Marco Rubio's speech notes:
PDF link on his site, excerpted below as well.
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imy6cdgTCaU
Excerpt of Speech Notes
●Last month, I spoke to students at Catholic University about the growing sense that our nation’s
institutions, especially in government, are unable to identify a common good and pursue it.
● I outlined my view of how that poses a threat to our economic foundation and our ability to
respond to threats abroad.
● I started the speech using a 19th
-century papal encyclical as its launch point -- a document
written as industrialization was causing tremendous economic change and disruption, a time not
unlike our own.
● This morning I am honored to speak here at the National Defense University to discuss the
defining geopolitical relationship of this century: the one between the United States and China.
● Unfortunately, I was unable to find a papal encyclical on this topic.
● But it is the perfect setting for this message, given the mission of NDU to prepare its graduates
with the ability to develop strategies to solve our nation's most difficult national security
challenges.
Changes in Domestic Attitudes on China
● For decades, we enjoyed a broad consensus that, once China became rich, they would become
more like us -- more democratic and respectful of the rules that govern international trade and
commerce.
● But while China has become richer, it has only deepened its authoritarian grip domestically,
while flagrantly defying international law and commerce.
● The last several years have brought a long overdue and almost too-late readjustment to our views
on China.
● Almost overnight, we have awakened to the reality that “while America slept,” the Chinese
Communist Party has emerged as an immediate and growing threat to prosperity, our freedoms,
and our security.
● Multinational corporations headquartered in our country, in search of quick profits, have
outsourced the dignified jobs that once sustained Americans to China. And our policymakers
rewarded this behavior.
● Now, once vibrant cities and towns are shells of their former selves, where incomes once
supported by a valuable industry get replaced by government checks and credit card debt.
● Tons of fentanyl manufactured in China flood our country, take thousands of lives, and destroy
countless families.
● Experts were intoxicated with post-Cold War fantasies about “the end of history.” A bipartisan
consensus formed that an American-helmed international system would forever be the new
normal, and the arc of all nations was toward democracy and respect for the rule of law.
● We have made great progress toward advancing our values and interests. But it is now clear that
our consensus on China was dangerously flawed.
Explaining the Rise of China
● China believes that its rightful place is at the center of the world and views the last 100 years as
an aberration it intends to correct.
● They have no interest in adhering to the rules of a post-war international system we helped
create, instead seeking to upend or replace it.
● They pursued these plans while “hiding their strength and biding their time,” portraying
themselves as a poor developing country and a non-expansionist power.
● And they succeeded in luring American policymakers into making negligent and catastrophic
mistakes.
● Washington passed financial, trade, tax, and patent laws designed to smooth over the process for
companies to open up operations in China. In turn, China would force those American
companies to partner with domestic competitors, which would steal their trade secrets and then
put them out of business.
● Washington allowed China into what was supposed to be the trade union of free states, the
World Trade Organization. Beijing accepted all the benefits but none of the responsibilities that
came with that membership.
● And under intense lobbying from companies desperate for access to the enormous Chinese
market, Washington did little to call out or address the Chinese Communist Party’s human rights
abuses in Tibet, in Xinjiang, and three decades ago in Tiananmen Square.
● Meanwhile, Chinese leaders kept subsidizing their domestic industries while undermining ours.
● China kept stealing intellectual property and reverse-engineering products.
● China kept expanding access to our markets for their companies, while restricting access to their
markets for ours.
● And China used the profits from these unfair practices to fund substantial investments in research
and development of their own.
● And now we awaken to the reality that for the first time in three decades, we are confronted with
a near-peer rival that seeks to displace us militarily, economically, technologically, and
geopolitically.
● Our aim should not be to halt China’s rise.
● The task before us is to prevent America’s fall.
● China is and will continue to be a great global power, but we must not continue to allow its
progress to come at the expense of our country, our citizens, our values, and the rules-
based international order that emerged from the incredible sacrifices made by the
generations before us – who defeated Nazi Germany in World War II and the Soviet Union
in the Cold War.
● This century will be defined by the relationship between the United States and China.
● And it will either be the story of an unfair and unbalanced relationship that led to the
decline of a once great beacon of liberty and prosperity.
● Or it will be the story of a stable, balanced, and sustainable relationship that allowed us to
further and protect our national interest and the common good of our people.
What Is a Balanced Relationship With China?
