John Bolton: Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Welcome to the third day of CPAC, and very glad you’re here. I want to start off with a, with a sad note, but I think it’s important that you know, this morning former secretary of state Alexander Haig died. He was, he was a great patriot, a true public servant. And certainly our, our thoughts and prayers are with his, with his family.

I want to spend some time this morning talking about the current state of play in America’s foreign policy, to describe a little bit about what I think motivates the president, to describe some of his failures to date, and then to talk a little bit about the further dangers that we face going forward, and to look at this in a very, very fundamental way. On January 20, 2009, Barack Obama was not qualified to be President of the United States. Today, today, exactly 13 months later, Barack Obama is still not qualified to be President of the United States.

Now, now with that, with that happy beginning, let’s look at the bases of where the President derives his foreign policy. First is, he doesn’t care that much about foreign and national security policy, it’s not what energizes him when he gets up in the morning. It’s not where he spent his career. It’s not upper most on his mind. That makes him very different from almost every other American President since Franklin Roosevelt, but it’s a fundamental fact. He’d rather talk about restructuring our healthcare system, restructuring our financial system, restructuring our energy system, restruc, well you get the point. He doesn’t really care that much about foreign policy. He addresses foreign policy issues when he has to, but that’s not where his main interest is.

Second, the President does not really see the rest of the world as dangerous or threatening to America. He made that clear during the campaign, he’s made it clear in any number of his actions since then. We no longer have a global war on terror. He told us Iran was a tiny country. I believe he sees the inevitability of American decline as a kind of natural phenomenon, and this combination of views; he doesn’t care that much about national security to begin with, and he doesn’t think that the world is a very threatening place, ties directly into the next characteristic, and that is, the, the, it’s not that he concludes from this that it’s, it’s right to be isolationist, as many others would. Instead he brings to the Presidency a belief in multi-lateralism unequaled since Woodrow Wilson. Listen to what the President said in September at the United Nations: It is my deeply-held belief that in the year 2009, more than any point in human history – aren’t you glad you alive when Barack Obama’s alive? More than any point in human history, the interests of nations and peoples are shared. In an era where our destiny is shared, power is no longer a zero-sum gain. No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation. No world order that elevates one nation or group or people over another will succeed. No balance of power among nations will hold. That’s the President. Now listen to Woodrow Wilson: The interests of all nations are also our own. He advocated in World War I peace without victory. Sounding familiar? President Wilson said, there must be not a balance of power, but a community of power. Not organized rivalries, but an organized common peace founded on the moral force of the public opinion of the world. So this, this fits in with the final defining characteristic of President Obama, he is what I have called the first post-American president.

Now, now let’s be clear, let’s be clear, not un American, not anti-American, post-American. Beyond all that patriotism stuff, and I think it’s, I think it’s clear, because fundamentally the President doesn’t believe in American exceptionalism. Now this is a, this is a subject that itself can go on for a while, but we’ve believed in the exceptionalism of, of America right from the founding. Governor John Winthrop of the Plymouth bay colonies said, we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. Ronald Reagan, in his inimitable way amended that to say that shining city on a hill. Some have called it the new Jerusalem, but we have seen ourselves that way for a long time, and you know what, so have so many foreign analysts, the first, in fact, to use the word exceptional to describe America was none other than a Frenchman. Alexis de Tocqueville, the great analyst in democracy in America said the following: The position of the Americans is therefore quite exceptional, and it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one. Now the President was asked on his first trip to Europe if he believed in American exceptionalism and he gave a classic answer. He said in the first third of his answer yes I believe in American exceptionalism and then in his second third of his answer, second two thirds, he contradicted himself, by saying just as I believe the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks in Greek exceptionalism. Now, you know, there are 192 members of the United Nations, he could have gone on just as, just as the Ecuadorans believe in Ecuadoran exceptionalism,  just as the Borcenofassians believe in Borcenofassian exceptionalism, just as the Papuan New Guineans believe in Papuan New Guinean exceptionalism. Obviously the, the, the real answer that he gives, is that he doesn’t believe in American exceptionalism, and even analysts of the administration favorable to, to the President have made the same, come to the same conclusion.

