AFTER VICTORY: Defining An American Role in an Uncertain World
Newt Gingrich, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives
Afternoon
Keynote Address: An American Vision for the 21st Century
Mayflower Hotel, Washington, DC
Wednesday, March 1, 1995.
HENRY KISSINGER, Conference Chairman: Mr. Speaker, ladies and gentlemen, many political figures are always assailed by the question whether what they did made any difference. In the case of our speaker, one doesn't have to ask that question. He's made a huge difference. In retrospect, many events look inevitable, but the transformation in our public dialogue and in our political situation brought about Newt Gingrich has been truly extraordinary. So, for all these reasons, it is a great privilege to welcome the speaker here.
Let me turn the podium to you, Mr. Speaker. (Applause.)
REP. NEWT GINGRICH (R-GA), Speaker of the House: Thank you. When they said you'd introduce me, how could I turn it down?
DR. KISSINGER: Thank you.
REP. GINGRICH: Let me say that it is a very great honor to be here, and I was told when we first discussed my doing this that I had an opportunity to be introduced by Dr. Kissinger and to be thanked by Dr. Schlesinger. As a mere assistant professor at a state college, the idea of being flanked by two eminences of that caliber, I would have gone virtually anywhere for the opportunity. (Laughter.) And it's also a very important opportunity to be here on behalf of the work which continues President Nixon's commitment to public policy and to creating a better world. So I am delighted to be here.
And I couldn't help, as I was listening to Henry's kind words, but to think of the very, very fine statement you made at the funeral, and the degree to which you brought, I think, a real sense of President Nixon's historic role, and his commitment as a human being, to creating a freer planet. And I guess it's in that sense of looking at the longer view and looking at the cause of freedom that I would like to talk briefly and then maybe take a couple of questions.
Let me say that I -- and some of this will sound banal unless you accept that I mean precisely what I am saying intellectually, because the world is changing. And at one level that's a banal statement -- well, it's always changing. But I believe that what we are living through is a series of changes that together fit in the better sense Kuhn's meaning of the word paradigm in his book "The Structures of Scientific Revolution." And I know that's, again, one of those, well, Washington went through its paradigm phase which was much mocked by some people, most of whom then did not succeed at subsequent elections because it turned out in fact we are going through a paradigm shift.
But it's deeper than just the change, for example, ending the bipolar conflict between the forces of freedom and the Soviet empire. Part of it is described by Alvin and Heidi Toffler in their description of a third wave. And I think if you back up -- and their work originally grew out of Kenneth Boulding's "The Meaning of the 20th Century," Peter Drucker's "The Age of Discontinuities," and several other works. And the essence of it is a very simple assertion: that the first wave of change was agriculture, the second wave of change was industry, and that the totality of what we are living through is a third wave of change.
Now, if you will accept that scale of parallelism for a minute, and you say to yourself, Okay, what was the ordering of power in the pre- agricultural period -- it was essentially hunting-gathering groups -- what is the ordering of power once you go through the agrarian revolution, to the Incas, the Mayas, the Aztecs, the Indus Valley, the Romans, et cetera -- Han China? The difference in scale of organizing power is so stunning that you have to stop and say, now, wait a second, this requires -- you can study Han China and the Incas and draw very useful parallels; you can study neither as compared to either the Kalahari Bushmen or the aborigines of Australia. If you accept that scale of change, and then you say, all right, now let's talk about the rise of the Industrial Revolution, how big a shift do you get?
Part of it -- I think you can arguably make the case that the productivity revolution that comes from the emerging world commercial market, combined with manufacturing, changes the entire nature of organizing power and in many ways lays the financial base for the nation-state to emerge and that in a sense what you get with Adam Smith is an organizing statement of the commercial manufacturing world. And because Pitt the Younger uses Smith's disciples to redo Britain's tax policy -- and you may remember that for all the conflicts we're having here in the United States right now, when they redid Britain's tax policy, one of the consequences was that they had battalion-sized detachments fighting smugglers on the beaches, because that was how large in the old order the underground economy had grown.
