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AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE

RENEWING AMERICAN STRENGTH ABROAD: A CONVERSATION WITH SENATOR TOM COTTON

INTRODUCTION AND MODERATOR:

FREDERICK W. KAGAN, AEI

REMARKS AND Q&A:

TOM COTTON, US SENATE (R-AR)

1:30 PM – 2:30 PM MONDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 2017

EVENT PAGE: http://www.aei.org/events/renewing-american-strength-abroad-a- conversation-with-senator-tom-cotton/

TRANSCRIPT PROVIDED BY DC TRANSCRIPTION – WWW.DCTMR.COM

FREDERICK KAGAN: Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon. Welcome to the American Enterprise Institute. We’re thrilled to have you today in our beautiful new facility. And I am thrilled and honored to be able to introduce to you the senator from , Tom Cotton.

Senator Cotton has devoted most of his adult life to serving our nation in a variety of roles, including five years as an infantryman with the great 101st Division and as the Provincial Reconstruction Team member in Laghman Province in — not an easy assignment, neither one of those.

But I think he has his hardest assignment yet as a member of the Senate and an increasingly prominent one speaking on national security issues with a very bold voice that we value greatly, so we’re very much looking forward to hearing his thoughts today.

Senator Cotton. (Applause.)

SENATOR TOM COTTON (R-AR): Thank you all very much for that kind welcome. And thank you, friend. Thank you to the American Enterprise Institute for once again hosting me, especially in the new digs — very nice. I’m looking forward to our discussion later today, first with Fred and me and then with all of you. But, at the outset, I want to offer some opening remarks about where we are, how we got here, and how we can begin to renew America’s strength.

Some people, especially those in the media and the Democratic Party, are astonished that we’re 18 days into the Trump administration, yet the federal government is still functioning. World War III has not yet broken out. America is still standing. Perhaps our Constitution is more resilient than some believe and our people built of sturdier stuff than sugar candy, to borrow from Churchill — so resilient and sturdy, in fact, that our system can withstand the shock of a Republican presidency, even if the media can’t.

Now, I will grant you, not all is well with the world or America’s role in it. Some lay the blame with President Trump’s statements during the campaign, the transition, and now in his first two weeks in office. Before President Trump was sworn in, for instance, the Obama White House called his comments about the world, quote, “unsettling.” One senator said his tweeting is, quote, “going to lead to chaos in our international relations.”

I hate to break this to you. The world already is in chaos. The world already is unsettled. And I have more bad news. was the president for the last eight years, and it’s his actions that unsettled the world and spread chaos, not ’s words.

Barack Obama quit , sacrificing the gains we’d fought so hard for and leaving that country to fend for itself against and the Islamic State. Barack Obama conciliated with Iran in the first days of his presidency, ignoring the Green Movement and tolerating Iran’s imperial aggressions across the Middle East, all in pursuit of a fatally flawed nuclear deal.

Barack Obama reset relations with and promised more flexibility after his reelection. In return, Russia invaded Ukraine, destroyed Aleppo, harbored Edward Snowden, teamed up with Iran in the Middle East, and shot a civilian airliner out of the sky.

Barack Obama said al Qaeda was on the run, handcuffed our military and intelligence officers, and refused to call the jihadist threat by its name, resulting in more and more complex terror threats than anything our nation has ever faced.

Even when he used force, he did so half-heartedly. He surged troops into Afghanistan — but not as many as his commanders requested and only with an explicit withdrawal date. He toppled the Gadhafi regime in Libya with neither a plan nor any interest to stabilize the country.

I would challenge you to name one country where America enjoys a stronger position than we did eight years ago, or one country that’s better off because of American policy. Barack Obama’s legacy is a legacy of ashes from the smoking ruins of a world ablaze.

But I don’t want to dwell on President Obama more than I must. He’s retired now and will no longer influence our . What will, though, is the ideology he championed. It’s not going away. The world we’re living in today is partly a product of that ideology, and the Obama worldview will persist, even though it’s as flawed and dangerous as ever.

And if I had to describe it, I’d say it has three distinct features. First, it lacks the courage of its convictions. It lays out vast goals, but refuses to employ the necessary means to achieve them. All of us can remember, for instance, when Barack Obama said his election would mark the moment when “the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” A vast Wilsonian promise, rivaled by the equally lofty vow a century ago by President Woodrow Wilson himself, who promised to make the world safe for democracy. Of course, these goals are praiseworthy. Who among us doesn’t want a healthy environment or want to see the spread of constitutional self-government?

But what are the tools they’ll employ to achieve these goals? It’s all talk, just talk, just words. A speech in Cairo will heal the rift with Iran and herald democratic reform across the Islamic world. The Fourteen Points will end the Great War, the League of Nations will prevent the next war, and the Kellogg-Briand Pact will forever outlaw war. Talk for this crowd is always preferable to leverage and pressure. If they must have pressure, sanctions are always preferable to military force. And if they absolutely must have force, air power is always better than the 1st Marines or the 101st Airborne. They never push all their chips to the middle, so it’s not surprising they never seem to win the pot.

This history of half-measures results in part from the second feature of this worldview: discomfort with strong, confident American leadership. When it gets hold of power, you see an America that’s uncomfortable with its own strength, a giant afraid of its own shadow. It wants to lead from behind. As King Abdullah of put it, quote, “I think I believe in American power more than Obama does,” end quote. Who are we, after all, to impose our leadership on other countries? Who are we to assume our way of life is better than anyone else’s? Who are we to overlook our own flaws and errors? It’s the Sermon on the Mount come to the councils of state: How can we judge the mote in their eye with the beam in ours?

