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. But instead, the administration did the calculus and felt that they had to extend an olive branch.

Our argument was, well, let’s at least have this in reserve. If you’re negotiating with North Korea, let’s have something in reserve for which there will be consequences if they do not follow through. So allow us to bring the bill up in the Senate. Clearly, we had more than enough votes for a veto override in the House. And, at that point, we had I believe 65 Senators that had shown an interest in the approach we were taking.

The bill was blocked by the administration. As a matter of fact, as I recall, that session no foreign policy initiatives came up in the Senate because the Senate leader at the time, Reid, was concerned that this would be attached to it and would get to conference or could get to the president’s desk.

I think this was an absolute blunder. And I think we’ve got to get back to the issue of whether or not there are going to be consequences. Now, one of the things we were assured of, Dani, was that if we went forward with this agreement, it would be enforced.

And a secondary argument that was made on the floor of the House of Representatives was, look, there already are U.N. sanctions in place. We’ll enforce those if we see a violation of either the issue of ICBM testing. We’ve now had two violations. And what happened? The administration began to move forward with some very de minimis partial sanctions, informed us in Congress, and soon as there was pushback from Iran, they pulled it back.

Also, we were assured that there would be no lifting of sanctions against those who were involved in terrorism. You know, the IRGC is going to be a main beneficiary here. There are several banks in Iran that have funded the ICBM program that the Iranians run, as well as terror.

So our point is, why aren’t we sticking to the letter of the agreement, why do we continue to fall back? We put legislation out yesterday out of the committee to address some of these issues and we will continue to push forward. But it is incumbent upon the commander-in-chief in this country to lead on these issues when it deals with the national security of this nation, and we haven’t seen that leadership.

MS. PLETKA: I want to come to the question of that leadership and an authorization for the use of force. But before we leave Iran, I want to ask you, just for a second, what your take is on the flare up between Saudi Arabia and various other Gulf states and the Iranians over the execution of Sheikh Nimr?

REP. ROYCE: So here is one of the unfortunate consequences of the calculus that is made in foreign capitals that we have tilted, or the administration has tilted towards Iran.

What that means is that they are less likely to take our counsel. So when we give advice now, we frequently find—for example, the Iranian Quds forces were involved in helping orchestrate the takeover in Yemen of the Shi’a militia there. And a decision was made in Riyadh, along with other capitals, to put together an Arab force to go into Yemen and to try to push the Iranians out. And you’ll notice that we were not included in those discussions.

Egypt, Saudi Arabia, other countries in the region are increasingly making decisions on their own, without our counsel. And I think part of that is they now lack the trust in the judgment of the administration with respect to anything dealing with Iran.

And the other consequences of this, by the way, is it makes it harder for us to get solutions to other problems when this sectarian divide—when Sunni and Shia begin to separate—because of the consequences, again, of actions where had the administration originally in 2008—I guess it was 2008—was the Iranian Green Revolution. Had we led then, we might have had a different situation right now on the ground.

When two-thirds of the people feel strongly that an election has been stolen, and you don’t speak out, and you don’t help increase the passions to 86 percent—which is what you could have done with Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty—if you don’t take Reagan’s view on this—that it’s our responsibility to lead also with public diplomacy— which we could have done effectively by broadcasting into Iran in support of those efforts in an effective way—and now we’re in this situation, it is very hard to untangle the lost opportunities, hard to get the confidence back in Egypt when they’ve seen the embrace of the Muslim Brotherhood. And this is the challenge we face in this theater.

MS. PLETKA: You just brought up a whole series of things that I also want to talk to you about, which is our public diplomacy, which brings also in Russia and all these other questions.

But I don’t want to leave the Middle East until we talk about the Authorization for Use of Military Force. This has been an argument that Congress has abdicated its responsibilities. I know you support the notion of an authorization. There was a lot of back and forth between the administration, which didn’t want to give language to the Congress, and the result is that we’ve been operating in what amount to a military activities.

