Ambassador Jamieson Greer Remarks at the
Reindustrialize Summit in Detroit, Michigan
As Prepared for Delivery on July 16, 2025
It is a pleasure to be here and part of this movement for American manufacturing. The conversations taking place here are what will ensure we achieve the manufacturing renaissance our country so desperately needs.
Any successful movement has core participants. So, I want to start by thanking some of them.
Thank you to the Reindustrialize team for putting together such a unique, and historic, gathering.
Thank you to everyone in this room—you are at the front lines of a generational project to reindustrialize America. Time is very short to accomplish this. During my career I have found that radical change and growth is normally the product of a handful of motivated and inspired people pushing everyone else to do the right thing. For American reindustrialization, I think many of that core group are right here.
And, thank you to the city of Detroit for hosting this conference. Detroit—and other cities like it—has, itself, been a participant in the tumultuous journey from industrialization to the brink—and back.
How we got to the brink, why we can’t let that happen again, and how the Trump Administration’s trade policy is bringing manufacturing back is what I want to share with you today.
At the heyday of American industrialization, our country enjoyed a robust middle class, an unassailable national defense, and an innovation economy unprecedented in human history. I am not appealing to nostalgia, but to real achievements that powered our nation.
Cities like Detroit made that possible.
Ford’s Rouge Plant alone employed over 75,000 workers in the late 1940s. These workers not only earned a good living, but had the opportunity to build a good life too. They could afford the cars they crafted out of cold metal, and the enormous and widespread demand for work provided long-awaited opportunities for Americans of every color and creed. Their promissory note for the American Dream was not signed on paper, but forged in steel. It was stamped “Made in the USA.”
What these workers did not realize, initially, is that change was afoot beyond our borders and allowed—and even encouraged—by Washington D.C. Foreign countries wanted in on the benefits provided by industrialization and innovation in the United States. To achieve that, foreign governments often adopted policies to give their businesses an unfair advantage. From subsidies to wage suppression to lax regulations and environmental rules, these foreign economic policies started a decades long experiment in market distortion the likes of which is unrivaled in history.
As an example, I will cite South Korea—which is a great ally and partner of the United States. They make a tremendous amount of steel there. Is that because South Korea has iron ore, or energy, or coal, or anything like that? No. It is because they have leveraged years and years of subsidies and industrial policy to achieve this. And frankly, that is what I would have done too if I was Korea. But it created enormous challenges for our own industry and workers. I raise this only as an example, many other countries pursued such a strategy as well.
Unfortunately, economic elites in Washington and on Wall Street realized that they could make a buck from this unfair competition. They could take their share off the top of this arbitrage. We pursued successive rounds of non-strategic trade liberalization, resulting in the creation of the World Trade Organization and the North American Free Trade Agreement. While there were some beneficiaries to these agreements, there were a lot of losers. And many of them were right here, in the industrial heartland of the United States.
These policies set U.S. tariffs below the rates of our major trading partners and failed to correct the systemic asymmetries in the global economy that jeopardized American competitiveness. The result was an ever-increasing trade deficit in goods—and waves of offshoring.
Some people will complain when I, or the President, invoke the trade deficit in goods. But these are typically people who are making money on both sides of the border. If you are a giant multinational corporation, you don’t care where your bottom line is coming from so long as you’re making money. If you are a welder in Detroit, or if you’re making autos in Ohio, you care where the money is coming from. It is either your job, or someone else’s in another country. Due to the trade deficit, the United States lost 5 million manufacturing jobs and 100,000 factories in the years before President Trump’s first election in 2016.
In arguing for unfettered free trade, in 1998, Jack Welch—then the CEO of General Electric—suggested that in an ideal world every factory would be on a barge which could be moved to different parts of the world to take advantage of wage and regulatory arbitrage. American workers, families, and communities were not on that barge—they were not part of this vision.
Since then, Welch has gotten a pretty close approximation of his barge. America, its manufacturing industry, and its workers got decline.
President Trump summed it up well when he noted that “It used to be that cars were made in Flint, and you couldn’t drink the water in Mexico. Now the cars are made in Mexico and you can’t drink the water in Flint.”
Today, we have a $1.2 trillion trade deficit in goods. It almost sounds like monopoly money. This is the largest trade deficit in goods of any country in human history on Planet Earth. And it is financed by the largest debt burden of any country ever.
It is a state of affairs that is as unsustainable as it is unacceptable—because failure to correct this status quo means being complicit in the total loss of our industrial base. And a country without robust manufacturing is hardly a country at all.
