Address To The Nixon Center And The Richard Nixon Foundation National Policy Conference
May 18, 2010
Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senator John McCain (R-AZ) will deliver the following remarks, as prepared for delivery, to the Nixon Center and the Richard Nixon Foundation National Policy Conference today, May, 18, 2010 at approximately 12:15 pm ET in Washington, DC:
“Thank you, Dmitri [Simes], for that kind introduction. And let me thank you and the Board of the Nixon Center for inviting me here to speak with you today.
“I see a lot of old friends in the audience this afternoon, and I’m honored to be here. But I also realize that I may be the only thing standing between you and your lunch, so I’ll try to keep my remarks brief and leave some time for questions.
“I know the Nixon Center, like the president whose name it bears, is committed to shaping a foreign policy based on ‘realism’ – on the enduring reality of national interests, the balance of power, and yes, the limits of power. In short, a foreign policy rooted in the world as it is, not as we might wish it to be. In this way, I count myself as a realist – for I have certainly seen my fair share of reality.
“It is fashionable to draw crude distinctions between realism on the one hand, and idealism, justice, morality, and conscience on the other. This is an academic debate, and I was never that fond of academia. Trust me, it was a mutual feeling.
“In the real world, in the world as it is actually lived and experienced by real people, the demand for human rights and human dignity, the longing for liberty and justice and opportunity, the hatred of oppression and corruption and cruelty – this is reality. And by denying this experience, we deny the aspirations of millions of people, and thereby invite their anger. Our country has its flaws and failings, as we have proved all too many times, but we are a country of conscience. And for this reason alone, the concerns of conscience must always be a part of our foreign policy – not the whole part, but an important part. I know you believe this too.
“America is just one nation, but we are a great nation, with great power, and an unrivaled ability to lead the world toward more freedom, more justice, and more rights for more people. We can’t make the world perfect, but we can make it better. What concerns me today, my friends, is that a robust support for liberty and human rights seems to be mostly missing from our foreign policy, and I do not think it’s a coincidence that this noble cause is now suffering setbacks worldwide.
“In China, another undemocratic change of leadership is on the horizon, and fears are growing in Beijing that local political activism is on the rise. So the government is cracking down harder than ever on popular dissent, especially in Tibet and Xinjiang. But you wouldn’t know it listening to this administration, which seems unwilling to speak up fully for the peaceful aspirations of China’s people. Our President appears reluctant to meet with Chinese dissidents, including the Dalai Lama, while our Secretary of State made light of even raising the subject of human rights on her first trip to Beijing. Worse still, in the recent U.S.- China Human Rights Dialogue, the State Department’s senior official for democracy and human rights seemed to compare the oppression of China’s autocratic regime with Arizona’s recent immigration statute. Now, whatever you think of the Arizona law, to imply that the transparent legislation of a democratic government is morally equivalent to the arbitrary abuses of an unelected Communist government is offensive and embarrassing. It is certainly not my idea of a human rights dialogue.
“This is just one example, and unfortunately, there are others.
“In Lebanon, Syria’s rulers are slowly getting more of their hooks back into that sovereign country, and Hezbollah is better armed than ever. I was in Lebanon in January, and I saw Walid Jumblatt, the leader of the Druze. He told me, ‘I have to go to Damascus.’ I saw Prime Minister Hariri, a talented young man who went to Georgetown, and he said the same thing: ‘I have to go to Damascus.’ So these men have gone to meet with the government that likely murdered their fathers. And yet, this administration seems consumed with a policy of engagement toward the Assad regime. There is nothing wrong with engagement, but it’s a tactic, not a foreign policy, and we should never give the impression that engagement with our enemies comes at the expense of the sovereignty and independence of our friends.
“I was also in Georgia in January, and I traveled just outside of Abkhazia. It’s a sad experience. The boundary line is hardening. Displaced peoples continue to flee in fear. And not only are Russian forces still occupying sovereign Georgian territory; they are digging in their military presence. But last week, the President resubmitted to Congress a civil-nuclear agreement with Russia, stating, and I quote, ‘the situation in Georgia is no longer an obstacle...’ And some wonder why the Georgians feel that Washington is selling them out to Moscow as the price of our ‘hitting the reset button.’ The sad thing is, it’s not just the Georgians. Ask the Poles, or the Czechs, or others in central Europe, and you’ll hear the same anxiety about American abandonment. You’ll hear much the same thing, for that matter, from those brave Russian democrats, and journalists, and civil society activists – patriots, all of them – who continue to work to restore a respect for human rights in Russia, despite a campaign against them of intimidation and brutality – and worse.
