat will fade from the Korean
    Peninsula. We see a new determination for freedom in the Persian Gulf,
    which we are proud to support, and the historic, almost breathtaking,
    recently unimaginable prospect of peace in the Middle East, the home of
    the three great monotheistic religions of the world, including Islam,
    which is followed by the vast majority of the people in this fine
    country.
        This is a remarkable time. And I am convinced that the increasing
    freedom of economic activity, rooted in your commitment to invest, your
    commitment to risk, your commitment to think and imagine and visualize
    what you might do and to mobilize human resources in this cause, is an
    absolutely pivotal part of continuing the march of freedom.
        So I ask you as we leave this remarkable meeting to recommit
    yourselves to fulfilling the human potential of your enterprise and all
    those whom you touch. For when the history of this era is written, it
    will be written in those terms. These changes, at bottom, are good
    because we are permitting, sometimes slowly, often rapidly, more and
    more and more and more people to fulfill the potential that has lain
    within them.
        Thank you, and bless you all.

    Note: The President spoke at 3:05 p.m. at the Jakarta Convention Center.
    In his remarks, he referred to Thomas McNabb, president, Aquatics
    Unlimited; U.S. Ambassador to Indonesia Robert L. Barry and his wife,
    Peggy; and Gov. Surjadi Soedirja of Jakarta.