Let me tell you why.
In taking our economy to the brink, American policymakers and leaders of business forgot something basic—that America, like any country, is not just a nation of consumers that want cheap stuff. It is a country of producers. You produce so you can consume, but also to support your family, community, and country. That was forgotten.
A robust manufacturing sector ensures socio-economic success, protects our national security, and rewards our economy with innovation. I want to address these three points.
First, manufacturing strengthens the economic foundation of our communities.
A production economy is an economy with the wage-growth and social mobility and stability that supports a broad middle class, especially for those without a college degree. This necessarily means that manufacturing plays a key role. A recent study found that typical restaurant workers make 35% more if they go into a comparably-skilled job at an average factory—and double that for the most advanced factories. That’s more than if they went into healthcare (19%) or even finance (32%). Manufacturing jobs offer better benefits, more career development opportunities, and the promise of stability. And manufacturing jobs have broader economic benefits for communities. A new manufacturing job creates 7.4 downstream jobs in other sectors, compared to 2 in healthcare and a mere 1.2 in retail. It is no surprise, then, that according to a Cato Institute survey—and this is the only time I will quote the Cato Institute—one in four American workers would leave their current job for one in manufacturing. Right now, less than 10% of the workforce is in manufacturing—but another 25% of Americans would leave their current job to go to a factory.
Most of you have heard of the “China Shock,” which cost America 5 million jobs after we foolishly allowed China into the WTO. Well, what became of those communities most impacted by the Shock a quarter century later?
Although employment generally rebounded in the hardest hit regions by the 2010s, the new jobs were primarily in low-wage service work. This has left those communities poorer, more precarious, and less stable.
And, the people taking the new jobs were not the ones who had lost their old jobs. This is not a case of creative destruction—it is the complete opposite. Native born black and white workers without a college education experienced permanent employment declines. Those workers did not leave to find better jobs elsewhere or become home health nurses. That’s because they are people, not numbers in an economics model. They want to be where they grew up, spend time with their family, and have the type of job where they can stick around and build a community. Instead, they got stuck, fell out of the workforce, and—far too often—into a cycle of despair. We all know about the fentanyl and drug abuse crisis, and I believe that our economic situation—including our international trade situation—plays a large role in that.
Young and middle-aged American men are less likely to be working now than at any time in modern U.S. history, with the labor force participation rate for prime-aged men at the lowest it has been in the last hundred years. I often hear people ask who would do the work if we succeed in bringing manufacturing jobs back. It is these people who have fallen out of the workforce. By way of comparison, only 7% of baby boomers were not working when they were 25. Today, 14% of millennials are out of the workforce at that age.
We cannot accept a society where our kids—and even many of our adults now—have few good job options and are instead playing video games in their parents’ basement. We must strive to create a society where an individual can find a good job in their hometown, a job that provides prosperity, purpose, and dignity. A robust manufacturing sector is critical if we are to remain a free and prosperous country.
Second, manufacturing is essential to ensuring our national security.
Remaining free is also only possible with a strong national defense.
Shortly after Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt told Congress that “[p]owerful enemies must be out-fought and out-produced.” He went on: “[i]t is not enough to turn out just a few more planes, a few more tanks, a few more guns, a few more ships than can be turned out by our enemies … [w]e must out-produce them overwhelmingly, so that there can be no question of our ability to provide a crushing superiority of equipment in any theatre of … war.”
And outproduce we did. Bethlehem Steel alone made more steel than the Axis powers combined. Over the course of the war, the US built more than 3,600 cargo ships and over 1,300 naval vessels.
By comparison, last year, the United States built just 5 ocean-going commercial ships. Estimates suggest China’s shipbuilding capacity exceeds ours by more than 200 times.
It did not have to be this way. As late as the 1970s, the United States was the second largest commercial shipbuilder in the world.
Now we make less than half of one percent of the world’s commercial ships.
The Trump Administration is taking action across the Federal Government to reverse this vulnerability through the Executive Order on Restoring America’s Maritime Dominance. As part of this effort, I took a Section 301 action on shipbuilding, which will levy fees on certain foreign-made ships to help create a demand signal to spur new investment into America’s commercial shipyards. We need to do more, but it’s a start.