It’s this very guilt complex that led President Obama to hold our allies to a higher standard than our adversaries. It’s also what led to one-sided deals with Iran and Cuba, violating Abraham Lincoln’s rule: “Never sell old friends to buy old enemies.” It’s why he said he believed in American exceptionalism, but only in the everybody-gets-a-trophy kind of way, the same way the Brits believe in British exceptionalism, the same way Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism. And it’s why he apologized for the 1,000-year-old Christian crusades when it’s Islamic terrorists who are chopping off the heads of Christians right now. It all goes back to a deep sense of moral doubt and equivalency about American leadership.

Fortunately, though, not many Americans share these doubts, which brings me to the third feature of this worldview: a concerted effort to banish the Jacksonian spirit from American life. Much has been written lately about the Jacksonian tradition; here’s the shorthand version. Jacksonians are proud, confident, muscular patriots. They have no doubt our way of life is the best there is. In politics, Jacksonians are democratic and populist, skeptical of elites and do-gooders. In foreign policy, they see the world as it is — a dangerous anarchy — not as we might wish it to be. For that reason, they speak the language of strength, respect, fear, and interests. They don’t think our job is to make the world safe for democracy, but rather to make the world safe for American democracy.

They therefore don’t care much for international law or organizations. When Donald Trump says he’s the most “militaristic” guy out there, they nod with approval. Gordian knots exist to be cut. Jacksonians make commitments and draw red lines with caution, but uphold and enforce them absolutely and ruthlessly. They aren’t looking for war, but woe unto those who provoke the Jacksonian spirit latent in the American soul. “Limited war” for them is an oxymoron. Jacksonians have a simple war doctrine: hit them as hard as you can as fast as you can with as much as you can, until they surrender unconditionally.

It’s, there, not hard to see why Barack Obama and his followers would deplore the Jacksonian spirit. It revolts their European friends. It constrains a statecraft of nuance and complexity — bad words to the Jacksonian mind. It overreacts at what they consider minor terrorist attacks and drags us into needless conflict. It underestimates genuine threats like climate change. It’s particular and nationalist, not cosmopolitan and enlightened. Not to mention that, when provoked, the Jacksonian sentiment is hazardous to the electoral health of politicians. Just ask Hillary Clinton.

Be that as it may, as someone who was raised among and fought alongside Jacksonians, let me tell you this: our country wouldn’t survive without them. The Jacksonian spirit is the fuel in the tank of our foreign policy. Jacksonians cash the checks that politicians write. Neither a statesman nor a strategy can succeed without the Jacksonian spirit, as President Obama learned the hard way. It would be nice if we could all just get along, but as it is for a boy named Sue, so it is for nations: This world is rough, and if a man’s going to make it, he’s got to be tough.

But if ever there were an antidote to this ideology, surely it’s Donald Trump. While the Democrats are busy disinviting Andrew Jackson from their annual fundraising dinners and removing him from the $20 dollar bill, President Trump brought him back to the Oval Office. In his inaugural address, he spoke of “America first.” Now, I know this is considered a thought crime by the globe-trotting Party of Davos, but to most Americans it’s just plain common sense. When they hear those words, they don’t think of Charles Lindbergh of World War II. You can marvel at that, but it’s still a fact of life.

And not necessarily a bad fact, either. The plainspoken meaning of those words contains a healthy nationalism. You can be sure other nations, especially our adversaries, put their interests first. Why shouldn’t America? The nation-state, after all, is the political community through which we defend our lives, protect our interests, and gain a sense of belonging. A nation is akin to a family, something into which we are born and to which we owe allegiance. We are more than economic producers and consumers; we are citizens, and we’re bound together in a common project.

And what nation deserves a healthy nationalism more than America? has never been about blood and soil, even as it’s about more than the abstract ideals of the Declaration of Independence. Those high-minded ideals are translated into an everyday code of honor, self-reliance, individualism, courage, and equality. That’s a pretty sensible basis for national identity.

And “America first” doesn’t mean “America only.” We’ve always needed allies and partners to protect our interests; we always will. We don’t have them because it’s in their interest, though it is; we have them because it’s in our interest.

A healthy American nationalism, strength and confidence in American leadership, the common wisdom of middle America, all these things are apt to be the basis of a sound foreign policy and one that commands popular support. Certainly more so than one built on castles in the sky, leading from behind, and the power of pretty words.

Where would such a policy start, and what would it look like? I’ll leave specific bilateral or regional policies to the president for now and to our Q&A session. But I will touch on a few foundational matters.

First, we’ve got to rebuild our military. To put briefly what I’ve said elsewhere at greater length, we need more ships, more soldiers, more Marines, and more aircraft of virtually every kind. We need more of just about everything, and we also need better capabilities. And more broadly, we need to invest in the men and women of our armed forces. We need to give them the training and equipment they need to do their jobs. And we need these things urgently, which is why I’ve recommended a $26 billion supplemental spending bill for this year. And we need them for the long run, which is why we ought to increase our defense budget by at least $54 billion, or 15 percent, by next year.

