Im-Politic: Washington’s Real Crazytown

Tags

alliances, anonymous op-ed, Bob Woodward, Fear, foreign policy establishment, Gary Cohn, Im-Politic, Jim Mattis, North Korea, nuclear war, South Korea, The New York Times, Trade, tripwire, Trump, Washington Post

“Crazytown” – that’s the memorable term reportedly used by Donald Trump’s Chief of Staff John F. Kelly to describe the White House under a President portrayed as dangerously erratic both in an upcoming book by legendary Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward (which contains this claim), and in an op-ed article published in The New York Times yesterday anonymously by an author who supposedly is a “senior” administration official.

I haven’t read the full book (titled Fear) yet, but what’s made stunningly and ironically clear in the excerpts that have appeared in the Post is that “crazytown” is actually a description most richly deserved by the national bipartisan foreign and economic policy establishments from which The Times author clearly comes, and whose administration representatives surely provided Woodward with much of his material.

My reason for this conclusion? The treatment of Korea trade and national security issues described in Fear.

According to the Post account, “Again and again, Woodward recounts at length how Trump’s national security team was shaken by his lack of curiosity and knowledge about world affairs and his contempt for the mainstream perspectives of military and intelligence leaders.”

And two prime (and related) examples of the team’s efforts to “control his impulses and prevent disasters, both for the president personally and for the nation he was elected to lead”? The President’s desire to pull U.S. troops out of the Korean peninsula, and to withdraw from the trade deal reached by his predecessor, Barack Obama, with South Korea.

In one Post description of an episode described in Fear:

“At a National Security Council meeting on Jan. 19, Trump disregarded the significance of the massive U.S. military presence on the Korean Peninsula, including a special intelligence operation that allows the United States to detect a North Korean missile launch in seven seconds vs. 15 minutes from Alaska, according to Woodward. Trump questioned why the government was spending resources in the region at all.

“‘We’re doing this in order to prevent World War III,’ Defense Secretary Jim Mattis told him.”

Another Post account specifies that “Trump at one point asked his military leaders why the United States couldn’t just withdraw from the Korean Peninsula.”

Yet as known by RealityChek regulars, Mr. Trump’s positions were not only completely rational. They’re the height of prudence. For North Korea has rapidly been nearing the ability to hit the U.S. mainland with a nuclear warhead. The American forces on the peninsula were still playing exactly the same tripwire role they had played before this American vulnerability had emerged – i.e., by virtue of their inability to defend themselves with conventional weapons alone, virtually forcing a U.S. President to escalate any conflict with North Korea to the nuclear level.

Nowadays, or very soon, the result could well be exposing the American homeland to an almost unimaginably destructive strike from Pyongyang. And the continuing U.S. alliance with South Korea and that military presence remains the only reason that North Korea would even think of risking a nuclear exchange with the vastly superior American strategic deterrent. Therefore, the alliance is the only reason that Washington would need to value early warning of a North Korea missile launch.

That is, President Trump has recognized that the cost-benefit calculus in Korea has changed fundamentally – and for the worse for the United States. Conventional thinkers like Mattis are still living in a world in which America can offer nuclear protection to allies without fear of losing an entire city – or two, or three – and in which it was reasonable to risk “World War III” for a country with only modest strategic or economic significance for the United States.

Indeed, the most compelling criticism that can be leveled against the President’s North Korea policies is that he hasn’t acted on his (accurate) instincts, and ordered a military withdrawal from the peninsula.

Similar reactions are justified by the Woodward contention that former White House chief economic adviser Gary Cohn (in the Post‘s words) “tried to tamp down Trump’s strident nationalism regarding trade” by stealing a letter off Mr. Trump’s desk “that the president was intending to sign to formally withdraw the United States from a trade agreement with South Korea. Cohn later told an associate that he removed the letter to protect national security and that Trump did not notice that it was missing.”

After all, it’s bad enough that Mattis thinks the United States still should risk nuclear attack to protect South Korea. It’s positively whacko to think, as Cohn apparently believed, that South Korea would renounce its alliance with the United States out of anger at President Trump for exiting the trade agreement. Who else did Cohn suppose would protect the South from the North’s vastly superior military forces? And if he really did fear that Seoul would tell its defender to take a hike because of a trade dispute, then why would he consider South Korea to be a reliable ally in the first place – especially once any shooting started? So good riddance to this one-time Wall Street plutocrat. 

There’s undeniably a case to be made that Donald Trump lacks some, much, or any of the temperament and judgment to be President. But here’s what’s also undeniable. His establishment foes (who style themselves “the adults in the room”) still cling to policies that are needlessly endangering literally millions of American lives; that have already just as needlessly cost many millions more Americans their jobs, their homes, and much of their incomes; and that have wasted trillions of dollars on ill-conceived foreign military ventures. If the choice is between this record and “Crazytown,” I’ll take the latter any day. And it’s anything but surprising that, two years ago, nearly 63 million Americans agreed.