Just like commercial ship production catalyzes naval ship production, a vibrant industrial base supports our national defense by giving us the “surge capacity” we need to ramp up production in a crisis. For example, although the United States possessed almost no domestic production of personal protective equipment prior to COVID-19, our apparel and textile factories were able to modify their operations to produce the masks and gowns we needed. Similarly, the ultimate ability of the United States to surge production of vaccines through Operation Warp Speed saved millions of American lives. Without those baseline industrial capabilities for strategic goods, fighting the pandemic—let alone a war—would be impossible.
It also bears noting that as the world becomes more hostile and challenging, more goods become strategic. Therefore, we need not only bleeding edge chips, but also textiles, fertilizers, tools, and medical supplies. Indeed, products long ago sent overseas as “low tech” goods may be among the most important in the hour of crisis.
The best thing for our allies across the world is for America to have a strong industrial base. That same industrial base will be asked to come to their aid in times of crisis and war. When we sent Stinger anti-air missiles to Ukraine, we had to scramble to bring back 70-year-old retired engineers to restart our long-dormant production lines. More recently, a Chinese chokehold on rare earth magnets has galvanized the country to action, including through direct government investment in MP Materials. We simply do not have time to wait. We have to pursue an active industrial policy, or we will be forced to accept one forced upon us by others.
Finally, manufacturing is an underappreciated driver of innovation and productivity growth.
The legendary former CEO of Intel, Andy Grove, famously explained how manufacturing—including that of so-called “commodity” products—builds the “chain of experience that is so important in technological evolution.”
Between 2003 and 2017, research and development (R&D) expenditures in China by U.S. multinationals grew at an average rate of 13.6 percent per year, while R&D investment by U.S. multinationals in the United States grew by an average of just 5 percent per year. This disparity is troubling.
If we cannot produce here, we will soon lose the ability to design here as well. Innovation follows manufacturing.
Today, U.S. manufacturing directly contributes 11% of GDP. But it punches above its weight in terms of innovation. The sector makes up 20% of capital investment, 35% of productivity growth, and 70% of business R&D spending.
Those who rationalize the status quo like to take comfort in the myth that all that we have lost is “low-value” manufacturing, and that we can rest easy knowing America retains an advanced manufacturing advantage. But, as all of you know, that is not the state of play. We have lost ground in both basic and advanced manufacturing.
Headline manufacturing output data is distorted by computer and electronic products, where the government measures output in terms of memory instead of units sold. Once you strip out the few supercomputers we still make domestically, the data shows that output has stagnated at best, or at worst declined, in absolute terms across most other production categories. The United States barely cuts the top 10 of countries based on robot density. We have 295 robots per 10,000 workers. China has 470, and Korea over one thousand.
U.S. manufacturing labor productivity, in absolute terms —not just the rate of growth—has declined for more than ten years. Our advanced technology trade deficit swelled to $297 billion last year alone.
The real reason for this lack of growth is that our international system does not reward investments in manufacturing productivity. Instead, it encourages a race to the bottom. American stagnation is an externality of unfair trade and non-market practices. That system is designed to encourage firms to compete on labor and regulatory arbitrage—what Vice President Vance recently called an “addiction to cheap labor.” Taking a cue from Jack Welch’s floating factory barge, companies pursue places to build where they can undercut American wages or waste the environment. This is hardly genuine comparative advantage.
What we want is an industrial economy built around productivity rather than exploitation. In that way, we create a positive feedback loop that rewards workers, business, and the nation at large. Innovation drives productivity, which raises wages—in a virtuous cycle underpinned by manufacturing. Who wouldn’t want the United States to have that? I’ll tell you. Our adversaries and the people making money supplying foreign manufacturing at the expense of U.S. workers.
Our industrial base wasn’t lost overnight, and restoring it won’t be easy either. But failure to do so is not an option. This is why—mindful of manufacturing’s unique benefits—President Trump declared a national emergency with respect to the trade deficit and the implications it has for our industrial base.
The result has been a 10% global tariff on all countries, higher reciprocal tariffs on the most distorted trade relationships, and cumulative tariffs of over 55% percent on China. Indeed, over the last few days, the President has sent letters to various countries indicating tariffs could go even higher to correct for the lack of reciprocity in our trade relations that leads to our global trade deficit. He has also signaled a willingness to negotiate new terms of trade for countries willing to participate constructively in our reindustrialization.
In every letter President Trump includes a line, which underscores the purpose of his tariff program: “there will be no tariff if [you] decide to build or manufacture product within the United States.”
