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c-span.org. >> wyoming congresswoman discussed foreign policy issues d relations with china and cuba's influence. this is hosted by the hudson institute. >> thank you all for coming. i would like to our live audience. i'm scooter libby, senior vice president at the hudson institute. some of you may know me better in my former role as a novelist. we have two best selling authors here. i don't like to brag but my sales exceeded triple digits. [laughter] >> it's a pleasure to be in the

prepares of representative liz cheney from wyoming in her second term. she is a member of the armed services committee and natural resources committee and more recently named chairwoman of the house republican conference and makes her the third-ranking republican in the house and the highest ranking women in the house ever -- republican women in the house. according to a widely cited publication "the hill," when she got this appointment -- she was elected -- when you were elected to this > that proves the point. your father said don't screw it

up. and your father said that to me and i never took it as a sign of affection. now it may not surprise you that when she t was 1978 was 12 years old and was recognize at the fair grounds. liz has never been lost when it comes to issues. my pleasure to work along side her three times when she was the principal deputy assistant secretary of state for the middle east. there were some tense times back in those days but she was always informed, inciteful, calm and commanding. from the rise in the house and nation is no surprise to those of us who worked with her. we have walter reed, the distinguished fellow in strategy

and statesmanship at the "wall street journal." i recommend you today's column on the u.s. foreign policy and secretary pompeo's speech which is typical of his great work. and thor of two works, "god and gold and the making of the modern world. he has been praised by historians and diplomats. he is an inciteful columnist and man with a great sense of humor. it was written during theera and begins his novel by exposing air brushing history that is changing history for political ends. decades earlier, a british

novelist did the same. we don't have toe toll tarian or socialists. but now is then, there are the dangers of distorting issues. we have still dangers posed by authoritarian states like iran, china and north korea. we have to foster economic deproth and technology continues to change our military needs, our economy and our world. we are lucky today to have a lented historian and brave chairwoman to understand what lies ahead. walter will begin with the discussion and perhaps at the end we will have discussion. >> thanks, scooter, for that introduction and thanks representative cheney for coming to be here this morning.

the audience has agreed to take questions at the end and so in order to make this process a little more orderly, we have interns will be passing out passes of paper for you to write questions and you can write your name and affiliation on the question and i will take a look and see if i can't group the questions or otherwise do it in a sensible way. she has to leave at 12:50 and we are holding an elevator for her and ask all of us to stay put until she has a chance to get away. the dialogues we have here at hudson with significant figures in public life are not to get away from the normal format of washington jourm is particular or television spruce of sort of gotcha, trying to force people

to respond in soundbites. our purpose here is to give you a chance and give our friends watching on video and television a chance to really get your own sense of what a figure in public life thinks, how they look at the world and then you come to your own conclusions about whether or not you agree with this person's point of view. so i'm not here -- i'm actually here to try to draw out this shy flower here. see if we can't encourage her to speak her mind with us. and the first question i've got, you look around the world today and i don't know when i've seen as many cries sees. the china trade talks causing the stock market to whip lash every day. we have drones attacking saudi plum facilities. we have ships in the petitioner

and gulf. we've got venezuela in chaos. we've got the ukraine situation. a lot of things, where you look around the world. what should american priorities be at this time? ms. cheney: thank you for having me here today. thank you to hudson and scooter for the great introduction and thanks for the opportunity to talk about these issues. you are right, i agree with you. if you look at the world we face and look at the complexity of the challenges, you look at the threats, the number of them, i don't think we have had as complicated as a threaten environment globally since world war ii as the one we face today and it is complicated for a number of reasons. you mentioned some of them. if you look at the threats that we face, we've got the threats

continuing from islamic radical terrorism, iran, north korea. the return of the great power conflict with russia and china and in many cases these threats have arisen during a time period in which our own capabilities were diminishing and you can look at the period of the obama administration and you can see the determination and the determination of the obama administration policies and what was going on in congress and our ability to put in the defense budgets that are necessary. you had a period of decline in the united states and our capability while you are seeing rapid increase in our adverse -- adverse areas' capability. there is a disconnect between what the american public germly believes about our capabilities. we have accustomed to thinking

