Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Glimmers of Hope on Ukraine?

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Biden, Blob, chemical weapons, cyber-war, David Ignatius, Donbas, EU, European Union, NATO, North Atlantic treaty Organization, nuclear war, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Russia, Ukraine, Ukraine-Russia war, Vladimir Putin, Volodymyr Zelensky

As known by long-time readers of RealityChek (see, e.g., here and here), I’m no fan of David Ignatius. Literally for decades, the Washington Post pundit has veritably personified the Blob – that mainly New York City- and really mainly Washington, D.C.-based mutually reenforcing network of current political leaders and senior bureaucrats, Congressional staff, former officials, other hangers-on of various kinds, consultants, think tankers, academics, and journalists who have long championed globalist U.S. foreign policies despite the needless national security and economic damage they’ve caused.

Not so incidentally, they keep moving in an out of public service so continuously that they’ve not only blurred the crucial lines between these spheres, but they’ve more than earned the term “permanent (and of course unelected) government.”

So imagine my surprise when I opened my Washington Post Thursday morning and discovered that Ignatius had written what may be the most important American commentary yet on the Ukraine War. His main argument is that President Biden and Russian dictator Vladimir Putin have each decided on a set of goals that could reduce the chances of the conflict spilling across Ukraine’s borders, and especially into the territory of neighbors that enjoy a strong U.S. defense guarantee. This chain of events could all-too-easily lead to direct U.S.-Russia military conflict that could just as easily escalate to the all-out nuclear war level.

But the goals identified by Ignatius are encouraging because they indicate that both Mr. Biden and Putin have retreated from dangerously ambitious objectives they’ve referred to throughout the war and its prelude. For the U.S. President, this means a climb-down from his administation’s declarations that Russia can’t be allowed to establish anything close to a sphere of influence that includes Ukraine, and that would prevent it and potentially any country in Eastern Europe from setting its own defense and foreign economic policies.

For Putin, this means confining his aims to controlling the eastern Ukraine provinces with large Russian-speaking populations, not the entire country

Ignatius’ most convincing evidence regarding the American position is Mr. Biden’s statement on Thursday that with its growing military support for Ukraine, the entire western alliance was  “sending an unmistakable message to Putin: He will never succeed in dominating and occupying all of Ukraine. He will not — that will not happen.” As Ignatius pointed out, this statement, “though resolute in tone, left open the possibility that Putin might occupy some of Ukraine, in the southeastern region where Russian attacks are now concentrated.”

Moreover, this Ignatius observation matters considerably in large measure precisely because the author is so well plugged in to the staunchly globalist Biden administration. If he’s putting points like this in print, the odds are good that it’s because he’s heard them from genuinely reliable sources, and even because those sources are using him as a vehicle for trial balloon floating.

Ignatius’ most convincing evidence regarding the Kremlin’s position is Putin’s statement the same day that the Russian forces that have virtually destroyed the southern Ukrainian city of Mariupol have “sacrificed their lives so that our people in Donbas [the aforementioned eastern Ukraine region] live in peace and to enable Russia, our country, to live in peace.”

Those last words in particular suggest that Putin now believes a Russia-dominated Donbas can serve as an acceptable buffer between Russian territory and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) that expanded its membership in the 1990s and early 2000s to countries directly bordering Russia.

On this issue, though, big questions remain: Would Putin permit what’s left of Ukraine join NATO (in which President Volodymyr Zelensky has said he no longer interested) or the European Union (which Ukraine still wants)? Or would Moscow let a rump Ukraine do what it wished on these defense and economic fronts? At the same time, the very uncertainty created by these Russian and Ukrainian (and now U.S.) statements makes clear there’s a deal that can be struck before Ukraine experiences much more suffering.

