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Tag Archives: multilateralism

Making News: Podcast Now On-Line of U.S. China Strategy National Radio Interview

12 Tuesday Jan 2021

Posted by Alan Tonelson in Making News

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alliances, allies, America First, China, globalism, Joe Biden, Making News, Market Wrap with Moe Ansari, multilateralism, national security, Trade, trade war, Trump

I’m pleased to announce that the podcast is now available of my interview yesterday with Moe Ansari on his nationally syndicated “Market Wrap” radio program. This was a real corker of a segment, turning into an awfully intense (but always civil!) debate about the best way for the United States to deal with the Chinese economic and national security threat – by relying on its own devices (a la, more or less, President Trump) or by building international coalitions (the preferred approach of President-elect Biden). Click here to listen and go to the “Current Market Wrap: link. My segment begins at about the 27-minute mark.

And keep checking in with RealityChek for news of upcoming media appearances and other developments.

Making News: Biden China Setback Post Re-Published in The National Interest

02 Saturday Jan 2021

Posted by Alan Tonelson in Making News

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alliances, allies, China, EU, European Union, globalism, investment, Joe Biden, Making News, multilateralism, The National Interest

I’m pleased to announce that my recent RealityChek post on the European Union’s decision to sign an investment agreement with China, and how it’s trashed apparent President-elect Joe Biden’s globalist dreams of a multilateralist, allies-centric China policy, was re-published yesterday as a blog item by The National Interest. Click here to read – or re-read – with a snazzier layout!

And all throughout the year, keep checking in with RealityChek for news of upcoming media appearances and other developments.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Biden Choices Signal a “What, Me Worry?” China Policy

13 Sunday Dec 2020

Posted by Alan Tonelson in Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Those Stubborn Facts

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alliances, allies, Antony Blinken, BlackRock, Brian Deese, China, decoupling, Jake Sullivan, Janet Yellen, Joe Biden, Katherine Tai, Lloyd Austin, multilateralism, national security, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Robert Lighthizer, sanctions, tariffs, tech war, Trade, trade war, transition, Trump, U.S. Trade Representative, USTR, Wall Street

Apparent President-elect Biden so far is sending a message about his China policy that’s unmistakably bad news for any American believing that the People’s Republic is a major threat to the nation’s security and prosperity – which should be every American. The message: “I’d rather not think about it much.”

In some limited senses, and for the very near future, the impact could be positive. Principally, although he blasted President Trump’s steep, sweeping tariffs on imports from China as disastrously counter-productive for the entire U.S. economy – consumers and producers alike – he’s stated that he won’t lift them right away. Presumably, he’ll also hesitate to remove the various Trump sanctions that have so gravely damaged the tech entities whose activities bolster China’s military strength and foreign espionage capabilities, along with new Trump administration restrictions on these Chinese entities’ ability to list on U.S. stock exchanges.

Looking further down the road, however, if personnel, as widely believed, is indeed policy, Biden’s choices for Cabinet officials and other senior aides to date strongly indicate that his views on the subject haven’t changed much from this past May, when he ridiculed the idea that China not only is going to “eat our lunch,” but represented any kind of serious competitor at all. In fact, in two ways, his choices suggest that his take on China remains the same as that which produced a long record of China coddling.

First, none of his top economic or foreign policy picks boasts any significant China-related experience – or even much interest in China. Like Biden himself, Secretary of State-designate Antony Blinken is an indiscriminate worshipper of U.S. security alliances who views China’s rise overwhelmingly as a development that has tragically and even dangerously given Mr. Trump and other America Firsters an excuse to weaken these arrangements by making allies’ China positions an acid test of their value. In addition, he’s pushed the red herring that the Trump policies amount to a foolhardy, unrealistic attempt at complete decoupling of the U.S. and Chinese economies.

As for the apparently incoming White House national security adviser, Jake J. Sullivan – who served as Biden’s chief foreign policy adviser during his Vice Presidential years – he shares the same alliances-uber-alles perspective on China as Biden and Blinken, and is on record as late as 2017 as criticizing the Trump administration for “failing to strike a middle course” on China – “one that encourages China’s rise in a manner consistent with an open, fair, rules-based, regional order.” I’m still waiting for someone to ask Sullivan why he believes that mission evidently remained unacccomplished after the Obama administration had eight years to try carrying it out.

On the defense policy front, Biden has chosen to head the Pentagon former General Lloyd Austin whose main top-level experience was in fighting Jihadist terrorists in the Middle East, not dealing with a near-superpower like China. That’s no doubt why Biden failed even to mention China when introducing Austin and listing the issues on which he’d need to focus – an omission worrisomely noted by the U.S. Asia allies the apparent President-elect is counting on to help America cope more effectively with whatever problems he thinks China does pose.