Evan Thomas, a senior editor of the badly misnamed publication Newsweek describing, describing President Obama’s speech at the 65th anniversary of D-Day, contrasting it with President Regan’s remarks on the 40th anniversary, Evan Thomas said the following: Well we were the good guys in 1984, it felt that way. It hasn’t felt that way in recent years. So Obama’s had really a different task. Reagan was all about America. You bet. Reagan was all about America. Obama, Obama is we are above that now. We’re not just parochial, we’re not just chauvinistic, we’re not just provincial, we stand for something says Evan Thomas. I mean in a way Obama’s standing above the country, above the world. He’s sort of God. He’s gonna bring all the different sides together. Now leaving aside the reference to God, which is a little over the top even for our establishment media, the description of Obama’s view of himself I think is very much on point. As I say, he’s above, you people in this room patriots? Obama’s above all that, okay? Now he is the first president I think to hold these views, but his philosophy represents a pretty deep-seated strain inside the left of the Democratic party. For example back in 1988, George H.W. Bush, accepting the Republican nomination, described his Democratic opponent, Michael Dukakis this way: Said Bush about Dukakis, he sees America as another pleasant country on the UN roll call, somewhere between Albania and Zimbabwe. That, that’s Obama. That’s Obama.

So he doesn’t care very much about national security, he doesn’t see the world as very threatening, and he basically thinks that our international problems can be handled by sweet reason and not by power. Let, let’s look at some of the specific examples of the failure of the Obama administration to date, and let’s be clear, there are a lot of areas where the verdict isn’t in yet, but I do want to focus on some where I think he’s made just absolutely critical mistakes, and let’s start with Iran. We’ve seen over the past 13 months in many respects a continuation of the failed Bush administration policy of believing that we could negotiate Iran out of its nuclear weapons program. In fact our intelligence services told us in 2007 that Iran had actually suspended the weaponization aspects of that program. Just this week the International Atomic Energy Agency issued a report that was more concerned about Iran’s nuclear program that that 197 – that 2007 national intelligence estimate. In fact Iran is well on the way toward nuclear weapons, they’re not gonna be talked out of that program. Sanctions that are being proposed are not gonna be adopted by the UN Security Council. Iran will continue to make progress, just as it continues to be the world’s largest financer of terrorism, and yet the President as recently as the last ten days has said that it’s still open, the possibility is still open to Iran to come back to negotiations. If you’re the regime in Tehran, if you’re Mahmud Ahmadinejad working your way toward a nuclear capacity to fulfill your dream of wiping Israel off the face of the map, what conclusion do you draw from an American president who keeps saying, I want to negotiate with you. The conclusion is, you’ve got no difficulty at all. In the face of this policy, the president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, has been heard to say several times, why is Obama so weak? Now when the president of France criticizes an American president, you, you know we’re in trouble.

Even where the President takes decisions that I think are sensible, as in the case of increasing our troop levels in Afghanistan, and as in recognizing that we need more Pakistani involvement in the struggle against the Taliban, not only to defeat them in Afghanistan but to make sure the Taliban don’t take over Pakistan with its substantial arsenal of nuclear weapons, even when he announces that policy, as he did at West Point, he couples it in the same speech with the, with the promise that he’s gonna begin withdrawing American forces by the summer of 2011, conveniently right at the beginning of the 2012 election cycle. This is another signal, to Al Qaeda, to Taliban, to terrorists around the world, that if you just wait long enough, this administration will run out of patience and find something else to do. Our military is demonstrating and has in the past week in Afghanistan, how to win this war, and the real question, the real question is whether the President’s gonna allow them to do it or whether he’s gonna constrain them.