“Then there is Kyrgyzstan, where this administration remained silent while the Bakiev government grew more corrupt, more autocratic, and more despised by its people. I’m told that, earlier this year, Freedom House went to see the Kyrgyz ambassador here in Washington to explain why they were designating the country ‘not free.’ The ambassador told them, ‘It used to be the State Department would talk to us all the time about democracy; now they never mention it …. If your State Department doesn’t care about democracy, then why should we?’ Despite this administration’s actions, certainly not because of them, the recent uprising has produced an interim government that could give Kyrgyzstan a second chance at democracy. So we better get serious about human rights in Kyrgyzstan, or we may lose both the goodwill of the Kyrgyz people as well as our military base at Manas.
“In Iran, we have seen in the past year a breathtaking popular movement for freedom and justice. The great Iranian people have said that they want their voices to be heard and their votes to matter. And for demanding this basic right, Iranians have met with the clenched fist of a militarized tyranny – intimidation, beatings, torture, disappearances, assassinations, show trials, and summary executions, as we saw just last week, when five Iranian Kurds were hanged for their political activism. The victims’ families learned of this injustice only after it was too late. This campaign of cruelty may delay the cause of freedom in Iran, but it cannot destroy it. Indeed, I believe that when that young girl Neda bled to death in the street in Tehran, it was the beginning of the end for this regime in Iran.
“I know that many in Iran view the American government with suspicion, and we should never provide our support where it is unrequested and unwanted. But when young Iranian demonstrators write their banners of protest in English – when they chant ‘Obama, Obama, are you with us, or are you with them?’ – that is a pretty good indication that we should do more to support their cause. Again, there is nothing wrong in principle with talking to our adversaries, but let’s use that engagement to further all of our interests, especially our interest in human rights.
“As in Iran, the struggle for democracy goes on in Burma. For twenty years, a woman of astonishing courage and grace, Ang San Suu Kyi, has freely endured imprisonment, threats to her health and life, the loss of loved ones, and all manner of cruelty at the hands of tyrants who resist her every effort to liberate the country. The millions of Burmese who lawfully elected her their leader have peacefully risen time and again to claim their rights. But despite more than a year of U.S. engagement with Burma’s junta – engagement that has not been backed up by any added leverage or pressure – the regime recently decreed that Ang San Suu Kyi’s political party must expel her from its ranks to compete in the upcoming elections. Rather than surrender their soul, Burma’s democrats will rightly boycott the junta’s rubber-stamp elections. They will persist in their righteous cause, despite torture, imprisonment, and murder. No defeat has undone them, and no defeat ever will.
“I have always believed that no matter how long it takes, how many setbacks are suffered, how resilient the forces of injustice, the righteous will triumph. Wherever darkness prevails for a time and inflicts its terrible miseries on the innocent, be it in Burma or Iran or North Korea or elsewhere, sooner or later, the light of human conscience will extinguish that dark forever. We won’t all live to see it, but I cannot accept that the day won’t come eventually, when a blessed generation will see the victory of justice in the last, darkest corners of the world.
“Until then, America has an historic duty not only to voice our moral support for all who seek lives of peace and freedom, but also to devote our great power to further their just cause. So with Burma, we know where the junta banks its illicit money, we have legal authority to go after it, and we should do so immediately to put some real pressure behind our diplomacy. With Iran, we should identify the agents of the regime’s oppression, we should publicize their names and faces, and we should make them famous. Then we should impose on them the kinds of targeted sanctions for human rights abuses that I have proposed in the Senate.
“I would urge our President and his senior leaders to meet with dissidents of countries where darkness now reigns, so they can tell their stories and share their dreams. And when the torturers and jailers of these dissidents protest that we are highlighting their deplorable treatment of their people, we should remind them that we will engage with any government if it serves our interests to do so, but that we will never pay for that engagement by silencing our support for justice and dignity.
“I believe that American leadership in opposition to human rights abuses is the truest expression of our national character. It is surely right to say that the United States has an obligation to set a moral example in the world, and it is also correct that we have failed that duty many times. We failed it when we did not act on reports of the Holocaust or when we ignored the slaughter in Rwanda until it was too late – when we refused to respect the civil rights and dignity of black Americans, or more recently, when we mistreated prisoners in our custody. That failure has made it harder for us at times to encourage other nations to respect human dignity and to rally support for the oppressed. But it hasn’t relieved us of that moral responsibility. Whatever our flaws, whatever dangers we face, and however sharp our debates, we must remain a country of conscience. We must feel ashamed when we ignore its demands. And we must resolve to do better.
“I have seen many things over the course of my life – many things, like the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism, which I often doubted that I would witness in my lifetime. Twenty years, ago, I watched on television as ecstatic Germans tore down the Berlin Wall, and it called to mind a quote from William Faulkner. ‘I decline to accept the end of man,’ Faulkner said in his Nobel lecture. ‘I believe that man will not merely endure; he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.’”
“That faith has cost many lives, but liberated many more. It is the faith that tears down walls and builds bridges between peoples. It is the faith that made our nation the hope of mankind. And it is that faith which we must never forsake.
“Thank you.”
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