One of the consequences of the liberating effect of the mid-1780s' rationalization of British tax policy was a British empire so wealthy that it could sustain a war against France for 23 years -- or 22 years. Now, that was something you could not have done with the British tax policy that had lost the American Revolutionary War. And yet you could argue it was part of the emergence of the nation-state and part of the rise of the modern world.
If we are in fact going through that scale of change -- and I am going to give you several examples in the next few minutes that we are -- it is going to exert itself not just in technology. This is not just gee- whiz stuff, although I did bring one gee-whiz toy that -- you have to take my word for it, there is a small -- about a fourth the size of a postage stamp -- dark space in this case. On that small, dark space are 70 electric engines. It's a toy loaned to me by MIT, which made it for the purpose of saying they could do it. (Laughter.) But their point is miniaturization is now going down to a level where you could imagine, for example, the equivalent of an individual roto-rooter, that instead of open-heart surgery they simply insert it in an artery in your leg, run it around for a while, bring it back out, and you do open-heart surgery in effect as an out-patient procedure.
Or to use a totally different example, which they're now working on: teaching surgery by virtual reality, so that you will perform hundreds of operations, except they'll have been inside the computer, which gets to the next stage, which the Army is now using, which is having a world- class expert connected electronically by satellite with the field station, actually engaged directly in helping manipulate the tools electronically, which then raises the question about the legality of a doctor practicing in an environment in which they may not have any legal status. And if you have the best surgeon in Minneapolis performing surgery on the wealthiest person in Sri Lanka, do you have to have an international law to allow you to do it? And what exactly is the relationship -- who pays whom? And does that mean health is a problem or an opportunity?
Now, if you look at this all the way down the line, you have two things going on. One is a technological revolution on a gigantic scale -- beyond anything we have yet come to grips with. We are about -- we are, compared to the development of the airplane, at about 1908. We think we're in the middle of the computer revolution. We are in the toy stage. And it's not just computers. It's the whole genetic breakthrough in biology. It's the capacity to organize miniaturization. It's materials technology. It's a scale of reordering our capacity to control material, which may literally eliminate much of what Ricardo thought about relative balance of trade, because it may turn out that as long as you have sand you have silicon, as long as you have silicon you have natural products; therefore you're simply manufacture with human creativity. And so Hong Kong is very rich, while Chad is very poor, although objectively Hong Kong is very tiny and Chad is very big.
Now, in that context the other thing you've got going is world trade, so that there will be this constant pervasive pressure that says you had better be adapting to the technological revolution pretty quickly, or somebody out there is going to run over you, and which then has parallel economic, diplomatic, political and military implications, because you can't always be sure in a period of change of this scale who are the winners and who are the losers. Who would have picked Japan in 1800 rather than China? And yet it's pretty clear that in adapting to the industrial era the Japanese made a ruthless decision to change, which led ultimately to the massacre of the last Samurai rebellion. The Chinese were unable to make that decision and instead went into a period of paralysis that lasted at least 60 to 70 years.
Now, in that context, let's look at the world at large. This scale, this combined change -- technology plus the rising world market -- will dissolve much of what we have thought of as the nation-state. It's shifting power around in ways that we don't fully understand yet. It's shifting economic power around so that none of the world -- none of the national banks, the Federal Reserve system for example, have anything like the power they had 30 years ago. And nobody has begun to organize theoretically what is the -- you know, if Samuelson was the freshman- class orientation to the national economy, then where is the writer of the freshman orientation to the world economy? How do you explain instantaneous capital flow? How do you explain what happened last week in Singapore? And how do you explain the effect that then has through the whole system? And what is real power if you can organize these things? And to some extent Tom Clancy's new novel gives a tiny tidbit of that in the particular version he has of closing down the New York financial system -- all of it done through computer viruses.
But I'm not here talking about horror stories, nor am I talking about the crash of '89, although, again, I believe novels are useful, because they stretch the limits almost as much as the daily newspaper. And I'm in favor of a wide range of fiction reading as a way of increasing your understanding.
The second thing that is going to happen, though, is while it's dissolving some of the orderly forms of power that we are used to, it is going to be empowering things we've never seen before. The most obvious example is military power. Had the World Trade Center involved a tactical nuclear weapon, the relative impact would have been horrifically greater, and you don't have to have an ICBM to deliver. You just put it in a Hertz rent-a-car. Or you deliver a chemical or biological weapon through UPS or Federal Express. And at some point people will be doing these things, because humans are ingenious. As large systems are created that are soft, somebody will find a way to exploit them. And somebody will do something bad to somebody else in a way that will then force us to stop and take a look at it.
