Presidential candidate and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis recently said in a Heritage Foundation speech that he supports removing China from its Most Favored Nation trade status and wants changes to de minimis, a Customs trade rule that has basically led to open border lawlessness for global e-commerce.
Some of the governor’s top issues on the China front included securing supply chains of critical drugs and minerals. DeSantis’ foreign policy plan says he wants to focus on:
- Reinvesting in America’s industrial base;
- Implement trade policies that defend American workers, farmers, and supply chain security;
- Delist and deindex Chinese companies supporting PLA, human rights abuses, or denying investor rights;
- Ring-fence U.S. capital (investment flows) from China’s Communist Party and Military, not just venture capital and private equity;
- Offer strategic tax incentives for companies to reshore and nearshore production from China;
- Reorder tax policies to favor domestic manufacturing and production;
- Track flows of U.S. capital into China;
- Secure vital supply chains like semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, and critical minerals from China control;
- End China’s most favored nation status and crackdown on China’s abuse of U.S. de minimis rules;
- And mandate divestment from Chinese companies threatening our interests for universities, public pensions, Thrift Savings Program, and other tax-exempt entities.
See full speech here.
The presidential hopeful’s wish list matches some items dear to the heart of CPA members, such as reshoring and reindustrialization, and paying special attention to critical supply chains like critical minerals – a market almost entirely dominated by Chinese miners and processing companies — and generic drugs – a market where both India and China are key suppliers.
DeSantis said that if the U.S. is to pursue a post-fossil fuels economic policy, then it needs to be in charge of important resources. As it is, Tesla is the only EV battery maker and they partner with Japanese-owned Panasonic. South Korean battery makers like LG are also big, and the rest are all Chinese, including Ford’s EV battery partner CATL. China has more than half of the top 10 EV battery manufacturers and is a huge processor of mined materials used in making those batteries.
“We need to expand domestic mining and mineral processing of key rare earth minerals,” DeSantis said. “Biden wants to force everybody to drive an electric vehicle, which then will make us more dependent on China because they’re the leader in producing these minerals. But then when we have our own deposits here, he takes that out of circulation because he won’t let that be mined. We need to be doing the opposite…(we need to be) doing the mining of materials we need. We need to enact tax, trade, and regulatory policies designed to secure critical supply chains and to effectuate a strategic decoupling of the U.S. economy from China and from the CCP.”
Last week, just days before DeSantis’ speech to the Heritage Foundation, the Department of Defense (DoD) lamented the rise of China’s military in a report to Congress. The DoD said China controls many key supply chains, something the defense industry contractor knows and seems unwilling to address. This summer, the CEO of Raytheon said his company had “thousands of contractors” in China and that decoupling was impossible.
DeSantis said, “We need a major overhaul of this country’s defense industrial base, it is lagging and it is causing huge vulnerabilities for this country.”
While the speech did not give specifics about de minimis or reshoring, the bullet points in his foreign policy plan, released Oct. 27, do lay that out as an issue to address.
Similar to Trump and Vivek Ramaswamy, DeSantis has positioned himself as another “America first” opponent to the super globalists that still permeate the Republican Party.
“First and foremost, you’ve got to put the American people first,” he said at Heritage. “That’s your obligation to put your own country first. The protection of the lives, safety, and security of our own people and the sovereignty of our nation is the fundamental duty of our federal government.”