But as Ignatius himself notes, this week’s Biden and Putin positions are anything but guarantees against disastrous escalation. The reason? As I’ve written, the longer the fighting lasts and especially the more intense it becomes, the likelier spillover gets – whether from air raids to artillery strikes to the spread of toxic clouds from exploded chemical or even nuclear weapons, to cyber attacks (e.g., by Russia against U.S. or other western computer systems intended to interfere with the Ukraine weapons supply effort or with the West’s intelligence sharing with Kyiv).

So the Biden and Putin statements may be necessary developments for securing a non-disastrous end to the Ukraine war, but they’re hardly sufficient. Some serious form of outside pressure looks to be essential — either President Biden on Zelensky, or (seemingly less likely) China on Putin. Without it, Americans — and Ukrainians — arguably are left with hoping for the best, a strategy with an historically unimpressive record of success.        

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: The Blob Keeps Discrediting Itself on Trump and Asia

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alliances, allies, Asia, Bloomberg View, China, David Ignatius, foreign policy establishment, Hal Brands, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Soviet Union, The Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, Trade, Trump, Washington Post, Yalta

President Trump’s recent Asia trip – or, more specifically, the chattering class commentary it keeps generating – is the gift that keeps on giving, especially for a blogger. I can’t remember a foreign policy event that has generated so much material from so many mainstays making of the nation’s foreign policy blob making so clear how systematically they fail tests of basic competence, common sense, and even internal consistency .

It’s long been clear that you don’t get ahead in America’s bipartisan foreign policy establishment with thinking that even peeks outside the box, but I had always thought that this hidebound crowd at least valued minimal knowledge. The November 14 essay by the Washington Post‘s David Ignatius casts doubt even on that proposition.

As Ignatius sees it, “Trump’s trip may indeed prove to be historic, but probably not in the way he intends. It may signal a U.S. accommodation to rising Chinese power, plus a desire to mend fences with a belligerent Russia — with few evident security gains for the United States. If the 1945 Yalta summit marked U.S. acceptance of the Soviet Union’s hegemony in Eastern Europe, this trip seemed to validate China’s arrival as a Pacific power.”

I had to read this passage several times before convincing myself it was actually written. For although it’s entirely legitimate to question Mr. Trump’s approach to China, the historical comparison indicated is jaw-droppingly ignorant. In fact, it amounts to endorsing a narrative about the beginning of the Cold War that’s been emphatically rejected by all students of the period outside the ranks of the lunatic right.

After all, evoking Yalta as an example of appeasement requires believing that the United States (with or without the help of the United Kingdom and France) could have done something to prevent the Soviet Union from establishing control over what would become the Iron Curtain countries. Why is this preposterous? Because literally millions of Red Army soldiers were occupying the region. Can anyone this side of sane really suppose that, after nearly four years of costly conflict with Nazi Germany – and with six months left of brutal combat against Japan – American leaders were going to turn on Moscow?

Just as important, although nothing done by President Trump indicates any desire to recognize China as a superior or even a co-equal in the Asia-Pacific region (as made clear here), there’s no question that China has been catching up to the United States economically and militarily. So why didn’t Ignatius broach the question of “Why?” Could it be because the reckless trade expansion with China backed enthusiastically by the entire foreign and economic policy establishment has transferred literally trillions of dollars worth of trade profits and defense-related technology to Beijing? So there’s another test Ignatius has flunked – that of intellectual honesty. (Interestingly, Ignatius himself seems to have been silent on the issue when it was being debated heatedly in the late 1990s and into 2000.)

Hal Brands’ Bloomberg View essay on the same subject two days later shows off another feature of establishment foreign policy thinking that’s all too common: trafficking in euphemisms aimed at hoodwinking the public – and, no doubt, unsophisticated politicians. According to Brands, a senior professor at The Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, the Trump visit reminded Americans and Asians once again that the president

“is blind to the importance of trade and commercial openness in underpinning America’s key security relationships. The president praised America’s tradition of defense cooperation with Japan, yet he continued to harangue Tokyo over its trade surplus with the U.S. Administration officials sought to foster enhanced multilateral cooperation on regional security issues, yet Trump reiterated his previous condemnations of the multilateral trade deals that previous administrations had seen as necessary complements to those defense relationships.”