As for the Biden economic picks, Treasury Secretary and former Fed Chair Janet Yellen has expressed little interest in China or trade policy more broadly during her long career in public service. (See here for a description of some of her relatively few remarks on the subject.) His choice to head the National Economic Council, Brian Deese, has been working for the Wall Street investment giant, BlackRock, Inc. – which like most of its peers has long hoped to win Beijing’s permission to compete for a slice of the potentially huge China financial services market. But his focus seems to have been environmentally sustainable investments, and his own Obama administration experience centered on climate change.

One theoretical exception is Katherine Tai, evidently slated to become Biden’s U.S. Trade Representative (USTR). Both as a former lawyer at the trade agency  and in her current position as a senior staff member at the House Ways and Means Committee, she boasts vast China experience.

But history teaches clearly that the big American trade policy decisions, like handling China, are almost never made at the USTR level. Mr. Trump’s trade envoy, Robert Lighthizer, was a major exception, and his prominence stemmed from the President’s unfamiliarity as an outsider with the specific policy levers that have needed to be pulled to engineer the big China trade and broader economic policy turnaround sought by Mr. Trump. So expect Tai to be a foot soldier, nothing more.

The cumulative effect of this China vacuum at the top of the likely incoming administration creates the second way in which Biden’s seems to reflect a lack of urgency on the subject: It signals that there will be no China point person in his administration. It’s true that reports have appeared that the apparent President-elect will appoint an Asia policy czar. But more than a week after they’ve been posted, nothing further has been heard.

All of which suggests that, by default, China policy will be made by the alliance festishers Blinken and Sullivan. And if their stated multilateralist impulses do indeed dominate, the result will be basically a U.S. China policy outsourced to Brussels (headquarters of the European Union), and the capitals of Asia. As I’ve written previously, many of these allies have profited greatly from the pre-Trump U.S. and global China trade policy status quo, and their leaders are hoping for a return to this type of world as soon as possible. And it’s no coincidence that’s the kind of world Joe Biden was happy to help preside over during his last White House job.  

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Biden Multilateralism Looks Ever More Muddled

27 Friday Nov 2020

Posted by Alan Tonelson in Our So-Called Foreign Policy

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alliances, Antony Blinken, Biden transition, China, decoupling, globalism, international institutions, Jake Sullivan, Joe Biden, multilateralism, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, technology

Attention to anyone in touch with the Biden foreign policy transition folks – I’m offering a deal.

I’ll stop charging that its top members (and especially Cabinet and similar nominees) keep spouting patently and dangerously vapid globalist foreign policy ideas if they provide some evidence that something other than patently and dangerously vapid globalist foreign policy ideas are going to shape their upcoming stewardship of American strategy and diplomacy.

So far, however, the evidence keeps showing that they have a long way to go, starting with Secretary of State nominee Antony Blinken. In his remarks accepting the position (subject to Senate confirmation of course), this quintessential Clinton and Obama administration retread spoke movingly about his family’s Holocaust roots, but committed one of the cardinal sins of not only diplomacy but any policymaking or politicking: He advertised weakness.

On top of failing either to mention or – more likely – recognize that the international cooperation and multilateralism that’s he’s elevated from a foreign policy tactic to a goal in and of itself will inevitably have content, and that therefore America will often need to play hardball in order to ensure favorable outcomes, Blinken emphasized that “as the President-elect said, we can’t solve all the world’s problems alone. We need to be working with other countries. We need their cooperation. We need their partnership.”

It was nothing less than an open invitation for U.S. friends, foes, and neutrals alike to assume that such problem solving efforts matter more to the United States to them, and that they can therefore repeatedly roll Washington by playing hard to get, and often simply stonewalling until the United States caves in to their stances.

And if you think that America’s wealthy, powerful, and influential allies, whose agreement will be rucial to the success of any international cooperative efforts, would never sink to these tactics, you need to learn some Cold War history. Even when the free world faced a Soviet threat that all of its members viewed as existential, countries like (then) West Germany and South Korea, which literally lived on the front lines, successfully free-rode for decades on Washington’s defense guarantees because U.S. leaders continually spoke and acted as if they’d maintain these military (including nuclear) umbrellas at all costs because they were vital to America itself.

To make matters even weirder, shortly before the election, Blinken – the fetishizer of international cooperation and multilateralism — justified these globalist priorities with an argument drawn straight from the very foundation of America First-ism, at least as I’ve defined it.

