Executive Session

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. SULLIVAN. Madam President, as we all know, our country is facing a lot of challenges, particularly overseas, and a lot of them are in the news--Iran, Syria, North Korea. When you look out across the landscape of what the big, long-term, geostrategic challenges are that face our Nation, in my view, there is no doubt that the No. 1 challenge economically and from a national security standpoint is the rise of China as a great power. We need to be thinking about that a lot more because that is going to be the issue our country faces, not just this year or next year but for decades.

I come from the great State of Alaska. We are an Asia-Pacific State. We are always looking to that region--as a matter of fact, we are in that region. My hometown of Anchorage is closer to Tokyo than it is to Washington, DC. What I see as a positive on this issue--having been someone in this body for a little over 3 years, I have come down to the floor and talked a lot about this challenge, the rise of China. It is a little concerning that a couple of years ago nobody was talking about it. Very few people were talking about it, but that is changing, and I think that is positive.

It is changing. This administration is focusing, and it is changing with my colleagues--Democrats and Republicans. Certainly, this is an area where, I think, there is a lot of agreement. I was just presiding for the last hour. The majority whip and the Senator from Oklahoma both were talking about issues dealing with China and trade and strategy, and that is positive.

The administration is talking about it. If you look at the national security strategy of the Trump administration, they are starting to focus on this issue. Front and center is the return of great power rivalries, with China as the leading, pacing threat and challenge, but it is also an opportunity for this great Nation of ours.

When you look at the history of our country, particularly post-World War II, the United States set up the international system--the international trading system and security system. We have been leading them, and so many countries--hundreds of millions of people in the world--benefited from that. The irony, of course, is that the one country that benefited probably more than almost anyone is China.

The rise of China was not only helped, but it was spurred by the American international trading system, the sealanes of commerce that we have kept open for decades. So there was a moment in the last couple of decades where we reached out very much--there was a great speech by our former Deputy Secretary of State in the Bush administration, a gentleman by the name of Bob Zoellick, who went on to become head of the World Bank. He asked in a speech to the Chinese: You need to now become a responsible stakeholder in this system that we created because you have benefited so dramatically. You are big, you are powerful, and now help become a stakeholder in the international order that we set up. Here is the offer to you.

Well, unfortunately, whether it is a Democrat or Republican, in the national security and foreign policy realm, most people are sensing that China has rejected that notion. No, we are not going to be a responsible stakeholder in your system. We are going to set up our own system. As a matter of fact, we might even try to undermine your system--the global system set up by the United States of America by Democrats and Republicans over decades.

You see it everywhere, whether it is decades-long theft of intellectual property, whether it is high tariffs, whether it is any American company coming into China and being forced to transfer their technology. No other countries do this to China, but they are doing it to our companies and have been doing that for decades.

So there is a rethinking right now. Clearly, the Trump administration is thinking about what the new strategy should be. The national security strategy of this administration, which I commend people to read--it is quite a good document, written by the outgoing National Security Advisor, H.R. McMaster--focuses a lot on this issue of reciprocity and great power rivalry again.

So as we are thinking about it, I would like to briefly touch on three principles I think will be key as we debate this. As we help formulate this--hopefully, in a bipartisan manner--this issue is going to be with us for decades. There are three key principles.

The first key principle is reciprocity--true reciprocity. The majority whip was just talking about this. The national security strategy of the Trump administration talks a lot about it. The President talks a lot about this. This is just a fairness issue. As I mentioned, there is IPR theft; high tariffs; the forced tech transfer from American companies to China; giant, subsidized, state-owned enterprises and state-backed investment funds buying up companies all over the world. No other country does that to China.

So when you look at the issue of reciprocity, I would like to break it down into a positive and negative. You have negative reciprocity. If we can't do that in your country, you shouldn't be able to do it in our country. It is pretty simple, pretty fair, and everybody understands that.

Then there is positive reciprocity. One thing I have been encouraging the Chinese to do for many years--and I have been over there a lot and spent a lot of time with senior leaders in that country. The United States has been going over and investing in China for decades. Factories have been rebuilt from the ground up and we have employed tens of thousands of Chinese with American capital. Well, you know what, China is getting big enough. They can do that in America. The Japanese did that in the 1980s. We had major trade disputes with them. What did they do? They started coming to our country and investing in our States with their capital, greenfield investments--auto factories, for example--and employing tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of Americans. We would welcome that. As a matter of fact, in Alaska, the Chinese are talking about helping us develop a large-scale Alaska natural gas project. Greenfield investment, employing Alaskans would be positive if that is going to happen. So that is the way we need to think about reciprocity.

The second key principle is allies--allies, allies, allies. The United States is an ally-rich nation. Our adversaries and potential adversaries--think about whom that might be: Russia, North Korea, Iran, potentially China. They are ally-poor. No one wants to join the North Korea team or the Iran team--well, maybe Syria--but the United States for decades has had allies because they trust us. We are not a perfect nation, but they trust us. Look all over the world.

So what we need to do with regard to our strategy on China is make sure we remember not only our allies and deepen current relationships with Japan, with Korea, with Australia, but expand them--Vietnam. The Presiding Officer and I went to Vietnam with the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, a war hero who spent time in prison in Vietnam, Senator McCain. The Vietnamese are very interested in doing more with us. India, there are incredible opportunities to have a deeper alliance between the oldest democracy in the world, us, and the biggest democracy in the world, them. So allies have to be a key part of our strategy as we look at how we deal with the rise of China for the next two or three or four or five decades because all of these countries-- all of our allies--are having the same challenges.

Finally, the third principle we cannot lose sight of--and for too long this body lost sight of it--is robust American economic growth. Since the founding of our Nation, we have been growing at about 3 or 4 percent GDP growth. I have a chart, and I talk about it all the time down here. Yet, over the last decade, because of policies we inflicted on the American people, we were barely growing at 1-percent GDP growth. What does that mean? Everybody talks about numbers, wonky. That is a proxy for the American dream, and we were not growing. We weren't growing. In Asia, the coin of the realm of power more than anything-- more than military power--is the power of your economy, and we have not had that. We have not shown up, and that matters.

What we are trying to do in this body now--tax reform, regulatory reform, unleashing American energy--is we are going to start growing this economy again, and that is going to help the American people, that is going to reignite the American dream, but that is going to be key with any policy we deal with China.

So as we are thinking through this challenge--and I am going to talk about this a lot, and I know all my colleagues are interested in this. I know my colleague from Michigan is interested in it--we need to continue to focus on these core principles--reciprocity, our allies, and robust economic growth as we all struggle with and put together a long-term strategy to deal with the rise of China, the challenges and the opportunities.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source