Advertisements

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Mainstream Media Trade Coverage that’s a Public Service

Tags

agriculture, China, exports, Heidi Heitkamp, Meg Kelly, soybeans, tariffs, Trade, trade war, Trump, Washington Post, {What's Left of) Our Economy

The Mainstream Media is so often accused these days by President Trump and others (sometimes rightly) of propagating “fake news” that it seems only fair to point out an important example of such news organizations fighting fake news: a Washington Post article yesterday exposing the phoniness underlying key claims that the Trump administration’s tariff-heavy China policies either have nothing to do with the woes being experienced lately by America’s soybean farmers, or that they’ve already devastated cultivators of this key crop.

At first glance it seems odd that the fate of soybeans growers has moved to center stage in the China trade debate. It’s true that this crop has become America’s second-leading export to China, and that a huge share (25 percent) of the annual U.S. harvest has relied on the Chinese market. At the same time, it’s hard to think of a time since the Great Depression Dust Bowl when America’s leading journalists paid nearly this much attention to American farmers.

As the Post‘s Meg Kelly (unsurprisingly, in my view) noted, President Trump got it wrong when he responded to soybean-focused critiques of his China trade policies by contending that “Farmers have been on a downward trend for 15 years. The price of soybeans has fallen 50% since 5 years before the Election. A big reason is bad (terrible) Trade Deals with other countries.”

In all fairness, though, soybean prices did begin sinking dramatically in mid 2012 – more than four years before he was even elected President.

More noteworthy, given the rash of soybean stories and widespread fears of soy-mageddon, was Kelly’s debunking of a claim by North Dakota Democratic Senator Heidi Heitkamp (also communicated by tweet) that “A study shows that corn, soybean and wheat farmers across the U.S. have already lost $13 billion because of the administration’s trade war. We need trade policies that make sense for North Dakota, protect farmers and ranchers, and open up markets.”

Thanks to Kelly, we now know that there was no such study – or even close. Let’s allow the author’s words show how flimsy this claim really was:

“When the [Post] asked to see the study, Heitkamp’s office pointed us to an op-ed from the National Farmers Union that was referenced in a New York Times article. But the National Farmers Union said the calculation was not its work. Instead, it said, it obtained the factoid from a quote in an article in the Wall Street Journal.”

Kelly further explains that the source of the quote was eminently respectable – an agricultural economist from Purdue University. But she also made painfully clear how shoddy his methodology was: His soybean crop loss estimates never distinguished between the impact of tariffs and the impact of weather. That’s like a sportswriter examining an athlete’s performance and never disclosing whether he or she plays for a good or a bad team.

But the importance of Kelly’s diligent reporting goes far beyond soybeans, or even trade. For Heitkamp-type sleights of hand take place in the American political and policy world’s all the time. Here’s another example, reported here about a year ago, about the popular meme that the beneficiaries of former President Obama’s “Dream Act” granting amnesty to many illegal immigrant children brought to this country by their parents were an unusually well educated group – and that therefore, revoking their amnesty would backfire on an economy that urgently needed highly knowledgeable workers.

Heitkamp, however, deserves some credit for taking down her misleading tweet. President Trump hasn’t – which is disappointing since, as made clear above, and is so often the case, he could have made a completely valid point by displaying just a moderately greater respect for accuracy.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Trump Metals Tariffs Coverage has Just (Again) Been Exposed as Largely Fake News

Tags

ABC News, aluminum, Associated Press, Bloomberg, CBS News, CNN, durable goods, Financial Times, Jobs, Mainstream Media, manufacturing, Marketwatch.com, metals, metals-using industries, NBC News, PBS, private sector, Reuters, steel, tariffs, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Trade, Trump, Washington Post, {What's Left of) Our Economy

In case you still think that President Trump’s charges of fake news-peddling by the national news media are fake news themselves, consider this: For the second time in two months, if you decided to hold your breath till you found a Mainstream Media item reporting that the America’s metals-using industries have been major job-creation leaders, not laggards, you’d have died.

Such omissions are especially important because since the Trump administration began imposing tariffs on steel and aluminum imports (in March), the media has been filled not only with predictions of massive employment and production losses in metals-using manufacturing (because the prices of two noteworthy inputs for these industries was bound to rise), but with accounts of actual economic damage that numerous companies in these sectors have already suffered. (See here and here for just two examples.) 

Last month, I noted that, for all these accounts, authoritative government data (through June) showed that the metals-using industries’ performance by both measures had both generally improved, and had indeed both generally improved more than job creation and output in the rest of manufacturing.

Since then, more steel and aluminum tariffs were put in place (mainly because some major U.S. trade partners initially exempted from the tariffs were subjected to the levies). And what did we learn from the newest jobs report, which was released last Friday, and took the story through July (on a preliminary basis)? That the metals-using industries continue to set the national job-creation pace for the entire economy, not simply for manufacturing.

