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Our nonprofit operations. | |
| Scan the code or visit cspanshop.org during our Memorial Day sale, going on right now. | ||
| In a nation divided, a rare moment of unity, this fall, C-SPAN presents Ceasefire, where the shouting stops and the conversation begins in a town where partisan fighting prevails. | ||
| One table, two leaders, one goal, to find common ground. | ||
| This fall, ceasefire on the network that doesn't take sides, only on C-SPAN. | ||
| Former U.S. Ambassador to Hungary, David Pressman, and other foreign affairs experts discuss the promotion of democracy abroad by the U.S. | ||
| The panel also touches on how the Trump administration's America first approach to diplomacy has affected allies and adversaries. | ||
| From the McCain Institute, this is about 45 minutes. | ||
| Well, good afternoon. | ||
| It's a real delight and pleasure to be here. | ||
| My name is Ishan Tharoor. | ||
| I'm a global affairs columnist at the Washington Post. | ||
| And at the post, we're honored to partner the McCain Institute here at the Sedona Forum. | ||
| It's my first time here, and I'm just still trying to get my job from the floor at the surroundings. | ||
| Our panel is democracy under pressure. | ||
| I think nobody in this room will be surprised by the conceit. | ||
| We hear about democracies under pressure in the international headlines every day. | ||
| We feel it in the vibes in Washington every day. | ||
| And to a certain extent, you can see it in the qualitative measures that a host of institutions have already put out. | ||
| This year, Freedom House marked 19 consecutive years of decline in freedom around the world. | ||
| The Eurasia, the Economist Intelligence Unit, in its index charted, well, declared that the quality of democracy per its exhaustive metrics is at its lowest point in almost two decades. | ||
| The VDEM Institute, which is another terrific project in Sweden involving political scientists and researchers, in its index annual sort of report on the health of democracy around the world, found that close to three-quarters of humanity lives in societies that it categorizes as autocracies, which per its calculations is the highest proportion since 1978. | ||
| And that for the first time in more than two decades, more of humanity lives in autocracies than democracies. | ||
| Sure, there are some exceptions. | ||
| Despots still fall. | ||
| We saw at the end of last year what happened in Syria and the fall of Bashar al-Assad. | ||
| Not every illiberal faction is bound to win an election. | ||
| But as I just mentioned, the trend lines seem quite deep and reflect a global status quo, perhaps, where autocracies are getting more and more entrenched, and liberal democracy seems to be, in many places around the world, eroding. | ||
| So how do we deal with this? | ||
| And what is the American role now? | ||
| What is the role of U.S. leadership and diplomacy in countering authoritarianism and authoritarian politics around the world, in supporting dissent and dissidents, and really upholding democratic principles around the world? | ||
| And to discuss this, I'm joined by a veritable triple D of pro-democracy warriors over here, David, Dan, and Damon. | ||
| We have, sorry, those really terrible words. | ||
| We have Ambassador David Pressman, who until recently was the U.S.'s top diplomat in Hungary. | ||
| Dan Twining, president of the International Republican Institute. | ||
| And Damon Wilson, CEO and president of the National Endowment for Democracy. | ||
| I think to kick things off, we have to recognize the tremendous domestic political headwinds that we're seeing right now. | ||
| Dan and Damon represent two incredibly significant institutions, Cold War-era institutions that continue incredible work into our current moment, furthering democracies, defending democracies, promoting democracy in various parts of the world. | ||
| But of course, they now face significant political pressures in Washington, major budget cuts that have come down the pike, cuts already experienced through the slashing of programs, USAID and other programs in the State Department. | ||
| So, Damon, and then I'll get to Dan. | ||
| Could you give us a sense of how you and your national, the NED is coping right now with what's happened and how you see the role of an institution like the NED in an America-first era? | ||
| What is the America-first argument for democracy promotion? | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| First of all, it is fantastic to be back here, and not just because of the amazing view which you're right about, but it's because I feel like in the work that we undertake every day, we live in the aura, the spirit, the inspiration of Senator John McCain. | ||
| He lived this, he breathed this, and it is so relevant to what we're dealing with around the world right now that it is soul nourishing for me to be among those who honor that tradition. | ||
| But I think more importantly, the thing I really welcome about Sedona is that I see so many of you out there who are on the front line of this fight. | ||
| Many of you are partners, our friends, our colleagues, to really help connect us to those on the front lines of this battle. | ||
| So, look, the National Endowment for Democracy is America's foundation for freedom. | ||
| And it's a sporty season right now. | ||
| We're having a debate about how our country should engage in the world, whether we should be supporting democracy and freedom. | ||
| And we're at the center of that. | ||
| And the endowment sees this as an opportunity actually to be on offense, not defense, and making the case for explaining what we do and why what we do and have always done has served the interests of the American people fundamentally over the long term. | ||