We face a similar problem in Iraq, where the President seems wedded to a withdrawal timetable rather than to a continuing assessment of the US strategic interests in Iraq, and if people think that you’re gonna withdraw pursuant to a timetable, they’re obviously gonna let you do it and wait until the American forces have withdrawn. These are the signals of weakness that Obama repeatedly sends, that our friends and adversaries alike can see very clearly and, and in terms of the, of examples, let me just conclude with the Middle East peace process, where 13 months of fruitless effort by the administration have actually left the United States in a weaker position in the United States and left Israel more at jeopardy than when we started. You know, when the US expends its political prestige in a negotiating effort and fails, we do not end in the same position that we started. We end in a worse position, because everyone concludes that we’ve made this effort and couldn’t succeed, and that’s exactly what the President did. This is perhaps the best example that I can think of of his completely naïve faith in negotiation for negotiation’s sake. Here’s a little secret: Negotiation is not a policy, it’s a technique, and if you and if you don’t have any substance behind the policy, obviously it’s not gonna succeed and, and the efforts in the Arab-Israeli circumstance I think have complicated America’s national security, not just in the Middle East but around the world.

Now, the President has three years left. I say that very confidently. So, so you can count on these and other problems that we’ve seen in the first term getting steadily worse, but I want to spend a little bit of time here telling you what else I think is gonna happen in the next three years, because as difficult as this first year has been, I think there’s worse ahead. No. 1, the President will announce any day now a new arms control agreement with Russia, that will substantially reduce both our operationally deployed strategic nuclear capabilities and our delivery systems. I think that this is something that will reduce the American to turn around the world; it will trouble our allies, Japan, Europe and others, who depend on the American nuclear umbrella. I think it’s consistent with the President’s unbelievably naïve idea that if we could just get to a world without nuclear weapons, if the US could somehow dispose of its nuclear weapons, why Iran and North Korea would give up their nuclear weapons, it would just, peace would break out all over, and this treaty that he is negotiating is something that we need to draw a line in the sand over in the Senate when he sends it up, and defeat it if we have the chance. Even , even worse, thank you even worse, there are reports that the President in this treaty will agree to limitations on our ability to construct national missile defenses. Now I have to say, one of the things I was proudest of doing in the Bush administration, and one of the things I think will be the, President Bush’s legacy, was getting the United States out of the 1972 anti-ballistic missile treaty so we could build a national missile defense. This treaty will be bad enough on the strategic offense side, I would say this, if there is one word limiting our capability for strategic defense, that and that alone would be a reason to defeat that treaty.

But the President, the President isn’t gonna stop there. Vice President Biden announced this week that the administration will resubmit the comprehensive test ban treaty, which would prevent us from testing the safety and reliability of our existing nuclear weapons, prevent us from testing to develop new nuclear weapons, this treaty was defeated in the Senate during the Clinton administration, the first major treaty defeated since Versailles, where we’ve got a smaller group in the Senate than, than we did then, when we had the majority, but we’ve, we’ve got 41 now and more to come, when that treaty comes to the Senate it should be defeated again. And, and there are more. This is an administration that believes in arms control as if it were an element of theology. We’re gonna see a fissile material cutoff treaty, a treaty on the prevention of the arms race in outer space, efforts to strengthen, how they consider strengthening the nonproliferation treaty and something called innocuously the arms trade treaty, dealing with conventional weapons. The hidden agenda for many groups supporting that treaty has nothing to do with real conventional weapons being shipped internationally, it has to do with the limitation of the prohibition on the private ownership of firearms, and that is something all of us here need to, need to keep our eye on and to watch as it, as it comes forward. And I, I know, I, I’m, I’m an old arms controller, I know that arms control terminology glazes peoples’ eyes over, but I’m telling you, American’s national security rests on a strong nuclear umbrella, it rests on strong defenses, we cannot give in on any of these points.

