Thank you for asking me to speak to you at this time of serious political turmoil in the United States.

The President has admitted to serious moral indiscretions. The House of Representatives is considering impeachment proceedings. The Senate waits to see whether it will have to sit in judgment of the President’s actions. The public is divided about what punishment should be meted out to a President who has engaged in such despicable and indefensible actions.

Clearly this is a difficult time for the nation domestically. It is also a perilous time for the nation internationally.

Throughout our history, Americans have understood that no matter what is happening in this country’s internal political life, it is in our national interest to present a strong, united front to the world.

That’s true now more than ever. The good news is we are the world’s only remaining superpower. The bad news is, we are the world’s only remaining superpower.

Unless we lead, no one will. The dangers we face are many:

C Financial crises in Russia and Asia;

C Humanitarian disaster in Kosovo;

C Weapons of mass destruction in Iraq;

C Nuclear weapons in North Korea, India, and Pakistan;

C Missile programs in North Korea and Iran;

C Fragile peace in the Middle East;

C And continuing threats from international terrorism.

The risks of not acting are obvious. There is real potential for foreign policy paralysis.

In my view American foreign policy, which has already fallen victim to the antics of the Republicans in the House of Representatives, has been further harmed by this growing domestic crisis.

In the face of major world problems, we cannot be distracted from our task of maintaining America’s security, leadership, and credibility abroad.

As I see it, the problem breaks down into two areas. In some key instances Congress is not doing its job. The need for IMF funding, payment of our UN arrearages, and sanctions flexibility regarding India and Pakistan are just three examples. I will mention others later in my remarks.

In other areas, the President is limited in doing his job by the uncertainty of Congressional support. As President he has the power to act, but he has to ask himself in this political climate whether he will be cut adrift by a Congress that will not back him up.

And foreign leaders, knowing of the President’s difficulties, wonder whether the President can deliver on his commitments.

The two most immediate cases in point are Iraq and Kosovo.

In Kosovo, the Serbian special police and Yugoslav Army continue a terrorist policy that has destroyed more than two hundred villages, driven more than 300,000 ethnic Albanians from their homes, with an estimated 50,000 forced into the forests and mountains. With the onset of winter only weeks away, a humanitarian catastrophe looms. The stability of the entire southern Balkans hangs in the balance.

I believe the United States and its NATO allies should give President Milosevic a date certain to cease military operations. If he fails to do so, then NATO should undertake an air campaign, whose preparations were agreed upon by the Alliance in Portugal last week.

But for the President to be able to act he needs to have the support of the Congress. If that support is not asked for - or given - because of the growing chasm created by the impeachment debate, United States leadership will be forfeited, and the Balkan tragedy will continue.

A similar potential for paralysis exists in the face of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. Iraq’s decision in August to block further UN inspections, and the resignation of UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, have forced both the Administration and Congress to focus on the need for a clear Iraq policy.

Do we rely on the immediate, unilateral use of force to back UN inspections? Or do we rely instead on sanctions and deterrence to contain Iraq?

These are tough choices, but, again, I worry that our ability to make the decisions required to exercise U.S. leadership is being diminished because of the uncertainty of Congressional support for Presidential action.

It is vital that the Administration work with Congress in making that decision, and that Congress deliver bipartisan support once a difficult decision is made.

No matter how we feel about the actions of President Clinton, and the debate over impeachment proceedings in the House, Bill Clinton is still President of the United States.

As President he has constitutional responsibilities to conduct our foreign policy and protect our national security.

Congress shares that constitutional responsibility. It is critical that we rise above our partisan differences, and work with the President to address these problems together.

There are also areas where Congress alone must act, and has not. We have two weeks left in this Congress. To date we have failed to address several critical issues.

In almost every case the Senate has acted in a strong bipartisan manner.

In the House a small group of highly partisan Members have been holding hostage important foreign policy initiatives - taking actions I am confident the large majority of the American people do not support.

I am not exaggerating when I say that the ability of our country to lead requires that we face up to the issues I am about to mention and act before we adjourn.

Embassy funding

First among these issues is consideration of the $1.8 billion emergency embassy security funding legislation to rebuild the destroyed embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and meet urgent security needs of other diplomatic facilities around the world.

The embassy bombings in East Africa were tragic reminders of the long-term war against terrorism.

An example of rank partisanship surfaced when President Clinton acted decisively and retaliated against Bin Laden and the other terrorists who killed so many innocent people. Rather than get the facts, the specter was immediately raised as to whether the President’s action was like that in the Wag the Dog movie .

We need to pass this emergency legislation before we adjourn. I am confident we will, but with this group I am never certain. The House may try to tie it to other unrelated domestic legislation to give them partisan advantage on some unrelated issue.

IMF Funding

A second critical issue is funding for the International Monetary Fund.

America’s own economic security depends on the ability to provide strong international leadership at this critical time for the international economy.

Other nations understand our system and understand that our leadership can only come from the President acting with the full support of Congress.

The Asian financial crisis has sent shock waves as far as Russia and Latin America. It is the only serious storm cloud on the horizon for the American economy. It requires decisive action.

The President requested $3.5 billion for IMF emergency reserves in February of 1997 and the additional $14.5 billion to replenish the United States share of our quota in February of 1998.

It is shameful that the House of Representatives has prevented Congress as a whole from acting in support of the President’s request to replenish the IMF.

To protect our economy and to keep the crisis from spreading, Congress must act now in the next few days on these emergency reserves and to replenish our share of the IMF’s resources, which have reached dangerously low levels.

It is clear there has been plenty of time to act.

Why didn’t the House act? Now the response is the IMF needs to be reformed. We all agree to that and the Senate bill has significant reforms. That is not the issue.

The House is using the IMF as a domestic bargaining chip.

Time may have run out on the IMF’s ability to help in the current Russian crises, but an immediate funding of the IMF is critical to addressing this economic crisis as it spreads to Latin America and our own economy.

Now is not the time for the United States to walk away from its commitment to the IMF and our country’s leadership in addressing this international economic crises.

CWC

Chemical weapons, among the world’s oldest weapons of mass destruction, are truly horrific - as we learned when Iraq’s Saddam Hussein gassed whole villages of his own people. Partly in response to Saddam Hussein, the world moved to adopt the Chemical Weapons Convention which outlaws chemical weapons and allows unprecedented on-site inspections to verify compliance with that treaty.

After a vigorous debate in the Senate, which I was proud to lead, there was a strong bipartisan vote of 74 to 26 to ratify the treaty. On May 23, 1997, the Senate unanimously passed bi-partisan legislation necessary to implement the treaty.

But the Chemical Weapons Convention is in limbo, and the United States, a leader in its creation, stands today in violation. Why?

Because House Republicans failed to act on the Senate’s implementation legislation for six months, finally choosing to attach it to unrelated legislation to sanction Russia for allowing missile technology to be transferred to Iran.

This was done knowing the President would veto the Russian sanctions legislation. The President did veto the bill, and was correct in doing so, to preserve his flexibility in negotiating a wide range of issues with the Russians at a time of economic and political upheaval in Russia.

That was an unwise and unnecessary political confrontation with the President, which also put implementation of the Chemical Weapons Convention at great risk.

The House could pass the CWC implementation bill whenever the Speaker wants. If it does not do so in the next two weeks, we will continue to be in violation of the treaty and be unable to demand compliance by others.

It is time people like yourselves called on the House of Representatives to step forward and put the national interest above petty partisan political considerations.

Let me reiterate, for the first time in my 25 years in the Senate an extreme action by a minority of the majority Republican party in the House is dealing with serious foreign policy issues as if they were fighting over Congressional reapportionment.

Foreign policy in the past has never been used as a bargaining chip for highly charged domestic social issues. This is an outrageous way to behave and must come to an end. Our security depends on it.

India/Pakistan

In the wake of the India and Pakistan nuclear tests, the President was forced by existing sanctions law to impose sweeping economic penalties against these countries, even though this made resolution of the crisis more difficult.

The Senate quickly moved to repeal part of the sanctions law to make exceptions for food and other humanitarian supplies. The Senate Sanctions Task Force, which I co-chair with Senator McConnell, also recommended changes in the existing sanctions regime to give the President flexibility in negotiating a deescalation of the nuclear tensions between India and Pakistan.

The Senate adopted these changes as an amendment to the Agricultural Appropriations bill. We need to complete action on this legislation before we adjourn.

