By David Lawder<\/p>\n
May 28 (Reuters) – U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent will argue on Friday that President Donald Trump’s economic policies are helping to reverse decades of policy failures that left U.S. supply chains \u200cvulnerable and its economy too dependent on adversaries including China.<\/p>\n
In prepared remarks laying out his views on economic \u200csecurity seen by Reuters, Bessent said that America has long been “asleep,” mistaking comfort and consumption for strength and prosperity, with too big a focus \u200bon efficiency at the expense of resilience.<\/p>\n
“Somewhere along the way, we lost sight of a foundational principle that previous generations understood instinctively: economic security is national security,” Bessent said in the speech to be delivered at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California.<\/p>\n
“For a nation that cannot manufacture, mine, ship or refine its needs gradually cedes its strength \u2014 and sovereignty \u2014 to others,” he added. “That is a dangerous dependency for \u200cany country. It is an unacceptable one \u2060for the United States,” added Bessent, who often describes himself as an “economic historian.”<\/p>\n
A series of bipartisan policy mistakes, including allowing China into the World Trade Organization and putting too much faith \u2060in the-rules based trading system to police non-market economic policies led to the erosion of the U.S. industrial base and dependence on foreign suppliers, Bessent said.<\/p>\n
Reliance on rivals for critical inputs, financing the rise of countries that don’t share U.S. interests and an \u200beroding industrial \u200bbase are incompatible with defending the international order, he said.<\/p>\n
Bessent’s \u200bremarks come two weeks after Trump’s summit with \u200cChinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing, which reaffirmed the economic and strategic standoff between the two superpowers and produced agreements for managed trade and investment and some purchases of U.S. farm goods and aircraft.<\/p>\n
He said Trump’s America First Agenda, encompassing tariff actions framed around national and economic security, would start to correct past mistakes, along with the administration’s efforts to rebuild American shipbuilding capability and U.S. supply chains for critical minerals and pharmaceuticals.<\/p>\n
His prepared remarks did not lay out any \u200cnew initiatives or address economic threats created by the war in Iran \u200band the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. But he said Trump’s \u200bagenda is based on the principle that “economic security \u200bis national security.”<\/p>\n
“But let me be direct about what this doctrine does not mean. It does not mean retreating from the world. On \u200cthe contrary, it means engaging with it on stronger, \u200bfairer, and more sustainable terms,” Bessent \u200bsaid.<\/p>\n
The U.S. will not indiscriminately sever ties with trading partners, but will distinguish “healthy interdependence from dangerous overdependence.”<\/p>\n
The U.S. faces some challenges in reducing its dependence on China given Beijing’s dominance in critical minerals, electronics manufacturing and industrial \u200bpolicies targeting several critical industries. Beijing \u200calso has imposed new regulations that could punish companies that try to shift supply chains away from \u200bChina.<\/p>\n
Bessent said reducing dependence on adversaries does not mean rejecting efficiency, adding: “It means refusing to worship efficiency \u200bwhen efficiency leaves our nation exposed.”<\/p>\n
(Reporting by David Lawder; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama )<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By David Lawder May 28 (Reuters) – U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent will argue on Friday that President…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":672596,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[28,144,12,152301,229946,101,5477,293415,4666],"class_list":["post-672595","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-china","tag-donald-trump","tag-economic-policies","tag-economic-security","tag-economy","tag-national-security","tag-ronald-reagan-presidential-library","tag-scott-bessent"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=672595"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672595\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/672596"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=672595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=672595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=672595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}