Rep. DeLay Condemns Clinton-Gore’s Abandonment of a ‘Principled U.S. Foreign Policy,’ Shows How to Resurrect It

(Washington, D.C.): Against the backdrop of a “disastrous” Clinton-Gore security policy legacy that will “take 20-30 years to reverse,” one of the most influential members of the U.S. House of Representatives, Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-TX) delivered an address today that not only provides a compelling indictment of the past eight years. It also represents a visionary road-map for restoring American power and prestige internationally by rooting U.S. foreign and defense policy once again in the Nation’s founding values and the Reagan philosophy of “peace through strength.”

Two Chinas, One Tyranny

A centerpiece of Rep. DeLay’s remarks (excerpts of which are attached) before the Center for Strategic and International Studies was the growing danger that Clinton-Gore policies of appeasing dictators is likely to lead to conflict. In particular, he illuminated the clear parallels between the current Administration’s insouciance with respect to Communist China’s threat to Taiwan and that of the allies towards Nazi Germany as Hitler threatened and then attacked the small, democratic nation of Czechoslovakia in 1938.

In keeping with a world-view that is at such stark odds with the go-along, get-along attitudes that have dominated American policy towards Beijing and Taipei for most of the period since Nixon’s “opening” to China in 1972, Rep. DeLay argued for some important changes in the U.S. approach to the People’s Republic. Especially laudable was his willingness to break with the long-held view that trade interests with the mainland must take precedence over national security and moral commitments to Taiwan, a practice that has come to be synonymous with the so-called “One China Policy.” DeLay issued the following call:

“We must discard old policies that no longer have credibility because they are no longer true. In my view, whatever utility the “One China” diplomatic fiction might have had twenty-five years ago has been erased by the new reality. There are, in fact, two Chinese states. One, the Republic of China on Taiwan, is free, democratic and a welcome member of the family of nations. The other, the People’s Republic of China, is not free, not democratic and a threat to the security of us all….The United States cannot…under any circumstances allow the People’s Republic of China to impose a communist future on Taiwan.”

The Bottom Line

Rep. DeLay is to be heartily commended for providing a powerful catalyst, not only to an urgently needed national debate about the future of U.S. policy towards China, but concerning the future conduct of America’s defense and foreign affairs more generally. This year’s elections offer a perfect opportunity to offer the voters a choice between Mr. DeLay’s vision of the United States as more than “simply another nation in another era along the timeline of history” and the Clinton-Gore attitude that has held our historic core values in contempt and done so much to compromise them to the advantage of enemies of freedom around the world.