Second, and on a related point, we need to modernize our nuclear arsenal and missile defenses. President Trump has wisely ordered a , which we haven’t had since 2010. Since then, Russia has developed extended-range cruise missiles, violating its treaty agreements, and faced no consequences. And this is while Russia reportedly has a 10-to-1 advantage over us and our NATO allies in tactical nuclear warheads. Moreover, nuclear strategy can no longer be solely bilateral, since is rapidly expanding its arsenal, as is . Given these provocations and threats, we must at a minimum study new nuclear capabilities, while we fully fund current modernization plans. Our nuclear forces are our ultimate deterrent; we use them every single day.

Third, we’ve got to get our economy moving again, and at full speed, not just a trot. We cannot accept the slow growth of the last decade as the new normal. A key driver of growth will clearly be the oil-and-gas sector, specifically the shale revolution, which has made America the world’s largest producer of hydrocarbons. The men and women in the oil patch are not only remaking our economy and creating new jobs and vast wealth; they’re also giving us greater freedom of action in the world and applying steady pressure to petrostate rivals.

We can still help them do more. Streamline liquefied natural gas permitting. Expedite LNG export terminals. Cut the red tape that’s stopping fracking on federal lands. Sell more leases on federal lands and the Outer Continental Shelf. All this and more will not only be good for our economy, but will have far-reaching strategic effects.

Fourth, we need to reassure our allies not only with words, though that is important after the last eight years, but also with reciprocal commitments. No alliance should be a one-way street. For example, our European NATO allies need to finally get their defense spending to 2 percent of GDP, and they need to do that by investing in capability, not pensions or health care. By the same token, we ought to commit more armor, artillery, and combat aviation to the eastern flank. Other allies around the world also need to hear this message: America is back, but it’s hard to help you if you don’t help yourself and help us.

Finally, it’s high time we recognized our adversaries are engaged in global geopolitical competition and we started competing ourselves. No more something for nothing. No more compartmentalizing issues. We don’t have to respond in kind to every provocation, but we do have to respond. Chinese aggression in the might produce a response on the Korean Peninsula or South Asia. Russian provocations in the Middle East could bring pain for Russia in Europe. But no more free lunches, anywhere, anytime.

And no matter what we face in the coming years, these basic policies will strengthen our hand, allowing us to seize opportunities and overcome challenges. We will be able to protect our interests and honor our commitments, and most important of all, we will keep our country safe.

Thank you all very much. (Applause.)

MR. KAGAN: Senator, thank you so much for those remarks, characteristically forthright and insightful and I think extremely important at this moment of a certain amount of confusion and doubt. And, as you say, people still trying to come to grips with the political realities that we face, and not everyone is doing that successfully, I would say.

I have been concerned as I’ve watched some of the rhetoric and very understandable sense that we need to do something right now on every front. We need to deal with the Iranians, we need to deal with al Qaeda, we need to — but you know better than I how badly hollowed out our military is, much more even than is publicly known, how many new Army combat brigades are actually ready to fight, what our status is.

I’m concerned that it’s easy to write checks at this point that the military can’t cash right now. And I’m worried, as my colleague Matt McInnis said about Iran, that the Iranians may be at a different step of the escalation ladder than we are and that we run the risk of inadvertently finding ourselves in conflict that we are not necessarily prepared for.

How would you advise the president and his team to prioritize and to manage this need to show something now with the challenge of the need to get ready?

SEN. COTTON: Fred, that’s one reason why in my opening remarks I focused on some of those foundational policies that will strengthen America’s hand regardless of what bilateral challenges we face, what unexpected issues arise in the world.

The big stick is very important. You know, it’s important that a new president announce the world that there is a new sheriff in town, that we have a new approach to US foreign policy and to our national security, but at the same time you have to have the big stick to back that up.

Ronald Reagan announced very clearly in the early days of his administration that he was no longer going to take the Jimmy Carter approach to foreign policy, but at the same time he knew that it would take some time to grow our military back to the strength that we needed.

That’s one reason why I proposed for that emergency $26 billion of spending this year, for the fiscal that is currently four months underway. That would all go to immediate operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also for the kind of readiness training that we need for our pilots so they can get back in the air training for — stop the reduction of end strength levels in the Marine Corps and the Army and to give us the platform from which we can build in the future.

This actually happened for Reagan. Fortunately for him, it happened in the last year of the Carter administration, which Carter had been (mugged ?) by reality, by the Soviet Union in 1979. President Obama didn’t give President Trump that head start so I think it’s important that we do so in these next couple of months.

MR. KAGAN: So one of the things that’s preoccupying me with my background in Sovietology is the issue of Russia. And I’m always heartened to hear your comments on Russia and the need to resist Russian aggression and recognize that Russia is an adversary and never misses an opportunity to tell us that we’re the enemy and that we have to be dealt with, which is not the rhetoric that’s coming out of the White House.

So are you concerned at all about the direction this administration is going to take on Russia?

SEN. COTTON: I think the direction of Russia is still to be determined. There are signs in different directions. For instance, I wouldn’t have characterized President Putin the way President Trump did over the weekend. is KGB — always has been, always will be. He’s an adversary of the United States. His intelligence services still refer to the United States as the main enemy, just like the Soviet Union used to refer to us during the Cold War.

At the same time, I wouldn’t reduce policy to one comment in an interview when President Trump has said other things that suggest he recognized the threat that Vladimir Putin poses to us. You know, he was recently in a press conference during the transition.

