Our So-Called Foreign Policy: No U.S. Learning Curve on Denying China Vital Tech

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China, Commerce Department, export controls, innovation, Kate O'Keefe, national security, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, sanctions, tech, The Wall Street Journal

The biggest reason to be appalled by The Wall Street Journal‘s excellent report yesterday on America’s efforts to control exports of high tech goods and knowhow to China wasn’t the raw data it contained – which showed that the U.S. government almost never rejects requests by business to sell high tech goods and knowhow to China.

No – as disturbing and scary as these findings are, the biggest reason to be appalled by the article is how clearly it reveals that, after decades of dealing with China, and despite the recent U.S. decision to spend huge amounts of money to try to stay ahead of China technologically, Washington has learned absolutely nothing about the threat to America’s national security, independence, and prosperity posed by this increasingly hostile and dangerous adversary, or how to counter it effectively. And maybe it hasn’t wanted to learn?

In fact, the article, by Journal reporter Kate O’Keefe, adds to the evidence that U.S. officials don’t even view China as especially hostile – let alone dangerous – at all. The People’s Republic is evidently assumed to be a country and an economy that in key respects closely resembles most other major powers with which U.S. companies do business.

Sure, U.S. export controls policies put China in a special category, and subject it to special restrictions for goods like weapons and satellite and space equipment, whose transfer to China is banned outright. But when it comes to “dual use” products and tech – which have both civilian and military applications, and which comprise an enormous group of goods and services – the American approach in practice treats China

>as if it’s got an independent private sector that can be sharply distinguished from its government agencies;

>as if China’s civilian government agencies can be easily distinguished from its national security apparatus;

>as if virtually all these entities operate in reasonably transparent ways and can be “trusted” to act safely in their role as “end-users” of these purchases;

>as if America’s main export control or sanctions challenge is making sure that cutting edge products and tech aren’t provided either directly to the Chinese military or other branches of the Chinese bureaucracy that jeopardize U.S. interests (like the secret police), or indirectly – via a small handful of other actors that, for whatever reason (Corruption? Tragically misguided patriotism?), will pass them along to the Bad Guys; and

>as if the U.S. government has the ability to make sure that prohibited items are kept out of the wrong hands.

Just two examples from O’Keefe’s article of how patently inane this approach has been:

>”Kharon, a Washington, D.C.-based research and data-analytics firm, said it has identified tens of thousands of Chinese entities that may meet the U.S. criteria for military end-user export restrictions, even though there are only roughly 70 on the Commerce Department’s current list.” (Commerce is the lead export control agency.)

>The Commerce Department has added to its list of entities for which Americans need a license to do business the officially state-owned flagship Chinese semiconductor manufacturer SMIC – but only after a U.S. defense contractor “documented the chip maker’s military customers.”

Back in 2012, I wrote that China represents a systemic challenge requiring a completely different export control (and sanctions) approach. Nowadays, when China has grown so much stronger in large part because of this La-La-Land (to be charitable) U.S. strategy, a course change is more important than ever.

What this means is that, no matter how they’re classified by the Chinese regime or structured on paper, every single entity in the People’s Republic that’s in the tech or broader manufacturing sector must be recognized as being under Beijing’s actual or potential control. Therefore, they can be counted on to (a) make available to the authorities anything they acquire that can undermine U.S. interests and/or keep the leadership in power; and (b) do everything possible, including with the regime’s active help, to cover its tracks.

This doesn’t mean that difficult China export control and sanctions policy issues don’t lie ahead for Washington. For that, we can thank all the U.S. leaders before Donald Trump’s presidency who so recklessly turned the People’s Republic into such a powerhouse tech manufacturer and major tech market. (At the same time, the fundamentally moronic export control system remained largely intact during the Trump years.) But one critical reform can be put in place immediately – new regulations realizing that if a product or technology is deemed too dangerous to sell or transfer to any one China entity, it’s by definition too dangerous to sell or transfer to all Chinese entities. Because the China challenge is systemic.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: A Strong Case for Decoupling from China Much Faster

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China, China market, decoupling, exports, globalization, imports, Joseph C. Sternberg, protectionism, The Wall Street Journal, Trade, XiJinping, {What's Left of) Our Economy

What if Americans no longer had to pay so much attention to two of the biggest economic reasons for worry about China? Specifically, if Americans didn’t need to be nearly so concerned that much smarter, tougher measures against China’s predatory economic policies would cost their exporters access to a gigantic current and potentially bigger market? And they believed that decoupling from the hostile, dangerous People’s Republic could be much less economically damaging than widely supposed? 

Those are fascinating and important questions asked and suggested by Wall Street Journal columnist Joseph C. Sternberg in a piece over the weekend, and he presented some compelling evidence that, however “preposterous” it sounds now, these possibilities are surprisingly close to becoming realities. Moreover, they’re getting closer all the time, thanks to dictator Xi Jinping’s reversal of the free market-ish reforms and integration into the global economy begun by Beijing in the 1980s.