Further, Mr. Trump seemed oblivious to how, “In the broadest sense, U.S. security and economic relationships have long gone hand-in-hand. Liberal trade practices have provided the economic lubricant for military partnerships, and reinforced the idea that America’s interactions with its closest friends are positive-sum rather than zero-sum.”

“Likewise,” he Brands writes, “allies have deferred to Washington on geopolitical issues not just because of the military protection the U.S. provides but because of its critical role in advancing an open international economy from which those allies benefit enormously.”

“Trade deals that [have] been “necessary complements to…defense relationships.” “Liberal trade practices [that] have provided the economic lubricant for military partnerships.” “Allies deferring “to Washington on geopolitical issues not just because of the military protection the U.S. provides but because of its critical role in advancing an open international economy from which those allies benefit enormously.”

Judging from these phrases, the longstanding status quo in East Asia has been so farsighted, so mutually beneficial, and even so warm and fuzzy and pleasingly symmetrical, that only a knave, a fool, or both would want it undermined. But translated into plain, euphemism and metaphor-free English, what Brands is saying is that the arrangements he believes Mr. Trump wants to shake up require the United States not only to bear the vast bulk of the burden of (rapidly growing, and increasingly nuclear) military risk, but most of the economic costs as well (both in the form of outsized defense spending and wildly lopsided trade flows).

And despite the “enormous” benefits enjoyed by the allies, if the United States doesn’t keep delivering on both grounds, these Asian countries will (a) be fully justified in questioning Washington’s reliability, and even telling the Seventh Fleet and the U.S. nuclear umbrella, to pack up stakes and return home; and (b) will be sorely tempted to do so.

Brands has every right to argue that the United States should expose itself to the ever greater danger of nuclear attack (from North Korea or China) on behalf of countries that insist on remaining free to shut American producers out of their markets, and that subsidize the destruction of U.S. jobs and output. He also has every right to contend that these allies will threaten to abandon security cooperation with the United States (and leave themselves more vulnerable to Chinese power) if Washington simply starts defending its legitimate economic interests.

But Brands has a corresponding obligation to state these views explicitly rather than follow well-worn establishment practice and cloak them in soothing cliches. While he’s at it, he might deign to explain to us peons how these approaches to Asia can possibly enhance the safety and well-being of the American people. And if he and the rest of the foreign policy blob refuse, the various media outlets that for so long have carried their work and helped propagate their messages should force them to lay their cards on the table – and at least expose the con job they’ve been pulling on the public.

Im-Politic: Mainstream Media Trump Slandering that Lacks the Courage of its Convictions

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2016 election, Adolph Hitler, appeasement, Czechoslovakia, David Ignatius, Donald Trump, George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, Im-Politic, Mainstream Media, media bias, Munich, Neville Chamberlain, Russia, The Washington Post, Vladimir Putin

If David Ignatius’ new column on Donald Trump’s Russia policy thinking and leanings isn’t the low point of Mainstream Media coverage of the Republican presidential candidate, that’s only because the competition has been so cutthroat. This Washington Post pundit has just produced a masterpiece of smearing by insinuation that doesn’t even have the courage of its own convictions. Here’s what I mean.

Ignatius began the piece by directly comparing a Trump statement on the candidate’s confidence that he’d get along with Russian leader Vladimir Putin with former then-British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s infamous 1938 claim that he’d achieve “peace in our time” by acquiescing in Adolph Hitler’s annexation of a chunk of the former country of Czechoslovakia.

Right afterward, Ignatius admitted that “Political analogies are often unfair, especially ones that invoke the overused Munich parallel.” But in the very next sentence, he insisted that

“this one is worth considering: The problem with Trump isn’t (as some critics have argued) that he’s a reckless and potentially genocidal aggressor. No, the danger is that he’s precisely what he says he is — a dealmaker who thinks he could craft agreements with despots that could bring peace and security.”

