SECRETARY RUBIO: Thank you. Thank you. Bernie Moreno, how’s the Senate? (Laughter.)
Thank you guys for having me. It’s an honor. I want to thank Chris for the introduction. Did you get my office? He just said – I just – the one I used to have, the one in Russell? Yeah. Did you find any cash or gold bars? No. (Laughter.)
Is there media here? There’s – (laughter) – that’s what they call – it’s a joke. It’s a joke. You guys know.
Thank you, Chris, for that introduction, and actually very proud of the work you did with us on the Small Business Committee, and then Oren and everyone here at American Compass for hosting me here tonight. A couple observations of seeing someone – we really only got to serve together for, like, 10 days, because I got confirmed pretty quickly. And by the way, the President was so – and I got 99 out of a hundred votes because the Vice President, at the time his seat had not been filled, and the President for some period of time expressed great concern about the fact that I had 99 votes in the Senate. He didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad thing. But I told him recently, sir, you don’t have to worry about that anymore. I don’t think I’d get 99 votes now. (Laughter.)
And anyways, but thank you for this chance to speak to you, and by – one more thing I want to tell you about: I spent – now that I’m in the Executive Branch, we oftentimes have to deal with the fact that we want to do something and it’s like, well, but there’s a statute or there’s a law on the books that limit our ability to do things by executive action. It requires us to go through certain steps. And so I increasingly find myself saying who the hell wrote these laws, and in – today I was reminded it was actually me who passed a certain law that stood as an impediment to quick action. So anyways, yeah, I’ve grown in my appreciation for the Executive Branch more and more each day. And – but that’s also – the media’s going to say, oh, he’s for an authoritarian form of government. No, I just – some of these laws I passed are getting in the way of my current life, so we have to work through it. We will.
But thank you guys for this chance and the work that you’ve done, and I know that obviously you’re going to spend a lot of time focused on domestic decisions, but I want to hopefully pitch you a little bit tonight about what I’ve learned and what I already believed coming into this job, that so much about what happens domestically, economically is increasingly intertwined in geopolitics. It always has been. I think that’s one of the lessons we forgot, but I think we’ve been reminded of that here, most recently in a number of events that brought that to bear.
The first thing I would say is I think it’s always been true – one of the amazing things, one of the reasons why history repeats itself – people like to say that – is because human nature does not change. Technologies change, the clothes we wear change, even languages change, governments change. A lot of things change, but the one thing that is unchanged is human nature. It’s the same today as it was 5,000 years ago, and that’s one of the reasons why history often repeats itself.
And one of the things about human nature – I’m not trying to sound like a psychologist here, but one of the things that I think history proves is that one of the things we are programmed as people with is the desire to belong. In fact, if you notice, one of the – if you put humans anywhere, a handful of people anywhere, one of the first things they start doing is trying to create things that they can join or be a part of, and that’s true for nationhood and nation-states, the concept of nationhood.
Now, it’s a new concept. I mean, before we all – but we had something. It was like organizations, whether it was city-states or tribal organizations, but the advent of the nation-state is a normal evolution of human behavior because people think it’s important to belong to something, and being part of a nation is important. And I think that’s really true, obviously, increasingly in how geopolitical decisions are made.
I think that’s obvious and people understand that, but it’s one of the things that we forgot. And we certainly forgot it at the end of the Cold War. If I can take you back to the end of the Cold War – and understand for me these were formative years, because I grew up in the ’80s, the greatest – probably the greatest decade ever, confirmed by the – yeah. (Applause.)
You know why I know this? Because my kids – I have young – young – I say “young” and they’re, like, 24, 22, 20 – just turned 20 – and one who’s 17. Every – all they do is watch reruns from the ’80s and ’90s. They don’t make good TV anymore. Everybody wants to watch stuff from the ’80s and ’90s, so that’s just my pitch. The ’70s were a dark period of time because of disco music, but – and the ’80s just – got a disco fan back there. But the ’80s, we did – the hair was a little too big, but other than that.
But going back, the ’80s, you grew up, and I remember in 1983 – now I’m aging – I just turned 54. I feel 55, but I – and it must be 1983. Do you guys remember a movie called the – oh, gosh, what was it? It was about nuclear war. Do you remember this? It was 19 – no, War Games, that was a great movie. I’m talking about one that was on TV that scared the hell out of me. There was –
AUDIENCE: The Day After.
SECRETARY RUBIO: The Day After. Do you remember that movie, The Day After? This was traumatizing, and they had this thing on television. But basically grew up understanding that the world at any moment could end because the United States and the Soviet Union were headed for conflict and war and that maybe we wouldn’t even make it to 25 and things of this nature.
I forgot about War Games. War Games was another good movie, where this guy hacks into the computer. This was an ’80s hacker. This was not – I can remember the phone and the modem, and it was – what was that actor? It was the same – Matthew Broderick. It’s a great movie. I know I’m completely off topic – (laughter) – but let me just tell you I lived in Las Vegas at the time, and if you recall, the first city that he blows up in the war games is Las Vegas. And I was sitting in the audience and everybody was like chuckling – nothing funny about this Las Vegas strike. (Laughter.)