His evidence? The big payoff that supposedly motivated the U.S. and foreign governments and their multinational companies to push so hard to bring China into the world trading system – that aforementioned access to the Chinese market – is stalling out way short of expectations. In fact, as Sternberg documents, “China makes a disproportionately low contribution to Western firms’ bottom lines relative to its population and potential.”

To support these claims, the author cites data showing that the China market’s share of the revenues of several big Western economies’ multinational businesses (including America’s) remains well below ten percent. And this even though:

(a) more than twenty years have passed since China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO), which entitled the People’s Republic to nearly all the benefits of integration with the global economy (while de facto enabling it to avoid most of the obligations); and

(b) China’s share of global economic output (which should approximate its share of the worldwide market for goods and services) had reached more than 15 percent in 2020 – and this percentage had jumped by some 50 percent in 2013.

But even these figures may be exaggerated, at least in the U.S. case. The financial research firm Calcbench has examined the share of revenues 67 of companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index earned in China in 2020. It came to a total of 10.48 percent – a little higher than Sternberg’s figure.

Most of the firms most reliant on China revenues, however, like Qualcomm (59.5 percent of its global total), Texas Instruments (55.5 percent), Lam Research (35.1 percent), and Applied Materials (31.7 percent) are either semiconductor manufacturers, producers of semiconductor manufacturing equipment, or makers of other advanced electronics parts and components. And large percentages of their China revenues are sold to the China-based factories that turn out consumer electronics products (like personal computers and cell phones), and that export huge shares of their own output. That is, those revenues aren’t really earned by sales to final customers located in China. They’re earned by sales to final customers located outside China (like the United States).

Just how large are some of these export percentages? According to this source and this source, 64.4 percent of all the cell phones made in China were sold overseas. According to this source and this source, 65.04 percent of the notebook computers made in the People’s Republic were exported that year. So that should more than satisfy the definition of “large”.   

One important claim that Sternberg gets wrong, however – that contention that “Countries wanted to open China to trade because of its population of more than 1.4 billion consumers. Their ascent into the global middle class, buying U.S. and European goods and services along the way, was the great prize to be won.”

In fact, as Ohio Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown explained in 2007, the companies “really had way more interest in one billion Chinese workers” when they were lobbying so hard to bring China into the WTO. I.e., they recognized at that point that China would long remain far too poor to become a major final market for their goods and services. But they were rightly confident that, with foreign training and management, China’s vast population could become highly productive (but still extremely cheap workers) long before that. A 2000 study by yours truly presented abundant evidence 

And China’s continuing heavy reliance on exports means that for all its spectacular progress, the People’s Republic is still far from the point where it can generate acceptable levels of growth and employment by relying on its own market for sales. In other words, for decades, the United States in particular -which has run the by far the world’s biggest trade deficit with China – has enjoyed much more leverage over China than vice versa. 

This doesn’t mean that Sternberg is under any illusions that further decoupling the U.S. and other foreign economies from China’s would be painless (though the still relatively self-sufficient U.S. economy would obviously feel much less – short-term – pain). But as he notes, China’s economy is running into big, growing problems – in particular a massive, already deflating real estate bubble that is undercutting the ability to China’s consumers to maintain current levels of spending on anything. In addition, Xi Jinping’s evident determination to squeeze foreign companies out of China as soon as feasible is leaving these foreign companies and economies little choice over the longer run.  So shouldn’t the United States and the rest of the world take these hints more closely to heart and greatly step up decoupling from China?  

Im-Politic: Major Evidence of U.S. Race Relations Progress

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African Americans, Asian-Americans, Census Bureau, Hispanics, housing, Im-Politic, integration, Latinos, race relations, segregation, The Wall Street Journal, white flight, whites

I’ve always liked the expression “voting with their feet” – which conveys the ideas that (1) the best way to understand how Americans (and people everywhere, for that matter) isn’t to listen to what they say, but to look at how they behave; and (2) one of the best measures of behavior is where they choose to live.

And the expression came quickly to mind as I was reading a recent Wall Street Journal examination of how U.S. housing patterns by race and ethnicity have changed in recent decades. Because what the Journal data show is that, although large majorities of every major racial and ethnic group seem keep telling pollsters, other researchers, and journalists that relations among them have worsened over the years (see, e.g., here, here, and here), they’ve kept living closer together during this period.

In other words, housing in America has become much less segregated and much more integrated. In turn, that looks like an unmistakable sign that bigotry, prejudice, and racial and ethnic tensions aren’t remotely as bad as widely portrayed – much less dangerously mounting.   

This trend is surely especially striking for anyone who remembers or who has read about the often hate-filled housing integration battles that erupted in the late 1960s and early 1970s in places like Queens, New York and suburban Chicago.

But unless you’re deeply skeptical about U.S. Census Bureau findings (the main bases for the Journal report and for the academic research it also cites), it’s clear that major race relations progress has been made by the voting-with-your-feet standards over the last fifty years.