● What is that kind of balanced & sustainable relationship?
● It’s to no longer ignore China’s repeated and flagrant violations of the international rule of
law.
● Violations of the assurances they made to the people of Hong Kong when their city was handed
over.
● Violations like the construction and militarization of artificial islands in the South China Sea,
after years of promising the whole world that they would never do so.
● It’s to no longer ignore China’s repeated and flagrant violations of human rights.
● Forcing over one million Uyghur and other Muslims into labor camps in Xinjiang.
● The systematic oppression of all religions: Islam, Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, and Falun
Gong alike.
● And the crackdown on political dissent at home and freedom of expression everywhere,
including here in the United States.
● It is rejecting Chinese colonial expansionism, which ensnares smaller countries in a state of
permanent economic vassalage.
● The exploitation of political corruption to lay debt traps, bleeding countries dry and then
hijacking their domestic and economic infrastructure.
And the use of state-associated firms like Huawei to entice foreign nations into exploitative
contracts that give China access to foreign nations’ critical national security data.
The Centrality of Economic Power
● But the most important element of a balanced relationship with China is to address how China
has used its material resources, like access to its vast consumer markets, massive labor force, and
technological development of its companies, to further its national interest and undermine ours.
● It is a fact that when you’re doing business with a Chinese company, you’re doing business with
the Chinese Communist Party.
● Beijing has used the foreign investment of American companies to steal intellectual property and
technologies in order to build their own native capacities and destroy ours.
● A few years ago they publicly outlined their plan to dominate ten emerging industries in the 21st
century.
● This isn’t just some tin-pot communist “Five Year Plan.” It is a coherent strategy to become the
world leader in industries such as aerospace, quantum computing, and industrial machinery.
● Let me read to you a quote, one translation of the plan’s introduction:
● “Manufacturing is the main pillar of the national economy, the foundation of the country,
tool of transformation and basis of prosperity. Since the beginning of industrial civilization in
the middle of the 18th century, it has been proven repeatedly by the rise and fall of world
powers that without strong manufacturing, there is no national prosperity.”
● This is a serious and direct challenge our nation must respond to for two reasons.
● First, because one of the most powerful defenses of our American system has long been the
prosperity of our way of life.
● For generations, industrial jobs have made up the core of our middle class, enabling Americans
to make a good living and give their time and treasure back to their families and communities.
These are the families where stable, dignified work allowed kids to “do better” than their parents,
opening up a world of opportunities in education, work, and life.
● In many of our communities, local factories and other industrial centers provided the “good,”
productive jobs -- a source of pride to their communities and envy to much of the world.
● China and its authoritarian communism have aimed to sabotage that defense.
● So while it may be true that China is “breaking the rules” or that Chinese companies are
engaging in “unfair competition” against the American order, the fundamental challenge will not
simply be solved by some future trade agreement.
● The fundamental challenge is that China seeks to prove that you can have a prosperous society, a
contented citizenry, and be the world’s major power without respecting human dignity, freedom,
or God.
● And the second reason we must respond to the challenge before us is because the industries that
China intends to dominate are the very ones that will create the dignified and productive work
Americans need for us to remain a strong nation.
The Perils of Free-Market Fundamentalism
● Responding to this challenge will require us to reject the fundamentalism that argues that the
greatest virtue in American policy is to maximize “efficiency.”
● The market will always reach the most efficient economic outcome, but sometimes the most
efficient outcome is at odds with the common good and the national interest.
● Outsourcing jobs to China may be more efficient because it lowers labor costs and increases
profits.
● But the good jobs we lose end up destroying families and communities.
● Just last year, a study found that areas of the United States that faced Chinese import saturation
from 1990 to 2014 experienced drops in male employment, as well as declining marriage and
fertility rates.
● In communities that bore the brunt of “normalizing” trade relations with China -- to put it
euphemistically -- we even see jumps in suicide rates and deaths from substance abuse.
● For public policy makers, the common good can’t just be about corporate profits. When dignified
work, particularly for men, goes away, so goes the backbone of our culture. Our communities
become blighted and wither away. Families collapse, and fewer people get married. Our nation’s
soul ruptures.
● This experience has become essentialized today in images of decaying Rust Belt towns and the
epidemic of working-class “deaths of despair.” But this story is playing out just as destructively
in our nation’s inner cities – from Flint to Phoenix and Baltimore to Birmingham. The erosion of
dignified work is colorblind and geographically limitless.