The President has complemented his reciprocal tariff program with proposed tariffs in a number of strategic sectors where America must reestablish secure supply chains. Using these tools, the Administration has tightened steel and aluminum tariffs, imposed new measures on autos and auto parts not made in the United States, and launched several investigations into the national security threats associated with reliance on foreign semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, drones, and critical minerals.
I know these policies will succeed in fostering our reindustrialization. Don’t take my word for it, the data show that this approach works.
As far back as 1791, when Alexander Hamilton published his Report on Manufactures, the United States has used tariffs to protect, and grow, our domestic industry. Henry Clay’s American System took things to new heights—by 1901, just the increase in U.S. steel production in the prior six years was larger the amount of steel produced by the entire world in any year before 1890.
Much more recently, President Reagan used import restraints to address a surge of Japanese auto imports that threatened to destroy the American auto sector in the early 1980s. Within a decade of imposing import quotas, he triggered a wave of greenfield investment. By the 1990s, Japanese carmakers created more than 100,000 new American jobs at more than 300 new production facilities. Today, Honda and Toyota have among the highest domestic content for cars sold in America. It is no exaggeration to say that the American auto industry is alive today because of President Reagan’s pragmatic trade restrictions.
But the intervening decades saw a trade policy that incentivized offshoring and outsourcing. With both hubris and naiveté, policymakers believed they could do economic “nation building” by pushing economic integration with non-market economies like China and Vietnam. In reality, this undermined our manufacturing base. By 2016, the American people had had enough.
President Trump was elected in part on his promise to reject economic policies that undermined American competitiveness.
In 2018, the Trump Administration took targeted actions to address vulnerabilities in our supply chains. We imposed tariffs on manufactured goods, and companies responded by reshoring production. Samsung and LG permanently shifted washing machine production to innovative new factories in South Carolina and Tennessee in response to safeguard tariffs. Steel production began to reverse a prolonged decline in response to Section 232 tariffs. Significant tariffs on China caused U.S. dependence on China to decline, promoting North America as our primary trade hub.
Inspired by these historical successes, President Trump’s current tariff strategy is already bearing fruit. General Motors is investing $4 billion over the next two years to increase U.S. output and move production of two popular models back to the United States from Mexico. Steel companies are opening new furnaces and lines from Ohio to Louisiana to serve U.S. manufacturers and replace dirtier imported steel. Hikma Pharmaceuticals is investing $1 billion into production of generic medicines in the U.S., helping reshore domestic capacity to mass-produce essential medicine. Innovative pharmaceutical producers have announced billions in new investments. Overall, companies and countries have already announced over $5.5 trillion in new investment in the United States.
The tariffs have also sparked interest from our trading partners in joining the United States in the emergence of a new trading system. The United States is setting the foundation for a new economic order—one premised on balanced trade, fairness for workers, and resilient supply chains. More than 50 countries have come to me seeking to negotiate agreements to open their markets to U.S. exports, align with us on economic security, and leave in place the significant U.S. tariffs we need to achieve our manufacturing renaissance.
As we deploy a combination of tariffs and deals, I’m reminded of the wisdom of Spanish chess grandmaster Jose Capablanca: “in order to improve your game you must study the endgame before everything else.”
Here is my end game:
First, reverse the trend of our global goods trade deficit and decrease it over time.
Second, increase real median household income in the United States.
Third, increase manufacturing’s share of our GDP.
By keeping an eye on these metrics of success, we can ensure that our reindustrialization is strategic and effective.
But trade policy is only one pillar of a reindustrialization strategy. That is why the Trump Administration is employing many tools to implement industrial policy.
Whether it be regulatory and permitting reform, tax changes recently passed in the One Big Beautiful Bill, or the Department of Defense’s large-scale investment in and offtake agreement with MP Materials to reshore rare earth production, the Administration is taking a comprehensive approach to economic and national renewal—with reindustrialization at the core.
I think we have to be clear-eyed and sober-minded about this challenge. Many in America would be content to live through the soft decline of our country, lit by the glow of yet another electronic device made thousands of miles away. But that cannot be the end result of American economic progress. We have to build.
Ultimately, I am not an inventor or investor or engineer or economist. I am the U.S. Trade Representative.
That means my job is to clear the playing field of all the pitfalls, and minefields, and obstacles to reindustrialization thrown up over the decades. YOUR job is to score the goal.
Only you can build the new factory, invent the new technology, and train the next generation of workers. If you don’t reindustrialize our country, who will?
Just tell me how I can help.