Here are the percentage gains for employment in some major sectors of the economy from April (the first month during which any metals tariffs effects would have been felt) through July except for the industries noted:

entire private sector: +0.53 percent

overall manufacturing: +0.73 percent

durable goods: +0.96 percent

fabricated metals products: +1.10 percent

non-electrical machinery: +1.43 percent

automotive vehicles & parts: +1.06 percent

household appliances (thru June): -0.63 percent

aerospace products & parts (thru June): +1.05 percent

Unfortunately, it was not possible to learn any of this from America’s leading news organizations. For these figures were completely ignored.

To their credit, some leading media mentioned that Trump tariffs and trade war fears in general seemed to be having no effect on manufacturing job creation overall despite industry’s exposure in principle to the fall-out. These included the Associated Press, The New York Times, the Financial Times, CNN, ABC News, and NBC News. Yet the metals-using sectors were never mentioned.

As for The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and CBS News, they made no connection of the tariff/trade war-manufacturing job connection whatever.

And several news organizations actually tried to rationalize the unexpected results. Reuters, for example, claimed that “With manufacturing payrolls increasing by the most in seven months, the moderation in hiring reported by the Labor Department on Friday likely does not reflect the rising trade tensions between the United States and other nations including China.”

According to PBS, “Economists say it is too early to tell whether the Trump administration’s tariffs on imported steel and aluminum are having a significant effect on manufacturing jobs.”

Bloomberg and Marketwatch.com weren’t as disingenuous, but still felt compelled to contend that rising trade tensions continued to cast a long shadow on the job markets’ future – without reporting that, if anything, new U.S. policies and statements were so far having exactly the opposite effect on parts of the economy most exposed to existing metals tariffs.

But no account of press coverage of these Trump trade policies would be complete without observing an equally weird development: Neither the President nor anyone else in his administration has pointed to the outperformance of the metals-using industries, either.

In a little over a week, the nation will get its next major opportunity to gauge the impact of metals and other tariffs, and future possibilities thereof – when the Federal Reserve releases the July industrial production data, which includes detailed statistics on inflation-adjusted manufacturing output. Will the Mainstream Media finally zero in on the sectors where the tariff rubber hits the road? At this rate, Americans should be grateful if they simply ended the string of job loss and other Chicken Little metals tariff impact stories.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: The Case that Trump is…and is not…a NATO Disrupter

Tags

energy, Europe, George H.W. Bush, Germany, Mainstream Media, Marc Fischer, NATO, North Atlantic treaty Organization, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Russia, Soviet Union, Trump, Trump Derangement Syndrome, Washington Post

Marc Fisher’s column in today’s Washington Post on the approach taken to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) by President Trump and his successors is one of the more schizoid articles on American foreign policy that I’ve ever seen.

On the one hand, Fisher makes the absolutely crucial – and typically overlooked – point that since its founding (back in 1949), the United States has seen the alliance as a means not simply to contain the old Soviet Union (and now the Russian follow-on state). It’s also been seen as a means to contain Germany – specifically, (in Fischer’s words) to “enmesh Germany so thoroughly in Western alliances that it never again became a dominant, destabilizing force.” And P.S. – that’s also why Washington was so enthusiastic about Germany joining the European Union (originally through various predecessor organizations).

Even better, the author discusses how this strategy has had historic benefits (helping build a Western Europe that was free and peaceful for decades) and costs (discouraging Germans, especially after unification, from grappling seriously with the challenge of becoming a “normal” country, complete with robust defense capabilities, without reverting back to dangerous militarism).

But despite the valuable history lesson, Fisher’s article at least flirts with Trump Derangement Syndrome in two important ways. First, he fails to distinguish between German ambivalence about more assertive foreign and defense policies, and current German policies like signing energy supply contracts bound to send billions worth of euros in revenue to a Russian government that Berlin professes to view as a threat to European security and the broader “global liberal order.”

Even seven decades after the end of World War II, the former remains understandable, at least to some extent. There can be no excuse for the latter, and President Trump has been absolutely right to call Germany on the carpet in this respect.

Second, Fisher calls the Trump-ian approach to NATO, and to defense burden-sharing issues a major and troubling departure from longstanding U.S. policy because it’s been (or seemed to be) uniquely ignorant of the Germany issue. Yet he belittles Mr. Trump’s claim to be a long overdue disrupter of hidebound American NATO strategies by noting that, in 1992, former President George H.W. Bush’s administration “bluntly warned” Germany that “the United States would pull its troops out of Europe if the Germans and other Europeans didn’t cough up the money and manpower to take more responsibility for their own defense.”

Unless Bush 41 was simply blowing smoke, I’m hard pressed to see the difference between this position and President Trump’s hard (and harsh) line. Fischer could have made this case – which is entirely conceivable given the long history of similar, indeed transparently hollow, threats from Mr. Trump’s globalist predecessors. But he didn’t. Moreover, the President’s rhetoric hasn’t (yet) gone as far as Bush 41.

