"it's obvious that the United States has not taken the most effective route to establishing large scale, low-cost human activity in space.

Well, the Europeans have an ATV that cost a couple of billion bucks to fly, the Chinese flew a couple of flights for a billion or two, the Russians, they're with US, so who exactly are you referring to, the people that we are trying to catch up to?"

Tom didn't say anything about catching up to any nation.
The Europeans have been fairly successful at launching satellites to GEO. They had this as a national goal and they are doing this. In the US putting satellites into GEO hasn't been seen as a national goal- at least not as far as NASA is concerned. If it had been a national goal the obvious place to put a launch pad is on the equator.

Boeing's Sea Launch does have a launch pad on the equator, and is focused on putting satellites to GEO.

Prior to the European building and launching from 05 latitude, the US simply launched from 28 inclination and expended more delta-v by changing the rocket's inclination- this cost about 2.5 km per sec.
You could say that most of what European countries really wanted was to put satellites in GEO and had much less interest in other aspects of space.
In other words the US developed a market for satellites in GEO, and Europeans wanted to be more involved and less dependent on the US launchers for this market.

NASA's job is to develop markets in space, which then permits the private sector [or the Europeans] to exploit it.