we will havedom nabs and the disconnect between that germ pleff and the reality where you've got things like the hypercxds hyper sonic weapons and you have what is going on in the cyber world, what is happening in space, you got what is happening with respect to nuclear modernization and so president trump made the right decision over the course of the last two years in terms of allocating the resources necessary, congress approving those resources and appropriating them for the defense budget. but we have to recognize that will be an ongoing challenge and one we captain we provided resources for two years. we have to ensure we continue that buildup. so it is a dangerous world and one where the united states has to remember at all times that

our safety and our security relies upon preeminence and dominance and we have to make sure we are focused on that and make sure and we regain it in areas we lost it. >> how far are we falling short financially. how much more defense budget should we have? ms. cheney: we have had a good few years, $716 billion appropriations. this year, the administration has requested $750 gillion. the challenge that we face in congress is the budget control act and the extent to which the budget control act was put in place in 2011 for reasons that were sound but has had exactly the opposite effect that it was intended to have. people said we need to come together and deal with the debt. what the b.c.a. does is imposes

these caps and has give quen the democrats the ability to demand a dollar of domestic spending for every dollar of increased defense spending. we will see what happens. the negotiations are going on. i don't think we will be at a dollar-for-dollar. if you don't come to an agreement, you face the sequester. i think the sequester, which will hit in i think the sequester would be like taking a meat ax to the defense budget. it's devastating. we're going to need to see, i would say 3% to 5% growth continue for a number of years to come in order to make sure we're doing everything we need to do. mr. mead: that's sort of a $25 billion, $35 billion a year trajectory? yeah.

if you look at our relationship with china, which is probably the country that presents the greatest mix of, i would argue, both opportunities and challenges for the united states, what should our priorities be in that relationship? hat do we want with china? ms. cheney: the chinese have made clear what they want is to diminish america's strength and power globally. they feel that their own future, their own trajectory, their own dominance in the world both virtually and militarily depends upon diminishing us. i think the chinese went to school on what we did in the first gulf war and looked at those weapons systems and have now been very public, frankly, i think that both republicans and democrats got china wrong over the course of a number of years and thought if we simply help encourage china to open up

economically, join the w.t.o., that will see the society open up, you know, from a political perspective and become part of the community of nations. that's not what happened. chinese belligerence, the extent o which chinese techniques attempts to monitor their own society, their own population, are clearly capabilities they would like to export globally. the belton road initiative is not a benign initiative. they pose a real challenge for us. commercially, china is hugely important to us. but having said that, i think that what we're seeing today, and i'm a free trader, but i think if you look at what the president and the administration are doing with respect to the tariffs, i support what they're doing. i think that they're saying look, we can no longer have a situation where the chinese lie. so working very much to get

commitments in writing, working to make sure that there's verification, working to help protect american companies from the kind of intellectual property theft we've seen repeatedly. is crucial. one thing we have to be very careful about when it comes to china is the extent to which you see what we've seen in the south china sea, where, you know, they will continually say president xi committed to president obama that he would not militarize these islands and has clearly gone ahead and done so. their weapons development, weapons systems development, is absolutely targeted at denying us our ability to protect our forces. when we look back at the issue the defense budget, for example, it becomes very, very important that we modernize. very important that we are focused on what's happening in space. and i think from an arms control

perspective what we saw the administration announce what the president is pushing for with respect to new star, we're not going to go down the path where we limit ourselveses in treaties where the russians cheat as they have been doing in the i.n.f. treaty and the chinese aren't party to them. those treaties have to reflect the realities of today's world which means the chinese have to e limited as well. mr. mead: how well do you think the administration is handling the situation in the middle east. ms. cheney: which one? mr. mead: there's a range. we have to look at the whole thing. ms. cheney: i think to start with iran, i completely agree the administration was right to pull out of the ycpoa. i know you all have heard -- the jcpoa. i know you all have heard the arguments previously about the jcpoa but the combination of no real verification system, the

