Tag: Economy
Friday stock taking
It’s Friday, so let’s take a look at how effectively the Trump Administration has dealt with world and domestic events this week while it obsesses over impeachment:
- The North Koreans continue to launch increasingly capable ballistic missiles.
- While suffering from reimposed sanctions, Iran is defying the US and increasing uranium enrichment beyond the limits specified the nuclear deal the US withdrew from.
- The Iranian attack on Saudi Arabia’s oil production facilities has elicited no visible response from the US or Saudi Arabia, which is joining the United Arab Emirates in playing footsie with Iran.
- While failing to remove from Syria all the troops Trump said would be withdrawn, the US has allowed Turkey to take over a buffer zone along its border with Syria, leading to large-scale displacement of people there. Russia has also gained a foothold in northeastern Syria, as has the Assad regime.
- The trade war with China drags on, with the US trade deficit ballooning and Asian partners and allies doubting US commitments in the region.
- Venezuelan autocrat Maduro has survived despite American pressure, as has the Communist regime in Cuba and Evo Morales’ rule in Bolivia.
- In Europe, French President Macron is describing NATO as “brain dead” because of Trump’s lack of commitment to it and Trump’s pal UK Prime Minister Johnson is being forced into an election to try to confirm his Brexit plan, which Trump has supported.
- In the Balkans, the Administration has confused everyone with the appointment of two special envoys whose relationship to each other and to US policy is opaque.
- That’s all without even mentioning Ukraine, where State Department officials have confirmed that President Trump tried to extort an investigation of his political rivals from newly elected President Zelensky in exchange for Congressionally approved military aid.
The home front is even worse:
- A New York State Court has forced Trump into a $2 million settlement in which he has admitted improper and fraudulent use of his family foundation.
- Republicans lost the governorship in Kentucky and control of both houses of the Virginia assembly in off-year elections earlier this week. Congressional Republicans are nervous.
- President Trump’s personal lawyer affirmed that everything he did in Ukraine was to serve his client’s personal interests, a statement that confirms public assets were used for private purposes.
- The Attorney General, a stalwart defender of his boss, has declined to make a public statement supporting Trump’s claim that he did nothing wrong in his infamous phone call with President Zelensky.
- The House Democrats are piling up subpoenas that the White House is ignoring, heightening the likelihood that obstruction of Congressional oversight will be added to the impeachment charges and limiting the news to the sharp critiques of non-White House officials.
- The economy is slowing, especially in some “swing” districts vital to Trump’s hopes for a win in the electoral college in 2020, when he is sure to lose the popular vote once again, likely by a wider margin than in 2016.
I suppose it could get worse, and likely will. But it has been a long time since we’ve seen an American Administration in worse shape than this.
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Good election, big challenges
On October 29 the Middle East Institute (MEI) and Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) hosted an event entitled “Observations from the Tunisian Election.” Tunisian Ambassador Fayçal Gouia delivered the opening remarks and participated in the panel discussion. Georgetown Professor and North Africa specialist William Lawrence moderated the discussion. Panelists included Jeffrey England, deputy director of the Middle East and North Africa program at the National Democratic Institute (NDI), Patricia Karam, Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa division of the International Republican Institute (IRI), Sarah Yerkes, Middle East Fellow at the Carnegie Institute for International Peace, and Thomas Hill, senior program officer for North Africa at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP).
England emphasized that the joint election observation undertaken by NDI and IRI demonstrated several positive aspects of the Tunisian election. Despite the fact that the July 25 death of former President Essebsi required the election to be held sooner than originally planned, it was peaceful and administered professionally. England also highlighted that the Parliamentary and Presidential debates that were held for the first time are evidence that the democratic system continues to mature. He noted that while there are lingering questions about turnout in the election, there was a larger pool of voters in both rounds than expected. England felt that because President Kais Saied does not belong to a political party he may be better able to hold the parties in Parliament to account.
Karam agreed that the election observation demonstrated several positive developments but noted that Tunisia should amend several aspects of its electoral framework prior to the next election, including campaign finance regulations, media rules, and the interaction between the judicial and electoral systems. Polling shows a crisis of confidence in politicians, growing dissatisfaction with the democratic experiment, and the sense that Tunisian political parties lack a clear vision for economic reform. This dissatisfaction is particularly deep among Tunisian youth, with preliminary data showing that youth turnout in the election may have been as low as 16%. Karam believes Tunisians voted for Saied because they prioritized stability in government, even if it comes with older, more conservative ideas.
Yerkes argued that while Saied received 70% of the votes, giving him a strong mandate, the incarceration of his opponent Karoui during the election was a significant flaw in the democratic process. She believes the election was unquestionably free but does not think it was fair. Karoui’s incarceration highlighted the need for Tunisia to implement a system for absentee voting. The electoral law allows prisoners to vote but there is currently no mechanism for them to do so, meaning that Karoui was unable to vote for himself.