| And so right now, our defense is offense, laying out a new strategy, a business plan to execute it, and building out the political support that's required to ensure that the American people at the end of the day will still be seen around the world as standing with those who seek freedom and that we preserve the dignity of the fact that that needs to remain a reality. | ||
| And so just to anchor it a little bit, take it back to our founding, and you think about when President Reagan, 42 years ago, it was not exactly a flourishing time of democracy. | ||
| He stood in Westminster in the British Parliament, and at a time when communism was on the march around the world, this the challenge of the Soviets, military juntas everywhere, he said, why do we actually have to sit by ILE and just accept the fact that we live next to tyranny? | ||
| Democracy is not a fragile flower, but we do need to actively take measures to support it. | ||
| And in doing so, this is going to be really good for free societies. | ||
| And he called for fostering that global infrastructure of democracy. | ||
| But it was members of Congress at the time, led by Democrat Dante Fassel, who picked it up and said, yes, we spend a lot of money on military, economic, diplomatic tools to address American security interests. | ||
| Can't we just make a modest investment in helping to allow others to benefit from the fruits of freedom? | ||
| And as they succeed, it'll be really good for American interests. | ||
| And that's what led to the idea of the endowment as separate from government, publicly backed by the U.S. Congress and the American taxpayer, but set up to be independent so that it could pursue long-term American interests over time, so that the U.S. government could have a relationship with Pinochet, with Marcos, with the apartheid government in South Africa, with communists in the Eastern Bloc. | ||
| But at the same time, the American people were seen working with Chileans, South Africans, those in Poland, those in the Philippines that were working for democratic change. | ||
| And when that day came, they didn't resent American support of their dictators. | ||
| They understood it was Americans who stood by their side in their darkest time. | ||
| And our relationship got better and stronger, benefiting America. | ||
| So if you bring this to today, first of all, right now we're working. | ||
| We had a little bit of a thing that some of you might know about where somehow our access to our congressional funds just stopped. | ||
| Nobody said anything. | ||
| Just stopped. | ||
| Go to the ATM, nothing comes out. | ||
| As an institution that gives out money, that was a little bit of a problem. | ||
| We spent a lot of time working this with allies in Capitol Hill and the administration, and there are a lot of allies in Capitol Hill and the administration. | ||
| And no one could really solve it. | ||
| So we had to take some measures to really push back and get that unblocked legally. | ||
| And so now where we are is a political fair fight. | ||
| Administration sent a budget to a draft budget to the Hill today that proposes to eliminate funding for the endowment. | ||
| It's not even about the endowment. | ||
| It's about whether the United States will do anything to support freedom and democracy around the world. | ||
| And so that's a conversation where we're engaging deeply. | ||
| And I believe firmly that there is deep support among most people that believe, yes, when someone's in trouble, the people you're going to hear speaking here over Sedona Forum, shouldn't we provide them moral support and just a little bit of material support at times? | ||
| So let me close by coming back to why is this an America first agenda? | ||
| I just came back from Dallas last week where I was with President Bush, who did a comparable sort of gathering of many of his colleagues at a forum of leadership. | ||
| I worked in the Bush White House, was proud to be part of the articulation of our freedom agenda. | ||
| And the conversation was sort of, wait a second, from President Reagan to what we were doing, this was an American First agenda. | ||
| This is not about just charity. | ||
| By fueling liberty, we're doing what we can do to help America. | ||
| And the way we sort of thought about this, first of all, it's built into our founding, the NET Act. | ||
| It's built so that what we do has to be in the long-term interests of the United States. | ||
| It's subject to congressional oversight and scrutiny. | ||
| Are we delivering on support for democracy only in a way that benefits America? | ||
| And if you think about our adversaries, the best way to deal with them is not to put that burden on the American people, but to put that burden on David Vladimir of Genya, to put it on you. | ||
| You know how to exploit the vulnerabilities of your tyrants. | ||
| All we need to do is support their people. | ||
| That's how we can think about making America stronger by supporting people to do this and help exploit their vulnerabilities. | ||
| But if you think about it even more, brass tax, 82% of conflicts around the world come out of dictatorships, 90% of refugee flows, 75% of organized crime, transnational trafficking from autocratic regimes, not to mention sources of terrorism. | ||
| When freedom flourishes, that is really not only the right thing for us to do, it's a really good thing for our interests. | ||
| And so it keeps us from having to do the hard work with our military with expensive attributes. | ||
| What we do on a case-by-case basis with small investments, expose how narco-traffickers have infiltrated government agencies in Colombia and Ecuador, and let people hold them to account, get prosecutions, U.S. sanctions, to support Venezuelans that document the criminal state of Maduro, to show in specificity its relationship with Hezbollah, the gold smuggling, the drug trafficking, to show that this is not a dictatorship. | ||
| This is a mafia running Venezuela that informs U.S. sanctions policy. | ||