iranians weren't required to disclose past nuclear activity, there were no limits on their ballistic missile activity, instead we shipped $1.6 billion to them and then i heard somebody describe what john kerry after that, which was travel the world acting as basically the head of the chamber of commerce for tehran and helping to encourage people to invest in iran. you've seen exactly the opposite approach now which i think is the right approach. to say, you know, we aren't going to accept a false agreement that brings us some sort of false security about the iranian nuclear program. we are going to do everything possible to exert maximum pressure and that includes the sanctions regime and i think, you know, what you're seeing new is, are the actions of a nation whose economy is being cratered. and that is maximum pressure. we want the iranians cocom back to the table. we want a real deal. but the kind of sort of

belligerent threats you're seeing in the middle east today are ones i think the administration has responded correctly to. making clear that we're not going to be blackmailed that the iranians have got to understand clearly that any attempt, you know, of force against the united states will be met with an overwhelming response. i think we've seen that by the movement of our -- of our assets there. the iranians continuing their nuclear program, continuing to have u.s. taxpayer dollars to fund terrorist activity, is something we simply won't stand for. mr. mead: you hear a lot in the u.s. about human rights in the middle east and the problem with democracy and people will look whether it's at saudi arabia or in egypt or maybe even on the west bank, the palestinian territory, and say shouldn't the u.s. be ding more to promote demkcy, promote human rights in

those countries, how would you respond to that? ms. cheney: yeah, i think it's very important to promote human rights. i think that, you know if you look at the history, though, you'll see that in both the case of egypt and in the case of palestinian authority and the elections, in 2006, that for example, with respect to the p.a., hamas won the election. and in egypt, you had the muslim brotherhood rise. and those are fundamentally anti-democratic movements. and movements that, you know, basically will prevent freedom for all the citizens forever more. so i think it is a challenging set of issues. i think it has to be on the table. but i think it's also important for us to remember that we have other issues that we're focused on with those countries as well and that includes our security and our safety.

mr. mead: the transatlantic relationship has come under a lot of stress in recent months. i guess that's happened before but how important is nato and how important is that transatlantic alliance of the united states and what, if anything, should we be doing to try to strengthen that? ms. cheney: i think nato is the single most successful, most effective military alliance probably in history. and it's crucially important, i think we have to maintain it, we have to strengthen it, i think the united states has got to continue to be a leader. i think it's right, you know, president trump is doing what presidents before him did, to some extent, in terms of saying our partners in nato have to be willing to pay their fair share. and so i think that's crucial. but i also think that, you know, we have to recognize and understand what our interests are. and i do think, you know, that the acknowledgment of the way

that the united states has benefited tremendously beyond measure from the international order that we basically set up that we lead, that's been in place since the end of world war ii, and we saw certainly in the obama administration what can happen if the united states walks away. the idea that the obama administration promoted, and you've written about this, walter that somehow we could pull away from the middle east and hope that the iranians would secure our interests, it was crazy. and today the question for us is, if we aren't the ones helping to set and lead the world and set the rules, by which people operate, then you will have nations like the chinese, like the russians, that step in. and neither the chinese nor the russians share our commitment to freedom, share our commitment to the importance of the individual, share our commitment

to open global commerce around the world. so i think it's very important for us not to step back, there are some voices in both parties that would advocate it but i think that would be the wrong thing to do from our security perspective. mr. mead: there does seem to be kind of a public mood, at least among some, of wanting to pull back a bit. people look at, you know, there was the cold war and then there was, you know, the war on terror and you know, the united states has been engaged all around the world, we have the war in afghanistan that is now -- it's now old enough so that people who weren't born when it began are old enough to fight in it. how do you talk to people who think that maybe some of our problems are that we've been hyper active and that we need to pull back rather than always be in charge and leading internationally? ms. cheney: well, i think that's sort of a dip lamatic way to discuss rand paul's view of the

world, frankly. and the idea that you should blame america for these conflicts. as long as america has adversaries, as long as we have enemies, as long as we have those who want to do us ill, who want to fundamentally destroy what we stand for, we have to decide, are we willing to fight for our values or not? and i don't think that those commitments can be time limited as long as you have adversaries still in the fight and still going to continue to threaten. when i look at afghanistan, for example, i see a situation in which, you know, we need to decide how important is it and i think it's pretty important to prevent our adversaries from being able to establish safe havens, to prevent them being able to establish territory they can control, free of interference from us, which they can plot and plan attacks against us. i think that clearly has got to be our mission. i think we have to be very clearheaded with respect to afghanistan about the extent co-which al qaeda and the