The way I see it, major changes in America’s approach to NATO (and to its alliances in East Asia) are urgently needed, and Mr. Trump hasn’t gone nearly far enough down this road. It’s also clear that, in some important respects, the Trump-ian approach of loud bark and modest bite has given his administration the worst of all possible worlds – widely accused by the U.S. and many foreign chattering classes of ostrich-like isolationism, yet failing (to date) to secure for the United States any of the benefits of a genuine America First global strategy. Worse, as I’ve just argued, Mr. Trump actually seems determined to increase some of the threats the United States faces from continuing the alliance status quo.

So I’m not knocking Fisher for criticizing the President’s NATO policy. What a shame, though, that he didn’t limit himself to spotlighting the Germany issue, and proceeded to fall into the kind of Trump-induced incoherence that has rightly cost the mainstream media so much credibility.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Fake Trump Trade News from the Washington Post

Tags

Barack Obama, China, Damian Paletta, Erica Werner, Seung Min Kim, TPP, Trade, Trans-Pacific Partnership, Trump, Washington Post, {What's Left of) Our Economy

There’s nothing unusual about my waking up each morning not sure about exactly I’ll be blogging on that day. There’s everything unusual about making up my mind immediately after glancing at the front page of the print Washington Post that arrives at my home daily. All it took was one look at the paper’s coverage of President Trump’s decision to consider starting negotiations to enable the United States to rejoin the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) – the Pacific Rim trade deal that he denounced during his campaign for the White House and that he withdrew from in his first week in office.’

The problem with the Post coverage entailed the one of the greatest sins journalists can commit – portraying matters of opinion as matters of fact. This transgression, moreover, almost could not appeared prominently – in the third paragraph of the edition’s front page lead story.

According to writers Erica Werner, Damian Paletta, and Seung Min Kim (and of course their editors),

“An embrace of the TPP would give Trump more leverage in his escalating trade feud with Beijing. It also would give U.S. farms, retailers and other businesses better access to foreign markets if China makes good on its recent threats of new tariffs on U.S. goods.”

In other words, what’s not to like about the treaty? And how could Mr. Trump have possibly turned it down?

Yet what’s apparently escaped the Post news team is that the points made above are far from facts. They’re opinions. They’re possibilities, to be sure, and have long been central to the case for TPP. But they’re nothing more than contentions. At best, no one can know whether these benefits will be realized. Indeed, as I’ve observed repeatedly (see, e.g., here and here), because of specific provisions of the version of TPP agreed to by former President Barack Obama (but never ratified by Congress), grounds for major skepticism about all these claims abound.

When I tutored Washington, D.C. school kids several years ago, one of the lessons assigned to me for second or third graders was distinguishing fact (“that chair is brown”) from opinion (“that chair is pretty”). Little did I imagine that adult journalists would need drilling on this subject, too.

Following Up: More on the Trump Tariffs

Tags

aluminum, Australia, Canada, David J. Lynch, Defense Department, defense manufacturing base, downstream industries, European Union, Following Up, George W. Bush, Gordon Hanson, James Mattis, Kentucky, manufacturing, Mitch McConnell, multiplier, Paul Krugman, Paul Ryan, steel, steel-consuming industries, tariffs, terrorism, The New York Times, Trade, Trump, U.S. Business and Industry Council, United Kingdom, Washington Post, Wisconsin

I could spend all day today rebutting ignorant, biased, and simply inane commentary on President Trump’s Thursday announcement that stiff tariffs will be imposed on U.S. imports of steel and aluminum (along with watching the plethora of college hoops on TV today!). Instead, I’ll offer some follow-on thoughts to the tariff talking points I posted yesterday.

>The European Union in particular seems outraged by the Trump decision, and has threatened to retaliate with tariffs on its own on a wide range of products, including some from Wisconsin and Kentucky. These of course happen to be the home states of House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. It’s an understandable, and certainly clever, impulse, and in 2003, something like it succeeded in convincing former President George W. Bush to lift steel tariffs he had imposed 18 months earlier.

Of course, Bush 43 was no Trump. He was a committed free trader and globalist, and/or agent of of America’s powerful corporate offshoring lobby. But here’s something that needs to be considered by Messrs Ryan, McConnell, and other lawmakers at whom the Europeans or other powers may take aim: What if, shortly after September 11, Osama Bin Laden had threatened to destroy major targets in their home states or districts unless the United States withdrew militarily from Afghanistan and left him alone. Would the affected legislators have run to the White House to plead for an abandonment in the war on terror? Not likely.

I know that war and economics are different (although given the importance of economic strength as a source of military strength and overall national success, the similarities and overlap are widely overlooked). But don’t doubt for a minute that American politicians’ reactions to these European threats will be watched closely in all the world’s capitals, and that signs of weakness will be factored into foreign decisions to abide by or violate current trade agreements at the U.S.’ expense, or take other measures to gain advantage in their own, American, or third-country markets that clash with free market and free trade norms.

So here’s hoping that American Members of Congress and Senators will show some backbone, and make clear to the nation’s trade partners that they won’t permit themselves and the country at large to be hanged separately.