| That we help those expose the fact that Cuba set up, Nicaragua set up a regime with Cuba to provide visa-free travel that allowed for a flooding of Cubans to come across the southern border. | ||
| And we support with a very modest grant, the organization that exposes that. | ||
| The support we gave for entities inside Syria that first documented that Assad's war effort was fueled by the sale of Captagon drugs that came to the world because of what the endowment did. | ||
| The exposure of Colombo Port City that was taken over by the Chinese, unpacked and documented by modest support that we provided to a partner to show that. | ||
| I'll close with this because you can get lost in the esoterics. | ||
| Is this woke? | ||
| Is it social? | ||
| Is it ideological agendas? | ||
| Is it intervening? | ||
| It's really not doing that much but saying who has the energy out there? | ||
| Who has the initiative? | ||
| Who's trying to solve problems in their own society? | ||
| Maybe we should just give them a little bit of a lift, let them do the hard work. | ||
| That'll serve us well. | ||
| And so the reason the world today, the reason we know of Masa Amini, is because of Ned partners that took a story that could have been lost and got it out to the world. | ||
| The reason we know of a genocide against Uyghurs is because we didn't sit back and just let the Chinese say these are Muslim terrorists of our own. | ||
| We worked with that community over two decades to help document, help them change the narrative and get that story out. | ||
| This is the kind of work that actually at the end of the day protects American firms, American workers by not being undercut by forced labor and by those that don't have a level playing field. | ||
| This is a very strong America First agenda, but in an enlightened self-interest of America's interests. | ||
| And it's something that if you see we're going to take our defense budget to a trillion dollars, I'm a security hawk, a defense hawk. | ||
| I believe in strong defense. | ||
| We're looking for a little bit, a modest investment like an insurance policy that will help us ensure that we don't have to deploy that military into some of these tough spots. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| As you just said, what we're talking about is a rounding error compared to other major federal outlays, especially on defense. | ||
| Yet the current political dispensation in Washington is taking a machete to a lot of these institutions and programs. | ||
| Dan, could you pick up from where Damon left off? | ||
| You know, the work that he itemized sounds like incredibly vital, important, unique. | ||
| It communicates American values. | ||
| It does a lot of good. | ||
| Yet we're faced by a dispensation that doesn't see that and doesn't appreciate it. | ||
| Today I just discovered that almost all the staff of Radio Free Asia have been laid off, which is a vital journalistic enterprise funded by the United States. | ||
| How do we recover from this? | ||
| And what's the case that you and your work are making to Folks on the Hill, folks in Washington, about perhaps the overreach or the over the missteps here in the cuts that we're seeing. | ||
| Thanks, Hashan. | ||
| I'm so happy to be here with all of you, Cindy McCain, the family, Rick Evelyn. | ||
| I was reflecting on the fact that it was 30 years ago this month that I started working for John McCain as a young Senate staff aide, which I think means I may need to be cashiered at some stage. | ||
| Incredible. | ||
| So I'll just pick up where Damon left off. | ||
| A couple things, Hashon. | ||
| One is America's adversaries are celebrating some of these cuts. | ||
| The Cubans, the Chinese, the Russians have never been able to take us off the field when it comes to democracy work, when it comes to broadcasting. | ||
| This would be good for them if it succeeds. | ||
| They have publicly celebrated these cuts. | ||
| Second, that's not to be said that there weren't useful cuts to be made. | ||
| I mean, I dealt with USAID, 50% of our funding. | ||
| It was a big bureaucracy. | ||
| I wasn't convinced that much of the money was going to the right places. | ||
| Here's the thing about investing in democracy and democratic institutions. | ||
| It's small money compared to so many other things we invest in, including in the world, you know, medical, humanitarian, disaster relief. | ||
| Countries that can govern themselves well and justly don't require U.S. foreign assistance. | ||
| They are responsive to their citizens. | ||
| They are net aid exporters, even if they're poor, like India, right? | ||
| Countries that can govern themselves decently and justly solve a lot of problems for America. | ||
| They do not export mass migration uncontrolled to our shores. | ||
| They do not germinate the kind of violent extremism that hit home very directly. | ||
| I was with Senator McCain in the capital on 9-11. | ||
| There was a plane coming for us. | ||
| That happened because we were not thinking about governance and freedom in the Middle East. | ||
| Democracies do not invade and try to swallow their neighbors, right? | ||
| Ukraine has not invaded and tried to swallow Russia. | ||
| It's just the opposite because Putin is a predator who can only shore up his domestic rule by coming up with enemies abroad. | ||
| I would like to challenge you, Ashan, on one thing, which is this idea that somehow the bad guys are winning. | ||
| I mean, we don't want them to win. | ||
| It's become much harder to be a dictator. | ||
| In fact, Russia is more oppressive than it was 10 years ago. | ||
| China is more oppressive than it was 10 years ago. | ||
| Iran is more repressive than it was 10 years ago. | ||
| Venezuela is more repressive than it was 10 years ago. | ||
| North Korea, you'll hear from some of the champions from these countries here. | ||
