UNDER SECRETARY HELBERG: Every so often, history hands a nation a choice: to drift, or to build. And every so often, it hands that nation a leader who inspires people to reject the drifters and build with boldness and confidence in the future.
One of our guests this morning is the son of Cuban exiles, a man whose family fled a regime that confiscated everything, and who grew up understanding in his bones that freedom and prosperity are not inherited - they're defended, and they're built. That heritage made him clear-eyed, and it gave him something rare in Washington: the memory of what it costs when a country loses its future.
For decades in the United States Senate, he warned us. He warned us that we traded our industrial base for the illusion of cheap abundance. He warned us that supply chains had become weapons pointed at us. And this year in Munich, in a speech that will be studied for a generation, he said what no Secretary of State had dared to say - that deindustrialization was a choice, and that reindustrialization must now be ours. He called on the free world not merely to defend Western civilization but to build a new Western century.
Under President Trump's leadership, he has turned that vision into policy, restoring American economic strength as the foundation of economic power, and reminding the world that the arsenal of democracy was never a metaphor - it was a factory floor. He's a statesman, a patriot, and the driving force behind the most consequential renewal of American economic statecraft since the Second World War.