● Free enterprise is the greatest mechanism for achieving prosperity.
● However, the market is agnostic as to whether America is a high- or low-wage economy.
● The market is agnostic on whether a certain outcome is in our national interest or the common
good.
● But as a policymaker I am not.
● And I suspect that all of you – men and women committed to our national security – are not
ambivalent either.
● The market may say short-term profits justify adhering to the requirements China places on our
companies.
● But policymakers must take into account that long-term surrendering our productive capacity to
China is reckless.
● The market may say Americans – often unwittingly – should invest in Chinese firms.
● But policymakers must take into account whether American investors should be capitalizing the
very firms that steal from our companies, commit human rights violations, and develop the
weapons that could one day kill the men and women of our military.
● This isn’t a call to socialism or a rejection of capitalism; it’s a call to policymakers to remember
that the national interest, not economic growth, is our central obligation.
● This isn’t a call to recreate the economy of America’s past. It’s a call to invest and compete in
the emerging industries of the future, rather than forfeit them to China.
● And this isn’t a call to kneejerk protectionism. It’s a call to maintain the technological and
industrial superiority necessary to defend our interests and ensure that working Americans have
access to dignified and productive work.
Revitalizing American Industrial Policy
● The critics of this approach argue that I am asking us to choose industries to favor and pick
winners and losers.
● But the truth is we are already doing that. The only difference is the path we are on now is
allowing Beijing to do the picking and the choosing.
● How secure or prosperous can America be if we cannot carry out heavy industry, pharmaceutical
manufacturing, and advanced technology?
● American policymakers must pursue policies that make our economy more productive by
identifying the critical value of specific industrial sectors and spurring investment in them.
● The depletion of America’s manufacturing sector has left us with a tremendous national security
vulnerability.
● I am not advocating for a government takeover of our means of production.
● What I am calling for us to do is remember that from World War II to the Space Race and
beyond, a capitalist America has always relied on public-private collaboration to further our
national security.
● And from the internet to GPS, many of the innovations that have made America a technological
superpower originated from national defense-oriented, public-private partnerships.
● This kind of collaboration is not a rejection of capitalism. It is a call to encourage and harness the
dynamism of our economy’s most productive private industries to further our national security
and ultimately our national economic development.
● It is a call for a 21st
-century pro-American industrial policy.
● When it comes to Chinese firms, our companies aren’t competing with private enterprises; they
are competing with a large and powerful nation-state.
● And in the long run it is a competition that market fundamentalists won’t win.
● Because China has learned how to leverage access to short-term profits as a way to get many
American companies to commit long-term corporate suicide.
● And because China provides their domestic companies the ability to make investments that make
no market sense in the short term but are critical to their national and economic security in the
long term.
● The market fundamentalists argue that government should not be picking which industries to
support -- that instead we should unleash the market to make those decisions.
● But what happens when an industry is critical to our national interest, yet the market determines
it is more efficient for China to dominate it?
● The best example of this is rare-earth minerals, which are vital to our defense and technology
industry.
● America currently imports 80 percent of rare-earths from China because the market has
determined that importing them is more efficient than investing in our own domestic mining
capacity.
● What is in our national interest? To adhere to the market’s determination and be vulnerable to
China crippling our industries and defenses? Or deciding that in this case the threat to our
security makes clear the market is not promoting the common good and, therefore, providing
government support for increasing our domestic capacity to mine rare-earth minerals?
● But the decision to observe when the market advances the common good shouldn’t just be
limited to those instances in which its determination runs contrary to our national defense.
● The most controversial argument I have made is that the loss of productive, dignified jobs for
Americans represents an existential threat to the common good -- especially ones that are not
easily replaced.
● Is it not in our national interest to have productive and dignified jobs available for young people
entering our workforce? For parents who need to support the next generation of Americans? For
veterans returning to civilian life after serving our country?
● Is it not in our national interest to ensure that productive new jobs are not only available to Wall
Street and Silicon Valley but to working Americans across all of our nation?
● This is what motivates me as chairman of the Small Business Committee to overhaul our Small
Business Administration.
● Not because I believe a revitalized SBA alone is the key to creating these kinds of jobs. But
because I believe our federal policies should be directed toward encouraging physical investment
and new, dignified work opportunities here in America.
