Fleshing Out America First--Text and Sub-Text of Remarks: Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the American Compass Fifth Anniversary Gala

 

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 The American Compass styles itself as devoted to an agenda around the objective of "developing the conservative economic agenda to supplant blind faith in free markets with a focus on workers, their families and communities, and the national interest." (Here). So they are; whether this constitutes conservatism or not is, I suppose, for them to say; and for their supporters to embrace. It is clear that, unlike conservatives of perhaps another generation, they view free markets in the pejorative ("blind faith" is never a positive way to describe something one supports). Like Marxist-Leninists of the current generation, they support a variation of what they call productive markets (the M-L equivalent might be socialist modernization); supportive institutions (the M-L equivalent might be the Core Socialist Values); and responsive politics (the M-L equivalent might perhaps touch on the premise that the people are the masters of the state). It is all good, of course. It is possible, after all, to think that the fundamental difference between capitalism and Marxism is the identity of the capitalist and the objectives toward which the product of capital is to be applied. It is also possible to see in this a view that politics and economics, and the social relations that they represent, ought to be expressions of systems of moral values, rather than the other way around. The echoes of Catholic social thought, for example and among others, might be heard and felt in all of this (see, e.g., here). 

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Thus, one understands that the project of global convergence as something that ought not to be abandoned, but rather as one that has been, and has to be, reoriented away from what the good people at the American Compass call market fundamentalism. That reorientation, in turn, is one in which markets are (re)embedded in a larger system which they must serve in their own way--that is, markets again are relegated to a role as instruments rather than as the objectives of social/political organization and the self-actualization of the individual within them. The core difference, then, between Marxist Leninist economic systems and those of productive markets are their aims, the basic unit around which one measures and values, and the political structures created to tend to them. The differences are not to be minimized--they are substantial--but the impulses that underlie the way in which order their realities against a blind faith in free markets (from very different starting and end points) is important to keep at least at the back of one's mind. Driving both is the core ordering premise that the human can only be cultivated within normative systems in which transactions are an instrument and not the ends of collective life. It is the difference--diverging paths from a similar source, that intensifies the competition and antagonism between these variations (much less between them and the older vision which they call market fundamentalism) or their more parochial variation in religious paths toward social doctrine. For example, one might think about the ways this sort of thinking finds an echo in strains of Catholic social doctrine/teaching (eg  Centensimus Annus (1991); here, and here).

Still, one ought to be elated, if one still values global convergence, that this project continues, even if in new form. The new form, of course is old form. It is within these strains of thought, of solidarity in the political sphere (at least), that one might situate Marco Rubio, and especially his efforts to articulate something like a working sense of the rationalization of premises that is represented by and in America First. That might best be evidenced in a recent set of Remarks delivered by Secretary Rubio at the American Compass 5th Anniversary Gala (the text of which appears below). 

What follows are just some brief reflections on Secretary Rubio's remarks and what they tell us about a world view that is helping to shape and then to propel America First into tangible action.

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1. The joke is always on you!

Secretary Rubio starts by acknowledging the tensions built into the modern administrative state, or at least the tensions of such a state still committed to democratic principles founded on popular representation in a system of divided power:

"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." (Remarks delivered by Secretary Rubio at the American Compass 5th Anniversary Gala ).

This is the usual lament of executives who had been legislators; but it works in reverse as well.  The lament is a useful indicator that a system is working to order. The absence of that tension suggests an imbalance--but it also highlights that the interests of administrators and legislators are not necessarily aligned even when they share objectives.   It calls for patience and planning. . .  and care. But in an Administration (like others before it) that is impatient for change, that can increase the risk of frustration as desire bumps up against systemic process. But political solidarity calls for this approach in order to avoid the unnaturalness of the triumph of an individual will against the desires and expectations, including the expectations as to form and content, of the community as a whole. That, as the Secretary then elaborates more fully in another context, might be understood to serve as the core of an understanding of human nature, and one that is central to the core of the Secretary's remarks that follow.  In that respect, the Secretary provides a quite reasonable basis for understanding both the promise and the challenges of embracing the modalities of solidarity in collective organizations in ways that accord with human nature. 

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2. On human nature:  One wonders why everyone seems to want to start with human nature as the gateway to analysis of the human. Probably bad education--and certainly the self-centeredness  at the heart of the Enlightenment, and of most cosmologies that matter to people, are always about people, their nature, etc.  Secretary Rubio appears to have been both a good student and an able handler of the human as an instrument to be wielded to suit place, time, and objective. Secretary Rubi starts with the proposition that the human is at the center of humanity, or at least of those things that may interest the human. "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." (Remarks delivered by Secretary Rubio at the American Compass 5th Anniversary Gala ). Everything else revolves around the human, but not the human. Here is where it becomes more interesting,  The human is a husk for Secretary Rubio. The hub of the human and human relations, the center around which social relations are constructed and humans know themselves, is not the human; it is the human's nature. The nature of the human then treats everything else as an instrument, one that can change to suit the desire of the human nature in tome, place and space. 

And the fundamental nature of human relations around which this nature builds its nest is, for Secretary Rubio, grounded in the individual thirst for collective solidarity. "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."  (Remarks delivered by Secretary Rubio at the American Compass 5th Anniversary Gala ).