I also wouldn’t reduce policy to just what he says in words. I would look at actual policy. So, for instance, his ambassador to the United Nations last week, , made very forceful comments about Russian aggression that’s renewed on the eastern front of Ukraine.

Second, some of the policies on which he campaigned, which I mentioned in my remarks — rebuilding our military, accelerating and expanding our nuclear modernization, unleashing the potential of the shale revolution in the United States — if you sit in Moscow, those are not good things from your perspective, just like and John Kelly and and some others in his administration are not good counselors to have around the president.

So I think it’s still in the early stages of the administration, like President Trump and many of his senior cabinet members have said. It would be a good thing if the United States and Russia had a better relationship. I’m skeptical that a better relationship can occur on any basis other than American strength and pressure against Russian aggression throughout the world.

MR. KAGAN: So following up on that into the Middle East, I’d like to talk with you about for a second because this is an area where I think there are conflicting views about how we should approach the problem, and particularly how we should approach Russia. I think there’s actually a fairly broad view that says that we should work with the Russians against ISIS and al Qaeda.

And, furthermore — and this came out in a couple of articles over the weekend in The Post and — that we can work with the Russians somehow to get the Iranians out of Syria, that we can drive a wedge between these two by cooperating with the Russians. Do you think that that’s the right approach?

SEN. COTTON: Well, I mean, in theory, we could work with the Chinese to stop North Korea from developing nuclear weapons as well. But, as we’d say in the Army, that briefs well, doesn’t actually execute too well. If Russia wanted to concentrate on the Islamic state, they would have spent the last year bombing Raqqa, not bombing Aleppo. If Russia didn’t want Assad to stay in power, he wouldn’t be in power. If they didn’t want to cooperate with Iran and sell billions of dollars worth of their arms to Iran, they wouldn’t be doing so.

They do those things because they perceive it to be in their national interest. I don’t think Vladimir Putin is necessarily wedded to Bashar al-Assad and is not his brother-in- law. You know, they’re not best friends, but he’s a perfectly good ally for Vladimir Putin, and he made that perfectly clear for Barack Obama for years while Barack Obama stood by and did nothing in Syria, showing that inaction can have as many downside negative results as action can have.

So I’m very skeptical that there’s any ground for us to cooperate in the Middle East, in Syria, or in Iran with Russia on any basis other than, again, putting pressure on Russia and fundamentally building the strength in our bilateral relationship, which is, again, the approach Ronald Reagan took.

You know, Ronald Reagan didn’t immediately start meeting with Andropov and Gorbachev and negotiating arms deals. That was later in his administration, after he had, for instance, started rebuilding our military and deploying Pershing missiles to Europe. That’s why I say we don’t have to respond to every provocation in kind. If Russia does something we don’t like in Syria or Iran, it doesn’t mean we have to respond in the exact the same way there. We can respond in other ways, in Georgia or Ukraine or Moldova or the Baltics or the NATO alliance or so forth. But there can’t be anymore free lunches, which is what Russia essentially got for the last eight years.

And I would say each of the last three presidents, going back to through that they were somehow going to be the American president that got to know Vladimir Putin and became his partner on a whole host of issues, and he wrong-footed each one of them. You know, President Obama likes to call politicians losers, and I think he approaches Vladimir Putin in the same way that the last three politicians — and the last three presidents have done, Vladimir Putin is once again going to be the winner.

MR. KAGAN: Yeah. So then we come to the issue of ISIS and al Qaeda and that strategy. And I want to focus your attention in the region. What I hear coming out in terms of leaks of proposals is sort of a supersize me version of what we’ve been doing. It’s more raids. It’s fewer restrictions. It’s more SOF and so forth. I’d be curious to know, first of all, if that’s your sense, but also if you think that that’s the right thing to do. Or do you think that we need to rethink this in a more fundamental way?

SEN. COTTON: Well, first, in the short term, it is. I’m on the Senate Intelligence Committee. I’ve rarely been surprised what I’ve learned in that committee about the world or situations in the world. Much of those things are in the newspaper, and it doesn’t take much understanding of human nature to read in between the lines what’s happening around the world.

I was frequently surprised to learn about the policy restrictions that President Obama had placed on the intelligence community and our military. Some of those are going to be lifted, if they haven’t already been, none of which I can discuss, but I do think that it will make a difference in the short run.

In the long run though, Syria has become an incredibly complex challenge because of President Obama’s policy that was very confused and all driven by a desire to do as little as possible there, so we’ve gotten to the point where we have allies that are fighting against each other like the Kurds in Syria and our NATO ally, Turkey.

But, at root, I think, you know, we are going to have to rethink our level of commitment in Syria. That doesn’t necessarily mean that we are going to have to put American soldiers there, more so than we already have. But we’re going to have to show a commitment to the interests of our allies that are doing some of the heavy lifting in Syria — countries like Jordan or Turkey or the UAE or .

I’ve been told by leaders of these countries that one reason why they have not done more there is because they’re not going to fight to install a Brotherhood or a Quds force government. That’s not in their interest, obviously. And this is a place where, you know, you have to have allies in the world. And if you want allies, you have to take into account the allies’ interest. You can’t just expect them to serve your interest as well.

MR. KAGAN: So I see we have the new ambassador from Iraq here. And I would remiss if I didn’t close by asking you as a veteran of the , how do you think things are going in Iraq, and what we should be doing the same or different?