Journal reporters Paul Overberg and Max Rust looked over the Census data and lots of academic research to see “where the homes of whites, Blacks, Latinos and Asians remained most clustered along racial lines, and where they have become more intermixed” since 1970. Their conclusion? In general, “segregation of all racial groups continues to decline steadily from a peak that occurred” around that year.

Moreover, with the exception of Asians, whose segregation levels have always been by far the lowest of any of these groups, every individual group is becoming more integrated with every other group. And the upward move of Asian segregation levels has been minimal.

It’s true, according to the Journal, that levels of white-black segregation remain the highest among the groups. But they’ve also been falling the fastest. Even better, especially for those who remember or have studied the early phases of housing integration and the resulting backlash, Overberg and Rust report one leading researcher’s findings of “an emerging pattern in which the arrival of Latinos and Asians in predominantly white neighborhoods doesn’t trigger white flight, even with the later arrival of Black residents.”

I don’t want to sound Pollyanish about U.S. race relations today. But who can seriously deny the importance of choosing where to live – which strongly determines conditions like your family’s safety, where your kids go to school and who they play with, and how promising a nest egg-building investment your home purchase will be? The housing integration progress documented above makes clear that Americans of all backgrounds are less and less prone to believing that the racial and ethnic character of a neighborhood per se influences these hopes and fears. Which sure doesn’t sound like a nation increasingly and even hopelessly divided along racial and ethnic lines to me.        

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: A Win for Transparency on Corporate Vulnerability to China

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China, Congress, investment, multinational companies, national security, offshoring, Securities and Exchange Commission, Steve Milloy, The Wall Street Journal, Trade, transparency, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Here’s a development in U.S.-China economic relations that’s potentially game-changing, and that yours truly finds particularly satisfying: The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the federal agency largely responsible for regulating U.S. financial markets require companies publicly traded in America to open their books wide on their ties with and reliance on China.

It’s potentially game-changing because ever since the early 1990s, Washington stepped on the gas to encourage the expansion of trade and investment with China (including massive factory and manufacturing job offshoring), but permitted the multinational companies that by far benefited most from these practices to control the release of most of the information capable of gauging the impact on the broader economy.

The result: When the American political system set its China economic policy priorities, it was forced to rely on the offshoring companies themselves for crucial information on the employment and production fall-out at home. And naturally, these firms – along with the sympathetic economists and think tank hacks they funded – presented Members of Congress and journalists with only cherry-picked facts and figures suggesting that the domestic winners far outnumbered the losers.

But this playing field may be in for major leveling thanks to the work of Steve Milloy of the Energy and Environmental Legal Institute. Milloy, a former SEC attorney, has persuaded the Commission to approve his proposal for a “Communist China Audit,” that would ask “companies to disclose to shareholders the extent to which their business relies on China.”

Milloy’s rationale, as explained in a Wall Street Journal op-ed earlier this week? A Chinese invasion of Taiwan would thoroughly disrupt the extensive commercial ties many public companies maintain with China (which include crucial supply chain dependencies of all kinds), and threaten their bottom lines – and the portfolios of their shareholders – with massive losses. In turn, the entire national economy would take a staggering hit. He rightly adds, moreover, that China’s hostility now extends nearly across the board of major U.S. interests.  

Multinational and other public companies are already required to tell shareholders about the various risks they run. But everyone who has looked through their quarterly and annual financial statements knows that politics and geopolitics risk disclosures are invariably vague and scanty, and details on their China-related operations almost non-existent.

Indeed, the author reports that the SEC is already pushing public companies to reveal how significantly Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is affecting their businesses. Since China’s impact on American companies, their shareholders, and the entire American economy is so much greater, he rightly argues that full transparency on this front is all the more important.

I was thrilled to learn about Milloy’s ideas and successes because for many years, I’ve been advocating something very similar. As I wrote in this 2017 post, Congress should pass and a President should sign what I called a “Truth in Testimony Act.” The measure would require any multinationals representatives appearing before Congress on an international trade or investment or technology-related issue

“to specify their job and production offshoring, the wages of their U.S. and overseas workers, their foreign and domestic procurement, the foreign and domestic content of their products, and similar statistics.”

I also recommended that time series be provided, in order to identify long-term patterns. In addition, I pointed out, comparable information has been required of auto-makers selling in the United States since the 1990s, so major precedent exists. And I urged similar requirements for a full range of businesses and their representatives when testifying before the House and Senate, and called for their think tank and academic spokespersons to come clean on all relevant sources of their funding.

Businesses have long protested that such requirements would deprive them of valuable trade secrets and other prime sources of competitive advantage. I countered that (a) if full disclosure is a must for everyone, then no one wins or loses on net; and (b) companies unconvinced by this argument would remain free to opt out of telling Congress their stories.

Milloy’s proposal, however, matters much more, because it would apply to the entire universe of public companies whether they appear before lawmakers or not.

