Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaks at the American Compass Fifth Anniversary Gala in Washington, D.C.
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00:00...boards might do some good. Maybe pandemic relief should be conditioned on doing right by your employees.
00:07Maybe the multi-ethnic majority of working people all across geographic and demographic lines had been hurt
00:16by the de-industrialization of America, and maybe we should do something about it.
00:23And while Senator Rubio was exploring these ideas and getting lots of people very angry,
00:27American Compass was exploring the same ideas, also getting lots of people very angry,
00:34and very often doing it with Senator Rubio's help.
00:37When American Compass released a statement, as Abby mentioned earlier,
00:42that declared conservatives should give workers an organized seat at the table,
00:46Rubio was the only sitting elected official to sign it.
00:49When American Compass organized an inaugural lecture about political economy, Rubio was there to deliver it.
00:54When, in due course, American Compass needed more staff, his office supplied it.
01:01American Compass is very grateful to Secretary Rubio for his leadership and for our partnership over the last several years,
01:10in pursuit of a better economic consensus that cares more about whether families and communities and industry can thrive,
01:19and less about simply getting out of the market's way.
01:23An economics that understands that people are not products.
01:27An economics premised on the dignity of the human person.
01:30An economics as if working people matter.
01:33That's why American Compass exists.
01:36That's what we do, and that's why we're all here tonight.
01:39Because, as Secretary Rubio said in one particularly economically heretical speech in 2019,
01:47quoting Poplio XIII from 1891,
01:52The labor of the working class, the exercise of their skill and the employment of their strength in the workshops of trade is indispensable.
02:01Justice demands that they who contribute so largely to the community may themselves share in the benefits which they create.
02:11Please join me in welcoming the 72nd U.S. Secretary of State, the Honorable Marco Rubio.
02:36Bernie Moreno, how's the Senate?
02:40Thank you, guys, for having me.
02:44It's an honor.
02:45I want to thank Chris for the introduction.
02:47Did you get my office?
02:49Yeah.
02:50The one I used to have?
02:52The one in Russell?
02:53Yeah.
02:54Did you find any cash or gold bars?
02:56No.
03:01Is there media here?
03:02It's a joke.
03:04It's a joke.
03:05You know, guys.
03:06Thank you, Chris, for that introduction and actually very proud of the work he did with us on the Small Business Committee and Oren and everyone here in American Compass for hosting me here tonight.
03:15A couple observations of seeing someone.
03:17We really only got to serve together for like 10 days, you know, because I got confirmed pretty quickly.
03:21And by the way, the president was so I got 99 out of 100 votes because the vice president at the time has seated up and filled.
03:30And the president for some period of time expressed great concern about the fact that I had 99 votes in the Senate.
03:35He didn't know that was a good thing or a bad thing.
03:37But I told them recently, sir, you don't have to worry about that anymore.
03:40I don't think I'd get 99 votes now.
03:42And anyways, but thank you for this chance to speak to you.
03:47And by one more thing I want to tell you about.
03:49I spent, you know, now that I'm an executive branch, we oftentimes have to deal with the fact that, you know, we want to do something.
03:55And 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.
04:03You know, it requires us to go through certain steps.
04:05And so I increasingly find myself saying, who the hell wrote these laws?
04:09And today I was reminded it was actually me who passed a certain law that stood as an impediment to quick action.
04:16So anyways, yeah, I've grown in my appreciation for the executive branch more and more each day.
04:24And but that's also the media is going to say, oh, he's for an authoritarian form of government.
04:30No, I just, you know, some of these laws I passed are getting in the way of my current life.
04:35So we have to work through it. We will.
04:37But thank you guys for this chance and the work that you've done.
04:39And I know that obviously you're going to spend a lot of time focused on domestic decisions.
04:44But I want to hopefully pitch you a little bit tonight about what I've learned and what I already believe coming into this job.
04:49That so much about what happens domestically, economically is increasingly intertwined in geopolitics.
04:55It always has been. I think that's one of the lessons we forgot.
04:58But I think we've been reminded of that here most recently in a number of events have brought that to bear.
05:04The first thing I would say is I think it's always been true.
05:09I 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.