SEN. COTTON: Better than they were, not as good as they should be or ought to have been, as I alluded to in my speech.

The original sin to me in our Iraq policy was when President Obama withdrew all those troops in — he said he was going to do it in 2009, did it all in 2011. President Bush certainly made mistakes in the conduct of the war in the 2003 to 2006 phase. I know I was there at the end of that phase. You were instrumental in turning that around though, and that was President Bush’s finest hour when he committed to the surge policy, with not just more troops but a new strategy as well.

And President Bush handed President Obama a relatively peaceful representative and stable Iraq. That was a big accomplishment. And, in 2011, you know, we were virtually never, you know, going out, kicking down the door, leading patrols ourselves. We were there as important mentors and advisers as well as providing, enabling support that’s, you know, a developing military need, whether it’s aviation or intelligence or logistics support. If we had kept, you know, 10 to 20,000 troops on the ground in 2011, I think the world would look very differently.

The world is a complex place. Iraq and Middle East is certainly very complex so it’s hard to say that, no, the Islamic state would have never risen to power. It would have had a much harder time rising to power. It would have had a much harder time crossing from Syria into Iraq and seizing Mosul and going almost to the outskirts of .

MR. KAGAN: Well, I certainly agree with that. We’ll go to questions now. The usual ground rules apply. Wait until the microphone comes to you. Give us your name and the organization and frame your statement in the form of a question and a brief one please. Right here.

Q: Thank you, Senator Cotton. Jay Kansara from the Hindu-American Foundation. President Trump in his inaugural address remarked that we will not impose our way of life, but he also remarked that we will defeat radical Islamic terrorism. How can we reconcile the two statements to form a constructive US foreign policy and military policy to achieve both goals?

SEN. COTTON: I don’t see much tension between the two. Radical Islamic terrorism is an enemy. It’s a threat not just to the United States but to the civilized peoples all around the world, including to many Muslims, if you look at who the victims of al Qaeda and especially ISIS are. So I don’t see a tension between those two statements.

In terms of imposing our way of life, we have to realize that even though we are the world’s superpower, there’s a lot of problems in the world, and we can’t possibly hope to solve them all. We have to identify areas where we can make a difference at the least risk and with the greatest impact. There are places where we’ve done that better, places we’ve done it worse.

But one immediate threat we face is the threat of radical Islamic terrorism. One way to help defeat that threat, besides with the barrel of the gun, is to help empower the voices of moderate Islam, which represent the vast majority of the world’s 1.7 Muslims. You know, people like President el-Sisi and have spoken very strongly about the need to defeat radical Islam and defend peaceful Islam. Mohammed bin Zayed, the crown prince of the , has done the same thing.

There are voices in the world that we need to work with more closely and that we need to help empower because in the end, you know, a bunch of American bureaucrats sitting in Foggy Bottom are not going to tweet our way to defeating ISIS. It’s going to have to come from within the Muslim world itself.

MR. KAGAN: I want to take the prerogative to follow up on that because the issue of supporting Sisi concerns me a fair bit. We have had the experiment of supporting Mubarak and trying to support Arab dictators, which got us the Arab Spring, which didn’t turn out so well — not necessarily inevitable that it wouldn’t turn out well, but it didn’t. And I’m also concerned about the conflation of all aspects of the Muslim Brotherhood and political Islam with the enemy that President Sisi seems to be doing.

First of all, do you agree with that? And, second of all, do you think that there is any way that we can and should be trying to shape the way that President Sisi is approaching this problem?

SEN. COTTON: I think it’s a valid concern. I think, on balance, President Sisi has proved himself a more reliable ally than President Morsi and his Brotherhood government did. In some ways, they were the ones trying to upend the constitutional order that had come into place in Egypt.

Now, I am uncomfortable with the levels of oppression in Egypt today, not just from a moral standpoint but from a strategic standpoint. If someone was out protesting the Mubarak government and then the supreme council and then the Morsi government and now the Sisi government, they’re probably not brotherhood radicals. They’re probably liberal democrats. And in any country, especially a country as large and as densely populated as Egypt with some of the economic strains they have, is going to struggle with that level of repression.

So, I mean, the road to democracy is a road that each country travels in its own peculiar way based on its history and its custom and its geography and its geopolitical position. We should encourage countries to take the steps towards more enlightened government, towards constitutional government that respects individual rights, and hopefully most of our allies can make the kind of transition that countries like and have made over time into a government that is liberal and constitutional in its design and democratic in its nature.

Q: Good afternoon, Senator. I’m Scott Klempner from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. In your opinion, should the United States adopt a policy that Ukraine’s border should be restored? In the context of your remarks earlier, how far should the United States go to make that happen?

SEN. COTTON: Well, the announced policy of the United States government remains that the Donbass as well as Crimea are a part of Ukraine, and they, in my opinion, should be recognized as part of Ukraine. We should not recognize a single inch of soil on which Russian troops stand as anything other than the Ukrainian territory. I think it sets a very bad precedent to recognize Vladimir Putin’s aggression in the heart of Europe.

But it also is a very bad precedent for America’s commitments and the reliability of our commitments. In 1994, we signed the so-called Budapest Memorandum, which said that if Ukraine would give up the nuclear weapons, of which they had very many from the Soviet days, the United States and other countries would guarantee their territorial integrity.