I’ve written that America First is the foreign policy approach most suited to the United States is one understanding that, although the United States is not strong, rich, and or smart enough to create a benign global environment or meet truly global challenges all by itself, it is plenty strong, rich, and smart enough to remain safe and prosperous in a world sure to stay anything but benign.

So imagine how surprised I was to see this Blinken statement at a foreign policy conference in October, when he was firmly established as a leading Biden spokesman: A new administration’s approach to world affairs would include “humility, because most of the world’s problems are not about us, even though they affect us.”

Now there’s nothing inherently wrong with addressing overseas situations that “affect us,” as opposed to representing mortal threats. If opportunities arise for the United State to better its lot, it’s of course reasonable to pursue them. But they shouldn’t be pursued until U.S. leaders ask themselves whether the best way to achieve such goals is by joining international cooperative efforts, or relying on any foreign policy approaches at all, rather than trying to build up its own capabilities and reducing its own vulnerabilities. As I’ve also written, in many instances, the latter, America First-y approach will be the superior or more promising, if only because the nation will always be able to influence its own affairs much more effectively than the affairs of others.

Finally, even when Biden aides do display some awareness that U.S. foreign policy needs to be something more than a content-free quest for cooperation, regardless of the stakes for Americans, they haven’t made much progress on figuring out what this content should be – or sharing the results with the public.

More than a year ago, the apparent President-elect’s choice for White House national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, wrote in the leading journal Foreign Affairs, that the central task of U.S. China policy must be to find a way to establish a modus vivendi with Beijing recognizing that the People’s Republic is here to stay as a great power. He stated that “Such coexistence would involve elements of competition and cooperation,” which sounds like yet another glib formula for emphasizing means over end. But Sullivan did specify that America’s policies must identify and seek outcomes favorable to U.S. interests and values.”

On broader matters, Sullivan even contended that “Going forward, Washington should avoid becoming an eager suitor on transnational challenges. Eagerness can actually limit the scope for cooperation by making it a bargaining chip.” Hopefully, he’ll communicate this “Don’t advertise weakness” to Blinken and the rest of a Biden administration.

So that’s progress. But in the year that’s passed since this piece came out, we’ve heard little from Sullivan or anyone else connected with Biden on what will be acceptable to a new adminstration and what won’t be, and less in the way of plausible tactics for achieving these goals or creating these conditions.

For example, Sullivan’s description in his article of ways to deter a Chinese attack on Taiwan – or other targets in Asia – demonstrates no awareness that Beijing’s ability to hit the U.S. homeland with large numbers of nuclear weapons looks formidable enough to inhibit conventional American military responses strong enough to threaten Chinese gambits with defeat.

Sullivan allows that Washington will need to use “some enhanced restrictions on the flow of technology investment and trade in both directions,” in order to “safeguard its technological advantages in the face of China’s intellectual property theft, targeted industrial policies, and commingling of its economic and security sectors.”

But because Sullivan’s overarching goal appears to be avoiding the “Balkanization” of “the global technology ecosystem by impeding flows of knowledge and talent,” he’d place limitations on these curbs that would result in a piecemeal response to a systemic threat. And even individual restrictions that are approved would surely be watered down to the point of ineffectiveness thanks to Sullivan’s insistence that they be “undertaken in consultation with industry and other governments” – two groups that have displayed not the slightest inclination significantly to disrupt business with China that they’ve each found tremendously lucrative.

And in fact, Sullivan ends up ignoring his own sage advice about the limits of international cooperation and multilateralism for their own sakes by declaring a faith in their capabilities that looks stubbornly blind. Why else would he end his article with these declarations?

“Establishing clear-eyed coexistence with China will be challenging under any conditions, but it will be virtually impossible without help. If the United States is to strengthen deterrence, establish a fairer and more reciprocal trading system, defend universal values, and solve global challenges, it simply cannot go it alone. It is remarkable that it must be said, but so it must: to be effective, any strategy of the United States must start with its allies.”

Which sounds like we’re back to Blinken-ism. With my offer still firmly on the table.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: The Globalists Still Don’t Get It

18 Wednesday Nov 2020

Posted by Alan Tonelson in Our So-Called Foreign Policy

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America First, Financial Times, Gideon Rachman, global leadership, globalism, international cooperation, international institutions, Joe Biden, multilateralism, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, The National Interest, Trump

It was tempting for me to react to Gideon Rachman’s column in yesterday’s Financial Times by noting, “At least he got it half right.” But this essay on Joe Biden’s determination to put U.S. foreign policy back on a globalist course isn’t even noteworthy by that modest standard.

For Rachman’s observation that a Biden administration is likely to find its goal of American global leadership much more difficult than expected to restore, and his conclusion that therefore the United States will have no choice to advance and protect its interests but to work via international institutions it can’t dominate and hope for the best, has been standard globalist fare for decades – as I’ve explained most recently and comprehensively here.

