National Security Act, 2024

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, long before I ever thought of running for office, I was a little kid born in a West Virginia coal mining town called Beckley. My sister and I ended up going to the same grade school not too far from our house.

As a kid, I was pretty well behaved and didn't get into much trouble, but in the first grade, I got in a fight. I got in a fight because some kid was picking on my sister, who was a year older, in the second grade. He was a much bigger guy, and it was not a fair fight. I got involved in it and took him out with one swing. That was the last punch that I think I had thrown in anger. But I didn't like the idea of a big guy, a bully, trying to push around somebody, whether it was my sister or not. I have never cared for that in other situations growing up and watching the behavior of people in all kinds of different situations.

Our country, if you go back to our founding, if you recall, we took on the biggest nation on Earth, the strongest nation on Earth, Great Britain. It was not a fair fight. They had us badly outgunned, outnumbered. And somebody came to our rescue. The persons who came to our rescue were the French. If it weren't for the French, we would still be, maybe, a colony of Great Britain. But the French stood up and said: We are here to help.

There is a time for people to stand--countries to stand by and allow things to happen, and there is a time to stand up and be heard. We were helped as a nation over 200 years ago by the French. We have, I think, a moral obligation to help make sure that Ukraine has an opportunity to continue to go forward and to be a democratic nation. They are a democratic nation. They actually choose--they elect their own leaders. Vladimir Putin doesn't care very much for that. He thinks they shouldn't be allowed to do so and has decided to use force to be able to take away the opportunity to be a free nation.

We have a couple of opportunities. We can criticize Putin, the Russians, for what they are doing or we can actually do something about it.

I think I may be the last Vietnam veteran serving here in the U.S. Senate. When we go out from here, I like to run. Many, many mornings when I have gone for a run near the Capitol, I have run out to the Lincoln Memorial. On my way back, I run right by the Vietnam Memorial. It is black granite. There are names of I want to say maybe 59,000 people who died in that war I served in.

We got involved in that war. It was not a popular war. It wasn't popular with my generation. But we got involved in that war. The communists in North Vietnam were coming in and trying to take over the south. We ended up, for better or for worse, aligning with the south. We know what the outcome turned out to be. A lot of people died. A lot of people died in that war. I know a number of them, and my guess is my colleagues do as well.

I tell that story because we have a situation here that is not altogether different in which the Ukrainian people, who want to defend themselves--they want to preserve their democracy, and they are willing to make the tough fight if we will help them and the rest of the free world will help them.

God bless our President and leaders of a bunch of other countries who said: We are not going to walk away and let Putin have his way and take away the democracy of the people of Ukraine. We are going to help them. We are going to help them not by sending--as we did in the Vietnam war--our own young soldiers, sailors, and airmen. We are not going to send them to Ukraine to defend Ukraine. We are going to send them munitions. We are going to send them drones. We are going to send them missiles. We are going to send them ships and aircraft. We will do that.

That is really all the Ukrainians are asking for. That is all they are asking for. They are asking for that kind of help. We ought to provide it. We ought to provide it.

I used to fly missions. I was a naval flight officer, P-3 aircraft mission commander. We used to fly a lot of surveillance missions around the world, track Soviet submarines everywhere across the planet. We also flew a lot of missions off the coast of Vietnam and a lot of missions in the South China Sea.

Even decades ago when I was flying missions with my squad in the South China Sea, we were concerned about the militarization of the South China Sea by China and China taking over islands that were not theirs, that maybe had been claimed by the Philippines and other nations. The Chinese were taking them over with the idea of militarizing them and ultimately making maritime trafficking--the moving of ships and aircraft through the South China Sea--more difficult.

We used to fly missions in the Vietnam war. We used to fly missions out of Vietnam. I was commissioned in 1968. By that time, we pulled a lot of land-based aircraft--B-52s, P-3s, just land-based aircraft with the Navy--we pulled them out of Vietnam, and we flew our missions out of Thailand, a big Air Force base.

We flew missions out of Taiwan, places in the southern part of the island, Tainan, which is an Air Force base in Taiwan. I had a chance be to deployed there from time to time. I got to know some of the people who lived in Taiwan--wonderful people, lovely people. Do you know what they were concerned about all those years ago? They were concerned about China coming in and taking them over, trying to take away their independence--not just militarize the South China Sea and transfer a bunch of islands into bases, if you will, for the Chinese military but actually take over a democratic country that has never been a part of China and make them do the bidding of China.

Mark my words. If Vladimir Putin is successful in prevailing in Ukraine, if he is successful, Taiwan will be next. As sure as I am standing here today, President Xi, the leader of China who says Taiwan is theirs, will hunt right into the fight. That would trigger a real- world conflict between them and us. It wouldn't be good for either of us, but we would, I think, be beholden to defend Taiwan.

Why don't we bring a halt to that idea of China getting involved and trying to come after Taiwan and having to commit our own troops? Why don't we just take care of it by making sure the people of Ukraine have the ships, the aircraft, the tanks, the missiles, and the armament they need to prevail on their own against Russia?