We were all encouraged by the positive statements of the prime ministers of India and Pakistan indicating their willingness to negotiate eventual accession to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

We also want them to pull back from the nuclear brink and agree not to deploy nuclear weapons on missiles or aircraft.

In order for the United States to be able to influence that outcome, this President and future Presidents need flexibility on sanctions.

This is not a game, and right wing Republicans should understand that. They should debate and act upon these changes in the sanctions laws and not let this legislation get caught up in the search for the favorite hostage of the day.

I am truly fearful we may have reduced our ability to impact others’ behavior on the Sub-Continent because of our failure to act quickly and decisively.

UN Arrears/State Department Reorganization

At the very moment when Republicans in the House are criticizing the President for failure to keep together coalitions in support of actions in Iraq or Kosovo, they deny him the ability to meet our fair share of United States commitments at the United Nations.

Chairman Helms and I worked hard to craft a bipartisan plan to pay $926 million in our arrears if the United Nations agreed to make reforms. Those plans are contained in the State Department Conference Report that has yet to be sent to the President.

Unfortunately, our payment to the UN has been held hostage to an unrelated, controversial provision that would prohibit giving population planning funds to foreign organizations that use their own funds to lobby their governments on abortion.

Holding the payment of UN arrearages, reform of the UN, restructuring and funding of our foreign policy agencies all hostage to this “Mexico City” provision has been highly irresponsible in my view.

The House is also holding any funding for the IMF hostage to this same Mexico City legislation.

The President has made it clear he will veto any bill with the Mexico City language.

However, the House Republicans insisted on keeping this totally unrelated language in the Conference Report.

This has resulted in an end game of chicken, with a terrible legislative collision ahead of us.

In my view the Mexico City language should be stripped from both the State Conference Report and the IMF bill, with a commitment to debate and vote on it up or down early next year.

The UN legislation had reflected bipartisan support for U.S. leadership and credibility abroad and is essential to strengthening diplomatic readiness.

We need to restore our bipartisan commitment before we adjourn.

Our failure to act will clearly diminish our country’s leadership abroad.

CTBT

Finally, two years after the signing of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, I regret that the Senate has not been able to act on this important treaty this year.

Chairman Helms and I disagree on the importance of this treaty and he has indicated a need to address other treaties first.

Nevertheless, I felt we had an obligation to hold hearings and act on a treaty of such importance. Had I been Chairman of the Committee we would have acted. We need to next year.

How ironic it is, just a week after India and Pakistan have pledged to negotiate ratification of this treaty by next September, that the United States Senate has not moved to take similar action.

I hope my message has been clear: If we don’t act on these foreign policy matters, the potential for paralysis is real, and the consequences disastrous.

It is time for strong bipartisan action.

Our time is running out.

You will have questions for me, but I have several questions for you.

Why, given the importance of the issues I have just discussed is there such a deafening silence?

Where are the editorials demanding action?

Where are members of the foreign policy community, many of whom are represented in this room, demanding action?

Where are members of the business community and others, who will be adversely affected by a failure of the United States to exercise leadership either at the IMF, the UN, or elsewhere in the world?

The issue we must be thinking about in the days before we adjourn is leadership: leadership at a time of crisis at home and difficulties abroad. If the United States doesn’t lead no one will. But can we lead?

You know where I stand. If you agree, my colleagues in the Congress need to know where you and the American people stand.

John F. Kennedy once remarked that ‘our domestic policy can defeat us, but our foreign policy can kill us’.

He was right, of course. And in the coming days, Congress and the President have the responsibility to step up to the plate and address our unfinished foreign policy business — or risk allowing these neglected issues to jeopardize our national security interests. Thank you.

It’s a real honor to be here, you know we say that in my business, it’s an honor to be here, and it’s a polite euphemism, but I mean it sincerely.

Because the truth of the matter is, you are this particular club, and I’ll say it with the press here, you’re not suppose to say these things and make choices, this is the most influential, influential group of people that gets assembles on a daily, on a weekly basis on a regular basis on anything that occurs in the State of Delaware. You all represent everything from the fortune 10 companies in the world to the public service and public organizations that exist in this State. And I want to be very blunt with you, what I would like to do today is try to convince you of something.

Because if I can’t convince you of what I’m about to speak to, quite frankly, I don’t have a chance and people who share my view on both parties will not have a chance to convince the American people. I want to talk to you from my vantage point on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. And I thought I would spend some time with you today trying to focus on America’s role in the world economically, militarily and politically.

The President has said something that every once in a while Presidents say during their terms, use a phrase that captures and essential truth. One of the phrases that is attributed to him is that he referred to America as the essential nation, the essential nation.

The good news is that America is the essential nation. The bad news is that we are the essential nation. It’s going to require us as a consequence of that position not sought, but arrived at to make some very, very, very difficult decisions over the next decade. Some as early as the next six months. Clearly between now and the year 2005-2010 we will write the script for the future of our country more than any generation has since the end of WWII. It is that fundamental.

Never before has America been position, including at the end of WWII with as much economic, political, and military dominance as they are today relative to any single nation. But never before have we been in the position, and nation been in the position in the modern, since the nation state has been formed, in the last three hundred and fifty years; never before has such a dominant nation in a relative to other single nations been lacking in as much power relative to the world.

In the past when there have been powerful nations that have guided the fate of the world. They have not only been powerful relative to the other power structures but the remainder of the world has been basically powerless. The centers of power are not as diffused. In today’s world, in today’s world that is not the case. So the good news is we are the essential nation. We are by far and away relative to any other single nation or block of nations, the dominant nation in the world.

But the ability of us to be in the jargon of the street, the policemen of the world, is less likely to be able to be done with efficacy than it was even twenty five years ago when there were two super powers.

So, what I want to speak to you today is about a debate that is not found itself into the daily news papers of America, that is not found itself today in the discussion that takes place, even with organizations like yours with well educated women and men who have a world view.

But a debate that is raging among those who will be the architects of public policy for the next decade. And that is, are we going to engage the world or are we going to trying to disengage. Is the neo-isolationist instinct that resides in my party on the left and the republican party on the right — will it become the dominant force in determining American foreign policy? Or will internationalism, internationalist view prevail?

We have a three hundred year history in America. Before we were United States, a three hundred year history of wanting to look inward; concluding that, we can be Fortress America. It has been a constant struggle as to what our role in the world should be. Today, the debate is under way. The heart and soul of both political parties are being debated around that subject. Although, it’s not articulated that way.

In my party, labor unions are against free trade. Labor unions fear loss of American jobs. Labor unions see their security in having protectionist barriers placed. In American business, among the Burgermeisters of the world who employ over sixty percent of all the public. There is the same strong tendency, the same strong tendency. The inability to understand the relevance of whether or not we provide an 18.5 billion dollar commitment to the IMF to bail out a place called Malaysia.

“What in the hell relevance does that have to do, Joe, with whether or not my drug store thrives? What does that have to do with whether or not the GM plant stays open?” As a matter of fact it lends itself to demagogic rhetoric that takes you the other way. It is easy to stand up and say, “Why bail out Malaysia, why bail out state-wide official in the last twenty five years — to the chagrin of many of you — that has had unvarnished, total complete loyalty from American labor. No other Democrat in the state carries that burden or that privilege.

So when I show up they are absolutely perplexed. “Joe, how can you be for fast track? You’re abandoning us!” When I speak to outfits like the New Castle Chamber of Commerce, when I’m not on the ninth floor of this building, there is this overwhelming tendency to say, “What are you doing? Why are you making easy for people to go abroad, why are you for knocking down all these trade barriers?”

Well, more to the point, these days men and women in business have a special stake in foreign policy. Whether your business is large or small, global or located in Delaware, you’re affected in some way by the events that occur around the world more than any time in our history. And today foreign policy is more complicated than ever, it’s effected by technology, economics and even the weather. Consider the Global Warming Treaty that’s being debated around the world now.

So I’d like to spend a few minutes giving you my sense of a few of the key foreign policy challenges we face in this complex environment and the end make the plea to you that we should engage. Because it’s easier not to engage. Engaging as you will soon find out, I can make no guarantees for you, I can not guarantee you that it will work. But I can guarantee you as a student of history, if we do not engage we will be engaged on someone else’s terms.

What are these threats to our security, our economic well being, our commitments around the world — what are they?

Well I believe the biggest threat we face is from weapons of mass destruction: nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. This is a huge problem that shows up in almost every foreign policy crisis we face. We see it in Iraq, we see it in Russia where there are thousands of nuclear weapons left over from the Cold War. And the question is, who controls them? People say to me, “What difference does it make, Joe, if our …economy crumbles?” Well it makes a hell of a lot of difference.

