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Home » Scott Bessent’s Keynote Address @ Reagan Economic Forum 2026 (Transcript)

Scott Bessent’s Keynote Address @ Reagan Economic Forum 2026 (Transcript)

Read the full transcript of U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s keynote remarks at Reagan Economic Forum 2026,

Editor’s Note: At the 2026 Reagan Economic Forum, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent delivered a comprehensive address mapping out the administration’s “America First” economic and trade strategies. He emphasized that economic security is directly tied to national security, calling for a major revitalization of domestic manufacturing and supply chain resilience. Following his speech, Bessent joined Lawrence Kudlow for a keynote conversation touching on the financial blockade of Iran, supply-side policy impacts, and new financial initiatives like the Trump savings accounts.

Opening Remarks

SCOTT BESSENT: Thank you very much. It’s an honor to be here, and I’d like to thank the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute for inviting me to join you today. Of course, this year’s forum carries special significance as we celebrate 250 years of the American story. But milestones of this magnitude demand more than ceremony. They ask something of us. They invite us to reflect not just on the creation of our country, but on its condition. And as we focus today on America’s economic future, they compel us to confront and correct decisions that have diminished our sovereignty in recent decades.

President Reagan himself understood that renewal begins with reflection. “One thing that has made our republic great,” he said, “is that we don’t hide from our mistakes. We learn from them. Then we go on and do things better than we did before.” Better than we did before. That is the spirit in which I want to speak with you today, with candor and with confidence in our capacity to deliver another 250 years of American economic leadership.

America’s Strategic Drift

The truth is that for too long, America had been asleep. We mistook comfort for strength. We substituted efficiency for resilience. And consumption as a measure of prosperity. We told ourselves that so long as goods were cheaper overseas, it did not matter whether factories went dark in Michigan, Ohio, or Pennsylvania. We assumed that supply chains would always function smoothly and adversaries would always behave responsibly, and the invisible hand would correct vulnerabilities that too few in public life had the courage to confront.

And while we reassured ourselves with those assumptions, risk accumulated all around us. Somewhere along the way, we lost sight of a foundational principle that previous generations understood instinctively: economic security is national security. For a nation that cannot manufacture, mine, ship, or refine its needs gradually cedes its strength and sovereignty to others. That is a dangerous dependency for any country. It is an unacceptable one for the United States of America.

Now, nations rarely cede their security in a single moment. More often, they drift into dependence through a series of politically expedient decisions. For our part, we made a series of mistakes, some bipartisan, others ideological, and many defended long after their cost became impossible to ignore.

The Failures of Trade Policy

One was treating trade policy as though it existed apart from national strategy. We convinced ourselves that we could pursue commercial partnerships in one silo while managing security relationships in another, as if the world would honor these distinctions. But a nation that relies on a rival for critical inputs, finances the rise of countries that do not share our interests, and allows its productive base to erode while promising to defend the international order will find sooner or later that these two silos collapse into each other.

As damaging as our willingness to extend strategic trust where it had not been earned. China’s accession to the WTO and the granting of permanent normal trade relations were sold to the American people as steps that would level markets and moderate behavior. Instead, we left our workers to compete against state-led subsidies, excess capacity, and practices that distort trade and undermine reciprocity. We assumed the rules-based system would discipline these behaviors, only to find that in too many sectors it accommodated them.

And in the name of efficiency, we began to celebrate just-in-time while neglecting just-in-case. The pandemic did not create our brittle supply chains so much as expose them. Suddenly, the world’s most advanced economy found itself partially dependent on foreign suppliers for semiconductors, large-capacity batteries, critical minerals, and medicines that we no longer produced here at home.

The Cost of Complacency

Regrettably, our recovery from the pandemic did not bring reform under the prior administration. Today, the United States still imports most of its rare earth minerals that are essential to the technologies that will shape military and economic power in the 21st century. Only a small share of the active pharmaceutical ingredients that we use in the United States are made here, and American shipbuilding capacity, which once helped to secure victory in war and prosperity in peace, has shrunk to a fraction of global production.

So when I say America has been asleep, I do not mean that no one warned us. In fact, many did. Workers warned us when their plants shuttered and communities decayed. Military planners warned us when supply chains narrowed. Manufacturers warned us about subsidized competitors and dumped products. Public health officials warned us about pharmaceutical dependencies. The warning lights were glaring all around us.

But our political class preferred the comfort of old formulas: cheaper was always better, offshoring was inevitable, industrial policy was unfashionable, and strategic dependence was acceptable so long as the cost remained invisible.

A Failure in Philosophy

Beneath every one of those mistakes lay a more basic failure in our philosophy. In reducing economics to consumption, we forgot production. We measured abundance at the checkout counter rather than at the factory gate. We talked about GDP, but not enough about its composition. And we prized low-cost inputs without first asking whether a nation can remain sovereign when it loses command over the things that matter most.

A country cannot outsource its industrial commons, ignore strategic concentration, and expect to remain secure.