Several panelists agreed that Tunisia’s economy was the key issue in this election and will play a key role in the future of its democracy. Gouia stated that job creation and delivering economic reform will be the first priority of the new administration. England asserted that while the electorate’s main concern was revolution in 2011 and identity in 2014, now people want to see results, particularly on economic issues. Hill argued that the Tunisian social contract has shifted so that graduates expect the government to create jobs for them rather than being entrepreneurial. England agreed, stating that the economic problems cannot be solved before the next election. He felt that the government should focus on developing a long-term plan to reform the economy and attempt to reframe the people’s expectations so that they understand that economic change will take time.
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Stevenson’s army, August 31
In an extraordinary story, WaPo reports that John Bolton has repeatedly been excluded from invitations to presidential policy meetings on Afghanistan and even denied access to the Taliban negotiations documents. Bolton’s only denial of the story was that he and his staff did not leak. It’s unclear whether this story was prompted by Bolton supporters who want him to resign in protest of Administration policies or opponents who want to further marginalize him by making this known to the world. [It is not unusual for senior officials to fall in and out of favor with a president. Nor is it unusual for one faction to try to exclude opponents from policy meetings. People in the Clinton and Obama administrations, for example, told me of deliberately excluding Richard Holbrooke from meetings because he was deemed disruptive. But to sideline the person in charge of the interagency process from a key policy matter is not a good sign.]
Another puzzling development Friday was a presidential tweet with what appears to be a classified intelligence photo of an Iranian missile site along with a Trump statement that the US was not responsible for the failed launch. NYT has background on both matters, including a discussion of the law on covert actions.
WaPo had a piece discussing Gen. Mattis’ refusal to criticize President Trump, linking it to broader issues of civil-military relations and whether retired senior officers can adjust to political roles like SecDef. Civ-mil scholars like Professors Karlin and Peter Feaver are quoted.
CBO’s latest economic report has details on the impact of the trade wars on the US economy. See box 2.2 in the full report.
NYT tells the sad story of the rise and fall of the president’s personal assistant and how she built large groups of supporters and opponents by how she controlled access to the Oval Office.
My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I plan to republish here. If you want to get it directly, To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).
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Stevenson’s army, August 26
[The Congress class starts next week, so I’ll be giving extra emphasis to news about the legislative branch.]
Congress will be in session only 15 days in September, then recessing for two weeks [Jewish high holidays]. Lawmakers have to fund the government, probably by passing a short term continuing resolution. They dodged a bullet by approving a two year budget topline and suspending the debt limit last month.
Another July accomplishment was a new law making it easier for congressional offices to do constituent casework that requires some kind of approval paperwork.
In an apparent effort to preclude further stock market declines, President Trump said the Chinese had called and wanted to restart trade talks. Bloomberg says the Chinese Foreign Ministry knows of no such calls, and other US officials previously said there would be more talks next week. Anyway, the president has now discovered the International Emergency Economic Powers Act [IEEPA] and thinks it would allow him to forbid US companies from having Chinese customers or subsidiaries. Here’s background on IEEPA from the Congressional Research Service, and another paper on broader national emergencies laws. [Note that both CRS and FAS have CRS papers now.]
The Atlantic has a piece showing China’s effective soft power at work.
My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I plan to republish here. If you want to get it directly, To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).
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The mercantile solution
Maybe trade talks with China are back on, or so says Donald Trump. The Chinese want to talk, he claims. More likely he is the one that needs to find an out: the slowing world and American economies and sharp drops in the stock market are flashing alerts: by November 2020 we could be in recession. His re-election prospects would be dealt a big blow if that materializes. No doubt he got an earful about all this from his G7 colleagues over the weekend.
An early solution to the trade war appears unlikely. The American position in the talks advocates fundamental changes in the way the Chinese manage their economy and treat foreign investors. The American negotiators want no technology transfer requirements, a free-floating Chinese currency, and an end to state subsidies. These are so-called “structural” changes that are difficult for the Chinese to concede. China needs more than 6% growth to accommodate its population’s expectations.
President Trump couldn’t care less about all that. He is interested mainly in the bilateral trade balance. A mercantilist, he regards imports as bad and exports as good. What he wants is not complicated structural change–which takes time and attention to detail–but rather simple Chinese commitments to import more from the US. The Chinese have understood this and are likely willing to give him what he wants: they should not care less whether they get soybeans from the US or from Brazil.
Negotiating with the US is therefore a two-level game. The Chinese have understood this: they will do their best to satisfy Trump on reducing the giant bilateral trade deficit while stiffing his negotiators on the structural changes. They will hope this approach will bend the President towards lifting the tariffs he has imposed while Beijing avoids fundamental reforms.
