Secretary of State Marco Rubio described America’s embrace of globalization since the 1990s as a “terrible mistake” and a “fantasy” at an event Thursday morning.

MARCO RUBIO: 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, and 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 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 always going to 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.

Here are Rubio’s full remarks at the opening of the Foundry School, a national program to train industrial leaders:
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