Secretary Of State Pompeo Mentions Libertad Act Lawsuits In Speech At University Of Kentucky
/Diplomatic Realism, Restraint, and Respect in Latin America
12/02/2019 02:09 PM EST
Michael R. Pompeo, Secretary of State
University of Louisville
Louisville, Kentucky
Excerpts….. [BOLD added]
SECRETARY POMPEO: Good morning. (Applause.) Thank you. Thank you all very much. Good morning. It’s great to be here. You have beautiful weather down here in Kentucky. (Laughter.)
Senator McConnell, thank you so much for that gracious introduction. It is – Senator McConnell has truly been a great partner of mine, of the State Department, of the Central Intelligence Agency, in his role as the leader in the United States Senate.
It’s great to be back in Kentucky. You know politicians always talk about being back, but this is true. I was stationed down at Fort Knox not once, but twice. I know every bar in Elizabethtown. (Laughter.) It’s been a couple decades, but I’ll bet I could still find them. (Laughter.)
I do want to thank, too, the McConnell Center and the University of Louisville for having me here. It’s difficult to come on campus. The last time I interacted with the University of Louisville, you were beating
Back in May, I spoke at a place called the Claremont Institute out in California. I used those remarks to talk about President Trump’s vision for American foreign policy, and I told that group that President Trump is within the American tradition, but is staring at this from the perspective of how the Founders thought about American foreign policy. There were three central ideas if you go back and read.
First was this idea of realism. You have to stare at the problem set as it is, not as you wish it were to be.
The second idea is restraint: understanding that we live in this unbelievably exceptional nation. We have an enormous privilege as American citizens, and we have a special role to play in that world; but our power is not limitless, and sometimes we must make difficult choices. And I’ll talk about that a little bit more this morning.
And the third idea is respect: respect for our American principles and how other nations choose to run their affairs inside of their own countries.
And I want to talk about that today in the context of a place that gets too little attention from us here in the United States, and it’s the work that we do here in the Western Hemisphere, the place that we all live. I looked at the list of where my previous – where the previous secretaries of state has traveled, and too often there was neglect to the places most close to us. I want to start with the big picture in Latin America.
In just the last few years, we’ve seen some truly remarkable things. Many nations have made a sharp turn towards democracy and capitalism, good government, away from dictatorship and socialism and the corruption that has been endemic in some of those countries.
You see this just in the past few weeks. The Bolivians are rebuilding their democracy even as we sit here today. No one in the region any longer believes that authoritarianism is the way forward, that it’s the right path, whether you stare at the people in Cuba or in Nicaragua or in Venezuela. They all can see the path forward is different from what they have been living.
When I was in Chile back in April, we saw how people there used their new democratic power for good causes. In July, nations of the region got together and began their first concerted effort to combat terrorism. Argentina designated Hizballah as a terrorist organization – first time ever that they had contemplated something like that.
Regional multilateral organizations too, like the Organization of American States and the Lima Group are members of a treaty called the Rio Treaty. They have taken the lead. They have allowed America to be the supporting effort in helping the Venezuelan people move towards achieving their desire for freedom, liberty, and to simply take care of their own families.
It was the summer, just a few months ago, when the Organization of American States put out its first ever statement affirming the right to religious freedom, something this administration has taken to heart and worked on tirelessly.
And Bolivia, as I said before, appointed its first ambassador to the United States in over a decade.
There is more democratic cooperation in our hemisphere today than at any point in history, and we’re proud of the fact that we have been a part of helping them get to that place.
We do this for a couple of reasons. This gets to how President Trump thinks about the world. We support it because people should be free to exercise their unalienable right to self-government. We support it because political freedom goes hand in hand with economic freedom, and economic flourishing, and trade with these nations benefits the people here in Kentucky and all across America. And we support it, too, because it’s simply the right thing to do.
Authoritarian regimes don’t go easily, however. Take a look at Maduro; he’s hanging on today. He rules Venezuela, but will never again govern it. But make no mistake, he and other dictators like him will work to continue to suppress their people.
Cuba, too, has tried to hijack legitimate democratic protests in its country and in the region to drive them towards their ideologic ends. Colombia has closed its border to Venezuela out of concern that protesters from – terrorists from Venezuela might enter. And the Maduro regime continues not to place any value on human life and human suffering, and their current lawful president, Juan Guaido, is working diligently to achieve that freedom for their people.