Ignatius then repeated this pattern of slinging mud even he obviously doesn’t believe – apparently in the hope that some of it will stick. First, the charge that:

“Trump seems to see commitments made to smaller states as expendable in the process of making deals with the big guys. When he linked U.S. willingness to defend the Baltic states and other NATO allies to what they pay into the alliance, it was a Chamberlain-esque emphasis on national self-interest, as opposed to sticking your neck out for possibly undeserving little guys.”

Then the cover-your-butt qualification: “This idea of reaching agreements with Putin’s Russia isn’t crazy, any more than was Chamberlain’s desire to escape war in 1938.”

Ignatius did make a feeble stab at squaring this circle:

“[T]rump actually deserves credit for raising this issue early in the Republican primary debates. But any such negotiation must be done carefully and unsentimentally, without the mutual self-congratulation that has characterized Trump’s comments about Putin.”

In other words, the Republican candidate’s praise of Putin has been wildly out of bounds.  Perhaps Ignatius has forgotten former President George W. Bush’s widely quoted, “I looked the man [Putin] in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul; a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country.”

And in case you still have doubts that Trump’s remarks are anything but unprecedented, get a load of this passage from that same June, 2001 press conference, which hasn’t been so widely quoted: “I look forward to my next meeting with President Putin in July. I very much enjoyed our time together. He’s an honest, straightforward man who loves his country. He loves his family. We share a lot of values. I view him as a remarkable leader.”

Moreover, the rest of Ignatius’ case apparently rests on his assumption that Trump would give away the store immediately – presumably as opposed to his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. That would be the same Hillary Clinton who, as President Obama’s Secretary of State, was positively giggly as she sent her Russian counterpart and the world the unmistakable message – complete with corny prop – that the two countries could simply “reset” their relationship because Mr. Obama had just entered office.

In his close, Ignatius make a final attempt to tar Trump with a brush while absolving himself of any responsibility for alarmism: “We’re not in Neville Chamberlain territory, not even close. But this is a slippery slope, not just for Trump, but for the United States. ”

What couldn’t be clearer is that if anyone’s not only on but well down a slippery slope, it’s Ignatius. And it’s labeled “slander.”

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: What Obama Gets Right and Wrong About America’s Allies

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alliances, allies, Asia, Bret Stephens, burden sharing, Cato Institute, David Cameron, David Ignatius, deterrence, Eli Lake, Europe, foreign policy establishment, France, free-riding, geography, Japan, Jeffrey Goldberg, Korea, LIbya, Middle East, Nikolas Sarkozy, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Saudi Arabia, self-sufficiency, The Atlantic, United Kingdom, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post

As I said over the weekend, that Atlantic article on President Obama’s foreign policy based on a series of lengthy interviews is an unusually rich vein of material. So let’s keep mining! Since its most newsworthy aspects so far have been judged to be Mr. Obama’s views on America’s allies, let’s focus on them.

The quick and dirty: The bipartisan foreign policy establishment (including its journalistic wing) is just aghast that the president has derided many of the nation’s main treaty and less formal allies – including the United Kingdom – as “free riders.” And on this matter, Obama could not be more on target. At the same time, just as with his pessimism on the Middle East, he hasn’t even begun to follow up policy-wise in ways that are not only logical, but vital for avoiding major future troubles.

As the article by Jeffrey Goldberg reminds, the president has dressed down London for skimping on defense spending while the United States has borne an outsized share of the Western security burden. The British responded by – minimally – meeting a spending goal long endorsed by Washington, but Mr. Obama still complained bitterly about the history of many allies’ “holding our coats while we did all the fighting.’”

Indeed, he largely blamed his failed intervention in Libya on “Europe and a number of Gulf countries who despise Qaddafi, or are concerned on a humanitarian basis, who are calling for action. But what has been a habit over the last several decades in these circumstances is people pushing us to act but then showing an unwillingness to put any skin in the game.” And he fingered both current British Prime Minister David Cameron and his then French counterpart, Nikolas Sarkozy, by name.