But there are other kinds of empowerment. There's information empowerment. If you look at the way in which we use CNN and -- and I don't want to get them all in trouble, but the truth is we used CNN pretty effectively in Desert Storm, in Desert Shield, and we communicated things pretty effectively in terms of what we were doing and why we were doing it. On other occasions we've seen countries very effectively -- I would argue that the Bosnian decision to hire a PR firm was one of their most cost-effective activities in maximizing public understanding of their version of the crisis in the Balkans, and in that sense it may have been their best national security investment, because they got leverage out of that investment that they would have not gotten out of the same number of dollars spent hiring mercenaries or buying weapons.
And so we have got to look at all sorts of empowerment that we may not be used to. It also means inevitably it's going to create new opportunities and new problems in that the same item may look different to people. One of the great works of change is Huizinga's "The Waning of the Middle Ages" in which he points out that the Renaissance seen by a medieval Christian was not a positive event and that one person's breakthrough is another person's disaster. In that sense, the apparatchiks in the Soviet Union could compare notes with some of the apparatchiks in Washington, and our version of perestroika and glasnost is probably as horrifying to some people in this city as was the rise of first Gorbachev and then Yeltsin in Moscow, because we represent difference. And while difference is good to one group it's often bad to another.
I tried to use a planning model derived from George Marshall and Alfred Sloan and Franklin Roosevelt of visions, strategies, projects and tactics. Now, I want to mention it for a second because I believe that we need new vision and new strategies for where we're at. I don't think we need to rethink NATO or rethink the current American defense force or rethink all arrangements. I think we need to erase the board and think anew and then come back and change these systems, having thought about what we need to do in a positive way.
Peter Drucker has a line. He says you ought to go around once a year and ask of everything you're doing, if you weren't already doing it, would you start? And if you wouldn't start, why are you still doing it? Well, to be able to ask that question, you've got to have a pretty clear sense of vision of what business you're in. And I'm going to talk a little bit about the business of the United States in the world.
But not only do we Americans need to develop a new vision and new strategies and then, frankly, help sell them to our friends and colleagues across the planet, but in addition, we need a model like visions, strategies, projects and tactics -- and by project I simply in an entrepreneurial sense a definable, delegatable achievement -- because we need to understand the leadership of large teams, and that requires common agreement on vision, common agreement on strategies, and then an ability to delegate projects and get out of the way of people.
And I'll give you a minor example. If Bosnia was primarily a European problem and we had agreed, a division in strategies level, it was primarily up to the French and the British to solve it, then frankly our role should have been to coach and cheerlead from the side and not apply great stress to NATO and just say: "Look, do the best you can. This is going to be a total mess. It will be a mess no matter who's doing it. Let's try to minimize the human agony involved, and let's try to maximize the transition to peace freedom. Tell us how we can help, because you're taking all the risk and you're paying the cost."
If, on the other hand, it was primarily an American leadership problem, we should have defined an end state we were prepared to engage in and told the Europeans not to get too deeply involved except on our terms.
But to be caught in a situation where they take the human risk of their forces on the ground, they take the investment of their people day to day trying to manage the process while we lean on their shoulder and tell them they're doing it wrong, both strains NATO and makes us all look dumb. And it's perfectly permissible to say we're not going to solve everything.
You have to be fairly juvenile to think we could stop Rwanda, although that's worth debating, and my challenge to everybody who visits the Holocaust Museum is to go to the Holocaust Museum and then imagine it's the week before the butchery starts in Rwanda and ask yourself what should we have done, because 500,000 people were chopped to death. And what is the world's solution to this in the 21st century? And not just back off. Much of Africa is going to be a crisis in the 21st century, and it requires very different thinking and a very different way of organizing things I'll get to in a minute.
So I'm suggesting we literally want to establish some kind of discipline, and I'm suggesting that visions, strategies, projects and tactics are a pretty good way that worked pretty well in World War II. That's why the coalition was coherent. They really did have long meetings. They really did find out where do we put the resources, who is in charge, how are we going to do it. And it's the best-fought coalition war in history.