So I’ll be trying to get in touch with him to see if I can help his China audit campaign in any way, and report back on the results, and on any further progress he’s made. As I wrote five years ago, for far too long, the U.S. government has been flying blind on China and other international economic issues and relying on unreliable, incomplete information. Milloy is right in emphasizing that the China threat in every dimension has metastasized. Nothing less than full corporate China-related transparency can be acceptable.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: An Epic Wall Street Journal Fail on Trump Tariffs

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aluminum, beverages, Donald Trump, tariffs, The Wall Street Journal, Trade, {What's Left of) Our Economy

The Wall Street Journal‘s recent editorial on how U.S. tariffs on aluminum imports are decimating the American American beverage industry serves at least one useful purpose: It makes clear that the newspaper’s editorial writers either don’t understand the importance of presenting data in context, or don’t care because they know the big picture would kneecap their argument.

According to this piece, these Trump-era levies show the dangers of trade barriers that “are a form of industrial policy that is really about favoring some producers at the expense of consumers,” and are fueling current inflation to boot. Their main evidence? First, that Since the tariffs were imposed in March, 2018, U.S. beverage manufacturers have “paid an equivalent of $1.4 billion in Section 232 aluminum tariffs through February 2022 [for the aluminum they use in cans”; and second, that this industry paid $463 million in tariff costs in 2021 alone.

The fueling inflatio argument can be dispensed with easily. In 2021, the U.S. economy produced just under $23 trillion worth of goods and services before factoring in inflation. (I’m using pre-inflation data throughout this post because that’s the gauge used by the Journal for tariff costs.) The non-durable goods sector (in which beverages are found) generated $3.455 trillion. As anyone can see at a glance, $463 million as a percentage of these totals is miniscule – to put it charitably. Its percentage of the non-durable goods sector alone is just 0.013. And these added costs are moving the needle on overall U.S. inflation exactly how?

But even when you look at the beverage industry by itself, the inflation and cost burdens fade into insignificance. Although official data are hard to find, this source pegs the sector’s total U.S. sales at $253.42 billion. The $463 million in tariff costs represents a grand total of 0.18 percent of that total. If the industry finds that amount crippling, or even noteworthy, it desperately needs new management.

More detailed data are available from individual corporate reports, and point to the same conclusion. This Yahoo Finance item presents the top ten beverage companies operating in the United States by revenue. Add up the figures and you get a $174.09 billion total for last year. The tariff costs as a share of that sum? A thoroughly unimpressive 0.27 percent.

But what about the all-important bottom line? The individual corporate reports of these publicly trade companies reveal this figure to have been $36.74 billion in 2021. The aluminum tariff costs come to 1.26 percent of that total. No one can blame companies for wanting to make every single dollar of profit they can (lawfully), but do the Wall Street Journal editorial writers really believe that the executives of these firms can’t compensate by increasing efficiency? If so, can them all. (Pun intended.)

Finally, the corporate reports also show the total costs incurred by these ten companies in order to produce their products. Last year, they amounted to $76.77 billion. So the tariff costs increased this amount by 0.60 percent. Again, this is worth a pity party? 

The Wall Street Journal editorial board — like everyone else — has a perfect right not to like any and all tariffs, on aluminum or anything else. It also has a perfect right (unless you don’t believe in freedom of the press) to cherry pick the facts to make its case. But readers and others also have rights — including the right to know when a publication is using Fake Commentary tactics like this to make its case, and to wonder whether, if this is the best this staff can do to discredit tariffs, any solid grounds to oppose them exist at all.

Following Up: A Learning Curve on Ukraine Polling

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CBS News, No-Fly Zone, nuclear war, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Pew Research Center, polls, public opinion, Quinnipiac University poll, Reuters/Ipsos, Russia, The Wall Street Journal, Ukraine, Ukraine invasion, Ukraine-Russia war, YouGovAmerica

We’re getting some clarity from the – always imperfect – polls on whether Americans support direct U.S. military involvement in the Ukraine war, and the news is mostly good. Specifically, strong majorities currently reject “boots on the ground” and even the more limited no-fly-zone proposal for fear of risking nuclear war with Russia.

In other words, we know more than we did a little more than a week ago, when the Reuters news organization and the Ipsos polling concern asked respondents their views on the no fly zone, but didn’t mention the nuclear war thing in their question. That’s about as smart as asking someone whether they’d take medicine A to cure disease B without mentioning that medicine A could cause an even worse disease C.

Even weirder, the Reuters article describing the survey’s results actually pointed out this crucial omission. Just for the record, though, Reuters and Ipsos weren’t the only examples of polls completely ignoring vital context, as this YouGoveAmerica post makes clear.

But it seems that pollsters are displaying a learning curve – even in the foreign policy field in which, as the above linked RealityChek post shows, they’ve been especially clueless.

For instance, the YouGovAmerica outfit followed up its first ditzy survey on the No Fly Zone with another that – unlike its initial soundings – defined the idea (without naming it) rather than asking if people support it “without a definition.” What a concept! And once respondents were presented with the fact that American pilots shooting at Russian military planes, support fell support fell substantially.

