A Conversation with House Foreign Affairs Chairman Ed Royce
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AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE NATIONAL SECURITY, THE NEXT PRESIDENT, AND RESTORING AMERICAN LEADERSHIP: A CONVERSATION WITH HOUSE FOREIGN AFFAIRS CHAIRMAN ED ROYCE DISCUSSION: ED ROYCE, CHAIRMAN OF THE HOUSE FOREIGN AFFAIRS COMMITTEE (R-CA) MODERATOR: DANIELLE PLETKA, AEI 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM FRIDAY, JANUARY 8, 2016 EVENT PAGE: http://www.aei.org/events/national-security-the-next-president-and- restoring-american-leadership-a-conversation-with-house-foreign-affairs-chairman- ed-royce/ TRANSCRIPT PROVIDED BY DC TRANSCRIPTION – WWW.DCTMR.COM REPRESENTATIVE ED ROYCE (R-CA) [Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee]: You’re right. The state of the union is coming up here, the seventh state of the union. And we’ve had seven years now of policies that frankly have been focused on befriending our enemies and distancing ourselves from our allies, ignoring our allies. And the consequences of that, I would just give one example. If we think back to 2005, there was a historic opportunity in Iran to have a chance at reaching out to the people of that country who had gone to the streets after a stolen election—and many of you remember the early broadcasting, you saw Neda, that young woman on the street who was shot by the authorities, and the consequences of a society in which, according to the Gallup polling, two-thirds of a people wanted a Western-style democracy without a theocracy and just had been robbed of an election. And we had the president make his strategic calculus in that, not to do the Reaganesque thing—not to reach out in support of the people—but instead to decide that the engagement would be a long-term engagement with the ayatollah. And, subsequent to that, we also saw another calculus on the part of the administration. And that was a situation where the decision was made to embrace the Muslim Brotherhood—the Muslim Brotherhood that had been funded partially by Iran— but distance ourselves from Egypt, from the people of Egypt. And the consequences of these strategies was to leave us in the Middle East in a position, in my opinion, where, whether it was the Jordanians or the Israelis or the Gulf states, people no longer trusted the judgment of the administration. And that’s important because that means people no longer necessarily take our counsel. They begin to take things into their own hands, or they begin to adopt a new calculus in terms of who the regional hegemon is going to be, based upon the assumption that we have now tilted toward Iran. And the reason this takes on, Dani, a new urgency is because in the last few weeks, we have seen a series of steps by the Iranian regime in which you’ve had violations of the U.N. resolutions with respect to two missile tests now, in which you see the firing of a rocket near the coast of the USS Truman, our carrier. We have seen another American hostage taken hostage. We have discovered recently of attempts to hack into a dam outside of New York City. I remember when we discovered the efforts here by the Iranians to attempt to assassinate at Café Milano by placing a bomb the ambassador from Saudi Arabia. Now you hear Iran openly speak of toppling the government of Saudi Arabia after already seeing their activities in Bahrain, certainly in Yemen, where they effectively did topple the government. So the question is, who is watching this? Not just our allies. All over the world, people are watching our failure to respond to these provocative actions. And given that, I think it explains a lot in terms of the position we’re in around the world. On the Foreign Affairs Committee that I chair, we are attempting to reach back to the old bipartisan consensus that America had, in terms of strong engagement overseas, something the AEI has long supported. We need U.S. leadership. We cannot be in a position where our policy is one of constantly backing down. We have to have a policy of more backbone, not a policy of more backing down. And that’s the crux of the problem today. DANIELLE PLETKA: So you have a lot on your plate for the committee. I know that you’ve been talking about what to do about Iran specifically. You’ve been working with your ranking member, Mr. Engel, and you introduced a bill on North Korea, that we had a North Korean nuclear test. That’s sort of Iran further ahead. That’s post a nuclear deal that was, at the time, touted by Bill Clinton as the model for how to come to a nuclear agreement with a country. Now we’ve got another nuclear agreement with the Iranians. And I’m wondering whether we’re going to see the same fate. What are you thinking about what Congress can do? REP. ROYCE: Well, a couple of thoughts there because during that original framework agreement, I remember debating Wendy Sherman at the time, who was the chief negotiator not only for the North Korean agreement, but also for the Iranian agreement. And I would just make the point that we had an example of what could deter North Korea. In 2005, we had a situation where you had Banco Delta Asia— MS. PLETKA: Right. In Macao. REP. ROYCE: In Macao was a discovery on the part of the Treasury Department that hundred dollar bank notes were being counterfeited by the government in North Korea. This obviously gave Stuart Levey, the undersecretary, the authority to go forward and he sanctioned that activity. And he gave a choice to the Bank of Macao and 10 other banks that served as the conduit for the hard currency needed by North Korea. They had a choice between remaining part of the international banking system and banking with the United States, or being cut off and they could bank with North Korea. They all made a decision against banking suicide and all decided they would freeze the accounts for North Korea. What were the results? Well, we discovered afterwards that, for example, the missile production line that the North Koreans had run, they could no longer get the hard currency they needed to buy either the black market gyroscopes that they needed for the missiles or other parts. It came to a complete halt. More importantly, not only was the dictator not able to pay his army or his secret police, he wasn’t able to pay his generals. That is not a good position for a dictator to be in. And, as a consequence, every meeting after that started with one question on the part of North Koreans: when do we get our money? When do you lift the sanctions? When do we get the hard currency? Unfortunately, Treasury was not left in the position of making the key decision on this. Unfortunately, that decision was made by the State Department, and they lifted, as part of a negotiation in the hopes that North Korea—the false hopes—would come back to the table. The legislation that I’ve authored, which will come up Tuesday, will take exactly that policy from 2005 and put it back into law. We will put that bill on the president’s desk with strong bipartisan support. It passed unanimously out of my committee. And this is the approach that will work because you need consequences. The idea of strategic patience, which is how the administration defines its current strategy with North Korea, means patience while North Korea goes forward with test after test, until it fully develops its ICBM program and its delivery capability. And right now, those ICBMs can hit the United States. We don’t want them to succeed in miniaturizing their weapons so that they can put them on the cone of those ICBMs and thus threaten us as well as the region. MS. PLETKA: Has the administration taken a position on that legislation? REP. ROYCE: I have not heard the direct position from the administration but I’m hoping that the strength of the vote behind it changes their calculus with respect to how to deal with North Korea. MS. PLETKA: So you described a mechanism with Banco Delta Asia in North Korea where the financial spigot was closed. They responded, the financial spigot was opened, and now we’ve had several nuclear tests. We are about to open the financial spigot on implementation day with Iran. What do you see as the options for the Congress to address the violations that you described of the U.N. Security Council resolutions and the threats that Iran is posing in the region? REP. ROYCE: Well, I am going to—I’m going to try to move legislation that will address those issues. But I’d like to revisit a discussion that I had with the secretary of state, myself, and Eliot Engel, in which we were advancing legislation, again, based upon Stuart Levey’s work that would give the ayatollah a choice between real compromise on his nuclear program or economic collapse. And that legislation had strong bipartisan support. And, again, I go back to the post-World War II thesis that we always had in the United States for leadership and a strong showing. Myself and Eliot Engel had put that bill together and we passed it out of the House of Representatives with a vote of 400 to 20. And our request to the administration was that they allow that bill—this was in a prior Congress—to come up in the Senate.