I would venture to say that if Ukraine had nuclear weapons on their soil today, they would not have Russian troops on their soil today. What kind of signal does that send to our allies or, for that matter, our adversaries around the world about our commitment to nonproliferation? It sends a very bad signal. This is one reason why I think President Obama’s policy towards Ukraine in the days after the Maidan were so misguided and, ultimately, so harmful to our long-term interests.

Q: Thank you. My name is Mitsuo Nakai, Reagan Foundation. I know you mentioned it a little bit, but can you comment on Asia-Pacific a little more in depth, including North Korean threat, missile defense, including Chinese aggression and so forth?

SEN. COTTON: So China at least is more straightforward in their ambitions than Russia. They don’t mince words. They tell us that they’re a great country and all the countries around them are small countries and, therefore, they have to deal with that reality. You know, Vladimir Putin likes to sometimes conceal his ambitions in the words of European diplomacy.

Those are two very serious threats. The North Korea threat is sui generis. It’s a rogue nation with nuclear weapons, increasing nuclear weapons that can target American citizens and American troops. In the late stages of the Obama administration, the South Korean government committed to the introduction of the THAAD missile defense system. President Trump has announced that he’s going to go forward with that. I think we should probably expedite it. I would welcome it on Japanese soil as well, not just as a way to defend our troops who are in South Korea and in and those nations’ citizens, but also our own citizens throughout the Pacific world.

In the end, we’re going to have to put more pressure on China, across the board, as I said, to recognize our interests. And some of our interests are things like controlling the nuclear proliferation inside North Korea, controlling their missile development program, freedom of navigation to the South China Sea, which China has successfully militarized. Again, that doesn’t mean that we have to respond in kind to every single provocation. You know, there are things that we can do that China won’t like, like deploying THAAD missiles in response to things they do in the South China Sea or things we can do in the Indian Ocean that they do on the Korean Peninsula.

But, again, we have to treat China, in my opinion, the way we treat Russia. We have to negotiate and bargain with them from a position of strength and applying pressure, realizing that there are no free lunches. We can’t simply stand by idly and let them do things like build those islands and militarize the islands or, you know, sell or fly within 12 miles on Japanese territory and so forth.

Our task there is different from an alliance standpoint than it is in Europe because we don’t have a multilateral alliance. We have a series of bilateral alliances. In my travels throughout East and Southeast Asia, one thing I’ve certainly noticed is that every country — almost every country — wants to be friends and partners with the United States, less so with China. A lot of them have very complicated histories with China, counties like Vietnam and Korea, for instance.

We need to give them more reasons to want to work more closely with us because we really are a linchpin in that alliance structure, even if it’s not a formal, multilateral alliance structure. We can do things like smooth over some of the differences that these countries have in between themselves like, say, Japan and Korea but also help give them the courage of their own conviction not to become a Chinese vassal state because China is right. I mean, it’s a matter of fact that China’s a big nation and most of those nations are small, except for Japan in its own way, but with the biggest nation of all behind them helping stitch them together in more formal arrangements, I think that we can check Chinese ambition.

MR. KAGAN: Do you think that we should try to convert those bilateral relations into a multilateral relationship? I mean, I get the tensions but, after all, we’ve got Greece and Turkey into the same alliance.

SEN. COTTON: That’s working out great right now.

MR. KAGAN: They’re still in the same alliance.

SEN. COTTON: I think, right now, more immediately, we have to focus on strengthening some of those bilateral relationships and promoting the countries that actually can be a lynchpin of the region — Japan, foremost, but also India in South Asia and in the Indian Ocean. And then the countries that are developing that for a long time have had very frosty relationships with the United States, but want to move in our orbit because they don’t want to be a vassal state for China. You know, I have in mind Burma here — countries that have been long-time allies because I think of some failed diplomatic initiatives are moving away from the United States and toward China, Thailand and Philippines being a couple of those. We should encourage the former, and we should top and reverse the latter.

Q: Thank you, Senator. Kirk Couchman (sp) with the Defense Priorities Initiative. One of the other things that President Obama did that weakened our country was being unwilling to tackle our long-term deficit and debt issue. Now, you’re one of the Senate’s leading fiscal conservatives as well, and I wanted to get your take on the interplay between the demands to increase defense spending as well as the need to reduce deficits.

SEN. COTTON: So our defense spending is not responsible for our national debt. That’s a common misperception, especially among the left. In some ways, our defense spending is actually a catalyst for economic growth. We’re a global trading nation with global interests. Without our military, especially our Navy and our Air Force, our forward deployed Marines and soldiers, we would have less prosperity here.

Also, in the end, trying to cut our defense spending to get a peace dividend as we did in the 1990s or to pay off domestic constituencies, as Barack Obama has done, is a self-defeating effort because your enemies get wind of what’s going on. Their aggression becomes bolder. You have to pay more to rebuild the capabilities and capacity that you lost just to get back to where you were. In the end, our defense budgets simply are not the driver our national debt. And actually, they’re one of the things that’s most popular among the American people to spend it on because they know that that’s the one thing that no doubt benefits them and protects them.

The way we address our national debt is twofold. We focus on health and retirement programs on the one hand, on the spending side; secondarily, we focus on the economic growth, which is why I say we’ve got to get the economy growing again. That helps pay off some of the defense spending. It also helps, you know, soften some of the domestic conflicts that we have, and it creates more opportunity for people all across America to get back in the workforce and get better wages and become taxpayers once again and help generate the tax revenue that we need to pay for things like our military.