Nicaragua crumbles the warring factions don’t have nuclear weapons. The instability generated by the collapse of the Ukraine means that the third largest nuclear power in the world, a country none of you know anything about, has to settle their differences, nuclear weapons.

The good news in the Soviet Empire collapsed; the bad news is it collapsed. Because the one thing we knew about the old Soviets is that they were incredibly cautious, they did not have any regard for human rights, but they never took any real chances. I always used to point out that when the Soviets put a nuclear battery in East Germany they surrounded it with two Soviet divisions and did not give a key to their allies the East Germans.

When we put nuclear weapons we gave a dual key to whoever the country to which we were dealing. And we did not surround it with other than NATO forces. But now, nobody, nobody, nobody, is in charge.

We also see it in North Korea, whose nuclear weapons program may be back on track. Iraq is the most immediate threat. But getting rid of Iraq’s weapons has not been easy, not will it be. An despite UN inspections and all the other efforts since the end of the Gulf War there is no fool proof way no matter what anybody tells you of eliminating the threat of Saddam Hussein posses and some say, and I’m one of those who say it, the elimination of Saddam Hussein is part of the answer.

But nobody who knows as much about foreign policy as I hope I do, can look at you and tell you we know what, who comes after Sadam Hussein. George Bush is [inaudible] criticized and Larry Eagleburger, the former Secretary of State for not finishing the job. The reason they did not finish the job is that through out the modern history of Iraq, unless there has been a dictator or a foreign power holding the center of Iraq together there has been war in the Middle East.

Iran is no box of chocolates. Iran and Iraq killed one million people between them, fighting over a border that controls a significant portion of the world’s oil reserves. So the answer’s not easy. Make no mistake about it.

If we want to take out Saddam Hussein in fact directly it will take American ground forces. A lot of you are military men. Name me a major campaign that has been sustained with out putting a soldier on the ground with a riffle in his hands. It cannot be done. And I’m the one you read in the paper constantly calling for use of force and use of air power against Saddam, but not because I think it will bring him down …I’ll go in to that later.

I’m not sure how this will be resolved. It’s possible there will be another confrontation over inspections an I predict it will occur within the next month. It’s possible such a confrontation may result in military action. But any military strike we undertake is not going to be enough in and of itself to remove Saddam Hussein. The threat of weapons of mass destruction also plays a key role in the relations with Russia. Russia is in the midst of an economic crisis with Yeltsin’s illness, and at the edge of political crisis and a beginning of a political melt down.

I have been there a number of times, and met with every single major faction leader in Russia and they are a sweet bunch. Keep in mind folks, for eight hundred years there has never once, never once in the territory now called Russia, never once been even the nascent experiment in democracy, never once.

It’s a long road. In the worst case scenario in terms of U.S. national security is that after Yeltsin passes from the scene, which is inevitable in near term, and extremist regime will gain power, and gains control of those weapons. That’s the worst case. It’s not something that I think is likely to happen if the foreseeable future, but it illustrates the dangers we face.

A more immediate danger we face in Russia is a political melt down that results in the need for us to make significant military expenditures relative to what actions they may take form the Crimean to engagements with Ukraine. It’s also the reason why we’re pursing an arms control regime and initiatives with Russia. We made good progress in reducing the stock pikes of left over weapons.

My conservative friends went crazy when I joined Sam Nunn and Dick Luger in putting up six hundred million dollars to pay the Russians to destroy their weapons and why are we giving those old commies that money. If in the midst of the Cold War I said to all you gentlemen and ladies we can buy all their nuclear weapons for six hundred millions dollars so you want to buy them. What the hell would you have done? It’s mindless, mindless this right wing opposition to dealing with nuclear weapons, mindless. But it is prevalent.

We made good progress but there’s a thing called a START II treaty has not been ratified by the Duma. And the reason they haven’t ratified it is because it says that we reduce the number of multiple war head weapons that we have, and only have single war head weapons, we have a lot more single war head weapons then they have. So, even though it’s good we get rid of these Merv ICBM’s it means that in order for them to maintain parity they’ve got to make a major build up in single nuclear war head weapons, they don’t have the money to do that.

That’s why they haven’t ratified START II, that’s why we should immediately leap to START III, in steaded in [inaudible] in the number of nuclear weapons in the thousand. Big deal whether you agree with me or not, it is a big deal how we resolve this and it must be resolved in a matter of months, months, not years. Right now we don’t know what the Duma’s going to do. Next year congress should expand the programs we already have in place to employ Russian scientists.

Joe and I were talking to earlier, you realize they have a nuclear cities program in Russian. Over the past fifty years they have built twelve cities the size of Wilmington. The sole purpose the, the sole environment, the sole thing they undertake is the nuclear war industry. They’re out of the business, there are eighty thousand people employed in those cities. They are laterally starving they have no pay. Thirty thousand of them have left, the non-essential workers who do not have enough where with all to be a danger. But of the remaining fifty thousand, ten thousand of them are the Verner Browns of Russia, and there are people wishing to employee them.

Offering them staggering amounts of money, just come to Baghdad. I’m not joking about this. You know what I’m taking about in Iran. The Iranians have a missile program right now. They are doing everything but kid napping these Russian scientists. There’s at least one more important step to take in controlling nuclear weapons of mass destruction, and that would be to ratify this thing called a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

We of all nations have the best position to do that because we have the ability to know test through computer models whether our existing stock piles are of value. No other nation has that ability. Yet we’re one of the few nations that hasn’t ratified it. It says that there can be no testing. Now you will be able to cheat and do some testing, but what it guarantees is the reason why we want no testing gentlemen and ladies, is because no nation can reliably count on their nuclear arsenal unless they can test it.

No military planner can plan for it’s engagement unless they can test it. And if you can not test it, practically speaking, you can not use it. [inaudible] break out of new weapons systems, of new capacity and capability. Of my good friend and he is a friend, Jesse Helms, says no. He constantly quotes somebody I don’t think ever said it, but I’m very big on quotes myself, says “America’s never lost a war and never won a treaty”, and he could never be more wrong.

Because this treaty is an American interest, but our friends on the right concluded that this is not a good thing to do. Can you imagine us, the people who initiated the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, we’re the nation that put it in play, and we’re one of only four nations who has not ratified it. In the countries that signed the treaty, the pledge not to test nuclear weapons, it wont eliminate them but it will vastly cut down on their ability to move to the next generation. And almost every country has signed it, we’re one of the few hold outs.

Skipping ahead because I’m taking more of your time than I should, let me turn to another significant area, and that is the stability of the world economy. There’s something that effects your business even more than nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. We escaped the worst effects of the so-called “Asian flu.” But the larger reality still exits. Our economy, our economic well-being, is tied to the global economy.

Interesting statistic I read, during the economic growth spirt of the last six years, one third of our growth was directly attributable to international trade to exports, one third. Just talked to the folks upstairs here and a few other companies. And they’ll tell you, so what’s happened the economic flu, although seemed to be contained slightly now, means the loss of American jobs, means the loss of American security, means the loss of American opportunity.

Because the good news is, one third of our growth came from exports, the bad news is when there are no exports, our job market will shrink , profits will diminish. Totally as a consequence of the international environment, the projections for the next years GDP, are instead of being 3.5 percent, just over 2 percent. All of you understand what that means to your bottom line.

Whether you own a drug store or the Dupont Company. So what do we so about it? Do we disengage, do we not do as we did and quote bail out Mexico, which I might add we made two billion dollars on? Do we not underpin Brazil’s economy, do we try to build fire walls, do we not spend dollars to avoid that?

Well, that’s a debate we have going on in the United States Congress. Exports this year are down twenty percent here in the state of Delaware. Down twenty percent. Projected deficit for this last quarter, just the last quarter in the United States of America alone is going to accumulatively result in a two hundred and forty billion dollar trade deficit. When it hits three hundred billion, how many years can we sustain that with out it turning out the pilot light on our economy?

Some of you are understandably are sceptics but last time I spoke to you, I remember I told you why we balanced the budget and why the deficit reduction package would do it and why these things would happen and why Bob Dole was all wrong about saying when we did it we would have an economic recession and high inflation. And why Volker is right, the predecessor to Greenspan. It was the single most significant thing we did to balance the budget.