REP. ROYCE: We’re operating under the 2001 and 2002 Authorizations.

MS. PLETKA: Correct.

REP. ROYCE: What I support is an authorization of the use of military force that will give our commanders the flexibility they need in the field.

One of the things we need, though, in all of this, is the commander-in-chief to be a commander-in-chief. One of the things we need, as we move forward on this, is a commander-in-chief willing not to tie his own hands and the hands of whoever follows him into office, but instead to be dedicated, not to a containment policy with respect to ISIS, but destroying ISIS.

And let me just speak to that issue for a moment because when ISIS came out of Raqqa in Syria and began its assault across the—well, across Northern Syria and across the border into Iraq—there were calls from the Pentagon, calls from us in Congress to use U.S. air power in the same way as we had used it in—back during the first Gulf war when Kuwait was invaded.

If you recall, when Kuwait was invaded, the United States took a position that those 42 divisions were going to be obliterated. And we did that with 118,000 sorties, 118,000 sorties, took out those armored divisions. And the question we had at the time to the White House was they’re moving with Toyota pickup trucks. You can see them from the air.

Why not use that strategy and remove ISIS before they ever take Fallujah, or before they ever take Mosul, town by town, city by city? This argument was made month after month, after month, after month as we held hearings on this.

And somehow the administration sat in a state of paralysis when ISIS could have been destroyed before they were embedded, before they were recruiting on the Internet from all over the world, before they were selling the concept that they were indestructible. We could have taken them out from the air.

Let’s take to the next stage. Then they finally, on Yazidi Mountain, that’s when the administration finally decided to sit—to take some kind of action, after Mosul had fallen, after they had taken the central bank. And what action did we take?

Well, we had a young Yazidi captive speak before our Congress and before our committee, and explain to us what happened to her. She said in my village, all of the men were killed, the women—the girls and the women—were sold. She said, I was bought by an American. I was a concubine to an American who had been recruited into ISIS a few years ago on the Internet. And he explained to me that as a Yazidi, I was an apostate and, therefore, that was what happens under a just system. If you’re not a believer in the ISIS, you know, in an ISIS cause, you’re an apostate.

She said, why won’t you arm the Yazidi men? Why won’t you arm the Kurdish men and women? By the way, 30 percent of the Kurdish battalions are female. And they are fighting with 40-year-old weapons, all right? They are fighting ISIS.

And when you ask—the question is, well, you know, Baghdad, well, yeah, the Shia-led government in Baghdad does have a problem with us arming the Kurds, or the Yazidis, or others in the region. But that’s because of the influence of Iran that doesn’t want to see anything except Shia militias operating across the region. Why should we care about the pressure from Iran on Baghdad?

Why shouldn’t we—and I’ve got legislation—bipartisan legislation that I passed out of committee to arm the Kurdish forces. You have 180,000 Peshmerga, 180,000. You had, what, 30,000 ISIS fighters? But as the Kurdish soldiers tell us, we don’t have artillery. We don’t have long-range mortars. We don’t have anti-tank weapons. That is why it is so hard for us to stop ISIS.

Another question I have, besides arming the Christians and the Yazidis and the Kurds and the Sunni tribes who want to take their towns back and live now in DP camps, well, maybe seven million people now have been displaced within Syria and we have no safe zone that this administration have set up to protect them. They would like to go back. They would like to have weaponry and some training from the U.S. to take their villages back.

But as long as we’re going to defer to Shia militia or to Baghdad and Iran, how is that going to happen? And as long as we’re not going to forward deploy our forward observers, in order to call in those air strikes, how are we going to give close quarter— you know—close air support to those Kurdish units and other units fighting ISIS? We need a strategy not to contain ISIS, but to destroy ISIS, so that those young men all—and women—now watching on the Internet suddenly get the message that it’s not their destiny to go join ISIS and expand the caliphate, that that is a losing cause. But that takes a change of calculus on the part of the administration.

MS. PLETKA: Are you more optimistic about the Iraqi government now that the Iraqi military, without militias, has taken back Ramadi?