05:16Technologies change, what the clothes we wear change, even languages change, governments change.
05:21A lot of things change. But the one thing that is unchanged is human nature.
05:25It's the same today as it was 5,000 years ago. And that's one of the reasons why history often repeats itself.
05:32And 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.
05:43In fact, if you notice, 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.
05:53And that's true for nationhood and nation states, the concept of nationhood.
05:59Now, it's a new concept. I mean, before that we all, but we had something, you know, it was like organizations, whether it was city states or tribal organizations.
06:06But the advent of the nation state is a normal evolution of human behavior because people think it's important to belong to something.
06:17And being part of a nation is important. And I think that's really true, obviously, increasingly in how geopolitical decisions are made.
06:25I think that's obvious and people understand that. But it's one of the things that we forgot.
06:29And we certainly forgot it at the end of the Cold War. If I can take you back the end of the Cold War and understand for me, these are formative years,
06:36because I grew up in the 80s, the greatest, probably the greatest decade ever confirmed by the. Yeah.
06:43You know, I know this because my kids might have young, you know, young, well, I say young, they're like 24, 22, 20, just turned 20 and one who's 17.
06:53And every, all they do is watch reruns from the 80s and 90s. They don't make good TV anymore.
06:58Everybody wants to watch stuff from the 80s and 90s. So that's just my pitch.
07:01The 70s were a dark period of time because of disco music. But in the 80s, yes, we had a disco fan back there.
07:08But, but the 80s, you know, we did, the hair was a little too big, but other than that.
07:14But, 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 in, what must be 1983.
07:27Do you guys remember a movie called the, oh gosh, what was it? It was about nuclear war. Do you remember this?
07:33The 19, no, war games. That was a great movie. I'm talking about when I was on TV that scared the hell out of me.
07:38There was, the day after. Do you remember that movie, the day after? This is traumatizing. And they had this thing on television.
07:44But 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.
07:51And that, you know, maybe we wouldn't even make it to 25 and things of this nature.
07:55I forgot about war games. War is another good movie where this guy hacks into the computer.
08:00This is an 80s hacker. This is not, I can remember the phone and the modem. And it was a, what was that actor? It was the same.
08:07Matthew Broderick. It's a great movie. I, I know I'm completely off topic, but let me just tell you.
08:13I 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.
08:19And I was sitting in the audience and say, everybody's like chuckling. There's nothing funny about this Las Vegas strike.
08:24In any event. Um, so this is where we grew up. And then in 1989 and 1990, 91, it was my first years in, in college.
08:33And literally the entire world just transformed my, before my very eyes. Understand you grow up your whole life and like the whole world is about the Soviet Union.
08:39And all of a sudden the Soviet Union no longer exists.
08:42My favorite memory of that is that I was actually taking a course that fall and by a Soviet expert.
08:48At the, I think it was in Gainesville, Florida. And this poor guy's entire career came coming down over a three month period as the Soviet Union collapsed.
08:57It's like all these years of work, you have a PhD in Soviet studies and now the Soviet doesn't exist anymore.
09:02So I don't know what he did after that. I need to check up on that guy because, uh, but anyways, the point is the whole world transformed.
09:10And 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.
09:19Free enterprise democracies. That was just a very idealistic thing to believe.
09:24But 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.
09:31That right now the world would no longer have borders. It wouldn't matter where things were made.
09:36What mattered is they were made in the most efficient place.
09:39And it became mantra. And look, I think it became part of Republican orthodoxy for a very long time.
09:44An orthodoxy that I came up in, which was, it's okay if productive capacity moves to another country.
09:50Because what that will do is it will free up our workers to do work that's even more productive and pays them more.
09:56It 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.
10:02And then you're going to be, you're going to make a lot more money doing that.
10:05Well, it was completely unrealistic, number one, and became incredibly disruptive that that decision was made.
10:11But here's the other implication of it. It robbed the nation of its industrial capacity, of its ability to make things.
10:17And its industrial capacity and its ability to make things has two ramifications.
10:21The first is it hurts your economy. It hurts your country.
10:24It robs people of jobs. And the transition is not nearly as easy, but it also ends up becoming corrosive and destructive to communities.