It may work, but it may not. If Trump is a true mercantilist, he will want to make the tariffs permanent, or at least of indefinite duration. Only then could he hope for American companies to do what he “ordered” last week: return to the US, where he would need to protect them from foreign competition with tariffs. If this is Trump’s real ambition, you can expect any renewed trade talks to fail.
You can also expect a permanent decline in US competitiveness as other countries meet competitive challenges while the US is protected from them. Americans will be less well off, productivity will suffer, foreign investment will shrink, the economy will grow more slowly, and the stock market–hesitant now–will fall to new lows. The mercantile solution is a bad one, but hard to rule out with a President who is a mercantilist.
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Peace Picks | August 5 – 9
How to Talk About People Disengaging from Violent Extremism – The Power of Strategic Language | August 06, 2019 | 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM | U.S. Institute of Peace | 2301 Constitution Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20037 | Register Here
Around the world, many countries face a challenging security question: what to do with citizens who have joined violent extremist groups. While many face criminal trial, thousands who traveled to live with ISIS will have to reintegrate into their communities, meaning rehabilitation must play a central role in any realistic security approach. Based on experience and research, this rehabilitation is possible through a two-way “re-humanization” effort. Yet we currently lack the language in public discourse to talk about those disengaging from violent extremism without reinforcing stigmas that hinder reconciliation.
It is critical for returning persons and community members to again see and treat each other as people with whom they share a basic human nature. Prosocial engagement between returning persons and community members and institutions is key to that effort. However, public discourse insists on using language steeped in fear and anger: the returning persons are “terrorists,” “jihadists,” “ISIS brides,” or “fighters.” The stigma this language produces is a self-fulfilling prophecy—it impedes empathy, erects barriers to prosocial engagement, and perpetuates the isolation and dehumanization that often fuels violent radicalization in the first place.
Speakers:
Dr. Arie Kruglanski, Distinguished University Professor, University of Maryland- Shannon Foley Martinez, Consultant for the prevention and disruption of targeted identity violence
Dr. Hollie Nyseth-Brehm, Associate Professor of Sociology, The Ohio State UniversityDr. Paul Thibodeau, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Oberlin College and Conservatory
Moderator:
- Leanne Erdberg, Director, Countering Violent Extremism, U.S. Institute of Peac
Contemporary India: Foreign Policy, Development Strategy, and Regional Priorities for Modi 2.0 | August 06, 2019 | 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM | The Heritage Foundation | Lehrman Auditorium, 214 Massachusetts Ave NE, Washington, DC 20002 | Register Here
Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India’s foreign policy and engagement with the world has acquired new energy and dynamism. Following India’s historic elections this spring, Modi’s second term will continue to focus on creating an enabling environment for India’s growth and development, while pursuing security and growth for all in India’s neighborhood and beyond. To discuss the Modi government’s foreign policy imperatives, and particularly India’s priorities in its regional engagements, India’s Ambassador to the U.S., His Excellency Harsh Vardhan Shringla will join Heritage Foundation South Asia scholar Jeff M. Smith for a wide-ranging conversation.
Speakers:
- H.E. Harsh Vardhan Shringla, Ambassador of India to the United States
- Jeff M. Smith, Research Fellow, South Asia, Heritage Foundation Asian Studies Center
A View from Iraq: A Conversation with Iraqi MP Sarkawt Shamsulddin | August 06, 2019 | 12:00 PM | The Atlantic Council | 1030 15th St NW, 12th Floor, Washington, DC 20005 | Register Here
With a new Kurdistan Regional Government in place, the Atlantic Council’s Iraq Initiative invites you to join us for a conversation with Iraqi Council of Representatives Member Sarkawt Shamsulddin to hear a view from Iraq. In 2018, Shamsulddin became the youngest member of the Iraqi parliament, securing the top position of the New Generation Movement in Sulaymaniyah Province. He is now one of the leaders of The Future parliamentary bloc and a member of the Iraqi-American Friendship Committee.
The discussion topics will include how Iraq views the tensions between the United States and Iran, how the new Kurdistan Regional Government cabinet is re-setting relations with Baghdad, and what can be done to promote reforms, counter corruption, and build bridges between civil society organizations in Baghdad in Erbil.
Speakers:
- Mr. Sarkawt Shamsulddin, Member, Council of Representative of Iraq
Moderator:
Dr. Abbas Kadhim, Senior Fellow and Director, Iraq Initiative, Atlantic Council
The Japanese-South Korean Trade Dispute: Ramifications and the Path Forward | August 07, 2019 | 1:30 PM – 4:30 PM | The Heritage Foundation |
Japan and South Korea have recently imposed rulings that impact each other’s financial interests and risk triggering a strategic trade war. During previous spikes in tensions, bilateral economic and security sectors were not involved and instead served as moderating influences. That changed for the worse last year. Strained bilateral economic relations undermine U.S. allied diplomatic and security coordination to deal with the North Korean threat. What role should Washington play in resolving disputes between two critically important Asian allies?