We balanced the budget, we made the hard choices. Like you in businesses have made. We have cut discretionary spending, in fact, in real terms twenty two percent. There’s not much more we can do to get our economy right. But we can do it all right and if the international economy collapses, it wont make a whole hell of a lot of difference. It will make a difference, it will just keep it from being as bad as it could have been.

But what do we do? Remember what we did when we went through the S & L crisis? The tough decisions, and how it caused businesses to slow down. What Japan is going through with their banking industry makes what we went through look like a walk in the park. And I’m not exaggerating that, that is not hyperbole, that is a fact.

So we’re tied, we’re tied in ways we’ve never been before. The Japanese are essentially engaged in denial and deferral, but it’s a great consequence to us whether or not they begin to engage. But remember how slow as I said it took us to turn things around. As I said the trade deficit, the mercantile trade deficit, is twenty two billion dollars for this month alone. The deficit is twenty two billion dollars — and that translates into third shifts in general motors if it keeps up being shut down. That translates into Dupont’s profits, and ICI and Zeneca and the rest. It translates into the stock market.

I predict we’ll continue to hear more voices and louder voices in support of trade restrictions and even retaliation, as the economy restrict and that as seen will be the very appealing, very appealing message. I turned on the television the other day and I saw Barbara Mikulski, an ally of mine, and Paul Sarbanes and Arlen Specter — all my friends – talking about trade restrictions because the steel industry in each of their states is in trouble, and they are, it’s real, it’s not a joke, but the answer is not trade barriers, but it’s going to be very appealing to talk about trade barriers.

There are other countries out there that remain economic basket cases, like Russian who are still sitting on those nuclear weapons, Latin American and so one. So the point I want to make to you is this because I’ve taken too much of your time, and I want to at least leave a little time for questions.

My conclusion is very basic and my plea to you is very basic, and that is; look at this closely. The answer for America as it goes into the twenty first century is to engage, engage. In arms control it means passing the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, START II and START III, the Nuclear Cities program — where we go in and hire those nuclear scientists, we hire them, with American tax dollars. We provide exchange programs for them, where we allow American corporations to go into those cities and subsidies American corporations if they find it in their economic interest.

To find alternative uses of that talent, for it will not just sit there. It will no just sit there. Any more than you in an economic collapse in the North East would not go to the South West to find the ability to take your talent and put it to use.

Economically, we must continue to support the IMF, the World Bank; we must pay our dues to the United Nations for our own naked self-interest. And we must continue a domestic policy of educating our work force.

Thank you.

*** AS PREPARED FOR DELIVERY ***

For close to a year, Washington has been traumatized by the non-stop debate about President Clinton’s shameful behavior. The President’s indiscretions have been the focus of intense scrutiny here in America — and intense puzzlement overseas. We have heard from the politicians, the pundits and the people. Everyone has had their say and now Congress is on the verge of impeachment hearings, where the members will be heard.

I have engaged in hundreds of discussions with citizens, elected officials, Constitutional scholars and even members of the press.

I have studied the Constitutional commentaries and carefully considered what my responsibilities would be as a juror and judge in the trial of the century. I believe that I have done everything possible to ensure that I am ready to address one of the most difficult decisions that may confront me as a United States Senator.

While the debate about the President’s conduct rages on, it seems we will never reach consensus on the challenging legal and constitutional issues that surround impeachment. Yet there is one area where almost everyone agrees. That is the need to conclude this episode as quickly as possible.

I do not mean that people want Congress to rush to judgment. After a year spent obsessed with this subject, we are beyond rushing. The consensus I am referring to is the need for all involved to act with sober deliberation but also with a sense of urgency as we approach the final stages of this difficult controversy.

If the recent election results told us anything, if elected officials learned anything, it was that the American people want the House to end the political posturing, get on with the process, and resolve the issue so we can get on with the Nation’s business. The American people have made up their minds on this matter.

Now it is time for members of the House make up their mind. And if they reach a different conclusion from the American people, they must convince the American people that they reached that conclusion through a fair and deliberate means.

I am here today to call for bipartisanship in the impeachment process. It is a concept many will say they agree with. But actions speak louder than words.

The framers of the Constitution knew that the greatest danger associated with impeachment was the presence of partisan factions that could dictate the outcome.

It is clear from the debates and from the commentaries on the Constitutional Convention that the framers were concerned that anything less than bipartisanship could, and would, do great damage to our form of government. They knew that to contemplate an action as profound as undoing a popular election requires at a minimum that members of both parties find that the alleged wrong is grave enough to overturn the will of the majority of the American people.

The framers also understood the sentiment expressed nearly 200 years later by Congresswoman Barbara Jordan during the impeachment proceedings of Richard Nixon.

She said, “it is reason, and not passion, which must guide our deliberations, guide our debate, and guide our decision.”

But the current debate is guided by faction, not reason. One example: The House Judiciary Committee this month heard a battery of witnesses address the question of what is an impeachable offense. Democrats called legal experts who testified that the President’s acts are not impeachable offenses, and Republicans called witnesses who were just as certain they were. By the end of the hearing, anyone listening would have the overwhelming impression that there was no consensus in the legal community on the issue, that it was an open question.

Yet the vast majority of historians and legal scholars have concluded — and stated publicly — that nothing that President Clinton has been accused of rises to the level of an impeachable offense. The hearing was a political charade.

We are told that ultimately, this is a political process. Ultimately, it is. The question is whether it is going to be a fair process. I argue that it can, and must be fair.

In his marvelous book on the impeachment process, published while the country was in the throes of President Nixon’s Watergate troubles, Professor Charles Black alerted us to the danger of partisanship.

Because the constitution and its history provide us with more questions about impeachment than answers, he said, “it is always tempting to resolve such questions in favor of the immediate political result that is palatable to us, for one can never definitely be proved wrong, and so one is free to allow one’s prejudices to assume the guise of reason.”

Black was echoing Alexander Hamilton, who warned in Federalist 65 that impeachments:

“will seldom fail to agitate the passions of the whole community, and to divide it into parties, more or less friendly or inimical, to the accused. In many cases, it will connect itself with the pre-existing factions, and will enlist all their animosities, partialities, influence and interest on the one side, or on the other; and in such cases there will always be the greatest danger, that the decision will be regulated more by the comparative strength of parties than by the real demonstrations of guilt or innocence.”

I don’t think I am being partisan myself in warning about the risks of partisan excess. As a 32 year-old Senator, I expressed this same concern about the fate of a Republican President. On April 10, 1974, I rose on the floor of the United States Senate and said:

“In the case of an impeachment trial, the emotions of the American people would be strummed, as a guitar, with every newscast and each edition of the daily paper in communities throughout the country.

The incessant demand for news or rumors of news — whatever its basis of legitimacy - - would be overwhelming. The consequential impact on the federal institutions of government would be intense – and not necessarily beneficial. This is why my plea today is for restraint on the part of all parties involved in the affair.”

I make the same plea for restraint today. And while the circumstances surrounding these two events are starkly different, the consequences for our Nation are the same. The gravity of removing a sitting president from office is the same today as it was twenty-four years ago.

The American people understand that the consequences of impeaching a sitting President are grave and, thus far, they have shown a remarkable restraint – more than some of the pundits and experts. But I believe they have reached two clear conclusions: Congress should resolve the matter expeditiously and resolve the matter in a fair and non-partisan manner.

These conclusions have great significance to the impeachment process. I believe the American people will ultimately make their judgment about the proceedings and the outcome based in part, on whether the House Judiciary Committee votes along strict party lines and whether the House of Representatives acts in a similar manner.

That may not be fair, but I believe that is how they will judge it. Therefore, it seems clear to me that for history’s sake, and with the Committee’s legacy in mind, Chairman Hyde and the Republican majority in the House must bend over backwards to demonstrate that they have conducted this proceeding based on principle, not politics.

There is yet another issue where public opinion comes into play. That is the question of whether the President’s transgressions warrant impeachment. We know from survey after survey that the American people believe the President’s actions do not justify impeaching him.

Should that have any bearing on the outcome? Many of my colleagues say they will ignore public opinion. In most cases, this is a sound position for a member of Congress to take. When we are elected to the House and the Senate, we are sent here to exercise judgment, not simply to be weathervanes that shift with the political winds. The fact that this is an impeachment proceeding doesn’t change that – it makes it even more important that we exercise our best judgment.

But I believe it is a serious mistake to take the position that public opinion should have no bearing on how we act and what we do. Let me explain. Many people — and many legal scholars — have said that impeachment should be reserved for grave breaches of the public trust. Surely, if we are trying to decide whether an offense is a breach of the public trust, it is important to know what the public thinks. If the American people think the President’s actions do not warrant impeachment, we should listen to their views, and take them seriously.