10:31And as a result, we had a Rust Belt. We had places that were gutted.
10:35And we had families that for generations had worked in a certain field or for a certain company.
10:39And all of a sudden that company or that field vanished because it moved somewhere else where it was cheaper to do.
10:44And those jobs were gone and obviously became incredibly destructive.
10:47Not just for the United States, by the way, but for many nations in the industrialized West.
10:52But the other thing it robbed us of is the ability to make things, which is a national security impairment.
10:58And a very significant one.
11:00If you go back to World War II, the Admiral who had been tasked with planning Pearl Harbor thought it was a really bad idea.
11:10He 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.
11:18And 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 otherwise, we had factories.
11:29And we had access to raw material and resources.
11:32And 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.
11:41And you can 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.
11:51When the Japanese lost the plane, they lost the plane.
11:54When we lost the plane, and their planes were better than ours for a long time.
11:58When we lost the plane, we were able to produce hundreds to replace it.
12:02Industrial capacity mattered in terms of national security.
12:05And that's never changed. That's always been true.
12:08And so today, what you find is because of all those years of neglect, because of the loss of industrial capacity, we didn't just undermine our society.
12:17We didn't just undermine our domestic economy.
12:20We've undermined our position in the world.
12:23And what you will find, and what we find even now, is that increasingly, on geopolitical issue after geopolitical issue,
12:29it 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.
12:39Now, the technologies are different, but nonetheless, that is what we're increasingly prioritizing.
12:45And 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,
12:52every country in the world is now pitching themselves as a source of rare earth minerals.
12:57Every 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...
13:02But that alone is not enough.
13:05Because you have to have access to rare earth minerals, but then you have to have the ability to process them.
13:09And you have to make them into usable material.
13:12And frankly, what the Chinese have done over the last 25 or 30 years is they've cornered the market.
13:18And this is one of the true challenges to sort of pure, free enterprise view of these things.
13:23You cannot compete with a nation-state who has decided they're not interested in making money.
13:29They're not interested in making money in this field.
13:32They are interested, in the short term, in dominating the market, being the sole source provider for the world of a certain product.
13:40Because once you establish industry dominance in any one of these fields, you can charge the world whatever you want.
13:47Now, one thing is if we said, well, this happened because they're just better than us.
13:51But that's not why it happened.
13:53It happened because we literally gave it away.
13:56Because we made the decision, we made the policy decision that it was okay.
14:00We were okay with 80-something percent of the active ingredients in most of our generic pharmaceuticals coming from another country.
14:08We were okay with giving that away.
14:10We were okay with giving away all kinds of things like that.
14:13And now, now we are in a crunch.
14:16And I say we, I mean the rest of the world is in a crunch.
14:19Because we have realized that our industrial capability is deeply dependent on a number of potential adversary nation-states,
14:28including China, who can hold it over our head.
14:31And so, in many ways, the nature of geopolitics is now adjusted to that and is adjusting to that.
14:37And it will be one of the great challenges of the new century and one of the priorities of this administration under President Trump.
14:43is 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
14:54unless you're able to feed your people and unless you're able to make the things that your economy needs in order to function
15:00and ultimately to defend yourself.
15:02There is virtually none of the leading-edge industries of the 21st century and we don't have some level of vulnerability.
15:09And it's become one of the highest geopolitical priorities that we now face.
15:14Not simply access to raw material, but figuring out how can we have more industrial capacities in these critical fields,
15:22ideally domestically, but if not here, then diversify the global supply chain so that it cannot be used against us as a point of leverage
15:29at a time of potential conflict.
15:32In fact, unless we fix it, some of these conflicts will never happen because the amount of leverage they will have on us
15:40will begin to constrain our ability to make foreign policy.
15:44Unable to get into a tremendous amount of detail, let me just say that even as I speak to you now,
15:48there are a number of foreign policy issues in which we're having to balance what we would ideally want to do
15:55with what we may not be able to do in the short term until we fix these problems.
16:02This is a real challenge in American geopolitics and it's one that's become a priority and goes right to the heart
16:07of the decisions that were made over the last 20 or 30 years that were a mistake and that we're now trying to correct.
