There were many warnings about not allowing the United States to become a service nation. It was the beginning of the era of globalism. Some were dragged kicking and screaming, but the lure of cheap labor and greater profits won out.
Now, we are fighting to keep our sovereignty and everything that makes the United States a great nation.
Secretary Rubio talks about our terrible mistake and how we can turn it around. We must put America First, and abandon globalism.
Transcript follows.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio just delivered the most important defense of America First Nationalism and indictment of Globalism I’ve ever heard
“We made a terrible mistake in this country — many years ago… that the ability to make things no longer mattered… Now, we are… pic.twitter.com/YOTXWLLiQ2
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) September 3, 2026
Transcripts to Follow.
To talk about today, let me put it to you this way: I think we made a terrible mistake in this country, not 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.
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.
There was this fantasy, really, that the whole world would become a free enterprise, democracies, and that everyone would look like us.
That ran into reality: 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. But the result of it is that it deindustrialized 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, but even some of the most basic components that are necessary, that underpin economic life, especially in the 21st century.
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-not simply for our economic vibrancy, but in many cases for our national security and our very survival as a prosperous nation-state, and so now we are involved in this endeavor across the board to try to reverse those mistakes, and it will be the work of multiple administrations.
But it starts here, and it starts now with this one, that is receiving attention at the highest levels. One way is just the basic ingredients to go into all this, and it’s why you’ve seen such a focus on access to not just critical minerals as raw material, but also to the ability to process them. But the other has to be the ability to actually make things once again.