Marco Rubio

Because this relationship we have here in Central Europe through you is so essential and vital for our national interests in the years to come.

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.

National security, which this conference is largely about, is not merely a series of technical questions.

How much we spend on defense or where, how we deploy it, these are important questions.

They are.

But they are not the fundamental one.

The fundamental question we must answer at the outset is what exactly are we defending?

Because armies do not fight for abstractions.

Armies fight for a people.

Armies fight for a nation.

Armies fight for a way of life.

And that is what we are defending, a great civilization that has every reason to be proud of its history.

We can reindustrialize our economies and rebuild our capacity to defend our people.