Speeches

Rep. French Hill (AR-02) delivered remarks at today's United States Global Leadership Coalition (USGLC) event in Little Rock with Group Director of Global Government Affairs at Walmart, Sarah Thorn, and Chief of Staff and Senior Advisor to the President & CEO at The Wilson Center, Eddy Acevedo, on the importance of America's global leadership and the impact it has on Arkansas.

To watch Rep. Hill's full remarks, please visit HERE.

Rep. Hill's remarks as prepared: 

History has a way of “upending” best laid plans or the logical outcome; the wishful thinking; or, even the old admonition that “things work for the best”.

It was a beautiful calm day … until it wasn’t – at 4:30am in Charleston on April 12, 1861; 7:55am Honolulu time on December 7^th, 1941; at 8:46am on that spectacular early fall day of September 11, 2001; and, horrifically, at 5:07am on an overcast cold morning of February 22, 2022, in Kyiv, Ukraine.

Wishful thinking is not a strategy.

Across our nation there is a growing movement of wishful thinking that somehow the United States is best when isolated from the world’s woes of war and authoritarian communism and  radical religious fanatics who are “committed to the death” of America or Western Values.

I witness it on the floor of the House of Representatives.

I see and hear it in both mainstream and social media.

And, I am face to face with it in regular conversations here at home.

The consistent line goes something like this:

-     We should give no money to other nations because we are running huge deficits.

-     We should only spend national security money here on our borders and our defense, not the defense of some other nation’s freedom or their sovereign borders.

-     We should abandon the United Nations because our contributions there just fund those who hate us.

-     We must end our support of Ukraine as Putin has no beef with us; Ukraine and Crimea are Russia’s anyway; and, Ukraine is a failed, corrupt state.

-     Some even argue why bother to continue to support Taiwan – – it belongs to China anyway.

Of course, these type arguments are not new.

We have faced these movements as a part of our politics since our founding.

In stark contrast, without allied financial support, no one denies that there would simply be no United States of America. 

Our beacon on liberty would have been still born.  

Yet, thankfully the Continental Congress took the risk based on Benjamin Franklin’s wise observation that “we must all hang together, or most assuredly we will hang separately” by dispatching Dr. Franklin and John Adams to French Court and the Dutch bankers, respectively, to achieve essential military and financial aid.

In a modern context we have learned the age-old maxim that appeasement does not work -- and, as successive U.S. presidents in both political parties have urged: peace is, in fact, achieved through strength.

Appeasement of Hitler was advocated by many in the 1930s, including famous Americans, flyer Charles Lindbergh and FDR’s own ambassador to the United Kingdom, JFK’s father, Joseph Kennedy.

These partners in a Munich Mentality were in stunned silence after Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia and Poland. 

Appeasement coupled with weak, ineffective security capabilities –  demonstrated by history, and reality – result in failure, misery and subjugation.

So, we must ask ourselves, what is the response to these arguments by these successors of Lindbergh?

Yes, our federal spending levels are unsustainable. We all agree on this.

And, yes, I will also agree that there could be tremendous improvements in the scope and effectiveness of U.S. defense spending.

But, our support of our allies’ freedom, strategic foreign aid in key regions, and our global military and economic leadership are not driving our deficits.

Our deficits are driven by our unreformed mandatory spending programs and big government advocates that continue to initiate new massive, multitrillion dollar federal spending programs as well as enormous, often overdone and poorly structured federal intervention as in the 2008 financial crisis or the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.

Such intervention is always clouded by the fog of the “unknown unknowns” of the particular predicament.

To those Americans that continue to resist NATO, the United Nations, and are cool on our allies in Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan, my message to them is that these institutions and alliances are a key to peace through strength.

America is a less prosperous place when we abdicate leadership.  Global leadership without the United States is a “Venn Diagram” with no intersection.  And, very importantly, to be successful, peace through strength is not achieved alone.