| It's actually harder to be a dictator. | ||
| So what are dictators doing? | ||
| They're working together in unprecedented and quite ingenious ways. | ||
| Russia, we know, couldn't have sustained its war effort for three plus years without the support of North Korea, Iran, and very directly China. | ||
| That's true when it comes to propping up Maduro in Venezuela, who lost an election. | ||
| That's true when it comes to the dictator in Belarus. | ||
| These countries, the idea that somehow we're the ones meddling or interfering in other countries' politics, it's just the opposite. | ||
| Citizens all over the world in autocracies are demanding change at the ballot box when they can or in the streets and in other ways when they don't have that opportunity. | ||
| And the countries that are intervening and meddling to keep them oppressed and repressed and poor and living in fear are America's authoritarian adversaries. | ||
| So the Make America case again, Make America Great Again case for this work is, look, I was at the Republican Convention, peace through strength. | ||
| I think that idea is mentioned 16 times in the Republican Party platform, which President Trump read and edited and approved. | ||
| He read it three times, I'm told, by the author of the national security piece, which was Mike Waltz. | ||
| Peace through strength. | ||
| Guess how do you get peace? | ||
| You invest in societies that don't want to swallow their neighbors, export refugees, export nuclear weapons or drugs or other things. | ||
| How do we project strength by being quite confident about our values? | ||
| It also just actually saves a lot of money. | ||
| When he was Secretary of Defense, Jim Mattis came to the IRI Freedom Dinner. | ||
| I think this was one that Jimmy McCain was at. | ||
| And Secretary Mattis then said, Look, where IRI succeeds, my Marines don't need to fight. | ||
| Right? | ||
| That was a value. | ||
| There's a value proposition there, and we need to get back to that. | ||
| David, Dan mentioned countries that solve problems. | ||
| Let's talk about a country that creates some problems. | ||
| You know, it's input to me that Hungary is the world's most relevant, irrelevant country. | ||
| Apologies to any Hungarians in the room. | ||
| I think it's better to be relevant, irrelevant than irrelevant, relevant, but that's another conversation. | ||
| This is a country with a middling economy, declining population. | ||
| It's one of 27 member states in the EU. | ||
| Yet, as you've come from a very eventful set of years as the U.S. ambassador in Budapest, where you've witnessed, I think in your own words, a kind of petri dish of illiberalism. | ||
| Could you talk a bit about why Hungary and what you've seen in Hungary and what's happened under Prime Minister Viktor Orban is important and the kind of broader lessons that we can draw from his success there. | ||
| And of course, the fact that we have a huge support or interest in Orban's success among some elements of the American right right now. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Let me just start, if I could, by reflecting upon my co-panelists' remarks, who I have enormous respect for. | ||
| What I heard articulated is not an America-first policy. | ||
| Supporting democracy and supporting the desire of human beings around the world to live freely and with dignity is an American policy. | ||
| And it worries me when we have to couch and explain America's support for democracy and fundamental values through the language of counter-proliferation or anti-narcotics work or law enforcement. | ||
| Those things are certainly important, but I think in this environment particularly, in meeting in a place where someone I admire so much has convened this forum, Senator McCain and Ambassador McCain and the McCain Institute, to remember that there are values that are transcendent, that are American, that are important, and that we need to remain committed to. | ||
| In addition, with respect to Victor Orban and Hungary, I would say, you know, let me just take the, if you go back to 2022, when I arrived in Hungary as the U.S. ambassador, there were a couple of headlines on the newspaper, sort of banner tabs on the newspaper. | ||
| One was me, it said Pressman, and you could click on it, and by the end of my tenure, you could see 10,000 articles that were not particularly flattering. | ||
| The other, though, was something called rolling dollars and sort of a weird English translation, but this is 2022. | ||
| And the narrative being propagated by Viktor Orban's government was that there was this vast conspiracy of development dollars going in through these nebulous channels, committed to creating a color revolution, to overthrowing the Hungarian government. | ||
| And if you look at what's happened in this country now with the rhetoric around USAID and other things, you see an incorporation, an ingestion in some ways, of that conspiracy, of this idea that there are rolling dollars, that in fact, AID funding or the work of IRI or its partner NDI or MED in that case is not promoting independent values, but is somehow an opposition force. | ||
| And this is one point I want to make about Victor Orban's Hungary, which is important, is there is nothing Prime Minister Orban, and I would say authoritarian leaders like him that they detest more than the idea of independence. | ||
| You are either with them or you are opposition. | ||
| There is no such thing as independent media. | ||
| There is only regime media and opposition media. | ||
| There is no such thing as independent values. | ||
| The work of NDI, IRI, and NED is supporting independent values, democratic institutions, democratic principles. | ||
| It's not a partisan player, but there's no such thing as independence in the eyes of a government like Viktor Orman has led. | ||