taliban work hand in hand. we've tended to try to distinguish the two but, you know, that is not the reality on the ground. so i think we have to be very willing to protect those interests. and i think we just, we have to accept the fact that saying we're simply going to wash our hands of the world's crises and we're going to come home and withdraw within our borders is absolutely irresponsible. and foolhardy. we are not the cause of the attacks. and if we were to decide tomorrow they were done operating internationally we would invite further attack, actually. the opposite of the result that those who advocate isolationism claim that they're working toward. mr. mead: as you look at your democratic colleagues in the house, would you say that they are -- that we're getting closer to a consensus on some of these? where is democratic party

thinking on foreign policy going? ms. cheney: um. mr. mead: i told you she was very shy, take a lot to try to bring her out. ms. cheney: i think you have several different phenomena under way. think there are no doubt moderate democrats who want to do what's right for the security of the nation. who understand and believe in america's leadership in the world. unfortunately, they're not the loudest voices in their party right now. you know you do have a group of very radical democrats. speaker pelosi said there were only five people in this group. i would tell you that there are at least 30 members of the democratic caucus who vote with alexandria ocasio cortez 95% of the time or more. this is a group of members who

will tell you, most of them, that they believe in socialism. and who seem to think we don't have any adversaries anywhere in the world. and so the question on our national security set of issues, and i would say on pretty much every set of issues, is whether speaker pelosi is going to continue to be captive to those voices. there's a situation today where, you know, moderate democrats will say they will tell you privately, you know, we're afraid to speak up in our caucus meetings because we'll be shouted down or we'll be primaried. you can see if you look at what the democratic presidential candidates are doing, they're rushing to see how far left they can become. how far left they can move. and it's a very dangerous thing for the country. so i'm hopeful, you know, we'll have a real test of this in the next couple of weeks on the armed services committee, we'll be marking up the national defense authorization act. that has been a bipartisan product for the last 58 years.

there are now some suggestions about things we might see the majority on the committee try to put into the ndaa, things that deny america's ability to use tactical nuclear weapons to develop tactical nuclear weapons, language that would prohibit first use in our deterrence policy and strategy. things that would make it very difficult for republicans to vote for that bill. and i hope we will not go down that path. but it'll be a test of how much people are willing, on the democratic side, put aside the radicalism and to come together to do what's right for the nation. mr. mead: are there colleagues on the committee, on the democratic side, who you think understand the problem here? ms. cheney: i think there are, yes. so i think these will be very interesting debates because that committee, i was surprised when i first became a member of that committee in the last congress at how bipartisan it is.

now of course we have battles and disagreements but it is one of the more bipartisan committees in the house and i really believe it needs to stay that way. mr. mead: all right. some of the talk that we hear about israel-palestine relations and u.s. policy there, that may be a place where there has been some real headline creation by some members of the democratic party. what's your take on that? ms. cheney: yeah, look, i think it's sickening. and you know, i think people can have disagreements about, you know, certainly when i was working at the state department we had disagreements about what sort of the overall structure for working toward peace should look like. but what you are seeing today out of some of my colleagues on the democratic side in the house a kind of vitriolic anti-semitism that should have no place in any of our public discourse and i think yesterday

was a really dangerous turning point. before that, i think you could fault the leadership on the democratic side with enabling this kind of discussion. by their silence. when they put a resolution on the floor that they told us was supposed to condemn ilhan omar's remark they removed her name from it, they couldn't get agreement to condemn her by name for what she said previously. yesterday, however, you had both majority leader hoyer and speaker pe he see stand up and defend the comments of one of my colleagues who, you know, in addition to saying that, you know, she felt a calming feeling as she was thinking about the holocaust, her justification for that was then to go on and tell this absolutely -- this fantasy notion of the extent to which the palestinians, in her telling, helped the jewish people during world war ii. the leader of