REP. ROYCE: I am somewhat more optimistic because, in the past, when they’ve used the Shia militia, the human rights abuses, to put it mildly, that they’ve inflicted upon indigenous village populations have created a huge blowback, so some of that is moving in the right direction.

But we could accelerate this if we listened to those in the field who want the authorization. I’d say 75 to 80 percent, from what I’ve heard from the commanders, of the flights that go out come back without getting authorization out of Washington in terms of dropping their ordinance. They have their—they’ve got to get approval out of Washington. And in this kind of situation, with those rules of engagement, you know the challenge there.

So for all of these reasons, I would like to accelerate the rollback of ISIS because so much depends upon us getting a handle on this enthusiasm of recruitment that right now is such a problem in Europe and North Africa, and now it’s becoming a problem here.

MS. PLETKA: You know, for as long as they’re perceived winning, they’re going to be recruiting. I don’t think there’s any question about that. Now, let’s change gears a little bit.

You’ve introduced legislation to support military assistance to Ukraine. I know the administration has, frankly, to me, inexplicably resisted that. This is the challenge we face in Ukraine: we’re not able to arm the people on the ground to support themselves. It’s not—there’s an analogy to what you were just talking about in the Middle East. Putin is now in Syria. First he started in Ukraine. How do we meet this challenge?

REP. ROYCE: Well, if we go back, Dani, one more step, where did it begin? It began with the decision to pull our interceptors out of Poland and Czech Republic.

Our secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, and this idea of pushing the reset, the idea that the Obama administration wanted to send a signal to Putin, and we had put in an interceptor system—we were expanding this system as a counterweight. If Iran ever threatened Europe or the United States, the concept was to have the interceptor system and a program where we could intercept any missiles coming out of Iran before they arced, you know, and fell into European or U.S. territory.

But the Russians were pushing back on that. And so, in the face of the commitment that had been made by Poland and the Czech Republic, our Secretary of State Clinton and the president pulled out this system. And I believe that, as a consequence of that, Putin read that as weakness—a lack of resolve on the part of the United States—and saw an opportunity when the situation presented itself in Ukraine.

Now, myself and Eliot Engel and a delegation of eight, four on each side, went into Ukraine and we went all the way east to Dnepropetrovsk, which is as far east as you can get before you get to Lugansk, in order to talk to the Russian speaking region there, to get their feelings about what was going on, to take their temperature in. We talked to the civil society, the lawyers groups, the women’s groups, the Jewish groups, the different minority groups, the mayor, the counsel.

The response we got was that, look, we get a lot of—they said this: Putin is recruiting every skin-head and malcontent that he can find in the Russian-speaking world, and they’re bringing them in here with weaponry, but we handle that because we can tell the Muscovite accent from our own Russian accent. They know. And they’re in the brig. We arrest them. That is not our problem. Our problem is the Russian tanks. Our problem is that we do not have anti-tank weapons to stop their tanks. And our problem is that you won’t sell or give us those weapons.

So the reason for the legislation, Dani, is to give those in Ukraine a credible deterrence that says to Putin: if you continue with the armor in this region, there will now be an antidote for inserting those tanks into this situation, because they clearly feel they could have handled the situation, the circumstances, if it weren’t for Russian armor and Russian troops.

So our goal, obviously, we have the sanctions on Russia to try to push Russia out. But for me, I think the problem is, if you show resolve up front—if, like Reagan, you announce that because the Iranians have taken the hostages, when you become president you’re going to do something about it, what happened the day that he was being sworn in? Our hostages at the time were being taken to a Canadian plane and they were trying to get them off the tarmac as fast as they could before Reagan took that oath of office, right? What’s happening today in Iran? They took an additional American hostage after the agreement was signed by our secretary of state.

So I think our whole strategy has to look at what’s worked in the past, including, by the way, broadcasting. I was in Eastern Europe, in East Germany, on an exchange program years ago. I saw the effects of Reagan’s orchestration of those broadcasts under Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, where we had a different plan. Our plan was to reach out and actually change those governments by taking that two-thirds opposition that existed and ratcheting that up to 85 percent, which is exactly what happened.