| And when you're in that space, and it transcends, by the way, and I would just add, it's using and may have some resonance with respect to other experiences, including at home in the United States. | ||
| It's using all elements of state power to assert control over all aspects of public life, not just government life. | ||
| So from churches, I'll give you an example. | ||
| There's a Protestant church in Hungary that's run by, until actually recently, run by a cabinet minister of Viktor Orban's government, a former cabinet minister, until ironically, he was actually removed from office due to his involvement in an actual pedophilia scandal. | ||
| But nonetheless, that church received tens of, my last year in office in Hungary received tens of millions of dollars of public land, flooded with public resources. | ||
| Another church, the Methodist church, led by a pastor who at one point married Viktor Orban and his wife, Christianed his children, but began to raise questions about creeping authoritarianism in Hungary. | ||
| And that church saw the use of state authorities to deregister the church so it could no longer even be considered a church for the purposes of receiving public benefits. | ||
| So it's the utilization of state power, state authorities across all levels to go after any semblance of independence, whether it's in the media, in the church, or in democratic institutions. | ||
| And I think we begin to see that being replicated in a variety of spaces in the world. | ||
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And I think we must pay very close attention. | |
| There's a lot I'd love to discuss more with you. | ||
| Ambassador Pressman had a very interesting, that's probably too euphemistic a term. | ||
| I found it interesting. | ||
| Tenure. | ||
| But could you talk a little bit, and then I'll turn to Dan and Damon. | ||
| One of, you know, Orban has really pioneered, at least especially in Europe, a particular brand of the culture war. | ||
| That resonates quite clearly here in this country as well, or is echoed here in various ways. | ||
| His gripes with a kind of liberal establishment, whether it's in Brussels or other capitals in Europe, his gripes with women, gender theory and LGBT rights. | ||
| And that plays quite well to a particular nationalist base. | ||
| And it also finds its echo in right-wing movements elsewhere, in the propagation of conspiracy theory, the conspiracy theories that you're talking about, in terms of, you know, and you're somebody, and forgive me to make it a slightly identitarian question, but you're somebody from the LGBT community. | ||
| What was it like being an ambassador in that environment where you were such a direct, where you became such a personal target of the Hungarian government? | ||
| I certainly was, but the reason why I was a target was not because I come from the LGBT community. | ||
| It's because I spoke up very clearly on behalf of American values and refused to be silent. | ||
| And the LGBT thing was a convenient vehicle through which to channel a lot of these attacks. | ||
| And I think one thing that's really important, and it goes to the first part of your question, is that this discussion of wokeism that Prime Minister Orbán and governments like his are very focused on, they want to be talking about transgender ideology and migration, migration actually being a fantastic example. | ||
| In the United States of America, we had a migration crisis, and I think it led to the result of the last election in part. | ||
| In Hungary, Victor Orban talks about migration all the time. | ||
| There is no migration in Hungary. | ||
| The only migration in Hungary are people leaving. | ||
| Truly, it's really, I go to the countryside and I spend as much time as I possibly could in the countryside in Hungary talking to people. | ||
| And the number of times I sat down with Hungarian grandmothers who were telling me, I'm so sad that my children, they're leaving Hungary to go pursue life outside of Hungary because it's simply impossible to actually survive and make a living in Hungary. | ||
| Victor Orban speaks about wokeism and wokeist issues and all these things, but what he's done is he's created a country that is the poorest, if not the second poorest country in all of Europe. | ||
| It is the number one ranked country, the number one most corrupt country in the European Union, year after year. | ||
| And so it's convenient to be speaking about gender and migration, which doesn't exist, when you have these fundamental problems at home. | ||
| And it does a real disservice to Hungarians and indeed our relationship with the country to be distracted by what is a political ad. | ||
| I mean, one other point I would just make, which is sort of interesting. | ||
| There is no country in Europe in the last European elections, literally not a single country across the 27 members of the European Union that spent more money than FIDES, Victor Orban's party, on social media political advertising. | ||
| I mean, Hungary, to your point, is a country of less than 10 million people. | ||
| No political party spent more money on social media advertising than FIDES in the last European parliamentary election. | ||
| And on top of that, it wasn't the only political spender in Hungary. | ||
| There were other state-aligned media outlets that were buying political advertising. | ||
| So there is a messaging campaign. | ||
| But let me tell you, if you look at the fundamentals of Hungary's economy, Hungarians are in distress. | ||
| They need help. | ||
| The economy is suffering. | ||
| And so I hear the conversation about the culture wars, but that's not what actually is affecting people's lives. | ||
| Damon, I'd love to get your thoughts along that. | ||
| You know, President Biden came into his term very clearly framing the kind of global struggle as one between democracies and autocracies. | ||
| That frame kind of got a bit blurrier over the course of his presidency. | ||