The crucial globalist mistake Rachman repeats entails what President Trump and his too-ragged pursuit of an America First strategy grasped in its essentials – that although the United States is far from strong (or wealthy, or wise) enough to achieve the central globalist goal of ensuring American security and prosperity by creating a fundamentally benign international environment, it is plenty strong and wealthy enough to achieve its essential interests through its own devices. The key is preserving and enhancing enough of that strength and wealth to maximize the odds of surviving and prospering in a world certain to remain dangerous or at least unstable.

To phrase this conclusion in globalist terms: The United States doesn’t need “global leadership” in the first place. It simply needs the capacity to take care of however it defines its own business.

An added virtue of this America First-y approach – success requires a lot less wisdom than globalism. That’s because (a) this strategy seeks to control what the nation can plausibly hope to control (its own affairs) instead of what it can’t plausibly hope to control (the affairs of everyone else); and (b) the United States’ favored (largely isolated) geographic position, its natural wealth, and its still formidable industrial and technoogical prowess endow it with a strong basis for withstanding and even thriving amid global turmoil that most other countries can only envy.

As I’ve also noted (in that National Interest article linked above) and elsewhere, the America First approach is needed even when working through those international institutions seems to be the nation’s best bet for coping with problems or maximizing opportunities. For as globalists (including Rachman in part) invariably miss is that the decision to foster “international cooperation” could even hope to be an automatic guarantee of favorable or even acceptable outcomes only if an objectively optimal solution for all concerned is already available and identifiable either by one or a group of the national governments involved, or by commonly accepted experts. Write me if you see any of these developments coming any time soon – even on a (rhetorically) widely agreed on worldwide “existential threat” like global warming.

In other words, for the foreseeable future, international institutions will be arenas of politics, not festivals of one-worldism, and international cooperation will have content. And if American leaders’ persuasive skills don’t suffice, for the best possible odds of mastering these politics and securing outcomes reflecting their country’s own distinctive interests and priorities, they’ll need to recognize that the former exist to begin with, and bring to bear the power (in all of its dimensions) needed to prevail satisfactorily. To cite a concept even globalists sometimes use, Washington will need to build and maintain and negotiate from “situations of strength.” But they’ll need to realize that these advantages are just as important in dealing with long-time allies and relatively benign neutrals as with adversaries like China and Russia.

The half of this cluster of issues Rachman gets right also includes his understanding that the American people will probably like the return to globalist-style multilateralism and cooperation even less than a Biden administration. But this insight isn’t exceptional, either, as his ultimate explanation for this resentment seems to be a neanderthal attachment to sovereignty by an electorate long viewed by globalists as too ignorant and unrealistic to acknowledge their superior wisdom.

And since, as Rachman correctly points out, Biden’s globalism is not only staunch, but pretty clueless itself, the nation will need considerable luck if his term in office avoids the debacles that so many of his pre-Trump predecessors created.

Im-Politic: Trump-ism Without Trump for America as a Whole?

16 Monday Nov 2020

Posted by Alan Tonelson in Im-Politic

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"Defund the Police", allies, CCP Virus, China, climate change, coronavirus, court packing, COVID 19, Democrats, election 2020, enforcement, Executive Orders, filibuster, Green New Deal, Huawei, human rights, Im-Politic, Immigration, Joe Biden, judiciary, lockdowns, mask mandate, masks, metals, multilateralism, Muslim ban, Phase One, progressives, Republicans, sanctions, Senate, shutdowns, stimulus, Supreme Court, tariffs, taxes, Trade, trade wars, Trump, unions, Wuhan virus

Since election day, I’ve spent some time and space here and on the air speculating about the future of what I called Trump-ism without Donald Trump in conservative and Republican Party political ranks. Just this weekend, my attention turned to another subject and possibility: Trump-ism without Mr. Trump more broadly speaking, as a shaper – and indeed a decisive shaper – of national public policy during a Joe Biden presidency. Maybe surprisingly, the chances look pretty good.

That is, it’s entirely possible that a Biden administration won’t be able to undo many of President Trump’s signature domestic and foreign policies, at least for years, and it even looks likely if the Senate remains Republican. Think about it issue-by-issue.

With the Senate in Republican hands, there’s simply no prospect at least during the first two Biden years for Democratic progressives’ proposals to pack the Supreme Court, to eliminate the Senate filibuster, or to recast the economy along the lines of the Green New Deal, or grant statehood Democratic strongholds Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia. A big tax increase on corporations and on the Biden definition of the super-rich looks off the table as well.