Speakers:
Panel I – Competing Views and Economic Considerations (1:30 – 3:00 p.m.)
- Scott Snyder, Senior Fellow for Korea Studies and Director of the Program on U.S.-Korea Policy, Council on Foreign Relations
- Yuki Tatsumi, Senior Fellow and Co-Director of the East Asia Program and Director of the Japan Program, The Stimson Center
- Riley Walters, Policy Analyst for Asia Economy and Technology, The Heritage Foundation
Panel II – Implications for Economics, Security, and U.S. Strategic Objectives (3:00 – 4:30 p.m.)
- Matthew Goodman, Senior Vice President, Senior Adviser for Asian Economics, and the Simon Chair in Political Economy, Center for Strategic and International Studies
- James Schoff, Senior Fellow, The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
- Patrick Cronin, Asia-Pacific Security Chair, The Hudson Institute
Hosted by:
- Bruce Klingner, Senior Research Fellow for Northeast Asia, The Heritage Foundation
Building Bridges? Development and Infrastructure in U.S.-China Relations | August 08, 2019 | 9:00 AM – 10:30 AM | CSIS Headquarters, 2nd Floor | 1616 Rhode Island Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20036 | Register Here
Amid escalating U.S.-China tensions, Washington and Beijing are focused on managing their differences on bilateral trade. At the same time, both countries have a major stake in the functioning of the global economic order—the institutions, rules, and norms that shape international economic affairs. Even as they address bilateral issues, it is also important for the two sides to confront strains in the global order.
During this event, U.S. and Chinese experts will discuss an important set of issues in the global economic order: infrastructure and development finance. They will explore where the two sides may be able to cooperate and where they need to manage their differences. The event will roll out a collection of essays written in parallel by U.S. and Chinese scholars on trade, finance, technology, and other key issues in the global economic order. This essay series is the culmination of a multi-year effort to promote U.S.-China dialogue funded by Carnegie Corporation of New York.
Speakers:
- Nancy Lee, Senior Policy Fellow, Center for Global Development
- Peter Raymond, Senior Associate (Non-resident), Reconnecting Asia Project and Simon Chair in Political Economy, CSIS; Former Advisory Leader, Capital Projects and Infrastructure, PwC
- Stephanie Segal, Senior Fellow, Simon Chair in Political Economy, CSIS
- Ye Yu, Associate Research Fellow & Assistant Director, Institute for World Economy Studies, Shanghai Institutes for International Studies (SIIS)
Moderator:
- Matthew P. Goodman, Senior Vice President and Simon Chair in Political Economy, CSIS
Confrontation in the Gulf: Unpacking Recent Escalations and the Prospects of US-Iran Talks | August 08, 2019 | 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM | Arab Center Washington DC | National Press Club, Holeman Lounge, 529 14th St., NW Washington, DC 20045 | Register Here
Tensions in the Persian Gulf threaten to escalate as regional and international actors look to improve their strategic standing at the expense of their adversaries. The last few weeks witnessed a number of attacks on oil tankers and platforms, seizures of ships operating in the Gulf and traversing the Strait of Hormuz, and the mutual downing of American and Iranian unmanned aerial vehicles. Left unaddressed, these actions ratchet up tensions and could quickly lead to a conflagration that would devastate all states in the region and disrupt the free flow of hydrocarbon supplies to the international economy. Over the last few months, many efforts have been made to find a compromise that could help address the sources of tension and spare the strategic area the outcomes of a confrontation, including calls and statements by regional and international actors as well as by the United States and Iran. Despite attempts at de-escalation, the stalemate persists and talks have not taken place.
Join Arab Center Washington DC to discuss the recent escalation of hostilities in the region, the economic, political, humanitarian, and strategic risks of a potential military conflagration, the possibility for negotiations and the measures needed to advance talks between Iran and the Trump Administration, and the impact of the current stalemate and policy responses from the actors involved.
Speakers:
- Shireen Hunter, University Associate, Georgetown University
- Kenneth Katzman, Middle East Specialist, Congressional Research Service
- Assal Rad, Research Fellow, National Iranian American Council
- Barbara Slavin, Director and Nonresident Senior Fellow, Future of Iran Initiative, Atlantic Council
Moderator:
- Daniel Brumberg, Associate Professor and Director, Democracy and Governance Studies, Georgetown University, Nonresident Senior Fellow, Arab Center Washington DC
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