It seems to me that the key principles of a healthy 21st century world are seven, and I'm going to be fairly brief about them, but I want to just lay them out.
One, the United States must lead. Period. I mean, the objective lesson the last five years is simple: There's no replacement. It's not a question of, well, we'll back out and somebody else will emerge. If we don't lead the planet, there is no leader on the planet. We are in the classic sense a hegemon. We're the only military power that matters -- if we decide to be decisive. Now, that doesn't mean we can bully everybody. I said lead. I didn't say dictate. I didn't say dominate. I said lead. That means we have an active duty to routinely be the leader.
Second, that means here at home we have three major responsibilities: to be economically capable of being the dominant economy in the world economy -- that is, the highest value-added producer producing the highest-quality jobs with the highest standard of living. And there are practical, long-term reasons that's true, both in terms of sustaining our leadership and in terms of sustaining our authority, which is very different from power.
Second, we need to, frankly, get our act together about our own civilization. A country whose children can't read, a country where 12- year-olds have babies and 15-year-olds kill each other and 17-year-olds die of AIDS and 18-year-olds get diplomas they can't read is not a country that's going to lead anybody. And so, if we're going to fulfill our duty to the rest of the human race, we have to fulfill our duty here at home.
Third, we have to be very tough-minded in being militarily strong enough to defeat any plausible combination of opponents. And we have to be blunt about it, that we are prepared -- the British had a rule that they were prepared to dominate the North Sea against any two navies. Our position has to be simple. We intend to dominate air, space and sea against anybody and have a mobilizable ground force capable of winning within a reasonable length of time. Period. And we have to have the Roman rule that we don't come unless we're really pushed, and if we're really pushed we're unstoppable. And there are profound historic reasons why a hegemon goes overtime to never lose but is very careful not to pick fights.
In that framework, I think we want leadership within a team, and the team has a very simple framework. It's committed to freedom and opportunity for all humans. It takes our Declaration of Independence seriously, believes all humans are endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And I think we'll find a surprisingly broad coalition within that leadership.
And I don't come down today and I'm not here to argue about Poland in NATO, Russia in or out of NATO. I'm here to say that we ought to say to everybody, "If you're prepared to meet a serious test of being in favor of freedom and you're willing to seriously work with us to expand freedom for the human race, then we want you to be part of our time and now we're going to negotiate out the details of the relationship."
That means a second model in addition to vision, strategies, projects and tactics. We try to teach a model of listen, learn, help and lead. As Eisenhower taught over and over, leading a coalition involves listening to your allies more than lecturing them, it means learning from your allies more than teaching them. And if you listen to them and learn from them, you can usually help them. And after you've done those three, they're pretty willing for you to lead. But it takes inexhaustible patience to lead this kind of a coalition.
And I think it leads us to two kinds of commitments: patient, firm commitments to large, positive growth-oriented projects. I met with Chancellor Kohl a couple of weeks ago, and he made the comment that he's concerned that we may ultimately drift apart. And my answer was: We will drift apart unless we have projects large enough to hold us together. We were faced with a competitor for dominating the planet, the Soviet empire. Western Europe was faced with being overrun. Surviving that seemed a big enough project to keep us hanging together. So, for 45 years we said, "Why don't we stay on the same side? Here's the alternative."
That's gone. We're not going to stay together out of nostalgia. I mean, anybody who thinks that doing the 60th anniversary of Normandy or the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall is going to, in any significant way, hold us together misunderstands the nature of humans, which is to be drawn into the future or to collapse into passions out of the past, which is what happened in the former Yugoslavia.
And my suggestion in part is that we want to start looking now at a free trade zone that includes the U.S. and Europe, negotiated in a very tough-minded way. We want to look at projects in space and under the seas and in science. But we want to do things that are large enough that they knit us together in ways that are practical, where on a daily basis thousands of Europeans and thousands of Americans wake up and go, "Oh, this is really exciting being on the same team." Because, if we're not actively on the same team in a practical way, we will inevitably, in the long run, not be on the same team.
