[Page: S11971]
Mr. BENTSEN. Mr. President, President Bush recently came to Texas, and he proclaimed that if there were a Clinton-Gore administration, thousands of defense workers would be laid off. It brought back a lot of memories. It brought back 1988 and the Presidential campaign then.
I can remember Chuck Yeager coming before the defense workers at General Dynamics and telling them, `if you vote for a Dukakis-Bentsen administration, thousands of defense workers, thousands in this plant will be laid off.'
Well, I voted for a Dukakis-Bentsen administration and Chuck Yeager was absolutely right: Thousands of defense workers have been laid off.
I really found President Bush's statement ironic for two reasons.
First, the very day that George Bush arrived in Texas, General Dynamics announced a cut of 5,800 workers at its F-16 fighter aircraft manufacturing facility in Fort Worth--5,800 well-paid, good jobs.
Second, President Bush himself could have saved at least 3,000 of those jobs by reversing an out-of-date policy toward Taiwan.
Mr. President, the cold war's demise and subsequent disintegration of the Soviet Empire have made a substantial reduction in defense expenditures certain. We know that. And cuts in both defense spending and the defense industrial sector of our economy have been underway for some time. But the end of the cold war and the Soviet Union's exit from history also call for a reassessment of our China policy of the last 20 years.
Let us look at that policy. Beginning in 1972, and throughout most of the 1980's, mainland China was rightfully regarded as an essential geostrategic counterweight to expanding Soviet military power. We understood that. China was a checkmate.
The so-called China card, so brilliantly first played by the Nixon administration in the early 1970's, and subsequently reaffirmed by the Carter and Reagan administrations, contributed significantly to the Soviet Union's exhaustion and ultimate extinction. As long as growing Soviet military power threatened both United States and Chinese security, the two countries enjoyed a shared strategic interest in much the same way that the United States and Stalinist Russia did against Hitler in the 1940's.
For the United States, however, the price of this marriage of convenience to Beijing was acceptance of Beijing's demands vis-a-vis Taiwan; namely, that Beijing, and not Taipei, be recognized as the legitimate government of mainland and offshore China, and that the United States eventually end any military relationship with Taiwan, including the sale of armaments. Acceptance of these conditions, expressed in three major United States-Chinese communiques in 1972, 1978, and 1982, cost the United States virtually nothing strategically or commercially. Through the early 1980's, Taiwan remained a politically isolated, economically insignificant country, still ruled dictatorially by the aging leadership of the old Kuomintang.
Mr. President, a policy of coddling Communist China, while treating Taiwan as a pariah, might still make sense if the Soviet Union and its threatening military power were still around. But a world without the Soviet Union is a world in which Communist China's military strategic value to the United States is virtually nil unless we anticipate a rerun of Japanese militarism in East Asia. And we have seen, certainly, no indication of that.
There is no more reason now to accommodate Communist China than there was to continue to accommodate Saddam Hussein's Iraq once the Iran-Iraq war ended in 1988. Indeed, the administration's apparent conviction that we still require Beijing's good graces for one reason or another, and therefore that the United States should say or do nothing that might offend the last Communist empire on Earth, has become a source of embarrassment.
Let us remember, Mr. President, just who this crowd is in Beijing. This is the same crowd that butchered hundreds of prodemocracy students in Tiananmen Square in 1989; that tortures political prisoners; that employs slave labor to manufacture products exported to the United States and that proliferates nuclear and ballistic missile technologies in the Middle East.
Why does the administration welcome communism's demise in Eastern Europe and the old Soviet Union but continue to regard the morally bankrupt Government of Communist China as an indispensable friend?
Let us also recognize, Mr. President, that the Taiwan of today is not the Taiwan of yesteryear. Taiwan has engineered an economic miracle that has transformed that country of only 21 million people into the world's 13th largest trading state, and possessor of $80 billion in foreign exchange reserves. Though Taiwan's population is less than 2 percent that of mainland China, Taiwan has put together a GNP that represents as much as 40 percent of the GNP of mainland China. Politically, Taiwan has also abandoned authoritarianism for democratic institutions, in sharp contrast to Beijing's continuing totalitarianism.
Mr. President, you may well ask what all of this has to do with defense industry jobs back in Texas and the General Dynamics layoffs in Texas. Well, I will tell you. Each year, for the past decade, Taiwan has requested United States permission to buy from 60 to 150 F-16's as a means of modernizing its obsolete tactical fighter force. The request is militarily legitimate. Taiwan's Air Force continues to rely on the now hopelessly outclassed F-5 and F-104 aircraft technologies of the 1960's and this at a time when Communist China is rapidly modernizing its huge air force and they are buying, at bargain-basement prices, such Soviet state-of-the-art combat aircraft as the SU-27 and Mig-31.
