American Dreams

by Marco Rubio

  Instead of doing the hard work of outlining the costs of weakness and inaction to the American people, they have taken the political path of least resistance. Our leaders have advocated leaving our allies to fend for themselves. They have proposed and enacted massive reductions in defense spending. They have tried to convince Americans the world would be fine without our leadership. Worse, they have told us that America would be fine regardless of the chaos that erupts in a leaderless world.

  No single president, no single party and no single Congress has been solely at fault. But a striking shift has occurred at the hands of our current president. In sharp contrast to the “peace through strength” leadership of George Washington and Ronald Reagan, the president has made reducing American strength and engagement an active priority. When he delivered his first inaugural address, instead of reassuring our allies, he spoke directly to our enemies, indicating willingness—even eagerness—to change our nation’s approach to them. He said, “We will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.” But the president didn’t wait for our enemies to take a less aggressive stance against America—to unclench their fists—before he extended his hand to them. Even as they continued to threaten, target and even kill Americans, this administration went to work stripping parts from the engine of American strength. Defense spending has been cut dramatically and disproportionately—by 21 percent since 2010 when adjusted for inflation. The army is set to be reduced to pre–World War II levels. The navy is at pre–World War I levels. The air force has the smallest and oldest combat force in its history.

  To the world, this decline in American strength has sent a message to both our friends and our enemies. Our friends doubt our resolve and hesitate to join us in combating threats. And our adversaries are emboldened by what they perceive as our diminished military presence. For proof, recall the way Russian dictator Vladimir Putin scoffed at the president’s modest attempts to impose sanctions during the Ukraine crisis. Or recall how the Syrian tyrant Bashar al-Assad declined to take America’s threats seriously, used chemical weapons on his own people and still remains in power.

  Here at home, the president’s foreign policy retreat and ensuing global chaos has undermined the American people’s faith, not just in the institutions of government to keep us safe, but in the very promise and power of the American ideal. The pride we once took in our global leadership has withered into uncertainty. The hope that America could fix international crises has turned to hope that we will stop making them worse.

  For me—and I hope the vast majority of my colleagues in Congress—the ongoing discussion about the nature and extent of America’s role in the world isn’t just an academic discussion. I am keenly aware that my decisions impact each and every American, sometimes in personal and profound ways. Over the last fourteen years, thousands of Americans have lost mothers, fathers, sons and daughters as part of our effort to defeat terrorism and bring freedom to Iraq and Afghanistan. These sacrifices have left many Americans understandably weary. Many of us are also discouraged by the nature of disputes in the world, particularly the Middle East, which seems to pit one bad actor against another. We’re tired that our efforts are so often unappreciated. And we wonder, with all the problems here at home, why we should spend our money and effort abroad.

  There is no denying that a globally engaged America comes at a steep price. But the history of our young nation shows that a lack of American engagement in global leadership exacts an even higher price. Imagine for a moment the kind of world we would live in if America had sat out the twentieth century. Imagine if the beaches of Normandy had never been touched by American boots, if American aid hadn’t helped alleviate the AIDS crisis in Africa or if nuclear proliferation had continued unfettered by U.S. leadership. It’s no exaggeration to say that the world would be less prosperous—even that the majority of democracies would fail to exist—had America failed to lead.

  When we have listened to the voices urging us to retreat from the world, we have failed to meet the threats growing abroad until it was almost too late. In November 2013 I stood at a podium at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington D.C. and warned that we were on the verge of repeating that mistake once again. Other nations were not sitting idly by waiting for America to, as President Obama put it, “nation-build at home.” Tragically, events of the past year have borne out this warning. From Libya to Syria to Egypt to Ukraine, this administration simply shrugs as threats fester. When it does act, it fails to communicate any consistent rationale for military use.

  We can’t change the past, but we can begin to build a foundation for future American strength and leadership. At a minimum, the events of the past year have made it clear what a twenty-first-century American foreign policy should not look like. It should not be tentative about—or even hostile to—American leadership. It should not be poll driven. And it should not seek to deny the simple truth that the world is at its safest when America is at its strongest.

  Rebuilding American strength and restoring trust in our national security institutions rests on achieving three objectives. First, we must recognize that, in a globalized world, conflict breeds economic disruption. If a band of pirates was able to wreak havoc on our economy in the late eighteenth century, then ISIL, a nuclear Iran, an aggressive China or a resurgent Russia can certainly do so in the twenty-first. We must boldly oppose efforts by other nations to infringe upon the freedom of international waters, airspace, cyberspace and outer space.

  Second, we need to have moral clarity regarding what we stand for and why. This means being unabashed in support of the spread of economic and political freedom. It means reinforcing our alliances based on these principles. And it means resisting efforts by rising and resurgent powers to subjugate their neighbors.