>Speaking of hanging separately, quite naturally, U.S. steel- and aluminum-consuming industries are concerned that their global competitiveness will be harmed if they’re forced to use more domestic metal in their products. They need to keep two considerations in mind. First, if foreign governments are permitted by Washington’s inaction to dump major American industries like aluminum and steel out of existence, consuming sectors would be next in line. 

Second, there is indeed no inherent reason to make the consuming industries pay any penalty at all. When I was at the U.S. Business and Industry Council, which represented many steel-consuming companies and industry groups, we persuaded them that the best solution would be tariff protection for them as well. The tariff complaints coming from such sectors today reveals that the Trump administration hasn’t put this possibility on the table. That’s a major missed opportunity, and the President should realize that such offers not only can build support for the steel and aluminum tariffs. They can also expand the constituency for broader America First trade policies. (New Trump statements on possible auto tariffs make clear exactly the types of steps needed, although as is usually the case, they work best when applied across-the-board.)   

>Speaking of missed opportunities, here’s another (big) one – the handling of some allied countries’ indignation about being treated as threats to America’s national security because of their steel and/or aluminum shipments. In several major cases, these complaints could have been prevented had the administration recognized that Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom are defined by American law as part of the nation’s defense “technology and industrial base.”

I’m not necessarily a supporter of this policy, but since it exists, these countries have an entirely legitimate point regarding their possible inclusion in the metals’ tariff regime. And the Trump administration should have explained to them that they were of course being exempted. Moreover, the Defense Department should have told the rest of the administration about the legal and legislative situation. Yet Pentagon chief James Mattis’ memo to his administration colleagues outlining his department’s position on the tariffs never mentioned it.

Not that these allied countries are entirely blameless for the row. They could have raised the issue when the prospect of sweeping U.S. tariffs was first raised. But all indications are that they preferred to grandstand.

>As should now be expected, the media coverage of the tariff controversy has often veered off into economics and policy La-La Land. Two of the funniest examples I’ve seen so far (and they’re nearly identical): criticizing the announced tariffs because they only boast the potential of bringing back high-value manufacturing to the United States instead of lots of industrial jobs.

Think I’m kidding? Here’s Washington Post correspondent David J. Lynch: “If tariffs prompt companies to move production back to the United States, they would likely opt for highly automated plants that require fewer workers. Trump’s tariffs ‘would bring back 21st-century factories where we lost 20th-century factories,” [economist Gordon] Hanson said this week at the National Association for Business Economics conference in Washington.”

Here’s no less than Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul M. Krugman: “[T]he tariffs now being proposed would boost capital-intensive industries that employ relatively few workers per dollar of sales; these tariffs would, if anything, further tilt the distribution of income against labor.”

What both authors are somehow missing is how manufacturing is valuable for much more than high wage employment. It’s long been the nation’s leader in productivity growth. It generates nearly 69 percent of private sector American spending on research and development. And don’t forget its high employment and output multipliers – which mean that each dollar of manufacturing output punches far above its weight in generation production and jobs elsewhere in the economy.

That last point is particularly relevant to Krugman’s claim about labor’s low share of national incomes. The manufacturing employment multiplier tells us that adding to industry in America – including capital-intensive industry – will promote employment in related sectors like logistics, plus revitalize the retail and other service sectors of the towns and cities and counties where the new factories are built. Those jobs may not pay as well as the manufacturing jobs lost. But they’re sure better than the economic death that often results when communities lose their factories.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Still Clueless on the Palestinians After All These Years

Tags

Arabs, Gaza Strip, Israel, Jackson Diehl, Jerusalem, Middle East, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Palestinians, Trump, Washington Post, West Bank

I’m not focusing on Jackson Diehl’s column yesterday in the Washington Post because he’s such a terribly important foreign policy pundit. He’s not. Instead, I’m picking on him because he’s so utterly typical of chattering class conventional wisdom (which of course includes the academics and the think tanks) on U.S. Middle East policy, and specifically on relations between Israel and the Palestinians. In the face of overwhelming and ongoing floods of evidence, it continues to be not only spectacularly wrong, but almost proudly so.

Israeli-Palestinian relations weren’t Diehl’s only focus today, but they were prominent in his overall theme that President Trump is making dangerous mistakes by tossing out so many foreign policy ultimatums to friend and foe alike lately. Diehl could be right on that larger point (though I’m doubtful) but could not be more off-base when it comes to what is still amazingly called “the peace process.”

Diehl’s evidently worked up this week because Mr. Trump decided to punish the Palestinians for snubbing a White House peace plan in protest of his recent decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. In retaliation, he’s cut half of America’s annual $125 million contribution to the United Nations agency that helps provide economic aid and various types of social services, and has threatened to eliminate the rest “unless they sit down and negotiate peace.”

According to Diehl, such steps will backfire big-time because

“The withdrawal of U.S. aid is the last thing Israel wants — it would cause the collapse of the West Bank Palestinian security forces that in recent years have worked closely with Israel to prevent terrorist attacks. Israeli military forces might have to redeploy in Palestinian areas they now avoid. In short, if Trump follows through, he’ll do less damage to the Palestinians than to Israel, the ally he thinks he’s appeasing.”

