SECRETARY POMPEO: Well, good morning, everyone.
Thank you all for being here.
It’s always great to be where everything’s bigger here in Texas.
I – my team, as I was flying out this morning, reminded me that it is not its own country,
so this is a domestic trip.
I know you all may think differently; I get it.
Thank you to Jim for that very generous introduction; I appreciate it.
It’s wonderful to be here at the Baker Institute.
You were so kind – when I was nominated to be Secretary of State, I was CIA director,
I – one of the very first phone calls I made was to Secretary Baker and said, “Hey,
would you come?”
He flew out and spent a handful of hours with me out at – out in Langley, and it has certainly
– that time has certainly been much to my benefit as I’m a better Secretary of State
because of the wisdom that you imparted to me that day.
You asked me, too, you said, “Here’s the deal.
You’ve got to come to the Baker Institute,” and I’m now upholding my end of the quid
pro quo.
(Laughter.)
You’ve got to have fun along the way.
Look, the State Department’s had a 25-year – 26-year partnership with your Center for
Energy Studies, and many other fruitful ties, and we thank you for that.
I want to thank you personally for that invitation to be here today.
There are lots of great stories about Secretary Baker, and great stories about you too, Susan.
A lovely couple that served America so graciously for so many, so many years.
(Applause.)
And Jim may have – you may have had more than one motto, but one of them was that “Prior
preparation prevents poor performance.”
I left out an adjective for the public audience here, but I think that’s certainly true.
Stories too about your Texas flair, like your propensity to put Tabasco on tuna salad, a
staple now at the State Department.
And stories too about the amazing relationship you had with George H.W. Bush, President Bush,
a man who had great influence on me as well, having served as the director of the Central
Intelligence Agency.
You were very respectful of President Bush, but he wasn’t afraid on occasion to make
his case very clearly to someone who was your close friend.
And you told me the story that day, you reminded me that every now and again he would say Jim,
if you’re so damn smart, why are you not the president? (Laughter.)
More seriously, I was thinking about your time at the State Department last week.
I was in Germany on the occasion of commemorating the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin
Wall.
Although Secretary Baker himself would give all the credit to his boss, President Bush,
no one should ever underestimate Secretary Baker’s individual contribution to taking
down that wall.
He helped lay the foundation for an international coalition to drive Saddam from Kuwait.
And you have been a tough act to follow at Foggy Bottom.
These are immense achievements for America’s national security, for those of us who remember
the history when we – when we had peoples who languished under the Soviets and Saddam.
These were achievements for mankind more broadly as well.
As you wrote in your memoirs, I think a bit too modestly, you said we diplomats should
only take a little bit of credit for these titanic shifts, because “the true responsibility
for changes in the world we inhabit lies in the ordinary men and women who sought freedom,
who struggled against darkness and totalitarianism, and who rose up to [achieve] liberty for themselves.”
I saw that last week.
I was reminded, that’s the subject of my remarks today.
It is – I want to talk about the natural hunger for human freedom, and why we should
never underestimate its great and awesome power, and our responsibility to assist those
people around the world who are seeking that human freedom.
I talked about my trip last week.
I witnessed this power myself.
In the late 1980s, I was a young lieutenant serving in a tank unit in southern Germany.
We patrolled the then-East German border and a little bit of the then-Czechoslovakian border.
There, I saw people try to cross to come – try to come across, come across to freedom from
the East German side.
We visited last week a little town called Modlareuth.
It was a small town that was completely bisected by a wall and by barbed wire, to the West
German side, families separated by this fence in the same town, buildings literally inches
from each other on opposite sides of authoritarianism and freedom.
And like so many thousands of brave East Germans, they – these people in Modlareuth valued
their freedom so much they were willing to risk dying for it.
I was powerfully reminded of their courage as I, for the first time, walked across what
had then been that border last week.
A section of the wall still stands there.
The barbed wire remains.
There’s a guard tower that’s been preserved.
The townspeople of the now-united Modlareuth never want to forget the horrors of communism
and what it wrought for their families, and we should never forget that either, and we
should never forget the good works, the force for good that America was in that important
achievement.
And we should appreciate what freedom has achieved, at the same time remembering the
past.
We take for granted – my son now is 29 years old, so just after this monumental achievement.
Sometimes I think people take for granted what happened, but those who lived it and
worked it know the German reunification wasn’t always easy.
Life in Modlareuth today is undoubtedly better than it was behind the Iron Curtain.
The work that we did, we saw it again when we traveled to Leipzig.
We visited a site, a place called St. Nicholas Church, the site of the very first protest
against the former, so-called German “Democratic” Republic – something that Secretary Baker
did on the 25th anniversary of the fall of that wall.
East Germans began to gather in that church in the 1980s.
They went there on Monday nights to pray for peace.
I had a chance to meet some of the former protestors who had participated in the Peaceful
Revolution.
They said each time they went they didn’t know what would happen when they stepped out,
when they exited that church.
They knew that they were being followed, but they watched, they watched the protests swell
and swell.
There was one gentleman who remarked to me that when the crowd numbered around what he
estimated would have been 70,000 people, he thought, what will the Stasi do?
Can it be the case that they will shoot all of us?
And he, saying that he did not know, said, “I went to the streets.”
He was young.
He would have been in his early twenties at the time.
They all found safety in those numbers, strength in their faith, and safe haven in that church.
