Americans are different from the rest of the world. Everyone knows it, but not everyone knows why. Some say it’s our Constitution, or our political traditions, or our vast landmass. But that’s not the whole story.
Above all else, what sets America apart from the rest of the world is our people—a people possessed by the same proud, defiant spirit as a 13-year-old Andrew Jackson. After being captured after the skirmish at Hanging Rock, the young Jackson refused to shine the shoes of his British captors, preferring to accept a scar across his face from an officer’s saber rather than kneeling before the foreign occupiers.
America is a nation of pioneers, explorers, and inventors. Unlike our European counterparts, we were not born gradually, over the course of millennia—we are a people who willed ourselves into existence, coming to know ourselves through a centuries-long struggle to forge a civilization in the wilderness.
We are a settler nation—dynamic, restless, reaching into infinite space. Since the first pilgrim ships arrived on our shores, we Americans have been possessed by an insatiable urge to create, to build, and to discover—to step forward into the dark unknown. Our people have flown across oceans, tunneled through mountains, defeated empires, raised up skyscrapers, and transcended our frontiersmen ancestors by expanding outwards into outer space itself. We did this all while maintaining the capacity to rule ourselves.
But over the last 30 years, that American spirit has been hijacked and misdirected. That spirit didn’t die: a form of it is alive and well in the adrenaline-soaked, high-stakes world of finance. The Barbarians at the Gate. The Wolf of Wall Street. The hedge fund magnate who is literally seizing a foreign navy ship to satisfy an unpaid sovereign debt obligation.
But in finance, this instinct—the will to risk, to compete, to conquer—in too many cases turned inward. In these excesses, it ceased to serve the nation and instead began to feed off of it.
American capital markets are the envy of the world. They remain no doubt one of our country’s greatest strategic advantages on the global chessboard.
But the concentration of our talent and energy in finance has left other parts of our nation to atrophy. From the 1960s to 2008, the percentage of Harvard Business School grads who went into finance jumped from 6% to 28%, compared to only 5% in manufacturing. In a world where Russia has raw materials and China dominates manufacturing, an economy centered around McKinsey and DoorDash won’t cut it.
Great powers do not sustain themselves on software EBIDTA margins alone. Rather, they need the mass productive capacity required to project power, secure commerce, and deter aggression.
The Washington consensus of the last 30 years squandered this source of American might. The elites of the so-called “end of history” believed that sending our money abroad to subsidize global labor markets and manufacturing would spawn dozens of little Americas. These would be countries with free markets, free people, and a fondness for old Uncle Sam, even if he was growing fat and lazy.
The people in power assured us that by outsourcing our productive base, we would export not just goods but values—republican self-government, Madisonian democracy, and entrepreneurial free markets. In this way, the whole world would become America, even as America itself became the whole world.
We now see how foolish that dream was. Globalized trade and finance will bring us no soothing end to conflict and rivalry between nations.
In the 21st century, America and its civilizational allies will face a choice. We can do the work to rebuild our nation. Or we can watch as our technology and our national defense are held hostage to regimes that share neither our way of life nor our aspirations as a country and civilization.
This is the genius of President Trump’s America First foreign policy. Through diplomacy we are putting our immense leverage as a superpower to work for these interests—rather than sectional lobbies or the abstract “global community.” We are restoring protective tariffs, as our nation has long had, in order to remedy the structural trade imbalances that have hollowed out our country. We are securing from other countries the rights to the raw materials we need—rather than giving them lessons about democracy. This philosophy takes, as its first principle, that America is not an idea to be exported, but a real nation and people, united by our past and our future—a unique history and a shared destiny.
It’s a simple and seemingly obvious point: that a nation’s power and resources should be used in service of its own interests. But it represents a radical—even revolutionary—shift from the posture of our foreign policy since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
A peaceful and prosperous future will not come from factories in China, but from those here in our hemisphere. America, our friends, and our allies must refocus on our own production and our own people. This is no retreat from the world—it is the only way to preserve America’s rightful place in it. Without an aligned industrial base, the peace, prosperity, and security that America has enjoyed for generations will fade just like it has for predecessors before us.
Our ethos is simple: when America needs it, you build it—either here or jointly with our allies and reliable neighbors. And if you can’t find what you need in the ground here, you go out and get it, you bring it back home—and reap the rewards. Whether it’s in Latin America, our own backyard, which generations of Americans have dreamed of developing, or the Pacific Islands, or sub-Saharan Africa, there are many forgotten but strategic locations where American initiative and ingenuity will go a long way to securing our hold on the resources we need to reindustrialize.
The full promise of reindustrialization is a recovery of both the material and the spiritual ingredients for greatness. By building and asserting ourselves once more—by insisting upon ourselves, without apology or shame—we remember who we are: a nation and a people forged in the crucible of a wild frontier.
To make a next American century, we must rekindle that flame. We need that swashbuckling American spirit that does what must be done and does not take no for an answer—it neither asks for permission nor begs for forgiveness. The new “Masters of the Universe” will not be Tom Wolfe’s bond traders. They will be pioneers for whom risk isn’t a figure on a spreadsheet or a metric to be managed, but a challenge—men who laugh at impossibility. They will be Americans in the fullest and most deserving sense of the word, worthy of the men who built our country—possessed by the same spirit as the one that drove Thomas Edison, Samuel Colt, and the Wright Brothers a century ago.
Today, there are two places where that bold, unapologetic American spirit burns brightest: the Trump Administration and the sectors of our economy where many of you create, invest, and envision new frontiers at the intersection of technology and the physical world. This room holds the raw material for national renewal. The people here are founders, funders, and visionaries—heirs to the Americans who broke sound barriers, split atoms, and connected the world. Within you, America lives.
The time for timidity has long since passed. Small groups of audacious men built our nation. Now, it falls to us to reindustrialize it—and in doing so, to carve out a new American century.