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clinton-foreign-policy
CLINTON-08/13/92
FOREIGN POLICY
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PAGE #6
not pity.
(Applause.)
The currency of national strength in this new era will be denominated not only in ships and tanks and planes but in diplomas and patents and paychecks. My first foreign policy priority will be to restore America's economic vitality. I have laid out a strategy to raise our people's skill level, boost productivity, spur innovation and investment, reduce the national debt and make us the world's strongest trading power. I will elevate economics in foreign policy, create an Economic Security Council similar to the National Security Council and change the culture in the State Department so that economics is no longer a poor cousin to old school diplomacy. (Applause.)
In a Clinton-Gore administration, presidential leadership will mean mobilizing our country for the global economic competition that is the hallmark of this new age. It will mean securing commitments from American business and American labor to take on new cooperative responsibilities, for there can be no growth without increased productivity in the private sector. And all the high growth countries do different than we do. In those countries business and labor, government and education are working in harness on the same side to develop the capacities of all the people. It will mean championing open trade in the world that benefits American workers as well as American businesses from the roaring markets of the Pacific Rim to the resurgent economies of Mexico and Latin America. But it must mean, too, swift responses and stiff penalties to those who abuse the rules of trade, once agreed upon.
One way we can strengthen our economy is through leadership for environmentally sound growth. President Bush abdicated that leadership. (Applause.) President Bush in my judgment abdicated that leadership both before and after and during the Rio Earth Summit. The Japanese and the Germans used the Rio Earth Summit as an opportunity to relentlessly attempt to sell environmental technology to all the other nations of the world while we were fighting the Global Warming Treaty and the Bio-diversity Treaty and claiming we could meet the CO2 emission standard that the Europeans and the Japanese said they could meet. Maybe that's one reason that 70 percent of the American market in environmental technology is now held by foreign firms when they ought to be held by American companies converting from defense and other technologies to make high wage jobs for the 21st Century by reconciling the goals of economic growth and environmental protection. (Applause.)
That is why I have proposed a strategy to boost our country's energy efficiency and to use market based incentives to prevent
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