U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio laid out the foreign policy and economic worldview of the Trump administration in a speech in Washington, D.C., on Thursday.
Rubio and others in the Trump administration were introducing the Foundry School, a national program to train Americans in manufacturing and design.
‘The nation-state still does matter, nationalism is real, national borders still matter, and … countries are going to always in act in their best interest.’
Rubio asserted that the policies of the Trump administration were just the first steps in undoing the errors of American economic policies of the last 35 years or so.
“Let me put it to you this way. I think we made a terrible mistake in this country many years ago, under people that were in charge at the time, especially at the end of the Cold War, and that was the idea that the ability to make things no longer mattered,” said Rubio.
“That it didn’t matter any longer where things were made. They were to be made in the most efficient place at the lowest possible cost. That meant more profits for the company, lower costs for the consumers, and that was the way the world would work,” he added.
“There was this fantasy, really, that the whole world would become … free-enterprise democracies and that everyone would look like us. That ran into reality,” Rubio said, “the reality that that is not how human events have ever worked, that the nation-state still does matter, nationalism is still real, national borders still matter, and that countries are going to always act in their best interest.”
He said it would take multiple administrations to undo the errors of those policies.
“The result of it is that it de-industrialized America. We lost our ability and our capacity to make things. And not just big things. Not just the kinds of big machinery and things that we normally identify with industry,” Rubio continued.
“But even some of the most basic components that are necessary, that underpin economic life, especially in the 21st century,” he added, “and we woke up to the reality, just a few years ago, that we are, suddenly, as a nation, dangerously dependent, dangerously dependent on other nations for all sorts of things that we need … for our national security and our very survival as a prosperous nation-state.”
He concluded, “And so now, we are involved in this endeavor across the board to try to reverse those mistakes.”
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Economic expert and Blaze News contributor Carol Roth responded in comments to Blaze News.
“The dollar being the global reserve currency was always about trade-offs. The U.S. received cheap government financing, cheap consumer financing, and cheap access to goods, which raised our standard of living. As Secretary of State Rubio noted, the flip side is that it hollowed out a large part of our manufacturing base, which was devastating for communities across the U.S. Ultimately, though, we transformed our economy to service-dominant and became the largest, most powerful country on the planet,” she said.
“Rubio is also correct in noting that our movement away from manufacturing has created economic and national security issues by being over-reliant on other countries for important goods and components, which we should be prioritizing making within the U.S.,” Roth continued. “However, there are many goods that we will likely never make again in the U.S., based on issues related to labor, laws, costs, and infrastructure. We should be focused on bringing back manufacturing specifically in areas like defense, pharmaceuticals, and other industries and sectors where dependence on other countries is particularly risky.”
Rubio is considered a possible Republican presidential contender in 2028, but Vice President JD Vance is widely seen as the current front-runner.
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