You see, too, malign interference in the region. We’ve worked tirelessly to push back against it. Today, in Venezuela, Rosneft, which is Russia’s state-backed oil company, continues to prop up the corrupt and illegitimate Maduro leadership. They take billions of dollars out of the Venezuelan economy each and every year.
We’ve tried to drive with moral and strategic clarity the recognition that authoritarianism in our hemisphere is a threat – it’s a threat to us here in the United States. We cannot tolerate these regimes inviting bad actors in, and trying to turn allied democracies into dictatorships. Indeed, the Maduro regime has permitted Iranians to come into their country, posing an even greater threat here to the United States. And we’ve done so in a way that’s been realistic, within the capacity of the American power to achieve the ends that we’re seeking to achieve.
So what did we do? We rolled back the Obama administration’s cuddling up to Cuba by applying heavy new sanctions. We’ve recognized that engagement has not improved Cuba’s regime, it hasn’t made it better; the human rights record was worse, the risk to the Cuban people was worse, and the risk to the United States was worse, and their capacity to influence Venezuela even greater. So we’ve changed that.
We’ve allowed Americans to seek justice by suing the regime in Havana to recover property that it stole a long time ago. It only makes sense when Americans had their stuff stolen to give them a chance to get it back.
And we’ve applauded countries that have expelled Cubans who have come to live as doctors inside of their borders, who were really working on behalf of the government. These doctors – this was a program that’s hard to fathom sometimes. They sent doctors to countries all around the world. They traffic to generate income for the Cuban leadership. So the doctors receive 10 or 20 percent of the revenue that they generate, and the rest goes to fund the Cuban regime.
We see these tyrants in the region for what they are, and we craft policies to confront them, not to appease them. And this really gets to the second point. Our policy on Venezuela is mixed with restraint.
We’ve seen folks calling for regime change through violent means, and we’ve said since January that all options are on the table to help the Venezuelan people recover their democracy and prosperity. That is certainly still true. But we’ve learned from history that the risks from using military force are significant, so we’ve instead worked to deprive Maduro and his cronies of oil revenue that goes to the – that should go to the Venezuelan people in the regime’s pockets. We’ve been ruthless in attacking the drug cartels that traffic drugs into the United States out of Venezuela.
And we built a coalition. This administration has often talked about going it alone. We built a coalition of 57 other allies and partners to maximize both the economic and political pressure that we’ve put on the regime.
And I was talking with Secretary Baker in celebration of 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. He reminded me that there are critiques that say, well, Maduro is still there. You’ve been working on this for months and months and he’s still there. And he reminded me that Eric Honecker was still in East Germany until the day that he was not. And there were articles in the months leading up to that glorious event for freedom across the world that, too, if we do it right and do it well and represent American values, that Maduro, too, will fall. In July of 1989, Nicolae Ceaucescu said capitalism would come to Romania “when apples grew on poplar trees.” And by December he was hanging from a rope. The end will come for Maduro as well. We just don’t know what day.
Our patience, too, can be seen in Nicaragua, where President Trump is working on economic sanctions to restore democracy there. And this demands some level of consistency and relentlessness, and the American people should know that the Trump administration will continue to be relentless.
Secretary Baker reminded me too that in 1950, people were questioning why America hadn’t yet succeeded in bringing down the Soviet Union. Then, one day in 1991, it was also gone. The end came slowly, and then it came really fast. Unending pressure and sensible restraint was the right combination then, and I’m confident that it is now as well.
Lastly, our foreign policy is built on respect. It’s respect for our principles as enshrined in our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution, and respect for how our neighbors and allies run their affairs.
We are so blessed here. America remains the greatest example in democracy in the history of the world.
And so we in the Trump administration will continue to support countries trying to prevent Cuba and Venezuela from hijacking those protests.
And we’ll work with legitimate governments to prevent protests from morphing into riots and violence that don’t reflect the democratic will of the people.
And we’ll be vigilant too. Vigilant that new democratic leaders don’t exploit people’s frustrations to take power, to hijack the very democracy that got them there. That’s the kind of respect that we owe to other governments, for people, so that they can have democracy in their own nations. I’ll end here. So I want to spend – leave plenty of time for questions.
I’m proud of what we’ve done in the region. There remains an awful lot of work to do in our own backyard, in our own hemisphere. The good news is that the sun of democracy is dawning in many places close to us. Whatever its day brings, we’ll approach it with our friends in a spirit of realism and restraint and support for the peoples of our region.
Thank you, and God bless you. God bless Kentucky. And God bless the United States of America. Thank you for having me. (Applause.)