It would be a serious mistake to ignore public opinion for another, more fundamental reason. This is their President we are talking about. The President of the United States doesn’t serve at the pleasure of the legislature, as a prime minister does in a parliamentary system. He is elected directly by the people of the United States.

The election of a President is the only nationwide vote that the American people ever cast. That is a big deal. If the American people don’t think they have made a mistake in electing Bill Clinton, we in the Congress had better be very careful before we upset their decision.

This was brought home to me several weeks before the elections at a filling station in Wilmington. The woman working the cash register looked up at me with something of a scowl on her face. I assumed — incorrectly, it turned out — that she had voted against me the last time I ran. She said, “You’re Joe Biden, aren’t you?” I nodded. She said, “What are you going to do to President Clinton on this Lewinsky thing?” I started to give her a noncommital answer about the process needing to go forward, but she brought me up short. “Don’t you or anyone else take my vote away, Joe. He’s my President! If you remove him, I will never vote again.”

This woman — and the American people — understand the genius of the American system in their bones. They know that the Congress and the President are separate branches of government. They understand that each branch is responsible to them, not to the other branch of government. Just as they know that the Senators from their state are theirs, and the Representative from their district is theirs, they know that the President is theirs, too.

Anyone who wants to impeach Bill Clinton needs to keep in mind what the American people think about it, because he is their president.

Let me be absolutely clear. This does not mean just doing what the opinion polls say. It means proceeding in a manner that the American people understand to be fair. In the case of an impeachment, fair means bipartisan. It means putting aside the disagreements that stem from partisan factions. The time for partisan factions to play a role is in the process of elections, where candidates advance competing policies and platforms and the people vote. Once the election is held, our leaders hold office until the next election. It is simply antithetical to our constitutional democracy to use impeachment to overturn an election on partisan grounds. It violates the independence of the Presidency and it usurps the people’s voice.

The Framers saw this danger when they wrote the impeachment power into the Constitution. Hamilton warned that an impeachment would “connect itself with pre-existing factions,” just as Black much later saw that impeachment was an occasion for “prejudices to assume the guise of reason.”

So those who wish to proceed with impeachment in the face of the public’s contrary opinion bear a special obligation and confront a special risk. The obligation they face is that they must proceed in a bipartisan manner, so that we can defend the Congress’s actions as fair and consistent with the constitutional framework – so that if impeachment goes forward, those who support it can look my constituent, or their constituent, straight in the eyes and defend the process as fair and just.

Should they fail to do this, the risk they face is the chance that they will inflicting more damage on our system of government and induce more cynicism and disgust with politics than anything the President has done so far.

So we must be prudent. Otherwise we will succumb to the danger the Framers warned against. We will subject the President to what amounts to a vote of no confidence. If you disapprove of his presidency and its policies, or if you do not like the man, vote to impeach. If, on the other hand, you support his presidency and his policies, or if you do like the man, vote to acquit. But that is not our system of government.

When Benjamin Netanyahu returned home after signing the Wye accords, he faced a vote of no confidence. If he had lost, he would have been out of office and another government would have to be formed.

That is simply not our system of government. Ours is not a parliamentary system. That is not how impeachment is supposed to operate.

Reflect for just a moment on how different our government is. Here, the president and the congress are separate branches of government. Each is elected directly by the people. The president and vice president are the only officials elected by ALL the people. Through the electoral process, they answer to all the people. In such a system, a vote of no confidence, as a means of removing the head of government when the Congress disapproves of his leadership, contradicts the theory of separated powers. It would trample on the choice made by the people through the electoral process.

This is no small matter. It goes to the heart of the constitutional design. As Jack Rakove, the Stanford historian, noted during the recently held House hearings on the standard for impeachment, the prevailing principle that guided the Framers in shaping the institution of the Presidency during the Philadelphia Convention, the one major goal and idea that best explains how that office took shape over the summer of 1787, was their intention on “making the presidency as politically independent of the Congress as they could.”

The Framers saw the system of separated powers and checks and balances as a bulwark in support of individual liberty and against government tyranny. The separation of powers prevents government power from being concentrated in any single branch of government. Permit one branch of government to subjugate another to its partisan wishes, and you permit the kind of concentration of power that can lead to tyranny.

So the system the Framers established is utterly incompatible with the idea that sharp partisan divisions could be sufficient to impeach. Preserving our system, with its checks and balances and separation of powers, ought to be part of our consideration as we attempt to resolve the current controversy.

How do we ensure that impeachments do not become the partisan showdowns that the Framer’s warned about? The answer is both simple and elusive. The only thing that prevents the impeachment power from being abused is the good faith of Members of Congress.

Professor Black proposed a simple test. He said that for the purposes of impeachment, members take off their party’s hat — shed their partisan identity — and then try to take on the identity of a member of the other party. In other words, Republicans who favor Clinton’s impeachment should try to pretend they are Democrats, and see if they still hold that same conclusion. Democrats who scoff at impeachment in the present instance should try to see it from the Republican’s point of view.

It is very difficult to perform this test, especially in the highly charged partisan atmosphere in which we live, but you get the point. Before we undertake such a solemn act as impeachment, we should examine our reasoning very carefully to be sure we are not simply following partisan instincts.

Impeachment can be legitimate if and only if it emanates from a bipartisan conviction that the president has committed high crimes and misdemeanors – when people of opposing viewpoints can come together in agreement over the seriousness of the offense and the appropriateness of the sanction.

Partisanship need not disappear entirely — that would be impossible. It simply must be held in check for a time – a few weeks, perhaps a month – and by a relatively small number of people, so that a bipartisan consensus can take shape.

Look back at the Nixon impeachment. It took on legitimacy when a core of Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee were moved by the nature of President Nixon’s offenses to break party ranks and vote for articles of impeachment. In the Senate, it was the stark reality of eroding Republican support that prompted President Nixon to resign. There was bipartisan consensus that what Nixon did was impeachable.

Partisanship did not evaporate entirely during the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson. In fact, the entire episode was riddled with partisanship, and overall it stands as an excellent example of how not to conduct an impeachment.

Still, seven Republican Senators did vote with the Democrats for acquittal, shedding their partisan preferences, to prevent that impeachment from succeeding. It took only that amount of bipartisanship to save the country from an impeachment that most people – in retrospect – have concluded would have been a terrible mistake. The fact that a conviction in the Senate requires a two-thirds majority guarantees a measure of necessary bipartisanship except in all but the most lopsided Senates.

But bipartisanship should not wait until the matter reaches the Senate chamber. In previous impeachments the votes in both the House and the Senate have been by overwhelming majorities. In the past, except for the Johnson impeachment, the only times articles of impeachment reached the floor were in cases of tremendous bipartisan consensus that the offenses satisfy the constitutional standard and that the officer ought to be removed.

As for the Johnson impeachment itself, according to James Blaine, one of the Republican House members who voted for impeachment, he and others came in time to regret the effort. In private correspondence, Blaine wrote that, “the sober reflection of after years has persuaded many who favored impeachment that it was not justifiable on the charges made, and that its success would have resulted in greater injury to free institutions than Andrew Johnson in his utmost endeavor was able to inflict.”

The conclusion I reach is this. The burden is, as it always has been, on those who seek to impeach and convict a President. To overturn a popular election, they must convince the American people and at least some in the President’s party that the President’s actions meet the high standard for impeachment settled upon by our founders in the Constitution.

This is what I mean by bipartisanship.

The standard is “principled political neutrality.”

And one measure of whether a member has met that principle is to ask in Professor Black’s words:

“Would they have answered the same question the same way if it came up with respect to a president towards whom [they] felt oppositely from the way [they] feel toward the President threatened with removal.”

The American people will know whether each member met that test. They will not demand unanimity, but they will demand consensus.

Thus far, the House Judiciary Committee has proceeded without dignity, causing the American people to loose respect for the Committee.

As a result, the burden of demonstrating that they are proceeding with a standard of “principled political neutrality” will be politically difficult to meet.

Ken Starr will make his case, the President should be allowed to make his. Then let them decide if the President’s conduct meets the test of what the framers had in mind by “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

The choice is not whether the President’s self-evidently shameful and possibly criminal conduct must be punished by impeachment or be condoned. The choice is whether the process for dealing with his conduct is removal from office or some other means — censure, or perhaps even a criminal trial after he has left office.

