Article by Erik Smith. Published on Friday, October 14, 2011 EST.

Former U.N. Rep Says Foreign Policy Challenges Are Sneaking Up Behind Obama’s Back

John Bolton chats with reporters prior to his appearance at the Policy Center dinner.

By Washington State Wire

BELLEVUE, Oct. 13.—Former U.N. Representative John Bolton, a prominent figure in Republican foreign policy circles and onetime presidential hopeful, says trouble is sneaking up where the Obama Administration isn’t looking.

            “They think we are weak,” he said of Iran, and added that he isn’t much surprised by the disclosure of an apparent plot by the Iranian government to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington. D.C. this week. “The only surprise to me is why this sort of thing hasn’t happened earlier.”

            Bolton addressed a crowd of 1200 at the Washington Policy Center’s annual dinner in Bellevue Wendesday night. Actually, Iran is just one of a host of adversaries that senses a weakness in America’s influence around the world, he said, and the country’s standing is in serious jeopardy.

            Bolton, one of those figures who makes the rounds of think tanks and Fox News appearances while the Republican Party is out of power, suggested last year that he might be interested in a presidential bid, but took his name out of the hat last month. Washington State Wire presents the full text of his address:

             A 12-Hour Speech, Condensed

“I would like to talk this evening about the foreign-policy challenges the facing the United States over the next couple of years. My speech lasts about 12 hours. I have been asked to condense it, so I will just take the highlights. I think it is important that even with a group that works so intensively on state and local issues, that the connection between our domestic policy and our national security policy be understood, and in fact, as we enter into a presidential campaign, that relationship get more attention than it does get, and that candidates for high office debate these issues and explain their positions so that as voters we can all make a better informed decisions. I very much fear that we haven’t had that over the past couple of years, and our adversaries are not waiting around for us to get our economic house in order.

“We are and have been since our founding a nation based on trade and the ability for Americans to interact on a global basis. It is one of the reasons we have been as successful as we have been. And being able to protect our national interest and those of our friends and allies overseas is critical. You can’t have a strong domestic economy without a strong defense capability and you certainly can’t have a strong national security without a strong economy. We are at risk of losing both in our own vision now. And it is equally important that we take command of the situation and make sure that it doesn’t happen.

“So let me run through a couple of problem areas that we face and give some thoughts on what we need to do to address it.

            The Euro Crisis

“First I want to talk about the crisis that Europe is going through. The crisis to its common currency, the euro, has implications for us and what the U.S. ought to do about it. I think the case for the euro is undebatable. Eliminating the transaction costs associated with multiple currencies in a common trading area, eliminating foreign exchange risk – all that makes sense no one can fault Europeans for wanting a common currency.

“But let’s not forget as Americans that one of the principal reasons behind the euro was a political purpose. It was intended to help undergird the basically social democratic nature of the European economies, and it was intended to help create the euro as an alternative global reserve currency without. And that political component is part of the objectives of those who saw the European project as a whole as a way of creating in a united Europe a whole alternative to the United States in world affairs. Now that’s legitimate for the Europeans to do, they’re democratic countries, they can make that choice if they want to set up a common currency for that purpose, just like it would be perfectly legitimate for the governments of Tokelau and Gambia and Tuvalu and Kirabas to set up a common currency to challenge the dollar if they wanted to.

 “But the risk of failure of the euro, given those underlying purposes, should lie with the Europeans. Again the policies that we are pursuing indirectly so far include the international monetary fund, somewhat more directly recently the Fed, making available a dollar liquidity facility for the Europeans. The policies we are pursuing are to help Europeans rescue the euro, under the argument that collapse of the euro will affect us.

“Of course the collapse of the euro will affect us. This is the argument that we have seen for the last three years about how there is that nothing too big to fail in the United States. Obviously we have unlimited liquidity of monetary policy, whatever it takes in terms of government spending, quantitative easing by the Fed – if it takes another couple hundred billion dollars of dollar liquidity to help the Europeans, surely we will do that.

“Surely we should not do that. I am not at all averse to policies help do something to mitigate the damage to American financial institutions that have not divested themselves of the European sovereign debt, which I hope they continue to do as we speak, and to protect America from the improvidence of governments like those of Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Ireland – I could go on but the evening is finite.

             Bailing Out Europe

“This is something that I think is very important for the Americans to understand, that we not find ourselves in a position not only to fail in our own financial institutions but bailing the Europeans out when they still have not taken adequate steps to put their own house in order. And I think we are going to see this debate continuing.

