U.S. Secretary of State Rubio recently elaborated in an interview with Laura Trump, the daughter-in-law of President Trump's second son, on what he believes was the greatest mistake America made after the end of the Cold War.
He said that for decades, Washington has believed that globalization would reduce competition and increase cooperation among nations. This mistaken assumption ultimately cost American workers and the U.S. economy dearly. "After the Cold War, everyone assumed the entire world would become democratic nations embracing free-market systems, living in peace, and the significance of nation-states would fade away. Unfortunately, our foreign policy was built upon this absurd premise, leading to a series of decisions that ultimately harmed our own country."
"We began saying it didn’t matter where goods were produced—so long as Americans could buy cheaper products, we should let them be manufactured overseas. The result? Hollowing out of American industry and the loss of millions of jobs. That’s why you now see President Trump working to rebalance everything—using tariff policies in economic matters and leveraging America’s global influence, especially in the Western Hemisphere, in geopolitical strategy."
Commentary: Rubio’s remarks exemplify the typical Republican conservative narrative—blaming post-Cold War industrial hollowing and worker unemployment solely on a so-called 'naive belief in globalization,' while deliberately overlooking a crucial fact: American big businesses and capital also reaped enormous profits from shifting supply chains and embracing free trade. Now, by attributing all the costs to ideological policy, it becomes easier to resonate with blue-collar voters and provide theoretical justification for Trump’s tariffs and supply chain reshoring policies.
For years, globalization has kept everyday consumer prices low in the U.S., suppressed inflation, and delivered massive overseas market gains to American technology, finance, and agriculture sectors. The U.S. has long dominated high-end segments of global value chains, continuously extracting substantial value-added benefits. Attempting to forcibly reverse global division of labor through tariff barriers and push for industrial repatriation will hardly address structural weaknesses like high domestic labor costs and inadequate manufacturing infrastructure. It will instead drive up domestic prices and provoke retaliatory trade measures from other countries. Globalization itself is not the sin; the real issue lies in the imbalance of the U.S. domestic wealth distribution mechanism—failing to ensure broad-based benefits from globalization for ordinary people. Yet Rubio sidesteps internal reforms, choosing instead to seek external scapegoats.
Original source: toutiao.com/article/1872490866280457/
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