As a result, Diehl claims, “To punish Trump for that ultimatum, the Palestinians need only sit tight.”

That last point alone leaves no doubt that Diehl thinks we’re living on a planet where water runs uphill. I mean, are the Palestinian people in any kind of a position where “sitting tight” is remotely appealing? Are they the side in this conflict that’s satisfied with the status quo?

Further, who historically has paid the highest price for a resumption of terror attacks on the West Bank and/or Gaza? Try “the people who live there” – i.e. the Palestinians.

And finally, if the Palestinians, or “outside agitators” (dating myself here!) ignite another round of violence great enough to strain Israeli resources seriously, nothing could be easier for the Trump administration to do than give the funds that were slated to the UN agency to the Israeli government – or more – to use as it pleases.

Diehl’s stated fear about Palestinian violence, however, underscores an even more important point about the standard lens through which the foreign policy establishment views this issue. These supposed experts have been raising this specter for years now, and seem to have forgotten that the last event that could legitimately be called a significant Palestinian uprising took place in 2000. In fact, Diehl seems to have forgotten that he himself semi-predicted new outbreaks because of the Trump Jerusalem decision – and like so many others, blew the call.

But don’t expect this Post pundit or any others to change their tune significantly. For doing so would amount to recognizing the fatal flaws that have marked their entire overarching analysis of Arab-Israeli relations for decades. As early as 2002, when I wrote this short article, it should have been screamingly obvious that the Palestinians had virtually no leverage with Israel, whether from using force themselves or relying on their fellow Arabs to help out.

And it should have been just as obvious that their delusional demands to negotiate with the Israelis as equals, or anything close, were being enabled only by the diplomatic support from outside powers. Whether mindlessly or cynically, the United States and the Europeans have acted as if peace could somehow be created by diplomacy that ignored power realities. That’s simply childish, and the prime victims have been the Palestinians.

That’s in fact why I found the Trump Jerusalem decision so refreshing and potentially productive.  It’s why I believe that an aggressive Israeli settlement program (if not every single settlement decision) can be similarly constructive. And it’s why the President’s announcement had made foreign policy sophisticates so livid: For the real message the United States is sending to the Palestinians now is the one that’s been as emphatically rejected in the past as it’s been urgently needed – and completely common-sensical: “Keep up the obstructionism, and you’ll lose even more land.” I only wish that Washington and Jerusalem were spelling this street smart content out more explicitly, or at all, and especially for the sake of the Palestinians themselves. Unless that common expression is true, and there really is no fixing stupid.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: The Big Messages Being Sent by a Jetsons-Like Invention

Tags

Aeolus Robotics, automation, capital spending, Consumer Electronics Show, Democrats, domestic workers, economics, Fight for 15, Immigration, innovation, Jobs, minimum wage, offshoring, Open Borders, robots, Roomba, Rosey, technology, The Jetsons, Trade, Washington Post, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Along with the rest of the world, I just got another reminder that the future is arriving a lot faster than most of us expect. And that’s got especially big implications for related points I’ve long been making about U.S. immigration policy and efforts to boost the country’s minimum wage.

For many years, when I’ve spoken about immigration policy, I’ve used the following argument to explain the relationship between the mass immigration America has fostered for so long (including winking at illegal immigration) and the productivity gains and technological progress needed to ensure that living standards can improve in a sustainable (not bubbly) way:

“Does anyone remember Rosey, the robot maid on the 1960s TV cartoon show, ‘The Jetsons’? Did you ever wonder why, decades later, there’s still no Rosey – or anything better than a Roomba? A major reason has to be that, with so many legally and illegally present housekeepers and housekeeper candidates available, and willing to work so cheaply, there’s been little incentive to automate domestic work.”

It was my way of using pop culture to illustrate why a big spur to technological progress (and the higher productivity it tends to bring) for the United States in particular has been the scarce labor situation that’s existed for most of American history. With workers in chronically short supply, and therefore increasingly expensive to hire, U.S. businesses were constantly looking for labor saving devices that could cut their costs. And American inventors were terrific at seizing the opportunity and providing them.

In other words, the U.S. economy was behaving exactly the way the textbooks said it should. When labor became too costly, business stepped up its search for ways to substitute capital (which often meant) technology, for those overly dear workers. More recently, as labor has become more abundant (and therefore, all else equal, cheaper), this dynamic has often shifted into reverse.

Incidentally, mass immigration policies aren’t solely to blame. Offshoring-friendly international trade deals like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and similar trade policies (like coddling China’s trade predation) have also greatly expanded the amount of workers realistically available to American employers, especially in sectors like manufacturing. And it’s surely no coincidence that business spending on equipment and machines and the like (called capital spending) has been a notable weakness lately in the U.S. economy. (In fact, although many factories in China are automating rapidly – because of wage increases – this report makes clear that labor surpluses are still slowing its pace in some important Chinese manufacturing industries.)

