| 摘要 | Panel:
John Charles Daly, Moderator
Les Aspin – Representative (D-Wisconsin)
Joe Biden – Senator (D-Delaware)
William Dickinson – Representative (R–Alabama)
General Brent Scowcroft (Retired) – Former Director of National Security Council
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JOHN CHARLES DALY, former ABC News chief and forum moderator: This public policy forum, part of a series presented by the American Enterprise Institute, is concerned with arms sales as supporting elements of foreign policy and national security. Our subject, “Arms Sales: A Useful Foreign Policy Tool?”
An examination of arms sales or arms transfers as a tool of foreign policy must inevitably recognize the potential of such sales to affect the economic, military, psychological, and diplomatic posture of the recipients. In each of these areas, the recipient’s posture plays an important part in the grand design of U.S. policy to protect crucial interests of the United States and of U.S. allies in Western Europe, in the Middle East, in Africa, in Asia, and in South America.
Our discussion of arms sales is concerned solely with conventional arms, not atomic weapons, but a vital factor is the extraordinary sophistication that has developed in conventional arms in this electronic era. If these sophisticated elements are in the hands of nations whose borders lie in the volatile areas of confrontation between the interests of the United States and its allies and the Soviet Union, they are potential hazards to our own overall security.
In mid-1981, the Reagan administration announced its arms transfer policy, emphasizing that the “basic thrust is to recognize that arms transfers properly considered and employed represent an in dispensable instrument of American policy that both complements and supplements the role of our own military forces.” This is a marked change of direction from the policy of the Carter administration, which emphasized restraint and consideration of a recipient’s human rights policies in approving arms sales.
We have an expert panel to examine the question of arms sales. Lieutenant General Brent Scowcroft, a West Point graduate, holds an M.A. and a Ph.D. in international relations from Columbia University. He is professor of political science at the U.S. Air Force Academy, he has served with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and, after retiring from the service, he was assistant to President Gerald Ford for national security affairs.
Representative William L. Dickinson, Republican from Alabama, is the ranking minority member of the House Armed Services Committee and of the Subcommittee on Research and Development.
Senator Joseph R. Biden of Delaware is a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the ranking minority member of its Subcommittee on European Affairs. Senator Biden served as chairman of the U.S. Senate delegations on SALT II in Moscow and to the North Atlantic Assembly in Ottawa in 1979.
Representative Les Aspin, six-term Democrat from Wisconsin, a graduate of Yale and Oxford universities, has a doctorate in economics from MIT. Mr. Aspin served as an economist with the Pentagon and with the president’s Council of Economic Advisers. He is now a member of the House Armed Services, Budget, and Government Operations committees. |