“Over this week our stock markets have fallen off dramatically. The euro has appreciated dramatically against the dollar. Why? Because on Sunday the German Chancellor Merkel and France’s President Sarkozy had announced they have solved Europe’s financial problem. They have a plan. They haven’t told us what the plan is yet. But the markets are still going up.

“I was in New York Monday, speaking to a financial institution, and I asked how it is possible that traders could actually believe a statement like Merkel and Sarkozy had issued on Sunday. And the answer was, well you know, it is the herd instinct. they see what is happening and all the traders go off in the same direction. Well, that is not an advertisement for capitalism.

“Why would people buy euros to the extent they have to appreciate over the past three days? I don’t know. I think they are mad I would like to know who is doing it. I would like to make some of the profit, too. but the fact is that the Europeans have made a mess of this project. I feel badly for them. I feel badly for the hit their standard of living is going to take. But I don’t think our standard of living should take a hit in order to protect them. And that is a debate we haven’t had. We haven’t seen it fully developed. In fact we hardly ever talk about the steps we are taking.

“I don’t want to leave this subject on too radical a note, except that I would recall for you that during the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, when all of the great and good insisted that the IMF had to bail out the Asian financial institutions, former Secretary of the Treasury George Schultz, former Secretary of the Treasury William Simon, former chairman of Citibank Walter Wriston wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that gave their answer to the Asian financial crisis and it was abolished the international monetary fund that was the right answer. But we are not going to carry out that option anytime soon.

Don’t Wait for the Arab Spring

            “Now from the ridiculous to the sublime, let me talk about the crisis that we face in the Middle East. There are several factors moving simultaneously. It is a very complex region, very important to the United States, very important to the world’s economy; the largest producer of natural oil and natural gas. It is the location of the Suez Canal and the location of some of our most important friends and allies.

“You know for the past six months there has been a narrative in the Arab media about the Arab Spring and the likely outbreak of democracy in a number of Middle Eastern countries. Obviously we all hope that that’s true. It is fundamental to our view of the way government ought to be; it ought to be limited and representative. But unfortunately that is not the direction that events have taken or are likely to take in the near future. Not because democracy is not ultimately possible in the region, but because democracy is not simply about holding elections and counting votes.

“Democracy is a culture. It is a way of life. We didn’t exactly establish it overnight here. Neither did the Europeans; neither have peoples all over the world. And in fact the risk is in many countries in the Middle East that people who believe in democracy as meaning one person, one vote, one time are increasingly likely to take power.

“We have seen in Turkey Prime Minister Erdogan saying, and I quote, democracy is like a streetcar. You ride it to the stop you want and then you get off. Think about that one.

             Egypt a Hotspot

“Look at what is happening in Egypt, where the television screens were filled for days with pictures of demonstrations in Cairo’s Tahir Square and the overthrow of President Mubarak, a close ally of the United States for 30-plus years, even though he wasn’t a Jeffersonian Democrat. We were told that democracy was next up on the agenda and what do we see? Just a few days ago riots in several Egyptian cities, crushed by the Egyptian military, 24 dead, most of them Coptic Christians. Their offense? Asking for continued guarantees of religious freedom.

“Now, this is a very, very serious issue, as we look to elections in the Egypt, the most populous of the Arab countries, the place where so much of philosophy and political trends in the Arab world begin. Coptics are 10 to 12 percent of Egypt’s population of roughly 75 million people. They have had for the past century a secular environment in Egypt that has done very well. You will recall 20 years ago the Secretary-General the United Nations was Boutros Boutros-Ghali, a Coptic Christian from Egypt. His grandfather was the original Boutros Ghali, the prime minister under British rule. Now we see in this past few months 100,000 approximately Coptic Christians who have fled Egypt, and experts looking at the violence we saw 10 days ago predict many, many more fleeing as well. They are worried about the prospect for radical Islamists taking control of the Egyptian political process.

 “But it is potentially even more dangerous than that. The post-Mubarak government in Egypt opened the border with the Gaza Strip, allowing Hamas, a subsidiary in effect of Egypt’s radical Muslim brotherhood, to be able to pass freely back and forth between Gaza Strip and Egypt. we now see weapons formerly part of Ghadaffi’s military arsenals in Libya passing into Egypt. We have seen the principal contenders for the Egyptian presidency, all of them, say that there have to be substantial modification to the 1979 Camp David agreement with Israel, the foundation stone for three decades of U.S. efforts for peace and stability in the Middle East.