And, this is lesson of the post Cold War decades.  Looking at the world through the lens of the post war period of 1945-1995 is a mistake. 

We now reside in a multipolar world with changing alliances and new risks. 

The binary choice of Soviet Union vs. United States is dead. 

In that post war period, the United States rode in as the cavalry in any conflict pitched as counter to our national interests or “the heads we win, tails you lose” cold conflict with the Soviets.

Today, achieving open seas, improved trade market access, deterrence of warfare and invasion on land, under the sea, in space or via a computer network are all at the core of the U.S. led global order. 

But in a multipolar environment, accomplishing these agreed upon outcomes require more complex diplomacy and partnership.

To be against the global order is to be for chaos and expanding threats and destruction.

This will result in fewer sales and fewer jobs for the world’s largest economy and her families – – us, our home, our country, the United States.

I believe that to be for America First then one must support U.S. diplomacy crafting flexible alliances that while built on the foundations of the post war period, are in no way nostalgic. 

Standing against this global order of open seas, open markets, deterrence of invasion of sovereign nations, safe and secure use of cyber and space are the self-described “axis of resistance” – – China, Russia, Iran, North Korea.

And, in my view, their very active proxies around the world: state actors like Cuba, Syria, and Belarus, and nonstate fundamentalist terror groups like Hezbollah, Hamas, Al Qaeda, ISIS, and the Houthis.

Their coordinated malevolence has only grown since the 2002 now almost quaint description by President George W. Bush of this group of actors as the “axis of evil.”

Unfortunately, through “resets, unenforced red lines, and appeasement, the Obama Administration empowered this axis of resistance and any constraints imposed by Trump officials have, for the most part, been dismantled by the Obama 2.0 policies by the Biden-Harris administration.

Iran sells 80% of its oil – – free from sanctions by President Biden – – to China.  

Iran takes this funding, and additional funds freed by President Biden in frozen accounts in South Korea and Iraq and uses it to build its weapons arsenal and spread its disorder:

-     Sending drones and missiles to Russia to kill Ukrainians.

-     Sending Shia militia to Iraq and Syria to protect the murderous Assad regime, and to kill Americans along with Syrian women and children.

-     Sending missiles and targeting technology to the Houthi rebels in Yemen to kill Yemenis, attack cargo ships and U.S. and Allied vessels in the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea.

-     Sending money and weapons to Hamas in the Gaza Strip to kill Israelis and start the now 11-month long war.

-     Sending millions of dollars in weapons to Hezbollah in Lebanon to attack and kill Israelis and, ensure that beautiful Lebanon is a bankrupt, failed state.

China and North Korea are aiding Russia with material necessary for its continued economic advance as it bombs children’s hospitals in Ukraine.

North Korea and Iran continue to advance their offensive nuclear weapon capabilities.

And, in the midst of its invasion of Ukraine, Russia, according to public reporting, is launching a nuclear weapon in space in violation of treaties and as a threat to the entire global civilization.

The December 1950 Time magazine quoted one of Putin’s role models, Lenin as saying – – “the road to Paris lies through Peking” signaling Russia will partner with China to advance global domination of communism.

Never has it been more true.

These new authoritarian axis powers have set out to achieve global domination by way of countering the United States and the rule of law and by poisoning the minds of millions with cyber warfare propaganda.

To preserve our economic vitality and opportunity for our future, the United States and like-minded peoples, must echo Churchill in his commitment to repel the Nazis…

We must commit to fight this toxic blend of communism and terror on the beaches, in the streets, on the seas, in the air – – but also on the network and in orbit.

Failure to do so will impoverish our economic future and our American spirit best voiced by President Kennedy in his inaugural address when he promised:

“Let every nation know, whether it wishes well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to ensure the survival and the success of liberty.”

Or maybe, as we are in a multipolar world you may find an old Chinese proverb (a favorite of Mao’s) more compelling: “you have to choose between killing the Tiger or being eaten by it.”

Thank you.