If the Senate does flip, the filibuster might be history. But big Democratic losses in the House, and the claims by many veterans of and newcomers to their caucus that those other progressive ambitions, along with Defunding the Police, were to blame, could also gut or greatly water down much of the rest of the far Left’s agenda, too.

CCP Virus policy could be substantially unchanged, too. For all the Biden talk of a national mask mandate, ordering one is almost surely beyond a President’s constitutional powers. Moreover, his pandemic advisors are making clear that, at least for the time being, a sweeping national economic lockdown isn’t what they have in mind. I suspect that some virus economic relief measures willl be signed into law sometime this spring or even earlier, but they won’t carry the total $2 trillion price tag on which Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi seems to have insisted for months. In fact, I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of relief being provided a la carte, as Congressional Republicans have suggested – e.g., including popular provisions like some form of unemployment payment bonus extension and stimulus checks, and excluding less popular measures like stimulus aid for illegal aliens.

My strong sense is that Biden is itching to declare an end to President Trump’s trade wars, and as noted previously, here he could well find common cause with the many Senate Republicans from the party’s establishment wing who have never been comfortable bucking the wishes of an Offshoring Lobby whose campaign contributions it’s long raked in.

Yet the former Vice President has promised his labor union supporters that until the trade problems caused by China’s massive steel overproduction were (somehow) solved, he wouldn’t lift the Trump metals tariffs on allies (which help prevent transshipment and block these third countries from exporting their own China steel trade problems to the United States) – even though they’re the levies that have drawn the most fire from foreign policy globalists and other trade and globalization zealots.

As for the China tariffs themselves, the latest from the Biden team is that they’ll be reviewed. So even though he’s slammed them as wildly counterproductive, they’re obviously not going anywhere soon. (See here for the specifics.) 

Later? Biden’s going to be hard-pressed to lift the levies unless one or both of the following developments take place: first, the allied support he’s touted as the key to combating Beijing’s trade and other economic abuses actually materializes in very convincing ways; second, the Biden administration receives major Chinese concessions in return. Since even if such concessions (e.g., China’s agreement to eliminate or scale back various mercantile practices) were enforceable (they won’t be unless Biden follows the Trump Phase One deal’s approach), they’ll surely require lengthy negotiations. Ditto for Trump administration sanctions on China tech entities like the telecommunications giant Huawei. So expect the Trump-ian China status quo to long outlast Mr. Trump.

Two scenarios that could see at least some of the tariffs or tech sanctions lifted? First, the Chinese make some promises to improve their climate change policies that will be completely phony, but will appeal greatly to the Green New Deal-pushing progressives who will wield much more power if the Senate changes hands, and who have demonstrated virtually no interest in China economic issues. Second, Beijing pledges to ease up on its human rights crackdowns on Hong Kong and the Muslims of Xinjiang province. These promises would be easier to monitor and enforce, but the Chinese regime views such issues as utterly non-negotiable because they’re matters of sovereignty. So China’s repressive practices won’t even be on the official agenda of any talks. Unofficial understandings might be reached under which Beijing would take modest positive steps or suspend further contemplated repression. But I wouldn’t count on such an outcome.

Two areas where Biden supposedly could make big decisions unilaterally whatever happens in the Senate, are immigration and climate change. Executive orders would be the tools, and apparently that’s indeed the game plan. But as Mr. Trump discovered, what Executive Orders and even more routine adminstrative actions can do, a single federal judge responding to a special interest group’s request can delay for months. And these judicial decisions can interfere with presidential authority even on subjects that for decades has been recognized as wide-ranging – notably making immigration enforcement decisions when border crossings impact national security, as with the so-called Trump “Muslim ban.”

I know much less about climate change, but a recently retired attorney friend with long experience litigating on these issues told me that even before Trump appointee Amy Coney Barrett joined the Supreme Court, the Justices collectively looked askance on efforts to create new policy initiatives without legislating. Another “originalist” on the Court should leave even less scope for ignoring Congress.

The bottom line is especially curious given the almost universal expectations that this presidential election would be the most important in recent U.S. history: A deeply divided electorate could well have produced a mandate for more of the same – at least until the 2022 midterms.

Glad I Didn’t Say That! Is China Calling Biden’s Bluff on U.S. Allies?

13 Friday Nov 2020

Posted by Alan Tonelson in Glad I Didn't Say That!, Uncategorized

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alliances, allies, China, Glad I Didn't Say That!, Global Times, Joe Biden, multilateralism, Trade

“Rather than picking fights with our allies and undermining respect for America, Biden will work with our closest allies [to end China’s trade abuses], mobilizing more than half the world’s economy to better deliver for our workers.”