And in East Germany, where I saw this happen, you could see exactly what was happening with the population and you could see that inevitably now, because we were sharing our values, the types of the values the AEI speaks of, long the role that we’ve had around the world to explain these political pluralism, freedom, you know, free speech, freedom of religion, tolerance. These were the concepts that were being taught and people were listening to this. This is what should be going on now, with respect to our broadcasts into Eastern Europe and into Russia. And what does—even the administration says the broadcasting is practically (defund ?).

So the legislation that myself and Eliot Engel is moving addresses that by—in two ways. You put a strong CEO in charge of this instead of a seven-board—you know, several—nine members of a board that can’t make a quorum. You let that CEO run it day to day, and you give that CEO the mission that we once gave Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, and you get us back up, countering what Putin is doing with his propaganda machine and RT television along with what ISIS is doing.

MS. PLETKA: So the radios, the surrogate radios, and also our direct broadcasting back in the day really were a lifeline of hope. We heard Andrei Sakharov. We heard Natan Sharansky talk about how they were the—hearing that was really something that gave them optimism that they had a future. In the ‘90s, we created Radio Free Asia to do the same thing. The president of Radio Free Asia is hiding over there in the corner.

REP. ROYCE: Right. I had a hand in that.

MS. PLETKA: I’m trying to understand what’s happened. When I worked at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, we created the broadcasting board in order to actually double down on protecting these radios from, you know, the influence of the go along to get along in diplomacy. What’s happened?

REP. ROYCE: Right. So it’s morphed into National Public Radio for—you know, it’s just—with the bureaucracy and without the mission that we had at the time—and let’s, let’s be honest. Our mission was to infuse those societies with the knowledge that would allow them to move towards great freedom and greater support for market economy, and a template in a lesson of tolerance of how democratic systems would work.

We have moved off of that mission, but there’s no reason we can’t move back onto it. And the legislation today is not just obviously about radios. It’s about the Internet. It’s also about television. It’s about the whole panoply of social media that we can deploy.

But to do it, we have to feel confident in our message about our goals. We have to be able to talk about freedom. We have to be able to talk about these issues that I’m speaking of—freedom of religion and so forth—and give people a vision of a different society than that one that they see clashing around them. But you’ve got to be confident to do that and you’ve got to believe that the right thing to do is to empower the people.

I believe the right thing to do is to be with those two-thirds of the people in Iran that went to the streets. I don’t think the right thing to do is to increase the leverage of the ayatollah or the IRGC in that society which will now receive 100 billion (dollars) plus in revenue because we’ve sort of forgotten that all of those companies were nationalized, including the oil industry, right. It’s not going to the Iranian people the way this has been set up. It’s going through the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps. What are they going to do with that additional money? What is the ayatollah going to do? This is not going to be empowering for the people in Iran. So I think this strategy has to be reversed.

MS. PLETKA: So we’ve talk a lot about political freedom. We haven’t talked about economic freedom. You’ve come out in favor of the TPP, of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

REP. ROYCE: Yes. I’ll just explain my thinking which—I have sat down with the representatives of governments across the Pacific Rim and in Europe. And what they share with me is: look, we’re either going to have agreements for international trade which are low tariffs, high standards, or we’re going to have agreements—if Beijing is leading the process—of low tariffs, no standards. And we figured out that, for us, we’re much better protected in these negotiations if we can have high standards.

So we’re willing to give you more market access. We’re willing to open our markets. After all, your tariffs are pretty low to begin with. Ours are pretty high. We will bring our tariffs down, and you write agreements with high standards and we’ll sign onto that because we would sooner have America driving this train than Beijing. This is also what European parliamentarians of either political stripe, you know, across the spectrum, tell us privately.