And that doesn't mean we don't want the same relationship with Japan or the same relationship with other countries, and it certainly does not mean we don't want the same relationship with Latin America, which is a natural part of the team we need to build. We also want on a much narrower and carefully chosen basis very patient, firm commitment to solving tough, specific problems.
There are a handful of things around the planet that we can't get away from. One of them is going to be frankly the pain level in Africa, which with AIDS and with social disorganization is, I think, going to be horrendous by early in the next century and which the entire human race is going to have some obligation to help think through and help deal with it. We have elites where as many as 70 and 80 percent now have HIV positive. You're going to have a catastrophe of enormous proportions, and we as a people, the human race, should be actively engaged in thinking this through much more aggressively than we are and with a much better instrument than the current U.N. bureaucracy.
All of which leads me to make the point that we need to build new systems. And the way I would describe this, if I can go back to vision, you say to yourself the generation of the wise men -- who after all often made their share of mistakes, too -- it's easier to be wise afterwards if you're on the winning team. And this is not to denigrate them. I mean, I think George Marshall is one of the greatest Americans ever to have lived, and I have enormous admiration for what he achieved.
But you go back to the period and you say, "All right, they had to invent NATO, they had to invent the CIA, they had to invent the Strategic Air Command, they had to invent the whole concept of the Marshall Plan." All right, if that was true, then what are our inventions? Over the next four or five years, as we grow into a mature acceptance of our obligation to lead the planet, what are the systems and institutions that have to be there?
Now, we may find we can transform some. Maybe NATO grows into one of these inventions. But it is far smarter intellectually to start with the needed system and then look around for what you can adapt than it is to start with the current system and try to figure out how you can gradually jury-rig them. And we need serious thought about how do we lead the planet and what systems does that require and how do they operate, and then see which ones we can grow from the current one.
Let me say one last thing about this, and then if we time I'll take a couple of questions. And I know this has been abstract, but I think you've got to start at this level if you're going to talk about the 21st century. Let me say something that I hope Professor Kissinger will not find too sophomoric. The core of American success is in a remarkably romantic way to combine idealism with a very tough-minded pragmatism, and it's not either/or. It's not real politik or Wilsonian idealism.
I mean, John J. Pershing was about as tough a field commander as we've ever had, and he was the American face that negotiated the management of the American part of the Allied forces in World War II. If you sit down and you actually start reading Marshall's papers and Eisenhower's papers, if you look at how systematically FDR manipulated everybody, this was a team quite worthy of any real politik ever, and yet Eisenhower could write "crusade in Europe" because he believed it. It was a crusade. It was designed to defeat evil.
And if you listen, as I did at in my course, to FDR's 8-1/2 minute prayer in which he literally led the nation in praying on the radio during D-Day and then you read, as I did in that course, Eisenhower's message to our troops, they reeked of idealism and a romantic sense of being free and being American, and yet they had behind them the mobilization of 15 million people and the only military in history ever capable of launching an amphibious landing on that scale.
And so what I'm suggesting to you here is that it's a very hard thing to do, but it's what adulthood's about: to be both idealistic and romantic and very tough-minded and pragmatic at once. And unless we're prepared to say bluntly and without much debate we will lead the human race, I don't believe anybody else is going to replace us. And I believe the alternative is a dark and bloody planet, and I believe in our absence you end up in Bosnia and Rwanda and Chechnya and they are the harbingers of a much worse 21st century than anything we've seen in the half century of American leadership.
So, if we have a couple of minutes, whatever your wishes are, I'd be glad to take questions.
MODERATOR: First question? Sir?
QUESTIONER: My name is Leo Wieland. I'm a correspondent for the Frankfurther Allgemeine.
REP. GINGRICH: You need a microphone.
QUESTIONER: I'm a correspondent of the Frankfurter Allegmeine from Germany. Mr. Speaker, how much of a consensus or of a division is there on foreign policy matters within the Republican Party and within the Republican majorities? And, if I may put it bluntly and personally to you, are you a new Republican leader who is leading the Congress in a more isolationist or more parochial foreign policy?