A similar YouGov exercise for CBS News yielded much more opposition to the No Fly Zone. When it was simply mentioned by name, it enjoyed 59 percent to 41 percent backing. When respondents were told this would mean “U.S. forces might have to engage Russian aircraft, and be considered an act of war by Russia,” the results more than flipped. Sixty two percent opposed the idea and only 38 percent favored it.

Earlier this week, the Pew Research Center found that Americans opposed the United States “taking military action” in Ukraine “if it risks a nuclear conflict with Russia” by 62 percent to 35 percent – a margin much wider than that in the YouGovAmerica poll.

Also this week, the polling center at Quinnipiac (Conn.) University mentioned that a No Fly Zone “would lead NATO countries into a war with Russia.” Opponents prevailed over supporters by 54 percent to 32 percent.

Interestingly, much more public caution was displayed concerning the question of whether the United States “should do whatever it can to help Ukraine, even if it means risking a direct war between the U.S. and Russia” or “do whatever it can to help Ukraine, without risking “such a direct war. The don’t-risk-war option won out by 75 percent to 17 percent.

I’ve found less information on an early March Wall Street Journal poll (including on the phrasing of the questions), but it, too, revealed meager support for direct U.S. military involvement in Ukraine. Only 29 percent of respondents backed the N0 Fly Zone, and only ten percent would “send U.S. troops” to the country.

So why did I say at the outset that the polling news was only “mostly good”? Because in my view, the shares of Americans reportedly willing to risk nuclear war over Ukraine are still alarmingly high – in the 30s and 40s percents, except for the Wall Street Journal poll. It makes me wonder whether the mere mention of nuclear war is enough to show the full potential magnitude of these positions. Maybe respondents should have to watch, for example, this movie, too.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Will a Russian Victory Really Bring On a World at War?

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Antony J. Blinken, Biden, China, Council on Foreign Relations, East China Sea, globalism, Japan, Kim Jong Un, national interests, North Korea, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Russia, South China Sea, South Korea, Taiwan, The Wall Street Journal, Ukraine, Ukraine-Russia war, Vladimir Putin, war, Xi JInPing

Not only do American leaders seem pretty united on the need for the nation to do much more to help Ukraine defend itself from Russian invaders. They and the (overwhelmingly globalist) American political and chattering classes seem largely in agreement on one of the main consequences either of permitting Russia to win, or permitting him to win without inflicting major, lasting damage on Russia’s economy – a return to a world in which aggressive dictators like Russia’s Vladimir Putin will feel much freer than they have for decades to attack their neighbors.

That fear definitely has a troubling ring of reasonableness – and all the more so since, unlike previous historical eras in which such attacks and invasions were much more common, some of the actors possess nuclear weapons.

But there’s something these warnings are overlooking. However vivid such dangers are in principle, it’s hard to identify actual places around the world where potential conquerors have been bidng their time until receiving just the kind of signal that a Russian success in Ukraine allegedly would send.

If you doubt the prominence of this argument for greater U.S. involvement in the conflict, you haven’t been paying attention. For example, in his first public remarks after the invasion, President Biden claimed that “Putin’s actions betray his sinister vision for the future of our world — one where nations take what they want by force.”

In a speech a month earlier, his Secretary of State, Antony J. Blinken, asserted that one of the post-World War II global order’s guiding principles was a rejection of

“the right of one country to change the borders of another by force; to dictate to another the policies it pursues or the choices it makes, including with whom to associate; or to exert a sphere of influence that would subjugate sovereign neighbors to its will.

“To allow Russia to violate those principles with impunity would…send a message to others around the world that these principles are expendable, and that, too, would have catastrophic results.”

The conservatives on the Wall Street Journal editorial board, who don’t agree with the Biden administration on much of anything, similarly contended that “Whether the West admits it or not, the invasion is setting a precedent for what the world will tolerate in the 21st century.”

But check out this assessment of worldwide hot spots from the Council on Foreign Relations, often called the seat of America’s globalist foreign policy establishment. Where exactly are the Putins of tomorrow whose will to international power would be even be sharpened by a Russian victory in Ukraine?

Certainly not on the Korean peninsula or in the East China Sea. North Korea no doubt has designs on neighboring South Korea, but they’ve existed for decades. Ditto for China and Taiwan. It’s true that Kim Jong Un and Xi Jinping might be emboldened by an inadequate U.S. and international response to Putin’s war. But not from any relief that global norms of behavior that had been holding them back had weakened, or that a Russian victory had set some a kind of precedent – with binding power? Because they take the idea of rule of law more seriously in their treatment of foreigners than they do in their treatment of their own people? Please.

Other than these Asian conflicts – which also include China’s expansionism in the South China Sea, but which also long predate the Ukraine war – where are the aggressors-in-waiting who may feel freer to attack their neighbors? Should we include the other East China Sea dispute, where China is involved, too – even though U.S. allies Japan and South Korea are also contesting each other’s claims to some miniscule islands?

More important, where are the global hot spots where current or potential territorial rivalries could explode into conflict that would imperil global peace and security – including America’s? Nagorno-Karabakh (on the border of Armenia and Azerbaijan, unless you’ve been following this tiff closely)? As Mr. Biden would say, “Come on, man.”