Also harshly criticized by the president: Saudi Arabia and other arch-conservative Persian Gulf monarchies, which he has accused of “intensifying” (Goldberg’s language) the outburst of “Muslim fury” seen in recent years by “heavily” funding the spread of Islamic fundamentalism.

Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens spoke for many in the nation’s professional foreign policy community when he wrote that Mr. Obama’s remarks to Goldberg “are so gratuitously damaging to long-standing U.S. alliances, international security and Mr. Obama’s reputation as a serious steward of the American interest that the words could not possibly have sprung from the lips of the president himself.”

But as shown by this essay by the Washington Post‘s David Ignatius, criticism has hardly been confined to neoconservatives. Indeed, Bloomberg View columnist Eli Lake delivered probably the ultimate slap at this facet of the “Obama Doctrine” – at least in the eyes of the nation’s chattering classes. He called it Trump-like.

The president certainly can be faulted for indiscretion while still serving in office. As Ignatius notes, candor can indeed be destabilizing. But such judgment questions aside what’s most important to know is that the president is unquestionably right on the merits. Unless you doubt that the Gulf Arab monarchies are funding the spread of one of Islam’s harshest, most medieval strains? Or believe that America’s allies in Europe and Japan have ever shouldered a remotely appropriate share of the load for what is after all their own defense?

As documented in this 2000 journal article of mine, since early in the Cold War, American administrations have struggled to convince or pressure leaders in London, Paris, Bonn (and then Berlin), and Tokyo alike to increase their military budgets both in absolute terms and as a percentage of overall alliance defense spending. All of these efforts have failed, even though Washington consistently used the most indulgent, and least sensible, criterion for success imaginable – raising allied spending to equal U.S. efforts.

If national security policy was a game, such an outcome would of course be “fair.” But when it comes to promoting and defending American interests, this approach has created a false equivalence in stakes, and led the United States to expend greater-than-necessary amounts on the military, and face greater-than-necessary risks. For however important America’s interests in securing Europe or Japan and the rest of East Asia from Soviet, Russian, and Chinese threats, the allies’ interests in defending themselves are infinitely more important – and indeed, vital.

But U.S. burden-sharing efforts also failed for the same reason that has frustrated President Obama’s own ambitions: a stubborn unwillingness to recognize the inescapable dynamics of free-riding. For just like his Cold War and post-Cold War predecessors, Mr. Obama has continually sabotaged his burden-sharing strategies by endlessly declaring not only that allies and their regions are vital American security interests, but that their security and America’s are indivisible. So naturally, allies for decades have concluded that they have no need for much military exertion given Washington’s conviction that their downfall would be completely unacceptable. Ditto for coalition warfare in third countries, like Libya. Whether for moral or strategic reasons, the Obama administration never indicated that it could take the situation or leave it. So countries like the United Kingdom and France understandably – and entirely predictably – chose to take the easy way out.

The bad news – not for the nation as a whole, but for the often grandiose ambitions of its leaders – is that without reliable allies, many of their foreign policy objectives do, as they fear, become impossible to achieve. So just to pick through President Obama’s remarks to Goldberg, say goodbye (at least often) to “establishing norms that benefit everyone, and even to “doing good at a bearable cost,” to “promoting values, like democracy and human rights,” to “making the world a better place,” to “bending the world toward justice,” and especially to “leading the world.”

The good news – not for America’s professional foreign policy community, nearly the whole of which believes deeply in the urgency of these goals, but for the nation as a whole – is that neither U.S. security nor prosperity requires achieving any of them. As I’ve explained repeatedly, America is geopolitically secure enough and economically self sufficient enough to achieve adequate levels of security and prosperity even in a badly failing world.