–The Biden presidential campaign, 2020

“If Washington wants to exploit its alliance system to deal with China, it is bound to be restrained by its allies. Many US allies have economic interests with China and they are not willing to confront China in an effort to strengthen alliances with the US.”

–– Chinese state-run publication Global Times, November 8, 2020 

 

(Sources:  “The Biden Plan to Ensure the Future is ‘Made in All of America’ by All of America’s Workers,” “Joe’s Vision,” Joe Biden for President, Official Campaign Website, undated, https://joebiden.com/made-in-america/ and “Drop illusions over China-US relations, but don’t give up efforts:  Global Times editorial, November 8, 2020, https://globaltimes.cn/content/1206128.shtml) 

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: The Public Outscores the Experts on China Trade Policy

14 Wednesday Oct 2020

Posted by Alan Tonelson in (What's Left of) Our Economy

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(What's Left of) Our Economy, allies, America First, Blob, Center for Strategic and International Studies, China, CSIS, elites, globalism, multilateralism, tariffs, Trade, trade war, Trump, World Trade Organization, WTO

So many big takeaways from a new poll on U.S. and global attitudes toward China and U.S. China policy (both the economic and national security dimensions), I hardly know where to begin! But if I could only write a lede paragraph for a single news article (or blog item), here’s what I’d say: The American public is a great deal more sensible on how to deal with the People’s Republic than so-called “thought leaders.” And what I mean by “more sensible” is more “America First-y” and less globalist.

The survey was conducted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington, D.C.-based think tank not only squarely in the globalist camp, but a charter member of the globalist, bipartisan U.S. foreign policy “Blob” (which includes a sizable trade and economic sub-Blob) that exerted dominant influence over America’s course in world affairs until Donald Trump came along, and whose supposed expertise still mesmerizes the Mainstream Media.

Of special interest, CSIS sampled opinion from everyday Americans, those so-called thought leaders (whose follower-ship, as implied above, is greatly diminished), and thought leaders from countries that are U.S. allies or “partners.”

The gap between public and elites on China policy views seems widest on the economic and trade issues that President Trump has made so central to his approach towards the People’s Republic, and the CSIS survey contains decidedly good news for him and his fans in this area: The general public is much more supportive of the “go-it-alone,” unilateral sanctions and tariffs imposed by Mr. Trump to combat and/or eliminate Chinese transgressions in this area than the Blob-ers.

Although a multilateral approach (using “international agreements and rules to change China” economically) won plurality backing among the general public (34.8 percent), fully 69 percent of the U.S. thought leaders favored this route. Yet nearly a third of the U.S. public (32.8 percent) endorsed employing “U.S. government tools like sanctions and tariffs”, versus only three percent of the deep thinkers.

As I’ve written repeatedly, (e.g., here and here) a multilateral China trade strategy is bound to fail because international institutions (like the World Trade Organization) are too completely filled by countries that either rely heavily on China-style predation to compete in the global economy, and because even (or especially?) longstanding U.S. treaty allies had been doing business so profitably with the People’s Republic that the last development they wanted to see was a disruption of the pre-Trump status quo. So support for multilateralism in this case can legitimately be taken as support for do-nothing-ism – especially since the vast majority of these elites so enthusiastically pushed for the reckless U.S. expansion of commerce with China that’s lined many of their pockets, but that’s undermined American prosperity and national security.

The CSIS poll, moreover, provides some indirect evidence for this argument: Nearly as high a share of the foreign thought leaders backed a multilateral approach for dealing with China economically (65 percent) as their U.S. counterparts. And their support of U.S.-only approaches (seven percent) was only slightly higher than that of the U.S. thought leaders’ three percent. (The foreign thought leaders may be slightly more gung ho for America going it alone due to confidence that their own products will fill any gaps in the China market left by U.S. producers shut out by the trade wars. On a net basis, though, their countries are coming out losers this year.)

At the same time, one surprising (at least to me) economics-related finding emerged from the survey: Whether we’re talking about the American people generally, or thought leaders at home or abroad, just under 20 percent favor substantial decoupling from China as the best economic approach for the United States.

When it comes to messaging, however, the survey isn’t such great news for Mr. Trump – and Trumpers – on China trade issues. On the one hand, answers to the question on evaluating his performance in this area can – although with a stretch – be interpreted to show majority support for the view that his record has achieved noteworthy gains. Principally, 27.8 percent of U.S. public respondents agreed that the President’s China measures have “been effective in producing some tactical changes in Chinese economic policy” and 9.9 percent believe they have “been effective in forcing long-term changes.” Those groups add up to 37.7 percent of the sample.