In any event, so this is what we grew up in. And then in 1989, in 1990 and ’91, it was my first years in college, and literally the entire world just transformed before my very eyes. Understand you grew up your whole life, and like the whole world is about the Soviet Union, and all of a sudden the Soviet Union no longer exists. My favorite memory of that is that I was actually taking a course that fall by a Soviet expert at – I think it was in Gainesville, Florida. And this poor guy’s entire career came crumbling down over a three-month period as the Soviet Union collapsed. It was like all these years of work, you have a PhD in Soviet studies, and now the Soviet doesn’t exist anymore. So I don’t know what he did after that. I need to check up on that guy.
But anyways, the point is the whole world transformed and there was this effusive exuberance, the belief that the Cold War is over, we won, and now the entire world is going to become just like us – free enterprise democracies. That was a very idealistic thing to believe.
But here’s the other conclusion they made, and that is that everybody – that it didn’t – nationhood no longer mattered when it came to economics, that right now the world would no longer have borders. It wouldn’t matter where things were made. What mattered is they were made in the most efficient place.
And it became mantra. And look, I think it became part of Republican orthodoxy for a very long time, an orthodoxy that I came up in, which was it’s okay if productive capacity moves to another country, because what that will do is it will free up our workers to do work that’s even more productive and pays them more. It was the famous or the infamous idea that who cares that you lost your job at a factory, you’re going to learn how to code, and then you’re going to be – you’re going to make a lot more money doing that.
Well, it was completely unrealistic, number one, and became incredibly disruptive that that decision was made. But here’s the other implication of it: It robbed a nation of its industrial capacity, of its ability to make things. And its industrial capacity and its ability to make things has two ramifications: The first is it hurts your economy, it hurts your country, it robs people of jobs, and the transition is not nearly as easy, but it also ends up becoming corrosive and destructive to communities. I mean, as a result we had a rust belt. We had places that were gutted and we had families that for generations that worked in a certain field or for a certain company, and all of a sudden that company or that field vanished because it moved somewhere else where it was cheaper to do. And those jobs were gone, and obviously it became incredibly destructive – not just for the United States, by the way, but for many nations in the industrialized West.
But the other thing it robbed us of is the ability to make things, which is a national security impediment – impairment – and a very significant one. If you go back to the World War – World War II, the admiral who had been tasked with planning Pearl Harbor thought it was a really bad idea. He went through and obviously followed orders, but he thought it was a very bad idea because he had spent a substantial amount of time studying in the United States when he was younger. And his conclusion was that attacking the United States was a bad idea because even though at the time militarily we were behind the Japanese, certainly technologically and otherwise, we had factories and we had access to raw material and resources. And he knew that over time, once those factories and those raw materials were put to the war machine, the Japanese would not be able to keep up.
And you could very well argue that the end of World War II, that the victory in World War II both in Europe and especially in Asia, was the result of America’s industrial capacity. When the Japanese lost a plane, they lost a plane. When we lost a plane – and their planes were better than ours for a long time. When we lost a plane, we were able to produce hundreds to replace it. Industrial capacity mattered in terms of national security, and that’s never changed. That’s always been true.
And so today, what you find is because of all of those years of neglect, because of the loss of industrial capacity, we didn’t just undermine our society, we didn’t just undermine our domestic economy, we’ve undermined our position in the world. And what you will find and what we find even now is that increasingly, on geopolitical issue after geopolitical issue, it is access to raw material and industrial capacity that is at the core both of the decisions that we’re making and the areas that we’re prioritizing.
It’s – now, the technologies are different, but nonetheless that is what we’re increasingly prioritizing. And that’s become really apparent to me. I think it was even going into this job, but in the months that I’ve been there, on place after place, every country in the world is now pitching themselves as a source of rare earth minerals. Every country in the world – by the way, they’re not that rare, so every country has access to it, but it’s become a big – but that alone is not enough because you have to have access to rare earth minerals, but then you have to have the ability to process them and you have to have – to make them into usable material.
And frankly, what the Chinese have done over the last 25 or 30 years is they’ve cornered the market. And this is one of the true challenges to sort of pure free-enterprise view of these things. You cannot compete with a nation-state who has decided they’re not interested in making money. They don’t – they’re not interested in making money in this field. They are interested in the short term in dominating the market, being the sole-source provider for the world of a certain product. Because once you establish industry dominance in any one of these fields, you can charge the world whatever you want.
Now, one thing is if we said: Well, this happened because they’re just better than us. But that’s not why it happened. It happened because we literally gave it away. Because we made the decision, we made the policy decision, that it was okay, we were okay with 80-something percent of the active ingredients in most of our generic pharmaceuticals coming from another country. We were okay with giving that away. We were okay with giving away all kinds of things like that. And now, now we are in a crunch. And I say “we.” I mean the rest of the world is in a crunch, because we have realized that our industrial capability is deeply dependent on a number of potential adversary nation-states, including China, who can hold it over our head.
