East Asia Relations

Floor Speech

Mr. WEBB. Mr. President, we spend probably the majority of the time when we discuss foreign policy on this floor talking about the crises in places such as Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan. If we talk about East Asia at all, we generally are discussing the economic situation as it portends to the future, especially with China.

But I would like to make a strong point here today; that is, if we don't get it right with our relations in East Asia, we are in very serious trouble as a nation. It is vitally important for the United States to continue to invigorate our relations with all the countries with East and Southeast Asia on economic, security, and cultural levels.

Today, I would like to talk about a few of these issues that are affecting our relations in that part of the world. This weekend, there will be a regional forum for the Asian countries in Bali. Our Secretary of State will be there.

This forum is coming at a pivotal moment with respect to our relations in Southeast Asia and the rest of East Asia. The recent military provocations by China against the Philippines and Vietnam in the South China Sea, which this body passed a resolution deploring, affect the mood of the entire region at this moment. There also have been political transitions in Thailand and in Burma and there are consistent ecological threats in the Mekong River, with hydropower dams up river beginning in China and now also being proposed in Laos.

All of these issues underscore the need for vigorous multilateral engagement in this part of the world and the development of new strategic relationships and the continuity of balance the United States has been bringing to this vital region since the end of World War II.

We are going to be reauthorizing a piece of legislation called the Trafficking Victims Protection Act in this session of Congress. I have an amendment to this act. I think it is an extremely important amendment in terms of our relationship with friends and allies, particularly in East Asia, and with representatives of highly developed governmental systems that have a lot of problems with the way we have implemented this act in the past.

I, similar to everyone in the Senate, fully support the intentions of this legislation and the intentions of the State Department to prevent human trafficking and to assist trafficking victims. But under our present policy, we have a great deal of confusion and, quite frankly, resentment from many of these more developed governmental systems. This present policy requires that a country be ranked against the progress it has made in the past year. In other words, a country is ranked against itself over a period of yearly behavior. This practice doesn't provide countries with a consistent standard by which they might truly measure their efforts against human trafficking versus other countries around the world, and it creates a lot of misunderstandings.

The criteria used to judge a country's efforts are difficult to estimate with any precision. They are often very subjective. For example by placing prosecutions for trafficking as a part of this evaluation over actual successes in areas such as the protection of victims and the prevention of acts in the first place, we get a total misreading of the success that many of these governmental systems actually have been able to bring about.

This is an excerpt from a press release that came out of Singapore's Ministry of Foreign Affairs on June 28 of this year, talking about their ranking under this Trafficking in Persons Report, the TIP Report.

They say: We note that the United States has again unabashedly awarded itself a tier 1 ranking. Yet the New York Times observed--this is from their press statement--that teenage girls coerced into prostitution in the United States are treated not as trafficking victims but as miscreants who are arrested and prosecuted. This is directly opposite to Singapore's approach. The United States also suffers from serious problems with illegal immigrants, many of whom are trafficked by well-organized criminal gangs which seem to operate with impunity.

Singapore, our friend, our ally, and an advanced governmental system by any determination, then says:

On any objective criteria, the United States has a more serious TIP problem compared with Singapore.

Why are they angry? Why do they feel they have not been fairly evaluated? Because they are evaluated against themselves by standards that may not apply. They are not alone, by the way. Singapore is not alone.

The last year's reporting showed Nigeria got a tier 1 rating. Japan, another highly advanced governmental system and culture, got a tier 2 rating. Singapore got a tier 2 watch list rating, which means that they could be in danger of losing a lot of the governmental interactions between our two countries if this continued.

How would they rate a tier 2 if we had a standard where we were evaluating all country systems against one another, rather than this approach we are now using?

Here is a good objective way to see if we cannot answer that question. These are the worldwide ratings from an organization called Transparency International. This is called the Corruption Perception Index, from the same year. From the country rankings for corruption perception, internationally, Singapore is tied for first as the most transparent governmental system. The United States is down here at No. 22--again, below Japan. I mention Japan because under this TIP system, Japan got a tier 2 rating. Nigeria is over here tied for 134th. This is not meant to be critical of the attempts of the Nigerian governmental system to fix their problems, but clearly, if we were evaluating these countries among each other rather than by this very confusing standard, you would not be seeing Singapore with a tier 2 watch list category and Nigeria as a tier 1.

I will have a simple but I think very important amendment to the legislation when it comes forward. It basically will require the State Department to categorize countries, first of all, as either in compliance or not with our legislation and then rank countries on a single scale rather than by year-to-year progress against themselves and to eliminate the special watch list category. It maintains all the other existing criteria we have used in terms of examining whether trafficking in persons is being addressed in these different countries; the extent to which a country is a country of origin, transit, or destination; the extent of noncompliance by the governments, including government officials; and what measures are reasonable to bring the government into compliance. This may seem a small matter on the floor of the Senate, but I can assure you this is not a small matter to countries that have been our friends and allies and have advanced governmental systems and believe they are being wrongly categorized for the rest of the world to see.

I would like to raise one other point today with respect to this part of the world--it goes back to what I said when I first began speaking--regarding issues of sovereignty and freedom of navigation in the South China Sea and recent activities which could quickly reach a level of volatility that we would not like to see and to emphasize again that our country is the No. 1 reason we have had the kind of stability that has existed for the most part in this very volatile region since the end of World War II.

The red lines on this map are the areas in which China claims sovereignty in the South China Sea. As you can see from these lines, it goes all the way past the coast of the Philippines, down into Borneo and Malaysia, up the coast of Vietnam, back into China.

Over the last 10 years, we have seen incidents that people in the United States, including military officials, too often seem to recognize or deal with as tactical challenges rather than strategic data points in terms of the ongoing issues of who actually controls these areas.

These areas are claimed by many different countries. They are the most highly trafficked sealanes, in terms of trade, in the world. Just in the last 1 1/2 years, we have seen an incident off the coast of Okinawa, with a dispute between the Japanese and the Chinese Governments. We have seen a military incident, a provocation by the Chinese off the coast of the Philippines, which was protested by the Philippines. We have seen two incidents off the coast of Vietnam, one in May and one in June. If you look at where these incidents have occurred, they mark the boundaries of the sovereignty claims that have been made by the Chinese.

This body unanimously passed a resolution condemning this use of military actions in disputes that should be resolved in a multilateral way. I am very hopeful that Secretary Clinton will reinforce our concerns in this area.

When I was on ``Meet The Press'' a couple of weeks ago, I said we could be approaching a Munich moment in this region. That comment has been widely circulated. Let me explain what I mean by that. That doesn't mean I see a Hitler out there; that doesn't mean I see a Neville Chamberlain here. What this means is when you have an expansionist power that is making claims that it owns land in disputed areas and is provoking these other countries through the use of military force, you are reaching the edge of a country unilaterally claiming sovereignty over areas that require multilateral solutions. That is not healthy. It is not healthy internationally.

This region historically has been a very volatile region, and the United States is the most important ingredient in making sure these issues are resolved multilaterally and without the use of force. Again, I strongly hope our Secretary of State will reinforce the comments she made last year to the effect that the United States does have a vital interest in resolving these issues in a multilateral way, just as we do, by the way, in resolving the issues with respect to the Mekong River. Rather than having a strong, powerful country insisting only on bilateral adjustments with countries that it totally overpowers. We are the essential ingredient. No one wants to see this issue go the wrong way.

We have the potential of resolving this with China and resolving our relationships with the Chinese Government in a positive way, looking into the future, but it is going to require clear, consistent comments and a credible approach by the U.S. Government.

I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

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