Security Cooperation 2001 Conference - Henry J. Hyde address - Excerpt

DISAM Journal, Fall, 2001 by Congressman Henry J. Hyde

[The following are excerpts of the remarks of the Honorable Henry J. Hyde presented to the Security Cooperation 2001 Conference, September 26, 2001.]

With the September 11, 2001 attack on the United States, we have once again been awakened to the reality that the U.S. has mortal enemies. The enemy does not desire compromise; they are not interested in negotiation. The U.S. suffering does not give them human pause; indeed, they celebrate it. They do not seek the U.S. mere defeat. They are intent on the U.S. destruction.

The United States' most immediate task is to hunt down and destroy those who participated in these cold-blooded assaults. However, because the U.S. purpose is not merely to extract revenge but to ensure its security, the U.S. cannot stop there. Instead, the U.S. goal must be to strike at and eliminate all those engaged in planning future horrors. The U.S. must accept that the U.S. has many implacable enemies in this world, and the U.S. must not shrink from doing what it needs to do disable or destroy them. I hope that the U.S. has taken that lesson to heart.

Without question, the U.S. was unprepared for what took place, despite the many warnings that now seem obvious in retrospect. The U.S. efforts must now concentrate on ensuring that it is fully prepared for whatever assaults may yet come. But in examining the reasons for the U.S. unpreparedness, one which seems particularly prominent to me is the false sense of security that has arisen from the U.S. enormous political, military, and economic strength. That great strength gave many the fatal illusion that the U.S. was invulnerable, that its enemies were vanquished, that it faced no real challengers, and that the U.S. was free to act or react as the we saw fit. The End of History, some termed it. But the U.S. unwillingness to deal with the world as it is, rather than as the U.S. hoped it might be, has greatly encouraged those who seek to do us harm. I fear the U.S. may have forgotten the great lesson of the past century: that the price for tolerating aggression is paid in blood and destruction.

The implications of this attack are so extensive that they will occupy the attention of the U.S. government and society for years to come. But in addressing the newly prominent threat posed by terrorism, the U.S. must not make the mistake of forgetting that the United States has many other interests around the world and that it faces many other threats. The U.S. may encounter many more unpleasant surprises unless we. begin to prepare for them now.

Even as the U.S. reacts to this crisis, the larger question before us is how will we use the enormous power the U.S. currently possess to secure the future for our country and the generations to come. The wealth of opportunities the U.S. currently possess are not permanent; its choices may in fact become increasingly narrow as the world evolves. The U.S. may have once believed that it would always be above the fray, untouched and untouchable by the forces of destruction at work in this world. But that has now been demonstrated to be a dangerous illusion.

Once again, the United States agenda has been set for us instead of by us. Once again, the U.S. is responding to the world instead of shaping it.

The principal problem, the one which the U.S. must begin to address in a more disciplined manner, is that the U.S. has no long-term strategy, no practical plan for shaping the future and thereby no plan for advancing and defending our interests, a task that must include identifying and disabling our potential opponents before they can do us harm.

Nearly a decade has passed since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and without question the world is a vastly better place because of it. But as that empire fell, it took with it what had been the central organizing principle of our foreign policy for the last half-century. Now I have read and heard many learned discourses and debates on what the new U.S. agenda should be, but I confess that I have yet to see a compelling path identified, much less mapped out, regarding how the U.S. should proceed, how the U.S. should use the power it currently possess to bring into being the world that the U.S. might want.

Instead of a firm course, I see drift. Instead of shaping the evolution of events in pursuit of long-term objectives, the U.S. has been busy responding to problems as they arise, guided by an agenda that has been thrust upon the U.S. by circumstances rather than one the U.S. has it self constructed.

That is not to say that many splendid things have not been accomplished in the past decade-the dismantling of the Soviet empire and the liberation of the eastern half of Europe; the expansion of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO); the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement; the continued spread of democracy; the resolute defense of our allies and the containment of our enemies around the world.

But these and other successes cannot substitute for a long-term vision. Not only does the U.S. risk leaving the future to chance, the U.S. risk losing fundamental things it has grown accustomed to taking for granted. Let me illustrate my point with couple of examples.