To those who say that failure to bring articles of impeachment against the President would amount to condoning his immoral behavior or overlooking a criminal act, not withstanding the fact it does not meet the test of an impeachable offense, I say they do not understand our system of government. For the Constitution contemplates and the law provides for such a circumstance - it is called a criminal trial after his term is served. It is a way to punish the President without doing damage to the system of separated powers or overruling the judgment of the American people.

Failure to impeach, even failure to proceed with a criminal action, does not mean that the President has not paid for his immoral behavior — he has already been sentenced to a hundred years of shame in the history books, which is not an insignificant penalty.

So I say to my colleagues in the House, do your duty. Proceed with principled political neutrality.

For if you do, history will judge you kindly. And if you do not, it will judge you harshly.

And for those of us who hold high public office and the public trust, history is a judge.

Senator Biden: Mr. Vice President, members of the Cabinet, ladies and gentlemen, I’ve been doing this a long time. I look out here, and I see some very familiar faces. We’ve come a long way.

We’ve come a long way in terms of how to approach dealing with the drug problem. We used to argue — back fifteen, twenty years ago – about whether the answer was more treatment or more police or more incarceration or more testing or more interdiction. And we finally learned to walk and chew gum at the same time. We finally figured out we’ve got to do all of them, all of them all of the time.

But we still suffer in this town — and, I think, in this nation — from celebrating our successes a little too soon. We have had periods where, when the Indian drug problem dropped off the map, we decided we didn’t have a problem and we didn’t follow up. So the Indian drug strategy was never followed up in Congress or by Presidents. Then all of the sudden it became a gigantic problem again.

Now we’re in a position where drug production is down; and hopefully, we’re not going to make the same mistake again.

Another good thing that’s happened: we have each year taken a little bit of the partisan poison out of this fight. It used to be, ‘Who does it better? Who’s doing it worse?’ One of the reasons why, when I wrote the act that created the Drug Czar’s — he’s now the Drug Director, but in Congress we call him the Drug Czar — office, is that no President wanted it. Two Democratic Presidents didn’t want any part of having it; Republican Presidents didn’t want any part of there being a Drug Czar. There’s a simple reason for it — and Vice President Gore was in the Senate then and supported it at that time so he’ll remember why — nobody wants to take the responsibility if the responsibility requires you to set goals and then measure whether or not you’ve met the goals.

Because if it’s a Republican President/Democratic Congresses — and there may be one again, Congressmen, and there may be a Republican President again; I doubt it but maybe — what would happen is Democratic Senators would say, ‘That Republican President didn’t meet the goal he set.’ And Republican Congresses would say the same about Democratic Presidents.

And then along came the most decorated member of the United States military, who decided to take on the job of being the Drug Czar. He’s a guy that everybody has learned to love and hate, and the reason why is that he got in everybody’s face. And that was the intended purpose of the Drug Czar.

There are fifty different agencies, fifty different people trying to do the right thing, thousands and thousands of people, and nobody wanting one person to be in charge of everything relating to drugs.

And he’s made some enemies, even some of his friends from the old Defense Department days; but he’s finally arrived at something here.

The first drug strategy written — and Robbie and others remember I happened to write the first drug strategy in the Congress — was one of these little volumes. Now we’re finally getting there.

You know why we’re getting there? We’re getting there because this guy used to be a General, and he’s used to facts. And he kept saying to me when he took on the job, ‘How do we know what the problem is? And how do we know and how are we going to measure whether or not we made any success?’ Because like crime and unlike international finance or complicated aspects of health care, everyone thinks they’re an expert on drugs.

No one has to know anything, but they all have an answer — ‘Everybody knows if you just did it my way, you’d be done’ – when in fact, we had very little data from which to make judgments about the kind of progress we’re making, whether it was on interdiction or on treatment or on any aspect of the fight. And what he has done is what every other President has feared someone would do, and that is begin to establish hard core numbers and goals.

Now (U.S. Representative John) Mica and Biden are going to be watching this President, and finding out whether or not he is going to meet the goals, whether he’s going to fund the goals, whether he’s going to fight for the goals. The next President, President Gore, you’re going to have the real problem. The reason why is because all these things will have kicked in by then. I really mean this. He knows I’m not kidding. The next President is going to have a real problem because the database will be firmly, firmly established.

The reason I bother to bore you with this kind of thing is the drug problem is not static. It’s not static, yet we tend to approach it as if it’s static. Now it’s heroin for kids my daughter’s age. Now it’s heroin that we have to worry about. We have to worry about marijuana, but heroin’s on the horizon. It’s a big deal. I wrote a report three years ago saying that and people said, ‘No, no, kids are not going to use heroin.’ Watch, watch. Tomorrow, the next day it will be something else. And so the reason to approach this thing in the businesslike manner the Drug Director has taken on is so that we can be flexible.

Now let me conclude by suggesting that the Administration has put forward what I believe to be a first-rate strategy. They don’t claim that they have reinvented the wheel. They’re not claiming we’re going to end drugs in our time. It took us twenty-five years to get to this spot, folks, and we are not going to be able to turn it back in two, five, or ten years. And we’re never going to be able to turn it back if we conclude we’ve finally won.

I’ll remind you all that we had a drug epidemic in the teens, in the 1900’s where more people in America were consuming what we now consider to be controlled substances, as a percent of the population, than consume them today. The drug epidemic was larger. It grew out of the soldier’s disease of the Civil War and germinated for thirty-five years.

We used to have another ‘Drug Director.’ The first one was a guy named Anslinger. It was in the twenties, and guess what? They whipped the problem. They whipped the problem; and they did it through education, they did it through treatment, and they did it through enforcement as well.

And then they decided it was over. They decided all through the thirties and forties, ‘Don’t tell our kids about the problem, they may use ‘em.’ We ended up in the sixties, with a doctor in the White House — whom both Vice President Gore and I know — who went and, when we said to him early on that cocaine was a problem, came up to me in my office as Chairman of Judiciary and said, ‘Why are we picking on cocaine?’ The A.M.A. did not even list it as an addictive drug. We had gone into a cocoon again. We ‘won’ and the problem was ‘finished.’

This problem’s not going to ever be finished. Our vigilance is never going to be anything other than needed.

What the General didn’t tell you is that this guy came along and said, ‘Look there’s a particular problem in the Black community, in the Hispanic community.’ We don’t like to talk about that. If we get drugs out of white middle class communities, we all feel much better about it, even if they’re still extremely bad in black communities.

With this program that you just saw, we’re getting saturation among all children. We’re getting twice as much saturation in Black communities and in Hispanic communities because the problem is bigger and there’s greater focus on it. This is a guy who keeps his commitments.

But in addition, this program lets kids know and parents know that this ain’t your - you know that ad that used to be out there, used to be called, ‘It ain’t your father’s Oldsmobile.’ Well those of you who are out of the sixties, this ain’t your father’s marijuana. It’s a different deal. It’s a hell of a lot more potent. It’s a hell of a lot different than it was in the sixties. So we’ve got to educate parents as well.

In addition to doing that, what they’ve decided to do is two things that I think are incredibly important. I’ll conclude with this and the General spoke to it: drugs are crime. These kids using marijuana are incubators for crime. And those hard core criminals, those hard core addicts that are mentioned, the ones we least like to try to focus on, have to commit somewhere in the order of 162 felonies a year to keep their habits going. It doesn’t take a lot of math to figure out that if you significantly impact the drug problem, you significantly impact crime.

One of the things we did at the federal level years ago is we decided we were going to treat people in federal prisons. One of the Republican initiatives, with Democratic support, was to do that for the states. This has been adopted. There’s going to be a significant effort to get states to deal with zero tolerance. We let more people out of prisons, in state prisons, addicted to drugs as they walk out the door than there are young people using drugs, hard drugs. And so they’ve decided to deal with prisons as a $75 million increase requested.

Drug courts: they work. We fought over that and fought over that for years. It was Janet Reno’s idea, and she told me about it, and we put in a law a long time ago that now has bipartisan support.

And treatment. You can’t get from here to there. Ultimately, when a person consumes drugs and gets addicted to them, it becomes a disease of the brain, as Pat Moynihan says, and it needs treatment.

And so, I think this is a balanced approach. I’m hoping we have a balanced, bipartisan approach to dealing with it. We will look at it; we’ll look at it closely, and when there’s disagreement, I’m sure we’ll say it. But I am confident that the partisanship is finally moving out of this thing. This isn’t a Democratic or a Republican problem, nor a Democratic or Republican solution. It’s a solution being led by a General who knows what the hell he’s talking about, who has taken no prisoners, who has laid out in detail a hard, cold statistical analysis of where we’re going, what we have to do, and what goals we have to meet.