● I want to ramp up the amount of federal funding for R&D available to small businesses.
● I want to modernize existing SBA programs so they prioritize encouraging investment in high-
potential firms in strategically important industries such as aerospace, rail, electronics,
telecommunications, and agricultural machinery.
● In essence, in the same industries China is trying to dominate via their Made in China 2025
initiative.
● This is just a small part of the much broader modernization of our economic policies that we
need.
● Furthermore, we should expand and make permanent the immediate write-off for any business
investment in machinery, structures, and land, as well as remove bias in our tax code that
incentivizes businesses to buy back shares, instead of reinvesting profits into their firms and
workers.
● We should continue President Trump’s regulatory rollback to achieve a better balance between
our nation’s economic vitality and commonsense protections.
● Doing so will provide a viable alternative for American companies considering joint ventures
with Chinese firms in order to gain access to capital.
● It will help revitalize American manufacturing, which in turn will bring higher wages and stable
work opportunities that allow for renewed family and community engagement. We will
reestablish a capitalism of the common good.
● In an essay last month, NDU professor Walter Hudson invoked the words of President
Eisenhower – an alumnus and the namesake, of course, of your school: “Spiritual force
multiplied by economic force multiplied by military force is roughly equivalent to security. If
any one of those factors fell to zero, or nearly so, the resulting product does likewise.”
● For the United States to be strong in all of these areas, and provide for our long-term national
prosperity, and for a strong national defense, and for the dignified work that allows families and
communities to thrive and share a sense of purpose – we need to restore our commitment to that
kind of common-good capitalism.
Conclusion
● Our current economic policy debate offers us an archaic and false choice.
● The left wants more government programs and more taxes on everything and everyone to pay for
them -- often advocating incentives and punishments on private industry that stoke identity
politics and culture wars, but ignore and even undermine our national security and job creation.
● The market fundamentalists on the right want more record-setting days in the stock market above
all else -- even if it means our dependence on and losses to China continue expanding to
American industries higher up the value chain.
● It is this financialization of economic policymaking that first allowed China to take over the
production of toys, cabinets, and mass consumer electronics -- and then take over the production
of generic pharmaceuticals. And now, they move to take over our genomic therapy industry.
● To what end?
● Until it doesn’t matter what innovation we come up with, because China will steal it and make it
cheaper?
● Until it doesn’t matter how much we spend on research and development, because we need
China to manufacture the end result for us?
● Until every leading technology, communication, transportation, and aerospace leader in the
world is a Chinese state-backed firm?
● If that day should ever come, then we will live in a world in which the most powerful nation on
Earth will not be one that believes all people are created equal and born with a God-given right
to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
● The most powerful nation on Earth will be a dictatorship that believes man exists to serve the
state; that its citizens’ opinions and religion must be cleared by political leaders first; and that the
only rights you have are those that the government allows us to have.
● What kind of world would that be? What would it mean for Americans here at home?
● We can already see a preview of it in our current events.
● How dozens of Muslim nations defend China’s treatment of Uyghur Muslims for fear of losing
access to the Chinese market or investment.
● How Hollywood self-censors movies and television shows for fear of not being able to make
money in China.
● How the most downloaded social media app in the United States, owned by a Chinese firm,
banned a young American from the platform because she posted a video drawing attention to the
mass atrocities in Xinjiang.
● How under pressure from China, an hourly employee of Marriott in Omaha, Nebraska was fired
for liking a Twitter post from a Tibetan separatist group.
● How nations throughout the world, despite knowing the espionage risk posed by Chinese
telecommunications companies, have allowed them to take over their domestic deployment of
5G, because no non-Chinese, cost-effective competitor exists.
● And how these same companies are so deeply embedded in our own domestic networks that we
still aren’t able to remove their equipment from our own military bases.
● This is but a small preview of the future that awaits us if do not undertake a complete
reorientation of our economic policies.
● It is not enough to ban Chinese technology or condemn Chinese human rights abuses.
● Achieving a peaceful, sustainable balance between the United States and China will require us to
increase our national strength.
● By rejuvenating our nation’s economic power.
● By prioritizing and incentivizing private economic activities that give Americans opportunities
for dignified work.
● And by furthering our national development through 21st
-century American industrial policy
compatible with and complementary to our free market system.
● The stakes could not be higher.
● Because the outcome will define the 21st century.