What has this to do with Rosey? Simple. As this Washington Post piece from last week shows, she’s here – or just about here. For at the latest annual Consumer Electronics Show (one of the tech industry’s major events), a company called Aeolus Robotics unveiled a device that looks awfully similar. According to the Post reporter, this “child-sized” machine

“performed domestic duties such as mopping, picking up stuffed animals off the floor and moving furniture, and, perhaps most impressively, retrieving drinks from the fridge using an intricate-looking grabbing arm — all without human assistance.”

The robot – billed as “the first multi-functional robot that can act like a human being” – still doesn’t crack wise in a New York accent, like the cartoon Rosey. But how far off can that be?

Technology and labor costs hardly move in lockstep, and of course innovation results from many causes. But economic theory, anyway, is saying that my view on the cost and supply of domestic workers is becoming outdated. Common sense also suggests that if something like Rosey is just about here, then domestic workers aren’t as cheap and/or as abundant as I believed. So their wages may well have been rising strongly enough lately to create demand for an automated counterpart.

At the same time, the advent of “Rosey” (and how many other devices like “her” just over the horizon?) amounts to a frantically waving red flag about the wisdom of any immigration policy moves likely to increase the supply of poorly-skilled workers in the American economy – which is to say, any proposals supported by the national Democratic Party and the rest of the country’s Open Borders enthusiasts. Just what kind of work can they be expected to find? Indeed, the automation progress represented by “Rosey” signals that much of the existing workforce in the nation is going to be increasingly hard-pressed to secure or hang onto decent-paying jobs.

Similarly, although I believe there’s still a strong economic (and moral) case for a national minimum wage that tracks inflation, the seemingly impending dawn of the Age of Rosey raises big questions about the wisdom of the kinds of minimum wage jumps sought by the “Fight for 15” campaign and other activists.

“Rosey’s” appearance at the Consumer Electronics Show doesn’t mean that I’ve come down one way or the other in the vital debate taking place today over whether all this recent technological progress ultimately will be a net job killer or creator. But it seems clear as a bell that this tech wave is being completely ignored by the Open Borders and the Fight for 15 backers, and that Americans closest to the low end of the wage and income scale are likely to be among the biggest victims.

Im-Politic: An Old Year Rung Out with Fake News

Tags

ABC News, Barack Obama, Bloomberg.com, CNN.com, Gallup, Hillary Clinton, Im-Politic, Mainstream Media, Marketwatch.com, NBC News, Newsday, Politico.com, The New York Times, Trump, USAToday, Washington Post

Whatever you think of Donald Trump, his presidential campaign, and his first year in office, you can be sure of this: His charges that too much of the Mainstream Media publishes and broadcasts too much fake news will continue – and continue to resonate – as long as their performance in covering a new Gallup survey of the most admired men and women in America keeps typifying their output.

Gallup has asked Americans who they look up to most since the 1940s (for male figures) and since the 1950s (for female figures). As I see it, the 2017 poll’s results were a fascinating mix. They showed that former President Barack Obama and last year’s Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton continued their long strings at the top of their heaps. President Trump came in second on the men’s list – as he has since 2015.

In my view, Gallup played it right in its report on the survey, noting the winners in its lead paragraph and then immediately observing that the Obama and Clinton margins were “much narrower…than in the past.” The firm didn’t highlight that both Democrats’ edge fell at a faster rate than President Trump, but at least its tables made that trend clear.

Few major news organizations followed suit.

USAToday‘s headline, for example, blared, “Barack Obama beats Donald Trump for most admired man, Hillary Clinton tops list again in Gallup poll.” Reporter Ashley May never mentioned their diminishing leads.

CNN.com did better. Its header announced “Gallup: Obama, Hillary Clinton remain most admired” and noted the Obama dip in the second paragraph. But the Clinton fall-off wasn’t reported until the fifth (of ten) paragraphs.

The ABC News headline – “President Trump is America’s second-most admired man, poll finds” – at least accurately reflected the disparaging tone of the full article. “Digital reporter” Karma Allen led off by observing that “President Donald Trump snagged a major legislative victory with the signing of his landmark tax reform bill last week, but he’s still living in his predecessor’s shadow when it comes to public admiration, according to a new poll.”

He continued with the factoid that the results marked “one of the very few times in recent history that an incumbent president hasn’t taken the top spot.” (It’s actually 13 out of 71 times.) And he simply ignored the declining Obama and Clinton numbers.

Bloomberg,com chose as its headline a reasonable “Obama Tops Trump as Most Admired, Gallup Poll of Americans Finds,” but although specifying that the margin was “close,” never mentioned the weakening Obama or Clinton ratings, either. The same held for the article run in Politico.com. The New York Times headline was a similarly accurate “Clinton and Obama Top U.S. Poll on Most Admired People” but the article neglected to include the trend over time as well.