  Finally, we need American strength. America under this president has simply not been at its strongest. Waiting for our adversaries to unclench their fists so we can shake their hands has not proven a responsible or effective strategy. The “don’t do stupid stuff” approach has proven self-contradictory. We must instead demonstrate a strength in defense capabilities that, as Presidents Washington and Reagan envisioned, leaves our enemies unwilling to provoke us. Yet times have changed since Reagan’s historic buildup. A strong national defense in the twenty-first century will require a defense agenda built for the twenty-first century—one that ensures the superiority of our technological advances, armed forces and intelligence capabilities.

  Rebuilding American strength for the twenty-first century begins with a willingness to allocate an appropriate amount of money toward our defense needs. There is no denying that the fiscal challenges facing our nation are daunting. In fact, I believe one of the greatest risks to our national security is our federal debt. But it’s important to remember that defense spending is not the primary driver of our debt. Defense makes up only about 16 percent of the federal budget—and that amount is declining. It is Social Security and Medicare that comprise a staggering 37 percent of the federal budget—and that amount is rising. This is why I’ve proposed ways to reform these important entitlement programs to make them sustainable.

  In 2011, then Secretary of Defense Robert Gates proposed a defense budget for 2012 that was forward-thinking, strategy-driven and also fiscally sustainable. The bipartisan National Defense Panel also recommends that we move to fulfill the Gates budget goals as soon as possible. As it is, our defense budget is running about $1 trillion short of this bipartisan funding goal.

  Basing our defense budgets on strategy and not math, as Secretary Gates has proposed, will allow us both to modernize our military to make sure it is on the cutting edge today and to innovate to make sure we remain there tomorrow. As it is, far from modernizing and innovating within our military force, we are actually going backward in the area of force levels. This may have gone largely unnoticed in the United States, but it sure hasn’t among our adversaries. China, in particular, is sprint
ing up behind us, rapidly closing the gap in readiness and strength, and now America must run faster than ever just to maintain our current level of superiority. For the first time ever, we are reacting to China’s advances in capabilities rather than having China react to ours.

  Along with this loss of faith in our government’s ability to ensure the national defense is a devastating—but deserved—distrust in the capacity and competence of government to ensure our domestic tranquillity. Americans’ trust in our institutions has been waning for decades, but the past year or so has been a particularly painful reckoning. A truly mind-boggling list of failures and betrayals covers virtually every part of government—the disastrous rollout and subsequent failure of Obamacare, the targeting of conservative groups by the IRS, the broken promise to our veterans by a dysfunctional Veterans Affairs, the State Department cover-up of Benghazi, the Secret Service’s failure to adequately protect the president, the incompetence of our public health system in the initial stages of the Ebola crisis . . . All of these lapses have brought Americans’ trust in government to all-time lows. The fact that these failures were so often accompanied by dogmatic assertions to the contrary by government officials has only deepened this distrust.

  I began writing this book knowing that the American Dream is threatened by the extreme stresses our schools, our businesses and even our families face today. As I write these words almost a year later, it is more clear than ever that the governmental institutions that are supposed to help Americans succeed—to help educate our kids, ensure a fair playing field for businesses and support American families—are less capable and less trusted than at any time in our nation’s history. Part of the reason is a lack of leadership in Washington. But a related and more significant reason—the one that I’ve attempted to address with a reform agenda outlined in these pages—is that our institutions are outdated and outmoded. They represent a twentieth-century big-government command-and-control approach that, if it was ever successful, is destined to fail in a globalized, technology-driven, twenty-first-century America. We simply can’t solve today’s problems with yesterday’s answers.

  When I became speaker of the Florida House of Representatives in 2007, I gave a speech laying out a plan to confront the challenges Floridians faced. I said: “To tackle the big and relevant issues of our day with bold and innovative ideas is without question the most rewarding way to serve. What will it take to fully capitalize on the opportunities before us? It will take what it has always taken: leadership.”

  I believe that is true at every level of politics. And I believe that the measure of our politicians is not in how good they look on TV or how popular they are with the media; it’s in their ideas to help everyday people: the single mom desperate to give her kids a better shot in life, the college graduate with crippling student debt and no job, the working parents struggling against a rising tide of bills and payments.

  So before I became speaker, I toured the state to talk with people in difficult circumstances just like those, and I put together a book titled 100 Innovative Ideas for Florida’s Future. We conducted “idearaisers” throughout the state and created a Web site to invite Floridians to submit their own ideas. We came up with an agenda that included innovations like a requirement that school districts create career academies for vocational training, an investment pool for businesses and infrastructure projects, and a Web site that allows consumers to compare Florida doctors, hospitals and health insurance plans—these were just three ideas along with ninety-seven others. Through this book, Floridians knew exactly what my goals would be in office, and I stuck to those goals and am proud of what we achieved as a result.

  This method of leadership—powered by ideas and sustained by an open communication of those ideas to the people they impact—is certainly not one that I invented myself. Others have taken a similar approach, often with great success. One of the most notable instances was an initiative announced twenty years ago last fall: the Contract with America.

  The Contract with America was led by Representative Newt Gingrich of Georgia, then minority whip and future speaker of the House. He partnered with other Republican leaders, including Texas Congressman Dick Armey and policy leaders at the Heritage Foundation, to craft a revolutionary collection of ideas for restoring the promise of America. Every Republican candidate signed the contract—and that November, the American people gave it their stamp of approval by giving Republicans the majority in the U.S. Congress.