jerusalem was helping hitler. it's a set of lies meant to delegitimize the state of israel. it's a vitriolic anti-semitism. i believe that the leadership on the democratic side should be ashamed of themselves for failing to stand up and stop it and speak out against it. mr. mead: one of the big differences, it seems, between the parties, or at least parts of the parties in american politics today is that many liberal internationals, let's say, look at international institutions and sort of say, ok the future world politics is that these institutions are going to become more and more powerful, nation states will lose power. and that that is in the u.s. interest and we should be trying to build up sort of a super national, international institutional community that will sort of -- they would argue make war less likely and promote

human rights, fight climate change and so on. where do you stand in that discussion? ms. cheney: i think that's ridiculous. i think that clearly, you know, to put it bluntly, i think that clearly every nation is going to operate and should operate in accord with its interests. i thought that secretary pompeo's speech this last weekend was actually really fascinating on this point in terms of, you know, thinking about, and this is sort of my description of what he said, i'm not putting words in his mouth. but these institutions that we built since world war ii are very important. and our alliances are crucially important. but we also have to reflect and understand the fact that those institutions have got to reflect the modern world and the modern era. and certainly when i was at the state department, you know too many times you would see people saying, well, we've got to work

toward an agreement, we have to work toward an international deal. you then lose sight this happened on north korea many times. you lose sight of how important the substance of the deals are because you are so focused on getting a deal. any deal. and i think, you know, that's where we have to understand and recognize how important it is to negotiate deals that are in our interest. to walk away when the other side, frankly, the -- as the president did with respect to north korea, to walk away when they're not willing to negotiate where we need to. so i think that the international structure is crucial, but i don't think that we should be in a situation where we think somehow that there's some, you know, international law out there that is going to defend freedom and security for the united states. we have to do that and one of the most important ways we do it is by working with our allies and being a leader, being the

leader globally to make sure that there is a world order that we all can continue to live in freedom and security. mr. mead: we haven't talked about the western hemisphere much yet but this is certainly a time when on the u.s. southern frontier with mexico, or in venezuela, we are really seeing some upheaval and crisis. let's start with venezuela. what do you think the u.s. should be doing and what's your reading of the situation there? ms. cheney: i think that we cannot allow a situation to stand where you have the russians, the chinese, the cubans, so actively involved in our own hemisphere so actively involved in terms of the support for the maduro government. and i think when you look at, for example, the fact that we had a couple of weeks ago, the maduro regime burning truckloads of humanitarian supplies for the

people of venezuela, i think we need to be doing everything possible to back guaido and make sure we send a clear message. i think in some ways this is a test. the russians are trying to sort out whether or not they can foment this kind of violence and upheaval in our hemisphere and whether we'll stand for it. i think everyone would like to find a solution that doesn't, you know, require u.s. military force, u.s. troops on the ground. i think that making sure that the venezuelan, the maduro government understands we stand with guaido and we stand with the people of venezuela is very important. mr. mead: there's been talk of seeing cuba as a key pressure point there. do you support administration efforts to put greater pressure on havana. ms. cheney: i do. we had a young man come and speak to the house republican conference a couple of weeks ago. pedron, name is enrique

he escaped on a boat from cuba in 1994. his message was one that was directed toward the so-called democratic socialists in the house. saying look, this is the price i paid for free health care and free education. and i asked him, you know, as a child, what made him recognize that there was an america, this is before the internet, what made him realize it was worth risking his life to get here? he said ronald reagan and ronald reagan's speeches on radio. and the motion of -- and the notion of this land where you could actually be free and people willing to risk all to get here and i think we owe it to the cuban people, we owe it to those who have escaped and have come here, and we owe it to all of us to be honest about the reality of the cuban regime and not let them have the kind of impact and influence they're trying to have in vens way afment

mr. mead: what about the southern border which is a domestic and foreign policy question, what should we be doing about this? ms. cheney: i think the southern border is one of the issues, one of the most partisan, it's become very partisan. and i think there were a number of us who thought, once nancy pelosi has the votes to be speaker, she'll come to the negotiating table, we can have discussions in a realistic, practical way about what's necessary to secure the border because securing the border shouldn't be a partisan issue but that didn't happen. she went from a situation where in the past she and the others on that side supported border security, and fencing and walls, to saying they wouldn't provide $1 for it. we have to secure the border. that's sort of the most fundamental responsibility of any sovereign nation. i don't like the fact that we're