Now, we understand protectionist attitudes and so forth in Europe, but when you’re talking to those who actually understand what’s at stake, they encourage us to move forward and to lead because, they say, if you don’t lead in the United States, then Beijing is going to lead, and that’s not going to have a happy outcome.

MS. PLETKA: So critics of TPP have said—in fact, critics on even among those who are nominally free traders—critics have said that some of the provisions will allow the Chinese state-owned enterprises to slide into TPP with no problem, that some of the intellectual property provisions aren’t good. How do you take that?

REP. ROYCE: Well, the intellectual property provisions are a lot better than the existing IP provisions. Are they—on indigenous innovation—are they what I would like to see in the end? No. I’d like to see them stronger.

But on IP protections, IP protections are in there. You contrast that with what Beijing is pushing, which has no protections, no protections. This obviously increasing the—don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, Dani. That is what I would say here.

And, remember, this is not a situation where, if we abdicate moving forward trade liberalization and a rules-based system, you know, we set up the GATT after the Second World War.

I just want people to reflect on what part of the consequences have been in terms of liberalizing trade around the world. Part of that consequence, if you look at economies then, the world economy was about five trillion (dollars). Today it’s $70 trillion. If you look at child mortality rates then, we’ve cut that rate by two-thirds. We have cut that rate by two-thirds. I mean, around the globe, the answer is not to put up higher tariffs. We saw what that looked like during the Great Depression because that Great Depression was a worldwide depression. And one of the things that accelerated it was this—was governments moving forward with ever higher tariffs as we fought tariff wars.

And today we’re in a situation where we could be so advantaged if we can build on the momentum of higher and higher standards, because we have our allies in Europe, and we have our allies in the Pacific Rim who will agree to go along with us, but if we lose the momentum on this process, and instead it’s driven in Asia by Beijing, I think it’s going to be a much different future.

MS. PLETKA: I take a little bit of the blame on us and institutions like ours as well. I don’t think we talk enough. We talk a lot about political freedom. We talk a lot about human freedom and religious freedom. We don’t talk enough about the transformative role of economic freedom. And even in the Middle East, where we don’t see that, it makes such a huge difference in people’s lives.

I have completely monopolized the microphone, as is my wont. And I’d like to open things up for questions. Everybody knows our procedures. I’ll call on you. Someone will come over to you with a microphone. Identify yourself and your affiliation, please, and put your brilliant, brilliant statement in the form of a very, very short question, or I’ll cut you off. This gentleman had his hand up first.

Q: Chairman Royce, Jay Kansara with the Hindu-American Foundation. Thank you for your leadership on the committee.

President Obama has—it’s come out in the media—has invited Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif for talks here in Washington in the spring. And these talks now are overshadowed by yet another terrorist attack. As chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, what will you advise the administration should be the trajectory of these talks to curb religious extremism in the region?

REP. ROYCE: You know, I have long discussed this issue with the former Chief Minister Gujarat’s state, and now prime minister of India, on this issue of better cooperation, anti-terrorist cooperation, between the United States and India.

And the attack on Mumbai, for example, is an example of where we picked up certain intelligence, but—and we shared it with the Indian government. But, collectively, we weren’t able—even though we knew an attack was coming, we knew the city that was going to be attacked—we weren’t able to discern enough information to prevent that loss of life.

Our secondary problem, of course, is that many of the schools—in this case, the campus that exist to recruit those jihadists have not been closed down. There are 600 Dil Bandhe (ph) schools for example, as well as the LeT campus that exist in Pakistan that I have been trying to get closed down. In three trips over the years to Pakistan, I have pushed, pushed, pushed on this.

Part of the problem is that these are not funded actually inside Pakistan. There’s Gulf state funding that continues to play this role in pushing an ever more confrontational interpretation of this Jihadist ideology. So we need to work worldwide to shut down the funding of that kind of mechanism.

Third, we need to work on the Internet with respect to—you know, we’ve got to work with Palo Alto as well as with our—in India and in Tel Aviv—with respect to those that are involved in that IT community in terms of how you take this down on the Internet.

