[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-


[[Page 2098]]

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.

[[Page 2099]]

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.