Second major, second major thing coming from the Obama administration is the continued pursuit of what today is euphemistically called global governance. No more global government, they, they know that sets people off, so they’ve got other phrases they use, but many of these proposals will result in palpable reductions in American sovereignty and need to be resisted, and this is something that we’ll have differences with our friends in Europe, we need to understand that. We, we in this country are sovereign,. we the people, so when you hear, when you hear the media and academics talk about the need to share sovereignty in a complex world, they’re saying you have too much control over your government and, and you need to share some of that with international organizations. I don’t need to say any more on that point, but let me just quote to you, so that it’s clear where this is coming from, from comments made by the new president of Europe, Herman Van Rompuy, the European Union on November 19 when he took office, Europeans take the, the presidency of Europe serious. So I suppose we should but anyway, Herman Van, Herman Van Rompuy said, and listen, this was before Copenhagen, but he said, 2009, remember that epic year that the President talked about? 2009 is also the first year of global governance, with the establishment of the G20 in the middle of the financial crisis; the climate conference in Copenhagen is another step toward the global management of our planet. Now nobody in Europe laughed when their president said that, and, and, and it’s, it’s important when you remember the adulation of one student after a speech the President made on his first European trip, he said in awe in his voice, he sounds like a European. That, that’s where the problem is, we’re gonna see more efforts on climate change, the collapse in Copenhagen has not discouraged the advocates and, you know, this is something that, that we need to be concerned about, whatever you think about the extent of global warming, whatever the extent you think about its man made causes, because the people who support the sorts of state control, state regulation and international taxation that were being talked in Copenhagen, would advocate those same policies whether the problem was global warming, global cooling or the earth’s temperature wasn’t changing at all. This is a statist agenda we have to reject.

The, the, the threats to American sovereignty are gonna come in a variety of other areas as well. I foresee at some point that the President will find a way to once again sign the treaty creating the international criminal court. Secretary of State Clinton said last year that it was, and I quote, a great regret but it is a fact we are not yet a signatory to the Rome statute which created the court. Again in the Bush administration we took the US signature off that treaty, which was a direct threat to American sovereignty. It’s something President Bush cared personally about. We obviously can’t stop the President if he re-signs the treaty, but if he submits it to the Senate, this is another die-in-the-ditch issue for conservatives. That treaty needs to be defeated by the biggest majority that we can make.

The, the President has made it clear he wants to see a lot more of American foreign policy run through the United Nations system, and he also, he also wants to see the US perceived as more engaged internationally. So there are a lot of treaties out there that have withered for a long time. I think at the appropriate moment the administration will make another effort to get them ratified by the Senate; the UN convention on the rights of the child, the convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against the women, the convention on the rights of persons with disabilities. You know there’s a theme here. In, in, in the United States at our federal level and state level, we have dealt with questions of discrimination on the basis of disability and gender and a whole range of issues. We in this room would probably disagree over what the appropriate measures are; there’d be a broader disagreement within the American population as a whole but you know what? As Americans, we are capable of passing our own laws on these subjects. You, you do not have to have a substantive position on these treaties or questions like the death penalty or anything else to say they are not matters for international negotiation. They are matters for democratically elected governments like ours to decide on our own.

And then finally, I, I could go on with a lot of other examples, but finally one that I know is important is the threat of international taxes. Now the, the UN and other international bureaucracies despise the American system, where Congress has to appropriate money to pay our assessments and pay expenses of these organizations, because Congress is so uncooperative, so they have looked for years to find ways to fund the international organizations without having democratically elected representatives make decisions. Prime Minister Brown of the United Kingdom is proposing an international bank tax, the French have proposed taxes on international airline tickets. The whole point is obviously banks and airlines don’t pay taxes, you pay taxes, and you would on bank transactions and, and the purchase of these tickets. It’s to get a way of funding, whether it’s the climate change organizations, the international monetary fund, the UN itself, these various taxes come in complex guises; they’re often hidden. Whenever anybody identifies one of these taxes, it doesn’t matter what the purpose is, it doesn’t matter how grave the situation, once the American people lose the ability to determine where they will be taxed, we have lost the revolution my friends.

So, so let me, let me conclude, you know, many reporters ask the question are we more secure today than we were a year ago. I don’t have any trouble saying we weren’t, but honestly that’s not the right question. The real question is, if President Obama continues the kinds of policies he’s been pursuing so far, the right question is, how secure will we be four, three years from now compared to when he was inaugurated, and that is the most troubling aspect of all. What we need to do is keep up the debate for the next three years, not be distracted by other issues. We need a sustained, unremitting effort until 2012, when we can evaluate our presidential candidates based on their ability to defend our national security, and our message to President Obama in the meantime should be this: We will not let you reduce American sovereignty. We will not let you make America vulnerable. And as the President’s oath of office says, we will prevail over all enemies foreign and domestic. Thank you very much.

 

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