We wouldn't have to commit our own troops. We wouldn't have to worry about the kind of body bags that came back from Vietnam when I was serving in the Vietnam war. We would end up with a free Ukraine, and I think we would have a much better chance of making sure that the folks in Taiwan would continue to enjoy their independence as well.

I am wearing a lapel pin here that people ask me about from time to time--even today. They say: What kind of lapel pin is that? It is an American flag, and it is a Ukrainian flag as well.

A couple of days after Russia invaded Ukraine, I sent somebody over from my staff to the Ukrainian Embassy to get this lapel pin. I have worn it every day since, every day since.

And I get a lot of people--I go back and forth on the train, as my colleagues know. I live in Delaware and go back and forth on the train almost every day. It is amazing how many people I run into on the train, at the train stations, or traveling around the country. They will say: What is that that you are wearing? And when I explain it, I don't recall one person ever saying: You shouldn't wear that, or, That is a bad idea. People say: Good for you. Good for you. We ought to help them.

The Presiding Officer may recall a couple of months ago when--in fact, this year and maybe even last year--President Zelenskyy came here. Not to this Chamber, but he came into the Old Senate Chamber just down the hall. And he spoke in a closed room to Members of the Senate, Democrats and Republicans, in very emotional, very compelling language where he laid out the situation that they faced, laid out how important our support was and how grateful that they were for us being willing to stand by them, stand up for them.

And his speech was interrupted any number of times by standing ovations by Democrats and by Republicans. I happened to be sitting right in front of his podium when he was speaking, about as far away as our stenographer is standing from me today. And during the course of his speech, a couple of times he made eye contact, and I tried to give him encouragement in a sort of way. And I think I did.

But when it was over, he walked away from the podium, and I walked up to him and I shook his hand and I hugged him. I don't get to hug international leaders every day, but I hugged him and he hugged me. And I said to him, ``You are a hero.'' I said to him, ``You are a hero.'' And he reached over and touched my lapel pin, and he said to me, ``No, no. You are our heroes.'' He said, ``You are our heroes.''

Now, I just want to say, in the months that have passed since then when we have floundered, kind of waffling around and trying to figure out how we are going to continue to provide aid and support for Ukraine, and I thought--he was back a couple of months later, and I had a chance to talk to him again. And again he said, ``You are our heroes; you are our heroes,'' talking about us in this body and the House of Representatives.

And I said to my staff later that day and my colleagues later in the day: You know what--it is funny--I don't feel much like a hero.

This was a couple of months ago when he was here because we were on the verge of pulling the plug on the aid and the assistance we were going to provide for Ukraine. There was a very real chance that we could pull the plug, take away the help, and Putin and the Russians would just move in and take over. And I didn't feel like a hero with that sort of staring us in the face.

When we leave this week and go back to our districts, our States, and our homes across the country and reflect back on what we have done, what we have decided, I want to feel like a hero. I want all of us to feel like a hero and a heroine and deserve to be feeling that way.

I am a great student of World War II, and some of my colleagues are as well. I remember a time when Churchill was leading the allied world and rising and standing up and warning against the threat that Germany provided for the rest of us, urging us to be brave and be strong, be vigilant, come to the aid of Europe.

There was another guy named Chamberlain whose name is sort of thought of in terms of appeasement. Churchill: engage, defend, be strong. Chamberlain: appease. We have a chance here to be more like Churchill and less like Chamberlain. And I hope and pray, when we vote here today--maybe even tomorrow--that is exactly what we will do.

I want us to make not just the folks in Ukraine, Taiwan, and--I don't want them just to be grateful. I want the people who we serve, who elect us and sent us here--I want them to be proud of what we have done and the work that we have done on their behalf and on behalf of these other countries who need our help.

We are the beacon for democracy for the world. Our Constitution is the longest living constitution in the history of the world. It lays out how the democracy should operate; and for all these years, we have. We need to hold that to our heart, and we need to do the right thing.

The last point I would say is this: My mom was a deeply religious woman. I have shared this with some of my colleagues before. She would drag my sister and me, in the West Virginia coal-mining town in West Virginia--she would drag us to church every Sunday morning, every Sunday night, every Wednesday night, and even on Thursday night. And then we would go home, and she would turn on the TV and we would watch Billy Graham on television. She wanted us to have a deep faith, but she really wanted us to hold dear the Golden Rule, the idea that we should treat other people the way we want to be treated.

How would we want to be treated if we were the Ukrainian people today? How would we want to be treated if we were Taiwanese people today, facing the kind of threats that they face? We would want the rest of the free world to come to their aid--not to send troops, not to send fighter pilots and all, but give them the tools that they need to take on this fight and to win it. When we do that, if we do that--and I am encouraged that we will--we will deserve the words of President Zelenskyy when he said, ``You are our hero. You are our hero.'' Let's be that hero.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source