Marco Rubio

And a continent was rebuilt.

Our people prospered in time.

The east and west blocks were reunited.

A civilization was once again made whole.

That infamous wall?

that had cleaned this nation into two came down, and with it, an evil empire, and the East and West became one again.

But the euphoria of this triumph led us to a dangerous delusion that we had entered, quote, the end of history, that every nation would now be a liberal democracy, that the ties formed by trade and by commerce alone would now replace nationhood.

that the rules-based global order, an overused term, would now replace the national interest, and that we would now live in a world without borders where everyone became a citizen of the world.

This was a foolish idea that ignored both human nature and it ignored the lessons of over 5,000 years of recorded human history.

And it has cost us dearly.

In this delusion, we embraced a dogmatic vision of free and unfettered trade, even as some nations protected their economies and subsidized their companies to systematically undercut ours, shuttering our plants, resulting in large parts of our societies being deindustrialized, shipping millions of working and middle-class jobs overseas, and handing control of our critical supply chains to both adversaries and rivals.

We increasingly outsourced our sovereignty to international institutions, while many nations invested in massive welfare states at the cost of maintaining the ability to defend themselves.

This, even as other countries have invested in the most rapid military buildup in all of human history, and have not hesitated to use hard power to pursue their own interests.

To appease a climate cult, we have imposed energy policies on ourselves that are impoverishing our people,

even as our competitors exploit oil and coal and natural gas and anything else, not just to power their economies, but to use as leverage against our own.

And in a pursuit of a world without borders, we opened our doors to an unprecedented wave of mass migration that threatens the cohesion of our societies, the continuity of our culture and the future of our people.

We made these mistakes together.

And now, together, we owe it to our people to face those facts and to move forward, to rebuild.

Under President Trump, the United States of America will once again take on the task of renewal and restoration, driven by a vision of a future as proud, as sovereign, and as vital as our civilization's past.

And while we are prepared, if necessary, to do this alone,