Remarks to the Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom Policy conference

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, March 6, 1995

March 1, 1995

To Tricia and John Taylor and all the people from the Nixon Center; our distinguished guests from Germany and from Russia; of course, to Henry Kissinger - I was thinking when he said we both spoke with accents, judging from the results of the last election, his native country is still claiming him more than mine is claiming me. [Laughter] But I'm a big one for reconciliation - [laughter] - and there's plenty of time to achieve it.

I am honored to be here tonight. Just a month before he passed away, President Nixon wrote me the last letter I received from him about his last trip to Russia. I told some people at the time that it was the best piece of foreign policy writing I had received, which angered my staff but happened to be the truth. [Laughter] And as with all of our correspondence and conversations, I was struck by the rigor of his analysis, the energy of his convictions, and the wisdom of the practical suggestions that he made to me.

But more than the specifics of the letter, which basically argued for the imperative of the United States continuing to support political and economic reform in Russia, I was moved by the letter's larger message, a message that ran throughout Richard Nixon's entire public life and all of his prolific writings. President Nixon believed deeply that the United States simply could not be strong at home unless we were strong and prepared to lead abroad.

And that made a big impression on me. When I was running for President in 1992, even though there was this little sticker up on the wall of my campaign headquarters that said, "It's the economy, stupid," I always said in every speech that we had to have two objectives. We had to restore the American dream for all of our people, but we also had to make sure that we move into the next century still the strongest nation in the world, and the world's greatest force for peace and freedom and democracy.

Tonight I want to talk about the vital tradition of American leadership and our responsibilities, those which Henry Kissinger mentioned and those which President Nixon recognized so well. Our mission especially I want to discuss: to reduce the threat of nuclear weapons.

Today if we are going to be strong at home and lead abroad, we have to overcome what we all recognize I think is a dangerous and growing temptation here in our own land to focus solely on the problems we face here in America. I want to focus on the problems we face here in America. I've tried to do it for the last 2 years. I look forward to working with this new Republican-led Congress in the next 2. But not solely.

There is a struggle now going on between those of us who want to carry on the tradition of American leadership and those who would advocate a new form of American isolationism. A struggle which cuts curiously across both party and ideological lines. If we're going to continue to improve the security and prosperity of all our people, then the tradition of American leadership must prevail.

We live in a moment of hope. We all know that. The implosion of communism and the explosion of the global economy have brought new freedoms to countries on every continent. Free markets are on the rise. Democracy is ascendant. The slogan says, "after victory." Today, more than ever before, people across the globe do have the opportunity to reach their God-given potential. And because they do, Americans have new opportunities to reach theirs as well.

At the same time, the post-cold-war world has revealed a whole web of problems that defy quick or painless solutions: aggression of rogue states, transnational threats like overpopulation and environmental degradation, terrible ethnic conflicts and economic dislocation. But at the heart of all these complex challenges, I believe, lies an age-old battle for power over human lives, the battle between the forces of freedom and tyranny, tolerance and repression, hope and fear. The same idea that was under attack by fascism and then by communism remains under attack today in different ways all across the world, the idea of the open society of free people.

America leadership is necessary for the tide of history to keep running our way, and for our children to have the future they deserve. Yet, there are some who would choose escapism over engagement. The new isolationists oppose our efforts to expand free trade through GATT or NAFTA, through APEC and the Summit of the Americas. They reject our conviction that democracy must be nurtured with investment and support, a conviction that we are acting on from the former Soviet Union to South Africa. And some of them, being hypocritical, say that we must trumpet the rhetoric of American strength, and then at the same time, they argue against the resources we need to bring stability to the Persian Gulf or to restore democracy to Haiti or to control the spread of drugs and organized crime around the world or even to meet our most elemental obligations to the United Nations and its peacekeeping work.