So there’s a number of different solutions here. We need to do all of this in tandem. And we must understand that, you know, as we dismiss ISIS and these other organizations as the JV team, this is not the case. They are growing with their momentum. This is accelerating. And instead, this must be, along with containing or stopping Iran from developing the capabilities, eventually, of getting a nuclear weapons program—and I would argue that the way this agreement was handled is just a temporary 10-year, 15 at the most, hiatus on this. I do not think we—until we have a strategy to empower the people in Iran—I think we have got a problem if the ayatollah is making all of these decisions. And until we close down those Dil Bandhe schools and the LeT campus where those terrorists are recruited, I think we have the same problem in terms of attacks in India.

MS. PLETKA: It’s interesting you bring this up. We’ve really taken our eye off the ball on Pakistan. And we’re not talking about al Qaeda enough as well and how— what they’re doing in Afghanistan. I didn’t touch on that with you. So I encourage you all to ask. This lady here has a question.

Q: Hi. Penny Starr with CNAS News. So if you could advise a new president in 2016, what would be the first priority in restoring U.S. leadership around the world?

REP. ROYCE: Well, I think the first priority is to lay out a strategy in which we’re going to lead. And I think reaching out, first to our democratic allies, and then to our other friends around the world, in order to lay out what that strategy is going to look like.

I think also, in terms of explaining the rules of the road internationally, OK, the international treaties and agreements, for example, that mean—and are interpreted as such by all the countries of the world except one—that means that you cannot claim a reef as your sovereign territory. You cannot take a marking pen and draw a nine-dash line around the South China Sea up against the borders of nine countries and then say, all of this is our territory.

So I think it’s important we work with the international community and with our democratic allies and others to say these are the rules and we’re not going to violate the rules. And with respect to terrorism, there is a new strategy and our strategy is not to contain it; it’s to defeat it. And you take it from there.

MS. PLETKA: I want to—can I follow up on your South China Sea statement? What more should we be doing? We’re doing some freedom of navigation—very limited freedom of navigation—operations in the South China Sea to push back on the Chinese. What more should we be doing?

REP. ROYCE: Well, that’s—the whole question here is freedom of navigation. So, Dani, what we need to do is do that on a routine basis and do that with the Pacific Fleet, you know. And I think—I don’t think you necessarily want to just send one frigate out there. You want to just keep those sea lanes open and make it clear—by the way, working internationally, since everyone else happens to perceive this exactly the same way, you make this a worldwide issue, that these are the rules of the road.

MS. PLETKA: Gentleman back here.

Q: Thank you, Chairman Royce and AEI. My name is Daniel Kushakchin (ph). I’m the communications director at the Armenian Assembly of America.

This week, you had a closed-door briefing with Ambassador James Warlick, the U.S. Ambassador to the OSCE Minsk group, on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, particularly steps that you and other congressional leaders would like to see this administration take to bring peace to the region.

Could you elaborate on some of that as much as you can, as well as, you know, steps that—other steps that you and other congressional leaders would like to see this administration or future administrations take in regards to protecting and helping our allies, Armenia and Georgia, in the region, who are a constant threat from external forces such as Azerbaijan and Turkey?

REP. ROYCE: Well, I think deescalating the situation. I sent a letter to the president along with my ranking member, Elliot Engel, and others on my committee that lay out a strategy of, first, putting these range-finding special equipment that can tell where a gun is fired from so if you have an incoming shell, it can tell which side of the line the control of the shell is coming from, direction finding equipment.

Second, to put observers there; and third, to require all sides to pull all snipers off of the front lines. If these three things are done, the NGO community and those in the Pentagon tell us it will lead to a much safer situation because you will no longer have the trip wires.

So we’re pushing for all three of those actions now, while at the same time we’re talking to both governments. I’ve been in Baku, as well as Yerevan, talking to the heads of state of both countries with a bipartisan delegation, Eliot Engel and I trying to lower those temperatures.