I’m sure that there are flashpoints in sub-Saharan Africa that could eventually embroil entire regions in warfare. But it’s as cold-blooded as it is true that these are regions so chronically dysfunctional (and therefore largely disconnected from the wider world) that even complete chaos has no potential to spread much further – or inspire conqueror wannabees in regions of greater concern.

Closer to home for the United States, according to the Congressionally founded U.S. Institute of Peace, some small countries in Latin America have been quarreling with neighbors over territory since 1990, and if they did ignite conflict, refugees would of course come streaming to U.S. borders. But only once – in 1995 – did one of these feuds result in war (between Ecuador and Peru). And I’m glad I don’t have to make the argument that revanchists in either country are chomping at the bit to get a symbolic green light from a Russian victory in Ukraine.

The big takeaways here clearly are (1) that the world isn’t a tinderbox likely to burst into a series of truly dangerous international conflicts depending on the outcome of Russia’s war on Ukraine; and (2) that the potential conflicts that can affect the United States consequentially are and have long been driven by their own dynamics (including current and longstanding American approaches to these situations).

So as has been the case since Russian policy toward its neighbors became more belligerent, what should be driving the U.S. response should be examinations concerning the nature of concrete, specific U.S. interests that are or are not at stake. Claims that Ukraine’s continued independence and full sovereignty are all that stand between today’s relative calm among countries (if not in terms of civil conflicts) and an entire globe engulfed in war deserve the same fate as previous alarmist concotions like the domino theory – getting tossed onto what former President Reagan memorably called the “ash heap of history.”

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: The Ukraine Crisis Grows Curiouser and Curiouser

Tags

Annaleena Baerbock, Biden adminisration, China, democracy, deterrence, Eastern Europe, energy, European Union, Germany, human rights, Italy, Mario Draghi, NATO, natural gas, Nordstream 2, North Atlantic treaty Organization, Olaf Scholz, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Phase One, Poland, Russia, sanctions, sovereignty, Taiwan, tariffs, The Wall Street Journal, Trade, trade war, Ukraine

The longer the Ukraine crisis lasts, the weirder it gets. Here are just the latest examples, keeping in mind that new developments keep appearing so quickly that this post might be overtaken by events before I finish!

>What’s with the Chinese? Toward the end of last year, (see, e.g., here) I’ve been worried that President Biden’s Ukraine policy would push Russia and China to work more closely to undermine U.S. interests around the world – a possibility that’s both especially worrisome given evident limits on American power (Google, e.g., “Afghanistan”), and completely unnecessary, since no remotely vital U.S. interests are at stake in Ukraine or anywhere in Eastern Europe.

In the last week, moreover, numerous other analysts have voiced similar concerns, too. (See, e.g., here and here.)

But just yesterday, The Wall Street Journal published this piece reporting on Chinese words and deeds indicating that Beijing opposed any Russian invasion of Ukraine. You’d think that China would welcome the prospect of significant numbers of American military forces tied down trying to deter an attack by Moscow on Ukraine, or on nearby members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), or getting caught up in any fighting that does break out. The result of any of these situations would be an America less able to resist Chinese designs on Taiwan forcibly.

It’s unimaginable that Chinese leaders have forgotten about these benefits of war or a continuing state of high tensions in Ukraine’s neighborhood. But according to the Journal, Beijing has decided for the time being that it’s more important to avoid further antagonizing the United States on the trade and broader economic fronts – specifically by helping Russia cushion the blows of any western sanctions. China is also supposedly uncomfortable with the idea of countries successfully intervening in the internal affairs of other countries – because of its own vulnerability on the human rights front, and because it regards foreign (including U.S.) support for Taiwan as unacceptable interference in its internal affairs, too (since it views Taiwan as a renegade province).

Not that China isn’t already acting to prop up Russia’s economy – specifically agreeing earlier this month to buy huge amounts of Russian oil and gas. But if Beijing has indeed decided to go no further, or not much further, the potential effectiveness of western sanctions on Moscow would be that much greater. It would also signal that the Biden adminisration has much greater leverage than it apparently realizes to use tariffs to punish China for various economic transgressions – e.g., failing to keep its promises under former President Trump’s Phase One trade deal to meet targets for ramping up its imports from the United States.

>Speaking of sanctions, the Biden administration view of these measures keeps getting stranger, too. The President and his aides have repeatedly insisted that the best time for imposing them is after a Russian invasion of Ukraine, because acting beforehand would “lose the deterrent effect.”

But this reasoning makes no sense because it – logically, anyway – assumes that the sanctions that would be slapped on would achieve little or nothing in the way of inflicting economic pain powerful enough either to induce a Russian pullback or convince the Kremlin that further aggression along these lines wouldn’t be worth the costs.

After all, pre-invasion sanctions would be taking their toll while the Russians were fighting in Ukraine, and until they pulled out or made some other meaningful concession. The Biden position, however, seems to be that in fact, during this post-invasion period, they’d be taking scarcely any toll at all – or at least not one significant enough to achieve any of their declared aims. If that’s the case, though, why place any stock in them at all at any time?