Another 20.5 percent checked the box stating that Trump policies have “hurt U.S. consumers and exporters but protected important U.S. industries.” A case can be made that at least some members of this group would give these policies good grades, or that many would give them partly good grades, possibly bringing the total for positive views somewhere in the mid-40 percent neighborhood.

Much more certain, however, is that the most popular single answer (with 41.8 percent support) was that the trade war “has damaged U.S. economic interests without achieving positive change in China.”

Also signaling a Trump China messaging problem – as with much other commentary, the CSIS survey mostly measures China policy success as changing Chinese behavior. In my view, that goal is much less important – because it’s much less realistic, at least in terms of producing verifiable reform – than protecting U.S.-based producers from China’s economic predation. The relative resilience shown by domestic industry both throughout the trade war and into the CCP Virus-induced recession indicate that this goal is being achieved. But neither the President nor his economic nor his campaign team mentions it much, if at all.

CSIS’ polling also found that fully 71 percent of U.S. thought leaders gave Trump’s China economic policies the big thumbs down – and although they don’t vote, their aforementioned influence in the Mainstream Media could partly explain why broader American opinion on the Trump record seems so divided. (For the record, foreign thought leaders weren’t asked to rate the Trump strategy.)

But having established that everyday Americans have a good deal to teach the experts on China trade and economic policy, how do the two compare on China-related national security policies? As indicated above, the gap here isn’t nearly so wide, but worth exploring in some detail – as I’ll do in a forthcoming post!

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: The Iran Crisis’ Real Lessons on Multilateralism

25 Tuesday Jun 2019

Posted by Alan Tonelson in Our So-Called Foreign Policy

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allies, America First, Barack Obama, foreign policy, globalism, Iran, Iran deal, Iran nuclear deal, Iran sanctions, JCPOA, Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, multilateralism, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, sanctions, Trump, unilateralism

If you think about it seriously, the main sequence of events that’s led up to the latest surge in U.S.-Iran tensions has dealt a hammer blow to the mainstream U.S. foreign policy idea that going it more or less alone is a formula for failure in world affairs, and that closely cooperating with allies is one of the biggest keys to success.

To remind: The mainstream (in the case of Iran, overwhelmingly its left-of-center wing) has been charging that the two countries have moved close to major conflict because, over allies’ objections, an America First-oriented President Trump pulled out of the deal negotiated during President Barack Obama’s administration with the European Union (EU), the United Kingdom, Russia, and China and Iran to restrain Tehran’s nuclear weapons development. And Washington then proceeded to antagonize Iran gratuitously by ramping up its own economic sanctions. As a result, Iranian leaders have threatened to start violating some of its nuclear agreement commitments, and has further protested these actions by lashing out regionally – including (as seems to be the case) attacking tankers transporting vital oil supplies through the Persian Gulf and its narrow Straits of Hormuz.

So if only Mr. Trump had listened to the allies and stayed in the agreement – i.e., if he followed an approach called multilateralism – all would be (reasonably) well in the volatile and oil-rich Gulf region. And to be fair, I myself initially bought the multilateralist reasoning when the nuclear deal (officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA) was finally reached, agreeing that without allied buy-in, the United States could never create enough pressure on Iran on its own (i.e., “unilaterally”) to prevent Tehran from going nuclear for any length of time.

And yet, as I eventually realized, this narrative held no water whatever. For the United States has proved eminently capable of inflicting major pain on Iran’s economy all by itself – by dint of its ability to deny companies that do business with Iran (including companies from allied and other foreign countries) access to the U.S. dollar-dominated global banking and payments system. America’s unilateral power, in turn, strongly reinforces the argument that the Obama administration (and the allies) could have secured much better terms from Iran than the deal currently contains.

It’s true that weakening Iran economically is no guarantee that it will turn from the nuclear weapons path. But neither is the agreement. The strongest argument made on its behalf is that it pushes back any possible nuclear-ization by roughly fifteen years. Even strong supporters, though, acknowledge it contains important verification loopholes. And had the United States remained in the JCPOA, and imposed none or few of its own sanctions, when Iran did “break out,” it would have surely been much stronger economically than otherwise – which couldn’t serve the interests of anyone worried about the Islamic Republic.       

Even more important than my own evolving views: Iran itself clearly understands the United States’ matchless leverage, too. That’s why it’s been so enraged by the American withdrawal from the nuclear agreement – even though all the other signatories remain part of the pact. Its leaders apparently understand that, in this instance, U.S. allies’ words and even deeds don’t matter much.

And as for the allies augmenting American power and influence in this episode – because their top priority (rightly or wrongly) is preserving the nuclear deal, they’re trying to frustrate American aims nowadays, not support them.