Better yet, both this security and prosperity can be further enhanced without more overseas engagement.  And even if strengthening the U.S. capacity for self-reliance in all dimensions wasn’t eminently feasible, assigning it a much higher priority would be essential precisely because America’s allies have proven themselves so utterly feckless for so many decades.

Moreover, there’s an even more compelling argument for disengaging from America’s current security commitments and pursuing a more independent course than recognizing their major limits as multipliers for American power. In this increasingly dangerous, unstable world, these ties are entirely too likely to embroil the United States in conflicts it’s better off avoiding. As analysts at the Cato Institute in particular have warned, when their deterrence power fails, they tend to become “transmission belts of war.”

And these belts remain in place throughout the world – albeit on scales smaller than during the Cold War. On the one hand, it’s true that international tensions in places like Europe and much of Asia are considerably lower than between 1945 and 1990 (with the Korean peninsula a notable exception). On the other hand, the threat to the United States from an ideologically hostile superpower with global ambitions is greatly reduced as well.

Fortunately for President Obama and the nation, the United States hasn’t yet been trapped into defending alliances and regions that, however important, don’t justify exposing the American homeland to the risk of major war. But because for all his frustrations with the allies, he hasn’t thought through the consequences of clinging to these outmoded arrangements, his successor is less likely to be so lucky.

 

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: A Glimmer of Establishment Realism on the Middle East

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border security, David Ignatius, elites, energy, foreign policy establishment, Iran, ISIS, Middle East, nuclear weapons, oil, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, pundits, September 11, terrorism

You know the saying, “Out of the mouths of babes”? David Ignatius’ Friday Washington Post column shows that “Out of the mouths of pundits” might also belong in our lexicon. The big difference is that the former suggests that many problems that look forbiddingly complex can be solved by examining them without the preconceived notions and other intellectual baggage built up by adults. The latter would suggest that, at least now and then, truths that have long been screamingly obvious to anyone with a lick of common sense, but that clash with the conventional wisdom, get recognized by columnists and other political and policy class types who usually defend this wisdom with a vengeance.

As I’ve written, Ignatius was born into this establishment and has faithfully disseminated and championed its view his entire career. So imagine my surprise to read his Friday article – which not only in detail strongly echoed my view that the Middle East these days has become an utterly hopeless mess, but at least referenced the policy conclusion that I’ve been pushing: that since outsiders can’t prevent the the region’s multiple disasters from unfolding, they need to focus on “protecting themselves from collateral damage.”

To be sure, Ignatius still seems to believe that something viable can be created in the Middle East – but not for years and even perhaps (as I consider likelier in my most optimistic moments) decades. The next logical step for Ignatius and the rest of America’s elites is supporting the specific measures needed to shield the nation from the main Middle East dangers it faces – major disruptions to global energy supplies and September 11-like terrorist attacks. (In my opinion, U.S. nuclear forces are a much more than adequate deterrent against any nuclear weapons and delivery systems developed by Iran.)

But don’t expect him or his colleagues to be vigorously pressing for ramped up efforts to develop the fullest range of alternatives to Middle East oil, much less for genuinely securing U.S. borders (along with pounding ISIS by air and with special forces until these goals are achieved). If Rome took more than a day to build, think of the obstacles to shibboleths that have fed elitist egos and preserved their privilege – at the expense of national security and prosperity – for generations.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: A Flat Earth-ist Argument for TPP

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David Ignatius, flat earthism, Immigration, investment, Japan, TPP, Trade, Trans-Pacific Partnership, transparency, {What's Left of) Our Economy

I don’t know what it is about international economic and trade policy that turns otherwise intelligent people into the professional equivalent of morons, but it urgently needs intensive study. And once again, Washington Post foreign affairs columnist David Ignatius has provided a stunning case in point.

As I’ve shown here and here, when Ignatius wades into economics, it’s as if his brain turns off, and his Post offering of March 26 was no exception. Writing about a recent interview with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Ignatius matter-of-factly informed readers that Japan “shares with this country fundamental values of democracy and openness.”