| And now we have a context where the vice president goes to Munich and rather than pronouncing upon authoritarian adversaries elsewhere, seemed much more invested in discussing the war within, the kind of domestic threats that Western democracies that in his mind face. | ||
| The culture war was paramount in his articulation of it. | ||
| How do you deal with that, with that kind of politics, when you are making the case for democracy and the expansion of freedom around the world? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Maybe three things. | ||
| And first of all, I always felt that the framing of autocracies versus democracies missed the mark on understanding the strength of allies that we have globally. | ||
| And if you rephrase it to think about people and those that aspire for freedom and they're our allies, how you have small D Democrats and how we want to build a sense of support with those who aspire to live in freedom, it gives us billions and allies rather than racking and stacking and thinking about just because it's a dictatorship, it's over here. | ||
| We need to be thinking about the people in that dictatorship who are our friends. | ||
| I often say at the endowment that we are the best friends of the Chinese people, the Russian people, even though we're portrayed as being a challenger to a regime. | ||
| Second, yeah, there's a we've heard about the culture wars, we saw the vice president's speech. | ||
| I sort of think about this in open societies, and if you have any sense of American history, you understand the challenges that we've had in bending the arc towards justice and pursuing the fundamental values that are articulated in our founding, how far it's taken. | ||
| And the thing that is beautiful about freedom and about democratic systems that enable freedom is that they have a built-in self-correcting mechanism, which means as people get frustrated, their reactions, whether it's through the ballot box or whether it's through social movements, which begin to change how people think about things, lead to self-correcting over time. | ||
| We've never needed really outsiders to tell the American people about the failings of the American people. | ||
| We'll document it, we'll write about it, we'll do videos, we'll protest. | ||
| And sometimes you'll see that those issues actually do not succeed at the ballot box in one election cycle, but they begin to shift the whole way society might see an issue so that some of these issues become not controversial at all after a couple of cycles. | ||
| So that's part of: do you have the oxygen? | ||
| Do you have the space in your society to have these debates in a civil way, to have them out, to figure out how to correct, to address, to respond to those as societies? | ||
| So when it comes back to the work that we need to do, we need to be able to pursue the sense of long-term American interests and greater free societies around the world, understanding that that works. | ||
| But it's really quite complementary. | ||
| Whether you're Biden or Trump or Obama, you want a strategic partnership with Vietnam. | ||
| You want a strong alliance with the Philippines, with our ally Thailand. | ||
| You think about these three countries, they all might fit into how we're thinking about a challenge in China and other things. | ||
| You've got a populist, complicated politics in the Philippines. | ||
| You've got a monarchy in Thailand that likes to put the military in charge when it's uncomfortable with its democratic opening. | ||
| And you've got an outright communist dictatorship in Vietnam that continues to imprison and repress even the slightest of dissent. | ||
| And each one of these societies, the work that we support of partners, is really helping them think about helping them move and change their own societies over time in a way that I would argue is going to make their relationship with the United States stronger and more durable. | ||
| How deep can our strategic partnership go with an outright communist dictatorship that represses every element of dissent? | ||
| We can get a lot done, but as that begins to open and change and evolve, is there a virtuous cycle of evolution? | ||
| And so that's how I see the fact of what we do isn't about the news cycle today. | ||
| It's not about the political cycle today. | ||
| As the Biden administration struggled with what to do in Burma, we were deep in support for the people of the region. | ||
| As a previous Trump administration blocked all aid to Central America, we stood by support for those who have a reason to stay in their societies. | ||
| We have a long-term consistency of approach that does have to stand scrutiny in the U.S. Congress and have a broader appeal across a bipartisan basis to make sure that there's enough support for how we interpret this way of thinking about support for freedom. | ||
| And I think that's how we think about navigating this with a true North Star of what it means to pursue democracy and freedom around the world in a way that stays focused on the most critical democratic issues and societies without getting involved in our domestic and ideological issues or others and trying to navigate that. | ||
| It's not always easy, but it is doable. | ||
| But I guess I can turn to Dan on this. | ||
| Is this space shrinking a little bit? | ||
| Because successive administrations have discussed how the watchwords at the moment are great power competition. | ||
| Dan, you were just in India. | ||
| In India, everyone loves to talk about how the multipolar age has arrived. | ||
| There are others who kind of think about the world now more as a kind of concert of powers or an emerging kind of concert of powers. | ||
| In all these formulations, there seems to be less space to talk about universal values, about certain democratic ideals, about the work and idealism that comes with the projects that both you and Damon represent. | ||