to the point where the president had to declare a national emergency and is reprogramming funds to do it. i think congress should have done its job and we should appropriate the necessary resources. but i also think that while we are making sure that our border is secure, we have to deal with our legal immigration system too. and we have to remember we are a nation of immigrants. at is a noble and historic fact at the heart of who we are. and we need to make sure we're encouraging people to come to this country legally. and that means that our legal immigration system has to work far better than it does now. so i'm hopeful that because the president has now done so much to make sure we're securing our southern border, that we should be able to now move to -- let's have some commonsense agreement about what we can do to make sure that our immigration system works for those who want to come here legally. mr. mead: great. i'm going to switch over now to

some questions from the audience and i don't know if i'll get to all of them but i'll do my best. we have a couple on north korea. asking about their recent missile launches, asking what the u.s. should be doing and is there some kind of a -- is there a prospect of a real solution there? ms. cheney: yes. well. i don't know if there's a prospect far real solution. you know, i think that if you ook at the north korean game plan, they are pursuing the same plan they pursued in the clinton administration, during the bush administration, and it's one where, you know they sort of demand concession after concession after concession and they never actually -- from us, and they never actually produce on their end of the bargain. i think you have to give this administration real credit for saying we're not going to do that anymore. that's where we are now. i think that the president was

right to walk away from the table. and i think that, you know, the north koreans have to recognize and understand that we're not going to play that same game again. in the past, you know, we saw that and i say this with -- scooter was very involved on the correct side of this issue during the bush administration, we had some who weren't, but the fact of that -- the fact of that sort of negotiating tactic is one that we can't allow to continue and i think making sure that the chinese know that we're serious about the sanctions, and making sure we continue to work with the japanese work the south koreans, to help to ensure that the north koreans, if at all possible, move in the right direction, i'm not optimistic. i think that kim jong un has decided his nuclear weapons are more important to him than anything we can offer. but we have to make sure that we are putting maximum pressure and not simply making condition sessions for the sake of saying

we got a deal. that would be very dangerous. mr. mead: if that's true that his nuclear weapons are more important to him than anything we can offer, what's the end game? ms. cheney: i think we have to make sure that the pressure that the north is feeling is pressure that is from us. we have to convince him he's wrong. and we have to make sure that he understands that he's going to be completely cut off and that his society, if it's possible, is experiencing even more of the kind of economic devastation that he has forced them to live under. i think the worst possible thing we could do would be to say, we're so desperate to be able to sign some kind of deal that we agree to the terms of the con -- or the concessions that he's offering is anything short of complete, irreversible nuclear -- denuclearization. mr. mead: we've got a question here on u.s.-russian relations. i guess secretary pompeo is

either today or -- i can't keep track of his schedule because it's changing -- but he was meeting with president putin and foreign minister lab rove in so chee. what's the state of u.s.-russian relations? are we stuck a hostile relationship? is there something that can be den? ms. cheney: look, i think that vladimir putin is an adversary. i think vladimir putin is k.g.b. the successor of the f.s.b. but that's his background. he's a thug. he's not somebody who is working as an ally with us. the obama administration, you know, gave the russians basically entree back into the middle east after they'd been gone since 1973. and i think that it's important for us to recognize that. i think there's no question and you've seen it repeatedly in

multiple sources that the russians did attempt to interfere in our elections in 2016. they will attempt to do so again. i think they need to understand the consequences of doing that. and i think that that's the sort of threat that the adversarial russian -- russia poses is why we have to make sure our commitment to nato is absolutely clear, absolutely solid and whatever discussions we have -- >> we're going to break away from this and get you live to the floor of the u.s. house. 29. 2379. first electronic vote will be conducted as 15-minute vote. remaining electronic votes will be conducted as five-minute votes. pursuant to clause 8 of rule 20, the unfinished business is the vote on the motion of the gentleman from california, mr. takano, to suspend the rules and pass h.r. 299 a