Reckless over-globalization left America dangerously dependent on its adversaries. Reindustrialization must be paired with enforceable rules for fair trade.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has identified one of the greatest policy failures of the post-Cold War era: America’s governing class decided that the ability to make things no longer mattered.
Under the prevailing theory, products should be manufactured wherever they could be produced most cheaply. Corporations would earn larger profits, consumers would pay lower prices, and economic integration would gradually turn authoritarian countries into peaceful free-market democracies.
It was a comforting theory. It was also a delusion.
China embraced international commerce without embracing political freedom. Beijing used access to Western markets to accumulate capital, acquire technology and build enormous industrial capacity. American leaders treated China as a developing commercial partner. China’s leaders treated trade as an instrument of national power.
The result, as Rubio recently argued at the launch of the Trump administration’s Foundry School, was the dangerous deindustrialization of America. The country did not stop manufacturing altogether, but it surrendered too much capacity in sectors essential to economic security and national defense. America became dependent on foreign countries for pharmaceuticals, electronics, critical minerals, machinery and basic components underpinning modern life.
Rubio’s proposed response begins with strategic reindustrialization. America must secure critical minerals, rebuild the ability to process them and train workers for advanced manufacturing. His emphasis on workforce development is especially important. Modern factories are not replicas of 1950s assembly lines. They require technicians, engineers and workers capable of operating sophisticated machinery, robotics and artificial intelligence.
The Foundry School is intended to connect universities, businesses and government. Companies identify the skills they need, universities provide practical instruction, and government aligns national policy with the country’s industrial priorities. Rubio correctly acknowledges that this cannot be completed during one presidency. Rebuilding industrial capacity will require sustained attention over a generation.
But Rubio’s cure remains incomplete.
If over-globalization produced deindustrialization, America must confront not only where products are made but the conditions under which they are made. “Efficiency” frequently became a polite word for exploiting enormous differences in labor, environmental and commercial standards.
American companies were required to obey American rules governing pollution, workplace safety and labor rights while competing against foreign producers operating under much weaker standards. Some countries suppressed independent unions, tolerated dangerous factories, permitted severe pollution and subsidized favored industries with cheap land, energy and credit.
That was never genuinely free trade. It was a competition between manufacturers playing by different rules.
The cure should therefore combine Rubio’s reindustrialization agenda with regulated globalization. Access to the American marketplace should carry enforceable obligations. Future trade agreements should include meaningful protections against forced labor, abusive child labor and the suppression of basic organizing rights. They should require participating countries to enforce workplace-safety laws, disclose industrial subsidies and refrain from deliberately weakening environmental protections to attract factories.
These cannot be ceremonial promises buried in trade agreements and forgotten after the signing ceremony. Violations must trigger rapid investigations and targeted penalties. Products made through forced labor, systematic environmental evasion or concealed state subsidies should not receive unrestricted access to American consumers.
That does not mean every trading partner must immediately adopt every American regulation or pay American wages. Developing countries possess legitimate cost advantages. Their wages naturally reflect different productivity levels and living costs. But there is a difference between competing through lower costs and competing through exploitation, pollution or government manipulation.
America also must reform its own regulations. It makes little sense to demand domestic manufacturing while allowing permitting delays to make new factories, mines, power plants and transmission lines nearly impossible to build. Environmental protection and industrial development are not mutually exclusive. Regulations should establish clear standards and firm deadlines rather than trapping worthwhile projects in uncertainty for years.
Nor should America attempt to produce every shoe, toy and household appliance domestically. The goal is resilience, not autarky. Ordinary trade can continue, but no hostile government should control a supply chain essential to American survival. Semiconductors, medicines, transformers, communications equipment, weapons components and critical minerals require domestic capacity or dependable production among trusted allies.
The strongest policy would therefore distinguish between ordinary commerce and strategic dependence. It would permit wide international trade while maintaining minimum domestic capacity in essential industries. It would diversify remaining supply chains among allies such as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and India. It would also require foreign producers to observe enforceable standards if they want privileged access to the American market.
Rubio is right that the cheapest supply chain during peacetime can become the most expensive one during war, pandemic or political confrontation. Markets optimize for price. They do not automatically optimize for national survival.
America’s mistake was not trading with the world. It was assuming that commerce had made borders, national interests and geopolitical rivalry obsolete. It compounded that error by enforcing costly standards at home while remaining indifferent to the conditions under which imports were produced abroad.
The cure is neither isolationism nor another return to reckless globalization. It is a new system of fair and strategic trade: build essential things in America, secure additional capacity among allies, train Americans for the industries of the future and require everyone benefiting from our market to play by defensible rules.
Rubio has diagnosed the disease. Now America must deploy the cure.
(Contributing writer, Brooke Bell)