| So, how do you see it? | ||
| And how do you see the space for the work you want to do? | ||
| Forget about the domestic pressures you're facing, but even facing outward, the capacity, the extent to which the work you're doing is received, and the extent to which America should be in the driver's seat here when it comes to this work. | ||
| Good question. | ||
| You very much know that. | ||
| Before your answer, I want to give a little bit of time for questions. | ||
| So, start populating the room with hands so I can have a look. | ||
| You have a little bit of time left. | ||
| Sorry, Dan. | ||
| So, I actually don't think American taxpayers should fund idealism. | ||
| I think this is the truest form of realism. | ||
| The fact is that fear of their own people is America's authoritarian adversary's greatest Achilles heel. | ||
| If we were to retract our support for freedom and human dignity, that would give the advantage to our actual adversaries, the ones that the Trump National Security Strategy and the First Administration fingered by name. | ||
| So, what's unrealistic is the proposition that somehow we should only compete via hard power. | ||
| If you take the soft power toolkit off the table, that is what you end up doing, having to use hard power. | ||
| The way not to use, not to have to use hard power and risk American lives and treasure is to make these modest investments, not in some kind of projection of America into the world, but in the proposition that investing in kind of a bottom-up organic process that speaks not to the transactional, | ||
| but to the very human quality of wanting to be free, not wanting to be governed by corrupt crooks who are unresponsive and unaccountable to you, wanting not to worry about the fact that if we get together in a cafe and talk about our politicians, someone's going to knock on the door in the night and take us away or threaten our families. | ||
| We don't want to live in that world. | ||
| America's best allies militarily are the democracies. | ||
| Our best trade and investment partners are the democracies. | ||
| This is a return that continues to pay a dividend. | ||
| This is an investment that has yielded so much fruit. | ||
| Think of the difference between China and Taiwan, or Germany, East Germany, and West Germany, or South Korea and North Korea. | ||
| Who would you like to have on our side, right? | ||
| Now, America has never been idealistic or messianic. | ||
| Taiwan and South Korea and the Philippines and many other allies were actually dictators, dictatorships when we forged these strategic alliances. | ||
| Their engagement with the United States, their own economic development, produced prosperous middle classes who decided they wanted more. | ||
| They wanted the universal rights and freedoms to speak and contest and have politicians who actually answer to them and work for them. | ||
| This is a long-term proposition. | ||
| It is fundamentally realist. | ||
| And I think we could argue the case all day. | ||
| By the way, last point. | ||
| I was sanctioned by the Chinese Communist Party alongside Tom Cotton and Marco Rubio. | ||
| I'm very proud. | ||
| I was up on Fox News, like our mug shots together. | ||
| Why would they be afraid of me? | ||
| Because of this idea that we collectively stand for in this room, which is this idea that people actually do have a right to hold their leaders accountable. | ||
| It's fundamentally deeply threatening to America's adversaries. | ||
| and we should stop letting them play offense, and we should play a little offense. | ||
| I don't see any hands in the audience, so. | ||
| Oh, there's one there. | ||
| You can just quickly wait for a mic to get to you and please quickly identify yourself. | ||
| And we'll take you from there. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| Hi, thank you. | ||
| My name's John Decker. | ||
| I am the White House correspondent for Great Television. | ||
| Thank you to each of our panelists for the work that you've done on behalf of our country. | ||
| My question has to do with NATO, the two most recent entrants into NATO, Sweden and Finland, the obstacle to these countries being a part of the NATO Defense Alliance, Hungary and Turkey. | ||
| Why should Hungary, in your view, and Turkey continue to be members of NATO? | ||
| That's my question. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| David? | ||
| Well, you raise a challenging question to answer because, no, because look, the Washington Treaty is an alliance of democracies. | ||
| And Hungary's strategic value to the alliance is that it is or was a democracy. | ||
| Hungary's military is the size of the New York City Police Department. | ||
| So when you have a member of the alliance who is prepared, as this government in Hungary has demonstrated its preparedness to do, to leverage its membership in the alliance to secure, including in the context of the entrance cases of Sweden and Finland, to secure personalized financial benefits and other rewards for the government at the expense of the security of the United States of America and transatlantic security, that's a real problem and raises fundamental questions. | ||
| And I'll tell you, when I went to Washington when I was ambassador and I spoke with members of Congress on a routine basis, Republicans and Democrats, one of the first questions they asked me is the same question that you posed here today. | ||
| In the few minutes we have left, I'd love to just get a quick response from all three of you. | ||
| Given the gloominess of some of our discussion, certainly the way I framed it in the beginning, what gives you hope for some of this pressure on democracy being alleviated? | ||
| What do you look for and what are you expecting or what are you hoping for in the months to come when we talk about the kind of global atmospheric pressure facing democracy? | ||
| David, do you want to start? | ||