Now it’s one thing for Ignatius, or anyone else, to favor liberalizing trade with Japan, and therefore, nowadays, completing and approving President Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) – the reason Ignatius touted these supposed Japan virtues.  I disagree, but there are respectable arguments on both sides. But portraying Japan as a society that prizes any form of openness? That’s the trade policy equivalent of flat earth-ism.

We’re talking, after all, about a country that remains hermetically sealed to imports. (If it were already open, why would a trade agreement be so important economically?) That has long shunned investment from abroad. That despite a population that’s aging rapidly and actually falling significantly, barely tolerates any legal immigration. And whose powerful, secretive bureaucrats, not elected politicians, have long wielded the real political and policy-making power. Moreover, anyone with any meaningful knowledge of Japan  knows that such features have marked Japanese culture and society for centuries.

Please keep in mind that I’m not making these points to criticize or to praise Japan’s choices, but to make clear how utterly off the wall Ignatius’ claim is – and how revealing it must surely be that it made its way into an essay by a prominent foreign policy commentator in a leading American newspaper as easily as an observation you can sail as far as you want on this planet without fear of falling off an edge.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: A Post Pundit with Foot-in-Mouth Disease on Trade Policy

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David Ignatius, exports, fakeonomics, fast track, GDP, Jobs, Mainstream Media, Obama Trade Policy, Peterson Institute, TPP, Trade, Trade Deficits, Trans-Pacific Partnership, Washington Post, {What's Left of) Our Economy

The nation owes a debt of gratitude to Washington Post columnist David Ignatius for once again making clear how arrogant and substantively clueless the Mainstream Media tends to be when discussing trade policy.

Last year, as I pointed out, this scion of Washington blue blood society displayed his elitist views on the issue by claiming that trade policy is “one of those subjects that often make people’s eyes glaze over.”  And it’s true that offshoring-friendly deals like NAFTA and the governing class’ bipartisan refusal to combat predatory practices like China’s currency manipulation haven’t cost many jobs – in the Georgetown salon circles in which Ignatius moves.  These measures and decisions, however, doubtless look different outside the Beltway and its government-dominated economy.

Ignatius’ high-handedness made its latest appearance this morning.  On Saturday, in his Fact-Checker feature, Ignatius’ Post colleague Glenn Kessler showed that a think tank figure touted by Ignatius as compelling evidence of the economic merits of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) was an Obama administration concoction.

Ignatius’ reaction this morning?  “Kessler is right.”  After which he added “The case for free trade is strong enough that I didn’t need a shaky jobs number.”

But here’s what Ignatius didn’t tell readers:  The statistic that so impressed him – which depicted the proposed Pacific Rim trade agreement as a major job creator – was one of only two pieces of evidence he presented for considering the deal a plus for the U.S. economy.  And the other was even shakier.

Ignatius had cited the same think tank – the Peterson Institute for International Economics – in declaring that the TPP would be a major engine of U.S. export growth.  What he evidently doesn’t know is that the only valid way to judge a trade agreement’s impact on a signatory’s economy is to examine the import side as well as the export side.  And as I’ve documented, when Washington signs a trade deal with countries boasting impressive manufacturing sectors – as is the case with the TPP – imports have increased much faster than exports.  Worse, the resulting worsening of the American trade balance kills not only employment but growth itself.

Finally, Ignatius snooty self-correction demonstrates a troubling ignorance of what’s mainly at issue in Washington’s upcoming debates over the TPP, a possible agreement with the European Union, and new fast track trade negotiating authority for President Obama.  What the nation and its leaders need to decide is not whether there’s a strong case for an abstraction like “free trade.” What they need to decide is whether the specific agreements being negotiated will strengthen or weaken the economy.

Because this embarrassing combination of haughtiness and ignorance can only (rightly) turn off ever more Washington Post readers, I recommended last year that the paper’s new owner Jeff Bezos bar Ignatius from writing about trade and globalization.  The columnists’ latest howler makes my advice timelier than ever.