Indeed, to those who claim that a sale of F-16's to Taiwan would upset the East Asian military balance, I would simply point out that that balance, if anything, is already being threatened by Communist China's rapacious military modernization and naval expansion into the western Pacific and especially the South China Sea. Even more ludicrous is the notion that Taiwan could or would pose an offensive military threat to China. The disparity in military power between the two countries is so great--consider, for example, China's 5,000 combat aircraft versus Taiwan's less than 500--that would make any Taiwanese military action against China an invitation to suicide. Maybe they have some of the old Kuomingtang warriors still left in Taiwan who dream about restoring themselves on the mainland. But that is a dream and nothing more than that.
But I would say this is the kind of a deal that we should be looking for. This is not the kind of a deal that South Korea was talking about where they wanted to do joint production. This is paying cash. This is helping an imbalance of trade. This is continuing good-paying jobs in this country.
The Taiwanese prefer the F-16 over any other military aircraft. It is a legitimate defensive need in the modernization of their air force.
During all of this time when they have been wanting to modernize, they have deferred it as they have tried to get agreement on the sale to their country by the United States, and get an affirmative answer.
The issue is who is going to modernize the Taiwanese Air Force? We know it is going to be done in a country sitting there with $80 billion in cash in surplus reserves, with an air force that is outnumbered 10 to 1 by their old adversary, but also a country who has listened to us say `Take a hike' each time they have approached us for trying to negotiate that kind of a purchase. So what have they done? They are now negotiating with France, serious negotiations with France.
France is proposing a sale to Taiwan of 120 Mirage 2000-5's valued at up to $7.2 billion. The sale would be part of a much larger Franco-Taiwanese deal involving the sale to Taiwan of French nuclear reactors and high-speed railroad equipment valued at an additional $18 billion.
I cannot help but remember the embargo in the Reagan years put on sales from Russia, which was trying to develop a natural gas pipeline coming to export gas directly from Russia into Europe, and how that embargo hurt Caterpillar because of the prohibition on exporting earth-moving equipment to Europe, to the Germans, and to the Russians. What did they do? They went over and bought that equipment in Japan, and Japan developed economies of scale in the production of that kind of equipment, and took much of that market away from us and have continued to hold it to this day.
I cannot help but remember the embargo on the sale of soybeans to Japan in the Nixon years. What did the Japanese do? They went down to Brazil. They spent over $1.5 billion putting in soybeans, buying land, leasing land, developing land.
Who is our biggest competitor in soybeans today? It is Brazil. We did it to ourselves. And here we are talking about doing it again in the defense industry.
It does not seem to bother the French. They are not concerned about possible retaliation from the Chinese. It seems to me that Paris has shown a lot more political guts than has Washington.
Mr. President, the time has come to place our relations with the aging group of totalitarians in Beijing on a purely pragmatic basis, on a self-interest basis, and to develop a new relationship with the new Taiwan. United States courtship of mainland China is no longer a militarily strategic imperative and in Taiwan major commercial opportunities now beckon us. We must learn to `just say no,' at least once, to Beijing and to `just say yes,' at least once, to Taiwan. What, after all, can Beijing do? Are they going to threaten to terminate its $20 billion-a-year trade surplus with us, they have with this country? Of course, they will not do that.
We still want to get along with Communist China, but on a pragmatic basis. Self-interest governs Beijing's policy toward us, just as it does France's new and intense interest in Taiwan.
I note that the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, which was the Congress' response to the Carter administration's severance of diplomatic recognition of Taiwan, permits the United States to provide Taiwan sufficient arms for its own self-defense. I also note that the United States has already sold hundreds of F-16's to no fewer than 15 countries overseas, including the East Asian States of Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, and South Korea.
Mr. President, a sale of F-16's to Taiwan would threaten nothing other than the administration's outdated and economically penalizing policies toward Communist China and democratic Taiwan.
Mr. President, I yield back the remainder of my time.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. There will now be 30 minutes under the control of the Senator from Idaho [Mr. Symms].
[Page: S11972]
Mr. SYMMS. Mr. President, before I start my remarks this morning, I would like to compliment the chairman of the Finance Committee for what I think is a very important speech. I hope that all of our colleagues will read what he had to say, and I hope that they will read it down at the White House, because he is absolutely correct.
In my view, we would have better relations with the People's Republic of China if we treat our long and trusted allies in the Republic of China as the friends that they are and have been to this country, and out of that will come, as the chairman says, a pragmatic relationship based on trust and respect. And it can do nothing but to encourage our relationship with the People's Republic of China as well as with our friends on Taiwan.
I think he is exactly right. And I hope we do move forward. We should lift that. We should sell those F-16's to our friends in the Republic of China. And, frankly, my advice to them is if we will not do it, they should go buy them from the French.
[Page: S11973]
Mr. BENTSEN. Will the Senator yield?
Mr. SYMMS. I am happy to yield.
Mr. BENTSEN. I thank my good friend for his very generous remarks. I think that is the pragmatic approach. I think that is the self-interest approach and that is what we should pursue particularly in the incredibly imbalanced trade we have.
I say to my friend from Idaho, who has been a good friend and a valued member of the Finance Committee, that he will be sorely missed in his decision to return to his home State.
Mr. SYMMS. I thank my colleague.
(The remarks of Mr. Symms pertaining to the introduction of S. 3159 are located in today's Record under `Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions.')
END
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