| Oh, I was hoping you were going to start on the other way. | ||
| No, I do have hope. | ||
| I do have hope, though. | ||
| What gives me hope is I believe in America. | ||
| And what gives me hope is I've had the great opportunity to work with many of the people in a variety of countries around the world that these very important institutions support around the world and that are doing brave work on the front lines. | ||
| And they're motivated not by financial interest. | ||
| They're motivated by some fundamental commitment that they have to a value that they have a right to define their own future, their own dignity, and elect their own government. | ||
| And that's something that should connect them with the United States of America, always has. | ||
| And so what gives me hope is that I'm an American. | ||
| I'm fundamentally hopeful. | ||
| I'm optimistic. | ||
| And I believe that this country will find its way to continue to support these issues at home and around the world. | ||
| So I'll say two things, one about America, one about the world. | ||
| One is we've had successive American presidents who have retrenched and retreated from the world, and it has grown much more dangerous, in part as a result of our retrenchment and retreat. | ||
| So let's learn some lessons from that. | ||
| Let's make a new case for why we need to be out there being smart and being strategic and leading. | ||
| That's America. | ||
| The world, I grew up in Africa. | ||
| The median age in Africa, in sub-Saharan Africa, is 19. | ||
| Young people are not going to put up with technologically empowered and connected young people are just not going to put up with corrupt kleptocracy, misgovernance, gross abuse of power, not just in Africa, but broadly around the world. | ||
| Young people are going to demand more. | ||
| The link between prosperity and freedom is so strong, right? | ||
| Taiwan is, people in Taiwan are like five times richer than people in China. | ||
| People in Hong Kong, before China cracked down and took away rule of law and freedom in Hong Kong, were five times richer than people in China. | ||
| These things go directly together. | ||
| And so even if the issue is not this fundamental idealism, these fundamental universal values, even if the issue is just kind of pocketbook, you know, I'm a young guy in a developing country. | ||
| I want a job. | ||
| I want a better future. | ||
| That leads you in the direction of freedom and openness, sound institutions, and a corrupt dictator is never going to get you there. | ||
| What gives me hope goes back to where I think Ambassador President David correctly said at the beginning, it really does come back to fundamental human rights, these fundamental values, these fundamental rights that are so powerful, they burn within people. | ||
| You don't have to ask, it's not about asking for permission. | ||
| It's not about governments. | ||
| If you think about the image of the tank man in Tiananmen, that's not a historic thing. | ||
| You know Vladimir Karamirza. | ||
| You know he went back to Russia to save the dignity of the Russian people to speak out against what he knew was unjust. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| We had lunch the day he flew out of Washington to go back to Europe. | ||
| I'm like, what are you doing? | ||
| And we have seen how he paid a price for it. | ||
| Our Venezuelan colleagues, David, Roberto, we've got Ana. | ||
| Ana's mother will be joining us, Maria Carina Machado. | ||
| It is unbelievable what your mother is doing. | ||
| It's unbelievable the courage she has in Maduros, Venezuela, moving from safe house to safe house, mobilizing people where everybody knows the opposition won this election. | ||
| You're going to hear from Sitlana Sikaneskaya. | ||
| She was a housewife in Belarus teaching English and taking care of her kids and all of a sudden thrust into an election campaign where she actually defeated Lukashenko. | ||
| What gives me hope is that the desire for dignity, what's better for your kids, that sense of freedom, it is so powerful that it doesn't matter what we do. | ||
| It doesn't matter what the United States does, what our government is, what's funded. | ||
| People are going to be out there pushing, struggling. | ||
| So the question for us is when they do that, when they take those risks, do we turn our backs on them and say, good luck, we're not, good luck, we're not interested? | ||
| Or do as people, as private entities, as Americans, say, this feels like the right thing to do, and it happens to be pretty smart for us to do. | ||
| And we're proud. | ||
| We're proud to stand with you. | ||
| That's what gives me hope. | ||
| You cannot stop these people, and you will hear them over the course of this weekend. | ||
| You will never stop them. | ||
| And that's what gives me hope. | ||
| Well, thank you very much. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We're out of time. | |
| I want to thank the McCain Institute for organizing this panel, having me moderate it. | ||
| It's been thrilling to have this discussion. | ||
| I imagine we'll be having this conversation through the rest of today and tomorrow. | ||
| Thank you all again. | ||
| Charles Rangel, former dean of New York's congressional delegation and the first African-American to chair the House Ways and Means Committee, has died. | ||
| He was first elected to Congress in 1970 and spent four decades in the House and was a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus. | ||
| The New York Daily News calls him a trailblazing New York politician, while the New York Times says he was a powerful political force for decades, only relinquishing the chairmanship of the Ways and Means Committee when he was censured for an ethics violation. | ||
| Former Congressman Charlie Rangel, dead at the age of 94. | ||
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