Q: Thank you for your time. Rahim Rashidi with Kurdistan TV. In your opinion, how important is it now, both globally and regionally, that the U.S. support the Kurds with realistic logistical and military capability? Thank you.

REP. ROYCE: I think it’s very important because, first of all, the Kurdish forces are doing most of the fighting on the ground. Second, the Kurdish forces are the best fighters. Third, as I said, 30 percent of the Kurdish battalions are female, and those women are fighting up against ISIS. And you and I have both read accounts in the American press about their bravery in action.

I think it’s morally—it’s not morally responsible for us to allow those women on the front to fight ISIS with 40-year-old equipment. They need to be given the anti-tank guns, the artillery, the long-range mortars that they have requested in order to match ISIS. And if they can fight with the same equipment, I have no doubt that they will be victorious, and I think it is a very important point.

MS. PLETKA: Do you ever worry that supporting some of these—the groups on the basis of tribes, or sect, or ethnicity is going to push apart the Middle East, or is that just a consequence we should tolerate?

REP. ROYCE: Dani, we should be focused on giving them the equipment that will allow these fighters to take their villages back. That should be the focus. And the munitions necessary to take their villages back because if we do not, if we—as I mentioned the word paralysis—if, like the administration, we’re in a state of paralysis, think for a minute, Dani, of the fact that we’ve got seven million people displaced in camps that want to go back to their villages. What are the consequences of that? And that is inside Syria and Iraq.

Imagine the million and a half in Turkey, the three-quarters of a million in Lebanon, or a million now in Lebanon, the three-quarters of a million in Jordan, the million in Europe. I mean, we have a humanitarian nightmare. And we dither because, yes, we’re pressured by the Baghdad government. Yes, they constantly tell us, no, no. If you’re going to arm anybody, come through us.

But the problem is that until they show a capability of standing up to Tehran, to standing up to the Iranian regime, and actually engaging the Sunni tribes, and the Kurds, and everyone in the same way, until we see that action—and I don’t dispute that the current government is certainly much better than Malaki’s government—but there is a habit that has been put into place. We have to break that habit. And I would say the way we begin is arming the Yazidis and the Kurds, and the Sunni tribes that want to take their villages back.

MS. PLETKA: Young man in the back there.

Q: Good morning, Mr. Chairman. Daniel Wicker from the Wilson Center. You began by talking about the administration befriending our enemies. My question is about the administration’s attempts to actually support our friends, specifically with the Asian rebalance. How would you characterize the progress so far? What more should we be doing with the Pacific pivot? And how would you respond to China’s critique that this is just a containment strategy?

REP. ROYCE: It’s just a containment strategy? Well, it’s not a containment strategy. What it is an effort to move forward with the rule of law. And I support very much the administration’s support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, as well as the Atlantic Agreement. Those are steps in the right direction in terms of enforcing the rule of law, the rules of the road. It will better protect our IP property, but it will also lead to a synergy of more economic growth. And I think all of that is a step in the correct direction.

MS. PLETKA: I’m going to work my way back across the room. I try to gather everybody up. There are two ladies behind the cameras here.

Q: Thank you. Reporter from Voice of America. I have question here. We talk about Iran and North Korea, Russia, and China. So, Chairman Royce, in your view, which countries poses a bigger threat to the United States in the coming year? Thank you.

REP. ROYCE: I think the greatest long-term threat is still Iran. It is a threat to the region, and 15 years out, it’s a threat, potentially, to the United States. And that is why I am concerned that the perception of our tilt to Iran in the region will complicate our efforts to try to constrain Iranian behavior.

The secondary problem, I think, we face long-term is this—by the way, I think the ayatollah basically has his own caliphate. When he is talking about overturning governments in Yemen, in Bahrain, in Saudi Arabia, I think this idea of the Shia crescent stretching to Lebanon is a very, very destabilizing reality that we’re dealing with.

And then at the same time, we have this jihadist concept of the ISIS caliphate. So you’ve got two competing ideologically driven interpretations. But both are moving away from any acceptance of political pluralism, or the idea of freedom of religion for people to practice their own religions. That’s not tolerated in either of these quarters.