  Today, the American Dream faces enormous challenges. These have been brought on by dramatic changes to the nature of our economy, and made worse by the failure of our policies and institutions to adapt. In the last elections, the voters made clear their dissatisfaction with the status quo. But we must do more—much more—than separate ourselves from the failed ideas of our current leaders. The temptation for Republicans after these elections will be to look for ways to keep the majority in 2016, to pursue small ideas that poll well but will do little to address the massive economic changes we are facing. But my hope is that we will use our new majority in the Senate and our larger majority in the House to offer and implement a twenty-first-century agenda to restore and expand the American Dream. After all, protest elections—even ones that (temporarily) benefit my party—will not save the American Dream.

  Americans are anxious. The institutions that used to work—like our educational system—no longer work. The wages of the working class no longer keep pace with the modern cost of living. And so we veer back and forth with each election cycle, looking for the party that promises to take us back to the good old days. But the twentieth century is over, and it is never coming back. What we are facing now are massive structural economic changes, not just the aftermath of a cyclical downturn. And until we accept that, we won’t get it right. Until we accept that we live in a world in which jobs, investment, talent, contagions and threats are no longer confined by national borders—that we have to restore American strength and leadership in order to restore the American Dream—no party will provide the solutions we seek. And until we understand that we need to move our economic, educational, health care, retirement and poverty-fighting institutions into the twenty-first century—not simply pour more money into them—we won’t restore our hope and greatness.

  The duty of Republicans who serve or aspire to serve in public office today is much as it was twenty-one years ago: We must stand for ideas that are modern, relevant, bold and innovative. Just as I did in the Florida House, I have spent this year developing the reform solutions described in this book. On some, I’ve partnered with leaders from both parties, such as Senators Mike Lee (Utah), Ron Wyden (Oregon), Chris Coons (Delaware) and Cory Booker (New Jersey), as well as Representatives Paul Ryan (Wisconsin) and Aaron Schock (Illinois). I’ve learned a great deal from the innovative conservative thinkers at the American Enterprise Institute. I’ve admired and borrowed liberally from the conservative reform ideas of Yuval Levin, Peter Wehner and others in Room to Grow: Conservative Reforms for a Limited Government and a Thriving Middle Class. There is an impressive number of conservative intellectuals and public policy experts coming up with ideas to save the American Dream today.

  The proposals that I have developed with the help of other conservatives will reach all Americans, regardless of party. They will make higher education accessible to everyone, help struggling single mothers rise above poverty, spur the transformative innovation that can create new industries and millions of jobs, open America to the possibilities and realities of our increasingly globalized economy, save our crucial retirement programs from self-destruction and encourage rather than punish marriage and parenthood. I place no copyright on these ideas. I encourage and welcome any candidate for office today, in either party, to adopt these policies to their own platform—and, if elected, to help me improve them. Because I truly believe that despite our challenges, we Americans have good reason to be hopeful.

  The most exciting moment in
human history is upon us. And no nation is better positioned to access the full promise of the twenty-first century than the United States. But first, we need leaders who will offer hope and ideas—the hope of ushering in the most prosperous era in human history, and the ideas required to make it a reality. Our current administration and many of its allies were elected by offering exactly that. They promised “hope” and assured our people their ideas would move us “forward.” They have failed on both counts. Instead of hope and ideas, they have clung to hopeless ideas. Instead of moving us forward, they have moved us backward.

  Yet despite this failure, most Democrats today are running on the same stale and failed ideas. Instead of looking at the modern needs of our people, they suggest pumping today’s money into yesterday’s policies and programs, many of which have been failing for decades. They somehow believe that these programs are the source of our jobs and prosperity. For proof, look no further than Hillary Clinton’s astonishing statement while campaigning in Boston last fall. “Don’t let anyone tell you it’s businesses and corporations that create jobs,” she said. Mrs. Clinton’s statement echoes the president’s infamous declaration, “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.”

  There’s no other way to put it: Both of these statements are just wrong. They’re wrong in economic terms, and they’re wrong in their assumptions about the American character. Government can help—and government can certainly hinder—but it’s the entrepreneurs, the strivers and the risk takers who create jobs. Government’s role is to make our nation the easiest and best place in the world to create those jobs. If we lose sight of that fact, we will have driven the final nail in the coffin of the American Dream.

  Not long ago, ours was still largely a national economy. But now the world is shrinking. And our economy is more connected and less insulated than ever before from events half a world away. As a result, today foreign policy is domestic policy. So much of what happens here at home is directly related to what happens abroad. When liberty and economic freedom spread, they create markets for our products, visitors to our tourist destinations, partners for our businesses, investors for our ideas and jobs for our people. But when liberty is denied and economic desperation takes root, it affects us here at home too. It breeds radicalism and terrorism, drives illegal immigration and leads to humanitarian crises we are compelled to address.