REP. GINGRICH: You know, I find that a fascinating question, first of all, because, as an Army brat who spent part of my childhood at Orleans American High School and part of it at Stuttgart American High School and who did my Ph.D. in Belgium and whose father served 28 years helping defend freedom, I think my personal commitment to the international cause of freedom is pretty overwhelming.
But secondly, to have been the leader of the NAFTA fight and have gotten far more votes on the Republican side than the president got on the Democratic side and to then have delivered on GATT and to have been the leader in advocating we do the $10 billion loan guarantee to Israel in housing and to have helped get that through and to have consistently worked with Dick Gephardt on a bipartisan basis to maintain aid to Yeltsin, I'm always curious why there's some presumption that we're in any way isolationist.
We have a period of dialogue going on. That's why I said you've got to think about the scale of change. This change is enormous. And unless we're really honest among -- and I say this as a friend to our German allies in the cause of freedom, and I would say this to anybody across the planet who loves freedom, don't misunderstand a dialogue for a defeat and don't misunderstand a willingness to question to everything to be a willingness to abandon anything. We're just entering a period of enormous change, and all of us ought to put all of our cards on the table, and let's talk for a while.
But if you take the empire of freedom, which now at a minimum runs across most of the educated and technologically-advanced part of the world -- and I decided not to name which capitals I would have included, because then I'd be -- since I'm now speaker, I then would have other capitals saying, "Why aren't we in there?" But we should be, talking among ourselves -- I see as almost in the Articles of Confederation period, and I'm not suggesting world government here, which is the next thing that people will decide to take out of context.
But I am suggesting that, just as the founding fathers -- you know, it's very hard for a Georgian to talk to somebody from Boston. George Washington felt almost isolated as a Virginian when he arrived in the army of the American colonies in rebellion in Boston. And, in fact, none of the New England colonies would allow him to take more than, I think, one Virginia with him. And he dealt with these strange accents. We are closer to Berlin by an enormous amount of time than Washington was in Boston to either Philadelphia or his own home or Savannah, Georgia.
And all I'm suggesting is all of us who are free should take the framework of my speech and let's talk together about the planet. It's not a question of being isolationist or internationalist. It's a question of how can you be intelligently committed to a single globe on which all of us are going to live with 24-hour instantaneous, real-time communications, a totally woven-together world market, and a technological revolution which both beckons us with opportunity and threatens us with terror.
QUESTIONER: Mr. Speaker, you talked about a possible -- thank you -- you talked about a possible free trade zone with Europe. Could you talk about our trade deficit with China and Japan, which totals about $90 billion?
REP. GINGRICH: Well, I think they're two very different problems. The problem with China in part, and I have to say the administration -- my impression is on the surface at least -- has done a pretty good job recently of being very tough-minded about pirating, which I actually think is a very good sign. Being willing to trade with -- and those of you who are involved in commercial life understand this in a way that the State Department doesn't.
There's a huge difference between what we did after World War II. After World War II, we were the only dominant economic power on the planet. Therefore, we cheerfully bribed our way into alliances and we gave away huge economic advantages, which was appropriate behavior at that point. Now we have allies who have thoroughly grown up, are very competitive economically, and now we need to have commercial relationships -- (coughs) -- excuse me -- that we maintain commercially. Those of you who are in commercial activity know you can often have the most bruising fights legally and economically and it doesn't lead to war.
So we should be doing more of what we just did in China, first of all. We should be willing to say to people, "We're willing to have an open market based on certain rules of the game; you break the rules of the game, we're going to cost you so much you can't afford it," and negotiate that way.
The problem with Japan is very different, I think. The problem with Japan is a country which has a legitimate cultural tradition of being terrified of isolation and of starvation and of, therefore, having all sorts of invisible barriers, many of which are literally not legally dissolvable by the government. And I've advocated for about five years now that we have an export ambassador, a special, unique ambassador only to Japan, who would be somebody like a Bob Galvin of Motorola, whose only job would be to get up each morning and ask themselves, "Now, which barrier am I going to kick down?"
We can penetrate -- and you see people do it every day -- we can penetrate the Japanese market if we're serious about it. But you've got to have such a depth of commitment and such a serious intensity that it takes, I think, a special level of leadership, and we have not been prepared to commit that. And, of course, state doesn't want to have a unique second ambassador. The truth is a normal ambassador has so many non-economic interests they can never focus their energy. And because Japan has a consistent high balance of trade, we have a unique problem there that's different, I think, than any other country in the world.