And the story, the story of the church in Leipzig speaks to larger truths, I think,
for each and every one of us, and for our responsibility in the world: the longing for
freedom accrues and is common to all of humanity.
No person desires subjugation at the hands of another.
We are all indeed formed in God’s image.
And we’ve all been endowed by Him with the right to live freely, with the unalienable
rights that our Founders knew so well: the right to life and liberty and the pursuit
of happiness.
I think people know these universal truths exist, deep down, deep down in their souls.
I think it’s by the very nature of our humanity.
I felt it when I served in West Germany and looked across the barriers to East Germany.
Even in the darkest days of the Cold War, there were periodic eruptions – we would
see them.
Those eruptions were always in the support of liberty, in Hungary, in Czechoslovakia,
in Poland, and in many places where individual acts of bravery, frankly, never received any
public attention.
I fast-forward to my time now as Secretary; we see the same fight for freedom today.
We see it in the people in the Islamic Republic of Iran, we see it in people in Venezuela,
and we see it in the people of Hong Kong.
And we should never devalue their deep desire for their personal freedom and for their personal
liberty.
It’s a noble goal.
And it’s no coincidence that the most successful societies in the world are indeed free societies,
because they’re the only place – and I think we all know this – they’re the only
place that men and women can reach their true potential.
We’ve seen it.
We’ve seen this same story play out time and time again.
Look at how the lives of the people in places like Poland or the Baltics changed for the
better after the remarkable work that took place during the Cold War.
Look at the prosperity of Pacific pillars like Taiwan or of South Korea.
Look at the wonderful experiment that we have here in the United States of America.
It’s rambunctious, and it’s free.
And freedom’s benefits are vast, and history proves it.
And America’s role in enhancing freedom around the world is central to the world’s
understanding of how it is we can achieve that.
We should never take – the march towards freedom, is – by fate.
It’s by hard work.
I remember, I left Germany in October of 1989.
I was heading back for my next assignment in the 4th Infantry Division in Colorado.
So a handful of weeks.
And I remember, I called back – weren’t cell phones at the time, but I called back
to my old unit, to a friend named Jeff Bubar, who was my fellow lieutenant, and said, “Jeff,
what the heck?”
And he said, “Mike, we were patrolling the space, we were blocking people from coming
across these roads, and the folks on the other side were blocking them too.”
We spent our entire time as young officers there.
And he said, “Mike, there’s traffic going in only one direction.”
Only one direction.
The wall came down, and everybody moved towards freedom.
But of course, we had to work for it.
It took decades of effort across multiple administrations.
And with the help of allies and the people of East Germany, we rid the world of the Soviet
scourge.
It took patient diplomacy of men like Secretary Baker.
And victory was not a foregone conclusion.
You can go back and read the quotes days, weeks, and months before the wall fell, and
there were critics that said, “Your policy is failing, it’s not working, this is going
to last forever.”
No one knew the day that it would come.
Look at places today.
Look south to Venezuela, to Nicaragua, to Cuba.
There are many examples, sadly.
What day their freedom will come, we do not know, but we know that if we work and collect
friends and build out a mission set and support those seeking freedom, that that moment will
come.
There are certainly limits.
Secretary Baker referred to this, too.
We have enormous power, but it is certainly limited.
There are limits to the assistance that we can provide – our pocketbooks and resources
aren’t unlimited.
But we should every moment look for places, places where we stand with those that are
seeking freedom.
The good news is we have lots of advantages.
Our democracies make us very, very resilient.
Our free and competitive markets help us all prosper.
Our rule of law anchors our gains and allows us to peacefully resolve disputes.
And our free and democratic values allow us to realize human flourishing that no other
nation can compete with.
I literally – I would put America’s exceptional track record up against anyone, anywhere,
any time.
But we shouldn’t take it for granted.
As Secretary Baker so eloquently observed, we should never underestimate “the ordinary
men and women,” and their desire to be free.
Ever.
On this trip I had a chance to meet a handful more of these folks.
I went when I was – in Berlin, I had a chance to stop in a Stasi Museum in former – what
was former East Berlin.
Several former prisoners were there to serve as guides, to tell us the stories, the history
of what had taken place in that particular space.
It was unmitigated evil.
Prisoners never knew what was coming.
Indeed, the guards used to wear slippers so they couldn’t – prisoners could not hear
them coming down the hall.
And yet, the human spirit survived.
One of those who survived, a man, told me that he was placed in total isolation, but
that a few times a week the guards would let him outside – not completely, but in a cage.
And they were told to look down, but he would glance up.
And when he would glance up from time to time, he would hear some noise and he would be told,
“Look down, look down.”
But he saw and knew that there was a particular Pan Am flight that came by.
He said it was his dream to get on one of those planes one day.
What remarkable courage, and we should all be proud of what those seeking freedom did,
and what the world did, and what America did to allow him to have that opportunity.
Never underestimate the courage of that man or those who seek freedom.
And never stop working for their triumph, wherever – and wherever we can.
America is a force for good.
We are imperfect; we get it wrong from time to time.
But wherever we go, I have leaders from all across the world who want to see the American
Secretary of State.
Not Mike, but the American Secretary of State.
Because they know – they know that we will be a force for good in their country, in their
region, in their part of the world, and that we will act for freedom and for what is good
for the world.
I hope God blesses this institute with its continued success and may God bless our great
country as well, and I look forward to taking a handful of questions about almost anything.
(Laughter.)