Multilateralism certainly can be a useful, effective U.S. approach to various international challenges. But contrary to the impression created by its staunchest champions, allies need to do their part, too. If consensus among all parties is lacking, multilateralism can too easily become a recipe for paralysis and inaction. In other words, like all other tools or tactics, it’s simply a tool or tactic. It mustn’t be treated as an end in and of itself.

And this caveat, of course, goes double for the United States. For as the Iran situation shows, it’s unique among the world’s major powers in having many, and robust, unilateral options.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: A Laughable Indictment of Trump’s World Bank Choice

07 Thursday Feb 2019

Posted by Alan Tonelson in (What's Left of) Our Economy

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David Malpass, economic development, Financial Times, globalism, multilateralism, third world, Trump, World Bank, {What's Left of) Our Economy

I was going to post this morning on more implications of yesterday’s new monthly U.S. trade figures, but as so often happens, the Mainstream Media has just come out with an article whose mind-boggling cluelessness reveals such deep-seated biases that I had to switch gears. Special bonus – it didn’t even come from a mainstay of the establishmentarian U.S. foreign policy and globalization Blob. Instead, we have the Financial Times editorial board to thank.

What other conclusion can be reasonably drawn from the FT editorial slamming President Trump’s appointment of David Malpass to head the World Bank?

Not that Malpass has been God’s Gift to Economics or to the cause of third world economic development. But according to the FT, a big problem with Malpass is that he lacks the leadership experience as well as intellectual and often political heft of previous U.S. choices like – wait for it – Robert S. McNamara.

That’s right – the same Robert McNamara who deserves such blame for the American disaster in Vietnam. What’s next for the FT? Criticizing Mr. Trump for appointing a senior military adviser lacking the battlefield genius of George Armstrong Custer?

Almost as bad: What’s given the FT editorialists the idea that McNamara, or any of his pre-Malpass successors, was such a whiz at the Bank? Here’s an appraisal of McNamara’s tenure arguing that he unintentionally created “incentives for Bank staff and management to push money out the door, sometimes with relatively little regard for how it would be used—a practice that still bedevils the Bank’s work today.” And this was from an admirer.

A second major FT argument against Malpass looks more reasonable at first glance:

“His judgment even on economics, his supposed speciality, is wanting. Notoriously, as then chief economist at Bear Stearns, Mr Malpass was blithely confident about the strength of the US economy in 2007 — a year before the global financial crisis hit and his own employer went under.”

What the FT conveniently forgets, though, is that using this standard would rule out virtually every economist in the world as World Bank president.  

Considerably stronger is the FT‘s observation that “As early as 2011 [Malpass] suggested tightening monetary policy and driving up the dollar, a hard-money philosophy entirely at odds with the reality that the Fed had averted economic disaster.”

The problem with this school of thought is that, although the Federal Reserve’s flooding of the American economy with easy money may have been necessary to keep the nation (and world) afloat, it’s also arguably created a global addiction to super-cheap credit that’s kneecapped chances of restoring genuine long-run economic health.

As contended by no less an economic authority than Lawrence Summers (a former World Bank research chief), the result has been “secular stagnation” – the inability of the United States or other major countries to grow acceptably without inflating lending and spending bubbles that are doomed to burst disastrously.

As the editorial makes clear, the FT mainly objects to Malpass because he’s “deeply sceptical of multilateral institutions.” Which would be funny even if the FT itself didn’t describe the Bank as already “dysfunctional” – despite being led by McNamara and all his supposedly genius successors.

More fundamentally, all else equal, why should anyone lack skepticism about any means to an end? Worshiping multilateralism is like worshiping a hammer. Sometimes is the best tool to use; sometimes it’s not.

The FT reasonably argues that “With an increasing number of rival sources of development finance — not to mention private capital — the bank needs to think hard about where it can best add value.” The paper just as reasonably concludes that effecting change requires its president “to be a critical friend of multilateralism who recognises that its institutions need to be adapted to a changing world, not an instinctive ideological enemy.”

But given that these – and other – problems with the Bank have persisted for so long, it’s hard to imagine that a leader accepted by multilateral fetishists like the FT would generate the necessary push.

As a result, the Malpass nomination can just as reasonably be viewed as a Trump administration attempt to change the kind of losing game coddled for so long by diehard multilateralists like the FT editorial board. Such critics should exhibit a little more humility before writing him off as a sure failure. Not to mention minimal historical memory. 

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Guest Posts

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  • Glad I Didn't Say That!
  • Golden Oldies
  • Guest Posts
  • Housekeeping
  • Housekeeping
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