And so, with that intolerance and increased radicalization comes the danger that either one of those groups get ever deadlier weapons into their possession. That’s why I would like to see ISIS decisively destroyed.

MS. PLETKA: Go back over that direction. This gentleman.

Q: Thank you. Haik Gugarats with Argus Media. It seems that sanctions relief on Iran is days away, according to Secretary Kerry yesterday, and once IAEA verifies that Iran, in fact, met its commitments, the nuclear deal lifts those sanctions automatically, without input from Congress. Given your view of Iran as a pretty substantial threat, what can Congress do in the long term, in a new era of U.S. sanctions lifted on Iran’s oil sector?

REP. ROYCE: Well, of course, I don’t think it’s just my view. This particular initiative, the president only got the support of 42 members in the Senate, all right, and certainly a minority of the members of the House of Representatives, including many defections from his own party in the House.

So, I think the question of what we can do depends upon our resolve to first try to enforce the agreement—and I haven’t seen any real resolve on the administration in terms of enforcing it. And, second, whether or not we intend to keep the commitment made by both those who voted for it and those who opposed it, which was, regardless of what happens next, we all agree that the U.N. resolutions that are in place will prevent Iran from developing further testing on ICBMs and further support for terror. Now that they’re in violation of that, I would say this is the acid test of their intentions.

I would put one other thing on the table. The reports that surfaced in the Wall Street Journal, that Iran had agreed to transfer the capability into the hands of Hezbollah for targeting for their missiles—as you know, Iran has—there’s some 100,000 rockets and missiles now in the hands of Hezbollah, but they’re dumb rockets.

I saw this some years ago during the second Lebanon war. I was in Haifa. I’d watch those things crash into the city every day. I was in the trauma hospital. There were 600 victims down there. But those were dumb rockets. They couldn’t target the tallest building. They couldn’t target the airport.

What Iran has said is that we will transfer that conventional capability to Hezbollah. We will also do that in terms of—we will re-supply the rockets to Hamas down in Gaza, and we will rebuild the tunnels.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, those are direct violations of the international resolutions and the call for sanctions against that kind of activity. Is the administration going to make it clear to the ayatollah that we are not going to allow the transfer of that capability into the hands of Nasrallah, into the hands of Hezbollah? I think this is an essential question.

And all of this, we intend to use our committee to—as we’ve done in the past, to put legislation out onto the floor of the House of Representatives, but also to try to encourage the administration to take action. The administration, we would like to have as a partner in halting Iran and this kind of conduct, but whether or not they agree, we will go forward with legislation to try to force this issue.

MS. PLETKA: We have a lot of people still waiting. I know you have a hard stop. We have time for one more question?

REP. ROYCE: Sure. Sure, Dani.

MS. PLETKA: This young lady waving her arm. And this is going to be our last with apologies to everybody.

Q: Valerie Insinna with Defense Daily. A handful of Pentagon officials have been calling for acceleration of the FMS process recently. They’ve been saying that partners are having to buy from China and Russia and places like that because the U.S. process is too slow. Do you plans to introduce any language that would help speed up the process, or would you have concerns about doing so?

REP. ROYCE: No. I don’t have concerns about doing so because we have been pushing the administration on this. It has to do also with our industrial base—the defense of our industrial base. When our allies need this equipment, it makes very little sense to have them go, instead, to other countries because, frankly, part of keeping our production lines open and part of offering a deterrence is having allies and friends able to count upon the United States for weapons of deterrence.

And so this is—we’ve had ongoing discussions with the administration on this in order to try to expedite and reverse some of these policies that have gone on, where things have been held year after year. I used to say month after month, but it’s now year after year. And so we’re pushing hard on that.

MS. PLETKA: I’m going to ask everybody to remain seated as the congressman has to head back to his job on Capitol Hill. But I know you’ll all join me in thanking him for his leadership.

REP. ROYCE: Thank you. (Applause.)

(END)