MR. KAGAN: I’m tempted to ask you the same once again that the defense budget is not the driver of our national debt because that — it’s amazing that that’s just not understood.

SEN. COTTON: Well people look at it because it’s the biggest item in discretionary spending every year. But, again, I mean, it’s an item that is necessary — it’s a necessary precondition for economic growth. Some people don’t realize that because they just take it for granted because very few of us have been alive in a time when that was not the case — sort of like fish swimming in water, they don’t even realize the world in which they’re living. And without the size of our military, without the forward deployed posture of our military, our country will be much poorer.

Q: Good afternoon, Senator. I am Gawa Labi (ph). I’m a Pakistani journalist. And I’m a White House correspondent, and I do special stories on . So I happen to go to Guantanamo Bay recently for the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed hearing. So my question to you is like do you agree with this and ? And what recommendation will you give to the Trump administration in (filling ?) Gitmo with bad (dudes ?)?

SEN. COTTON: The second one is easy. We should capture them where we can. The Obama administration, because it didn’t want to deal with the detainee policy, made a priority of killing bad guys. And I’ve got nothing against killing bad guys when that’s the only thing that can be done to them at an acceptable risk to your own troops. Always better to capture bad guys and to be able to exploit their physical possessions, the electronic devices we find around them and to interrogate them to get the information they have.

To do that, you’ve got to have a detention policy. I think Guantanamo Bay is a modern, humane, legal detention facility. We should be using it again. It’s much better than leaving some of these people in countries that are allies of us that don’t have the most enlightened detention policies.

Your first question about waterboarding –—waterboarding is now illegal in the United States. Jim Mattis, , Mike Pompeo, pretty much every of Donald Trump’s nominees who’ve come before Congress have acknowledged that it’s now illegal. They don’t anticipate asking Congress to change it, to change that law. However, the people, the very limited number of people who engaged in that practice in the last decade did so with deliberate legal guidance from the Department of Justice.

So you’re not going to find me calling it torture and adding my name to an affidavit in some European court so those brave Americans who are trying to keep us safe can be detained and thrown in jail overseas.

Q: Colin Clark, Breaking Defense. You want to add the $26 billion this year. The Tea Party/Freedom Forum people are still alive. The Democrats and the Senate don’t exactly love this idea unless there is a grand bargain. Are you able to hug the Freedom Forum people close enough to your heart to make them change their minds?

SEN. COTTON: So the political challenge we’ve had in the Congress over the last few years is that the Budget Control Act, which went into effect in 2011, treated defense spending and nondefense spending as if it was equivalent and, therefore, every dollar of increase in one got another dollar increase in another. The Democrats held the line on that because the president held the line on that.

That is no longer the case. We now have a president who recognizes that is not the case. It’s ahistorical in our country. And while top line spending levels may remain the same, we don’t have to increase nondefense spending for every dollar of defense spending. Several Democrats in the Senate have acknowledged that they’re not going to be able to hold that line either.

So I think that we can find the money because it is so urgent to increase defense spending by $26 billion in this fiscal year. The needs are demonstrated. Most of them come straight from the chiefs of the services’ unfunded priority lists. And I think we can do so in a way that’s fiscally responsible as well.

Q: Hi. My name is Dane Patel (ph). I’m a student at the American University. And my question is that Donald Trump long campaigned against, you know, Obama’s Pacific trade deal, and many experts even here at AEI say that the trade deal advanced US interests in the Pacific and pushed back rising Chinese influence.

So my question to you is, do you believe that Donald Trump’s protectionist perspective is actually a detriment to US foreign policy and the national interest of our own?

SEN. COTTON: I’m not sure I’d characterize his views as protectionist. He said he believes in trade. He just doesn’t believe in stupid trade. He thinks that, you know, a lot of deals, to include the TPP, is an example of stupid trade. Now, I have some Arkansans who I represent who are very much in favor of it, and I have some others who are very much opposed to it because of some concessions that were made.

Regardless, that deal is behind us now. I do think it’s smart for President Trump to pursue additional bilateral deals, which tend to be simpler to negotiate, take less time to negotiate, and they’re easier to adjust the terms as time changes.

One example of this would be with Great Britain. The day after Brexit, I introduced legislation that would keep Great Britain on par with the trade agreements we have with the European Union because I thought it was very inappropriate for President Obama to threaten the British people with bad trade relationships if they voted for Brexit. Donald Trump was in Scotland. He said the same thing. He said that we should pursue a bilateral trade deal. That’s what he and Prime Minister May discussed a week and a half ago when she was in town. Prime Minister Abe from Japan is coming to town this week. I think they’re going to be discussing that as well.

I don’t think there’s any doubt that we benefit when we trade with people. You know, that’s in the same way with different regions in the United States. When we, you know, sell stuff that we make in Arkansas and get stuff back from California that we don’t make, that benefits both of us. But it should be done in a way that benefits the interests of the American people.

And if you look at some of the promises that were made to sell past trade agreements and the reality they delivered, Donald Trump has a point that we haven’t been delivering good trade deals for the American people.

Q: Thank you. My name is Li Yang (ph). I think from the beginning, Trump promised to drain the swamp. So what do you think that he has accomplished, and what else do you recommend?

SEN. COTTON: I’m sorry. He’s promising what?

MR. KAGAN: Drain the swamp.

