Photo credit: Misc.
“I wrote this book called Neighbours in Arms and it’s published by Penguin of India. They changed all of the spelling into the British type, so it’s neighbors B-O-U-R-S,” joked Senator Larry Pressler at a talk and luncheon at The Metropolitan Club in downtown Washington, DC. “They think I’m trying to be a little snobbish or something, but they did it – my publisher did that, not me.”
Pressler was introduced as a man who has had a great career who “went from a farmhouse where they didn’t have electricity to a Rhodes scholar and then he became a United States Senator, and one of the issues he got involved in was the Pakistan – Indian area and the weapons there.” It’s complicated.
His book grapples with some of those problems by going back to the Pressler-Glenn Amendment. “Senator John Glenn and I had several amendments to try to prevent Pakistan from getting nuclear materials, which they said they were gonna use for peaceful purposes, but we were convinced they were gonna use them to build a bomb – which they did. We had this long history of the Pakistanis being dishonest with American presidents, and there were a series of amendments from Senator Symington – this was a long time ago. They were called the Symington-Glenn-Pressler amendments.”
“Basically, it said that we would shut off all kinds of aids and military activities with Pakistan if they continued to develop a nuclear weapon, essentially with our money. It was passed, and a few years later President George H. W. Bush, based on his experience as head of the CIA, enforced the Pressler amendment to the fullest extent and all of our aid was cut off for about three and a half years to Pakistan, including our joint military operations. Then finally, when Bill Clinton became President, he totally dismantled the Pressler Amendment, which is totally unexplained. He had kind of a strange cast of characters advising him on Pakistan at the time, in my opinion, and I point to that in the book a little bit. They did not support the nuclear nonproliferation agreement as much as we had hoped.”
Photo credit: Outlook India
“What does this add up to today? Well, it’s a policy book and it doesn’t sell very well because nobody wants to read a policy book. If I could turn around and make it into a novel about nuclear weapons being stolen from Pakistan and set off some place, it may be read by many – in any event, observations and prescriptions for the future. One thing that we found in our effort, and this maybe won’t be too popular in Washington DC, but I suggest getting lobbyists and influencers out of the fundraising chain for foreign policy. This is the only capital in the world where the Indian Ambassador and the Pakistani Ambassador have to hire lobbyists on a large scale to pursue their interests. Maybe that’s not always bad in the sense that maybe some good things come out of it, but in my opinion we should be relying on our State Department’s policy planning bureau, we should be relying on congressional hearings to formulate foreign policy.”
Photo credit: Magzter
“The second conclusion in my book is to create a super US-India alliance. I think India is potentially our greatest partner, and I think President Trump has done a good job of initiating this, he and Secretary Tillerson. President Trump is much criticized in many quarters, and brings it upon himself to some extent, but he’s doing a pretty good job in my judgment in foreign policy and defense policy. This has been more true of our relationships with India. The point is, some very positive things are happening in our foreign policy and defense policy. I wrote this book because I thought I could have some influence on keeping nuclear weapons from being more proliferated. I think almost everybody would agree that that would have been a good outcome when we first started it in the late 1970’s. Today we have a nuclearized subcontinent and we have nuclear weapons and North Korea.”
“It used to be we said that the Foreign Relations Committee was the graveyard of Senators politically. Back in the old days when I first came on the Foreign Relations Committee we had Senator Church of Idaho, he was defeated. Then Senator Percy was defeated, Senator Fulbright was defeated, there were five chairmen of the Foreign Relations Committee in a row who were defeated, plus several members. A lot of Senators don’t like to go on the foreign relations committee. They like to go on the Defense Committee, not on the Foreign Relations Committee, because you can’t do much for your constituents there. You can’t package it into something that they feel. A lot of times I had some political problems and ultimately was defeated; I don’t think because of that, but it’s very hard to spend a lot of time on foreign relations in the United States Senate.”
Senator John Warner, Senator Larry Pressler, Harriet Pressler Photo credit: Janet Donovan
“I’ve been very pleased that this administration did a policy review and believe it or not they circulated 11 copies of my book. Maybe somebody read it, read my conclusions at least, but this administration has really decided to treat India at a higher level, a closer level, and to move towards declaring Pakistan a terrorist state, or at least trying to get Pakistan to be more responsive to our needs in fighting terrorism. With that, I see so many people here that know more about this than I do, so I think I’d better stop talking and start taking questions.”