Let me say one other thing. At some point, we have to get serious both about our own education system, which is inadequate to sustain our being a world -- an exporter. Second, we have to get serious tonight and tell you we are next week in the House on litigation reform, because you can't be the most litigious society in the world and compete in the world market. And, third, I think we have to reexamine our tax code, because we're the only major industrial country that does not have a tax which allows it to rebate exports and apply it to imports.
Now, those three changes will do a lot even with the Japanese to begin to shrink the deficit.
MODERATOR: One more?
REP. GINGRICH: One more, sure.
QUESTIONER: This is Chung Soo Lee of Korean Broadcasting System. I'd like to ask this question: What is your contract with the agreed framework between the United States and North Korea? And are you optimistic or pessimistic on the agreed framework? What is your new contract with the framework?
REP. GINGRICH: Well, I'm not sure we have a contract with everything yet, but it's an interesting idea. (Laughter.)
Let me say that my impression is that it is possible that the agreement will work. And I would not want to go an inch beyond that. I think it actually takes two very different things, and I'm talking here partially that's based on general briefings and talking with Tony Lake and with the secretary of state and others. One is it takes, I think, much as I said about China, a very tough-minded attitude about enforcing the details of the agreement, and I think we should be, frankly, ferociously committed day by day to monitoring that agreement, because otherwise it becomes a sham.
And I don't think we can say to a partner, "If we're willing to tolerate you running a sham on us, that we should blame you for having run a sham that we tolerate." So on the one front I think we should on the details of the agreement be very tough-minded. On the other front I believe we should have a conscious strategy of maximizing openings with North Korea. I think that is a regime likely to be changed with remarkable suddenness as soon as it understands the gap between its current reality and the rest of the world.
And I think -- and I just say this in terms of things I've learned from various former Soviet officials about how shattering their encounters with the world became in the 1980s, that it was precisely the process of leaving Russia and seeing how much everywhere else was changing that rapidly convinced them they literally couldn't sustain the system.
So I would actually advocate that we find every possible excuse to get North Korean officials out of North Korea, to get them in other countries to the maximum degree possible to open up their understanding of what they are costing themselves by maintaining a regime this repressive and this secretive.
That's a long-range strategy. The shorter-range strategy would be to very intensely micro-manage the exact keeping of the agreement and to be prepared to very, frankly, fairly coercive if they're not prepared to keep the agreement.
Let me just say again this is a very great honor for me, and I can't think of two finer people to have introduce you and then kick you out than these two, and I'm very honored to have been here, and I think as somebody whose first active campaigning was as a volunteer for Nixon- Lodge when I was in high school, I can't think of a better place to show up and have a chance to say thank you to all of you who were so active and did so much to extend freedom for so many years.
Thank you. (Applause.)
JAMES SCHLESINGER, Former Secretary of Defense: Mr. Speaker, we thank you for your guideposts into the 21st century, for your erudition, and for your relating freedom to the paradigm shift, which involves the Information Age and information warfare.
I cannot forebear to express our thanks by quoting from the story in The New York Times today in which your spokesman, Tony Brinkley, compared you first to Churchill, then to DeGaulle -- (laughter) -- and finally to Mahatma Gandhi. (Laughter.)
REP. GINGRICH: This is a press secretary in search of a raise. (Laughter.)
MR. SCHLESINGER: Brinkley said, "Newt is a tad like Gandhi, a combination of visionary and practical tactician not often seen in politicsm, but obviously Gandhi dressed better." (Laughter.)
None of us here think that Gandhi was a better dresser, Mr. Speaker, nor do we see much resemblance between you and the late Mahatma. You are a prophet of a technological revolution involving electronics. He was a profit of a technological reversion involving the spinning wheel.
So on behalf of the Nixon Library and the Nixon Center, I want to thank you for taking this time that is so valuable to you in this period as you conduct your remarkable 100-day dash and particularly wrestling as you will this evening with the wisdom and the propriety of the Mexican loan and wrestling, as we have heard, with the flu.
Thank you. (Applause.)
