Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Globalists Remain as Clueless as Ever on the CCP Virus

Tags

America First, Catch 22, CCP Virus, Clinton administration, coronavirus, COVID 19, globalism, health security, healthcare products, Joseph Heller, Madeleine Albright, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, pandemics, TIME, Wuhan virus

The current CCP (for Chinese Communist Party) Virus outbreak has intensified a broad debate about America’s grand strategy in world affairs.

Specifically, supporters of an America First-type strategy (including, to some extent, President Trump) believe that the key to current and future anti-pandemic success, and overall national success, is building up national capabilities – like restoring lost production capacity in healthcare goods like pharmaceuticals and medical devices (think “ventilators”).

Pushing back is a school of thought now called “globalism” – a handy shorthand for backers of pre-Trump U.S. foreign policies who have long insisted that the nation’s best bet for adequate levels of security and freedom and prosperity is strengthening mechanisms of international cooperation. Not that the globalists completely neglected the need for national self-sufficiency, especially in terms of purely military products, or national sovereignty. But they clearly sought to “bend the curve” of American national security and foreign economic policy toward buttressing global capacities instead of national capacities. My evidence? The very healthcare goods shortages America is facing today.

As RealityChek regulars know, I’m squarely in the America First camp. And my confidence in this strategy has just been immeasurably bolstered by having read Madeleine Albright’s new essay in TIME defending the focus on cooperation.

I’m this confident not simply because Albright has long been one of the dimmest bulbs in the globalists’ ranks – despite having served as Secretary of State (during the Clinton administration). As I’ve previously noted, she never seemed to have learned the definition of “deterrence.” Instead, I’m mainly confident because her own new post (unwittingly) explains why it’s globalism that – in her words – reflects “childish” beliefs.

To oversimplify a little, the America First strategy doesn’t softpedal cooperative efforts because it’s selfish or mean or any of those human character traits that so commonly (yet so misleadingly) are used to characterize approaches to world affairs and the motives underlying them. Instead, its emphases stem from the assumption that American leaders can’t count anytime soon on the rest of the world adopting the kind of cooperative ethos needed to transition to globalism safely, and that as a result self-reliance is the only realistic choice available.

It’s also important to note that support for the America First strategy doesn’t require believing that all of most or even any other countries can rely on their own devices as well. Rather, it requires understanding how distinctively capable of self-reliance the United States has always been – and how much more self-reliant it can become.

Albright regurgitates the standard globalist points about how the main foreign dangers to the United States, including pandemics

“do not respect boundaries. They include rogue governments, terrorists, cyber warriors, the uncontrolled spread of advanced weapons, multinational criminal networks and environmental catastrophe. These perils cannot be defeated by any country acting alone, and any country would be foolish to try.”

Yet here’s what she also observes about the current state of world affairs:

>”[T]he largest and most powerful national governments are not prioritizing the improvement of our capacity for international cooperation.”

>”Hyper-nationalist leaders across the globe seem determined to ignore the awareness of interdependence that was—in the last century—drummed into our minds at a nearly unbearable cost.”

>”In the past two decades, jingoism has returned and spread in the manner of a contagious disease. Instead of highlighting the need for global teamwork, the doctrine of “every nation for itself” has taken hold on matters involving oil prices, trade, refugees, climate change, the regulation of communications technology and more.”

>“Look around: where are the leaders who will remind us of our mutual obligations and shared fate? In Moscow? Beijing? London? Rome? Paris? New Delhi? Ankara?”

>”[A] huge gap has opened between what the international community needs and the patchy, underfunded, under-energized reality now in place. The size of this gap represents a failure on the part of leaders on every continent….”

It’s true that Albright seeks to pin the blame on “a vacuum at the top that only the United States can fill.” But is claim is not only loony, but clueless. For this kind of leadership obviously requires the kind of superior material power and wealth that, in a world lacking common rules because common values are missing, have always been essential to influence behavior abroad. And relative American power in all fields except actual weapons and military equipment (though not in the materials, parts, and components needed to build them) has always been dismissed by the globalists as a pipe dream.

In one of the dark comedy classic novel Catch 22‘s numerous stunningly insightful exchanges, Yossarian, the main character who’s trying to have himself declared crazy and therefore unfit for combat or any kind of military service, tells one of his superior officers, “From now on I’m thinking only of me.” As author Joseph Heller continues:

“Major Danby replied indulgently with a superior smile: ‘But, Yossarian, suppose everyone felt that way.’ 

“‘Then,” said Yossarian, ‘I’d certainly be a damned fool to feel any other way, wouldn’t I?’”

That’s obviously disastrous advice for Americans today – and inexcusably so, since the nation unmistakably has built up a network of shared values that marks it as a genuine community, and consequently a political unit that makes cooperation both necessary and possible to begin with. When it comes to the (undeniably anarchic) “international community” – not nearly so much.

Which is why until Madeleine Albright and other globalists acknowledge this situation, and the policy imperatives flowing logically therefrom, you’d need to be a damned fool to take them seriously as well.