It’s a long way to go; but I’m confident that the combination of a bipartisan approach in the United States House of Representatives and in the Senate, led by the guy who’s been the spearhead of all of this, the Vice President of the United States, we’re going to be able to get it done.

I have the great honor of being able to introduce a young woman who knows first hand about the toll that drug abuse can take on a family, especially children who grow up in homes where parents are drug abusers. She grew up in a home in California where both her parents were heroin addicts. Her mother is in recovery, but her father is still fighting against the tremendous lure of drugs. Nevertheless, this young woman, Jessica Hulsey, whom I’ll introduce in just a second, has become a national spokesperson on the dangers of drug abuse.

She received a scholarship from Princeton University, from which she graduated last year. Subsequently, Jessica was named last fall to be a member of the President’s Drug Free Communities Advisory Commission, which I am proud to have supported in the last Congress along with many others. Jessica is an example of someone who has made and continues to make a difference in the fight against drug abuse. She knows of what she speaks. I now would like you all to meet Jessica.

I. Introduction

It is an honor to be with you today. This has been a momentous week for American foreign policy. I don’t know how else to say it. To the surprise of many, NATO for the first time has taken offensive action to deter ethnic cleansing in Kosovo.

When the Council asked me to speak about two months ago, I looked at the calendar, and saw that the NATO summit was coming, and that we would just have welcomed three new members into the alliance.

This would be an opportune time to talk about the future of NATO — the challenges, the adjustments, the costs. In particular, I planned to talk about the importance and the difficulty of keeping NATO united on Kosovo. Kosovo was a big test.

After this week, I think NATO has passed that test, at least the first phase. But there are more hurdles ahead for NATO in Kosovo. NATO has to see this crisis through. By that I mean - either get a verifiable agreement that the “cleansing” will stop or render Milosevic incapable of of continuing the repression.

There’s something of an irony here. Most Americans will not consider NATO a 21st century alliance if it cannot deal effectively with a crisis in Kosovo, its own backyard. But it’s also true that most Americans probably don’t understand what happened in Kosovo or what’s at stake. NATO has to make the case.

II. History of the conflict

Why are we bombing Kosovo? There is a two-word answer: Slobodan Milosevic. He has massed more than 40,000 troops on the border of kosovo and has launched scorched-earth attacks on the Kosovo Liberation Army and ethnic Albanian civilians within the province.

His goal was once and for all to drive thousands of Kosovars from the province of Kosovo before NATO could intervene.

He may be trying to create an Albanian-free zone in northern Kosovo in preparation for a partition of the province. We just don’t know his exact intentions, other than he’ll do anything to stay in power.

But to really understand the crisis, we have to go back further — six hundred years in fact – to 1389, on a place called Blackbirds’ Field, near present-day Pristina. There, medieval Serbian knights were defeated by the Ottoman Turks. This led to five centuries of Turkish domination of most of the Balkans — and the Serbs have been trying to undo that humiliation ever since.

But there’s a problem: ethnic Albanians also claim Kosovo as their own. They trace their roots there even farther back than can the south Slavs.

And, in 1974, when all of all of Yugoslavia was united under Marshal Tito, the communist dictator, the Kosovar Albanians were granted autonomy within the republic of Serbia. The Albanians were allowed local control, while border security and foreign relations remained in the control of Belgrade.

Over the next fifteen years the Serb population in Kosovo dropped from one quarter to less than one-tenth. Why? There was a higher birth rate among the Kosovar Albanians; “buy-outs” of many Serbian homesteads by Kosovars; the desire of many Serbs to move to the more prosperous Serbia proper; there was some harassment of Serbs by Kosovars — although nothing approaching the “ethnic cleansing” that is now being carried out by the Serbs.

With Tito’s death, Yugoslavia began to fall apart. In Serbia an ambitious young politician named Milosevic engineered a coup against the communist leadership. He had ambitions beyond Serbia proper: he sought to extend his power to Serb-inhabited regions of Yugoslavia outside of Serbia.

In 1989, on the six hundredth anniversary of the Serbs’ historic defeat, Milosovic traveled to Blackbirds’ Field and delivered a nationalist speech.

He promised that no Serb would ever again be pushed around. With communism gone as a cause, Milosevic had found a new route to power: rabid nationalism and ethnic hatred.

That same year, Milosevic revoked Kosovo’s autonomy. The following year the parliament and government of Kosovo were abolished.

A purge of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo followed. Thousands were fired from their civil service jobs, and the Serbian government cut off funding to the basic institutions of society.

How did the Kosovars react to these violations of their human and civil rights? Peacefully at first: the Kosovars set up a parallel, unofficial system of governance — schools, hospitals, and the other basic institutions. Under Dr. Ibrahim Rugova’s leadership, they held to a policy of non-violence for nearly seven years.

I do not know of any other example anywhere of such self-restraint in recent years. Only later did they become radicalized.

It’s amazing what happens to people when their homes are burned, their children are executed before their eyes, and they are forced to flee into the mountains.

III. Recent events

The United States was not totally ignoring Milosevic. In December, 1992, President George Bush sent a warning — the so-called “Christmas Warning”. In a letter delivered Milosevic and the commander of the Yugoslav army, Bush said that the United States was prepared to intervene militarily if Serbia attacked the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.

Perhaps because of this “Christmas Warning,” Milosevic refrained for four years from an all-out military assault on the Kosovars, content to use repression instead.

The Kosovars waited in vain for the west to help. They hoped their cause would be on the agenda at the Dayton peace negotiations in November 1995, but at the insistence of Milosevic, the talks were restricted to Bosnia and Herzegovina.

By 1996, armed Kosovar resistance began under the loosely organized Kosovo Liberation Army.

Milosevic saw an opportunity. To divert the Serbian people’s attention from the massive failure of his authoritarian communist regime, he undertook the systematic campaign against the KLA, in the process seeking to drive the ethnic Albanian population out of large areas of Kosovo.

Until this week, the west took note of these atrocities but could not deter them. The United Nations Security Council has passed two important resolutions — numbers 1160 and 1199 (1998), decrying the repression and calling for an end to them. Milosevic publicly agreed to the U.N. demands, and then continued his terrorism.

Last October, under threats of NATO military action, Holbrooke and Milosevic reached agreement on a plan to end the massacres and move toward an interim agreement on the future status of Kosovo.

A ceasefire was to take effect, monitored by unarmed NATO aircraft, and international compliance verifiers were to be allowed into Kosovo.

But Milosevic treated this agreement as a “scrap of paper.” The Yugoslav government flagrantly violated it.

Rather than the twelve thousand five hundred regular army troops, and the six thousand five hundred special police called for — a total of nineteen thousand — they stationed forty thousand Yugoslav soldiers and Serbian special police in the province.

As for the ceasefire — it very quickly became a total joke. But Milosevic allowed the international observers in. So we have a documented, ongoing pattern of warfare, both against units of the Kosovo liberation army, but especially against innocent Kosovar civilians.

The most widely publicized massacre was perpetrated by the Serbs on January 15, 1999 in the village of Racak. There, forty-five Kosovar Albanian civilians were slaughtered. The Serbs, of course, asserted that they were KLA fighters who had either been killed in combat or had been shot while fleeing.

But a Finnish-led team of forensic experts examined the bodies and concluded that most of the victims had been forced to kneel and had then been executed by small-arms fire.

Another massacre occurred this week in the village of Srbica.

And during the past ten days the Yugoslav army and the Serbian special police have gone on the offensive, seizing the high ground above roads and railroads, moving in their most modern weaponry including M-72 and M-84 tanks, and conducting search and destroy missions against Kosovar villages suspected of harboring KLA sympathizers.

The net result is a new flood of refugees now approaching the four hundred fifty thousand reached last fall. To date approximately two thousand Kosovar Albanian and Serbian civilians have been killed so far in the conflict.

IV. What have been the results?

More than four hundred thousand Kosovar Albanians have been driven from their homes, including tens of thousands during the past ten days. Thousands of homes in hundreds of villages in Kosovo have been razed to the ground.

One-quarter of Kosovo’s livestock has been slaughtered, and ten percent of its arable land burned. A food blockade has been imposed upon large segments of its population.