>One reason for these evidently low Biden sanctions expectations is surely that, at least for now, the administration isn’t willing to promise that the potentially most effective punishments will be used. Nor are key U.S. allies.

Principally, last Friday, Deputy National Security Adviser Daleep Singh told reporters that banning Russia from the global banking system would “probably not” be part of an initial sanctions package. And Germany keeps hemming and hawing about ending the Nordstream 2 gas pipeline project even if Russia does invade.

The Germans – and the rest of Europe – are now acting like they’re taking seriously the need to reduce their reliance on Russian natural gas (which currently supplies some forty percent of their supplies of this fossil fuel. But Berlin has still not committed to cancelling its plans to buy even more gas from Russia via the recently completed Nordstream channel. (The pipeline isn’t yet in use because the Germans are in fact dragging their feet on final regulatory approval.) Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock has declared that Nordstream is “on the table” for her if the Russians move militarily. But nothing even like this non-promise has been made by Prime Minister Olaf Scholz. And last Friday, Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi said he opposes including energy in anti-Russia sanctions.

>The final puzzle: Although Poland is a linchpin of NATO’s strategy for preventing any Putin aggression beyond Ukraine, the European Union has just moved a major step closer to cutting the country off from the massive economic aid it receives from the grouping, and indeed has already frozen $41 billion in CCP Virus recovery funds it had previously allotted to Warsaw.

The decisions stem from Poland’s alleged backsliding on commitments it made to protect human rights in order to join the EU, but blocking these resources isn’t exactly likely to strengthen Poland’s ability to aid in the effort to contain Russia, and Ukraine itself is hardly a model democracy (see, e.g., here and here) – all of which can’t help but scramble the politics of the crisis in Eastern Europe yet further. And all of which should be added to the already impressive list of paradoxes, ironies, mysteries, and curiosities that everyone should keep in mind whenever they hear about the future of Europe, the global liberal order, world peace, and human freedom itself being at stake in Ukraine.    

Im-Politic: Latinos Flocking to a (Still Trump-ian) Republican Party

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Axios-Ipsos Poll, Biden, Democrats, Donald Trump, election 2016, election 2020, election 2022, election 2024, exit polls, Glenn Youngkin, Hispanics, Im-Politic, Immigration, Latinos, NPR-Marist Poll, Pew Research Center, polls, public opinion, Republicans, The Wall Street Journal, Virginia governor's race

Remember all those those charges that former President Donald Trump made clear from the very beginning of his 2016 presidential campaign that he was an anti-Latino bigot, and the predictions that any political success he enjoyed would doom Republican chances of winning support from this increasingly important group of voters?

Apparently, many Latino voters themselves don’t. Or they’ve concluded that Trump and now dominant Republican views on sensible controls on immigration matter less to them than views on other issues. Or that they actually like Trump and the Republicans on some combination of these subjects – including immigration. Or that maybe the Republican positions aren’t terrific, but that what the Democrats have stood for lately is a non-starter.

That’s the message being sent lately by several recent polls on Latino political views that could decisively shape American politics for the foreseeable future.

First, though, some context. There’s little doubt now that four years of Trump-ism wound up boosting the former President’s support among Latinos, now further shrinking it. In 2016, Trump won 28 percent of their presidential vote. In 2020, this figure had grown to 32 percent according to the eixt polls. (This subsequent study pegs his 2020 total at 38 percent.)  And of course, in some key states, the exit polls showed, his 2020 performance was far better – notably Florida (46 percent) and Texas (41 percent). So the racism and xenophobia charges were showing signs of flopping while throughout Trump’s term in office.

Even so, the results of a Wall Street Journal survey conducted in the second half of November came as a major shock. They showed that if Trump was running for the White House against President Biden today, he’d lose by only 44 percent to 43 percent among Latino voters. And they said they’d be even split at 37 percent in their votes for Democratic and Republican Congressional candidates.

As noted in this analysis, the poll’s sample size was very small, so serious doubts in its accuracy are justified. But similar results have been reported elsewhere. Yesterday, notably, National Public Radio and Marist College released a survey showing that just 33 percent of Latino adults approved of President Biden’s performance in office, versus 65 percent who disapproved. These Biden Latino numbers were worse than his ratings from American adults as a whole (41 percent approving and 55 percent disapproving).

Moreover, only 11 percent of Latino adults “strongly approved” of Mr. Biden’s presidency so far, versus 17 percent of U.S. adults overall, and when it came to strong disapproval, 52 percent of Latinos marked that column compared with 44 percent of the total national adult population.

Nor does the evidence stop there that the longer Mr. Biden has been in office, the less Latinos like his perfomance. As this Washington Post column reminds, “In late May, Biden’s job approval among Hispanics averaged 60 percent, with a net approval margin of 32, a bit larger than his vote margin the prior year.”