And so in many ways the nature of geopolitics is now adjusted to that and is adjusting to that. And it’ll be one of the great challenges of the new century and one of the priorities of this administration under President Trump is to reorient our domestic and the way we pursue geopolitics to take into account for the fact that you can never be secure as a nation unless you’re able to feed your people, and unless you’re able to make the things that your economy needs in order to function and ultimately to defend yourself.
There is virtually none of the leading-edge industries of the 21st century in which we don’t have some level of vulnerability, and it’s become one of the highest geopolitical priorities that we now face – not simply access to raw material but figuring out how can we have more industrial capacities in these critical fields, ideally domestically, but if not here then diversify the global supply chain so that it cannot be used against us as a point of leverage at a time of potential conflict.
In fact, unless we fix it, some of these conflicts will never happen because we will never be able to enter – the amount of leverage they will have on us will begin to constrain our ability to make foreign policy. Unable to get into a tremendous amount of detail, let me just say that even as I speak to you now, there are a number of foreign policy issues in which we’re having to balance what we would ideally want to do with what we may not be able to do in the short term until we fix these problems. This is a real challenge in American geopolitics, and it’s one that’s become a priority and goes right to the heart of the decisions that were made over the last 20 or 30 years that were – that were a mistake and that we’re now trying to correct.
The other, which is more broad but I think also ties to economic policy, is the following: Part of the decisions that were made were, in the end, if something is good for the global economy, that’s really what matters. Ultimately, a lot of public policy decisions were made without the nation-state in mind. Rather, the decision was: Is this good for the global economy? Is this good for global economic growth? Is this good for prosperity in other places even if it may not be in our interest?
And we made those decisions even during the Cold War to some extent. We allowed nations to treat us unfairly in trade, but we allowed them to do it because we didn’t want those countries to become victim to a communist revolution that would overthrow them. But then we kept it going. And so today there are multiple countries around the world that are fully developed economies, but whom we have enormous trade imbalances because they want to continue that system moving along. And that has to be corrected.
But here’s the final point, and here’s why this is also critical. Because not only did we take out nation-state interest and the national interest out of our economic policies; we also took it out of the way we made foreign policy decisions. The idea that our foreign policy, depending on the place and on the issue, should be centered and focused primarily on what is good for the United States was completely lost. Time and again, we made decisions in foreign policy because of what was good for the international order or what was good for the world. And I’m not saying those things are irrelevant, but the number one priority of our foreign policy must – of the United States – the number one foreign policy priority of the United States needs to be the United States and what’s in the best interest of the United States. (Applause.)
That’s not isolationism. That’s common sense. On the contrary, in order to do that, we have to engage in the world. But we need to engage in the world in a way that prioritizes our national interest above all else. And the reason why we do that goes back to my point at the outset of this, with human nature. And that is: That’s what other countries do all the time. Virtually every single nation-state we interact with prioritizes their national interest in their interactions with us. And we need to begin to do that again, and we’re beginning to do that again – prioritizing the national interest of the United States above everything else in making these foreign policy decisions.
And I’ll close by saying that’s where foreign policy works best. As I’ve said to multiple foreign leaders, including some with whom we haven’t had engagements with for many years, I said the way foreign policy works best is when our national interests are aligned. When they’re aligned, that’s where we have incredible opportunity for partnership together. And when they’re not aligned, that’s where I expect them to pursue their national interest and us to pursue ours, and to do so peacefully if possible, and that’s the work of diplomacy.
And so I think the work you have done to reorient our thinking towards the national interest – both in our domestic economic policies as well as in our foreign policies – is critical work for 21st century conservatism. And I thank you for all the work you’ve provided. You’ve done great work. When no one else was talking about these things, when no one else was providing the material that allowed us to build public policy and challenge thinking, you were doing it. And I encourage you to continue to do it because this is going to be the work of a generation. It’s – there’s still much work to be done. We are in the midst of an important and long-overdue realignment in our thinking in American politics, and it takes organizations like American Compass to drive the innovation and the thinking. And we appreciate everything you’ve done up to this point and encourage you to continue to do that.
And one of the people who has really been a leader in this regard – someone who I actually got to know as part of this project and this thinking back when he was only a best-selling author and not even a political figure yet – is our current Vice President, who is doing a phenomenal job, and someone I’ve grown tremendous – my admiration for him has grown tremendously. I admired him before. I admired him in the Senate. I admire him a lot more now as Vice President because I think vice presidents are just more impressive than senators, Bernie. That’s all. (Laughter.) But I can say that now that I got 99 votes, see, because I don’t need their votes anymore. (Laughter.)
But the Vice President is going a phenomenal job, and I think is one of the most powerful and clearest voices in the world – really at the edge, at the leading edge of this new thinking in American politics. And it’s my honor to serve with him in this administration, and it’s my honor to invite him onto the stage now to speak to all of you.
So thank you for the opportunity to be here. Ladies and gentlemen, the Vice President of the United States, JD Vance. (Applause.)