Back in October, immediately after the agreement between Ambassador Holbrooke and Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic was made public, I said: “We must never again allow racist thugs like Milosevic to carry out their outrages while the alliance dawdles.” It took several months, with more massacres and more refugees, but NATO is no longer dawdling.

V. What’s at stake

Yet there is still a great unease in Washington, and around the United States, about NATO’s action. Why should we care if Kosovo burns? Explaining this operation is itself an important test for NATO, and for U.S. foreign policy.

We are a European power. Since the end of World War II, our strategy has been to promote stability in Europe through the spread of democracy. For fifty years NATO has been the umbrella under which our European allies have survived and prospered.

Since the end of the cold war, we have extended this zone of stability eastward. We enlarged NATO. NATO entered into partnerships with many countries in the region. Over time, these countries may even join NATO. But in the short-run we have formed productive relationships with Russia and others in the region.

This policy has helped move several countries toward real democracy and toward healing their own domestic ethnic tensions.

Finally, we have determined to oppose the aggressive policies of demagogues who are trying to stir up ethnic and religious hatred. Milosevic is such a demagogue, and if his scorched-earth “ethnic cleansing” is allowed to continue, the result will be greater instability in this part of Europe. I believe the national interests of the United States and other NATO members are directly threatened by actions of the Yugoslav government in Kosovo.

Let me be more specific about the dangers we face. This is the Balkans, an area that already has spawned one world war in this century. There is little doubt that continued ethnic cleansing of ethnic Albanians by the Serb interior ministry special police and the Yugoslav army will create thousands — if not hundreds of thousands — of refugees.

We saw that last fall when about four hundred fifty thousand Kosovars were displaced from their homes and forced to flee. These people are called “displaced persons,” not “refugees,” because they have stayed within the boundaries of their own country, even if they are hiding in the mountains.

No one believes they would stay in Kosovo indefinitely if the Serbs are allowed to continue their murderous rampage. They would logically conclude that the west has given Milosevic carte blanche to do what he wants with “his Albanians.”

So they’ll head for the borders, and the Serbs will be only too happy to let them leave. After all, the whole point of this vile “ethnic cleansing” is to get the Serbs into a majority position in Kosovo’s population.

Thousands of Kosovars will cross into Albania and Macedonia, and some will undoubtedly cross into Montenegro. To an extent, these refugee movements have already occurred.

But what happens if it becomes a flood across the borders?

Macedonia, the only former Yugoslav republic that seceded peacefully, has a highly unstable ethnic mix: two-thirds Macedonian slavs, nearly one-third ethnic Albanians, plus a smattering of other groups. The ethnic Albanians do not feel like fully-empowered citizens. Their language is not officially recognized. Few ethnic Albanians serve in the Macedonian civil service or military.

Last fall, however, a young, conservative Macedonian political leader named Georgievski was elected prime minister, and he has reached out to the ethnic Albanians, including some of their most assertive leaders in his coalition government.

But if thousands of desperate, radicalized Kosovars stream over the border into Macedonia, the delicate ethnic balanced will probably be tipped.

Despite the good intentions of the new Macedonian government, violence would likely result.

The picture gets worse. Many observers believe that Turkey would not stand idly by if fellow Muslims are being persecuted in Macedonia.

If the Turks intervened, the Greeks, who border on Macedonia and have a long involvement there, would surely counter the Turks and attempt to protect the slavic Christians. We would have the nightmare — averted only narrowly several times in the last few decades — of two NATO allies fighting each other.

If this sounds far-fetched, one need only read the history of the bloody ethnic violence in Macedonia over the past hundred years.

Then there is Albania. It is the poorest country in Europe. It has a per capita gross domestic product about one-twentieth that of the wealthiest western European countries.

During riots that erupted two years ago, armories were plundered, and hundreds of thousands of AK-47 assault rifles wound up on the street. As a result, Albanian society is lawless. The central government has only nominal control in many parts of the country, especially in northern Albania, which borders on Kosovo.

If the KLA is expelled from Kosovo, northern Albania would become their prime staging area. This would increase the risk of raids on the KLA by Serbs crossing into Albania. That’s a much more dangerous situation than we have today.

Moreover, a wave of Kosovar refugees into Albania would probably induce many Albanians to flee to Italy across the Adriatic. This has happened before, and it destabilized Italian domestic politics much the way the Haitian refugees in Florida affected our own.

Once in Italy, refugees could travel freely, and undoubtedly they would head north in search of jobs — but unemployment is already a problem in Europe.

If the countries of the European Union — the bastion of democracy and our most important investment and trading partners — suffer economically, it will hit Americans where it hurts: in their wallets.

About one-third of our economy now depends on exports. So if wealthy west Europeans bear the costs of sheltering refugees from the Kosovo conflict — or the cost of sending them back — and must pay more unemployment compensation to their own workers who have lost jobs to refugees willing to work for next-to-nothing, these Europeans will be less able to buy our products. It’s that simple.

If Albania is destabilized, its Greek minority could suffer discrimination. The Albanian Greeks have demanded more cultural autonomy in the past, and very modest progress has been made.

If that progress were reversed — or if there were attacks on the ethnic Greeks who are slightly better off than the ethnic Albanians — there could be a response from the government of Greece. Then Turkey might intervene, precipitating a conflict between two NATO allies.

Then there is Montenegro, the junior partner with Serbia in what is left of Yugoslavia. It’s a mountainous place of six hundred thousand hardy souls. Not a likely place to accomplish a democratic and economic turn-around, but that’s exactly what has been going on there. Their young president, Milo Djukanovic, whom I met a few years ago, is a former communist youth leader who now runs a democratic government with representation from all ethnic groups — the slavic Orthodox Christians, the Albanians, and the Slavic Muslims. Moreover, he has privatized the economy. Djukanovic is now seen by Milosevic as a serious potential threat within Yugoslavia.

If the Serbs are allowed to continue their rampage in Kosovo, Milosevic would could easily be tempted to attack Montenegro in an effort to unseat Djukanovic. This is not far-fetched. This is a very real danger.

There is also the “demonstration effect” of allowing Milosevic to conduct his ethnic cleansing with impunity. Let me note just a few of the quarrels that could quickly heat up if tyrants elsewhere thought they could get away with persecuting their own minorities.

About nine percent of Romania’s population is ethnic Hungarian. Largely thanks to its desire to join NATO, the Romanian government has reached an accommodation with the Hungarians, but a right-wing party still is spouting ethnic hatred. If the social and economic situation in the area deteriorates, these radicals could gain influence. Slovakia has a large Hungarian minority in the south. Past antagonisms persist and tensions could escalate in Slovakia if the Serbs get away with their ethnic cleansing in Kosovo.

Ukraine has an ethnic Russian population approaching one-fifth of the total. The situation has not polarized along ethnic lines except in the Crimea, but unbridled ultra-nationalism in Serbia could stir people up, especially with Ukraine’s economic troubles.

Neighboring Bulgaria is also trying valiantly to reform. Its government reversed the 1980s communist persecution of the ethnic Turkish minority. But organized crime is a cancer in the body-politic. Refugees, ethnic cleansing, and a destabilization of Macedonia — which many Bulgarians consider to be a part of Bulgaria anyway — could wreck the reforms in Bulgaria.

Let me be very clear: none of these potential crises, taken alone, would directly threaten the United States. But the history of this century has shown that in a relatively short time the kinds of instability I have described could carry a higher cost than the current air strikes. “Pay now, or pay more later.”

But let me ask you–what will we have left our children and grandchildren if we allow one man to begin to reverse the process of unification and stability that has been underway for the past 54 years? At the cost of billions of U.S. dollars and the stationing of thousands of American troops?

Finally, there is the question of NATO’s credibility, and American credibility as NATO’s leader. NATO has already identified ethnic and religious quarrels as the greatest danger facing the alliance.

In addition, NATO has already warned Milosevic many, many times not to continue his bloody repression in Kosovo.

If NATO hadn’t acted this week, its viability would have been questioned, and properly so.

And if NATO begins to lose its rationale for being, the entire European security architecture that the United States has painstakingly built over the last five decades will be at risk.

VI. Conclusion

The situation in the Balkans is complex and fraught with danger. I do not know how the NATO operation will turn out. No one knows. There are no guarantees in foreign policy, especially in the post-Cold War era.

But I believe the president and our NATO allies made the right decision. American interests are too intertwined with Europe to let instability spread. The risks of not acting outweigh the risks of action. But it will be weeks, perhaps months, before we know how this crisis will turn out.