SEN. COTTON: Drain the swamp.

Q: Drain the swamp.

SEN. COTTON: Well, I think a lot of Trump voters hear the howls and lamentations of Democrats in the media, and that’s the sound of the swamp draining to them. (Laughter.)

Look, it’s been a very active two weeks. And he’s taken a lot of actions with which I agree, trying to — you know, directing in particular the regulatory agencies and bureaucracies to try to use their power, interpret the authorities and the discretion that Congress has granted them in a way that helps working Americans, that helps people get back in the workforce and get higher wages.

Of course, I’m not going to agree with every single thing that Donald Trump has done. And he’s been hamstrung to some degree by Democratic obstructionism in the US Senate, and he, therefore, doesn’t have much of his cabinet in place yet. I think as time passes and we get beyond those preliminary matters in the Senate, which we’ll be doing a lot of this week, when we move on to the legislative agenda, you’ll see him delivering on even more of his promises.

But the promises that he has within his powers to do, for instance, begin the construction of a border wall, he started to deliver on; to try to rebuild our military, he’s started to deliver on. Ultimately, he needs congressional help to do a lot of those things, but he’s keeping most of the promises he made during the campaign.

MR. KAGAN: On the issue of moving things forward, Harry Reid has come to have sort of — (inaudible) — remorse on the question of the nuclear option and the sort of the destruction of the filibuster. Is the filibuster dead? Are we to a 51-vote Senate at this point, and is that good or bad?

SEN. COTTON: There’s two different functions in the Senate. We do executive business and we do legislative business, the executive business being nominations and treaties. And in that space, it is dead for all but the Supreme Court. And the legislative business, it still applies to all laws and bills.

I think there’s a case to be made that it never should have applied to nominees because if an office goes unfilled, the work is not being done. Moreover, it’s hard to compromise on a nominee. You know, you can’t give a little more money or extend the deadline or find some other compromise. You either confirm the person or you don’t confirm the person.

On legislation, I think it’s often been a useful check on the excessive ambitions of the majority. I wish we’d had a little more gridlock in 2009 and 2010 when President Obama and the Democratic super majorities were passing the stimulus and Dodd-Frank and Obamacare.

I assume that what you have in mind about your question is the nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. And I would simply say that he’s an outstanding nominee, and I expect that he’ll be confirmed.

Q: Thank you, Senator. My name is Ben Sheridan. I work at J Street. And I just wanted to thank you for your service in the Army and now in the . You spoke earlier about compartmentalizing US foreign policy and the shortfalls related to that.

But today in , leading security officials in the IDF and retired from the IDF would say that the Iran deal has removed the nuclear threat immediately from the state Iran and can allow the Israelis and regional allies to deal with the Iranian threats like support for terrorism and their actions in Syria on a much more direct basis with regional allies.

So when you hear last week Flynn saying that we’re putting Iran on notice in rather vast, broad terms, I’m wondering what your advice to the administration would be to protect what the Israeli security establishment sees as kind of breathing room with the Iranian nuclear threat.

SEN. COTTON: My advice to what President Trump did last week with Iran are probably more and faster. But this is an example of what I mean about compartmentalizing issues. You often heard from Barack Obama or about how we can compartmentalize issues. When we deal with Russia, we can treat Ukraine on one track and Syria on the other track. I know they can do that. I know Vladimir Putin does not do that. He does not give something for nothing.

Likewise with Tehran. We can compartmentalize as we did their nuclear program with their vast campaign of imperial aggression. That is now how they think of things. That was one of the fundamental flaws of the nuclear deal. Whether or not it’s extended the timeline past a year, which was the stated and relatively modest goal, in the end, the deal itself only applies for 10 to 15 years, which is the blink of an eye in the life of a nation, but more fundamentally, it did nothing to stop Iranian aggression in the region and support for terrorism. In fact, it enabled it by giving them so much sanctions relief and, in some cases, giving them, you know, cold hard cash flown in in the dark of night.

So that’s an instance in which we should no longer compartmentalize issues with our adversaries. And I’m glad that President Trump indicated last week that he’s not going to.

MR. KAGAN: I believe I recall that you did not take the view at the time the deal was being negotiated that this was a terribly good idea.

SEN. COTTON: I was opposed to it from the beginning.

MR. KAGAN: So do you think that we should just rip it up?

SEN. COTTON: Well, ironically, there’s really nothing to rip up since John Kerry acknowledged no one ever signed anything. (Laughs.) I think the deal if fatally flawed. It can’t be fixed. It can’t be repaired.

How President Trump wants to go about that, he has a few different courses of action. He obviously has some members of his cabinet with — (inaudible) — views about it, my friend Mike Pompeo and I are the ones that discovered the so-called secret side deals about Iran’s past military work in this nuclear program and some other matters. He’s now the CIA director. Jim Mattis, when he was CENTCOM director, listed Iran, Iran, and Iran as the top one, two, and three threats that are our country faced in the region.

At root, though, I think the Iran deal is dead because I think we now have a president who won’t compartmentalize these issues, who will confront Iranian aggression, whether it’s in Iraq or Syria or or the Mandeb Straits or anywhere else, and that will ultimately put too much pressure on the regime in Tehran.

MR. KAGAN: So we’ve come to the end of our time. I will ask you please to wait until the senator has left before you leave your seats. But, first, I will ask you to join me in thanking the senator for his service and for this talk. (Applause.)

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