The two worst performances? The Washington Post‘s headline was a gratuitously snarky “Obama beats Trump where it will sting: He’s the most admired man in America.” A graphic made clear the closing Trump-Obama gap, but this development never made it into the article itself. However reporter Philip Bump did consider it important to write that the overall results “coming at this moment, will probably be somewhat galling to Trump.”

Whoever wrote the headlines for the coverage by Long Island’s Newsday seemed like he or she was auditioning for a job at the higher profile Post. “Gallup ‘most admired’ poll is an ‘Obamanation’ for Trump,” was the first description of the survey the paper’s readers saw. The second description, in a subhead? “He just can’t win the popular vote.” The article itself, by William Goldschlag, simply continued in this vein.

But I’d be just as remiss as much of the Mainstream Media by failing to mention journalists who recognized the deteriorating relative Obama and Clinton ratings. So Rachel Koning Beals of Marketwatch.com and Phil Helsel of NBC News, please take richly deserved bows. Let’s all hope your news judgment spreads to many more of your colleagues in the New Year!

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Never-Trumpism Goes Off the Deep End on Korea

Tags

deterrence, Jeffrey Lewis, Kim Jong Un, North Korea, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, South Korea, Trump, Washington Post

Since I’ve made my living through writing of various kinds, and have been blogging furiously here for the last few years, I’m not often at a loss for words. This morning was (briefly) one of those exceptions, when I began reading a Washington Post Outlook article titled “This is how nuclear war with North Korea would unfold.” My verbal paralysis came not from the military details of the scenario presented by prominent arms control specialist Jeffrey Lewis. It came from the author’s disgraceful effort to pin much of the blame for the nightmare scenario he lays out on President Trump. The only word I literally could come up with was “unspeakable.”

At least Lewis didn’t portray Mr. Trump as an unhinged leader who, out of a simple fit of pique, decided needlessly to trigger a disastrous nuclear exchange that winds up killing millions on both sides of the Pacific. But for being subtler and (arguably) more sophisticated, this example of Trump Derangement Syndrome was all the more insidious.

Specifically, according to the author, it’s completely legitimate to suppose that, at a key point in the escalation of hostilities on the Korean peninsula, the president will turn a fraught situation into an unprecedented and nearly irretrievable disaster. How? With “an idle Twitter threat” that convinces North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un that both the United States and South Korea will use the unfolding conflict “as a pretext for the invasion he had wanted all along.” His response? He fires some of his own nuclear weapons “against U.S. forces in South Korea and Japan” and “slaughters” them “as they slept in their barracks or as they arrived at ports and airfields.”

Shortly afterwards, Lewis’ scenario continues, in the penultimate blunder of this tragedy, the Trump administration ignores the intercontinental North Korean nuclear-armed missiles still at Kim’s disposal, and tries to decapitate his regime and defang these forces with a conventional attack that, however massive, was too weak to accomplish its mission. In retaliation, Kim launches these missiles at the United States, and enough of them hit their targets to kill nearly 1.5 million Americans.

Whether you’re a Never Trump-er or not, you have to acknowledge two related flaws that are not only fatal, but completely irresponsible to overlook. The first is that even Lewis recognizes that, in order to look credible, the speculative exercise he describes needs to start with actions and miscalculations by the North and South Koreans, for which Mr. Trump couldn’t possibly be held responsible. The only way he can figure out how to blame the president for a dramatic worsening of the situation is to hide behind a charge from his own creations – fictional “surviving members of the [South Korean] Moon administration [who] insist that things would have been fine had President Trump not picked up his smartphone” and tweeted.

Second, Lewis seems to think, a la these South Korean officials, that following South Korean retaliatory missile strikes on North Korean air defense systems and “select leadership targets throughout North Korea,” there was any significant chance that nuclear weapons would remain sheathed.

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t recommend that anyone take the time to read this kind of intellectually dishonest claptrap. But Lewis’ exercise in slander does usefully reinforce one point about the Korean crisis that I’ve been making for years – and in fact the most important point for any American: The only reason that the United States could become sucked into a war with nuclear potential on the Korean peninsula – and thus expose its own cities to the unprecedented disaster of nuclear attack – is that tens of thousands of American troops and their families are still sitting directly in harm’s way.

During the decades when the United States could destroy North Korea with nuclear weapons and the North could not place millions of Americans at risk with its own nukes, this strategy could be defended as a reasonable gamble capable of deterring an attack by the North on South Korea – by making North Korea’s nuclear destruction inevitable. Now that the North can pose such a threat to the American homeland, this strategy unconscionably places American cities in North Korea’s nuclear cross-hairs. Worse, it achieves this result not to defend the United States itself, but to defend a South Korea amply wealthy enough to mount its own successful conventional defense.

The policy conclusion that must be drawn couldn’t be more obvious: Whatever you think of President Trump, the only way to remove this North Korean threat is to get U.S. forces out of this tinderbox immediately, if not sooner. The longer they remain the longer Kim has any reason to even threaten, much less attack, the United States if events, as is all too likely, start spinning out of control.