16:14The other, which is more broad, but I think also ties to economic policy, is the following.
16:20Part of the decisions that were made were, in the end, if something is good for the global economy, that's really what matters.
16:27Ultimately, a lot of public policy decisions were made without the nation state in mind.
16:32Rather, the decision was, is this good for the global economy?
16:35Is this good for global economic growth?
16:37Is this good for prosperity in other places, even if it may not be in our interest?
16:42And we made those decisions even during the Cold War to some extent.
16:45I mean, we allowed nations to treat us unfairly in trade, but we allowed them to do it
16:51because we didn't want those countries to become victim to a communist revolution that would overthrow them.
16:55But then we kept it going.
16:57And so today there are multiple countries around the world that are fully developed economies,
17:01but whom we have enormous trade imbalances because they want to continue that system moving along.
17:07And that has to be corrected.
17:09But here's the final point, and here's why this is also critical.
17:12Because not only did we take out nation state interest and the national interest out of economic policies,
17:18we also took it out of the way we made foreign policy decisions.
17:21The idea that our foreign policy, depending on the place and on the issue,
17:27should be centered and focused primarily on what is good for the United States, was completely lost.
17:33Time and again we made decisions in foreign policy because of what was good for the international order,
17:38or what was good for the world.
17:41And I'm not saying those things are irrelevant,
17:43but the number one priority of our foreign policy must, of the United States,
17:47the number one foreign policy priority of the United States needs to be the United States,
17:52and what's in the best interest of the United States.
17:55That's not isolationism, that's common sense.
18:02On the contrary, in order to do that we have to engage in the world.
18:06But we need to engage in the world in a way that prioritizes our national interest above all else.
18:11And the reason why we do that goes back to my point at the outset of this with human nature.
18:17And that is, that's what other countries do all the time.
18:22Virtually every single nation state we interact with prioritizes their national interest in their interactions with us.
18:30And we need to begin to do that again and we're beginning to do that again,
18:33prioritizing the national interest of the United States above everything else in making these foreign policy decisions.
18:39And I'll close by saying that's where foreign policy works best.
18:42As I've said to multiple foreign leaders, including some with whom we haven't had engagements with for many years,
18:47I said the way foreign policy works best is when our national interests are aligned,
18:52when they're aligned, that's where we have incredible opportunity for partnership together.
18:57And when they're not aligned, that's where I expect them to pursue their national interests and us to pursue ours
19:03and to do so peacefully if possible, and that's the work of diplomacy.
19:07And so I think the work you have done to reorient our thinking towards the national interests,
19:12both in our domestic economic policies as well as in our foreign policies,
19:16is critical work for 21st century conservatism.
19:19And I thank you for all the work you've provided.
19:21You've done great work.
19:22When no one else was talking about these things, when no one else was providing the material
19:26that allowed us to build public policy and challenge thinking, you were doing it.
19:30And I encourage you to continue to do it because this is going to be the work of a generation.
19:34There's still much work to be done.
19:36We are in the midst of an important and long overdue realignment in our thinking in American politics.
19:42And it takes organizations like American Compass to drive the innovation and the thinking.
19:47And we appreciate everything you've done up to this point and encourage you to continue to do that.
19:51And 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
19:59in this thinking, back when he was only a best-selling author and not even a political figure yet,
20:05is our current vice president who is doing a phenomenal job and someone who I've grown tremendously.
20:11My admiration for him has grown tremendously.
20:13I admired him before.
20:14I admired him in the Senate.
20:15I admire him a lot more now as vice president because I think vice presidents are just more impressive than senators, Bernie.
20:21But I can say that now that I've got 99 votes.
20:28I don't need their votes anymore.
20:30But the vice president is doing a phenomenal job and I think is one of the most powerful and clearest voices in the world,
20:36really at the edge, at the leading edge of this new thinking in American politics.
20:42And it's my honor to serve with him in this administration.
20:45And it's my honor to invite him onto the stage now to speak to all of you.
20:48So thank you for the opportunity to be here.
20:50Ladies and gentlemen, the vice president of the United States, J.D. Vance.