Self-actualization, then, leads the individual to the collective; and reversed, the collective exists as an expression of the nature of the individual to seek expression in and through another, but not just as "the other" of 20th century philosophy that centered on the individual, but as that "othering" withing fields of collective solidarity. And those include collectivization of every sort--cultural, ethnic, racial, sexual, economic; among these Secretary Rubio focuses on what in contemporary times might (still) be viewed as paramount collectives--those of political solidarity manifested in States (not nations). Now the human can approach their nature more pragmatically (at least in the aggregate) nature; and that lust, that desire, can itself become an instrument for the management and realization by the human of what their nature most desires. The human must belong; the individual human may want space, and might long for self-actualization--but they want company in the process. And the company they keep produces the community that makes it possible for the realization of human nature. That need to belong, for collective solidarity drives all humans, and by driving all humans drives the nature and actions/interactions of their collectives. 

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3. Globalization as an unnatural corruption of human nature. The exuberance of the defeat of the Soviet Union, and what appeared to be the discrediting of Marxist-Leninism as a foundation for  viable political-economic systems then produced a generation long embrace not of community, of belonging, but of the individual, alone, self-actualizing for a community of one. That is the vision that Secretary Rubio offers up as a summary of a generation of globalization grounded in what some might disparage as globalized markets fundamentalism. It serves as an indictment, in the field of politics driving economic policy, not as a bad idea but as an unnatural one--that is, as a project and an idea that goes against human nature:

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. (Remarks delivered by Secretary Rubio at the American Compass 5th Anniversary Gala ).

To the Secretary, then, the global convergence globalization that bloomed substantially unimpeded within OECD spaces and from there everywhere, appears as the ultimate individual existential space (think, perhaps in terms of Sartre's Les Mouches (The Flies), one in which the individual is tasked with defying their own nature; where individuals spend a lifetime engaged in all sorts of activities (though of course economic activities tend to garner the most interest among legislators most of the time) that appear (although only he is privy to his own mind)  meaningful to them. That directionless meaningfulness provides its own meaning for communities only through their aggregated effects. It is, in this sense a phenomenology of the individual that produces an iterative and dynamic aggregated manifestation of collective desire (but not belonging) performed within platforms where users and producers of these actions or states of being could interact, each for their own greater glory. This anarchic solidarity, the Secretary suggests, defies  human nature in the sense that collectivity ought to be managed by the desire for the collective, rather than as the aggregated product of individual action. The greater purpose of this de-natured system, if such it was, the Secretary suggests, is in the preservation of a system designed merely to create the greatest possible flexibility for self-actualization through inter-penetrative acts of production and consumption of everything to satisfy individual desire and extending no farther.

But this vision of the globalization of the post-Soviet period, the Secretary suggests, goes against nature--human nature if only because it makes it impossible to achieve what nature requires--a collective state that is solid enough to support structures of solidarity.  Individuals do not belong by being; individuals are human beings by belonging. His example, and greatest concern, of course, are the geopolitical implications of this unnatural turn in the context of economic activity within States:

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. * * * 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.(Remarks delivered by Secretary Rubio at the American Compass 5th Anniversary Gala ).

While the Secretary focuses on its effects in the sphere of economic activity, the implications are far broader. There is an invitation to walk down the path toward the systemic and socio-cultural implications, but the Secretary doesn't go there. That wider set of implications, of course, aligns strongly with the perspectives of the American Compass, but also with that of Catholic social theory and Marxist-Leninism of the 21st century, though to very different effect.

Instead he narrows the view to capacity and national security, presuming the primacy of national solidarity as a starting point for the return to a natural state of human nature--one of belong in and to the State.

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. (Remarks delivered by Secretary Rubio at the American Compass 5th Anniversary Gala ).

And thus the price of globalization was dissipation--the dissipation of the strength of belonging. And that dissipation was augmented because while some societies enthusiastically enhanced this unnatural state, others used that to their advantage, and in the process unbalanced a world in which belonging ought to (better) serve communities of individuals belonging to communities that then engage with each other according to a common set of rules, and if not rules, then of expectations.  

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4. America First as a return to the "natural" state of human nature.  And so, America First represents a return to the natural, to the appropriate construction of organizations for belonging that suit human nature within the contemporary contexts of states of constant interaction. 

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.(Remarks delivered by Secretary Rubio at the American Compass 5th Anniversary Gala ).

For Secretary Rubio, then, the dissolute state of the globalized mind produced a dissipation of the United States that not only affected its economic capacity (and nationals security) in a world where nations still mattered (but not under globalization and its atomization of collectives), but it also affected the capacity of the United States to act in the world not just for itself but for the belonging enhancing values that serve the world.

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.)(Remarks delivered by Secretary Rubio at the American Compass 5th Anniversary Gala ).

It is with this in mind that one might perhaps better understand, if not President's Trump's thinking, at least that of Secretary Rubio, as the premise based grounding for decisions and actions at the Department of State: belonging, production, and security. "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. " (Remarks delivered by Secretary Rubio at the American Compass 5th Anniversary Gala ). That is the essence of the America First initiative he seeks, in his own way, to describe. Whether one agrees or not, then, becomes the issue at the center of the politics of our times.  

 

 

 

Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the American Compass Fifth Anniversary Gala

Remarks

Marco Rubio, Secretary of State

National Building Museum

Washington, DC

June 3, 2025

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.)