The following is a transcript from Sen. Marco Rubio’s address at the Heritage Foundation on the occasion of the release of a new Heritage report, “Winning the New Cold War with China.”
A lot has changed in the last year, in two ways. I think China has obviously gotten more aggressive, more transparent about what they’re trying to do in the world. And there’s a growing bipartisan consensus that something needs to happen about it. But I still think this needs a lot more framework. And what I mean by that is that it’s really easy to stand in front of cameras and say, “I’m going to be tough on China,” but I think it has to tie in to why. Why does it matter? So that you can do it in a way that’s smart and intelligent and actually serves the national interest.
I think the best way to do that is to start talking about how we got to this point where we are now. I think that requires us to go back not just 20 years, 50 years, but really throughout the course of human history, at least parts of it that have been recorded. If you think about the history of mankind on the earth, with probably the exception of the 100 years or so of [classical] Greece, every society was basically a place that said there’s no such thing as individual rights. It’s a totally foreign concept, the notion of individual rights. Largely, the rights