Glad I Didn’t Say That! What Could Have Gone Wrong with Offshoring?

Tags

Clinton administration, coronarivus #CCP Virus, COVID 19, Glad I Didn't Say That!, globalization, health security, Larry Summers, manufacturing, Obama administration, offshoring, supply chain, Trade, Wuhan virus

“Why can’t the greatest economy in the history of the world produce swabs, face masks and ventilators in adequate supply?”

–Former Clinton administration Treasury Secretary and Obama administration top White House economic adviser Larry Summers, March 21, 2020

“There are those today who would resist the process of international integration; that is a prescription for a more contentious and less prosperous world. We should not oppose offshoring or outsourcing.”

–Former Clinton administration Treasury Secretary and Obama administration top White House economic adviser Larry Summers, June, 2011

(Sources: Summers Twitter feed, https://twitter.com/LHSummers/status/1241329121768230912 and “At World BPO/ITO Forum 2011, iRise CEO Stresses Need for Transformational Thinking Among CIOs,” Business Wire, August 25, 2011, https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20110825006115/en/World-BPOITO-Forum-2011-iRise-CEO-Stresses. Specia acknowledgements: John Greener and Mike Cernovich)

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Trump Tariffs Evoke Summers Snake Oil

Tags

Al Gore, China, Clinton administration, current account surplus, Emergency Committee for American Trade, exports, FDI, Financial Times, forced technology transfer, foreign direct investment, General Motors, intellectual property theft, Larry Summers, Obama administration, offshoring lobby, tariffs, Trade Deficits, Trump, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Larry Summers doesn’t like President Trump’s China trade policies – that’s not news. After all, he served in senior economic policy posts both in the Clinton administration, which proudly championed expanded trade with China and laid the groundwork for the PRC’s entry into the World Trade Organization, and in the Obama administration, which less proudly but nonetheless effectively coddled much of the Chinese trade predation (including intellectual property theft) that even most globalization cheerleaders now admit is a major problem.

Newsier are two arguments Summers made yesterday in the Financial Times that indicate how dishonest years of justification of the China trade policies by globalist U.S. administrations have been, and how clueless they remain.

The dishonesty entails Summers’ dismissive treatment of China’s intellectual property “extraction” (as he calls what is usually and rightly recognized as “extortion”) from U.S. and other foreign companies that are forced by Chinese policy into joint venture partnerships with Chinese entities. According to Summers, this form of theft is no big deal for Americans because these episodes

“typically involve cases where the company in question produces for China in China and so have little impact on US employment. In many cases a substantial number of the company’s shareholders are foreign and it pays taxes to many governments. It is more than a little ironic that an administration that condemns outsourcing should make standing up for those who move production to China so central a priority.”

As should be clear to anyone who has followed U.S. trade policy toward China and other offshoring-friendly countries, that’s a heckuva way to describe the outbound American investment that’s been encouraged by the trade deals and related policy decisions enthusiastically supported by Summers and his White House bosses.

For especially during the Clinton years, when so many of these policies were put in place, the construction of American-owned factories, labs, and similar facilities in China was depicted not as activity that would substitute for American exports, or for U.S.-based production (in the form of goods shipped from these factories to the U.S. market), but as activity that would benefit the domestic American economy and its workers by supercharging U.S. exports – which would comprise much of the content of these foreign-made products.

Here’s a typical example from a 1998 report by the (Offshoring Lobby-funded) Emergency Committee for American Trade:

“American companies with global operations ship the large majority — between 60 percent and 75 percent — of total U.S. exports. Their foreign affiliates are important recipients of these exports; their share has increased to over 40 percent today.”

And let’s not forget one of the showcase examples of such Clinton-era investments – General Motors’ 1997 agreement with a Shanghai-run entity to produce autos in China. GM gushed that the joint venture would generate billions in American auto parts exports to China, and the importance attached by the Clinton administration to such deals was made clear by the decision to send Vice President Gore to the PRC to attend the signing ceremony. (Neither GM Chairman John Smith nor Gore mentioned that the agreement’s provisions mandated that the factory achieve 80 percent Chinese content levels within five years.)

Now, according to Summers, these joint ventures don’t significantly benefit the American domestic economy at all. Of course, there’s still the matter of how this Chinese tech theft – including from world-leading U.S. companies in cutting edge industries – will affect America’s innovation and technology futures. But these critical issues don’t seem to be on Summers’ screen.

The author’s cluelessness is evident from his insistence that

“it is wrong to say nothing has been achieved through negotiation with China. Only a few years ago, China’s current account surplus was the largest relative to GDP among significant countries….Today China’s global surpluses are far below past US negotiating targets of a few years ago….”

Here’s the (glaringly obvious) problem. During the current economic recovery, China’s total trade surplus with the United States (including its services deficit) jumped by 75 percent – from $219.47 billion in 2009 to $385 billion in 2016 (the last year for which such figures are available). Can a piece from Summers expressing his astonishment that so many U.S. voters opted in 2016 for a candidate promising to look after “America First” be far behind?