“The challenges to the Camp David accords all involve a direct conflict with the principle of land for peace under which Israel’s security has rested. If Camp David is undercut between Israel and Egypt, the peace agreement with Jordan will be in jeopardy. We have already seen the risks that Israel faces from the terrorist group Hezbollah in Lebanon and the repression that we see going on in Syria now, where the Arab spring is being crushed by the family Ba’ath party dictatorship, with important assistance by the government of Iran, will leave Israel in a much more strategically vulnerable position than before, and it will leave America’s Arab allies equally concerned for their future.

            Iran Can’t be Trusted

“The principal threat in the Middle East to peace and security is not, as our current administration believes, the construction of apartment buildings in East Jerusalem. The principal threat to peace and security in the Middle East is Iran. It is Iran’s support for international terrorism, Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons. And what did we see just in the last 24 hours? That the Obama administration’s Justice Department has uncovered what it says is an Iranian government plot to assassinate the ambassador of Saudi Arabia in Washington.

“Now let’s consider who is describing this plot. This is not the Bush administration. It is a government that has for 2 1/2 years gone out of its way to hold open the possibility of negotiations with Iran over Iran’s nuclear weapons program, and has gone out of its way not to give offense to the government of Iran when that government was brutally suppressing peaceful demonstrations after the fraudulent June 2009 presidential election. It is this administration which has uncovered this plot and issued information about it yesterday. Some people have said they doubt that Iran would do anything that foolish. Well, okay you are entitled to your doubts. The only surprise to me is why this sort of thing hasn’t happened earlier. Certainly they are brazen and I think there’s an explanation for it. They think we are weak. They think we are weak and they can get away with it.

“We will see what the administration’s response is, but I tell you this conflict that Iran has stirred up in the region and in Saudi Arabia against the Arab states in the Gulf region which fear a decline in American power, which fears the effect of American withdrawal from Iraq, which fears the consequences of the drawdown of the forces of in Afghanistan. All point in the direction of declining American influence.

“I understand why people think we have been engaged a long time in Afghanistan but a withdrawal such as we are engaged in now on a fixed timetable is almost certain to reverse all the gains that we’ve made the Taliban in Afghanistan. They had a saying about us. They said you have the watches, we have the time and sad to say, they are right.

            Global Terrorism a Threat

“We continue to be engaged in a huge global struggle against international terrorism. We had some successes – Osama bin Laden killed and Anwar Al-Awlaki are successes, no doubt about it. But the war against terrorism is always going to be a long war, and we have been vigilant, but it is luck we have avoided additional terrorist attacks in this country.

“Just within the past day the Christmas underwear bomber, Umar Abdulmatallab, changed his plea to guilty in his criminal case in Detroit. Why? Did he do it because the evidence against him was overwhelming? Because he didn’t think he could escape? of course not, he’s guilty, he’s proud of it. That’s why he wanted to plead guilty. So that he could give this speech that he gave about why he hates America.

“And as we should be, we continue to be concerned about the war on terrorism. Keep in mind the perfect storm that the terrorists who willingly committed suicide on 9/11 could have caused a lot more damage if they had nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. That is their aspiration. They’ve been after it for some time. An Iran with nuclear weapons, the principal banker for international terrorism, a Pakistan that falls under radical control with its existing arsenal of nuclear weapons, all raise the level of threat to the United States in unacceptable ways. And we fail to pay attention to this, we fail to discuss this threat in our national discourse, at our peril.

           China and Russia Pose Concerns

“As I say, the long version of the speech would talk about issues like how to deal with a rising China, where it threatens to exclude American naval forces from international waters near the coast of China and has been making outrageous territorial claims against their neighbors, something that if our military budget continues along its current course we actually won’t have to worry about, because we won’t have enough ships to sail in international waters near China’s coast.

“What [will] we do with a resurgent Russia as Vladimir Putin comes back next year to reassume the presidency? Vladimir Putin said a few years ago that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century. Now, I think most of us would say the collapse of the Soviet Union was a great way to end the 20th century. That’s obviously not Putin’s view. That’s not the policy his government has been pursuing. It is not the policy he will pursue once he takes power again.

           Must Maintain Strength

“All of which says, I think, in very dramatic terms, that the view that unfortunately too many in America too many in our government have, that what causes danger for the United States in the world is American preeminence. That it is America’s position that sets others against us, that if only we move more into ourselves, if only we weren’t so intent on protecting our interests around the world the threats and the dangers that we face will recede. This is 180 degrees the opposite of the truth.

“Ladies and gentlemen, it is not American strength that is provocative. It is weakness that is provocative, because it encourages our adversaries to try and take advantage of that perception of weakness.

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