Biden backers and Democrats can point to a new Axios-Ipsos survey reporting that “The Democratic Party enjoyed huge advantages over the Republican Party when Latino respondents were asked which party represents or cares about …..” But after that ellipsis comes the finding that “those advantages evaporated when it came to the economy and crime.”

Democrats own a clear edge among Latinos on one major issue, though: the CCP Virus pandemic. According to the Axios-Ipsos results “respondents were much more likely to say Democrats were doing a good job of handling COVID-19 as a health challenge — 37% to 11% for Republicans, with another 17% saying both are doing a good job.” 

But Axios-Ipsos has been a major outlier lately, as made clear in this analysis that looks not only at this year’s polls but the Virginia gubernatorial election, which saw victorious Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin actually win the state’s Latino vote.  The conventional wisdom seems to hold that Youngkin prevailed in large measure because he held Trump at arm’s length. But in light of all the other survey results, maybe that’s wishful Mainstream Media thinking?      

It’s still a long way even to the 2022 Congressional elections, much less the 2024 presidential race. But unless the President and his party can turn their sagging fortunes around, it looks like they’re rapidly running out of time with Latinos – who are increasingly flocking to a Republican Party still strongly influenced by Donald Trump.  

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Brazen U.S. Corporate Collusion with China

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aerospace, Belt and Road, China, globalization, Honeywell, human rights, manufacturing, multinational companies, multinationals, national security, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, steel, tech, tech transfer, The Wall Street Journal, Uighurs, Xinjiang

Usually, it’s not a terrific idea to begin a piece of writing with a phrase like, “If you want to see something that’ll make you sick to your stomach….” But I think you’ll agree that this recent article from The Wall Street Journal justifies an exception. For its portrayal of the China operations of U.S.-owned multinational manufacturer Honeywell depicts a big company actively helping the dangerous thug dictatorship in Beijing endanger often-intertwined American security and economic interests, and evidently doing so without even a peep of protest from Washington – including during the Trump years.

Journal reporter Trefor Moss’ piece dealt with the question, “How can an American company thrive in China at a time when tensions between the two countries are running high?” His answer: Under Honeywell’s long-time head of China operations, it pursued a strategy of fully immersing “the company in Chinese business and culture—and [not shying] away from helping Chinese companies achieve strategic goals set by Beijing.”

This approach was worrisome enough when this executive, Shane Tedjarati, launched Honeywell China down this path in 2004. By that time, Beijing was not only gutting America’s domestic manufacturing base with a wide range of predatory trade and broader economic practices. But it had also compiled a record of challenging American national security interests through policies like supplying countries like Iran and North Korea with technologies vital to developing weapons of mass destruction and the missiles needed to deliver them.

Now that the People’s Republic has since at least early 2018 been seen as a threat to critical American interests in the Indo-Pacific region requiring a “whole-of-government” response, and that President Biden has declared that “We’re in competition with China and other countries to win the 21st Century. We’re at a great inflection point in history” and that “we’ll maintain a strong military presence in the Indo-Pacific…not to start a conflict, but to prevent one,” activities like Honeywell’s in China look alarmingly like colluding with an enemy.

What else can be made of Tedjarati’s position as “a visiting professor at Shanghai’s China Executive Leadership Academy, an elite school that provides leadership training to the Communist Party’s rising stars.”

Or of Honeywell’s sale of industrial automation equipment to one of the state-owned Chinese steel companies that for years been glutting global markets with dumped and artificially cheap product that’s hammered America’s own sector?

Or of its “open” support for the Belt and Road Initiative, the Chinese global infrastructure plan widely seen as a way for Beijing to expand its worldwide influence, and that’s got the Biden administration concerned enough to be mounting a U.S. response?

Or of these Honeywell actions (which didn’t make the Journal piece) “[T]he company repeatedly, between 2011 and 2018, sent drawings of parts of US military aircraft to suppliers in foreign countries, including China, asking for price quotes, according to a Department of State charging letter. The manufacturer voluntarily disclosed the violations.

“The engineering prints showed layouts, dimensions and geometries for manufacturing castings and finished parts for military aircraft and engines, as well as other hardware and weaponry. Drawings for parts within the Lockheed Martin F-35 and F-22 stealth fighters, Boeing B-1B supersonic bomber and Pratt & Whitney F135 turboshaft engine were included.”

For good measure, Honeywell has also supplied protective equipment to Chinese security forces operating in western Xinjiang province, where Beijing has been harshly persecuting the Muslim Uighur minority group.

Honeywell did pay a (tiny) fine for its seven years of sharing those drawings. But overall, according to Moss, Tedjarati told him that “No U.S. or Chinese officials have ever told him the company should do, or should avoid doing, specific things in China.”

Honeywell has by no means been the only U.S. multinational to enrich China and strengthen it militarily and technologically for decades. (See, e.g., here and here.) But it may have just won the award for the most brazen. And until these kinds of operations are halted completely, it’ll be hard to describe America’s China policy with the word “serious.”

Full disclosure:  I have no financial positions whatever in Honeywell, other than possibly through index funds or exchange-traded funds, and other such vehicles, and have no plans to acquire any.