Republican Presidential candidate and former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina will deliver a speech Monday evening at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library that will call for the United States to maintain its military supremacy, reject the Iran nuclear deal currently being debated, and “push back against rising Chinese aggression,” according to prepared remarks provided to Breitbart News by the Fiorina campaign.
The speech will be delivered at 9:00 pm Eastern Time/6:00 Pacific Time and will be livestreamed here.
Fiorina spent several years as a national security adviser, assisting in the efforts to reform how America’s intelligence community communicated after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, serving on the Pentagon’s Defense Business Board and two years chairing the Central Intelligence Agency’s External Advisory Board.
Her speech Monday is designed to lay out the foreign policy platform she would pursue as President. According to Fiorina’s prepared remarks, the word is “in dire need of American leadership… more tragic and dangerous place when America is not leading.” She decries President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for “always speaking in terms of ambivalence and shades of gray, offering false choices and raising the shadow of doubt about our will to lead.”
Fiorina will detail the growing troubles around the world in Russia, Iran, and the Middle East, problems for which she says that Obama is responsible, and Clinton has either participated or signaled her approval.
“It is really quite simple. When you reward bad behavior, you get more of it,” says Fiorina. “This administration’s blind eye to aggression has become a black eye for America. When we do not stand with our allies nor confront our adversaries, our friends lose courage and our enemies press forward.”
The solution, according to Fiorina, is an “honest leader” who “will own up to the difficulties of the job in front of her—and who has a track record of leadership, accomplishment, and challenging the status quo.”
“As President, I will not wait until things have reached the crisis level,” vows Fiorina. “And I will not shy away from the most important challenges facing our world today. Because without American leadership, we face two choices: regional hegemons who challenge America or global chaos.”
Among other pledges Fiorina will make in her speech: to preserve the American military as the strongest on the planet, “overhaul the VA from top to bottom,” rebuild our Sixth Fleet, support our Arab allies in the fight against terror group ISIS, and reach out on her first day in office to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who she refers to as “my friend,” to “reassure him that the United States will always stand with the State of Israel.”
Fiorina also vows to reject the nuclear deal that Obama is currently negotiating with Iran, saying that her second call would be to the Supreme Leader of Iran. “He might not take the call, but he will get the message,” says Fiorina. “I will tell him: new deal. Unless and until Iran opens itself to full and unfettered inspections of all nuclear and military facilities, we are going to make it very hard for Iran to move money around the global financial system.”
These two phone calls will send a signal to the world, says Fiorina, that “the United States is back in the leadership business.”
Fiorina’s speech will then turn to China, who she refers to as “our rising adversary,” a country that is “using their economic might to rewrite the global order.”
She describes how China’s influence is rapidly growing in the fields of international banking, energy, trade, and how they are throwing their weight around militarily as well, growing their nuclear arsenal and becoming increasingly aggressive with their neighbors.
On the specific issue of cybersecurity and the recent hacking of the OPM personnel files, Fiorina is especially scathing of the failings of not just the Obama administration, but also the political class in their weak response to the hacking:
The Chinese steal our intellectual property with impunity and engage in state-sponsored cyberterrorism. The Chinese government has stolen the personal information of over 20 million Americans. We’ve known that the Chinese were seeking to infiltrate our networks for over a decade. We’ve also known about the vulnerabilities in those networks. And yet, once again, the government bureaucracy was too bloated and inept to act and the political classes were too complacent to stop it.
Having obtained the highest security clearances available to a civilian, I know the Chinese now possess all my personal information. This is more than a bureaucratic failing. The Chinese now possess incredibly valuable intelligence information.
The answer from the political class is to demand the resignation of the head of OPM. But what has been done to protect us from future cyberattacks? Has anything changed? The political class moved on as soon as the outrage subsided and the bureaucracy continues to lumber along.
Clinton is also called out by Fiorina for her dangerously lax approach to cybersecurity issues:
And let’s not forget our former Secretary of State told us her private server was protected from hacking because she had two Secret Service agents guarding it. We weren’t worried about your server being stolen, Mrs. Clinton. We were worried about it being hacked. Or worse, used as a back door to hack into the State Department system, which is exactly what appears to have happened at OPM.
The next President must understand technology. She must understand both how to use it to harness the power of our citizenry to challenge the status quo of Washington and to protect and defend our nation.
Fiorina will also point out Clinton’s hypocrisy, to run for President “as a champion of women’s rights,” when she has turned a blind eye to human rights abuses in China and elsewhere around the globe.
America is “at a crossroads,” concludes Fiorina, and we need a president who is “prepared to lead the resurgence of a great nation”:
We need a President who will see and speak and act on the truth. We need a President who knows that some things are black and white and who will be a clear-eyed advocate for policies formed by principles, not by polls and politics. We need a President who will reassure our allies that we are a friend who can be trusted and who will show our adversaries that we will not be bullied or intimidated.
We must nominate and elect a president who proudly accepts the mantel of leadership that a weary world is eager for us to wear.
I know what such leadership requires. I will recognize dangers with eyes wide open but will also embrace with open arms the enormous opportunities and potential of these amazing times. I am prepared to be a President who will lead the resurgence of this great nation, here at home and around the world.
Monday’s speech comes at a critical time for Fiorina’s campaign, shortly before the first Republican presidential primary debate. The two most recent national polls show that she has just popped above the top ten cutoff point.
Carly Fiorina Reagan Library Remarks as Prepared for Delivery
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